Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception: A Comprehensive Approach (Contributions to Phenomenology, 119) [1st ed. 2022] 303105816X, 9783031058165

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Contributions to Phenomenology 119

John Rogove Pietro D’Oriano   Editors

Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception A Comprehensive Approach

Contributions to Phenomenology In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology Series Editors Nicolas de Warren, Department of Philosophy Pennsylvania State University State College, PA, USA Ted Toadvine, Department of Philosophy Pennsylvania State University State College, PA, USA Editorial Board Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive KU Leuven, Belgium David Carr, Emory University Atlanta, GA, USA Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University of Hong Kong Sha Tin, Hong Kong James Dodd, New School University New York, USA Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa Pisa, Italy Burt Hopkins, University of Lille Lille, France José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo, Canada Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University of Hong Kong Sha Tin, Hong Kong Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University Seoul, Korea (Republic of) Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne Cologne, Germany William R. McKenna, Miami University Ohio, USA

Algis Mickunas, Ohio University Ohio, USA J. N. Mohanty, Temple University Philadelphia, USA Dermot Moran, University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis Memphis, USA Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany Gail Soffer, Roma Tre University Rome, Italy Anthony Steinbock, Department of Philosophy Stony Brook University Stony Brook New York, USA Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University Sapporo, Japan Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University Nashville, USA

Scope The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than 100 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship,the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of phenomenological research. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance. The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology.

John Rogove  •  Pietro D’Oriano Editors

Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception A Comprehensive Approach

Editors John Rogove Ecole normale supérieure Archives Husserl de Paris Paris, France

Pietro D’Oriano Sapienza University of Rome Rome, Italy

ISSN 0923-9545     ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic) Contributions to Phenomenology ISBN 978-3-031-05816-5    ISBN 978-3-031-05817-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

Will there ever have been a purely American reception of Heidegger’s thought? Will his thought ever have been submitted to a distinctively American discourse? Will a surrogate for his voice ever have been heard sounding forth in a purely American idiom? When Heidegger’s thought first reached this side of the Atlantic, there was predictably massive refusal by those who claimed to constitute the majority, as though truth itself always sided with the multitude, with the many, with οἱ πολλοί. Yet, there were those—not many—who welcomed the sound and sense of Heidegger’s words, even though to American ears—and not only theirs—they were like bells tolling in the far distance. If they were to be brought closer, or rather, if a way was to be charted into their vicinity, Heidegger’s texts had to be compelled to speak English, notwithstanding the fact that to those few—very few—who had the opportunity to speak directly with him, he always disclaimed knowing any English at all, though in a written text he could undoubtedly have discerned—and perhaps did—the Classical or Germanic roots from which so many English words are constructed. But when—as often—it was a question of translation, his reserve was less pronounced, though still he stuck to German and limited himself to approving or rejecting translations of English words once their meaning had been explained to him in German. Beginning in the early 1960s, serious translations were ventured, and there was admiration especially of John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson for their courage in rendering Sein und Zeit into English. To be sure, when Heidegger’s text was thus compelled to speak English, his words were interspersed with some hardly intelligible stammering; words of sorts were put together as they never had been before, inserted ingeniously in place of German expressions that could not be fluently transported into any American idiom. It took decades—into the twenty-first century— before a new translation was crafted more ably by Joan Stambaugh, a close friend of Heidegger’s; subsequently the translation was thoroughly revised by Dennis Schmidt so as to take into account the newly published volumes in the Gesamtausgabe as well as more recent scholarship. Already in 1972 Stambaugh had translated the long-anticipated lecture Zeit und Sein, which Heidegger had finally delivered in v

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1962 and which, in title if not otherwise, was a surrogate for the never published Third Division of Sein und Zeit. In 1968 Glenn Gray, also an American friend of Heidegger’s, published a translation of Was Heißt Denken? which first offered a glimpse of Heidegger’s later work. Gray and Stambaugh, in consultation with Hannah Arendt, launched with the publisher Harper & Row what was initially designated as Heidegger’s Works. After Harper & Row withdrew from the project, it was taken over by—and continues with—Indiana University Press. In William Richardson’s massive study Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1963), unprecedented at the time and perhaps even still, Richardson introduced the distinction between Heidegger I (Sein und Zeit and related works) and Heidegger II (works after 1930). The Preface that Heidegger addressed to Richardson immediately gained canonical status among Heidegger’s shorter texts. Heidegger’s comment on the distinction became, from that time on, the basis of the controversies that ensued concerning its exact sense: “only by way of what Heidegger I has thought does one gain access to what is to-be-thought by Heidegger II.  But [the thought of] Heidegger I becomes possible only if it is contained in Heidegger II” (xxii). The 1970s brought a flood of additional translations, which were gathered in masterly fashion by David Krell in his collection Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (1977). Once the massive Gesamtausgabe was launched (beginning in 1974), the number of translations multiplied. In the 1960s a small group of persons engaged with Heidegger’s texts—a number of them immigrant Europeans—began meeting annually, focusing often on recently published works such as “Zeit und Sein.” The group evolved into what became the Heidegger Circle. Broad discussions of Heidegger’s thought have been sustained up to the present, though the particular focus has shifted again and again, from concentration on Sein und Zeit and the lecture courses that preceded it to Beiträge zur Philosophie and, more recently, to the controversial Schwarze Hefte. And yet, the question remains: Has there been a purely American reception of Heidegger’s thought? Is there a prospect of such a reception, or has its possibility already been undermined? There are at least two factors that appear to preclude this possibility, that—so it seems—dictate that there will never have been a reception of Heidegger’s thought that will have been purely American. The first is the result of the fact that the American engagement has been mediated by European interpreters: by German philosophers close to Heidegger such as Gadamer and Biemel and by French commentators such as Beaufret and Haar. Yet, the most profound effect has derived from philosophers such as Derrida and Nancy, who, launching paths that diverge from Heidegger, have nonetheless in their own distinctive ways engaged Heidegger’s thought and communicated that engagement to American interpreters. What comes to the shores of America will almost inevitably have infiltrated and to that extent compromised what otherwise might be considered native thought regarding Heidegger.

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Yet, in many cases there is still another kind of compounding that has the effect of interrupting the concept of an engagement with Heidegger’s thought that would be purely American. For many of the most productive American interpreters—such as Richardson, Stambaugh, and Krell—have carried out their research almost entirely in a European context, as have others to various degrees. There can be no doubt but that numerous Americans have in this connection injected European perspectives into American interpretations of Heidegger. Though to a lesser degree, much the same can be said regarding the import from Asia, especially from the Kyoto school. Origins are always elusive, and, as Empedocles attested, not only things but also words are nourished by roots that come from numerous directions. Boston College Newton, MA, USA January 2020

John Sallis

Acknowledgements

The initial inspiration behind this volume was a conference organized by Pietro D’Oriano and Yulia Tsutserova with the help of Jean-Luc Marion at the University of Chicago’s Paris Centre in January 2015. Five of the contributions contained herein were presented at that conference. I would like to thank Pietro D’Oriano and Yulia Tsutserova for their decisive help with the early stages of the preparation of the present volume. Before this volume went to print, we learned of the sad passing of two of its contributors, Michael Inwood and Rudolph Makkreel. Michael Inwood’s meditation on death in this volume has become all the more poignant and moving.

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Heidegger studies in the English-speaking world have in a sense fallen victim to their own success. On the one hand, they have become more present in mainstream academic philosophy  – and as a touchstone in other fields, and in the culture at large – than ever before. They have left the more or less confidential circles they once inhabited in order, in a way, to come to occupy many simultaneous circles, as different philosophical traditions coming from very different places and bearing very different intellectual baggage have joined the larger Heideggerian family. This has to a certain extent given rise to what might be called a diversity of distinct Anglo-Heideggerian “schools”, but which often have not had contact or been in dialogue with one another, so great have been the disparities among their historical origins and their methods. This has been in no small part because proponents of various approaches have more often than not been more concerned to communicate with colleagues who share their approach to philosophy – to explain, for example, why Heidegger has important things to say to someone working in post-Rylean philosophy of mind, or to debate the respective merits of his and of Derrida’s description of the closure of metaphysics  – than to enter into dialogue with one another concerning what they have in common, even if the only thing they have in common is a contested object or reference. From Richard Rorty’s declaration1 that it was Hubert Dreyfus who, almost single-handedly, introduced Heidegger (and European philosophy more generally) to the Anglo-American philosophical world, to Thomas Sheehan’s canonical and canonizing periodization2 of Anglo-American Heideggerianism beginning with William Richardson, whose seminal 1963 work3 “would guide mainstream Heidegger scholarship for the next forty years”, the  “Forward” in, M. Wrathall and J. Malpas (eds.), Heidegger, Authenticity and Modernity. Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2000, pp. ix–xi. 2  “The Reception of Heidegger’s Phenomenology in the United States”, in Michela Beatrice Ferri (ed.), The Reception of Phenomenology in North America, Dordrecht, New  York, Springer, 2016, p. 4. 3  Through Phenomenology to Thought. Preface by Martin Heidegger. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963. 1

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v­ arious tribes of Anglo-American Heideggerians have until recently seemed to live their respective lives in splendid isolation from one another. Parallel and sometimes prior to the gradual and multi-vectorial penetration of Heidegger studies into mainstream academic philosophy in the English-speaking world, Heidegger’s influence came to be massively felt in other reaches of the academy, most notably via the French thinkers influenced by him, especially in comparative literature departments, and in cultural and gender studies.4 Largely under the name of Derrida, the at first apolitical triumph of hermeneutics and what was then called “post-modernism” first fanned out from Yale and Johns Hopkins in the 1960s and 1970s to become hegemonic in “comp lit” departments, before assuming a more politicized, militant form (usually in league with Foucault’s thought, this time) in various newly formed cultural studies departments of multiple stripes (here the more distant influence of Heidegger’s “existentialism” and concern with authenticity could also be felt via the more direct influence of Fanon and Sartre). It is striking that, in the vast majority of North American, British and Australian universities where the philosophy departments remain monolithically “analytic” in orientation, comparative literature (or in some cases, English, German or French) departments have become de facto “continental” philosophy departments, the only place in the university where one can take courses on Heidegger, or Hegel, or twentieth-century French philosophy. It is moreover often with these “Derridean”-Heideggerian quarters that philosophical Heidegger studies proper, such as have been practised since the 1960s in “continental” philosophy departments, have often made common cause or been in confluence.5 On the other hand, the parallel story of Heidegger reception in more “analytically” oriented philosophy departments, beginning with Hubert Dreyfus at MIT and UC Berkeley and finding its English idiom in the American tradition of pragmatism, largely evolved in isolation from his more faithful, “continental” reception which began at places like Boston College with William Richardson or elsewhere with figures like John Sallis and David Farrell Krell, and a fortiori from the “comp lit” Derridean-mediated quarters. One of the goals of the present volume is to take a step towards remedying this situation. As opposed to Heidegger reception in, say, France – a country with whose intellectual tradition and life Heidegger maintained an active and interested dialogue, and whose mainstream philosophical scene has been dominated by its engagement with Heidegger’s thought for 75 years – there is more than a taste of the paradoxical in the very idea of a properly Anglo-American Heideggerianism and in the very existence of thriving Heideggerian “schools” in a country such as the United States, for whose culture and intellectual world Heidegger had little esteem, and even a

 For a French account of this remarkable cultural transfer, see François Cusset, French Theory, trans. Jeff Fort, University of Minnesota Press, 2008. See Françoise Dastur’s and David Krell’s contributions to the present volume. 5  On the role that the Collegium Phenomenologicum, the annual three-week conference and gathering in Città di Castello, Italy, for Anglo-American continental philosophers, has played in the evolution of these circles, see Daniela Vallega-Neu’s contribution to this volume. 4

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contempt to which he ascribed the highest metaphysical import.6 Moreover, whereas in France Heidegger has played a constant and decisive role as maître à penser or at least as dialectical foil in mainstream academic philosophy since the end of the war,7 in the English-speaking world it can be said with little exaggeration that this role has been occupied by a hybridization of pragmatist philosophy and of the logical positivism of Rudolph Carnap, the anti-Heideggerian par excellence.8 This situation, that of a thriving Anglo-American Heideggerian scene, for all its paradox and improbability, is nevertheless empirically the case, and it is perhaps all the richer and more interesting for it, since this means that it is layered and cross-fertilized by other traditions, unexpected influences and ends, and has had above all to meet the challenge of conceptual translation into and from other philosophical languages. The present volume is a collection of essays both on Heidegger’s thought from the point of view of Anglo-American philosophy and on the encounter of his thought with the English-speaking world. Its goal is to include work by or about a critical mass of the most prominent Heidegger scholars in the English-speaking world, and to give thus a view of current and past Anglo-American Heidegger scholarship that is both synoptic and substantial. The volume is roughly divided into two types of contribution: discussions of Heidegger’s reception in the English-speaking world, on the one hand, and outstanding examples of English-language Heidegger scholarship and uses of Heideggerian thought at work, through a sampling of contributions from prominent Heideggerians writing in English, on the other. The first include both historiographical accounts of the meeting between Heidegger’s thought and the Anglo-American world, and philosophical expositions and/or critiques of the forms taken by that thought once absorbed into the receptive web of Anglo-­ American schools and ideas. The second might be thought of as an exemplification of the former, and represents an offering of the latest work and positions of a critical mass of leading contemporary Heideggerians, but also including a sampling of work by promising young philosophers representing the rising generation of Heidegger scholarship, presenting very diverse tendencies and ways of “being Heideggerian” in current-day Anglo-American academia. As I mentioned at the outset, Heidegger studies in English have up until now largely developed and moved in separate circles working in almost total isolation from one another. The ambition of this volume is to contribute to ending such isolation. No such volume can, of course, claim any sort of exhaustivity, and this one even less so. There are many key voices we would have also liked to include; nevertheless, the texts included offer a very broad, not to say exhaustive, panoply of contemporary perspectives on the Anglo-­ American Heideggerian scene, both from within and from without. Since most of the authors contained herein are working clearly within one of the given traditions or schools alluded to above, they are not in dialogue with one another. So while  Cf. Paul Slama’s contribution to this volume.  Cf., for example, Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France, Paris, Albin Michel, 2001, or Tom Rockmore Heidegger and French Philosophy, New York and London, Routledge, 1995. 8  This hybridization can be seen most clearly and brilliantly in the work of W. V. O. Quine and in its posterity. Cf. John Rogove’s contribution to the present volume. 6 7

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indeed what is new and exceptional about the present collection is that it unites together under one cover leading representatives of what might hastily and imprecisely be called the “continental” and the “analytic” (or pragmatist) Heideggerians,9 it is difficult, given the current state of Heidegger studies, to go beyond an “anthological” phase. So, while only a handful of the some 20 contributions contained herein go beyond the mere exemplification of the various schools and approaches and attempt to engage in a critical dialogue with the other tendencies, the hope is that this sets out a road-map or a constellation for further dialogue. One consequence of such a volume’s inevitable lack of exhaustivity is that not every aspect of Heidegger’s reception can be thematically discussed. I would like to address two of these partially absent aspects here, namely the scandal(s) surrounding Heidegger’s politics,10 on the one hand, and his reception outside of philosophy and even outside of academia, on the other. Ever since 1933, with respect to his reception among his (especially Jewish) German students,11 since 1945 with respect to his reception in France, and periodically since 1945 in the English-speaking world as well, the “Heidegger scandal” has occurred and reoccurred with a surprising regularity. This regularity is “surprising” in that it seems, each time, as though it were being discovered for the first time that Heidegger was a committed Nazi. In the face of the fact that Heidegger was both probably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century and a Nazi, two polemical reactions have tended to develop, both of which are predicated on the notion that these two facts cannot co-exist. The first, apologetic, reaction has been to minimize or even deny the extent or even the existence of Heidegger’s Nazism; the second has been to deny that he was a great philosopher, or even that he was a philosopher at all, but rather that he was merely some sort of servile and unoriginal ideologue whose works should only be read by historians of the Third Reich. Both  Again, the former might also be referred to as “Derridean” (for, even if they are not stricto sensu “Derrideans” or disagree with Derrida, their conceptual vocabulary allows them to engage with his thought and more largely with the current of Anglo-American Heideggerianism for whose introduction Derrida and his followers were at least partially responsible) Heideggerians or even as “Heideggerian Heideggerians” (in the sense that their engagement is more with Heidegger on his own terms and does not attempt to translate his thought into a largely alien conceptual idiom); while the latter are almost always “Dreyfusians”, building on Dreyfus’ fruitful insertion of Heidegger’s thought into the tradition of American pragmatism. It is also worth noting that the latter approach is almost always engaged only with Heidegger’s earlier thought and especially with Being and Time, having little to say about the late Heidegger, whereas the former approach derives largely from an engagement with the onto-historical concerns of the late Heidegger. Some of the contributions in this volume which contribute most effectively to what might be called a “dialogue” between the different approaches happen therefore to address the earlier Heidegger, but from what might be called a resolutely phenomenological point of view. 10  Even though it is not their direct theme, the issue of Heidegger’s Nazism is addressed obliquely in Nicolas De Warren’s, Paul Slama’s and Edward Kanterian’s contributions to the present volume. 11  Or, in the precocious cases of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean Cavaillès, French students. Regarding Heidegger’s influence on his Jewish disciples and their reactions to his Nazism, see Marie-Anne Lescouret (ed.), La dette et la distance. De quelques élèves et lecteurs juifs de Heidegger, Paris, Editions de l’éclat, 2014. 9

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of these reactions are in a very concrete sense “negationist” and ideologically, rather than empirically or philosophically, motivated: the first reaction denies a widely and easily attested historical fact, again on the premise and argument that (1) a philosopher cannot be a Nazi; (2) but Heidegger was a (very great) philosopher; (3) therefore, he could not have been a Nazi. The second argues that he cannot have been a philosopher, not based on any philosophical refutation of or engagement with his arguments, but on the basis of the same premise: (1) a philosopher cannot be a Nazi; (2) Heidegger was a Nazi; (3) therefore, he cannot be a philosopher. The “Heidegger controversy” is usually given new life every few decades on the occasion of the publication of a new book, usually by a journalist or academic of the second camp,12 which either simply reminds the general public that he was a Nazi, or, as in the case of the recently published Black Notebooks,13 reveals in an even more detailed and damning fashion facts and statements that demonstrate this same truth. With each new iteration of the “scandal”, at equal distance between these two ideological camps, the only serious reaction and assessment has been by those thinkers who have refused to deny either of the two aforementioned facts: that Heidegger was indeed both a Nazi and one of the most important philosophers of the century. And they have recognized that this state of affairs is in fact itself the locus of a very important philosophical problem. This was recognized from the first generation of Heideggerians, such as Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas, who, without ever renouncing Heidegger as a guiding inspiration for their thought, came, through the shock and betrayal wrought by their own recognition of Heidegger’s political blindness and/or wickedness, to receive this thought not as dogma but as an ethical-political problem  – one to which they devoted the entirety of their own thinking. At the boundary between the first, apologetic, strategy, consisting in a denial of Heidegger’s evident political engagement in order to “save” his philosophy, and this recognition that this engagement is the locus of an important philosophical problem, one finds the strategy that consists in insisting on the absolute separation of the man and his personal political opinions, on the one hand, from the philosopher and his thought, on the other – much like one might separate, say, the validity of contemporary mathematical logic from the virulent antisemitism of its inventor, Gottlob Frege. However, as even the earliest generations of Heidegger’s students recognized, the very content of Heidegger’s philosophy refuses this

12  Among the most visible of these publications have been Victor Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme, Paris, Editions Verdier, 1987 (1988 for the English edition); Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being, New York, Harper & Row, 1980; The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993; Heidegger’s Children. Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse, Princeton University Press, 2001. 13  GA 94 Überlegungen II–VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938); GA 95 Überlegungen VII–XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938/39); GA 96 Überlegungen XII–XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941); GA 97 Anmerkungen I–V (Schwarz Hefte 1942–1948); GA 98 Anmerkungen VI-IX (Schwarze Hefte 1948/49–1951).

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distinction,14 and moreover the content of the Black Notebooks reveals the extent to which Heidegger saw a connection between his philosophy and his political convictions. The most consequent reading has therefore been the aforementioned one which is both philosophical-political and refuses either one of the facile “negationist” solutions (whether the anti-philosophic, and ultimately anti-intellectual, moralizing one, or the anti-empirical, ahistorical one). As Leo Strauss stated, “the only great thinker of our time is Heidegger […]. The most stupid thing I could do would be to close my eyes or to reject his work”, even though “[t]here is a not altogether unrespectable justification for doing so. Heidegger became a Nazi in 1933”.15 “Heidegger, who surpasses in speculative intelligence all his contemporaries and is at the same time intellectually the counterpart to what Hitler was politically, attempts to go in a way not yet trodden by anyone […]. Certain it is that no one has questioned the premise of philosophy as radically as Heidegger”, and that he alone opened up “the possibility of a genuine return to classical philosophy” to which Strauss, inspired by Heidegger, devoted himself.16 Likewise, Hannah Arendt, whose central activity as a thinker was devoted to an attentive description of the sui generis horror of totalitarianism, owed much to Heidegger’ thought, both positively and negatively, for such descriptions. While her response to Heidegger’s political “error” seemed to oscillate between critical confrontation and apologetic rehabilitation, the relative consistency between these two attitudes has often been overlooked: he had taught her, and her entire generation, to see phenomenologically; he had “effectively attained those things themselves that Husserl had proclaimed”,17 even though he himself had remained massively blind to a certain category of phenomena – precisely the one to which Arendt, in a corrective and compensatory move, devoted herself. Likewise Levinas, after his initial dominating concern with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology – which remained his (negative) touchstone throughout the remainder of his work – was jolted after 1933 into what to him was an even more  See, for example, Herbert Marcuse’s letter to Heidegger from 18 August 1947, in which he demands an apology from his PhD supervisor precisely because “we cannot separate Heidegger the philosopher from Heidegger the man, for this is in contradiction with your own philosophy” (Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, op. cit., p. 161). Cf. Marie-Anne Lescouret, La dette et la distance, op. cit. 15  L. Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism”, in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (ed. Thomas Pangle), University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp.  29–30. Concerning Strauss’ debt to and critique of Heidegger, respectively, see Jacques Taminiaux, “Sur la dette de Leo Strauss envers le premier enseignement de Heidegger”, in Sillage phénoménologique. Auditeurs et lecteurs de Heidegger, Brussels, Ousia, 2002, and Beau Shaw, “‘The God of This Lower World’: Leo Strauss’s Critique of Historicism in Natural Right and History”, The Review of Politics, 81:1 (2019), 47–76, a version of which was originally set to appear in the current volume under the title: ‘“There is no Room for Political Philosophy in Heidegger’s Work’: Leo Strauss’s Critique of Heidegger”. 16  “An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John’s College in Honor of Jacob Klein”, in L.  Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Kenneth Hart Green, Albany, SUNY Press, 1997, p. 250. 17  Arendt, “Heidegger ist 80 Jahre alt”, trans. Douglas Hofstadter, New York Review of Books, Oct. 211,971. 14

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fundamental concern with “l’humanité de l’homme”, in what was to become an ever more pointed critical confrontation with Heidegger’s “antihumanism”, and whose centre-piece became a quasi-theological concern with the irreducible singularity of each human subject, over and against an ontology that had become so fundamental that it lost sight of this human singularity in a night in which all cows are black.18 What characterizes all of these thinkers is a phenomenological sensitivity to certain phenomenal differences to which Heidegger was, in their eyes, singularly insensitive, namely in the domains of politics and ethics.19 For all their differences, one thing they (Arendt, Strauss, Levinas) all have strikingly in common (aside from their common indebtedness to Heidegger) is a moral, ethical and political sensitivity to evil, a category totally absent from Heidegger’s thinking.20 This phenomenon is, I think, perhaps best understood by John Caputo21 in his perceptive analysis of one of Heidegger’s rare allusions to the Holocaust, in which, while acknowledging the horror of Auschwitz, he presents its “mass-production of corpses” as being essentially the same as what is at work in the industrialisation of farming.22 This is Heidegger’s way of saying that Germany too, in which he had placed his hopes for a “new beginning” at the end of the history of Being as the history of its forgetting, had succumbed to the lethic and homogenizing forces of Gestell manifesting in modern technology, and proposed no fundamental alternative to Anglo-American liberalism or Soviet communism.23 Caputo very effectively attempts to remain fully sensitive to the scandal provoked by Heidegger’s seemingly  (Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werk II, 22) See Levinas, Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlerisme (1934), Paris, Rivages, 1997; « Préface » to Totalité et infini, Kluwer/ Matinu Nijhoff, 1971; Ethique comme philosophie première (1982), Paris, Rivages, 1992. 19  Although she was addressing Eric Voegelin, it seems as though Arendt could have been addressing Heidegger when she said that he treats ‘“phenomenal differences’ – which to me as differences of factuality are all-important – as minor outgrowths of some ‘essential sameness’ […] Numerous affinities between totalitarianism and some other trends in Occidental political and intellectual history have been described with this result, in my opinion: they all failed to point out the distinct quality of what was actually happening. The ‘phenomenal differences’, far from ‘obscuring’ some essential sameness, are those phenomena which make totalitarianism ‘totalitarian’, which distinguish this one form of government from others and therefore can alone help us in finding its essence”. H.  Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin”, in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. J. Kohn, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1994. 20  The only exception being Heidegger’s Summer semester 1936 course on Schelling: vom Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit, GA42. However, it is important to note that this course can be contextualized within Heidegger’s thinking intensely about Nietzsche during this period. He comes to the conclusion that Schelling failed to justify the category of evil, and this seems to have paved the way for Nietzsche’s transvaluation of Good and Evil. 21  J. Caputo, “Heidegger’s Scandal: Thinking and the Essence of the Victim”, in Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis (eds.), The Heidegger Case. On Philosophy and Politics, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1992, pp. 265–281. See also Edward Kanterian’s contribution to the present volume. 22  From a lecture from 1949 at Bremen, first published in Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik und Gelassenheit: Zeitkritik nach Heidegger, Freiburg, Alber, 1983, p. 25. 23  As he had famously thought in Einführung in die Metaphysik, trans R. Manheim, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1959, p. 38. 18

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nonchalant equivalence but without allowing himself to be overwhelmed by the scandal, thus allowing himself to think through what might be true about Heidegger’s description, to remain attentive to both its penetrating insight and its scandalous blindness. While Heidegger’s essential identification of genocide victims and the beneficiaries of factory farming remains irreducibly scandalous and insensitive to a very real aspect of phenomenal being, his analysis is not reducible to that scandal, and remains singularly sensitive to other aspects of the manifestation of what is. These debates concerning Heidegger’s thinking about technology or ecology also point to the depth and breadth of his more diffuse influence in Anglo-American culture at large, outside of philosophy and even outside of academia – in technology studies, in environmental studies and in the thinking of the environmental movement since the 1970s, in architectural studies and in the practice of architecture, in psychology and psychoanalysis, in theology, in art, in literature, in cinema and in pop culture generally. The present volume is concerned exclusively with Heidegger’s strictly philosophical reception, and so does not address the broader cultural reception. This broader reception is addressed effectively by a book such as cultural and intellectual historian Martin Woessner’s Heidegger in America.24 Other such popular books and articles purport to be genealogies of Heidegger’s supposedly nefarious influence on culture at large. At one end of the spectrum, one may find Faye-esque near-paranoid exposés of Heidegger’s supposedly ubiquitous (and thoroughly Nazi) influence on nearly every aspect of contemporary culture25; at the other end one finds books such as the much more serious Closing of the American Mind,26 which shares and respects much of Heidegger’s diagnostic of America even while denouncing the effects of its potentially dangerous conclusions. Such books are not wrong, however, in their claim that Heidegger’s influence on American culture has been deep and pervasive.

 Cambridge University Press, 2011. See notably Woessner’s discussion of filmmaker Terrence Malick’s transformation from Heideggerian academic (he was Hubert Dreyfus’s teaching assistant at MIT, and translator of Heidegger’s Vom Wesen des Grundes GA9 - The Essence of Reasons, Martin Heidegger, Evanston, Northwestern University, 1969) to Heideggerian filmmaker (p. 206). 25  Emmanuel Faye goes so far, in a recent book, as accusing even Hannah Arendt of being a vehicle for the spread of Nazi ideology. See Thomas Sheehan, “Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud into Philosophy”, Philosophy Today, Vol. 59, Issue 3 (Summer 2015). An older example of this type of literature is Dagobert D. Rune’s translation and collection of Heidegger’s speeches as rector under the simple title German Existentialism (New York, The Philosophical Library, 1965). As was immediately pointed out upon its publication in 1965 (e.g., Review of Metaphysics, vol.19/1, Sept. 1965, p.162), the compilation is a partial forgery by a translator who knowingly mistranslated throughout and himself added the words “Heil Hitler” to the text. 26  Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1987. See notably the long chapter entitled “From Socrates’s Apology to Heidegger’s Rectoratsrede”, pp. 243–312. While Bloom’s bestseller certainly fits into the category of these denunciatory genealogies meant for a popular audience, Bloom, being a Straussian, takes Heidegger very seriously as a thinker. Despite superficial rhetorical resemblance to the typical denunciatory scandal literature, Bloom’s problematic is essentially the same as Strauss’, mentioned above. 24

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One of the most visible sites of this cultural presence has been in the field of architecture. Heidegger’s influence here, and the degree to which many contemporary architects have since the 1970s thought of themselves and their work as being explicitly “Heideggerian”, would merit its own book. Taking their cue largely from Heidegger’s two lectures from 1951 “Building Dwelling Thinking” and “…Poetically Man Dwells…”,27 the Heideggerian movement in architecture arose as a revolt against the soulless “International Style”, initially inspired by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, which became dominant after WWII and synonymous with liberal globalization and American cultural and economic hegemony. This revolt has come to be associated with the “New Urbanism” movement, devoted to rehumanizing architecture and urban planning into liveable spaces on a human scale, against the alienation produced by industrialisation and the buildings and waste-land-scapes conceived for motorized and separately zoned spaces. Heidegger has become one of the main references for this movement and others, and one sees such emblematic titles as Adam Sharr’s Heidegger for Architects.28 While not quite as palpable or pervasive as his pre-eminence for the architectural world, it is also possible to speak of a “Heideggerian cinema” in North America. In fact, a link between the two can be made in the cinematic oeuvre of Godfrey Reggio, which explores Heideggerian themes of technology, Gestell and their domination of the Earth. Koyaanisqatsi (1982), created with the musical collaboration of Philip Glass, even documents in one scene the destruction of the Pruitt–Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri, which had come to be emblematic of the desolation and blight wrought by the International Style. Other examples of Heidegger’s influence in anglophone cinema are the already mentioned Heideggerian-academic-turned-­ director Terrence Malick,29 whose films explore themes similar to those of Reggio but in a slightly more narrative, conventional way, or Hal Ashby’s satire starring Peter Sellars, Being There (1979). A former Catholic monk and social activist, Reggio’s films, which are tone-poems reflecting on the relation between technology and the Earth, also exemplify another intense site of Heidegger’s influence, namely ecology. Although it is an international movement by no means limited to the English-­ speaking world, the deep ecology movement was also largely inspired by Heidegger, especially his 1955 “Question Concerning Technology”. The deep ecology movement calls for a radical de-anthropologizing de-centring of the relation between

 “Bauen Wohnen Denken” (Vorträge und Aufsätze, Pfullingen, Neske, 1954) was delivered to engineering students in Darmstadt in 1951; “…dichterisch wohnet der Mensch…” (in ibid.) is a lecture from the same year. Both are translated by Albert Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought, New York, Harper & Row, 1971. 28  London, Routledge, 2007. Sharr is a British architect and professor of architecture at Newcastle University and Editor of Architectural Research Quarterly. 29  See note supra. See also Martin Woessner, “What Is Heideggerian Cinema? Film, Philosophy, and Cultural Mobility” New German Critique, No. 113, (summer 2011), pp.  129–157. Before teaching H. Dreyfus’s Heidegger courses at MIT and translating Vom Wesen des Grundes, Malick even met Heidegger in Messkirch. 27

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humans and the Earth, and a return to authentic and reverent dwelling from the exploitative relation to a “standing reserve”.30 The broad influence of this movement can be seen through the activity of such organisations as Greenpeace, to name one of the most mainstream and least radical. Heidegger’s broader cultural reception in areas such as literature, theatre, pop culture, theology, psychology and psychoanalysis largely happened as a part of the general reception of “existentialism” as a movement, along with such figures as Sartre and Kierkegaard. This reception happened earlier in the United Kingdom than in the United States, through figures such as Colin Wilson, Iris Murdoch, John Macquarrie, Paul Tillich, R.D. Laing and Samuel Beckett. Through this vehicle, Heidegger’s indirect influence is even more pervasive, and in the United States this reception into pop culture happened largely through the 1960s counter-cultural movement. That Heidegger reception in so seemingly unlikely a place as the Anglo-American world has been so pervasive as to far outstrip the scope of this introduction and even of any single book may be seen as a testimony to the pertinence of his thought for understanding a modern world that has become more and more synonymous with globalized Anglo-American culture. Despite Heidegger the man’s political errancies and dark ambiguities, we return to his thought over and over again as a crucial, even essential, resource for resistance to the spreading wasteland of contemporary globalisation. I propose the following taxonomy:

Historical Assessments Even though Macquarrie and Robinson’s famous translation of Sein und Zeit was made available in 1962, it was not until the 1970s that Heidegger translation into English began in earnest, as a result of the Harper & Row series edited by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray. David Krell’s engaging and valuable autobiographical contribution recounts this adventure, and recalls that, in addition to himself, the members of the editorial circle at that time included Hannah Arendt and Joan Stambaugh. It is still too little known that the soul of this group was Hannah Arendt. Krell also recalls how his meetings and correspondence with Heidegger from 1974 until his death in 1976 were central to this enterprise. Krell’s text is the first (aside from two articles of his from the early 1980s) to give us an account of the translation

 See Michael E. Zimmerman, “Toward a Heideggerean Ethos for Radical Environmentalism”, Environmental Ethics 6, no. 2 (1983): 99–131, and “Implications of Heidegger’s Thought for Deep Ecology”, The Modern Schoolman 54 (November 1986). For the founding essay of the Deep Ecology movement, see Arne Næss “The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement: a summary”, in Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. 16 (1–4), 1973; see also Arne Naess, Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, translated from Norwegian by David Rothenberg, Cambridge University Press, 1988. 30

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of Heidegger’s works into English in their entirety. The Harper project of Heidegger’s Basic Writings was taken up as readable introduction that would make his thought available to a broad public of non-specialists, at about the same time that Indiana University Press began the much more onerous and complementary task of making Heidegger’s complete works, whose publication was just then beginning, available in English under the supervision of Krell’s teacher John Sallis. Thus Krell recounts for us this decisive moment in the history of the cultural transfer of Heidegger to an anglophone setting, in which, among other things, Heidegger’s English vocabulary would be set for the years to come. Françoise Dastur offers a critical overview of Heidegger reception in the United States, following the various periods and influences that have punctuated English-­ speaking Heidegger studies. While she starts out by adopting Thomas Sheehan’s schema of a succession of “paradigms” (the “existentialist paradigm”, followed by the “being paradigm” initiated by William Richardson, the “deconstructionist” paradigm...), Dastur quickly puts Sheehan’s readings themselves in context, and criticizes his claim, after his own taxonomy of Heideggerians according to the analogy with “Left” and “Right Hegelians”, to be himself not merely a “Left Heideggerian”, but “Heidegger’s Marx”. Dastur opposes to this claim Reiner Schürmann’s alternative reading according to which Heidegger himself was already what Sheehan would have called a “Left Heideggerian”, anticipating the Derridian problematics the importance of which for American Heidegger reception since the 1970s she emphasizes at length. She proposes to see in the work of David Krell and John Sallis the most refined expression of the Heideggerian–Derridian hybrid that has come to inhabit American Heidegger studies at their heart. Joseph O’Leary shows us two ways in which Anglo-American philosophers of religion have managed to obfuscate the relevance and importance of Heidegger’s central preoccupation with the question of Being. The first is what he insightfully calls a “Derridian positivism”, wherein deconstruction and pragmatism dovetail neatly. What Derrida offers in place of Being is a “wonderful realm of post-­ ontological freedom” which is likely to “relapse into good old Anglo-American positivism for which Being is merely shorthand for the sum of things that happen to exist…That impregnable position, in all its barrenness, imposes itself on the Anglo-­ American mind as a virtue”. The second is an application of the “genetic fallacy”, motivated by a certain religious inquisitorial spirit, that reduces Heidegger’s use of Christian texts alongside philosophic texts in order to show the ways in which Being reveals itself in different historical epochs, to a unilateral source of inspiration – an inspiration which is then by this account purely and unavowedly theological rather than philosophical. Far from any anti-theological animus, what motivates Fr. O’Leary’s policing of the separation between philosophy and theology in Heidegger is a faithfulness to the purity of Heidegger’s strictly phenomenological inspiration and method, and to the constancy of his project: to give a phenomenological description of being as it manifests itself historically. Daniela Vallega-Neu gives an account of the discussions, going back to 1989, of “Heidegger’s later work by Anglo-American philosophers at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum during years that were formative” for her own work. In her

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contribution, which is at once autobiographical, historiographical and an important substantive contribution to this current, the reader is given a detailed and progressive analysis of the tradition of American Heidegger commentary influenced by Derrida: Scott, Sallis, Krell and David Wood, marking various “limits of Heidegger’s thinking”. She engages some themes and core questions marking their readings of Heidegger that are also central to her own work, namely radical performative questioning, radical finitude, the history of being, thinking beyond metaphysics, and departures from Heidegger by virtue of letting go of the unifying force of the question of being through practices of dissemination. Nicolas de Warren’s searching reflection on Reiner Schürmann’s Heideggerian anarchism reads Heidegger’s groundless search for ground inside out, as it were, exchanging absences for presences and vice versa. Heidegger’s apophatic search for being, like Meister Eckhart’s negative theology, in truth uncovers the emptiness at the heart of beings. And Schürmann, through a deconstructive approach more radical, according to de Warren, than Derrida’s, replaces the “signified” corresponding to the signifier “Heidegger” with the texts in the pure immanence of what they enable us to see, completely bracketing whatever is “psychologically, politically, and morally signified in the name of Heidegger”, the reactionary peasant from Messkirch. While looking unblinkingly at the consequences that such an approach might have in terms of unburdening Heidegger of political responsibility, de Warren also proposes to put what is psychologically, politically and morally signified by “Schürmann” in its place. This enables him to carry out a sustained reflection on the relation between thinking and acting, theory and praxis, on the possibility of a relation of consequence from one to the other: Schürmann’s deconstruction is revealed to be a sort of metaphysical anarchism opened up by the closure of epochal metaphysical thinking.

Between the Pragmata and the Phainomena: Phenomenological, Metaphysical and Pragmatist Readings Taylor Carman traces Heidegger’s use of the term “metaphysics” in its evolution from Sein und Zeit to the 1953 preface to Was ist Metaphysik (1929) and to the Einführung in der Metaphysik (1935), and attempts to uncover unresolved or unavowed contradictory senses in that use. Indeed, up until about 1935, Heidegger employs the term “metaphysics” in a positive sense as the thinking of entities as a whole, as such, or in their being, and thereby identifies it with both the “heart of philosophy” and his own project of asking the question of being. But from 1936 on, he says that metaphysics is incapable of ever asking this question, and attributes to the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Nietzsche the fault of having obscured and forgotten this question. John Rogove’s resolutely phenomenological reading asks the double question of the presence of reduction in Heidegger and the pertinence of various analytic

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readings of Heidegger that he claims remain trapped in a pre-phenomenological “natural (i.e. dogmatic or metaphysical) attitude”; Rogove demonstrates the extent to which the intelligibility of the “question of being” remains radically dependent on a rigorous fidelity to Husserl’s phenomenological method of the reduction. This, in spite of Husserl’s misunderstanding of Heidegger’s work in Sein und Zeit, and Heidegger’s own misrepresentations of Husserl, such mutual dissensions have “obscured” this methodological continuity “in the minds of many commentators”. Indeed, among certain Heideggerians there is a tendency towards “a quasi-positivistic mistaking of being as such simply for all beings taken together  – which is precisely the ontic, anthropologizing de-transcendentalization that Husserl feared”. In Rogove’s eyes, such a misunderstanding about being’s ontological framework constitutes the starting point in the positions of many recent Anglo-American commentators, who, in order to make them intelligible to analytic philosophy, re-inscribe Heidegger’s concepts into contemporary debates whose presuppositions are beholden to a naturalistic metaphysics. He goes on to demonstrate the decisive importance not just of the reduction but also of categorial intuition for Heidegger’s understanding of being, and shows at length how the atomistic formal ontology presupposed by the philosophical heirs of logical positivism was precisely the target of Husserl’s phenomenological mereology, the establishment of which was the goal of his demonstrations of the possibility of eidetic and categorial intuition. In his 1913 thesis on Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus, Heidegger asks the question: “What is the Sinn des Sinnes?”, the sense of sense,31 and he calls his opening part of Being and Time an “exposition of the question of the sense of being”. In his Zähringen seminar at the end of his life, Heidegger returns one last time to the question of being, before specifying that this question remains identical to the question of the “sense” of being. Daniel Dahlstrom proposes to interrogate the apparent paradox whereby Heidegger simultaneously holds this equation to be the case, affirms the primacy of the question of being which he interrogates at length in Being and Time, and yet leaves woefully underdetermined what he means by “sense”. Dahlstrom points out the tendency to confuse the “use” and “mention” of “being” that can be traced to what seems like a confusion between Bedeutung and Sinn in an inverted Fregean sense, before recalling the overarching context of Bedeutsamkeit according to which the already hermeneutic structure of the understanding interprets the sense of things and of which the linguistic “meaning” is only a part. His painstaking textual analysis shows how Heidegger understands “sense” as that by which Dasein projects possibilities, and how the more specific “sense” of Dasein itself is, therefore, “timeliness”. Steven Crowell proposes an explanation of what Heidegger meant by “metaphysics” in terms of its contrast with phenomenological ontology. Whereas the latter concerns “being” and is only accessible as the fruit of the phenomenological bracketing of “entities” in their metaphysical positivity, the latter can be said to be the science of these entities taken in their totality. Crowell reads what we might call

31

 GA 1, p. 171.

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Heidegger’s “middle” period (1927–1937) as precisely that during which he was concerned with “metaphysical” topics (philosophical anthropology, Weltanschauung and Lebensphilophie). While Crowell argues that Heidegger never completely succeeded in making this transition fully intelligible from a phenomenological point of view, he shows how Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics and of what a metaphysical worldview looks like in terms of cognitive and scientific commitments provides a powerful and incisive framework within which to critique the “metaphysical presuppositions” at work, say, in contemporary analytic philosophy of science and mind. If Heidegger’s attempt during this period to create a metaphysical Haltung that was more adequate to the essence of Dasein ultimately failed – and here Crowell mobilizes Cassirer to help show how it does – the attempt nevertheless illuminates by analogy the more “degenerate” Haltungen such as subjectivism or naturalistic physicalism. This analysis helps us moreover to understand the connections between Heidegger’s metaphysics and his politics during this period. Aaron Shoichet proposes a critique of the “pragmatist” reading which has met with such success in the United States (Rorty, Brandom, Okrent, Dreyfus). Shoichet’s analyses of the “misunderstanding of the statement (Aussage) in Being and Time” by this reading are indeed striking and effective. But what is really at stake in the Zuhandenheit/Vorhandenheit distinction resides for Heidegger in what the author of the Grundprobleme recalls near the end of these lessons, where he asks whether everything can be captured as vorhanden in the sense of production (Herstellen [that is, poiesis]), “or if there is not something that categorically eludes such a designation. He answers his own question. Indeed there is something that is never vorhanden: the being that we are, that is, human being”. But “the being that we are”, according to Shoichet, also escapes any definition in terms of Zuhandenheit. Denis McManus, on the other hand, proposes to elucidate both the underdetermined role of “conscience” in Sein und Zeit and its connection to the key Heideggerian notion of “authenticity” through a rigorous examination of the hypothesis (notably proposed by Steven Crowell) that what these notions imply is an “owning of norms”; and to resituate certain tensions and ambiguities they bear in the history of philosophy. He emphasizes that it differs from traditional Christian notions (notably Aquinas’ notion of conscientia, which, as an understanding of how to act in concrete situations, is tributary to the theoretical practical knowledge contained in synderesis) in that the “call of conscience” in Sein und Zeit is not taken to come from an onto-theological divine entity but rather from “within” Dasein (even though its source, which is also “beyond” Dasein, is not some romantic “true” or “inner” self either), and that it has no positive cognitive content, adding nothing to our knowledge or reality. On the other hand, it might be tempting to see Heidegger’s notion of Eigentlichkeit in continuity with Kant’s concern with the risk of ethical heteronomy, as Crowell tends to. However, McManus concludes at an impasse: Heidegger’s Dasein is constituted as a self in authentically owning norms; but this then seems to preclude the very idea of inauthentic Dasein’s experiencing of the heteronomous norms of the “They” as an alien imposition: the inauthentic pseudo“self” is merely unproblematically constituted by those norms that are not (and cannot be) its own, since it has no authentic self.

Contents

Part I Historical Assessments  Heidegger Translation in the 1970s����������������������������������������������������������������    3 David Farrell Krell  Derrida’s “Deconstruction” and Heidegger’s Reception in America����������   19 Françoise Dastur Seinsvergessenheit: Heidegger and Anglophone Philosophers of Religion ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   31 Joseph S. O’Leary  Among Heretics: Derridean Influences in Anglo-American Encounters with Heidegger’s Later Work ����������������������������������������������������   51 Daniela Vallega-Neu  Anarchy in the Name of Heidegger����������������������������������������������������������������   67 Nicolas de Warren Part II Between the Pragmata and the Phainomena: Phenomenological, Metaphysical, and Pragmatist Readings  Heidegger’s Disavowal of Metaphysics����������������������������������������������������������   89 Taylor Carman  Formal and Fundamental Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger������������������   99 John Rogove  The Topic of Sense in Being and Time������������������������������������������������������������  117 Daniel O. Dahlstrom  Life and World: Heidegger’s Phenomenological Metaphyiscs and Its Discontents������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  135 Steven Crowell

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Michael Inwood brings into proper consideration for the first time the problem of sleep, the “small death”, in Heidegger. Although Heidegger was attentive to this problem in his later writings, it is strangely absent from Sein und Zeit. He examines the paradox that connects the fact that “the maximum possible length of a human life is known empirically rather than a priori” to the fact that it is indeed a priori that “we can know that there is any such maximum at all”. For, the fact that “I shall die is not merely empirically likely or even empirically certain”: as page 251 of Sein und Zeit tells us, anyone who seems not to know about death is “really ‘fleeing in the face of death’”. But this ‘paradox’ (which follows directly from that fact that “it is easy to assume, unless one reflects and until one begins to decline, that elderly people are a distinct species, doomed to die in a way that I am not”) forces upon us the thought that “we do know that everyone dies and that therefore I too will die”. But, by sheer force of such a paradox, my knowledge “seems nevertheless to depend on our collective experience rather than simply my own personal experience”. But then, “there is something inauthentic about my conviction that I will die and that the dead do not awake”. Therefore, Inwood asserts, the authentic experience maintains a paradoxical dependence on the inauthentic experience, through the empirical experience of sleep. Rudolph Makkrell shows us how Heidegger used Dilthey to separate himself from Husserl. Whereas Husserl saw Dithey’s Weltanschauungsphilosophie as a relativistic foil to his phenomenology als strenge Wissenschaft, Heidegger crucially saw the two as complementary. He carefully traces out the various steps of this abandonment first in volume 56/57 of the Gesamtausgabe, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, following it through volume 59 dedicated to the Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression, and up to the famous courses on Aristotle.32 It is, as such, a question of the early Heidegger, and it is between this Heidegger and Dilthey that Makkrell carries out his highly instructive comparison. Lee Braver, in his comparison of Wittgenstein and Heidegger on honesty and self-transparence, presents us with a negative portrait of Heidegger by means of a sort of double-mirroring: first, by reading back into Wittgenstein the “existentialist” themes of an early Heidegger whose overriding concerns with authenticity situate him in the company of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre; and then by proposing to find in this Wittgenstein a lens through which to critique Heidegger on his own terms. What we find in this lens is a Wittgenstein operating a sort of phenomenological reduction eliminating cognitive prejudices imported by our intellectual cowardice from other domains, or pictures, of thought; and what we find in its object is a Heidegger who, in theory, seeks to undo the knots in our understanding but who could learn a thing or two from Wittgenstein’s actual practice of obsessive selfexamination with respect even to his most trivial representations.

 Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, trans. Ted Sadler, New Brunswick, NJ: Bloomsbury (Athone), 2000;  Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, trans. Tracy Colony, London, Bloomsbury (Continuum), 2010; Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (GA 61), trans. Richard Rowjcewicz, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 32

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It is with one of the most thorough masteries of analytical philosophy in contemporary Germany that Pirmin Stekeler-Weithoferst places Heidegger’s meditation on truth within a Kantian, a Hegelian and a Husserlian framework. He puts this into the context of prototype semantics, meaning that we understand words and expressions best if we know clear paradigms or stereotypes to which they apply. This explains how we can turn proper names into adjectives. We talk, he says, for example, about a Homeric laughter. Especially in the sciences, ideal forms as in geometry become constitutive for using generic concepts like straight lines and circles. It happens, however, that stereotype pre-judgements, conventional hearsay or formal schemes of literal calculation hide the true form of a phenomenon or of the meaning of words. The true notion of truth is, therefore, a-letheia. The Greek word alludes to an un-covering of what shows itself if we learn to bracket deep-rooted prejudices (as in Husserl’s epochē) and understand truth with Heidegger as clearing, that is, as the open horizon of real possibilities in a modal understanding of time and in a radical acknowledgement of the finitudes and contingencies of being. The very method of critical thinking thus consists in listening cautiously to language, without following blindly the differentially conditioned inference schemes learned in our intellectual youth or established in scientific theories. Pietro D’Oriano’s chapter reads Frege from the point of view of the later Heidegger, and interrogates, in the manner of Derrida, the place of the ego loquens, of the concrete thought, and of language as sensuous sign, in Frege’s logical idealism. He reads Frege in such a way as to find the question of being in his Begriffschrift, his Gedanke, and in Sinn und Bedeutung. In a word, he attempts to unearth a Fregean ontology behind Frege’s back, as it were, and from a Heideggerian point of view. Frege and Heidegger appear to stand at opposite ends of the historical contraction/ expansion of λόγος between the poles of mathematical logic and of the essence of language in its fullness. D’Oriano attempts to collapse this distinction by putting at centre-stage what seemed incidental to Frege’s project: the scaffolding that was to be thrown away once the edifice built stays put, and is incorporated into the edifice as a definitive, even central, feature. In so doing, he extracts Frege completely from the retro-projected light of the schools he founded: Frege becomes a continental philosopher…

Politics and Poetry (the Empirical/Ontical) Paul Slama addresses directly the question of Heidegger’s own attitude towards the United States, and illustrates how not only was it tinged with common anti-American prejudices of interwar Germany, but can be seen as a more radical version of similar attitudes held by two other prominent German thinkers, Carl Schmitt and Max Weber. For each thinker, “America” represented something of capital importance for their systems of thought. Slama outlines the principles both of Schmitt’s “political” anti-Americanism, according to which the philosophical significance of the United States lies in the introduction of the universalizing concepts,

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rationalization and rhetoric of human rights into what were fundamentally naked political considerations of imperial power and domination, which obscures the basic nature of the political and characterizes the modern age, and of Weber’s “theological” critique of Americanism, which sees in this phenomenon the elevation of the utilitarian principle of money-making as an end itself to that of a disinterested religious-moral duty, replacing the category of salvation. Slama then goes on to compare both with Heidegger’s sui generis “metaphysical” critique of Americanism, which he sees as the socio-political manifestation of the long process, beginning with the degeneration of “thought” into metaphysics and the calculative rationalistic appropriation of beings, by which “being” has been forgotten. Whereas the poet Paul Celan explored the axiological aspects of human life in such depth, Heidegger showed a fundamental insensitivity, Edward Kanterian contends, to these aspects of human life. He argues that this is largely because of Heidegger’s “commitment to the hidden history of Being as the true happening of human history”, which “involves an abstract, metaphysical conception of history”, and to which poetry is epistemically tributary, even as it plays an epistemically privileged role as way of access to this history. Nevertheless, he brings out the deep complementarity between Heidegger’s thinking and Celan’s poetry. Celan was Jewish, and used the German language to sing German-Jewish history, not in a mythical way, like Hölderlin, but to describe real history and real human experiences. Finally, the “impersonal” (i.e. the philosophical as such) and the “empirical” are at loggerheads and stand at an impasse, staring each other down. Charles E. Scott’s chapter takes up the dialogue found in Conversations on a Country Path with the interrogations of the notions of τέχνη and φύσις found in Contributions to Philosophy. He asks whether Heidegger’s thoughts on Seyn, Wesen, Machenshaft are helpful for understanding the desolation that has been wrought by modern technological civilisation. He interrogates Heidegger’s assertions that “nothing had fundamentally changed” after the destruction of WWII and its brutality. Scott asks how such a momentous event as the defeat and destruction of Nazi Germany can be thought to be “nothing”. Of course, Heidegger meant “nothing essential changed”. Scott proposes to face this problem through a meditation on Heidegger’s use of language, and its ability (or lack thereof) to grasp the essential pre-predicative experiences of stillness and silence. Ecole normale supérieure Archives Husserl de Paris Paris, France

John Rogove

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Contents

 The Pragmatist Reading of Being and Time��������������������������������������������������  159 Aaron Shoichet  Conscience, Its History and Being and Time: On Selfhood, Autonomy and an Experiment with Norms��������������������������������������������������  181 Denis McManus  Death, the Brother of Sleep ����������������������������������������������������������������������������  209 Michael Inwood  Dilthey, Heidegger and the Actualizing-­Sense of History����������������������������  221 Rudolf A. Makkreel  Ethics of Courage and Honesty in Wittgenstein and Heidegger ����������  235 An Lee Braver  Heidegger on Truth as Opening Possibilities������������������������������������������������  257 Pirmin Stekeler  Frege and Heidegger: On Frege’s Style ��������������������������������������������������������  281 Pietro D’Oriano Part III Politics and Poetry (the Empirical/Ontical)  Heidegger on Americanism, After Carl Schmitt and Max Weber: The United States as a Figure of a Historical Transcendental��������������������  311 Paul Slama  The Desolation of Our Time: Celan’s Struggle with Heidegger������������������  331 Edward Kanterian  Technology, Essence, and Everyday Living ��������������������������������������������������  367 Charles E. Scott Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  385

Part I

Historical Assessments

Heidegger Translation in the 1970s David Farrell Krell

My first effort at Heidegger translation was the essay “Logos: Heraclitus B50” from Vorträge und Aufsätze, a contribution to a graduate seminar taught by John Sallis at Duquesne University in the late 1960s. For years I kept a copy of this first effort as a kind of memento mori, but in the meantime, happily, it has disappeared. The version that eventually appeared in Early Greek Thinking in 1975 was much altered. At some point in the early 1970s, after completing my doctorate from Duquesne in 1971, I sent the translation to J. Glenn Gray, who taught at Colorado College and who directed the Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) Heidegger Series. Glenn thought well enough of my effort to ask Joan Stambaugh to meet with me in Pittsburgh. Joan was supportive of both the Early Greek Thinking project and my involvement with the editorial circle in general. Fred D. Wieck, an editor at Harper’s who had collaborated with Glenn on the translation of Heidegger’s Was heisst Denken? was the official head of the project—yet I never met him. The editorial work was done principally by Glenn Gray himself, together with his daughter, Sherry Gray Martin, and Joan Stambaugh. All three, however, would have said that the real leader of the circle was Hannah Arendt, and this is no doubt true. It is well known that Arendt played a leading role in the editorship of Karl Jaspers’ works; far less well known is the fact that she was just as active in the translation projects involving Heidegger’s works. Nothing appeared in the Harper Series in those days that did not Copyright © 2017, 2021 by David Farrell Krell. An expanded version of this text is to appear in my forthcoming memoir,  Three Encounters: Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida  (Indiana University Press, 2023). D. F. Krell (*) DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA Brown University, Providence, RI, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_1

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pass through her hands and under her eyes. My meetings with her—among the most privileged events of my life—always had these translation projects at their center. She had admired my translation of Heidegger’s Der Spruch des Anaximander, the first essay of Early Greek Thinking, and although she had justified doubts about my youth and the parlous state of my German—I was learning more every day, but life is never long enough, and no effort ever adequate—she too was nothing but supportive. There were particular passages in the Anaximander piece that we spoke about at length, and I will mention at least one of them in a moment. Early Greek Thinking was a collaboration between a fellow Duquesne graduate, Frank Capuzzi, and myself. Because I was already living in Germany by that time, it was a collaboration by post. The final correction of proofs fell to me, and the little book that cost the two of us considerable blood sweat and tears appeared in 1975. It was then later revised and published in paperback in 1984. Today it is out of print, a fact that I regret, even though other English translations of Heidegger’s Holzwege and, I presume, of Vorträge und Aufsätze, contain translations (not mine or Frank’s) of these pieces.1 My letters to my parents and my journals say very little about the work done on Early Greek Thinking. The letter of June 15, 1974 says that the typescript was mailed to Harper & Row on April 15, 1974. I was expecting the book to be in print by December of 1974 (ah, the impatience and inexperience of youth), but my memory of the process by which the book got done lies too far back to be trustworthy. Two recollections do stand out. One involves a long discussion with Arendt, the other with Reiner Schürmann. Reiner was a young professor of mine at Duquesne, a brilliant man, and very generous with his time and expertise. He worked through an early version of my attempt at “The Anaximander Fragment,” which should have been rendered as “Anaximander’s Saying,” of course, but I, like Glenn Gray, was obstinate about reducing the number of “Heideggerisms” as much as possible. Earlier translations had suffered from the tendency to translate Heidegger into Pennsylvania Dutch. Reiner and I sat at the dining room table in my apartment in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh and pored over Heidegger’s “Anaximander.” All went as well as it could go, until we reached this sentence: Geschick versucht sich an Geschick. Readers will find it in the first line of page 311 of the 1950 Klostermann edition of Holzwege. What could be simpler: two identical nouns connected by a reflexive verb and a familiar preposition. Five words. I had done my homework, and so I knew that the verb sich versuchen was a relatively rare instance of the familiar verb versuchen, to try or attempt. Der Versuch was such a “try” or “effort,” or, more formally, an

 At some point in the 1990s or early 2000s HarperCollins released the World Rights in English of Early Greek Thinking to me, and Indiana University Press immediately attempted to do a reprint; this was blocked by the Klostermann firm, which argued that Heidegger had insisted on the publication of Holzwege and Vorträge und Aufsätze as complete entities. They took this to mean that he did not approve of Early Greek Thinking, which is of course nonsense. He was happy to have these essays in English and was grateful for the little book, which I handed over to him during one of my visits. 1

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“experiment.” What made the noun especially interesting was its close relation to die Versuchung, “temptation.” Nietzsche had already teased his readers with his play on these words: no “essay” of his was without its diabolical side, its “temptation.” James Joyce would not have hesitated to have Shem the penman translate Versuch and Versuchung with attemptation. But sich versuchen is less entertaining than all that. It means simply to try one’s hand at a thing, to undertake a task or to pose a question or a theme to oneself: ich versuche mich an einem Thema, says the dictionary. What was odd about this use of the verb is that Geschick was doing this to itself—in the third person present indicative. Geschick was of course the “sending” or “destining” of being, from the verb schicken, “to send.” The broader sense of something’s being “sent” one’s way is one’s personal destiny or fate, and that is perhaps the most common sense of Geschick. Yet the adjectival past participle geschickt also means “skillful,” presumably as a result of one’s having been “sent” a special gift or talent for something—for singing, dancing, woodwork, and so on. I knew that Heidegger often played with the notion of a “skillful” thinking that would trace the history (for Geschichte, “story” or “history,” is a near-homonym of Geschick) in terms of its destiny or “sending,” so that skill in thinking requires that one have a sense for what is fateful or even destined about the history of being. Those were the “parts”; but what was the sense of the whole? Reiner smiled amiably, and in his deep, rather stentorian voice, repeated the German sentence over and over again. I sagely reviewed the context for him. Heidegger is talking about errancy (die Irre) at this moment in his “Anaximander” essay. I will cite here the paragraph that culminates in the redoubled Geschick, which Reiner was making me feel would seal my own fate: As it reveals itself in beings, Being withdraws. [I was still doing Big B Being at that point, but I would soon give it up. In any case: Das Sein entzieht sich, indem es sich in das Seiende entbirgt. Paragraph break, and then:] In this way, by illuminating them, Being sets beings adrift in errancy. Beings come to pass in that errancy by which they circumvent Being and establish the realm of error (in the sense of a prince’s realm or the realm of poetry.) Error is the space in which history unfolds. In error what happens in history bypasses what is like Being. Therefore, whatever unfolds historically is necessarily misinterpreted. During the course of this misinterpretation destiny awaits what will become of its seed. It brings those whom it concerns to the possibilities of the fateful and fatal [Geschicklichen und Ungeschlicklichen]. (H 310–11; EGT 26).2 “Fatal” for Ungeschlicklichen is of course an overtranslation, although Heidegger clearly means something both fateful and dire, something significantly amiss. Then comes the fateful, fatal sentence that Reiner, smiling benevolently, insisted on repeating over and over again. Who knows what I initially did with the sentence? I no longer have any of my early drafts. Here are some of the ways the translation could have gone and probably did go in my conversation with Reiner: “Destiny tries

 That is, Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1950), 310–11; and Early Greek Thinking, second ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 26. 2

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its hand at destiny”; “The sending undertakes to send itself”; “Skill hones itself on fateful destining”; and so on, a different effort for each of Reiner’s repetitions. Long after the fact, I realized that he was trying to get me not to crack the riddle but to crack my head. That is to say, to wake up and realize that there are aspects of any text, and certainly of Heidegger’s texts, that will not boil down to a particular sense. Risk of overtranslation or undertranslation is therefore in principle never overcome. The primary “skill” of a translator is a finely developed sense of paranoia—not a sense of assuredness. In any case, I must have noticed that the next sentence of Heidegger’s paragraph says something about the human being’s inability in errancy to recognize itself, an inability that corresponds to the self-concealing clearing of being in errancy. The upcoming mention of der Mensch either rescued me or drew me into fatal attemptation, for the English translation of Geschick versucht sich an Geschick became: “Man’s destiny gropes toward its fate.” The only thing that is right about this translation is that it “gropes.” Whether or not my solution had Reiner’s blessing I no longer remember, or I have repressed, but it surely came to me only after our long discussion of the line. And in later years Reiner continued to be kind to me—always full of praise, always encouraging. Some years later he honored me by asking me to translate a newly discovered poem of Hölderlin’s.3 Reiner Schürmann’s early death was an enormous personal loss for me, and it continues to be a terrible loss to contemporary philosophy. Hannah Arendt, herself an enthusiastic admirer of Schürmann, read the “Anaximander” translation only at a late stage in the preparation of Early Greek Thinking, although I am certain that Glenn would have run by her any doubts he may have had about the translation earlier on. In any case, her reception of the translation was very generous; it convinced her that I should continue as a translator and become a member of the informal “editorial board.” I remember a conversation with her in the Schlossbergblick Hotel, where she always stayed during her visits to Freiburg, about Heidegger’s treatment of the word κατά in the phrase κατὰ τὸ χρεών, usually rendered as “according to necessity.” The context in Heidegger’s “Anaximander” is as follows: The word κατά precedes τὸ χρεών. It means “from up there,” or “from over there.” The κατά refers back to something from which something lower comes to presence, as from something higher and as its consequent. That in reference to which the κατά is pronounced has in itself an incline [ein Gefälle] along which other things have fallen out in this or that way. (H 334; EGT 49). I was no doubt pleased with myself for having found a way to save two senses of Gefälle, the “incline” by which things have “fallen out” in this or that way. Der Fall is a “case,” as in a criminal case or the case of a declension, but also a “fall” or “drop.” Eine Fälle is a trap, Gefallen is the verb “to please.” Obviously, not all these senses could or should be retained in a rendering of Gefälle. “Incline” was not a bad  “Hölderlin’s ‘Hymn to Serenity’: A Newly Discovered Poem,” translated, with introduction and commentary, by David Farrell Krell, in The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (New School for Social Research), XI, 1 (1986), 3–15. 3

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solution. But Hannah spoke of a stairway, remarking that the Gefälle between the steps should be regular, so that one doesn’t stumble and fall. Gefälle has to do with the rate of fall or descent, for example, of a mountain stream: the Chärstellenbach of the Maderan Valley in the central Swiss Alps has such a steep Gefälle that an incredible amount of water flows by in any duration of time, and with reckless speed. The stream I mentioned to her, however, is one near my home in the Schwarzwald, which flows over moss-covered stones down a steep hillside. The hillside’s incline is more or less regular, except that each stone or boulder over which the stream pours is varied in size. At some point I called it a “cascade,” eine Kaskade (from the Latin cadere, to fall, the source of our word cadence), and I recall that her face lit up with the sound of that word. She repeated the word, saying, “That’s it, that’s it!” She didn’t mean as a translation of the word Gefälle, but as part of a context or word-field that would lead to a good translation. And I think she simply enjoyed the word, the beautiful noise that the word cascade makes whether spoken in German or English or French. I recall many other instances when she would repeat a line of verse by Heine or Hölderlin or Goethe, savoring each word, her deep voice—she could have been one of The Whiskeyhill Singers—sometimes growling it out between long drags on her cigarette, which was her way of singing. Her savoring of words and her love of language sometimes meant trouble for other translators—I was fortunate in being spared, but others were not so lucky. Arendt felt strongly that the first priority in translation was to protect two languages, the original and the “target” language (horrible expression!). She affirmed something that Glenn used to say on many occasions: translations usually fail because of trouble in one’s own primary language, the so-called “target” language. The worst mistake a translator can make is to assume that he or she is comfortable in one of the two languages, in one’s own Muttersprache—or in some cases Vatersprache. There is no comfort. Glenn and I, working hard on the Introduction to Being and Time for the Basic Writings anthology, spent most of our time worrying the English and American language(s) in our efforts to find a way to say the German. We never stopped using every tool we could think of, especially Roget’s thesaurus. And even after we had found a decent alternative to a failed translation of a word or phrase, Glenn would say, “There will be a third way; let’s put it aside for now.” That is why he and Hannah could be such close friends: their love of and respect for language was paramount. Glenn Gray’s correspondence with me—I have sixty-eight letters from him, dating from August 15, 1973 to October 23, 1977, six days before his death in Colorado Springs—tells me much more about the formation of Early Greek Thinking. In that first letter to me Glenn lists his emendations to the Logos essay I had sent him. He refers to Joan Stambaugh’s corrections as being more important than his own, but I no longer have a record of hers: they must have been absorbed into my typewritten drafts (no computers back then!) and then tossed after the book appeared. In this list of issues Glenn is thinking over the translation of sich ereignen, and he suggests the biblical “come to pass,” biblical—and therefore eloquent. He resisted both “eventuation” and “appropriation,” the first for aesthetic reasons, the second for perhaps the same philosophical reasons that caused Derrida to invent “propriation.” A

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second full page and part of a third page, single-spaced, list various typos but also matters of substance: gleichsam, “as it were,” which I had omitted from a passage; einen Wink, not an “insight,” as I had it, but a “hint” or a “clue”; zugleich, “at the same time,” which I had omitted; bildarm, not “prosaic,” since thinking for Heidegger is essentially poetic, not prosaic, but rather “‘nonpictorial’ or something similar.” And sometimes there were simply words requiring a less Germanic English: vielmehr, not “much more” but “rather”; zusammenfallen, not “falling together” but “coincide.” It is tiresome for my readers, no doubt, to be dragged through these details, but such details determine whether a translation succeeds or fails. Virtually every translation I sent to Glenn received this kind of detailed scrutiny, line by line, word by word. At the same time, Glenn and I wrote back and forth about the forest that contained all these trees—speculating on what Heidegger might have meant by any given phrase against the backdrop of the whole. From time to time Glenn would instruct me to ask Heidegger on my next visit, and I always did so.4 A final word about the Logos essay. I did not know at the time that Jacques Lacan had tried his hand at translating the essay into French—and it is good that I did not know, for his rendering would have confused me forever. Yet his rendering, published in the first issue of La psychanalyse (1956: 59–79), is a psychoanalytic tour de force—that is force, not farce—and I can encourage my readers to read both Lacan’s translation and my account of it in Derrida and Our Animal Others.5 From one of these early letters of Glenn’s I note that my former professors at Duquesne, John Sallis and André Schuwer, also read through the essays that went into Early Greek Thinking. The more I look into the history of these early  For an account of these “Work Sessions with Martin Heidegger,” written many years ago now, see Philosophy Today, XXVI, 2 (Summer 1982), 126–138, or, preferably, see chapter 5 of my forthcoming Three Encounters: Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida. 5  See ch. 5 of Derrida and Our Animal Others (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 2013). Why mention Lacan in a book on Derrida and animals? Because Lacan translates Heidegger’s Versammlung, which for Derrida is the bête noire of Heidegger’s thought, not as “gathering” but as “distribution” or even “dispersion,” répartir. An excellent account of Lacan’s translation is Hans-Dieter Gondek, “Logos und Übersetzung: Heidegger als Übersetzer Heraklits— Lacan als Übersetzer Heideggers,” in Übersetzung und Dekonstruktion, ed. Alfred Hirsch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 263–348. (I am grateful to Gerhard Richter of Brown University for the reference to Gondek’s fine essay.) Lacan’s outrageous translation of Versammlung is no Freudian slip on Lacan’s part, nor even a Lacanian lapsus. Rather, it is the mark of the subject rent by desire; it is the mark of the phallus as signifier, which works its effects only in and through dispersion and absence. Following Elisabeth Roudenesco, Gondek affirms that Lacan’s “translator-boldness” is Mallarméan in its inspiration and strategic in its procedure. For it is the infinite— and infinitely dispersing—domination of the signifier over the signified that makes it so. Lacan’s translation, devoted to the truth of desire, if not of being, thus challenges Heidegger’s confidence in his own reception of the call from being (303). Lacan’s inspiration for répartition arguably has to do with the insights of Heidegger’s “Moira”; that is, it pays heed to the endless process of allotment and apportioning in revealing/concealing, to the ceaseless cycles of the ontological difference. Gondek concludes: “That Lacan here no longer speaks of ‘gathering’ could readily be explained by the fact that signifiers, which stand in a relation of absolute difference to one another, cannot ‘gather’; they cannot form a whole, a unity, or a totality, but can only perform a ‘distribution [‘Verteilung’]. A supremely transitory one. In which difference, as an ‘apportioning judgment, is endlessly in process” (306–7). 4

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translations, the more I realize my debts to others, many others. As I have already indicated, the essay that received the most attention was “The Anaximander Fragment.” Both Glenn and Sherry Gray, she from a classicist’s point of view, worked carefully through my version, as the letter of March 15, 1974 indicates. (Sherry was working on her doctorate in Classics at Boston University, but she devoted endless time and her great talents to the Heidegger translation project.) His (or their) comments are particularly valuable, and whereas I would like to reproduce them all here I will cite only a few—again they fill two pages of single-spaced type: Das Seiende we translate usually as beings, τὰ ὄντα. The plural prevents one in class teaching from talking of big B and little b. I talked this over with Heidegger and he readily agreed that he thought of plurals here, as in τὰ ὄντα. Sometimes it is desirable to use the singular nevertheless and then we insert the word particular before being. I note in this essay a few instances where you properly use the singular without qualification, but usually you should change them to accord with other translations. OK? Versammeln, Versammlung is best rendered as “gathering,” “to gather,” rather than “assembling.” When we meet I shall tell you a story about Jean Beaufret, Heidegger, and I discovering that this word goes back to the medieval gattern, the union of two, and hence back to ἀγαθόν. We got quite excited about the matter. Beaufret had objected that our translation of versammeln as “assemble” or “collect” was too external, and Heidegger explained that he thinks of versammeln as an ontological word with inner power, not an external bringing together. A good dictionary will tell you, as mine does, that “gather” is different from “collect” or “assemble”. . . . lichtend-bergende Versammlung—“the gathering that lightens and shelters.” Heidegger thinks of Licht both as making lighter (leicht) and as illumination. So [Albert] Hofstadter and I hit upon “lighten,” which is delightfully ambiguous. Bergen seems also to have the sense here of protecting or sheltering. Please think it over and also note whether Joan agrees with us. . . . It is important to note that these suggestions were always tentative in at least two senses of that word. First, no translator was ever constrained by them, but in the end had to find the way by his or her own lights; and second, Glenn, Hannah, Joan, and I often enough changed our minds about which of the many possible solutions was best. The more important the word for Heidegger, the less certain we all were about how to render it in English. Let us decide to call this “Gray’s Law,” in his honor, even if it seems likely that translators have been following it for a long time now. This same letter of March 15, 1974 also says, “Your division of the Nietzsche volumes seems now just right to me, as do your English titles for them.” By the time I had moved permanently to Germany, during the summer of 1974, two translation projects had already been agreed upon: a translation of Heidegger’s eleven-­hundred-­ page Nietzsche and an anthology of his writings for university students. The anthology, eventually called Basic Writings, occupied my first three years in Germany. It was an enormous amount of work, and it left me so exhausted that I had to ask for help with the Nietzsche translation. Let me discuss the anthology first.

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The initial question, of course, was what should go into the anthology. On November 12, 1974, I wrote to my parents, “The Heidegger anthology is shaping up, slowly but surely, as I make plan after plan, changing my mind about what belongs where!” Harper’s had given me a very strict page limit for the anthology, one that caused me to edit down two of the pieces—“The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Letter on Humanism”—a terrible mistake in judgment that was corrected in the second edition of the anthology in 1993. Heidegger himself had direct input with regard to the book’s contents, and he blessed the final form that the anthology took. My first proposal to him, however, which I unfortunately no longer have, included much more from Being and Time than the Introduction. Section 40 on anxiety, for example, and section 53 on the full existential conception of death, were included in the proposal; also at least parts of section 44, on “Dasein, Disclosedness, and Truth.” I note that both Glenn Gray and especially Hannah Arendt desired this fuller presentation of Heidegger’s magnum opus. Heidegger himself took the time to look over the proposal carefully, and the only real objection he had was to the treatment of Being and Time. He asked me, in that raspy, high-pitched voice of his, and looking at me with those protruding eyes, yet quite calmly and in the friendliest possible way, “What is the principle of selection for what you have chosen here?” Das Prinzip der Auswahl, that was his expression, and when I heard it something like my being drained out of me. An honest answer would have been, “Well, I just sort of liked these sections,” but luckily honesty was kept in abeyance that day. It was clear to me, and to us both, that there was no such principle of selection operative here, nor could there be one. After a long discussion, we agreed that it would be best to offer the Introduction alone. There was something like a “principle of selection” for the book as a whole, however. Our effort was to offer as many aspects of Heidegger’s thought as possible to students, aspects that would speak not only to young philosophers but also to architects, artists, mathematicians, natural scientists, poets, and so on. When Harper’s granted me a bit more space for the second edition, I made certain that “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Letter on Humanism” appeared complete and then added an essay on language, one that I felt would be most comprehensible to linguists and students of languages and literatures. On December 15, 1974, I wrote to my parents The anthology is coming along slowly but surely, but the Nietzsche translation only slowly. After Christmas I have to get busy on the latter, which I haven’t touched in a couple of months. No word from Harper & Row about either project yet, even though Glenn Gray writes them about once a week. He assures me that all is a “go,” so far as they are concerned, and that they are just too lazy or disorganized to write. He even says that they are no worse than most other publishers! More’s the pity. I may be able to visit Heidegger shortly after the Christmas break to talk about the anthology, if his health and energy hold up. And his interest, of course!

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And on May 17, 1975, the following Dr. Gray is here now and we are working like a couple of old Roman slaves, hoping that the September deadline for the anthology can be met. He is a fine gentleman, and we are enjoying his visit.. .. Our [i.e. my and Frank Capuzzi’s] translation of Early Greek Thinking should be out soon, that is, by the Fall. Frank and I completed our work on the proofs, and so we are sitting around waiting for the book to be printed and bound.. .. I visited with Heidegger—alone—yesterday for a quarter of an hour. The immediate occasion was to pick up some books Glenn and I need for our work on the anthology. But Heidegger invited me in and we had a nice discussion about that project and other matters. I’m astonished by how much he knows about me. You would figure that the greatest living philosopher, at almost 86, would have other things to occupy his mind. Once the selections had been determined for the first edition of the book, Glenn and I settled down to work on the Introduction to Being and Time. Glenn was able to stay for an entire month in the house where I lived, and we worked every day from dawn till dusk on an initial translation of the Introduction by Joan Stambaugh. Joan later accepted the results of our work and used our version for her new translation of Being and Time, eventually published by SUNY Press. Glenn and I both felt that Joan’s initial effort as a whole required reworking, however. There were simply too many impossible choices for the key words of Being and Time—and almost the entire vocabulary of Sein und Zeit is presented in these opening eight sections, as one would expect. In a sense, Glenn and I were required to translate all of Sein und Zeit in cameo form, en miniature. It was an amazing month. And the result of our labors, even after all these years, generally pleases me. And yet: Glenn once wrote me to say, in another context altogether, that translation is “bad for the soul,” and I think he may be right: it is such hard work and it is so disrespected, or at best so taken for granted. Furthermore, the responsibility the translator has to assume is too heavy a burden: botch your own authored text and only you and your text suffer, the fault is your own; botch a text of another, a text that you know demands your own best effort, and the fault ripples outward and causes real damage. The anthology appeared in the spring of 1977, but not before a whole series of crises, which I want to detail here. Apart from the crises, however, about which more in a moment, there were delightful discoveries. Most important, I found that the best translators of Heidegger were absolutely dedicated to the originals and not their own versions, so that they did not object to my effort—essential in my view then as now— to unify the vocabulary of the anthology as much as possible. Albert Hofstadter, the gifted translator of “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “Building Dwelling Thinking,” was a model of courtesy, cooperation, and kindness; W. B. Barton, Jr., writing also on behalf of Vera Deutsch, was equally as forthcoming about the suggested changes. When I think back on my correspondence with Glenn Gray, who as General Editor of the Heidegger Series carried out all these difficult negotiations, I am filled with gratitude: the participating translators, under the gentle guidance Glenn himself, showed the generosity of spirit that I have found in every thinker with whom I have had the privilege to work—among them, Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida.

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The crises often came in the form of obstructions introduced by the German publisher of Heidegger’s Collected Works, the Klostermann firm of Frankfurt am Main, and by confusion at Harper’s. I hope my readers will not object to being dragged through several of these; for they are instructive and they will enable future editors and translators to anticipate what may be in store for them. Here I will rely principally on my correspondence with Glenn Gray. This correspondence, to repeat, is for me the most important source of information about the Heidegger translations. And Glenn’s letters, if I may say so, have a great deal of philosophy in them.6 Yet much of the correspondence is taken up by the irascible German publishers of Heidegger’s works, above all, the Klostermann firm. Add to this the overworked and underpaid editors at Harper & Row and you have the makings of a long-standing fight over the World Rights in English for Heidegger’s works. A first sign of trouble appears in a letter to my parents dated July 24, 1975: I found out today that Harper & Row do not have the rights for three of the most important essays in the anthology—the German publisher will sue if we go on with the project. Harper & Row assured me before I began last November that all the rights were in their hands that there would be no problem. So for a year I took their word for it. Now that I am preparing the final manuscript, after all the work is completed, I find out that there is a major legal obstacle. I’ve written Glenn Gray about it, and am simply going to sit back and wit until they resolve the matter. A year of one person’s time is enough to waste. But I don’t have much hope for the project. The German publisher is dead set against it, and Harper & Row will let the whole thing fall through if the threat of a suit comes up. But I’m not giving up altogether: as I say, I’ll let a few weeks pass to see if anybody else is interested enough to negotiate a settlement with the German publisher.. .. A real shame, though, since all my work was done—the manuscript was to be sent away at the end of August for printing. So, live and learn. The first volume of translations is now out: Early Greek Thinking is its title, and I will send you a copy as soon as Harper & Row send me a few. Basically it is well done, most of the printing errors being in the Greek.. . . I will ignore here the early stages of the quarrel over the anthology, in which Martin Heidegger himself intervened on behalf of what we were calling a Studienausgabe of his works, a “students’ edition,” since that was the purpose of the book right from the start. At each phase of this imbroglio over the rights Heidegger would shake his head and say, “I’ve told Klostermann... .” Yet I soon learned that publishers and authors live on two different planets that follow orbits very remote from one another. Add to this two different countries and the metaphor inflates to cosmic crisis. To be fair, the Klostermann firm was only one half of the problem. An undated letter from Martin Heidegger—it could have been anytime during the year 1975, since the rights problem was a perpetual companion of the project, but probably written in mid-summer—says, in translation,  I discuss them in greater detail and with a broader range of topics in “A Smile and a Sense of Tragedy: Letters from J. Glenn Gray,” Philosophy Today, XXV, 2 (Summer 1981), 95–113. 6

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I am extremely sorry that you and Herr Gray are now having difficulties with the publishing of your excellent translation work. But the blame lies squarely with Harper & Row, who have not bothered to secure the translation rights. I’ve now asked Klostermann to arrange matters in a generous way, but I cannot order him about in such matters. I wrote him immediately to say that I place the highest value on your and Herr Gray’s translations. I truly hope that the issue can be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. With friendly greetings and best wishes, etc. A second undated letter, but probably from mid-October 1975, from Elfride Heidegger, who often served as Martin’s secretary and who actually knew more about rights questions than he did, says, “I’m happy to be finally able to tell you that Klostermann has communicated the following to me: ‘The firm Harper & Row has received the rights [die Lizenz] for the Holzwege volume as well as for all the part publications for the planned anthology that they are producing.’ With hearty greetings, etc.” I was clearly feeling more confident when I wrote home on September 30, 1975, If all goes well I can mail it [the anthology] to New York by the end of October.. .. I was at Heidegger’s not long ago and he assured me that all would be well with the rights problem, that the German publisher ultimately had to follow his wishes in the matter. So, with Heidegger on our side, I feel as though the team may win after all. I’m anxious to have the book behind me, since it has absorbed all my time and attention, leaving me free for nothing else really... .

However, the problem was that three of the anthology texts came from Wegmarken, not Holzwege, and so the wrangle continued all the way up to the production of the book itself. The final stage in the rights quarrel came in August of 1976, as the book was about to be printed. On August 10, 1976, Glenn wrote me to say that both he and Harper’s would be grateful for a letter from Elfride—for Martin had died on May 26 of that year—to Harper & Row listing all the texts to be taken up into the anthology and expressing support of their publication. The Klostermann firm was in the process of buying all the rights to Heidegger’s works from Günter Neske of Pfullingen and Max Niemeyer of Tübingen, an expensive and delicate process for them, so the rights issues (and the economics behind such issues) were more volatile than ever. Whereas Martin had said that he could not order Klostermann about, it was also clear that they could not contravene the wishes of the Heidegger family. I prepared such a letter and brought it with me to Elfride, who signed and dated it by hand, sending it off to Harper & Row soon thereafter. That was the end of the first and longest-lasting crisis.The second crisis falls into two parts, both involving my editorial work. The first was an instance of my over-editing, the second of my under-­ editing. Each shows how fragile the ethics of translation can become. Glenn and Sherry Gray went over every word of the original translations and also my edited versions. At a certain point, well into the project, I must have felt a greater freedom—I believe Glenn called it “the editorial itch”—to alter already approved translations. I did this in the name of a certain unity of vocabulary, but it became clear that I overstepped that boundary on many occasions. Glenn was furious, and rightly so, for he then had to restore many of the original choices, which meant double the workload for him and Sherry. His letters from late December 1975 and early January 1976, already desperately sad and overtaxed because of Hannah’s recent sudden death, contain the harshest reproofs I ever received from him, for he was the gentlest of souls, not prone to anger. But then in July of that year, very near the end of the

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project, something equally distressing occurred. One of the translations that was intended for the anthology was revised (not by me) in a way that Glenn could not accept, revised without his having had a chance to go over it. Meanwhile, I had acquiesced in the new version, throwing in the towel, and Glenn had to ask me how I could possibly have done so—I had failed in my duties as editor! I can only suppose that by that time I felt browbeaten by the whole project. In a letter home dated June 27, 1976, I apparently refer to the piece in question: I’ve been correcting galley proofs for the anthology. It has been well printed, so there is not a lot of correcting to be done. Still, it is strenuous and boring work, proofreading, and I’ll be happy when it is finished. The book is due to appear in September, but I’m skeptical. Yet another set of proofs has to be gone through, and then comes the printing and binding. In general I’m satisfied with the way it looks, except for one piece, which seems to have been translated into Chinese instead of English. But the other nine look okay, and so do my little introductions. I’ll be happy when the book is a book, and I’ll have H & R mail you a copy. In the case of the essay latterly transmogrified into what the Germans call Fachchinesisch, Glenn replaced it with the earlier version, the one that he and Sherry had checked, and then accepted my last minute emendations. The anthology was already at the page proof stage, the stage we now call “the second run,” in which normally authors dare not change a word, much less an entire chapter. The third crisis was a personal one, because well after the book was published (the publishing date was April 1977), a young friend and colleague, Reginald Lilly, alerted me that I had skipped a sentence in my translation of Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?” “Impossible!” I replied. I had checked my English against the German text several times; at one point I read my translation into a tape recorder, playing it back slowly as I read the German. But Reggie was right. On each occasion my eyes and brain had betrayed me, and I skipped a sentence! I was able to restore it in the second, 1993 edition of the book, but I never got over the shock. It did teach me something about proof-reading, namely, that when we leave words out of a sentence our minds restore them and we read blissfully on. In one of my recent books I skipped the verb is in two sentences—the withdrawal of being, as it were. I am always incredulous when this happens, but Reggie taught me something about finitude, and I am grateful to him. Glenn once wrote to me that translations are never truly finished, never adequately corrected and polished, and that colleagues, friends, and strangers can often improve them on the spot and off the cuff, as it were. This may be part of the reason why translation is bad for the soul: the responsibility is so great, and the chances to make terrible bloopers never end but only multiply. Perpetual humiliation is the lot of the translator, even if, every now and again, some renderings—veritable trouvailles—exceed our own expectations. At all events, a letter home dated March 30, 1977, announces that the anthology “is finally at the printer’s,” adding, “I mailed the final proofs in last week. Harper & Row pulled a few dumb stunts right up to the last, however, so I’m afraid when the book does appear (June is my guess) I’ll have my red pencil in hand. Anyway, the Fates have it on their desk now, and that’s fine with me.” I have no idea what those “dumb stunts” may have been, but the phrase reflects my state of mind. My readers

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may be smiling over my use of the word crisis in the above paragraphs to describe events that now seem to me no more than a tempest in a teapot, and I have to confess to the tendency to overreact. Glenn attributed this to my youth, but he was too kind. At least, things have not gotten any better for me in this regard. J. L. Mehta used to write me from India, repeating Meister Eckhart over and over again. –– David, Gelassenheit in allen dingen. Yet releasement and letting-be have never been my strengths. What did help were what turned out to be Glenn’s last letters to me: Harper’s had sent him a bound copy of the proofs for the anthology so that he could teach it to his undergraduates at the Colorado College. He found that the anthology “worked,” that is, that students could read it and understand it. He praised it and me to the rooftops, and I had to remind him that the three persons to whom the book was dedicated—Hannah Arendt, Joan Stambaugh, and Glenn Gray—deserved equal credit. Only his own modesty prevented him from accepting all three-thirds of my remark. That the Basic Writings has been influential in the reception of Heidegger’s work in the English-speaking world is, I think, beyond dispute. Some 40,000 copies of the paperback second edition have gone out into the world, if I am right. The book has been used not only for classroom teaching, however. When, decades ago now, I went to give some lectures to Daniel Libeskind’s architecture studio in Como, he greeted me on the runway when I got off the airplane with a big smile and a warm greeting. –– So you are the Big Red Book! You should be much older! I explained that working on the anthology certainly should have made me look older and more weary. But Daniel and his colleagues—for example, the architects Peter Davidson, Donald Bates, and Ben Nicholson—took it as a given that Heidegger was an essential source for contemporary architects and artists, and they knew Heidegger’s texts very well. It was at about the time of our work on the anthology, the mid-1970s, that Heidegger began to prepare the publication of his Collected Works—in over a hundred volumes. It was clear that Harper’s would never be interested in bringing these new works into English. It was principally Indiana University Press, in the series edited by John Sallis, that undertook the task. I believe one can say that the Indiana series differs from the Harper series in that it is intended for the specialist, not the young student or general reader. The main goal of the Harper series was readability. This was surely Glenn Gray’s understanding of the matter, so that many—no, most—of his emendations had to do with avoiding Engleutsch or Dinglish or Pennsylvania Dutch. Whenever my translations were too freighted with neologisms or attempts to play with etymologies, Glenn would say ugh! and insist on a more elegant solution. Interestingly, this was Hannah’s desire as well: as much as she loved her mother tongue, she loved the English of Shakespeare and Auden, and she too wanted translations that did not sound like translations and prose that did not sound forced and unheard-of. Translators will debate the matter of precision and soul forever, but I will only observe that achieving the more elegant and natural flow

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of English or of any “target” language is much the most difficult task of the translator. That is my tiny footnote to Walter Benjamin on the task of the translator. Speaking of readability and elegance in a language, allow me to add a brief word about the Nietzsche translation. In a letter home dated November 12, 1974, I note that I have developed a final plan for he Nietzsche volumes, one that Harper & Row has found acceptable: “there will be four English volumes in all,” I wrote, “if I can hold out that long.” In a later letter dated July 21, 1976, I mention that “the first volume of the Nietzsche is due (in manuscript) in January. I’m about a fourth of the way through it, so I have a lot of work ahead of me.” That is merely an indication of how the work on the Nietzsche had been held up by the anthology: I was already working on the first Nietzsche lecture course in 1974, and in July of 1976 only a quarter of it had been completed! I have virtually no other information regarding the timeline of the Nietzsche translation, and so I revert to the theme of readability. For Heidegger’s own Nietzsche courses have always seemed to me to be instances of his own best writing. People often kindly credit me for this, but no, it has to do with Heidegger’s original—and his desire to communicate clearly to his student audience. Even before the Early Greek Thinking volume went to the printer’s, I had drawn up an outline of the Nietzsche project. Some parts of volume II of the 1961 Neske edition had already been extracted from it and translated by Joan Stambaugh in a volume called The End of Philosophy. Harper’s called for four separate hardbound volumes (combined into two volumes for the paperback edition in 1991), and I began to work on the 1936 “Will to Power as Art” immediately. That work was interrupted by work on the anthology, which proved to be so time-consuming and exhausting that I eventually had to call for help with the later lecture courses. I did the first two courses, the second one, “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same” (1937), being in my view the high-point of the series. Joan did a first draft of the third lecture course, “Will to Power as Knowledge” (1939); Frank Capuzzi did a first draft of the essay “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics”7; and I did the two undelivered lectures of 1939, “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same and the Will to Power.” Finally, volume four of the Harper hardbound Nietzsche contained the 1940 lecture course on “European Nihilism,” translated by Frank Capuzzi. I believe it is fair to say that I reworked all the translations, editing them much in the way that Glenn and Joan and Hannah had edited me. I added whatever explanatory notes were necessary, checked Heidegger’s many citations from Nietzsche’s works against the historical-critical Colli-Montinari edition, retranslating many of the passages, and wrote “Analyses” for each of the four volumes. I did not finish the task until 1982, several years before the “personal computer” arrived on my desk, the tool that would have made the job so much easier. Imagine translating all these pages without “word search,” so that  A first draft of “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics” was also prepared by my colleague and friend Bruce Pye, of Mannheim University. I was uncertain at that time about whether Frank Capuzzi was working on that essay, and Bruce translated the entire essay for me. He never received credit for it, nor certainly payment, and I have always felt wretched about that. Clearly, I was stretched beyond my limit, working in Germany and publishing in the United States, casting about for help and desperate to find it. After all these decades have passed, I still must repeat my apology to him. 7

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an altered decision concerning a particular word required endless searching—one became totally verzettelt, and it was no dream but Zettel’s Nightmare. I will not comment on translation difficulties with regard to the Nietzsche, but will merely try to justify my remark about the “high-point” of the lecture series. What I really mean to say is that Heidegger’s lecture courses from 1936 to 1940 strike me as infinitely superior to the essays on the history of being that occupy much of volume II of the Neske edition. The essays tend to reduce Nietzsche’s position in the history of metaphysics in a way that the positive readings of Nietzsche’s texts (in the lecture courses) resist. Although it is only a phrase, it is perhaps useful to characterize the essays as asserting that Nietzsche is the “last metaphysician of the West,” whereas for the lecture courses he is “the most recent thinker of the West.” The words last and most recent translate the same German word, der letzte, but for Heidegger there is all the difference in the world between metaphysics and the thinking of being. My own feeling has always been that all the evidence of Heidegger’s readings of Nietzsche’s works, especially the reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the 1937 course on “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same,” refutes Heidegger’s own efforts to enclose Nietzsche within the house of metaphysics. It is perhaps fair to say that my little joke about nietzsche’s heidegger, as opposed to heidegger’s nietzsche, has had an impact on discussion of Heidegger’s Nietzsche in the English-speaking world. The joke resulted from the fact that on the spine of the Neske volumes, designed, I believe, by Günter Neske’s wife, only two names appeared: heidegger nietzsche. It was impossible to say which was the author and which the title of the work, especially because, as Nietzsche said, “some are born posthumously.” Gadamer used to repeat Heidegger’s remark, “Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht,” but I always took that to mean that what became impossible for Heidegger himself was a decisive evaluation of Nietzsche’s Gedankengut, the fund of his thinking—or, as Derrida would say, the rich variety of Nietzsche’s styles of thinking. What this really means is that the efforts to deride Nietzsche’s thinking as a mere inversion of Platonistic metaphysics, or to reduce the thought of eternal recurrence to the rotary machine of technology, are bound to fail. The result is that Heidegger’s Nietzsche, especially in its readings of Nietzsche, is not as remote from Bataille’s Sur Nietzsche or Pierre Klossowski’s Le cercle vicieux or even Derrida’s Éperons as one might have thought. And this may be one of the most positive aspects of Heidegger’s reception in the Anglophone world, not a weakness but a strength. It may also be that, alas, both Heidegger and Nietzsche are falling into abeyance or going into eclipse in the English-speaking world nowadays. Heidegger’s anti-­ Semitic remarks might explain the ostensible decline of interest in his thought, although the eclipse of Nietzsche is more difficult to understand—perhaps it is simply our inability to withstand the radical recoil of genealogical critique or to rise to the occasion of “fashioning a new lyre” for philosophizing. However, as Derrida remarks in his 1984–1985 seminar, “The Phantom of the Other,” thinkers are measured not by their persistent presence and uninterrupted impact but by the number of eclipses they survive and by the changes in the reception of them when they come out of eclipse. No eclipse, I believe, will obscure either Heidegger or Nietzsche for long, at least for those readers who, in Glenn Gray’s words, think about “the intimate and the ultimate.”

Derrida’s “Deconstruction” and Heidegger’s Reception in America Françoise Dastur

In a short but quite informative text on the reception of Heidegger’s phenomenology in North America, Thomas Sheehan, a well-known philosopher and commentator of Heidegger’s works,1 underlines that, in opposition to Husserl, Heidegger “was late arriving in America” since it was only in the 1960s that “the true nature of Heidegger’s project became clear to American scholars”.2 Only a few of Heidegger’s texts had been translated into English until then, among them What is Metaphysics?, On the Essence of Truth, in the 1940s, Heidegger’s 1935 course on The Introduction to Metaphysics in the late 1950s, and Identity and Difference and The Question of Being in 1960s. During this period, the reading of Heidegger’s works was dominated by what Thomas Sheehan names “the existentialist paradigm” which focused on the thematic of human existence. But things changed after the publication of the English translation of Sein und Zeit, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit and Brief über den Humanismus in 1962,3 since the emphasis was now put on being itself and no longer on human being.  Thomas Sheehan (born in 1941), professor at the Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University, has dedicated many of his publications and lectures to Heidegger and Roman Catholicism. He is the translator of M. Heidegger, Logic.The Question of Truth, Indiana University Press, 2010. 2  Thomas Sheehan, « The Reception of Heidegger’s phenomenology in the United States », Forthcoming in The Reception of phenomenology in North America, ed. Michela Beatrice Ferri, Cham, Dordrecht, New York, Springer, 2016, on line, p. 1. 3  Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, London: SCM Press, 1962; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. by James S. Churchill, Bloomington, University of Indiana, 1962. “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth. Letter on Humanism”, trans. by J. Barow and E. Lohner, 1

F. Dastur (*) Department of Philosophy, Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Saint Pons, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_2

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According to Thomas Sheehan, a new paradigm appeared, the “being- paradigm”, in 1963 with the publication of William Richardson’s “magisterial work”, Heidegger. Through Phenomenology to Thought,4 in which the emphasis is put on the “turn”, die Kehre, from Dasein to Sein, from There-being to Being itself. This paradigm is called “classical” by Thomas Sheehan, since even if in the following years the interpretation of Heidegger has developed in a plurality of ways, “Heidegger scholarship still remains anchored in the three basic tenets of the being-­ paradigm: the primacy of Sein over Dasein, the agency of Sein revealing and concealing itself, and the centrality of the ‘turn’ in Heidegger’s thought”.5 We can find the same periodization of the early reception of Heidegger’s works in France, in spite of the fact that some important texts had been translated as early as 1938 by Henry Corbin, such as What is Metaphysics?, Hôlderlin and the essence of poetry, parts of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and of Being and Time.6 The “existentialist paradigm”, represented by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Heidegger, prevailed during the 1940s and 1950s and the passage to the “being paradigm” could only really happen after the publication in 1964 of the French translation of the first part of Sein und Zeit.7 According to Sheehan, a “paradigm shift” happened at the end of the 1970s with the beginning of the publication of the complete edition of Heidegger’s works, but this was also the case in France when some of Heidegger’s last texts were translated, such as Unterwegs zur Sprache in 1976,8 in which the being-question is in a way replaced by the thematic of Ereignis, the “appropriating event”.

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But Thomas Sheehan has another conception of this paradigm shift, as shown by the book he published in 2015 under the title Making Sense of Heidegger. Following what Heidegger said in his letter to Richardson from April 1962 which is included as a preface in his 1963 book, Sheehan puts into question the distinction made by Richardson between an early “Heidegger I” and a later “Heidegger II” and insists on “the unity and continuity of Heidegger’s thought”.9 His main objection is directed against what he calls a hypostatization of being leading in Heidegger scholarship to Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, ed. W.  Barrett and H.  D. Aiken, New  York, Random House,1962, pp. 251–302. 4  William J. Richardson, Heidegger. Through Phenomenology to Thought. Preface by Martin Heidegger. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963. 5  Thomas Sheehan, « The Reception of Heidegger’s phenomenology in the United States », op. cit., p. 5. 6  Cf. M. Heidegger, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? Suivi d’extraits sur l’être et le temps et d’une conférence sur Hölderlin, trad. Par Henry Corbin, Paris, Gallimard, 1938 7  M.  Heidegger, L’Etre et le temps, trad. Par Rudolf Boehm et Alphonse de Waehlens, Paris, Gallimard, 1964. Two full French translations of Sein und Zeit were published only in 1985 and 1986. 8  M. Heidegger, Acheminement vers la parole, trad. François Fédier, Paris, Gallimard, 1976. 9  Th. Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger. A Paradigm Shift, London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, p. 185.

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an attribution to Heidegger of a mystical “crypto-metaphysics”10 for which being is something absolute and identified with “a supra-human Cosmic something”.11 His claim that the correlativity of Being and Dasein is the thread that runs through all of Heidegger’s works is based on many quotes from Heidegger’s writings of different periods.12 He goes as far as declaring that “Heidegger’s philosophy was not in pursuit of Sein at all”13 and explains that the real research topic of Heidegger was the clearing (Lichtung) or the appropriated clearing (Ereignis), this open space being what first enables the encounter between Dasein and the things of the world. But all these important and precise indications are made by Thomas Sheehan in order to establish a new paradigm, the word “being” connoting in his view the “meaningful presence” of things to humans, the world’s meaningfulness and significance being the real subject matter of Heidegger’s philosophy. It is quite true that Heidegger’s question was from the beginning and remained to the end the “meaning of being”, but does it imply, as Sheehan wants it, that being should be interpreted and translated as “meaningfulness” or “intelligibility”? This is the question asked by Ingo Farin in the excellent critical analysis he gives of Sheehan’s book.14 In his 2016 text on the reception of Heidegger, Thomas Sheehan mentions other approaches to understanding Heidegger besides the existentialist and being paradigms, and among them, from the 1970s on, the Derridian paradigm, i.e. “an assortment of readings inspired by Derrida and directed at select elements of Heidegger’s work, such as language and the deconstruction of metaphysics”.15 It is a fact that the influence of Derrida’s works in America has been and is still important. His lecture “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences” given in October 1966 in Baltimore made him suddenly famous and since then, Derrida’s influence has invaded the American philosophical and literary field and his works have been the focus of a great number of studies in the United States. But very few American scholars know that he borrowed from Husserl and Heidegger the key-word attached to his name, “deconstruction”. This word already appears in 1967 in Speech and Phenomenon, but it is in 1968 in Of Grammatology that Derrida explains that de-­ construction has to be understood not as a “demolition”, but as a “de-sedimentation”,16

 Ibid., p. 237.  Ibid., p. 235. 12  Ibid., p. 11, 26, 99, 251. 13  Ibid., p. 236. 14  See Ingo Farin, “A response to Sheehan‘s attempted paradigm shift in Heidegger studies “, https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia26/parrhesia26_farin.pdf, and Sheehan’s answer to it “Which Heidegger?” (on line). Ingo Farin, who completed his PhD at Indiana University in 2004, is lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania. He has published many articles on Heidegger and is the translator of M. Heidegger, The Concept of Time, Continuum, 2011. 15  Th. Sheehan, “The Reception of Heidegger’s phenomenology in the United States”, op. cit., p. 2. 16  J. Derrida, De la grammatologie, Paris, 1968, p. 21. See F. Dastur, Déconstruction et phénoménologie. Derrida en débat avec Husserl et Heidegger, Paris, Hermann, 2016, pp. 68–72, and also F.  Dastur, “Derrida’s reading of Heidegger”’, Interpreting Heidegger, Critical Essays, ed. by D. Dahlstrom, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 273–298 10 11

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which shows that he is there borrowing this word not only from Heidegger’s project of a “destruction of the history of being”,17 but also from Husserl’s project in his last works of a genealogy of logic whose purpose is to exhume, under the deposit of the subjective operations giving to the world its meaning, the originary source on which it is founded, which is what Husserl calls “antepredicative experience”.18 It is in this context that Husserl makes uses of the term Abbau, “dismantling”,19 and it is an analogous meaning that Heidegger in Being and Time gives to what he names Destruktion, which has not “the negative meaning of unburdening ourselves of the ontological tradition”, but of a “dissolving out the concealments produced by a sclerotic tradition”.20 The term Abbau appears only later, in the 1927 course on The Fundamental problems of Phenomenology, but also in What is Philosophy?, the lecture given by Heidegger in the 1955 Cerisy Conference and in the 1956 text On the Question of Being. Gérard Granel, at that time Derrida’s close friend, was in 1968 the translator of this text and coined the word “déconstruction”, a word which was immediately adopted by Derrida. The word began to appear more and more frequently during the seventies and eighties in the field of literary studies and social sciences in America, so that the impact was much more important in this field than in Heidegger studies themselves. Deconstruction became rapidly the method of analyzing texts in comparative and English literature departments, in opposition to the meaning Derrida had given to this word. As he explains in 1985  in a letter to Professor Izutsu asking him some preliminary considerations on how to translate “deconstruction” in Japanese, deconstruction can only be defined in a negative manner, it cannot be understood as an analysis, i.e. a regression toward “the simple element or an indecomposable origin”, it is not even an operation or an act, but rather something that takes place in itself and which has to do with the delimitation of the ontological.21 If the question of the deconstruction of metaphysics indeed became the main axis of Heidegger’s American reception in the seventies and eighties, it is nevertheless not what constitutes for Thomas Sheehan himself the centre of the discussion of Derrida’s relation to Heidegger in the text he published in 1985.22 He begins there by saying that from his early essays to his most recent publications Derrida has not ceased to try to deconstruct Heidegger’s texts, claiming that he had surpassed him insofar as his thinking of différance is anterior to Heidegger’s ontological difference, Heidegger remaining not his model, but his target. He recognizes on the one

 M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1963, § 6, p. 19.  See E. Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, Hamburg, Claassen & Goverts, 1948, § 6, p. 21. 19  Ibid., § 11, p. 46.. 20  M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, State University of New York Press, 1996, § 6, p. 20. 21  J. Derrida, “Lettre à un ami japonais”, Psyché, Paris, Galilée, 1987, p. 390–391. 22  See Th. Sheehan, « Derrida and Heidegger », Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, Hugh Silvermann & Don Ihde (eds), New York: Stat University of New York Press, 1985, pp. 201–218, on line p. 139–157. 17 18

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hand the “unquestionable brilliance of Derrida”23 and declares that Derrida, in spite of his misreadings of Heidegger, “has opened up one of the few viable roads for those who, having learnt something from Heidegger, want to think after and beyond him”.24 But on the other hand, accordingly to Sheehan, Derrida has misunderstood what constitutes the central issue of Heidegger’s thought, namely the relation of Being and Dasein. He does not hesitate in this respect to declare that “if we do lay Being and Time or Letter on Humanism or Holzwege, alongside the corresponding pages in Marges de la philosophie or De la Grammatologie, we find Derrida proposing readings that, quite frankly, we would not accept from our own graduate students”.25 He draws a very interesting parallel between the opposition of the Left and the Right Hegelians after Hegel’s death and the followers of Heidegger who could also be divided into two groups, one emphasizing the presential dimension of being, the other one the absential dimension of being26 and adds that it is “impossible to decide if Heidegger himself was a Right or a Left Heideggerian”.27 As far as Derrida is concerned, he showed that Heidegger was the very victim of the tradition he tried to overturn and exposed him as a Right Heideggerian. But when the Left Heideggerians claim that indeed there is in Heidegger a primordiality of absence over presence, Derrida undertakes to blur that distinction in the name of “undecidability”. Sheehan seems to see here, but in a positive light, not only the end of theology, either positive or negative, but also the end of philosophy itself, the undecidability of presence and absence being perhaps “the prelude to a new critique of the earth”.28 The last word is nevertheless not given to Derrida himself, since if he can be understood as Heidegger’s Feuerbach, “the real important question is: How to be Heidegger’s Marx?”.29 No doubt that Thomas Sheehan considers himself to be Heidegger’s Marx in his 2015 book. But this implies not only the affirmation that Heidegger can accept some kind of anthropologism, ex-istence being according to him “the one and only topic of Heidegger’s thought”, as Sheehan declares in an interview after the publication of Making Sense of Heidegger, but also the rejection of all Heidegger’s texts dedicated to the critique of modernity and to the devastating impact of modern technology, in which he sees only “a Solzhenitsyn-like jeremiad against modernity and its intrusions on rural life”.30

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 Ibid., p. 149.  Ibid., p. 140. 25  Ibid. 26  Ibid. 27  Ibid., p. 141. 28  Ibid., p. 153. 29  Ibid. 30  See “No one can jump over his own shadow”, Richard Polt and Gregory Fried in conversation with Thomas Sheehan, first published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, December eighth, 2014 (on line). 23 24

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A quite different interpretation of the Heideggerian deconstruction of metaphysics is at the center of Reiner Schürmann’s book, Le principe d’anarchie. Heidegger et la question de l’agir, published in 1982, and translated into English a few years after.31 Even if the main reference in his works, from this first book to what Gérard Granel, who published it after Schürmann’s death, names his magnum opus, Broken Hegemonies,32 is Martin Heidegger, it should be said, right from the start, that Schürmann is not only a Heidegger scholar, but a major philosopher of the end of the twentieth century, his thought encompassing a large swath of western philosophy, from Plotinus to Meister Eckhart, Luther, Schelling, German Idealism, Nietzsche and Heidegger. In opposition to Sheehan, who declares that Heidegger was a phenomenologist from beginning to end and overplays Husserl’s influence on Heidegger, Schürmann considers that Heidegger had broken with Husserl during the composition of Being and Time, which constitutes a radical new orientation of philosophy. He also, against Sheehan’s disdain for the Heideggerian analysis of modern technology, shares with Heidegger the idea that the technical age inaugurates the closure of metaphysics. And whereas Derrida’s reading of Heidegger in the 1960s and 1970s does not really go beyond the problematic of Being and Time and does not seem concerned by the publication of the complete edition Heidegger’s works which began just before his death in 1976, Schürmann on the contrary takes into account Heidegger’s later writings and proposes a backward reading of Heidegger that goes from the last texts to the first ones, contesting therefore, as Sheehan also does, the existence of a split between a Heidegger I and a Heidegger II, but also the postulate of a lineal development of his thought. It does not mean that Schürmann rejects the idea of a “turn” in Heidegger’s thought, but he does not understand it as a particular moment, happening in the 1930s, but rather as an ongoing process which has been taking place in his writings since the very beginning. This goes along with Schürmann’s main idea of a “principle of anarchy”, since there is an “an ultimate dissonance”, an internal dissension in the origin itself,33 which implies a “radical multiplicity” and plurality of being. Here, there might be a proximity with Levinas’s “anti-metaphysical and anarchic attempt to think the approach of the Other”,34 but also with Derrida’s idea of an “originary complication of the origin”.35 This proximity is attested at least once, when in Broken Hegemonies,

 R. Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting. From Principles to Anarchy, trans. by C.-M. Gros, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987. Reiner Schürmann (1941–1993) was from 1976 to 1993 Professor in the department of philosophy of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. Born in Amsterdam of German parents, Reiner Schürmann wrote all his major published works in French. 32  R. Schürmann, Des Hégémonies brisées, Mauvezin, T.R.R., 1996; Broken Hegemonies, trans. by Reginald Lilly, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003. See G. Granel, Postface to R. Schürmann, Les Origines. Récit, Toulouse, Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2003, pp. 217–238. 33  R. Schürmann, Hégémonies brisées, op. cit., p. 782. 34  See Joeri Schrijveers, “Anarchistic Tendencies in Continental Philosophy. Reiner Schürmann and the Hybris of Philosophy, Research in Phenomenology, July 2007, p. 429. 35  J.  Derrida, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl, Paris, PUF, 1990, « Avertissement », p. VI. See F. Dastur, Preface to Les origines, op. cit. 31

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Schürmann quotes a passage of Derrida’s Parages (1986) concerning “the law of impurity of the principle of contamination” that could be present in the law itself.36 But in fact there are few references to Derrida either in Broken Hegemonies or in Heidegger on Being and Acting. It is quite evident that Schürmann does not understand the word “deconstruction” as Derrida does, namely as a deconstruction of the logocentrism to which Heidegger, according to him, not only belongs, but of which he is the main figure.37 As it becomes clear in Broken Hegemonies, deconstruction means for Schürmann the dismantling of the epochal hegemonies which constitute the history of philosophy, a dismantling which has been made possible by Heidegger’s reading of what he calls the “history of being”.38 But Schürmann does not engage in a direct debate with Derrida. It is only possible to find in some footnotes critical remarks about Derrida’s reading of Heidegger. In his 1987 book, he declares that the game Heidegger played with Nietzsche by turning him into the “last metaphysician” is similar to the game Derrida plays with Heidegger by turning him also into the last metaphysician.39 In the Introduction to Broken Hegemonies, he quotes what Derrida says in Margins of Philosophy about the necessity at the end of metaphysics “to decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion, by brutally placing oneself outside and by affirming an absolute break and difference”.40 Schürmann does not hesitate here to make fun of Derrida’s “deconstructive naivety”, declaring that the task to be accomplished is “more modest, for from what lofty place would we be able to draw the geographic map of discontinuous planes? What field outside the terrain must we occupy in order to affirm rupture?”. And he concludes that for himself he does “not know another place than the one whereupon the waning twentieth century has planted us”, adding in a footnote that “Derrida seems to speak here as a chronicler of what was going on in France at the time he signed the text, the 12th May 1968”. In another footnote concerning Heidegger’s apophatism, he declares that page 592 in “How to avoid speaking” in Psychè, where Derrida affirms that there is no difference between writing a theology and writing about being, as Heidegger did, is the page which left him in perplexity concerning this author whose reading subtlety one likes to praise, explaining that here Derrida finally subscribes to the oldest prejudices about Dasein and Seyn, the first serving as the basis for an anthropology and the second one for a theology.41 Already in an earlier text, we could find a more explicit judgment concerning Derridian deconstruction: “The  Hégémonies brisées, op. cit., p. 50.  See R. Schürmann, Le principe d’anarchie. Heidegger et la question de l’agir, Paris, Seuil, 1992, note3, p. 266, where it is said that the inclusion by Derrida of Heidegger in the era of logocentrism is “unjustified”. 38   See on this Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott’s excellent article “Anarchy as the Closure of Metaphysics: Historicity and Deconstruction in the Work of Reiner Schürmann”, Política común, Volume 11, 2017 (on line). 39  Le principe d’anarchie, op. cit., p. 224, note 1. 40  J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. by A. Bass, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 135. 41  Hégémonies brisées, op. cit. p. 769, note 89. 36 37

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word deconstruction has been popularized by Jacques Derrida. Although he is more triumphant than Heidegger about the hypothesis of closure, and although he adds to this method a few useful concepts: logocentrism, différence/différance, and so forth, I fail to see how, on the issue of deconstruction itself, Derrida goes beyond Heidegger as he claims he does”.42 Schürmann’s reading of Heidegger remained rather ­confidential during the 1980s in the United States, which is unfortunate, since it could have constituted a good counter-effect to the sudden passion shown by Heideggerian scholars for Derrida’s deconstruction. It does not seem that Derrida read Schürmann’s works and there was never a direct confrontation between them. He nevertheless recognized him as a great philosopher and dedicated a text to him, History of the Lie. Prolegomena,43 in which he cites him a mere two times.

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Derridian deconstruction in the 1970s remained confined to departments of literature, in which Derrida began to teach. There was a kind of eruption of deconstruction at Yale, where Derrida was invited to give a three week annual seminar by Paul de Man from 1975 onwards. Yale’s comparative literature department, where a group of literary critics, theorists and philosophers of literature were teaching, played a key role in the dissemination of deconstruction to other departments, but it was only in the 1980s that Derrida’s work began to be taken into account in Heidegger studies to such an extent that it was no longer possible to work on Heidegger without mentioning Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysics, onto-­ theology and logocentrism. David Wood, who in 2002 wrote a book bearing the significant title Thinking after Heidegger, which aims at defining the role of philosophy in the wake of Heidegger and deconstruction44 and another one in 2005, The Step Back. Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction, which deals with the question of the possibility of ethics after Heidegger’s deconstruction and its new meaning in Derrida and Levinas,45 was also the author of “Heidegger after Derrida” an article published in 1987.46 At the beginning of this article, he recalls a conversation he had had a couple of years before with David Krell. He had been telling him that having read Heidegger again, he felt that he was moving away from Derrida and back to Heidegger. He was

 R. Schürmann, “What Must I Do?” at the End of Metaphysics: Ethical Norms and the Hypothesis of a Historical Closure”. Phenomenology in a Pluralistic Context. Eds. William L. McBride, and Calvin O. Schrag. New York: State U of New York P, 1983: 49–64. 43  Jacques Derrida, “History of the Lie: Prolegomena” in “In Memoriam Reiner Schürmann” special issue, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 19:2–20:1 (1997), pp. 129–61. 44  D. Wood, Thinking after Heidegger, Polity Press, 2002. David Wood (born 1946) is Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and also the author in of Darrida. A Critical Reader, Blackwell, 1992. 45  D. Wood, The Step Back. Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction, Albany (N.Y.), State University of New York Press, 2005. 46  D. Wood, “Heidegger after Derrida”, Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 17 (1987), pp. 103–116. 42

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expecting David Krell to say the same. Krell’s answer was that, as for himself, he was on the contrary moving away from Heidegger and towards Derrida. This anecdote gives a good picture of the American phenomenological scene in the 1980s, where the most prominent representatives of this philosophical current, like John Sallis and David Krell, were situating their respective inquiry about the questions of the end of metaphysics, finitude and temporality in the space “between” Heidegger and Derrida.47 But what, for David Krell, does moving away from Heidegger and towards Derrida mean? It is perhaps possible to find the answer in a passage from his 1986 book: “Insofar as Heidegger’s intimations of a history of Being tend to seek necessary results by fixing on origins and ends, that history falls prey to the suspicion that it is but one more effort to rescue the past, to find the concept and perform the deed, an effort ensconced in the history of reactive nihilism, dreaming all the old dreams. When Heidegger’s thought is most pious and insistent, least light-hearted and ironic, where it takes itself abominably seriously, Nietzschean/ Derridian laughter is a welcome corrective”.48 This is in fact what Derrida himself says at the end of the 1968 lecture “The Differance”: “There will be no unique name; not even the name of Being. It must be conceived without nostalgia (…) On the contrary, we must affirm it – in the sense that Nietzsche brings affirmatively into play – with a certain laughter and with a certain dance”.49 It seems therefore clear to David Krell that the need “to quit the House of Being” has been “impressed upon Derrida by Nietzsche”.50 Already in the Introduction to Intimations of Mortality, David Krell speaks of a necessary “shift of ground” and of a change of style in order to escape what he suspects is still governing Heidegger’s deconstruction of metaphysics, i.e. “an effort to rescue the past”: “Does Heidegger’s ‘step back’ out of metaphysics and into its ‘essence’ safely remove us from the snare of ontotheology? Or do we, after the Nietzschean-Heideggerian eschatology, require a shift of ground and an alter(n) ation of styles such as Jacques Derrida has attempted?”51 In his view, as he explicitly says, “Derrida wavers between the call to preserve the tradition and the need to escape it”. But he immediately adds that such a wavering is “not indecision, but strategy, a strategy that animates all his work”,52 consisting in using the word différance, a term irreducible to the metaphysics of presence and “older” as the History of Being. He explains that it is precisely “nostalgia (…) that Derrida sees in  See J. Sallis Delimitations. Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986 (Délimitations, La phénoménologie et la fin de la métaphysique, trans. by M. de Beistegui, Paris, Aubier, 1990) and D. F. Krell, Intimations of Mortality. Time, Truth and Finitude in Heidegger’s Thinking of Being, University Park and London, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986. 48  Intimations of Mortality. Time, Truth and Finitude in Heidegger’s Thinking of Being, op. cit., p. 151. 49  Passage quoted by D. Krell, Ibid., p. 143. 50  Ibid. p. 145. 51  Ibid., p. 6. 52  Ibid., p. 145. 47

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Heidegger’s quest for Being, whereas “all hopes of ‘overcoming the tradition must be surrended”.53 This has been attempted by Heidegger through his “step back”, but he has apparently failed. And he adds that for Derrida the step back “becomes a leap rather than a mere step (…) a leap in dance, a saltus of Nietzschean affirmation”. David Krell is nevertheless conscious that Derrida did not really take into account the late Heidegger and in a note from the chapter he dedicates to the question of the finitude of time, he does not hesitate to declare that “Derrida fails to engage” not only “a careful analysis of ecstatic-horizonal Time”, but also “an analysis of the Time of Ereignis, as Reichen” and “a detailed consideration of the starting-point of Being and Time in finitude”.54 John Sallis seems to express the same reserves in Delimitations, where we find a chapter entitled “Heidegger/Derrida  – Presence”, which reproduces the “Program” John Sallis published before a Symposium, announced under the title “Heidegger/Derrida”, which took place in December 1984. He begins there to underline that the opposition Heidegger/Derrida, if we remain “within the classical conceptuality, e.g. of German idealism” is not a simple one, since it presupposes “a common position” and this common position is the question of the closure of metaphysics and of its deconstruction, metaphysics being essentially defined as “the positing of Being as presence”.55 It seems therefore that the “site of the opposition Heidegger/Derrida” is what John Sallis would like to call “presence as such”.56 This was the conclusion of the program of the symposium. In the “epigram”, a text written after the symposium, John Sallis undertakes the reading of a passage of Heidegger’s lecture course 1942–43 entitled “Parmenides” addressing the issue of practice and of its connection with the hand, in which Heidegger declares that “the hand is as hand only where there is unconcealment and concealment”.57 The privilege given by Heidegger to the hand comes from the fact that “It is preeminently in handling things that one is drawn forth into an exteriority that is irreducible to self-­ presence”, so that “in this withdrawal of presence, the I is drawn along, extended”.58 This means that the analytic of Dasein becomes an analytic of extendedness, i.e. primordial temporality. John Sallis sees here “the most radical dimension broached in Heidegger’s texts” and it seems to him that “it is especially Derrida’s virtue to have recognized and taken up” this dimension.59 But the question remains “of the closure of the Heideggerian project”. The question is whether that project “does not continue to be governed by the very metaphysical privilege that it would put in question, the privilege of presence”. In this respect Sallis wants to “maintain certain reservations” against Derrida’s reduction

 Ibid. p. 151.  Ibid. Note 9, p. 182 55  J. Salllis, Delimitations, op. cit. p. 141–142. 56  Ibid., p. 145. 57  Ibid., p. 146. 58  Ibid., p. 149. 59  Ibid., p. 150. 53 54

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of Heidegger’s conception of presence to a narrow sense of presence. His conclusion is nevertheless: “Yet, it is precisely (…) by his having attempted (…) to locate in Heidegger’s text… the sign of a belonging to metaphysics”, as Derrida explicitly says in Positions, “that we here to-day can (…) come a bit nearer sustaining what, for want of a proper word, I shall call (…) a radical reading of Heidegger”.60 In other words, reading Heidegger “after” Derrida means nothing else than reading Heidegger in the only appropriate manner.

60

 Ibid.

Seinsvergessenheit: Heidegger and Anglophone Philosophers of Religion Joseph S. O’Leary

If it is true, as Bergson suggested, that every real philosopher thinks a single great idea, then it is clear what Heidegger’s was: the idea of Being, which he retrieves by a specifically and exclusively phenomenological approach to the classical texts that speak of it, from Parmenides and Aristotle on, and also by a direct reflection on beings in their being. He can even meditate on being as such, the very idea of being, the meaning of being, the truth of being, the place or topology of being, the granting of being. Arcane as this sounds, Heidegger nonetheless pursues it with a steady phenomenological attention and with appreciable results. Poetic language allows beings to be named in the full richness of their presence, in contrast to the depleted sense of being that merely functional everyday language can convey. Yet though Heidegger tunes into Hölderlin in his search for glimmers of the truth of being, his approach is also grounded in reflection on everyday use of the word “is.” To take just one text among many, the section on “being as emptiness and as wealth” in the 1940 essay on “European Nihilism” considers obvious attributes of the notion of being. “Being is for us the emptiest, most general, most understandable, most usable, most reliable, most forgotten, most said” (GA 6/2.227) and we are less attentive to the contraries of these qualities: being as the richest, as irreducibly singular, resistant to understanding, unthought in its arrival, abyssal, constantly recalled, silent about its essence.1  I asked Jean Beaufret in 1979 if “being” remained a unitary notion throughout these various approaches to it—through the history of philosophy, through poetry, through a phenomenology of presence, and through questioning the sense of our everyday language of being—and he interestingly replied that for Heidegger this unity was “a working hypothesis.” 1

J. S. O’Leary (*) Department of English Literature (Retired), Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_3

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If “language is the house of being,” then it does seem as if some languages are most hospitable to being than others. There is a patient steadiness about Greek and German that makes them fitting instruments for sustaining the thought of being. Latin and French refer to being in a light and airy way, making it an abstraction, whereas English gravitates to the concrete and down-to-earth, to beings rather than being. In part because of this inauspicious linguistic milieu, the idea of being is one that British and American philosophy has never been able to get a handle on, and thinkers in this tradition are likely to agree that being is a mere “mist” (Dunst) (GA 40.39). Just as many anglophone studies of Greek philosophy reduce being to the copula and ontology to logic, so anglophone readers of Heidegger attempt to make him a pragmatist or a student of human existence who had no real interest in being as such. Thomas Sheehan, for example, believes that the only way to “make sense” of Heidegger is to translate “being” as “meaningfulness”: “Heidegger properly understands Sein phenomenologically as the meaningfulness of things. Underlying all of his work is a phenomenological reduction of things to their significance to human beings.”2 Some deplore the heteronomy of a philosophy that consigns the essence of man to the truth of being, and thus bills itself as a humanism of a higher order. In Sheehan’s reading being steps aside so discreetly as to be no longer anything more than a dimension of human existence, a quality of the human habitat, and Heidegger is rediscovered as a thinker of human autonomy. His whole rereading of Western philosophy in terms of the question after being turns out to be colossal self-­ mystification; he should have read it in terms of the questions of human existence, thus humanizing the whole tradition and freeing it of its useless preoccupation with being. One of the senses of die Kehre, and perhaps the most important one, is the overcoming of the human-centered perspective still prevalent in Sein und Zeit. So this central “turn” in Heidegger’s thought cannot be primarily a message stressing “radical human finitude—with no need for a supervenient God or some preternatural ‘Being’—the ultimate source of meaning-at-all and thus of culture in all its historical configurations.”3 Being-in-the-world even in Sein und Zeit does not mean that human finitude is the source of meaning; rather it opens the transcendental perspective in which the meaning of the world appears—and later, with die Kehre, it ek-­sists into the clearing in Denken and Danken, thus receiving rather than creating meaning. Nothing preternatural about that; in fact it is a phenomenological representation of Greek nature, physis. World is not over against me; my thinking is the opening of world; but still it is world, not I, that takes the lead in this disclosive event. If their angophone and often monolingual culture poorly disposes Anglo-­ American philosophers of religion to receiving Heidegger’s thought on being, this

 Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 189. 3  Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger, p. 292. 2

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forgetfulness of being (Seinsvergessenheit) or blindness to being (Seinsblindheit) both reinforces and is reinforced by another factor, a professional deformation common among philosophers of religion, namely that they are more interested in religion than in philosophy, and often drift into the realm of theology rather than sticking to properly philosophical themes. The “theological turn” in French phenomenology, imitated in the Anglo-American movement of Radical Orthodoxy, has generated a rather fanatical atmosphere in which the one important thing about any philosophical thinker is his or her relationship to God. The vast literature on religious aspects or implications of Heidegger’s thought has contributed very little to an understanding of the central matter of that thought, the question of being. It is salutary that the Blackwell Companion to Heidegger4 has no chapter on Heidegger’s relevance to religion or theology, since the religious receptions of Heidegger constitute a conglomeration of discourses that are oblivious of Heidegger’s basic questions and that are not grounded in patient reading and rereading of the central texts. Religious debaters have drowned out the philosophical reception, sometimes even censuring Heidegger’s preoccupation with being as idle or idolatrous. Those whose interest in Heidegger’s thinking on being is motivated primarily by its promise for a renewal of thinking about God are unlikely to make much progress in understanding his thought, not to speak of developing it creatively. Despite the remarks on “the last God” in Beiträge zur Philosophie (GA 65), it is not correct to say, with Günter Figal, that “if one wanted to erase the theology of Heidegger’s later thought, one would deprive it of its center.”5 Like Hölderlin, he sensed the “lack of God” (“Fehl Gottes”) and cultivated a nostalgia for a return of Greek-style divinity, which is connected with Nature. When he speaks of the earth, and the world or sky, and the mortals, he shows a strong sense of these phenomena, often rejoicing in a Greek vision, and his words ring true. The overwhelming power of being or of Nature is addressed convincingly (as a phenomenon; it has nothing to do with a metaphysics of omnipotence). But the discourse on the holy, the divine, the gods, and the divine God, and the pathos of “only a God can save us,” are little better than armchair theologizing, a lukewarm precipitate from Hölderlin’s vatic utterance, and quite secondary to his central concern with being as such, which might even benefit from their removal. We need to sound this hollowness in his ersatz religiosity6 if we are to discern between what is authentic and what is fake in the thinking of Heidegger. In any case I think it would be safe to say that Heidegger’s musing on the gods has had no effective impact on Anglophone philosophy of religion. The center of his thought is simply being; divine presences, like human existence itself, come into view only within the play of being. Just as an existentialist or a pragmatist   Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A.  Wrathall, ed., A Companion to Heidegger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 5  “Forgetfulness of God: Concerning the Center of Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy,” in Charles E. Scott et al.,ed., Companion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 198–212), p. 199. 6  Fritz Heidegger, the philosopher’s banker brother, showed me the manuscript of Gelassenheit with the remark, “That’s a half-swindle.” 4

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Heidegger is a gravely diminished one, so a theological Heidegger has little value; it is as the thinker of being, and only as the thinker of being, that Heidegger counts as a great philosopher. I am uneasily aware that to go around detecting “blindness to being” in a string of anglophone religious philosophers is a futile activity. It bears too strong a likeness to the theological critic who is quick to detect Pelagian or Monophysite tendencies everywhere. Such zeal soon misses the core phenomenon just as much as the alleged heretics do, and perhaps even more. The thinking of being, like the thinking of revelation in theology, is a constant challenge to attentive openness, and this is incompatible with constant nagging at those who fall short of it; and all fall short in any case. Just as censors of Pelagianism or Monophysitism rarely themeselves have an Augustinian sense of radical dependence on Grace or a fine Chalcedonian subtlety in bringing the divine and human natures of Christ into accord, so those who denounce blindness to being are as likely as most to be living in that blindness. Blindness to being is in any case the most natural thing in the world, since being, like Nature, “loves to conceal itself.” Heidegger’s early teacher Carl Braig adopted a passage from St. Bonaventure as his motto: “The eye of the spirit, when it directs itself to beings in the singular and in the whole, also does not recognize being itself” but “has the impression of seeing nothing.” So “although the soul does not apprehend being-itself, it is only through being-itself that beings may be at all.”7 As with so many of his sources, Heidegger siphoned out the purely philosophical element of this, disregarding the theological context. This omnipresence but elusiveness of being is the phenomenon that gripped Heidegger’s total attention, and he soon found that it was detrimental to thinking on this phenomenon to bring in theological issues. Thinking of being is impeded by the inherent limits of the structure of metaphysics as onto-theo-logy, but also by the way confessional religion has dragooned ontology for its own purposes over the centuries. Thus even as theological sources became grist to his phenomenological mill, Heidegger had to ward off theological encroachments on the philosophical task, both in the past (the influence of the doctrine of Creation on metaphysics in the Scholastics, Descartes, and Leibniz) and in the present (the Christian philosophers who insist that philosophical thinking, including Heidegger’s, needs to be grounded in or completed by biblical revelation). To recover the space and freedom for authentic radical philosophical thinking Heidegger had to struggle with his own conservative Catholic background, and to draw on alternative sources of inspiration such as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and, alas, Hitler.

 Jeff Owen Prudhomme, God and Being: Heidegger’s Relation to Theology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), p. 44. 7

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Resistance to Detheologization “There is no Christian philosophy. There is no genuine philosophy that could be determined from anywhere else than from itself” (GA 6/1.4). Heidegger’s struggle for the autonomy of philosophical thought is rarely given due respect by his religious-­minded admirers and critics, who often prefer to re-establish the short-­ circuits between theology and philosophy that he was at such pains to avoid. Jeff Prudhomme supposes that Heidegger’s “expressly non-theological form of thinking” can “illuminate and convey a theological content.” “Because such a correlation entails a double, or back and forth, movement, it is also possible that theological reflection on the God who is as other than God can, in turn, illuminate the essential matter of Heidegger’s ontological reflection.”8 This eagerness to find theological resonance in Heidegger implies that ontological questioning cannot stand on its own two feet. Heidegger is careful to differentiate his existentials from apparent theological correlates; thus the guilt (Schuld) inherent in existence in its struggle for authenticity is differentiated from theological guilt, which “has its own attestation that remains fundamentally inaccessible to any philosophical experience” (GA 2.406). Just as metaphysics postulates God as supreme being, in principle independently of biblical revelation, so Heidegger’s rethinking of being is presented as preparing the ground for a renewed perception of the holy and the divine, but this is in principle independent of any sources other than philosophical thought itself. While religious-minded scholars have been very busy finding “hidden” religious sources for Heidegger’s later thought they have missed the way that Heidegger systematically translates the hints he receives from the sources he does mention (Daoism, Eckhart, Angelus Silesius) into strictly philosophical and phenomenological terms.9 Heidegger “cannot escape having some predetermined philosophical notion of God, some Vorbegriff, which means that implied in his philosophical denial of the possibility of philosophical knowledge of God, there is already a philosophical knowledge of God.”10 This is rather ineffective, since what Heidegger denies is philosophical knowledge of the God of revelation, not the God of metaphysics, and he himself sketches an alternative, phenomenological, approach to God within philosophy. The word Vorbegriff has Rahnerian overtones of the mind’s openness to the ultimate mystery of God, but Prudhomme seems to use it in the flat sense of “prior concept.” In any case Heidegger’s thinking of being has its own integrity and consistency and is worked out without any necessary reference to God, whether as a pre-given understanding or an ultimate horizon. Those who insist that the projections of a phenomenology of the divine are essential to his thinking of being risk making this thinking a hostage of its weakest extension. Heidegger’s gods are  Prudhomme, p. 39.  For thoughts on how this could stimulate theology, see J. S. O’Leary, “Theological Resonances of Der Satz vom Grund,” in Christopher Macann, ed., Critical Assessments: Martin Heidegger (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), I. pp. 213–56. 10  Prudhomme, 95. 8 9

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actually deader than the God of metaphysics and an invitation to dance and sing before them would be farcical, leaving one wondering if phenomenology can really handle this dimension at all; and that would sow the further doubt about the adequacy of a purely phenomenological approach to being as such. At the beginning of his path of thought Heidegger drew on Paul, Augustine, and Kierkegaard for the “factic” structure of human existence, and on Luther and Harnack for the overcoming of metaphysics in the name of authentic existence. Had he pursued theology he would have wanted to step back from Greek metaphysics to the authentic shape of Christian existence as found in Paul and as already compromised by Neoplatonic structures in Augustine. Of all the alleged parallels between Heidegger and Christian theology, this project of overcoming metaphysics, through a sensitive historical hermeneutics, is the most substantial.11 But soon the orientation of Heidegger’s inquiry moved away from Christian existence to existence as such. Dasein’s questioning about its own being then opens out onto a thinking of Being as such. All the theological categories of the above-mentioned thinkers are thus recycled or secularized; that is, their ontological element is thought out on its own terms, independently of the religious contexts in which it was originally embedded. Theological concerns are put within brackets as Heidegger clears the ground for re-engagement with the question of Being. Many theologians and religious philosophers react to this detheologization as a bull to a red rag. They see it as a betrayal of Christian faith and its replacement by a pagan Prometheanism. Some anglophone philosophers of religion, in their indifference to Heidegger’s concern with being, take up the old religious critiques of Heidegger’s anthropology: the Protestant objection that there is no such thing as a neutral ontology of the human, and that to set up such a neutral picture is in effect to be in the posture of sin and unbelief; and the Catholic critique that Heidegger misses some basic dimensions of anthropology, such as the gracious presence of God, source of all being. The Protestant critique is based on the idea that philosophy has no authority to define the human condition, since the biblical revelation of sin and justification first gives the true account of what the human being is.12 The Catholic critique is more intra-philosophical, and holds that a true philosophy should discern God as the goal of human existence, even independently of the light of the Gospel. Many intra-philosophical critiques of Heidegger’s anthropology, bearing on his ethics, his handling of interpersonality, and his alleged inability to think “the event of agapeic love,”13 or his lack of concern for embodiedness, tend to slip over into the theological.  In writing Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition (Minneapolis: Winston-Seabury, 1985) I did not realize that I was developing an approach in which the young Heidegger, as a reader of Luther and Harnack, was thoroughly versed. 12  See Ingolf U. Dalferth, “Justification by Faith as Key to Understanding Human Existence,” The Japan Mission Journal 71 (2017):33–43. 13  William Desmond, “Maybe, Maybe Not: Richard Kearney and God,” in John Panteleimon Manoussakis, ed. After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 55–77; p. 62. 11

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Thinkers influenced by Jean-Luc Marion14 have replaced Heidegger’s meditation on Being with a virtuous rejection of Being as an Idol. John Manoussakis even finds a touch of blasphemy in what Heidegger writes about Dasein: “The ‘essence’ [‘Wesen’] of this being lies in its to be [Zu-sein]. The whatness (essentia) of this being must be understood in terms of its being (existentia),” since this ascribes to humans the definition of God in whom “essence or quiddity is not distinct from His existence.”15 Such metaphysical critiques of Heidegger’s phenomenological utterances regularly fall wide of the mark; to formulate such critiques effectively is a delicate hermeneutical task. Aquinas defines God, being, and truth metaphysically, whereas Heidegger apprehends them as phenomena. Here he is expounding human existence phenomenologically, with no reference whatever to God, and the alleged cheeky allusion to metaphysical accounts of God would be a pointless distraction from his argument. Existence as to-be is a dynamic phenomenon that has no claim to be equal to being-itself in a metaphysical sense (or even in a phenomenological sense for that matter). That the essence of Dasein is located in its concrete existence is not intended as an attack on God “as its target.”16 Theological suspicion that pounces on philosophical discourse in this way, or metaphysical suspicion that pounces on phenomenological utterance, is bound to miss any ontological perception advanced by Heidegger. Such theological critiques of Being and Time were rife from the beginning. Gerhardt Kuhlmann in 1931 denounced a philosophy in which “man arrogates to himself the right and the ability to inquire after his nature so radically… that he himself, with the essence of his being, is called into question.”17 Heidegger protested in the Letter on Humanism: “It would be the ultimate confusion were one to explain the proposition about the ek-sistent essence of the human being as the secularized transfer to humanity of an idea said of God in Christian theology (Deus est suum esse); for ek-sistence is neither the realization of an essence, nor  Notably his essay “La double idolátrie” in R. Kearney and J. S. O’Leary, ed., Heidegger et la question de Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1980), pp. 46–74. Marion rightly derives from Heidegger and Barth a sense of the difference between the question of Being and the Christian concern with Revelation, but he goes too far in denouncing Being as an idol in Heidegger and in denying that God, being Love, has any need to be. This leads to a rather high-handed hermeneutics of classical theologal ontology in Augustine and Aquinas. Marion’s influence on anglophone philosophers of religion has been in the direction of discrediting the language of being, in favor of the language of agape, gift, and negative theology That Heidegger could be a positive resource for thinking these themes is a possibility that is little explored. My criticisms of Marion could no doubt be applied to many anglophone philosophers influenced by him; see Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 185–91; Conventional and Ultimate Truth (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), pp. 106–43; “The Gift: A Trojan Horse in the Citadel of Phenomenology?,” in Ian Leask and Eoin Cassidy, ed., Givenness and GIft: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp.  135–66; “Phenomenology and Theology: Respecting the Boundaries,” Philosophy Today (forthcoming). 15  Manoussakis, “Toward a Fourth Reduction?,” in Manoussakis, 21–33; pp.  30–1, quoting Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), 42, and Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, 22. 16  Manoussakis, “Toward a Fouth Reduction?,” p. 31. 17  Quoted in Judith Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology (Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 139. 14

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does ek-sistence itself effect and posit the essential” (GA 9.327). If any reference to “autonomy” is taken as a secularist rejection of God, one could end up decrying mathematics as godless, and as infringing divine prerogatives when it dares to discuss infinite numbers. Those who want “to take every thought captive to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5) by planting the divine flag in every outpost of human learning end up confirming Heidegger’s diagnosis of a radical antipathy between Christianity and philosophy, instead of cultivating a dialogal relationship between the two that respects their differing concerns. In defending Heidegger’s detheologization of his sources, I stumble on the difficulty that its most famous expression, in the 1935 summer semester course Introduction to Metaphysics, is not only sharply provocative but has a sinister ideological context clarified by Hugo Ott. Heidegger’s sarcasm about the Genesis-based anthropology of Theodor Haecker (GA 40.151) is disturbing when we remember that Haecker was a courageous anti-Nazi voice at a time when Heidegger’s autonomous philosophical questioning had in practice placed him in thrall to Nazism.18 Nonetheless, Heidegger’s opposition to the hybrid notion of a “Christian philosophy” is not a matter of unbelief or of anti-Christian prejudice, or even of principled opposition to the mental narrowness of those days of the Concordat and the AntiModernist Oath, but aims rather to safeguard the identity of philosophy, or the very possibility of philosophy. As such it would be welcomed by many Thomist philosophers. Judith Wolfe is among the many scholars who see anti-Christian provocation in Heidegger’s methodological warning against the hybrid of Christian philosophy.19 When she claims that “analogies to Heidegger’s quasi-mystical vision have been present in the Christian tradition since its beginnings, not least in Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, John Scotus Eriugena and Meister Eckhart,”20 she reveals the tendency to conflate Heidegger’s concerns with those of theology, which seems endemic in those who approach Heidegger with a primarily theological interest. She thinks that the scholastics’ interest in being was purely theological; for them, “Being is nothing less than another name for God Himself.”21 This is a drastic foreshortening of medieval philosophy. She calls Heidegger’s Being “an elusive but distinct actor, revealing and concealing itself to man,” which involves a “structural similarity” with “the Christian  See Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (London: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 270–83. 19  Judith Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology (London: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2014), pp. 131–5. Following Caputo, Wolfe cites Heidegger’s “severe assessment” of the work of J. B. Lotz, Max Müller, and Gustav Siewerth as evidence of Heidegger’s anti-Catholicism (p.152); but these thinkers never held this against Heidegger, nor did Heidegger’s no doubt justified sense that their philosophical work was unduly influenced by theology prevent him from giving them the required academic approval. 20  Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, p. 194. Post-Heideggerian theology should reconsider “its professed response to God as the self-giving being of the late Heidegger” (p.  195); this makes Heidegger’s Being sound too divine, and ascribes to post-Heideggerian theologians an identificaiton they do not make. 21  Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, p. 81. 18

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account of God and the Christian life,” and she says that those appropriating Heidegger for a narrative or mystical theology “do little more than appeal to such structural parallels.”22 The hypostatization of Being here misses the phenomenological point of Heidegger’s language. The “analogy of proportionality” that Heidegger proposed in 1962 sets the relation of thinking to being on one side and the relation of the thinking of faith to God on the other. The twain do not interpenetrate. Thus Heinrich Ott’s Barthian phobia about that analogy of proportionality as used in the quite different context of Thomism, and his replacement of it by a “correspondence,” are misplaced, as is Peter S.  Dillard’s demand that Heidegger’s thought on the holy and the gods be clarified before the analogy can be applied.23 The search for concrete correspondences between Heideggerian and Christian themes is usually deleterious to both. Sometimes a Heideggerian  insight is taken up and developed promisingly for a while, only to be drowned out as the more powerful and vivid religious concerns come to the fore. Thus Richard Kearney’s reflections on “the God who may be,”24 bring together Heidegger’s phenomenological retrieval of the modalities, according to which “possibility belongs to being just as much as do actuality and necessity” (GA 7.185), and Nicholas of Cusa’s metaphysical speculation that grounds God’s being in his power-to-be. To set up an interplay between those ideas is an exciting project, but when an eschatological idea of divine possibility, derived from Scripture, is brought in to improve on these, the resulting reflections on divine promises and divine power belong properly to theology rather than philosophy. Heidegger’s “quiet power of the possible” (GA 9.31) loses its original force when divorced from

 Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, p.  194, referring to WIlliam J. Richardson, “Heidegger and Theology,” Theological Studies 26 (1965:)86–100, and Thomas F. O’Meara, “Heidegger and his Origins: Theological Perspectives,” Theological Studies 47 (1986):205–26. Richardson quotes the analogy of proportionality: “As the thinking of philosophy is to Being (understood as alêtheia, process of revelation), so the thinking of faith is to the self-revealing God,” and concludes that we must find in biblical revelation “some analogical counterpart of the e-vent of ontological difference,” but he doesn’t “feel ready to suggest how this might be done” (p. 91). Seeking an analogy between thinking and faith he recommends “an effort to think the un-thought, utter the un-said of the written word of Scripture, perhaps even of the Fathers of the Church and the documents of the magisterium” (p. 98). O’Meara stresses Heidegger’s affinities with Eckhart, in a way that, as with Caputo, may risk blurring the frontiers between philosophical concern with being and theological concern with God. 23  See Peter S. Dillard, Non-Metaphysical Theology After Heidegger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 1–4. In an earlier book, Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology: A NeoScholastic Critique (New York: Continuum, 2008), Dillard called Heidegger’s thought “atheology” because of the contradiction between the immanentist Ereignis and a transcendent creator God; but this contradiction only emerges if the Ereignis is misread as a metaphysical thesis. His current engagement with Heidegger’s language of the holy and the gods again may risk eliding the centrality of being. 24  Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana Unviersity Press, 2001); “Heidegger, the possible, and God,” in Macann, ed. Critical Assessments: Martin Heidegger, IV, pp. 299–324, 22

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a phenomenology of being and attached instead to the promise to Moses, “I will be with you” (Ex 3:12). What Heidegger says about the God of Christian theology is punctual and aphoristic, and sometimes caricatures theology as a crude metaphysics that uses God as the explanation of the world. Even the critique of the God of ontotheology strays off-key when he indulges the pathos of not being able to make music and dance before such a God (GA 11.70). Here he should have explored more the intellectual force of metaphysical attempts to think the supreme being, as he respectfully explores the attempts of metaphysics to think being as such. He incorrectly characterizes the idea of causa sui as the quintesssential definition of God, though it is rather a rarity in the history of metaphysics, making its most famous appearances in Plotinus, Enneads VI 8, and in Spinoza’s definition of causa sui as that whose essence implies its own existence. Perhaps just as the principle of sufficient reason emerges in its full power in Leibniz, Heidegger would see the causa sui emerging at the same time as an equally powerful principle of the theological side of metaphysics. But there is no careful working out of this, in contrast to the elaborate meditation on the principle of sufficient reason. A first cause, itself uncaused, is what metaphysics posits, and perhaps this is not so neatly re-inscribed within “logic” as Heidegger wants to claim. Heidegger talks irritatingly of God as “a being,” but the entire effort of Thomistic metaphysics is to think of God not as a being but as ipsum esse subistens, and Heidegger never deals closely with this.25 The extreme confusion that prevails about the meaning of “onto-theo-logy” in Heidegger’s usage is due to indifference to Heidegger’s concern with being. Onto-­ theo-­logy is the structure of metaphysics as such, and it goes back to Aristotle. It misses the truth of being in that it approaches being only logically. To say that “Heidegger notes that ontotheology involves a certain marriage between Greek metaphysics and Christian theology”26 is incorrect. He does criticize the influence of the doctrine of Creation on the ways beings are envisaged in medieval and modern philosophy, but this is adventitious to the basic ontotheological structure of metaphysics. “By focusing attention on the highest Being, ontotheology neglects to think being” is misleading, as is the riposte that “this objection will carry force only

 He says he asked a Jesuit to find the places where Aquinas defines being and explains what is meant by “Deus est suum esse” (GA 15:346). This suggests indifference rather than curiosity, since one need look no further than De ente et essentia for the first topic, and the second is very prominently discussed: Summa Contra Gentiles 1.21 teaches that “Deus est sua essentia” and 1.22 teaches that “in Deo idem est esse et essentia,” and “in Deo non est aliud essentia vel quidditas quam suum esse.” Moreover, God is “ipsum esse per se subsistens” (Summa Theologica I, q. 4, a. 2), “ipsum esse per suam essentiam” (q. 8, a. 1). “Est enim maxime ens, inquantum est non habens aliquod esse determinatum per aliquam naturam cui adveniat, sed est ipsum esse subsistens, omnibus modis indeterminatum (He is the maximal being, in that he hasn’t any being that is determined by some nature to which it would accrue, but he is being itself subsisting, indeterminate in every respect)” (q. 11, a. 4). 26  Merold Westphal, “Hermeneutics and the God of Promise,” in Manoussakis, After God, pp. 78–93; p. 80. 25

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with… those whose religion is Heidegger’s Seinsmystik.”27 The critique of ontotheology has nothing to do with any alleged rivalry between God and being. Rather, both are depleted by their subordination to the effort to think being logically: not just “theo-logy” but first of all “onto-logy” as such is seen as forgetting being. Heidegger’s phenomenology of being is not mystical and is nowhere described as such in his corpus; it is simply attention to the being of entities close to hand. Nor is his thinking of being a “religion,” even if he does think that it can develop a phenomenology of the sacred, the holy, the divine, the gods, and a supreme God. But one can set aside those themes in Heidegger’s phenomenology without thereby discrediting his diagnosis of a phenomenological deficit in the ontotheological procedures of metaphysics. Slavoj Žižek voices a reductive reading of Heidegger: “This radical historicity reaches its definitive formulation with the shift from Being to Ereignis, which thoroughly undermines the idea of Being as a kind of super-subject of history, sending its messages or epochs to man. Ereignis means that Being is nothing but the chiaroscuro of these messages, nothing but the way it relates to man. Man is finite and Ereignis also: the very structure of finitude, the play of Clearing or Concealment with nothing behind it.”28 Žižek sees Heidegger’s closeness to Catholicism in later years as a surrender to metaphysics, since he had dismissed Christianity as “the result of the Roman misreading of the original Greek disclosure of Being, as the key step in onto-theological forgetting of Being, and as a metaphysical-ontological screen obfuscating the immediacy of life.”29 But in fact the “key step” is the basic structure of metaphysics itself since Plato and Aristotle, and Heidegger, even when farthest from the Church, did not set his philosophical thought in radical opposition to Christianity as such but only to the distorted construction of “Christian philosophy.”

Heidegger Without Being One of the less fortunate effects of Derrida on anglophone religious thinkers is that he encouraged them to treat Heidegger’s talk of being as old hat. John Caputo enacts insouciantly a suspension of Heidegger’s claims: “I do not expect to be on hand for the Other Beginning, which can be granted if and only if one can maintain communications with the First Beginning. I have in short been abandoned, become a part of and a party to the very Seinsverlassenheit against which Heidegger has at length warned us all. Though I wait daily by my phone, though I keep my ear close to the

 Westphal, p. 80.  Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2013), p. 890. Žižek is probably influenced by Sheehan here. 29  Žižek, p. 893. 27 28

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ground, I cannot, for the life of me, hear the call of Being.”30 This is a riff on Derrida’s discussion of the “mittences of being” (Seinsgeschicke) in terms of postcards going astray.31 The effect of Derrida’s thought has been not to pluralize or complicate Heideggerian engagement with being, but rather to disable it.32 Derrida nowhere shows a deep sympathy with or understanding of Heidegger’s reflection on being. He celebrates Heidegger as a precursor of deconstruction, but one who remained insufficiently deconstructive, because unable to overcome a residual “metaphysics” of the proper and of presence. Caputo’s “listening” is undercut by interferences and distractions, one of which is the caricatural account of Heidegger’s thought to which he here subscribes. Derrida might say that the interferences and distractions are every bit as essential as the concentrated recollection to which Heidegger was dedicated. Heidegger’s claim to attend to being as such, the “miracle of miracles, that beings are” (GA 9.307), can then be nothing but a fatuous illusion. What does Derrida offer in its place? The wonderful realm of post-ontological freedom he opens up is likely to relapse into good old Anglo-American positivism for which Being is merely shorthand for the sum of things that happen to exist, and for which there is nothing meaningful to be said about being as such. That impregnable position, in all its barrenness, imposes itself on the Anglo-American mind as a virtue. We are urged to renounce the quietistic mysticism that is nourished by contemplation of being, for the pressing problems of humanity oblige us to put being on the back burner while we use our wits to advance knowledge and ethical action. Heidegger would see this attitude as rootless, lacking in Bodenständigkeit. For Heidegger the “call of Being” is not a remote or esoteric matter: it simply refers to the presence of beings, and of their being, to which we are always attending even if we do not attend to our attending. To maintain communication with that presence no special faculty is required, nothing religious or mystical, no philosophical theory, only a mere attending. Caputo claims that the later Heidegger “was, as he himself said, returning to his theological beginnings.”33 This is based on what seems to be a misreading of Heidegger’s remark: “Herkunft aber bleibt stets Zukunft (One’s provenance always remains one’s future)” (GA 12.91). The meaning is surely not that Heidegger wants to return from philosophy to the bosom of theology, but that his early study of theological hermeneutics prepared him to become the

 John D. Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993). p. 2. 31  Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1987). 32  For critiques of Derrida’s characterization of Heidegger as fixated on the proper and on presence, see David Wood, Thinking after Heidegger (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), pp.  93–15, and Charles Spinosa, “Derrida and Heidegger: Iterability and Ereignis,” in Dreyfus and Wrathall, ed., A Companion to Heidegger, pp. 484–510. 33  John D. Caputo, “Heidegger and Theology” in Charles B.  Guignon, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 282.

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hermeneut and exegete of being; the future inscribed in his origin was thus a strictly philosophical one. What he inherits from theology is method not content. Caputo sees the structures of Heidegger’s thought as dependent on theological inspiration, finding in him “a transference of the categories of Christianity to early Greek texts,” since the call of being and the human response are modeled on the Christian kerygma and the response of faith, That the history of being, with its eschatology, is not “fundamentally Greek in inspiration” but “is clearly Hellenizing and secularizing a fundamentally biblical conception of the history of salvation” “is clear to everyone but Heidegger’s most fanatical disciples.”34 This claim flattens out the distinctive nature of how being is revealed and concealed in the epochs of its history, which Heidegger establishes by phenomenological observation and not by importing extrinsic schemas. The idea that Heidegger is building “a rival Heilsgeschichte to the biblical one” and “demythologizing the history of salvation” by offering a different history that ironically turns out to be just as mythical is again a distorted perception based on reading Heidegger as if he were a crypto-theologian rather than an integrally philosophical thinker.35 The excited reports of some scholars that Jewish or Augustinian structures pervade Heidegger’s writing36 are a massive distraction from the concern with being. Heidegger took some passages of the Confessions as a clue to factic existence, but he frees these existential elements from the frozen metaphysical macro-structures of Augustine’s thought, his subsequent phenomenology of existence and of being never shows any tendency to bring these back into the Augustinian box. Whereas “Heidegger challenges metaphysics about its failure to think the Being of beings, for stopping short with beings and not moving on to ‘Being’ or to the ‘meaning’ of Being or, later on, to the ‘truth’ of Being, to aletheia, or later still to the Ereignis (the ‘event of appropriation’) which sends both Being and beings into their own,” in shocking contrast “Being, meaning, truth, and the proper are, for Derrida, so many produced, constituted effects, which it is a naiveté not to reduce.”37 Against Derrida, it can be argued that the effect of truth is not reducible to its mediations: that “two plus two is four” is a truth mediated, no doubt, by the history of mathematics and the human life-world within which mathematics emerges, and much else. Nonetheless when I say that it is “true” and that “two plus two is five” (within the same mathematical language-game) is “false” I find myself facing a phenomenon—indeed an apodictic evidence—that cannot be further reduced, by whatever ingenious arts of phenomenology or hermeneutics or pragmatism or historicism or sociobiology, for in its core reality truth does not lend itself to these arts. The truth of propositional judgment, made much of by Thomists such as Bernard  Caputo, “Heidegger and Theology,” p. 280.  Caputo, “Heidegger and Theology,” p. 280. 36  Marlène Zarader, La dette impensée: Heidegger et l’héritage hébraïque (Paris: Vrin, 1990); Ryan Coyne, Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in Being and Time & Beyond (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). 37  John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987). p.153. 34 35

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Lonergan and by analytic philosophers since Frege, remains stubbornly irreducible to the discourses on truth elaborated by Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida.38 Truth is less amenable to phenomenological treatment than being is, and its quiet authority best impinges itself on our awareness when we see efforts to undercut it brazenly succeed, whether in postmodern philosophy or in the post-truth rhetoric of a new breed of demagogues. Heidegger’s quasi-Hegelian locution “the truth of Being” refers to full apprehension of the phenomenon of being—not, as Hegel would have wanted, through the dialectical travail of negation that takes us from naive immediacy to a powerful grasp of being in the Concept, but through attending to refinements of that initial immediacy that Hegel overleapt and that render it resistant to onto-theo-logical explication. The presence of being is not, as Derrida would have it, produced by a “hermeneutics which receives messages sent by the gods, dispatches and letters (envois, Schickungen) addressed to mortals, disclosing the meaning of Being and delivered courtesy of Hermes in an onto-hermeneutical postal service.”39 Heidegger traces quite empirically a history of being in which rationalist philosophers have diminished our awareness of being while great poets have enhanced it. At each step Heidegger gives firm phenomenological warrant for his diagnoses, rather than relying on divine messages of any kind. For Derrida and Caputo, Heidegger remains in thrall to a “metaphysics of presence,” which prevents him from undertaking a more radical deconstruction of tradition.40 But Heidegger defines metaphysics quite precisely, and makes clear that his own phenomenological interrogaton of presence is a different kind of thinking from metaphysics, consciously pre-metaphysical and counter-metaphysical. To lump the two kinds of thinking together under the rubric of “metaphysics” is just the sort of sweeping gesture of which Derrida incorrectly accuses Heidegger. Caputo says: “Even to think the ‘history of metaphysics’ as a ‘destiny of Being’ (Seinsgeschick), to enclose it thus within the unified and undivided essence of ‘metaphysics,’ is to remain within the project of metaphysics and to arrest the play, to tame the flux.”41 But this sentence itself refers to a unitary “project of metaphysics” and its purported alternative to metaphysics, the “play” and the “flux,” sounds like a standard metaphysics of becoming. Heidegger’s schema of the history of metaphysics in terms of Being is set against his arch-rival Hegel’s schema of the same history in terms of Reason. It can be dethroned only by a more

 See O’Leary, Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth, pp. 98–125, and “Les incidences radicales du tournant herméneutique sur la théologie,” in Stefano Bancalari et al., ed., Jean Greisch: Les trois âges de la rasison (Paris: Hermann, 2016), pp. 301–17. 39  Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, p. 153. 40  Timothy Clark remarks: “To criticize Heidegger as Derrida does. in terms of certain ‘signs of a belonging to metaphysics’ is still the opposite of refuting him, for it is forces in Heidegger’s own thinking that are being brought to bear against him” (Martin Heidegger [London and New York: Routledge, 2002], p. 153). Derrida does have original resources for a critique of Heidegger; the problem is that his focus on marginal aspects fails to engage at all with Heidegger’s central concern with being. 41  Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, p. 170. 38

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powerful historical schema, not by the tired gesture that dismisses the whole idea of “metaphysics” as a deluded construct. Derrida, following Nietzsche, holds that “whatever is privileged as ‘true’ can be nothing more than a fiction produced by différance.”42 Heidegger would no doubt see this as nihilism that reduces being to will-to-power, but Caputo has an answer to that: “The laugh is on Heidegger who missed Zarathustra’s joke. Nietzsche does not believe in anything, including the will to power.”43 Quite possibly Heidegger suspects this, but insists on holding Nietzsche to his actual metaphysical investments. A ludic approach to metaphysics easily tumbles over into a decadent aestheticism, which could be embraced by President Trump: “We create as many truths as we require. Having style means to change with the changed, to invent what is required, to make nothing irreformable.”44 “Heidegger wants to think beyond Being to that which lets Being happen or come to be. At this point there is a certain closure of metaphysics. And at this point, too, ‘Being’ and ‘truth’ in the metaphysical sense become something nonoriginary.”45 But the metaphysical definitions of being and truth have been nonoriginary ever since the project of overcoming metaphysics was conceived. When Heidegger thinks beyond being to what lets being be, he is not abandoning the theme of the presence of being, but bringing it more precisely into focus, always following a phenomenological method of thinking. For Caputo this means “to find the hidden upon-which in terms of which the various metaphysical projections of Being are organized.”46 From early on “Heidegger is already on his way, unterwegs, not toward Being but beyond it.”47 The text Caputo refers to in support of this reads: “It demands no extensive demonstration to make clear how immediately we move within a basic problem of Plato, in our attempt to go beyond being to the light whence and into which it itself comes into the brightness of an understanding (zu dem Licht, aus dem her und in das es selbst in die Helle eines Verstehens kommt)” (GA 24.400). But far from leaving being behind, Heidegger here speaks of it coming into its true light. Like Sheehan, Caputo pounces on locutions that might be read as suggesting that Heidegger, like Derrida and himself, is in flight from being, when in reality these locutions mean the exact opposite. Heidegger is depicted as surveying mere projections of the meaning of being within the metaphysical tradition, and offering no alternative or rival account of that meaning. But Heidegger does not present metaphysics as a set of projections; it is much more solid than that; hence his use of the term Seinsgeschick; some objective yield of insight into the meaning of being is afoot in metaphysics. Moreover, Heidegger does present an alternative, in the step back to a phenomenological apprehension of the meaning of being. Caputo seems

 Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, p. 155.  Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, p. 155. 44  Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, p. 155. 45  Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, p. 171. 46  Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, p. 173. 47  Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, p. 174. 42 43

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to think of “meaning” in all these contexts as a theoretical construal, whereas Heidegger in every case is thinking of a phenomenological grasp, cramped within metaphysics, freed by the step back from metaphysics to its ground in the experience of being. The rather hasty reception of Derrida by anglophone literary critics and theologians in the early 1980s worked with a deconstructionist vulgate centered on dogmas applied as rigidly as the canons of political correctness. To the fore among these dogmas was a proscription of the “metaphysics of presence” or even of “presence” itself. Steeped in negative theology, Kevin Hart subscribes to this dogma in a way that threatens to void all of Scripture’s language about divine presence, and that is also deleterious for a reception of Heidegger. Building on Derrida’s critique of an alleged residual “metaphysics of presence” in Heidegger, Hart holds that “‘presence’ is a sure and certain sign of metaphysics.”48 “While he [Heidegger] rejects the idea that Being is presence, he still regards Being as Anwesen, as coming-into-­ presence.”49 But any phenomenological foothold for the idea of being must refer to presence; and Heidegger’s interrogation of coming-into-presence (in Was heisst Denken?, the second section of Vorträge und Aufsätze, and “Zeit und Sein,” for example) is subtle and searching. Again, it is religious preoccupations that most prevent attention to the actual movement of Heidegger’s questioning: “The notion of Seinsgeschick is in some respects not unlike the Catholic belief in the progressive revelation of doctrine; and the consolation of religion is surely suggested by such words and phrases as ‘Shepherd of Being,’ ‘Openness,’ ‘Lighting,’ ‘Call of Being,’ and ‘Being as gift.’”50 Hart is clear, in discussing the analogy of proportionality between thinking and theology, that “Heidegger in no way links God and Being.”51 But he does not attend sufficiently to the purely ontological bearing of Heidegger’s reference to mystics: “In Der Satz vom Grund Heidegger draws parallels between the thinker’s leap out of metaphysics and the mystic’s radical denial of God as a ground for beings.”52 The quotations from Angelus Silesius play the same role as those from Goethe’s “Spruchsammlung” (in the closing lecture of Der Satz vom Grund), namely to illustrate the difference between a contemplative weil that lets beings be and a warum that compulsively seeks their sufficient reason. Mysticism and negative theology as such provide mere distraction here. The wisdom Heidegger milks from mystics is of a quite secular order.

 Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000 [1989]), p. xxvii. 49  Hart, p. 88. 50  Hart, p. 254. 51  Hart, p. 257. 52  Hart, p. 255. Hart says that “within metaphysics Being is fashioned as the essence of all that exists” and that “Aquinas identifies the ontico-ontological distinction with that between essentia and existentia” (p. 255); “there is a radical difference between Being and a being: the one is construed as essentia, the other as existentia” (p.  243). This seems to invert Aquinas’s definitions: Being is the act of existence, and essence is the definition of a being’s identity which limits its participation in the act of existence. 48

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Putting God Back into Heidegger Until about 1920 Heidegger believed that his analysis of human existence must include a reference to God. Then he comes to regard phenomenological study of the human condition at a level prior to religious beliefs as “at the same time a more human way of being true to the acknowledgment of God than theology itself (because it does not seek to exceed the limits of the human, and so implicitly acknowledges the absolute transcendence of God), and a rebellion against God (because it resists His intervention).”53 To be sure there is an element of violence in wresting a neutral anthropology out of the Christian matrix in which human existence has usually been grasped in the West, and Heidegger is sensitive to the tensions involved. But the essence of his intervention has nothing to do with religion, but only with the inquiry into being. That death rather than eternal life is the last horizon of Heidegger’s eschatology seems to Judith Wolfe and other theologians to make him not a neutral but an anti-Christian thinker. But in fact Heidegger explicitly brackets the question of life after death, and does not declare death to be a final doom. To assume one’s mortality is given a neutral salvific sense in that it lights up the Gebirg des Seins. Barth’s “principled silence”54 about Heidegger testifies to the “incommensurability” between the concern with being and the concern with salvation. This pluralism irritates both philosophers and theologians but, like the pluralism between the great religions, it seems irreducible. The urge to reduce it has kept many Christian thinkers from real appreciation of Heidegger’s thought. Laurence Hemming discerns “an aggressive, personally held atheism,” which would “disqualify any concern Heidegger might have with Christian theology, in that it places him outside or beyond any real concern for the God of whom theologians speak.”55 This is a misperception of what places Heidegger outside theological concerns, much as it would be a misperception of what places the writings of a mathematician or a physicist outside theology if one were to ascribe this to the scientists’ personal atheism rather than to the inherently non-theological character of their discipline. This confusion pervades Hemming’s book. It is reinforced by an interpretation of being that narrows it to human existence and sees it as a proud assertion of finitude over against divine infinity. Heidegger says that “one who has experienced theology from rooted provenance, both that of Christian faith and that of philosophy, today prefers to be silent about God in the realm of thinking” (GA 11.51). Is he here, in 1957, turning his back on his earlier talk of the gods (perhaps admitting defeat), and also renouncing the traditional duty felt by philosophers to say something positive about God? Conversely, at a Zürich seminar in 1971, he adds that if he were ever to write a theology then “the word ‘being’ would not occur in it” (GA 15.437); he “would never attempt to  Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, p. 66.  Wolfe, Heigegger’s Eschatolology, p. 140. 55  Laurence Paul Hemming, Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), pp. 179–80. 53 54

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think the essence of God through being” (436).56 Hemming’s interpretation of this is again skewed by theological considerations: first the word “being” here must refer only to the being of Dasein, and then this must be seen as posited over against God: “The question of being, as Heidegger understands it, can only appear at all because it appears atheistically, as finite, the being of being-human, which has nothing to do with God.”57 The same reduction of Heidegger’s questions to the merely existential permits the assertion that “for Heidegger, die Kehre and the overcoming of metaphysics had already been understood and carried out by Nietzsche.”58 Hemming restates the Kehre in religious rather than ontological terms: “The phenomenological description of the turn is Heidegger’s atheism as such, no longer as a method, now as event.”59 Heidegger’s attempt to renew ontology is described as a Promethean attempt to wrest his noetic prerogatives from God: “The new beginning is nothing other than the knowing of knowing, not as attributed to the gods and God, but as entirely mine.”60 But Heidegger’s quest for a more originary phenomenology of being is not concerned with epistemology or alleged divine warrants for human knowledge; the religious take does not meet Heidegger’s thought at all. Hemming takes Heidegger’s discussion of Nietzsche’s “God is dead” as a theological one. But Heidegger insists that when Nietzsche attacks the Christian God it is as a cipher for that Platonic “suprasensible world” (GA 5.216), so “God is dead” means “the suprasensible world is without effective force…. Metaphysics… is at an end” (217). Heidegger is not interested at all in Nietzsche’s challenges to Christian faith, but only in the significance of Nietzsche’s diagnoses for metaphysics. Hemming characterizes the Ereignis as “the death of God as event,”61 Thus the very essence of Heidegger’s most central thought reduces to mere atheism. As if to compensate for the thinness of his sense of Heidegger on being, Hemming consistently exaggerates the religious aspect of Heidegger’s thought. “There is hardly a text of Heidegger’s, long or short, that does not mention God, gods, or divinity—not only once, but on almost every page. Heidegger reeks of God, and yet at no point does he say who or what God is.” And incomprehension of being is clearly betrayed when Hemming adds: “Heidegger—this man routinely taken to be the philosopher of being—refuses to tell us not only who or what God or divinity is, but what being is either.”62 Heidegger does profile quite clearly at least three  Hemming, p. 184.  Hemming, p. 185. 58  Hemming, p. 119. 59  Hemming, p. 103. 60  Hemming, p. 127. 61  Hemming, pp.  135–77. Religious distortions occur throughout Hemming’s text. “Beings as a whole function as the name of God as thought by metaphysics” (p. 166); no, but God, or some equivalent, figures in metaphysics as the supreme grounding principle that helps grasp the unity of beings as a whole. “For Heidegger the metaphysical position concerning God is that being and God are the same: Deus est suum esse. Ontotheology says no more than this” (p. 167). No, ontotheology may say no more than this about God, but it says much mroe than this about being. 62  Hemming, p. 2. 56 57

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discourses on God: the ontotheological construction of God as supreme being, first cause; the God of biblical revelation; and the God after which Hölderlin yearned and which provides the template for Heidegger’s musings on the sacred. Similarly, Heidegger profiles, or rather explores in depth, several styles of discourse on being: the ontotheological understandings of being from Plato and Aristotle to the present; the sense of being that is expressed whenever we use the word “is”; the phenomenological grasp of being in the fullness of its presence or truth, to which poetic language points. Far from refusing to tell, Heidegger tells and shows all the time, and it is hard to see what else there is for him to tell. There is now an entire cottage industry that aims to show that Heidegger’s account of metaphysics is confuted by Neoplatonism, which already thought the ontological difference so deeply as to escape Heidegger’s characterization of metaphysics as onto-theo-logy.63 What disqualifies this project, in my opinion, is its effort to see Plotinus’s One as something very close to Heidegger’s Being. It could rather be argued that in transcending beings to a reality quite beyond being, Plotinus reinforced the forgetfulness of being inscribed in the structure of metaphysics, and injected this forgetfulness deep into medieval scholasticism as well. The scholars who seek to release ancient or medieval philosophy from the characterization of metaphysics as onto-theo-logy generally do so for the religious motive of upholding negative theology, with little if any concern with reviving the question of being. Theological perception is spoilt if one brings God in prematurely, and this is still truer of philosophical perception. If one wants to initiate a dialogue between God and being, one must first let being be being (as well as letting God be God). One cannot contemplate a tree or read a poem attentively if one is constantly dragging in God. Even contemplation of the fabric of human, mortal existence needs to proceed on its own terms, prescinding from Christian or Buddhist soteriological framings of it.

Conclusion This tiny sampling of what anglophone philosophers of religion say about Heidegger seems to me quite representative of the type of discourse that is prevalent in the field. The two most salient characterisics of this reception of Heidegger are a very feeble appreciation of his thinking of being and an itch to make theological declarations about the significance or insignificance of his work. There is a fear of letting Heidegger be Heidegger, or of letting being be being, unlicensed by religious labels. Further explorations here would bring many disheartening discoveries, showing how anglophone philosophers, unable to make sense of the idea of being, instead dragoon Heidegger into religious apologetic.

 See the literature quoted by Wayne Hankey, “Why Heidegger’s ‘History’ of Metaphysics is Dead,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 78 (2004);425–43. 63

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Perhaps this philosophical blindness has exalted precedents, for the Fathers of the Church may have similarly created an imperceptive and foreshortened image of Plato and other philosophers, judging them as enemies or potential allies of Christian faith rather than engaging disinterestedly with their philosophical concerns. If so, the catastrophe represented by the (non-)reception of Heidegger among contemporary philosophers of religion would be a belated echo of an older catastrophe, that of the (non-)reception of Greek philosophy by the Fathers. Heidegger struck a blow for the authentic identity of philosophy, free of religious enframing. He challenges Christian thinkers to rethink their attitude to philosophy, to get beyond the urge to use it, and to recognize the otherness of the question of being to the specific concerns of faith. The more I read anglophone philosophers of religion who are blind to what Heidegger meant by being, the more a grim conclusion suggests itself: more often than not this blindness to being goes hand in hand with a blindness to the phenomenality of Christian revelation. I would recommend as a medicine for two contrasting forms of this blindness—for the liberals who would whisk away the resurrection and the divinity of Christ and for the conservatives who narrow the image of Jesus and his salvation through clinging to Vatican texts—a more serenely contemplative approach to this revelation, one that could learn from Heidegger’s meditation on being. Classical theology owes much of its health to its generous embrace of a Greek philosophical vision of the inherent goodness of being, though this was received more as a doctrine than as a theme of philosophical questioning and though full respect for the irreducible pluralism between the proper concerns of philosophy and those of faith was not cultivated. Modern theology could similarly benefit from letting being be being, along the lines Heidegger opens up, in order then to explore with an equal spaciousness the possibilities of letting God be God in a new style of listening to and rethinking the theological sources of the past.

Among Heretics: Derridean Influences in Anglo-American Encounters with Heidegger’s Later Work Daniela Vallega-Neu

Prelude I am writing this essay in homage to the discussions of Heidegger’s later work by Anglo-American philosophers at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum during years that were formative for my own work. I attended the Collegium Phaenomenologicum for the first time in 1989, as the youngest participant then.1 The director that year was James Risser and the topic was Heidegger’s work in the thirties. Risser edited a volume2 that contains versions of most of the lectures delivered at the Collegium he directed. I believe I was admitted to that Collegium in light of the fact that I was studying Heidegger with Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann at the Albert-Ludwigs-­ Universität Freiburg im Breisgau and came highly recommended by Michel Haar whose lecture courses (as well as those of Françoise Dastur) I attended in Paris 1988–1989. Since 1989, I have participated at the Collegium almost every year. Consequently, my own encounter with Heidegger was influenced on the one hand, by studying with an orthodox and careful immanent reader of Heidegger’s texts and on the other hand, with people who, from this orthodox standpoint, could be named “heretics.” It turned out that I became friends with the heretics and moved to the States in 1997 where I have lived and worked since then.

 In those years, the Collegium Phaenomenologicum took place at the Casa del Sacro Cuore in Perugia, Italy. It lasted 4 weeks with each week being comprised of a main lecture course with accompanying small text seminars and three independent lectures related to the Collegium theme. 2  James Risser, ed., Heidegger toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999). 1

D. Vallega-Neu (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_4

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The “reception” of Heidegger by the Anglo-American philosophers that affected my own encounter with Heidegger is marked above all (and in distinction to what happened in Germany at that time) by a deconstructive approach influenced by the early work of Jacques Derrida and certainly also by Nietzsche. It is due to the lectures and discussions at the Collegium that I witnessed and to the books and essays coming out of these lectures and discussions, which I read, that I broadened my initial dissertation project on the question of grounding in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy3 by addressing also Derrida’s early work on Heidegger.4 My initial resistance to Derrida turned with the realization of the possibilities opened by a radical questioning that Derrida was able to foster, a radical questioning itself indebted to Heidegger and Nietzsche and that takes different shapes in the works of, for instance, David Farrell Krell, John Sallis, Charles Scott, and David Wood, who will be the main Anglo-American philosophers that my paper will address.5 This radical questioning goes along with careful deconstructive readings that are at once indebted to Heidegger’s own Destruktion (or deconstruction)6 of the metaphysical tradition and mark limits of Heidegger’s thinking. Rather than simply writing about how some Anglo-American philosophers influenced by Derrida have interpreted and written about Heidegger, in this essay I will engage some themes and core questions marking their readings of Heidegger that are central as well to my own work. 1 . Radical finitude, abyssal truth, and radical questioning 2. The history of being and transgressing metaphysics 3. Disseminations

 Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophy (Vom Ereignis) was published in 1989 and appeared in a first English translation in 1999 under the title Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, and then in a second English translation in 2012 under the title Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Both translations came out with Indiana University Press. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophy (Vom Ereignis), vol. 65 of Gesamtausgabe, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994) will be henceforth cited as GA 65. 4  My dissertation project turned into a book: Daniela Neu, Die Notwendigkeit der Gründung im Zeitalter der Dekonstruktion. Zur Gründung in Heideggers ‘Beiträgen zur Philosophie’ unter Hinzuziehung der Derridaschen Dekonstruktion (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997). 5  I certainly was influenced also by other thinkers involved in discussions that marks the work of those I am more explicitly referring to, among which I should mention Walter Brogan and Robert Bernasconi. Furthermore, I will not address discussions concerning the question of tragedy or Heidegger’s relation to Hölderlin, which would have brought me to write also about Dennis Schmidt and William McNeill (although the latter is from a younger generation). 6  Derrida’s notion of “deconstruction” translates Heidegger’s notion of Destruktion in Being and Time. 3

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1. Radical finitude, abyssal truth, and radical questioning Many Heidegger interpreters from a more orthodox camp7 resisted Anglo-­ American deconstructive readings of Heidegger or tried to dismiss them as “not really understanding” Heidegger or “thinking everything as text” and thus missing the question of being. It is my suspicion that this resistance comes from a profound sense of threat. This threat has to do with the way readers such as Scott, Sallis, Wood, and Krell were able to think with Heidegger, following Heidegger to the most radical aspects of his thinking, and (in view of a Derridean sense of deconstruction) showing through these radical moments in Heidegger’s thinking where he remained bound to a desire for unity, origin, or “grounding presence.” These readings are troublesome because they expose us to the abyssal character of being, to a radical finitude as we find it in Heidegger’s thinking that disrupts and puts into question profound senses of meaning, of what is felt as “essential” and “true” in Heidegger’s thinking. This proximate, intimate sense of meaning and truth is what is at stake in Derrida’s thinking of différance in the sixties and seventies. The unmediated presence of meaning is what is to be subverted by unhinging the signifier, i.e. writing, from the signified, i.e. meaning. Written words are no longer bound to an original sense; the “freeing” of the signifier opens up a referential play that allows entrance to the “outside” of the metaphysical text. This outside is nothing in itself, it is a “non-place” (non-lieu).8 From a Heideggerian perspective, what the earlier Derrida pursues is the active “letting loose” of beings and thus the forgetfulness of being.9 As Heidegger thinks it in Contributions to Philosophy, at the end of metaphysics, being withdraws from beings to such an extent that beings are let loose (Loslassung) into the shackles of machination10 and don’t harbor any truth. (One could say that we are left with signifiers without signification.) Beings, i.e. things and events “are” not truly, they are emptied out to mere placeholders for calculation and productivity. Heidegger understands metaphysics as a history of being in which the presence of (represented) beings covers over the event of unconcealing-concealing through which such presence is first granted; the presencing of what is present gets forgotten and completes itself in the occurrence of being as a withdrawal that leaves beings to themselves, i.e. to their empty machinational deployment. This is what Heidegger would see happening in Derrida. What makes especially the early Derrida

 It is not by chance that Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, the editor of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, chose Fraçois Fédier to translate Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie into French, and Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly to translate the volume into English. 8  Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 123. 9  In “The Ends of Man” Derrida himself encourages a Nietzschean practice of active forgetfulness of being. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit), 163f; Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 135f. 10  GA 65: 132. 7

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monstrous from a Heideggerian perspective is that Derrida seems to know well what he deconstructs. How could one want to pursue the active forgetfulness of being?11 For Derrida on the other hand, deconstruction is a liberatory movement; he speaks of a “freeing” of the signifier. His understanding of metaphysics is more Nietzschean than Heideggerian in that he sees operative in metaphysics hierarchical oppositions and operations of exclusion that deconstruction overturns and lays bare. I think that his Algerian-Jewish background in the French context must have been part of his sensitivity to hierarchies and practices of exclusion in the name of truth.12 At the same time that Derrida continues reading Heidegger’s texts by pointing to places in which they don’t escape metaphysics, he would never simply say that Heidegger’s thinking is metaphysical. Indeed, he finds différance operative in Heidegger’s thinking where Heidegger exceeds thinking in terms of presence.13 Derrida’s many readings of different texts by Heidegger never simply claim that Heidegger is trapped within metaphysics but they show how Heidegger’s texts, at the same time that they exceed a metaphysics of presence also remain tied to oppositional structures and excluding operations constitutive of metaphysical thinking.14 Similarly, Anglo-American deconstructive readers of Heidegger have also found radical aspects of Heidegger’s thinking in which he exceeds metaphysics and subverts metaphysical principles. The excess in Heidegger to a “metaphysics of presence” or a “will to ground” can be situated in ecstatic temporality and the centrality of death in Being and Time, and of nothingness, concealment, and withdrawal in his later thinking of the truth of beyng. I will first consider Scotts reading of death as undermining metaphysical principles and then Sallis’ reading of Heidegger’s essay from the 30s “On the Essence of Truth.”

 In Die Notwendigkeit der Gründung im Zeitalter der Dekonstruktion, I pointed out that what motivated Derrida’s deconstruction was the desire for justice and I showed how one could interpret this desire for justice as a recoiling movement in which this desire continues to fuel itself by deconstructing what it strives for, i.e. I interpreted the desire of justice analogously to a will to will as Heidegger thinks it in relation to Nietzsche. (370–374) However, I also pointed out that such reading would interpret Derrida’s movement of thinking metaphysically and would miss the nonappropriative openness to radical alterity that Derridian deconstruction performs at its best. 12  Deconstrution thus opens venues from within Western thought for decolonial and feminist ways of thinking. 13  Derrida, Marges de la Philosophie, 75; Margins of Philosophy, 65. 14  Derrida shows how Heidegger’s texts remain bound to metaphysics by pointing to Heidegger’s privileging of questioning in Being and Time, to the differentiation from animals and privileging of the human when Heidegger speaks of the “world-poverty” of animals, and to how Heidegger brings into play “spirit.” See Jacques Derrida, De l’esprit. Heidegger et la Question (Paris, 1987). For the Anglo-American reception of Of Spirit, see David Wood, ed., Of Derrida, Heidegger and spirit (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993).

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a. Charles Scott on death in Being and Time Scott reads authentic being-toward-death in terms of an interruption of meaning and life that undermines Heidegger’s own “obsession with unity.”15 Dasein’s authentic being towards death is characterized by the possibility of the impossibility of existence. According to Heidegger it is only by running ahead into the possibility of this impossibility that Dasein discloses as a whole and that Dasein’s most proper or authentic possibilities of being are disclosed. At this point, one may emphasize disclosure, wholeness, and authenticity that are made possible in relation to death; however a deconstructive reading such as Scott proposes it, a reading that emphasizes death and impossibility as an interruption of the matrix of connections that determine our lives, leads to another conclusion: “When dasein’s eigenste Möglichkeit (most proper possibility) is named death (BT 263), the meaning of most proper or ownmost or most essential is thus interrupted.” (The Question of Ethics, 99) Interrupted is also any sense of “self.”16 What Scott is after here and in many other of his writings, arises, I believe, out of a sense of necessity to keep ethics in question, a necessity that relates to an experience of life-denial (here also a Nietzschean heritage comes into play) and suffering inflicted in the name of an ethics or morality that does not question itself. (I must say that living in the USA and experiencing the damaging effect of fundamentalist values and moral righteousness has made me appreciate more and more Scott’s endeavor.) There certainly is an “ought” at play in Scott’s thinking: that we ought to question our most cherished values, our most intimate convictions, for the sake of possibilities of living and the alleviation of suffering. This is not easy to do, for this questioning is not a theoretical matter but an existential one and even the “ought” that leads to questioning fundamental values needs to be held in question. Still, the questioning of ethics appears to arise as an ethical matter, which parallels in some ways (although it also differs from) Derrida’s understanding of deconstruction as ultimately answering to a call for justice. However, Scott belongs to the many Anglo-American deconstructive philosophers who see in the turn to justice of the later Derrida a religious turn that falls behind the radicalism of the early Derrida, since the desire for (an impossible) justice17 can be seen as functioning as a quasi-transcendent idea that unifies the deconstructive endeavor and provides the dissemination in deconstruction with a quasi-religious unifying principle.

 Charles Scott, The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 95. 16  In “Nonbelonging/Authenticity,” Scott develops the interruption in being-toward-death in terms of nonbelonging: “Dasein’s belonging belongs to non-belonging, which provides nothing.” In John Sallis, ed., Reading Heidegger: Commemorations (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 73. 17  See Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Metaphysical Foundation of authority,” in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. 15

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b. Johns Sallis’ reading Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Truth” In his essay “Deformatives: Essentially Other Than Truth,”18 John Sallis finds in Heidegger’s text a radical subversion of traditional notions of truth. In addition to showing how this subversion happens in Heidegger’s text, towards the end of Sallis’s essay occurs what I would call a “Derridean” turn in his reading of Heidegger’s essay, in which Sallis alludes to an “outside” with respect to Heidegger’s text. In “On the Essence of Truth,” Heidegger traces back the traditional notion of truth as correspondence between intellect and thing to the notion of truth as both disclosure and concealment to which also always belongs errancy. What Sallis highlights in his reading of Heidegger’s text is how within the very essence of truth there is “something essentially other than truth, a divergence from nature within nature, true monstrosity” (“Deformatives,” 29) The crucial moment at which there occurs “a monstrous decentering of the essence of truth” is marked by Heidegger himself in a marginal note that reads: “Between 5. and 6. the leap into the turning (that occurs essentially in the event).” (GA 9: 193) Between sections 5 and 6 of the essay there occurs a rupture and shift with respect to the path the essay had taken up to then. Up to that point the path Heidegger had taken was one of addressing the inner possibility of truth understood as the correspondence between intellect and thing, which lies in the disclosure of what becomes the object of a true statement and an open comportment toward what is disclosed. Only because the open comportment takes its measure from what is disclosed can an assertion correspond to a thing. Yet the open comportment in turn is grounded in what Heidegger calls freedom that grants a being-free toward what is disclosed or manifest (das Offenbare). This letting-be-­ free, although it is not a property of man, still could be read as belonging to Dasein understood as human ek-sistence, as a (literally translated) “standing out[side]” in the openness that makes possible human comportment and what is manifest to it. However already here Sallis offers a more radical reading according to which freedom is not a property of man but “the very dispropriation of the essence of man” (“Deformatives,” 38), foreshadowing the turn in the text where Heidegger will begin to think “from” the essence of truth rather than in relation to human eksistence and comportment. With this turn, at the center of the text, Heidegger also begins to emphasize concealment. He writes how “thought from truth as unconcealment,” concealment is “the un-disclosedness [Un-entborgenheit] and therefore the ‘non-­ truth’ that is most proper to the essence of truth” (GA 9: 193). Indeed, non-truth – that Heidegger also addresses as the non-essence” of truth is “older” than the disclosure of beings and older than the letting be of beings. In Sallis’ interpretation, insofar as non-truth and non-essence belong to the very essence of truth, “truth becomes monstruous: a deformation of what is natural (i.e. of the essential); a divergence from nature, something unnatural, within nature (non-essence within essence)” (“Deformities,” 39). The words “deformity” and “unnatural” dramatize Heidegger’s discourse in a way that shows its subversive movement with respect to traditional metaphysical accounts of truth that emphasize essence, unity, and 18

 John Sallis, “Deformatives: Essentially Other Than Truth,” in Reading Heidegger, 29–46.

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disclosure. Sallis extends his deformative discourse briefly by pointing to a doubling of deformities first when Heidegger brings into play the notion of errancy, i.e. the concealing of concealment in the turning toward readily available things and away from the mystery (the concealment that is older than the disclosure of beings and the letting be that allows for the open comportment toward them). Second, Sallis emphasizes the “force of disruption” of the notions of the non-essence and untruth insofar as they speak against the law of non-contradiction. So far, then, Sallis finds within Heidegger a decentering and disrupting of a metaphysical notion of truth. Toward the end of his essay, however, Sallis performs what I take to be his own decentering of Heidegger’s “monstrous” account of truth. He points to the passage in “On the Essence of Truth” in which Heidegger speaks of the possibility of not letting oneself be let astray by errancy (which relates to what Heidegger in Contributions addresses as “knowing the truth of being”) and relates this to what he (Sallis) calls a “prohibition” of the question of the relation of truth to an other. Sallis asks: “What of the prohibition that would have the effect of holding it [errancy] within reach of such an experience?” He then suggests that it is “just this prohibition that we shall have to ponder” and “to test the weight of the prohibition against saying an other so essentially other that it would not belong to the essence of truth, an other that would be outside the essence of truth without becoming again a mere opposite unable to withstand the logic of appropriation” (“Deformatives,” 44). This other would engender “outrage,” writes Sallis and would be “so essentially other than truth that would be absolved from truth, as absolutely as madness can be” (“Deformatives,” 44f). If I understand these last dense paragraphs in Sallis’ essay correctly, he is suggesting an “other” to truth that does not hold within truth, at the center of its essence, it’s own non-essence, but rather an “other” that is “absolved,” i.e. untied, not bound, to truth, and from there puts into question truth. If at this point I may add my own reading of Heidegger and my understanding of the difference between on the one hand, how something like “negativity” or finitude works in his thinking and on the other hand, the delimiting and disrupting operation of différance, I would put the matter in the following way: Heidegger’s thinking of truth as unconcealing-­ concealing has an abyssal, groundless quality to it. Truth is an occurrence that is at once groundless but also an opening that allows disclosure of things and events in which truth may resonate or remain hidden. Abyssal concealment in Heidegger, however, is not sheer nothingness, as it discloses in an attunement (Stimmung) that is determining (bestimmend) for how thought holds itself in relation to truth and especially to the concealment belonging to truth (by acknowledging it or turning away from it). Insofar as thinking is attuned by the concealment and by the withdrawal of being, it remains – to use an expression by Charles Scott – in “the draft” of the withdrawal of being.19 Thus, out of concealment may be heard the attuning,

 Charles Scott writes of the “draft” of beings withdrawal. Living with Indifference (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 41. 19

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silent “voice of being.”20 By contrast, the “a” of différance is mute.21 The “outside” of the metaphysical text that différance brings into play disrupts the silent voice of being, a gathering force at play in Heidegger’s thinking. Before saying more about this gathering force I would like to stress that like Scott, Sallis, and Derrida, I also see at work in Heidegger's thinking finitude and the abyssal character of being a disruption of unifying principles. If on the one hand in Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger speaks of the necessity of grounding Da-sein as the time-space for a possible other beginning of the history of being, on the other hand, such grounding occurs itself without ground. Truth remains abyssal even if it were to find a worldly site, even if it were to be said, i.e. “sheltered” in words. The truth of being as Heidegger thinks it since the thirties, is never simply a “ground” but an abyssal event (Ereignis), a middle voice event that has neither subject nor object. As Heidegger writes in section 242 of Contributions, the event occurs out of the abyss.22 Heidegger’s non-public writings from Contributions to Philosophy (GA 65, written 1936–38) to The Event (GA 71, written 1941) are in fact clearly marked by a growing emphasis on abyss, withdrawal, concealment and by a “downgoing movement” that reaches its peak in 1941 when Heidegger begins to introduce the notion of the “beingless” and “nothingless” that, as I have argued elsewhere, comes closer than any other thought in Heidegger to Derrida’s notion of différance. The beingless and nothingless are “words” indicating neither the withdrawal of being nor the abandonment of beings by being but “beings” (“beings” would have to be crossed out here) before or after they come into being.23 Thus, although nothingness (death and the withdrawal of beyng) in Heidegger mostly remains tied to being insofar as it is constitutive of the disclosure of being and therefore does not disrupt the gathering force of the question of being, there are moments of radical rupture in Heidegger’s texts. We may find these in movements of displacement from worldly connections (see Scott’s reading of death) or in most extreme moments in Heidegger’s thinking as we find them indicated in the notions of the beingless and nothingless but that one may intimate also in the notion of Enteignis (“expropriation” or “disappropriation”) that begins to emerge in the forties.  In Über den Anfang, Heidegger writes of the silent voice of beyng that attunes Da-sein such that Da-sein is “the re-sonating [Wieder-klang] of beyng.” Martin Heidegger, Über den Anfang, vol. 70 of Gesamtausgabe, ed. Paola Ludovika Coriando (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), 131. Henceforth cited as GA 70, followed by the page number. See as well section 185 of The Event where Heidegger speaks of the word as “the inceptively attuning voice” [die anfänglich stimmende Stimme]. Martin Heidegger, Das Ereignis, vol. 71 of Gesamtausgabe, ed. FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2009). Henceforth cited as GA 71. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz as The Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 21  The “a” that differentiates différence from différance cannot be heard. 22  Heidegger writes: “Truth grounds as truth of the event. The latter is therefore understood coming from the truth as ground: the primordial ground. The primordial ground discloses itself as selfconcealing only in the abyssal ground.” (GA 65: 380) 23  Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger’s Poietic Writings: From Contributions to Philosophy to The Event (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2018), 107–108, 112–115, 134–136. 20

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2. The history of being and transgressing metaphysics The notion of Enteignis is tied to Heidegger’s account of the history of beyng and at the same time transgresses it. This section thus will address deconstructive readings that at once mark where Heidegger transgresses metaphysics and remains bound to it and this in view of his thinking of the history of beyng. First, however, a few notes on Heidegger’s thought of the history of beyng, since it is by now means simple or uniform. By distinguishing history (Geschichte) from historiography (Historie), he wishes to differentiate the history of beyng or the historicality of being as he thinks it, from a representational approach to and a linear sense of history based on facts that happened in the past (historiography). Geschichte, in contrast, would address the essential occurrence of being. Within this sense of the history of being, too, some differentiations need to be made. On the one hand, Geschichte is more originary than any linearly represented “history;” it is the source or sending of history as it concretely occurs, and on the other hand, it takes different shapes in different epochs such that beings (things and events) are discovered in advance as determined by presence (eidos), by makeability (ens creatum), or by subjectivity (machination, lived experience). By situating a first beginning of the history of beyng (that is, the history of metaphysics) with the Greeks and its ending with the Germans (Hegel and Nietzsche) and interpreting it as one of progressive concealment and withdrawal of being, Heidegger cannot but let linear (and thus metaphysical) thinking slip into his account. Many scholars have pointed out a similarity between Heidegger and Hegel here. In his early Heidegger book, for instance, David Krell refers to Michael Haar who found “Hegelian structures in the Heideggerian thinking of history.”24 Still, the comparison with Hegel has its limits that have been pointed out by Sallis and Krell. Sallis explains the difference between Hegel’s and Heidegger’s accounts of history in the following way: Whereas in Hegel history is gathered to the center and to its actualization or telos in absolute spirit, in Heidegger history gathers to its extreme possibility, namely death or the withdrawal of all possibilities of being.25 For Krell, too, the difference between Hegel’s and Heidegger’s accounts of history lies in “the irremediable finitude of both humanity and Ereignis.”26 What happened between Hegel and Heidegger was Nietzsche. And yet, Krell concludes that Heidegger’s account of the history of being, which he (Krell) terms a “descentional reflection,”

 Michael Haar, “Structures hégéliennes dans la pensée heideggérienne de l’Histoire,” in Revue de la Métaphysique et de la Morale, 85, 1, (January-March 1980), 48–59. Robert Bernasconi also sees Heidegger constructing his history of being “from a framework borrowed largely from Hegel, while using the inclusion of Nietzsche to subvert the Hegelian starting-point.” (Robert Bernasconi, “The Greatness of the Work of Art,” in James Risser, ed., Heidegger toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s [New York: SUNY, 1999], 100.) 25  John Sallis, Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics, 2nd exp. ed. (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 21f. 26  David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality: Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger’s Thinking of Being (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1986), 121. 24

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remains “delivered over to the language of its metaphysical heritage even as it strives to think beyond it.”27 But let me develop more moments in Heidegger’s texts where a linear sense of history (that invokes representational thinking) indeed disappears or at least is suspended. This happens when we follow him to that limit that is addressed either as death or as withdrawal of being or as Enteignis, expropriation. The text that Anglo-­ American deconstructive readers would refer to in the eighties and nineties is Time and Being, where Heidegger alludes to expropriation (Enteignis) when writing how in sending the history of being there occurs a “holding-on-to-itself” (Ansichhalten), refusal (Verweigerung), or expropriation (Enteignis).28 In Intimations of Mortality, following Haar, Krell interprets the initial source of the history of beyng as remaining somehow beyond or behind history.29 Heidegger’s more recently published nonpublic writings give additional insight into Heidegger’s thinking of the history of being and into the source of history as well as into his thinking of expropriation. In Heidegger’s Poietic Writings: From Contributions to Philosophy to The Event, I trace the development of Heidegger’s thinking from 1936 to 1941 as a movement of downgoing into the abyssal inception (Anfang) as which Heidegger now think the event of the truth of being. It reaches the peak of its descent in 1940–1941. In Über den Anfang (On Inception) he thinks inception as not yet differentiated into first and other beginning.30 When Heidegger meditates on the incipience of inception, on the not-yet coming to be of beings, on the withdrawal that grants a clearing, he is far away from thinking any “thing;” he is far away from any notion of Germans or Greeks; he is far away also from any notion of history in the common sense. Indeed, the way he characterizes history is thoroughly alienating and one may say that it reverses the metaphysical schema of being and becoming in which history would belong to what becomes, i.e. things and events. In section 152 of On Inception Heidegger sets out with the question: “What happens in the history of beyng?” and answers it the following way: “Nothing happens” (Nichts geschieht); “inception initiates;“ (GA 70: 171) “the event eventuates” (GA 70: 172). The history of beyng as Heidegger thinks it in On Inception and The Event (1940–1941) is nothing but the incipience of the event thought as inception.31 Said with the words of Heidegger’s essay “Time and Being” from 1962, what in his non-public (I call them also “poietic”) writings of 1940–1941 he calls history of beyng, is not what is sent in the destiny of being (Seinsgeschichte, das Geschick von Sein) but the abyssal  Krell, Intimations of Mortality, 123. See also p. 139.  Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, vol. 14 of Gesamtausgabe, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), 27f. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), 22f. 29  Krell, Intimations of Mortality, 118. 30  Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger’s Poietic Writings, 107. In section 42 of Über den Anfang (On Inception) Heidegger writes: “’Inception’ is the word for being that has the capacity to name the first and the other ‘beginning’” (GA 70: 55). 31  See Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger’s Poietic Writings, 123–126 and 129–132. 27 28

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holding-­on-­to-itself, the withdrawal or expropriation (Enteignis) and sending or eventuating (Ereignis) that sends a history of being. History of being (Seinsgeschichte) is here written with an “i” to mark its difference from the more originary withdrawal and sending of a clearing of being.32 The history of being addresses how the being of beings is determined differently in different epochs, the epochs we represent to us as a sequence and for which Heidegger names the Greeks as the beginning and the Germans as both the ending and transition into another beginning. I could say the matter in yet another way: Heidegger thinks originary history (the history of beyng) as the moment of decision over the history of being (over the various ways in which things and events are discovered and addressed differently in various epochs). This moment of decision allows Heidegger to think history in a nonlinear way. Echoing how Scott finds in death a disruption of a unity of being, I would say that when Heidegger thinks originary history (especially in terms of expropriation) as hither the different epochs of the history of being, this whole account of the history of being is disrupted, held in question, or suspended. And yet – and there is always a yet – Heidegger re-emerges again and again from his thinking in decision with a narrative that reiterates a history of being in the West, a history that is/was necessary and that performs a powerful exclusion of non-­ Western histories. Furthermore, a look at his Black Notebooks shows that he interpreted all political events in terms of his narrative of the history of being. No-thing, it seems, can escape the dominion of machination and lived experience, no-thing but thinking in the suspended in-between of first and other beginning, no-thing but “Heidegger’s” (which is not properly “his”) commemorative thinking that finally learns to let machination pass by and dwell in the poverty of a thinking that hears/ belongs (gehört) to the silent expropriating appropriation of being. What is at stake in the differentiation between the originary history as which the truth of beyng (or the event) occurs and a history of being determining in various ways the being of beings, is the difference between beyng and beings. One may read Heidegger by emphasizing beyng and with it finitude and abyssal truth, or one may read him emphasizing how despite the radical transgression of limits of metaphysics, Heidegger also remains caught in metaphysical determinations (may we understand metaphysics as thinking on the basis of present entities or as operating through fundamental oppositions). There are many indications in his non-public writings that he understands the thinking “of” the event that responds to a historical necessity to prepare an other beginning – that he understands this thinking (when it succeeds) as overcoming (Überwindung) or twisting free (Verwindung) of metaphysics. Derridean deconstruction has taught many of us to be suspicious of the claim that thinking can actually simply leave metaphysics behind. Although the movement of différance that Derrida also finds at work in Heidegger’s thinking transgresses metaphysics, it cannot simply leave metaphysics behind. We may rethink this matter in terms of Heidegger’s differentiation between being (or beyng) and beings in the

32

 GA 14: 13; On Time and Being, 9.

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following way: Although his task is to think being as such, being (or beyng) never occurs in its truth without beings. In case of Heidegger’s thinking, these beings would be words but also “the Greeks” and “the Germans.” What is decided in the history of beyng is the concrete way in which beings, things, and events appear. What is decided is the history of a people. But in turn, is it not the case that Heidegger’s thinking arises in a concrete political situation? Does he himself not situate the beginning of the history of being in Greece and its ending and other beginning in Germany? How far can we separate, then, “originary history” or “being as such” from the concrete time and place in which Heidegger lived, from his implications in National Socialism and his political views as we find them expressed in the Black Notebooks?33 A Derridean reading teaches us to ask these questions; it also teaches us to keep them open and not simply settle on an answer – because there is no simple answer. This does not preclude, however that one can mark and perhaps condemn moments in Heidegger’s texts or thinking, in which he falls back into metaphysics or remains blind to political implications of what he writes. In Heidegger’s Poietic Writings, I argue that this blindness is anchored in Heidegger’s attempts to remain attuned to the withdrawal of beyng, that is, to the most radical moment in Heidegger’s thinking by virtue of which he also transgresses metaphysics. A close reading of Heidegger’s poietic writings shows how he answers to the withdrawal or refusal of beyng in thinking in various ways, always anew. (Hence the sense of repetition one gets when reading Heidegger’s non-public writings and notebooks.) Thus, the history of being as the history of a progressive oblivion of being and its withdrawal gets its unity from this sense of withdrawal that implies that one is unsettled from everyday dealings with things and lets go from a representational and machinational approach to beings. At the same time that Heidegger’s thinking occurs in being displaced from beings and responding to the withdrawal of beyng, the task he sees in his thinking is to bring the truth of being into the openness of a world for a people, to ground the truth of beyng in Da-sein, in “there-being” (as he writes in Contributions); and this requires beings, i.e. words, things, deeds. The truth of being is only through beings. There is, then, a powerful tension in Heidegger’s thinking between on the one hand, thinking being itself (and thus not in relation to beings) and on the other hand, seeking that the truth of beyng find a site through beings (words, things, deeds). This takes me to the last section of this essay.

  In a number lectures on Heidegger that Robert Bernasconi gave at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, he never failed to push the thorn of the political implications of Heidegger’s thinking when the latter situates the history of being in relation to the Greeks and the Germans. As I understand it, his claim is that nothing in Heidegger’s thinking can escape the political implications it engenders by performing an exclusion of what does not fall in the history of being that Heidegger recounts. 33

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3. Disseminations It is by gathering towards the withdrawal of beyng that Heidegger’s thinking transgresses metaphysics and opens new venues for thinking being in its temporal and historical unfolding. Largely such gathering requires for Heidegger an active letting go of a representational approach to things, resisting objectification, resisting speaking “about” things. Thinking needs to be unsettled from everyday relations to things into the sheer “that” of mortal being, into the “pressing forth of what is self-­ concealing” (GA 65: 15). At the same time, if this is sustained in thinking, and a saying of this event occurs that performatively brings the event into the open, beyng and beings (in this case: words) are, as Heidegger writes in Contributions, “transformed into their simultaneity;” (GA 65: 13) they occur at once. When the simultaneity of being and beings occurs, when beings “shelter” the truth of being, (abyssal) grounding occurs. There are two main ways in which one can address this grounding: First, one can think of it in terms of the historical grounding of another beginning of the history of being for a people. Second, one can consider Heidegger’s own performative thinking in his poietic writings as grounding, that is, as providing a concrete site (through his words) for the eventuation of an originary sense of being, always anew, always uniquely. According to Heidegger, the first sense of grounding can only be prepared and may in fact never occur. As for second sense of grounding, it can only occur in an attempt at a saying of the event34 and Heidegger is well aware that there is never a guarantee that “his” words actually say of the event and thus bring the truth of beyng into the open, provide a site for it. In section 41 of Contributions Heidegger reflects on how since every saying of being is kept in words that can be interpreted in terms of everyday opinions about beings, a saying of the event can always be misunderstood. “Words themselves already reveal something (known) and thus veil that which should be brought into the open in thoughtful saying. Nothing can remove this difficulty.” (GA 65: 83f) Heidegger may well have had in mind here that the difficulty of thoughtful saying lies in how his words are heard; but he is also thinking of how words in themselves are both revealing and concealing. Thus, it is not only a matter of how “his” words are heard. Furthermore since he continued to write how to truth always belongs errancy, that is, a turning toward beings that never allows for the truth of beyng to show itself purely, one would expect him to be aware of this in his thinking. David Wood seems not so convinced about this when he writes that “the central thrust of Heidegger’s later thought is corrupt” and that “this corruption is unthought in his texts.”35 Wood develops this “corruption” in two directions, first in terms of “ontic discourse” with which he addresses the fact that Heidegger’s language has “ontic roots” (145); second, in terms of what he calls the “machinery” or “hidden law” of Heidegger’s thought. I will limit myself to the consideration of the first. Not unlike Derrida, Wood takes issue with words like “ownness,” “property,”  See section 1 of Contributions.  David Wood, “Reiterating the Temporal: Toward a Rethinking of Heidegger on Time,” in Reading Heidegger, 144. 34 35

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“belonging,” “hearing,” “giving,” as constituting forms of identity and presence. He writes: “What is put into play in this lexicon of giving, belonging, bestowing, etc. are various contained forms of identity-constituting and identity-generating relationships. But their containment is assured from the outset. It is assured by the economy that frames this lexicon, which essentially excludes representation, signs, structure . . . and we might add, writing, excludes the outside, and in particular excludes, in an important respect, time.” (146f) Although I might not get as far as saying that Heidegger constitutes “identities” with the words Wood highlights, I would say that these words let resonate the gathering power of Heidegger’s thinking that does not turn to and thus perhaps “excludes” thinking beings, things and events in the singularity of their being. This has to do with the fact that Heidegger always attempted to think out of grounding attunements (Grundstimmungen) that remove thinking from its engagement with specific things. In fact, the abandonment of beings by being that he experienced, the hollowing out of things such that these not properly are; this is for him a necessary transition into the experience of beyng as withdrawal and thus the occurrence of the truth of being as such. He always did actively not engage singular beings but instead the singularity of being (beyng). Even when he meditates on the jug (in “The Thing”) or the bridge (in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”), the emphasis is on how these gather the fourfold, and not on their singularity or distinctness. In the foreword to the The Event (GA 71) Heidegger quotes from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus a passage that he interprets as blind Oedipus saying that he is blind for beings (for things and incidents) but has an eye for being and for destiny. I believe Heidegger identified himself with this blind Oedipus. And while there are great merits in a lifelong dedication to thinking being and not beings (even if and precisely because our production- and outcome-interested societies attribute little value to such an endeavor), this has consequences with respect to that which such attempt does not engage. Heidegger’s poor political judgments and tendency to interpret everything happening around him in terms of the history of being he constructs is rooted, I believe, in this “blindness” with respect to beings. I find myself sharing with Wood, Krell, and Scott an uneasiness with, if not “allergy to” (as Wood writes)36 Heidegger’s thinking of a destiny of being, to a certain “piety” (as Krell calls it)37, or to the ascetic ideal (as Scott addresses it)38 in the later Heidegger. Each of these thinkers performs in their writings in their own particular ways a dissemination of thinking in terms of origin (in case of John Sallis work, I would rather speak of an indefinite displacement of the question of origin as one has “always already begun”)39 in the attentiveness to singular things and events.  Wood, Reading Heidegger, 150.  David Farrell Krell, Ecstasy, Catastrophe: Heidegger from Being and Time to the Black Notebooks (New York: State University of New York Press, 2015), 167–168. 38  Charles Scott, The Question of Ethics, 2, 210–112. 39  I am thinking, here, of how John Sallis begins the first Chapter of Force of Imagination (Force of Imagination [Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000]) or the second Chapter of Delimitations, but also his reading of the Chora (Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus [Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999]).

36 37

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This can be found in their critical readings of Heidegger that at the same time never fail to acknowledge his influence on their work. In my own engagement of Heidegger I began emphasizing the simultaneity of being and beings and more specifically the role of the body or of the bodily character of being.40 Radicalizing the simultaneity of being and beings and releasing the notion of Da-sein from its being-historical framework leads to its pluralization (whereas in Heidegger Da-sein is always singular). There-being (Da-sein) occurs through singular things and events (human, animal, plant, elemental, celestial, and other). It addresses their temporalizing and spatializing that is not gathered by a common destiny or source but permeated by chance with manifold overlappings and various dynamics.41 My project thus turns out to be close to that of Wood: Thinking time without single origin.42 Coda In this day and age where everything is about what is newest and most recent, I can imagine some people criticizing that in this essay I am not addressing the latest books and articles that came out nor Heidegger scholars of the Anglo-American world that are closer to my generation. But I decided to commemorate what I find to be a uniquely intense and fecund period that brought together what I still take to be some of the most engaging and creative Anglo-American readers of Heidegger’s texts; readers who are not first and foremost academics or “Heideggerians” but thinkers who engage Heidegger’s text in its question-worthiness without becoming either pliant followers or militant opponents. I should at least mention in closing, an aspect of their reading and writings that would have merited a longer discussion: performativity (Vollzug). Performative reading and writing, or perhaps better: performative thinking as I understand it here, holds itself in question, exposes itself to its own finitude as it attempts to stay true to what calls to be questioned. It is both generative and transformative. It is more an art than a technique. It implies a work with language that seems to suit less and less the time- and outcome-driven life of Academia, as it requires time to listen and to let thoughts and words find their way when they are ripe.

 Daniela Vallega-Neu, The Bodily Dimension of Thinking (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), Chapter 5.  See Daniela Vallega-Neu, “Disseminating Time: Durations, Configurations, and Chance.” Research in Phenomenology 47: 1 (2017): 1–18. 42  At the end of “Rethinking the Temporal” David Wood writes: “I am suggesting we pursue the possibilities of multiplicity of temporal series, of the complexity of their constitution of the capacity for cross-determination of one series by another.” Reading Heidegger, 156. 40 41

Anarchy in the Name of Heidegger Nicolas de Warren

I was far away from my origins for so long. that the one and sole origin seems very close. Reiner Schürmann.

Perhaps, what it means to be contemporary in thought is to find oneself in a situation of questioning that remains at once abstract and concrete. Such a place of questioning would inhabit the world while simultaneously releasing us from the binding and blindness of the world in drawing us away from its immediate hold, thus coming to place the world into the tighter grips of its questioning. To be contemporary, in this regard, would mean to be disjointed, placed athwart in a space that nonetheless still retained a footing in and orientation towards the world. Such a space of questioning is the place of thinking itself. In its inaugural figuration under the name of Socrates, thinking takes the form of an interpolation that speaks and enters the world from nowhere, as with the opening question of the dialogue Protagoras. “From where, Socrates, have you just arrived?” The voice of thinking is without place, atopos – strangely issued from nowhere, and in this sense, original without any manifest origins. Of all those questions that situate us today, holding us to a place from which it would seem we know not where and how to move, while at the same time, in the same gesture, making of this place of questioning a focus of unrest, looms the specter of “what is to be done?” It is a question asked time and again, whose haunting makes us contemporary in the conflicting pull of disappointment and aspiration. Whether loudly declared, as with Lenin’s famous pamphlet, under the name of a determinate politics, or indistinctly bespoken in life’s intimate retreat, whether N. de Warren (*) Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_5

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posed in 1901, in 2001, or today, “what is to be done?” is a question as abstract as it is concrete. In its form of questioning, it is abstract given the wide berth it affords as well as seeks for possible direction, yet it remains concrete given its specified urgency. “What is to be done?” is often either the first imperative question, that question which initializes a series of subsidiary questions, or the penultimate question, that question to which all questions arrive, regardless of where those questions and concerns first started, and how. However posed and approached, with whatever intention and desired consequence, the question “what is to be done?” is inseparable from two other questions, the first frequently more explicitly articulated than the second. Our answer to the question “what is to be done?” would seem to depend critically on some founding knowledge or directing wisdom. “What is to be done?” would thus be conditioned by the more basic issue of “what can I know?” or “what should I think?” such that we can only do once we know – once we know what to do. Once we know what is to be done, we might convince others to follow suit, disabuse others of their own proposals for action, or stand ourselves convinced of what to do. There is no action without prior thinking; thinking would serve, on this score, as the a priori for action. To this prerogative of thinking over action, or, equivalently, this acting under the aegis of thinking, there stands a second implicated question. For if action requires a foundation or directive in thinking, the value of asking “what is to be done?” would seem to be drawn from the question of why we should live this way or that way, of whether life only lives originally when grasping itself in knowing why. There would be no value to asking “what is to be done?” if we did not stake the value of life itself on the answer to this question, indeed, on the very significance of raising this question in the first place. A life that remains unexamined as to its why – its foundation – would remain, so it has been said, not worth living. The difficulty in knowing “what is to be done?” is bound to the challenge of thinking: what is one to think, what is it to think? Both questions, in their openness, are struck, dumb-founded, by a constitutive ignorance. Such ignorance does not stand in front of us so that its contours might become more visible in light of its questioning, as if the question pointed like an arrow for where to take aim, thus inviting us to progressively pierce through that initial ignorance on which any questioning would seem to depend and hang. The anchoring ignorance that afflicts the existential questions “what is to be done?” and “what is it to think?” resides instead behind us, inhabiting the question in such a manner that no amount of effort or movement through the question can fully expel or expunge. This a priori of ignorance is not without a certain correlation to the interpolation of thinking in its questioning, for if thinking is essentially a voice that speaks from nowhere, both dislocated and dislocating – a dislocution, to import one of James Joyce’s coinages – its address speaks to us through this animating principle of ignorance. Rather than move backwards from something already known to the pretense of ignorance posing as a question, the difficulty in asking “what is to be done?” would be measured by this catalyst of motion issuing from an original ignorance; such a principle of motion in this question would make of its pursuit a wandering rather than a method, a searching for a strategy rather than the finding of an answer.

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Within the span of twentieth-century philosophical thought, there is arguably no other thinker whose self-fashioned identity and contested legacy is more emphatically marked by the intractability of the questions “what is thinking?” and “what is to be done?” than Heidegger. Throughout Heidegger’s writings, both of these questions animated his thinking, often merging into each other, or passing through each other, or remaining distinct from each other, but never without tacit affinity. What it is to think, or, more attuned to Heidegger’s own idiom, what calls for thinking, what is thinking called for, and what is called thinking (all of these permutations contained and expressed in the richness of Heidegger’s German “Was heisst Denken?”) remained a constant obsession of his writings. In Heidegger’s handling, the question of thinking calls for and calls on something which still lacks a proper designation – “thinking”  – while simultaneously calling out those pretensions to thinking, first and foremost, that pretention to thinking called philosophy in its institutional and historical forms. In this manner, the question “Was heisst Denken?” marks a placeholder for “thinking” in avowing a constitutive ignorance of what it is to think. This question opens a place of waiting and time of wanting for thinking – waiting for that nowhere from which thinking speaks or arrives. As Heidegger tirelessly declared, whether explicitly or implicitly, we – as philosophers, as cultures, as human beings  – do yet know what it is to think. This polemical stance is directed against the history of philosophy as an accrued conceit to master and hence, in this sense, know what it is to think. In rejecting different images of thought (truth as correspondence, knowledge as representation, knowing as justified true belief, etc.), Heidegger seeks to distinguish “philosophy” in its familiar forms and recognizable names (as theory, science, contemplation, wisdom, etc.) from “thinking.” Against the grain of institutionalized philosophy, Heidegger’s thinking does not instruct or teach what it is to think, but operates in such a manner as to undo and “unthink,” as it were, what we thought it meant to think, to deconstruct thinking from thinking that it thinks, to dislocate thinking in thinking that it knows itself to be thinking. Heidegger’s question “Was heisst Denken?” equally registers the collapse of any distance between the question of thinking and the question of doing. In one translation of this question (a question affording translations into many strands of questioning) we are to hear “what is thinking called for.” Here, the implication would be that we must ask the question of thinking in order to answer the question of what is to be done. Heidegger’s questioning, however, can be read the other way around. In this translation, the question “what calls for thinking” situates it, on the contrary, within the question of what is to be done, such that the question of action would anchor the question of thinking. Heidegger’s form of questioning allows for and invites a bi-directional reading: what is thinking called for (to do) and what (doing) calls for/on thinking. Gathered within this placeholder of the question “Was heisst Denken?”, we discover in Heidegger not an image of philosophy as rigorous science or programmatic action, but the effort of thinking as errancy in thinking as well as doing.

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Although less pronounced and indeed often cloaked within his writings, Heidegger pursued the question “what is to be done?” with the strenuous embrace of a constitutive, that is, existential ignorance. In his 1966 Der Spiegel interview “Only a God Can Save Us,” Heidegger, shortly before his death, observed: “It is a decisive question for me today how a political system, and what kind of one, can at all be coordinated with the technological age. I do not know the answer to this question. I am not convinced that it is democracy.” Are we today any wiser with respect to this epochal question? Are we any more convinced about democracy, let alone any other political system and ideology? In answer to the question “what is to be done?” in the urgency that defines our contemporary situation, Heidegger embraces the same place of ignorance which animated his questioning “Was heisst Denken?” In both instances, perhaps two instances of a kind, it is not, as has often been wrongly or too eagerly ascribed, a stance of resignation or mystical eschatology that we are to hear in the declaration “only a god can save us.” Keener ears are to discern instead the avowal of an existential ignorance that, more encompassing and profound than any personal limitation, psychological attribute, or cultural trope, directs internally Heidegger’s thinking. In this manner, Heidegger’s exceptionality would perpetually make of his thinking our contemporary, as the dislocated and dislocuted thinker for whom the questions “what is to be done?” and “what is thinking?” are questions for which the first step is not the passage from not-knowing to knowing, or not-doing to doing, but from knowing to unknowing, from doing to undoing. More than 40-years after this avowal of ignorance, his death, and the gambit of his thinking, Heidegger – his writings, his doings – have become even more of a looming question before which, especially in the shadow of the recently published Black Notebooks, we stand without knowing what to think or what to do. Despite the deluge of literature on Heidegger, the precise contours and significance of his thinking still remains, if not shrouded in obscurity, at least suspended in the viscous medium of its ever changing forms, as if with every new look, every newly published text, and every new revelation, Heidegger becomes other than Heidegger. The presence of Heidegger’s thinking continues to circulate like a rumor – a rumor of thinking permeating the textual corpus signed Heidegger. This rumor of a “hidden King” (or for many today: a deposed King) is freighted with the promise of delivering us from the condition of existential ignorance it so consistently avows. Yet, arguably, from the beginning, from the first university lectures and publications, Heidegger’s thinking always resisted any fixed placement within the landscape of philosophical thought; hence, the difficulty of finding a place from which to approach Heidegger’s thinking, especially with its open embrace of the question “what is to be done?” The expectation is frequently held before his thinking that a certain ethics (or politics) might be issued from Heidegger’s thinking, or that from Heidegger’s thinking, a theoretical illumination might alight onto the present in light of which we might extract ourselves from the reign of technology, the flight of the gods, and withering away of any foundational principles. Conversely, the reproach is just as often held against this thinking that Heidegger cannot, for reasons structural or biographical, deliver an ethics or make any normative claims to either

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thinking or action. Either way, we seem to remain at the same place as with Faust’s lament. After innumerable studies, assessments, affairs, and polemics under the name of “Heidegger,” wir sind so klug als wie zuvor. With Heidegger, what is still to be done? In Heidegger, what still calls for thinking?

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In 1966, a 24  year-old Dominican friar, born to German parents in 1941  in Amsterdam, began the singular pursuit of answering these two questions with respect to Heidegger, with respect to himself, and in response to the world in ruins, our contemporary epoch, into which he had recently been born. At the time a student at the Dominican School of Theology Le Saulchoir in France, the young Reiner Schürmann wrote a brief letter to Heidegger with two questions as well as a request for a conversation.1 In this letter, Schürmann explains that he has interrupted his studies at Le Saulchoir to pursue a PhD on the theme of “the unknown God in Meister Eckhart’s thought.” Encouraged by his supervisor, Bernard Welte, a prominent scholar of Meister Eckhart in Freiburg who hailed from Heidegger’s native village of Messkirch, Schürmann’s request for a conversation alludes to Heidegger’s own interest in Meister Eckhart’s thought in his 1955 Gelassenheit.2 This slim volume contained two texts: the lecture “Gelassenheit” and a conversation (Gespräch) “Towards an Explication of Gelassenheit. From a Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking.” This published “conversation” presents an abridged version of a longer discussion among three characters (a researcher, a teacher, and a scholar) written towards the end of the Second World War in 1944–1945. The lecture “Gelassenheit” was first delivered in a manner inspired by Eckhart’s sermons in celebration of the 175th anniversary of the birth of the Messkirch composer, Conradin Kreutzer.3 As has now been well established and investigated, Heidegger cultivated a profound interest in Meister Eckhart, and specifically in the question of thinking (or meditation: Besinnung) and the notion of Gelassenheit, the traces of which are apparent in much of his later writings. On Heidegger’s reading of Gelassenheit, this critical notion is divorced from any conflation with volition and willing.4 Instead, Heidegger speaks of Gelassenheit as a “non-willing,” but likewise distances himself from Meister Eckhart’s own emphasis on the abandonment of human volition (in self-denial) in favor of divine authority. Gelassenheit, as designating the temperament of thinking, is further characterized as “openness for the mystery” in

 “Reiner Schürmann’s Report of his Visit to Martin Heidegger,” translated and edited by P. Adler, in: Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, (1997). 2  Welte gave the funeral oration at Heidegger’s burial. 3   Ingrid Schlüsser, “Nachwort der Herausgeberin,” Martin Heidegger, Feldweg-Gespräche (1944/1945), GA 77 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997). 4  For a detailed analysis of Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit throughout his writings, see Brett Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008). 1

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contrast to the reign of technology and its essence of the will to power that defines the epoch of the twentieth-century. The thinking in Gelassenheit is less an attitude of questioning as it is an attunement of answering and listening. Intrinsic to conversation (Gespräch), Gelassenheit holds itself open and in waiting, without, however, adopting a posture of wanting or willing. As representing the young Schürmann’s first approach to Heidegger’s thinking through this proposed three-way conversation between Heidegger, Meister Eckhart, and himself, Schürmann’s letter exhibits the quality of humility reflected in Gelassenheit itself. Schürmann’s first question concerns “Eckhart’s relevance for the situation of thinking today.” More specifically, Schürmann wonders if Meister Eckhart thinks being beyond, that is, without, the metaphysical categories of being-­ present, such that, as would later be fruitfully developed by other commentators and scholars, Meister Eckhart’s rejection of any identification of God with being places his thinking in a liminal space within the history of metaphysics as onto-theology.5 As Schürmann formulates this suggestion: “Might not Meister Eckhart’s thinking help us along in a meditation directed at being which always withholds itself and, in this very withholding, addresses itself to us?” Schürmann’s second question, more speculative, already exhibits an independence of thought to pursue consequences that reach beyond the scope of Heidegger’s thinking as well as his own own appropriation of Meister Eckhart. Schürmann wonders whether “the proposition ‘being is there given’ [Es gibt sein] be expressed in the form ‘thou gives being’ [Du gibst sein] without injury to the mystery?” Schürmann writes that he finds a suggestion for this detachment of “Thou” from “Being” such that even in the “break through all of God’s titles (such as the ‘good’ or ‘truth’), there still subsists for Meister Eckhart the inkling of the ‘thou’.” Indeed, the implication is that only through the breaking, or undoing, of God’s proper names, or attributes, can the non-substance and non-­ being of God break through, in its mystery, in the form of an address to us from a place that is nowhere, but which all the more speaks to us in the name of Thou. In a subsequent letter penned to an anonymous friend reporting on his meeting with Heidegger, Schürmann paints a portrait of Heidegger, his thinking, and their conversation in terms that visibly reflect (whether consciously or not on Schürmann’s part) the four defining themes of Meister Eckhart’s thinking, as succinctly stated in his Sermon 53 Misit dominus manum suam, and endorsed by Schürmann himself in his own exegesis: detachment, being transformed [into God], nobility, and simplicity. But rather than reporting this experience of conversing with Heidegger as “transformative” into any God, it can be said that Schürmann became propelled into his own path of thinking, as oriented by the two bearings of Heidegger and Meister Eckhart. These questions would germinate into Schürmann’s reading of Meister Eckhart’s thinking in his 1972 Maître Eckhart et la joie errante, where Schürmann inflects the notion of Gelassenheit into the distinctive form that he earlier performed  For an over-view and assessment of the reception and influence of Meister Eckhart’s thinking in the twentieth-century, with illuminating discussions of Heidegger and post-modern interpretations, see Dermot Moran, “Meister Eckhart in 20th-Century Philosophy,” in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. J. Hackett, (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2013): 699–710. 5

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in writing his letter to Heidegger in search of conversation. As evident from Schürmann’s letter to his anonymous friend, letters are testimonies to ways of life: to write a letter, to be received for a visit, and to return in joy. As Schürmann develops in his analyses of Meister Eckhart’s German sermons, Gelassenheit is not to be thought as either enraptured abandonment to God or self-negating detachment from the world, but is understood instead as a form of living, as involving what Schürmann calls a “wandering identity.”6 “Wandering” is not without its constitutive ignorance, or errancy, as more clearly expressed in the French title of Schürmann’s work – la joie errante, poorly rendered, or better: one-sidedly rendered with the English “wandering joy.” This errancy of life is not conceptualized as either a straying or fall from an origin to which the trajectory of life, lost in the desert, must return, as a return to God. Rather, this straying of life testifies to another critical dimension in Schürmann’s reading of Meister Eckhart and one his principle statements: hoc enim proprie vivit quod est sine principio. As Schürmann develops in his textual exegesis of Meister Eckhart’s sermon “Woman, the Hour is Coming,” what Schürmann could only intimate in his 1966 letter to Heidegger, for which that letter is but an inkling, is now fully transformed, or blooms, as it were, like a flower in the desert, into what Schürmann codes as the “anarchism” of Meister Eckhart’s thinking.7 As Schürmann writes: “The term ‘anarchy’ has to be understood literally as the absence of a beginning, of an origin in the sense of a first cause. It must also be understood as negating the complement of arche, namely telos. I claim that the logic of releasement as it is lived in Zazen and by Eckhart leads to the destruction of origin and goal not only in the understanding of the world but even in human action.”8 A life thus beholden to straying-wandering, as well as a thinking thus betaken to such wayward living, would move through the world in living “without a why.” Released from the grips of any why, life thus lived would think from nowhere in a contemporary “anachorism” (to import Robert Bernasconi’s felicitous coinage), as strange to every place, out of place in every space, or, in other words, as atopos, but nonetheless as entirely present to the times, perhaps even more so than those who are in place.

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This constellation of thoughts in Schürmann’s interpretation of Meister Eckhart bespeaks of a constitutive docta ignorantia for thinking. Anarchy in thinking would thus amount to a thinking that avows its own ignorance as the releasing of thinking unto itself. Issuing from nowhere, thinking would no longer stand detached from the world, but would on the contrary become issued to the world in a movement of

 For an insightful treatment of Schürmann’s interpretation of Meister Eckhart, the contours of which I adopt here, see Robert Bernasconi, “Eckhart’s Anachorism,” in: Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, (1997): 81–90. 7  Reiner Schürmann, Wandering Joy. Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy, (Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Books, 2001), pp. 53–95. 8  Reiner Schürmann, “The Loss of the Origin in Soto Zen and in Meister Eckhart,” in: The Thomist, 42 (1978), p. 283. 6

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dislocation and dislocution. Whether directly professed or obliquely suggested, avowals of ignorance – ignorance of thinking, ignorance of acting – run through Heidegger’s writings, beginning with the seminal publication of Being and Time, which, in its chosen point of departure with the evocation of the “forgetting of the question of the sense of being,” opens its way of thinking by confronting the many senses in which this question is deemed an impossible and self-collapsing question – a question that collapses into itself in the very act of its own asking. This existential dimension of ignorance in Heidegger’s thinking provides the cue for what remains one of the more original confrontations with Heidegger’s thinking in the Anglo-American context of its reception, influence, and contestation: Schürmann’s Heidegger On Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy. Characteristically, although Schürmann’s academic career and charismatic presence as a teacher took shape in the United States, his philosophical works were originally written in French.9 Gadamer, in his sympathetic review, places Schürmann’s interpretation in the context of French literature, or, as he specifies, “French language writing on Heidegger,” while identifying Schürmann as a German, who “lives and teaches in America.”10 In citing Heidegger’s avowal of ignorance with regard to “what is to be done?” in the Spiegel interview, Schürmann declares that, “it is the nature of this ‘I do not know,’ of the ignorance admitted in these lines – feigned? sincere? or perhaps necessary? – which is of interest here [in his book].” As he further elaborates: “I am not treating this avowal of ignorance as a signifier that would refer to some state of consciousness or some event in Martin Heidegger’s life; one that would be the symptom, in other words, of some psychological, political, or moral signified. Whether this avowal of ignorance is pretended or sincere, whether it refers to political longings and leanings or not, is not my subject. But perhaps this avowal is not accidental.”11 This methodological opening is decisive for the approach to and through Heidegger’s thinking and can be likened to initiating a phenomenological suspension and reduction, but not in its classical form in Husserl, as the reduction of world-manifestation to consciousness, or as the reduction of experiencing consciousness to world-manifestation in Merleau-Ponty. Schürmann deploys instead a deconstructive phenomenological suspension and reduction of both world (Heidegger’s political context, his cultural milieu) and consciousness (his psychological disposition, his biography) to texts, or better, to the texture of his thinking, its composed logos. Heidegger’s varied statements of ignorance, errancy, and searching are not only constitutive for his own thinking. In his own engagement with the history of  For a thoughtful recollection of Schürmann as a teacher, see Christopher Long, “Care of Death: On the Teaching of Reiner Schürmann,” DOI: 10.5840/philtoday201713141 Online First: January 31, 2017 (accessed September 18, 2018). 10  Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Review of Heidegger on Being and Acting,” in: Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, (1988): 155–158. 11  Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 2. 9

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metaphysics, Heidegger equally underlines ignorance as the critical dimension of any thinking worthy of engagement, response, and interpretation. Much as with those elected figures in Heidegger’s telling of the history of metaphysics that mark different stages of forgetting and entrenchment, Heidegger’s own thinking is traversed by an “unthought” and “unsaid,” albeit of a different kind, given that Heidegger’s thinks the closure of metaphysical thinking on the verge of a passage to a new style of what it means to think. In both cases, whether the unthought within the forgetting of being and the unthought within that remembrance of forgetting passing into another beginning, what remains unthought is not what a thinker failed to say, but could, or should, have said, awaiting the correction and progress of posterity. The unthought, as a constitutive ignorance, is that which thinking cannot itself think as the condition for its own thinking. As Heidegger remarks in his Kantbuch: “Do not our own efforts, if we dare compare them with those of our predecessors, ultimately evidence a hidden avoidance of something which we – certainly not by accident – no longer see?” As signposts along the wayward path of Heidegger’s thinking, these avowals of ignorance provide both clues and cues for Schürmann’s Heidegger interpretation. Rather than consider this ignorance as reflecting a certain deep psychology, a certain convert politics, or a certain manifest culture of Heidegger “the man,” or cast-­ off this ignorance as either accidental or incidental, or at worst, as feigned, Schürmann enters Heidegger’s thinking from within this ignorance, as if such constitutive ignorance functioned in equal measure as a provocation away from Heidegger as well as an invitation into Heidegger, and thus, both instances taken at once, as necessarily calling us through Heidegger. As Schürmann proposes: “What if the avowal of ignorance were integral to the body of writings which circulate, operate, put people to flight, or make them think – that is, which function – under the name of ‘Heidegger’?” This constitutive ignorance opens a space of reception under the name of Heidegger as a space of answering and responding, held open between the two extremes of “putting people to flight” and “making them think.” Such a constitutive dimension of ignorance in thinking is, moreover, situated historically at moments of rupture and transition in the history of metaphysics. This prevailing situation of thinking’s ignorance at decisive moments of historical transition would mean that although decisive thinkers in the history of metaphysics are traversed by a constitutive ignorance, the texture of ignorance is not uniform. Distinctive is not only that ignorance must necessarily prevail, not as an accident that externally befalls thinking, but as one its constitutive principles, but that each decisive transition in the history of metaphysics is characterized by a distinctive form of constitutive ignorance. Heidegger’s own thinking proves here not exceptional, but what does grant it an exceptional status, as both confirming this rule of thinking and its singular exception, is the situation of Heidegger’s thinking at the closure of metaphysics. What is exceptional, in other words, is the situation of Heidegger’s thinking as both “inside” and “outside” metaphysics, as both witness to and enacting of the closure of metaphysics. Ignorance is necessarily woven into the texture of thinking, giving thinking its fineness of grain; ignorance is that singular aperture within the work of thinking that

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can only be opened by someone else, and yet from nowhere else but in the texture of thinking itself. In taking this constitutive ignorance as integral to the principle of the work of thinking’s textual composition, the interpreter does not make any claim to transform this ignorance into non-ignorance, as either knowledge or action. The interpreter does not stand outside in judgment and condescension; nor does the interpreter become fully subservient to and, in this sense, enter wholly inside, the text. In identifying ignorance as an “internal law for a text,” Schürmann characterizes his own manner of reading Heidegger as a form of inscription, but more accurately stated, as self-inscription. To read Heidegger and heed this internal law of its address is to “inscribe” oneself into the textual fabric signed under the name of Heidegger. This inscription deprives itself of the prestige and conceit of knowledge standing above the text as well as action guided by the text. There is no hors du texte, point de salut. This Gelassenheit of inscription (neither descriptive nor prescriptive) affords itself, however, a certain violence, and hence distance, against the text to the extent that it releases possibilities within Heidegger’s text in ways that Heidegger himself, psychologically, politically, culturally, would resist, or at least, wished not to have been led to. Through this praxis of self-inscription, Schürmann does not deploy a hermeneutics of either suspicion or charity, but calls his way of working through Heidegger’s thinking a deconstruction.12 Most significantly, as he remarks, “‘Heidegger,’ then, will take the place here of a certain discursive regularity. It will not be the proper name, which refers to a man from Messkirch, deceased in 1976. We might say ‘with Heidegger,’ but in all strictness we must say ‘in Heidegger’.”13

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Once the proper name of Heidegger has been suspended, what remains of what is most strikingly and controversially associated with, or read along with, this proper name? What does such a suspension of the proper name and what properly belongs to the life thus named elide? Once the ignorance of thinking is no longer considered the symptom of some psychological, political, or moral signified, but the manifestation of thinking signifying and signing for itself, what becomes of the psychological, the political, or the moral? How might this elision of Heidegger in the name of Heidegger allow for the inscription of another life and hence of another sense and direction – a new vitality – in the name of Heidegger? Given this deconstructive suspension of the psychologically, politically, and morally signified in the name of Heidegger, there is something recklessly provocative in Schürmann’s apparent circumvention, made today even more glaring in the dark light of the Black Notebooks, of the political dimension of Heidegger’s 1976  For an instructive comparison of deconstruction in Schürmann and Derrida, see Sergio VillalobosRuminott, “Anarchy as the Closure of Metaphysics: Historicity and Deconstruction in the Work of Reiner Schürmann,” Politica Comun, Volume 11 (2017): https://doi.org/10.3998/ pc.12322227.0011.004 (accessed September 18, 2018). 13  Heidegger, p. 3. 12

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Spiegel interview, which Schürmann passes over in silence, while calling attention to its avowal of ignorance with regard to the question of what in our age is to be done. The gnawing suspicion here is that Heidegger’s avowal of ignorance regarding “what is to be done?”, aside from another statement of his refusal to issue an ethics from his thinking, veils a sinister political implication and legacy, or serves to screen a certain remembrance of Heidegger’s own “compromising declarations in favor of Nazism,” as Schürmann elsewhere recognizes. Schürmann’s own manner of reading the unfolding of Heidegger’s thinking localizes these unseemly declarations to an intermediate stage in Heidegger’s thinking in which Heidegger remained unable to fully recognize the essence of modernity as technology. Standing in opposition to “global technology,” which Heidegger thinks under the rubric of “inauthenticity” from Being and Time, Heidegger’s 1935 praise of the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism looks to redemptive authenticity against the inauthenticity of the former. As Schürmann argues, however, in the 1976 Spiegel interview, Heidegger now identifies “global imperialism of technologically organized man” with Russia and America, against which he opposes, not an enterprise of authenticity, whether political, cultural, or ethical, but the manifold thinking of presence that characterizes his later thinking. From this later perspective, Heidegger’s increased clarity regarding technology functions as a tacit disavowal of his earlier praise of National Socialism as a world-historical force in opposition to technology. Heidegger’s political statements, in their ignorance with regard to his own later thinking, would thus appear in their genuine function as “trailmarks, Wege, nicht Werke,” as waywardness on the way of ways. It will undoubtedly strike many that such a handling of Heidegger’s errancy in political (and historical) judgment during the 1930s might prove a damning indictment of Schürmann’s own way of reading Heidegger in exposing a certain naïveté or attitude of exculpation on his part. As Vittorio Hösle justly voices: “I even cannot help feeling angry about Schürmann’s explanation of Heidegger’s political lapse. According to him, it was mainly due to his lacking an elaborated philosophy of technology in 1933. Although this answer would have met with Heidegger’s approval, it is intolerable.”14 However we might critically assess Schürmann’s stance towards Heidegger’s troubling declarations (as lucidly dissected in Hösle’s discussion), there is perhaps another strategy at work in Schürmann’s exploitation of ignorance in Heidegger’s discursive fabric and dislocation of Heidegger’s thinking from the hold of its proper name “Heidegger” with its signified consequences. This other strategy at work inverts the principle assumption about how to think errancy in thinking as normally addressed, for example, in Hösle’s sympathetic answer to “why could as noble and intelligent a person as Reiner Schürmann become so deeply attracted to the late Heidegger” and thus so blind to his all too glaring political lapse? Hösle turns to Schürmann’s biography in search of a clarifying “Urerlebnis,” that “originary experience which determinates as the whole style of

 Vittorio Hösle, “The Intellectual Background of Reiner Schürmann’s Heidegger Interpretation,” in: Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, (1997): 263–285; p. 275. 14

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thinking or a person,” as that topos of beginning of any serious philosophical life.”15 On this approach, Schürmann’s errancy in judgment and interpretation functions as a symptom for a psychological signified, namely, his biography, into which his thinking becomes re-inscribed through its biographical and historical contextualization. We must have recourse to a “psychological explanation,” as Hösle suggests, in answer to the question of “what is one to think?” about this errancy, and hence, ultimately, of what one is to do with Schürmann’s Heidegger. Yet, such an approach, although suggestive in seeking an explicit relation between the existential condition of Schürmann’s and his thinking, contravenes (and perhaps, deliberately so) in how its construal of relation between life and thought the internal law of Schürmann’s style of reading Heidegger, and hence, presumably, the internal law of any reading of action and thinking. As Schürmann sets down as a methodological maxim: “I am not treating this avowal of ignorance as a signifier that would refer to some state of consciousness or some event in Martin Heidegger’s life; one that would be the symptom, in other words, of some psychological, political, or moral signified. Whether this avowal of ignorance is pretended or sincere, whether it refers to political longings and leanings or not, is not my subject. But perhaps this avowal is not accidental.”16 In the same vein, we should remain cautious about treating Schürmann’s lapses as signifiers that refer to some original experience or event in Reiner Schürmann’s life, or at least, not reduce the thinking to a life outside of it. Or rather than reduce thinking to a life outside, we must discover the traces of that life, displaced and atopos, inside a thinking it claims in making its own. When Schürmann characterizes the name “Heidegger” as signing, as sign and signature, a “certain discursive regularity,” and speaks of an interpreter as “inscribing” himself into this discursive fabric, we should not think that Schürmann is here counter-signing Heidegger’s signature with his own and prone to straying irremediably into the traps of Heidegger’s own lapses. On the contrary, this act of inscription can be read inversely as Schürmann counter-signing his own wandering/erring identity into Heidegger’s signature, slipping, by sleight of hand, his own singular life, intellectually speaking, into this discursive regularity under the name of “Heidegger.” In such a displacement, Heidegger “the man” becomes in turn displaced from Heidegger’s thinking, or better, the thinking in Heidegger. In speaking in Heidegger, and not with Heidegger, Schürmann speaks not in the name of Heidegger, but from under the name of Heidegger, thus allowing Heidegger to speak other than Heidegger, or, as Schürmann himself announces, with consequences that might very well reach beyond (and turn against, yet always from within) Heidegger in leading Heidegger to where “Heidegger” never wanted, or could, venture. Evidence for this counter-signature, as inscribing an-other life, an-other politics, and an-other ethics, into the place signed Heidegger in the suspension of the psychological, the political, and the moral signified by the name Heidegger, can be

 Ibid., p. 176.  Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 2. 15 16

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gleaned by sub-planting Schürmann’s auto-biography in Origins under his Heidegger book, as if the interpretation of Heidegger became inscribed back into his life as textually composed in Origins. In fact, what is remarkable about Schürmann’s Origins is not only, as Hösle proposes, that the beginning of Schürmann’s philosophical life is “linked to the date and place of his birth,” but more specifically that this date and place of birth is exceptionally experienced by Schürmann as atopos. Origins recounts a life in perpetual flight and dislocation from place to place (Germany, Israel, Greece, the United States), from one social milieu to another social milieu. Even Schürmann’s final place of rest, the United States, did not provide an oikeios topos (contrary to Hösle’s view), let alone the institution of philosophy; aside from a grimly comical portrait of job interviews at the APA, Schürmann treats his readers with a revealingly satirical image of professional philosophy with the description of philosophers departing from the APA convention hotel just as the next convention, a dog show, is about to begin: “Each turn of the revolving door lets out a philosopher and lets in a dog. The dean of Harvard pushes the door for a poodle dolled up in pink. The medievalist from Texas performs a half circle with a white collie. Like waltzing couples, they appear and disappear in the four-windowed carousel.”17 A dislocated existence in both the existential time of living as well as in the historical space of living, haunts Schürmann’s life as an inherited guilt for the horrors of Nazi Germany, into which he is born and made complicit under the sign of being a German. “Too late to see” the war and hence bear directly its responsibility and yet “too early to forget” the war and not stand accused for it, Schürmann recounts an especially horrific story of being led in his youth to an underground passage at the factory where his father worked by a red-haired worker, a girl, who was evidently the object of his youthful desire. It is his birthday. But rather than being led on any erotic adventure, she leads him to the decomposing bodies of two forced laborers during the war, who had once tried to escape. As Schürmann recalls, “it was there that something became torn inside me.” Ever since, he speaks of remaining “incapable of feeling accepted. Running away. I run away. I spend my time eclipsing myself.” As he further recounts: “The uprooted know what exclusion is. But they have as their privilege, freedom. Someone who is excluded no longer lives under the law. School, Anna, the war, implanted in me a taste for the one origin, the unique, beyond all origins.” Living a wandering / errant life “without any real attachments,” Schürmann’s unsentimental education followed an unmarked path of “no longer asking why” while learning to “train myself to live without a why.”18 Perpetually finding itself in-between a plurality of worlds, life becomes lived at the violent intersections of worlds, where the challenging of living “without a why,” at the intersection of worlds, depends on finding a way of releasement in the gleam of a creative interstice. The anachorism and anarchy of thinking is first lived. Such a life produces its own principle of anarchy by virtue of its repetition; anarchy

17 18

 Reiner Schürmann, Origins, trans. E. Preston (Berlin: Diaphanes Press, 2016), p. 241.  Ibid., p. 25.

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becomes a matter of principle in perpetual flight from itself: from one place to the next, from one “dissolution, followed by consent” to the next. This wandering identity, as the plot of Schürmann’s autobiography, which, as he notes, he has undertaken to write as a birthday gift to himself, makes Schürmann a contemporary of his times, even if not with his times. Having trained himself to live without a why, he has also learned how to see. As he notes in the final words of his book: “My eyes are burning. I can see only the things that are present.”19 In the name of Heidegger, Schürmann counter-signs the wandering / errant identity of his own singular existence and its incarnate wisdom, namely, the anarchic praxis of living without a why. It is the performative priority of the practical modification of existence over philosophical analysis. This self-inscription into Heidegger’s discursive space effects a displacement of Heidegger “the man,” and hence, “the politics” (without thereby mitigating the cogency of Hösle’s just protest against Schürmann’s handling of Heidegger’s political lapse) while at the same time inscribing into Heidgger’s thinking a possibility of thinking that draws its force of conviction and orientation from a life other than Heidegger’s, a singular life that nonetheless functions as its preparation, albeit, and perhaps, necessarily, from elsewhere. It as if Heidegger’s refusal of any acceptance of guilt or implication in the Nazi catastrophe became amplified in Schürmann’s guilt for what he did not and could not have been party to, with neither apology nor atonement. What is lived in Schürmann’s life becomes thought in Heidegger, but only on the condition that Heidegger’s thinking is counter-signed. The requirement for thinking that Heidegger’s own life could not fully provide is released through its displacement onto another life, yet in turn, this other life must inscribe itself into this thinking in order to render transparent its own action as the condition for this thinking. A mode of thinking is made dependent on a mode of living. This, according to Schürmann, represents the seminal discovery of Heidegger’s thinking, which places him in the exceptional company of Plotinus and Meister Eckhart.20 The reckless daring of Schürmann’s anarchic praxis of reading is to have inserted the singular experience his own life into Heidegger’s thinking as a strategy to open Heidegger’s thinking beyond Heidegger, and thus, to a future not beholden to Heidegger “the man” and his origin, as principle or prince. The rhetorical verve is equally to convince his readers that such a potential emerges from Heideggerian thinking itself, but since the origin of this reading Heidegger is elsewhere than in Heidegger, to wit, in the origins of Schürmann’s own life, Schürmann could only convincingly argue for his reading by showing that what is original – the anarchy principle – in Heidegger’s thinking is discovered only at the end, in the final stage of this thinking. ∗



19 20

 Ibid., p. 270.  Heidegger, p. 237.



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Rather than organize his interpretation of Heidegger around the question of being and the history of metaphysics, Schürmann is guided by the relationship between theory and action, between the question “what is it to think?” and “what is to be done?” This established theme in philosophy – the relationship between theoria and praxis – is thought under Heidegger’s significant claim that metaphysical thinking produces its own closure; integral to this metaphysical closure is the dismantling of an entrenched relationship between thinking and action. Heidegger’s dislocation of the question “what it is to think” from established images of thinking, gathered under the general sign of “philosophy,” throws open the relation between thinking and action with its rejection of any foundational privilege or status to thinking. “Thinking” no longer signifies the project or dream of establishing foundations for forms of knowledge or for the possibility of knowledge as such. In this manner, Heidegger undermines the metaphysical unity of thinking and action. Once thinking no longer involves the securing of foundations (theoretical foundation, first principles, axioms, common sense, etc.), then action no longer means acting according to, or in conformity with, or as directed by knowledge; acting loses its foundation in knowing and knowing, likewise, loses its prestige and privilege of directing and grounding action. This Heideggerian transformation of the relation between thinking and acting does not surrender on the question of their unity, but makes of this question a vital question once more. As Schürmann argues, metaphysical closure is not a definitive condition or fixed state, from which, once achieved, we can safely and knowingly move forward or beyond. Closure is never final, never fully closed. We should neither celebrate nor regret the metaphysical obsolescence of theory and practice in their recognizable relationships, but embrace instead the deconstructive imperative of perpetually dismantling any pretense to founding principles, especially within the historical epoch of metaphysical closure and withering of its principles, where the temptation to re-affirm principles in the historical void of their traction resurges ever so virulently. As Schürmann insightfully writes: “When one considers the sufferings that men have inflicted and inflict on one another in the name of the epochal principles [of metaphysics], there can be no doubt that philosophy – or “thinking” – is no futile enterprise: a phenomenology that deconstructs the epochs ‘changes the world’ because it reveals the withering away of these principles.”21 In this liminal transition of metaphysical closure, a new potentiality emerges to consider thinking and action as “anarchic,” as viable and vital in the absence of any foundation, arche, or principle. Deconstruction, as understood by Schürmann, releases thinking and action into a creative void in depriving any discourse on thinking or action of any principles or privilege; ignorance, in other words, becomes constitutive of the vital emancipation of thinking and action from conceit. Released from metaphysical patterns of thinking and the presumed authority of thinking in its foundational aspiration over action, the question “what is to be done?” does not give way to the frictionless void of “anything goes” or an unrelenting relativism, but becomes

21

 Heidegger, p. 11.

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instead liberated to a novel sense of possibility and significance, even if, in keeping to the stricture of his own anarchic principle, Schürmann does not propose or envision any prescriptions or even determinate directions for what such a new openness towards action (and hence: ethics and politics) might bring. As Schürmann remarks, once action becomes embraced without any founding principles, asking the question “what is to be done?” “is to search in the vacuum of the place deserted by the successive representations of an unshakable ground.” Action thus considered becomes “an-archic” once thinking is no longer thought to entail the provision of legitimation or foundation for action. This guiding thought in Schürmann’s interpretation of Heidegger crystallizes in what he paradoxical calls the “anarchy principle” (which the original French title exclaimed directly). This at first glance self-contradiction brings to expression the liminal place, or nowhere, for this anarchic release of action from thinking and of thinking from metaphysical thought. In bringing together these contradictory terms  – anarchy as absence of principle and principle as absence of anarchy – Schürmann does not mean to suggest any dialectical resolution between “anarchy” and “principles,” nor, as falsely suggested in the English sub-title of his work (“From Principles to Anarchy”), a definitive passage from an epoch ruled by principles to a post-historical age absent of principles. Under the name of Heidegger, anarchy does not become a new principle; anarchy becomes a principled deconstruction of any return of principles and the hegemonic totalization based on such principles. In this sense, the expression “anarchy principle” is meant to serve as a perpetual sign of vigilance that thinking and action, once released from hegemonic pull of principles, always remains both within and beyond the closure of metaphysics. In this manner, Schürmann’s notion of anarchy should not be conflated with its various historical and political meanings, for example, in the nineteenth-century tradition of Proudhon and Bakunin. These thinkers sought to displace traditional principles (divine right, etc.) with their own elected functioning principles. Schürmann proposes instead to conceive of anarchy as a void or blank space – as desert and ignorance – that deprives any claim on the space of action by the authority of founding principles or teleological normativity. The anarchic logos of thinking is the “pulverized poem” and “archipelagic speech” of René Char, or, to wit, the archipelagic composition of Heidegger on Being and Acting and, beyond, the archipelagic constellation of Schürmann’s writings published during his lifetime: Origins, Wandering Joy, Heidegger on Being and Acting, Broken Hegemonies.22

∗



Schürmann inscribes himself, his pulverized speaking, into the textual body of “Heidegger” through the opening of ignorance in Heidegger’s thought. Through this counter-signing of Heidegger’s signature, Schürmann can be said to provide an exemplification of the “a priori of practice” for thinking as well as illustrate the  For a bibliography of Schürmann’s writings, published and unpublished, https://library.newschool.edu/archives/findingaids/NS000601.html#ref23 22

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unity between the tragic condition of existence and categories of thinking. If ignorance represents the opening into Heidegger’s thinking that promises a space of dislocation such that the origins of Schürmann’s own way of living, his wandering identity, can come to speech in the name of Heidgger, this operation of counter-­ signature requires an equally idiosyncratic and yet no less illuminating, that is, productive manner of reading Heidegger. Schürmann in this vein proposes to read Heidegger backwards. This approach to Heidegger’s thinking singles-out Schürmann’s interpretation from conventional ways of engaging Heidegger, which, in the Anglo-American context, can be roughly divided into two dominant approaches: William Richardson’s division of Heidegger’s thinking into “Heidegger I” and “Heidegger II” and the genealogical approach that tracks the development of Heidegger’s thinking, always looking back to his earliest writings while reaching forward to his twists and turns of his later works, through the seminal and unfinished enterprise of Being and Time. Schürmann rejects both approaches; instead of dividing Heidegger’s thinking into two extended stages marked by a dramatic turning or consider Heidegger’s thinking as shaped by a development measured by its increasing distance from the 1920s and Being and Time, Schürmann argues that Heidegger’s writings pass through three structural stages. Each stage recuperates the preceding stage such that, in one sense, the origin for Heidgger’s thinking is not at the beginning, but at the end. By the same token, these stages are not animated by a hidden telos, for even as Heidegger’s thinking finds itself at the end, it only comes to speak its truth through the counter-signature of another life, speaking from another place. In the 1969 “Le Thor Seminar,” Heidegger distinguishes three stages in the development of his thinking. In Being and Time, as Schürmann expounds in his own reading, Heidegger’s thinking was gathered around the question of the sense of being. According to its strategy of renewing and retrieving the question of being, the sense of being would become delineated across the horizon of Dasein’s temporality and the ontological structures of its being-in-the-world, or care. Heidegger still remains beholden, however, to two crucial patterns of metaphysical thinking: the assumption that subjectivity, thought under the name of Dasein, discloses the many senses of being and truth; the assumption that the sense of being becomes illuminated against the manifold regions of beings, which are circumscribed and mapped within Dasein’s disclosure of the world: things, other Daseins, language, Dasein itself, etc. Heidegger’s thinking undergoes a self-critical and self-transforming turning in the years after Being and Time and its abandonment of any metaphysics of Dasein. Heidegger displaces the focal point of the question of being away from the sense of being as disclosed along the horizon of Dasein to the truth of being as disclosed historically through the manifold of successive epochs of metaphysical thinking. This turning away from the direction of thinking in Being and Time also entails a turning away from the individual subject to collective inter-subjectivity. Within this framing of Seyngeschichtliches Denken during the 1930s, Heidegger discovers another order of temporality, namely, the temporal spans of metaphysical epochs (Greek, Latin, Modern, the Technological), each of which is structured by a founding principle; such principles are hegemonic in scope and force, since within

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each epoch, or span, in the history of being, principles reduce and shape the singularity of what-is to patterns of meaning, forms of knowledge, and the pros-hen structure of attribution. Such founding principles are, from within a given historical epoch, unquestionable and unassailable, and yet it remains the destiny of every epoch within the history of metaphysics to experience a withering away and dissolution of its founding principles. Truth is here an event that occurs to human beings. On Heidegger’s thinking, the human dwells in the truth of being. Truth is not a proposition or theory, which human subjects affirm or reject, but a space and span of presencing, as defined by an historical epoch governed by a principled economy of presencing. In the third stage of Heidegger’s thinking, what Heidegger himself refers to as the “topology of being,” the manifold of beings breaks from any notion of region (being in the world or historical epochs) as well as from the over-arching question of “being” as such. Being becomes thought in its plurality as manifolds of “coming to presence” and “an event of multiple origination.” As Schürmann argues, “only with this last form of multiplicity does the thrust of the problematic appear which has moved Heidegger throughout the trajectory of his polymorphic writings with their shifting vocabularies: to grasp presencing as a force of plurification and dissolution.” In this form, Heidegger’s thinking can arguably have been said to break with its obsession with the question of being in developing a vocabulary of thinking the multiple presencings and absencings of beings, none which is reducible to an arche, nor dominated by a meta-narrative of metaphysical epochs, nor guided by an historical telos. This plurality of ways of being does not allow for the return of the subject or any form of humanism, and only ambiguously promises a response to the present age of technology which, as Schürmann notes, “is still principle in stature but anarchic in germ.”23 Most significantly, “a political a priori determines thinking. Anarchic praxis restores the thing beneath the object, presencing beneath principles, and truth as freedom beneath truth as conformation” – but what forms such politics, an aesthetics, and an ethics might take within this newly opened vista of anarchic thinking remains woefully under-developed in Schürmann’s book. What is clear, however, is that after Heidegger, thinking cannot be made dependent on any form action that is either moral (grounded in duty, the Ought, norms, etc.) or existential self-empowerment (my being-towards-death, will to power, etc.). The closure of metaphysical thinking signals, on the one hand, the impossibility of stabilizing, or norming, through some appeal to epochal principles and their adjustment through institutionalized philosophical discourse, of the relation between thinking and action, and hence, of any politics or ethics grounded on hegemonic principles. The conditioning a priori of practice is not an action, but a way of living guided by the imperative of releasement in tune with the withering of principles. Such a life belongs to this withering while releasing itself from the hold of principles. In words frequently cited in Schürmann’s writings, and prominently present in his reading of Heidegger, “to understand one has to live equal to truth.” To understand one has to

23

 Heidegger, p. 241.

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not just live, but live equal to the truth spoken to you. It was only through a self-­ inscription into Heidegger that one can think the anarchy in the name of Heidegger, counter-signed by another name in search of its own proper origin. As Schürmann remarks: “To understand the four-fold’s play without why, one must live without why. To understand releasement, one must be released.”24 Heidegger could not equal his own truth, the event of his own truth; it required another life, a singular life, living without a why through the metaphysical closure of the twentieth-century, from which, however, there is no escape or emancipation, even, in this age of withering, there is still the precious possibility of the joyous wandering of thinking and living. As Schürmann notes in Origins: “It is true that I still dream about SS men posted in front of a building. Then they fire. Machine guns and grenades. But I no longer ask why. I train myself to live without a why.”25

24 25

 Heidegger, p. 236.  Origins, p. 25.

Part II

Between the Pragmata and the Phainomena: Phenomenological, Metaphysical, and Pragmatist Readings

Heidegger’s Disavowal of Metaphysics Taylor Carman

There has been extensive scholarly debate surrounding Heidegger’s self-described “turn” (Kehre) from the phenomenology of Being and Time (1927) to his later work, and broad disagreement about exactly what the turn was and when it occurred. On some accounts, it had already taken place by 1930, at which point Heidegger no longer believed that fundamental ontology opened the way to a general consideration of the meaning of being as such. According to Heidegger himself, by contrast, the turn was not a change in his own philosophical views at all, but an impersonal event of some larger significance in the history of thought. Accounts of the shift from the “early” to the “later” Heidegger have as a result never fully managed to disentangle two distinct issues: his abandonment of the project announced and commenced in Being and Time on the one hand, and the his critique of metaphysics on the other. Whereas Heidegger says very little explicitly about his abandonment of the project of fundamental ontology, probably around 1930, his disavowal of metaphysics in the late ’30s is explicit and well documented. Prior to 1936, Heidegger used the word freely with no pejorative or even critical connotation. The first sentence of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), for example, credits Kant with “placing the problem of metaphysics before us as a fundamental ontology,” which he in turn defines as “the metaphysics of human existence, required for metaphysics to be made possible.”1 Similarly, his famous 1929 inaugural lecture “What Is  Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed., R. Taft, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 1. 1

T. Carman (*) Philosophy, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_6

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Metaphysics?” addresses that question not by examining and discussing metaphysics at arm’s length, as it were, but by “tak[ing] up a particular metaphysical question,” thereby “let[ting] ourselves be transposed directly into metaphysics.”2 Heidegger’s lectures of 1929–1930 are entitled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, metaphysics being, he explains at the outset, “the central discipline in the whole of philosophy.”3 As late as 1935, in the lecture course later published as Introduction to Metaphysics, far from excluding the Presocratics at one end of the tradition and himself at the other, he says again, “Metaphysics is the name of the definitive center and core of all philosophy.”4 By 1936, however, he began using the word very differently, to refer not to the entire history of Western philosophy, but to a dominant tradition within that history, beginning with Plato and ending with Nietzsche. Metaphysics, he would now say, does not just happen to fail to arrive at the question of being, but systematically suppresses it, concealing it and rendering it unaskable, indeed virtually incomprehensible. Why the change? Heidegger’s disavowal of the word “metaphysics” was at least in part a rhetorical response to Rudolf Carnap’s 1931 essay, “Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” which ridiculed the “question of being” (Seinsfrage) as a prime example of nonsense in violation of the rules of logical syntax. Heidegger insisted, on the contrary, that Vienna Circle positivists like Carnap were the real metaphysicians, for it was they who had reduced the question of being to mere gibberish by arbitrarily restricting meaning to the formal constraints of logic and mathematics on the one hand, and to the material constraints of empirical inquiry on the other. In redefining the term “metaphysics” in this way, Heidegger was also beginning to distance himself from Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s doctrines of will to power and eternal recurrence, in effect retreating from the charged blend of political and philosophical rhetoric with which he had been supporting the Nazi regime, not only during his year as rector of Freiburg University in 1933–1934, but for several years thereafter (just how long is not entirely clear). What, then, did Heidegger think metaphysics was? A first, crude approximation is to say that metaphysics was, for him, knowledge or cognition of entities (das Seiende) as a whole, as opposed to being (Sein). But that is not quite right, for two reasons. First, for Heidegger until 1936, metaphysics, precisely by being knowledge of entities as a whole, is thereby – implicitly or explicitly, directly or indirectly – knowledge of entities as such, as entities, which is to say, entities in their being. Entities as a whole, after all, are (implicitly) entities and only entities – that is, entities, and nothing else. An understanding of the totality of entities thus presupposes an understanding of being. Absent an understanding of being, there can be no  “What Is Metaphysics?” D. F. Krell, trans. Pathmarks, W. McNeill, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 82. 3  The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, W. McNeill and N. Walker, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1. 4  Introduction to Metaphysics, 2nd ed., G. Fried and R. Polt, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 19 [13] (translation modified). 2

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understanding of entities, let alone entities “as such and as a whole.” In raising the question of being explicitly, then, Heidegger did not take himself to be introducing an altogether new theme into a philosophical tradition lacking it entirely. Instead, he saw himself as uncovering a question that lay dormant in the tradition, reminding it, as it were, of the question that had defined it all along, since its inception, but that it had forgotten, at least since Plato. As we have seen, as late as 1935 Heidegger was presenting the question of being as belonging to Western philosophy, indeed as the culmination and fulfillment of that tradition, so he was perfectly happy to call his own thinking, and likewise that of the Presocratics, “metaphysics.” The second reason it’s not correct to say simply that metaphysics is, for Heidegger, knowledge of entities to the exclusion of being is that after 1936 Heidegger himself began to doubt, as he had not done previously, the intelligibility of the very idea of a knowledge or cognition of entities as a whole. By the late 1930s, that is, metaphysics had become, for Heidegger, a name referring not to knowledge of the totality of entities as such, but to the misconceived, forlorn aspiration to such knowledge. There is, he came to believe, something incoherent in the very notion of a knowledge of entities as a whole, so that metaphysics according to his earlier conception of it must be strictly speaking impossible. Of course, metaphysics, now understood as the misbegotten effort to know the totality of entities as such, is still possible  – just as it’s possible to try to jump over your shadow. According this new conception, then, metaphysics is not a kind of knowledge, but a style of thinking, a way of understanding the totality of entities as conforming or corresponding to a kind of cognition or attitude – for Plato, intuitive apprehension of forms; for Descartes, rational certainty; for Nietzsche, perspectival will to power – that grasps those entities fully, adequately, as such and as a whole. Specifying the precise difference between Heidegger’s views before and after 1936, however, is not easy. For one thing, it is not obvious that in the 1920s and early ‘30s he accepted as possible what I believe he came to reject as incoherent in the late ‘30s and thereafter. Before 1936, however, I believe he accepted two traditional metaphysical assumptions: first, that the very idea of a totality of entities as such is a coherent or intelligible idea; second, that there actually is such a totality, at least of “occurrent” (vorhanden) objects, as opposed to human beings and “ready-­ to-­hand” (zuhanden) cultural artifacts, whose being is constituted by our understanding of them.5 The notion of a sum total of occurrent entities seems straightforward enough, moreover it seems safe to say that such a – or rather the – totality of entities really does exist. Heidegger also seems to have supposed that human understanding can (and does) grasp such a totality – not by knowing everything about it, but just by comprehending it in some basic kind of perception or cognition. We have an understanding  – indeed an affective apprehension  – of  Consider, by contrast, Markus Gabriel, who denies the coherence of the very idea of a totality of entities, hence its existence. See his Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and Why the World Does Not Exist, G.  S. Moss, trans. (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). For a critical review of Fields of Sense, see my “Gabriel’s Metaphysics of Sense,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy, vol. 23 (2016): 53–9. 5

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entities as such and as a whole simply by grasping the (perhaps vague) concept everything. Heidegger, that is, held not only that there is a totality of occurrent entities, but that we can (and do) know something about them, for example that, unlike Kantian things in themselves, they have determinate causal structure in space and time. That last claim is what I have elsewhere called Heidegger’s ontic realism.6 Ontic realism is more robust than the “empirical realism” of the Critique of Pure Reason, which Kant offers as a corollary to his transcendental idealism, but it is not as ambitious as other forms of metaphysical realism, for it concerns only the reality of occurrent entities, not the truth of actual or possible descriptions or theories of them. Heidegger never supposed, that is, that there could be, even in principle (even, so to speak, in the mind of God) a complete knowledge of everything. Unlike Kantian things in themselves, the ontic reality about which Heidegger was a realist is not an object corresponding to omniscience, a notion Heidegger (rightly) rejected as incoherent. Put slightly more technically, Heidegger never believed in the existence of what are sometimes called facts (or propositions), such that the totality of entities must include a subtotality of facts (or propositions) that might then be the object (or content) of a complete knowledge of everything. So, even if Heidegger later became even more hostile to the notion of a complete knowledge or description of the totality of entities (even merely qua occurrent), that by itself does not constitute a sharp break from his earlier view. What Heidegger came to regard as incoherent, I believe, was rather the very idea of a cognition of entities as such as a whole, that is, as entities. For such a knowledge would have to include a knowledge of knowledge as itself standing in relation to that totality, as understanding it as such, and consequently as involving – indeed, resting on – a prior, more fundamental understanding of being. A genuine knowledge of entities as such and as a whole, that is, must necessarily include in itself a further understanding of what it means for something to be. That was precisely what Heidegger claimed for his own philosophical project in Being and Time and immediately thereafter – namely, a continuation and radicalization of metaphysics, proceeding from what he called “traditional ontology” toward his own fundamental ontology, which would spell out the conditions of the intelligibility of our understanding of entities as a whole, culminating in a fully general account of the meaning of being. Like the logical positivists, Heidegger came to believe that modern science had superseded and absorbed metaphysics into itself, precisely by attaining an objective knowledge of nature in its pure occurrentness – but, crucially, without also grasping the being of occurrent nature, the reality of the real, as such. Thus in his 1964 lecture “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Heidegger notes the de facto “development (Ausfaltung) of philosophy into the independent sciences,” and even the “dissolution (Auflösung) of philosophy into the technologized sciences.” What the sciences cannot do is grasp being – hence Heidegger’s

6  See my Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in “Being and Time” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Chapter 4.

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famously provocative, if potentially misleading, quip that “The sciences don’t think.”7 The change in Heidegger’s conception of metaphysics was both terminological and substantive. Terminologically, the word “metaphysics” took on a different meaning in his vocabulary before and after (roughly) 1936. Before then, it appeared in the titles of many of his lectures and books, and it just meant philosophy. As he says in Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935, “Metaphysics is the name of the definitive center and core of all philosophy” (EM 13). Afterwards, it referred just to that segment of the tradition that began with Plato and ended with Nietzsche, excluding the Presocratics at the beginning and Heidegger himself at the end. Substantively, Heidegger came to see his own project as more radically discontinuous with the philosophical tradition. Specifically, he drew a sharper distinction between his own thinking and metaphysics in the second, narrower sense of the word. Whereas earlier he had understood Western philosophy as a whole, including the Presocratics, as having failed to make the question of being explicit and thematic, he came to regard the peculiar style of thinking that began with Plato and ended with Nietzsche as systematically incapable of even acknowledging, let alone addressing, the question. Two texts in particular, together with Heidegger’s own subsequent commentary and self-interpretation, attest to the change itself and to his rather clumsy attempts to obscure and conceal it. The first is the 1929 lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” which was followed by a 1943 “Postscript” and a 1949 “Introduction.” The second is the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics, published with revisions and emendations in 1953. In the 1929 lecture, Heidegger pursues the question, What is metaphysics? not merely by discussing metaphysics, but by doing it, by engaging in it. The “metaphysical” question he poses is, Wie steht es um das Nichts? In English, roughly, What about the nothing? Science is the investigation of entities, and nothing else. So, what about the nothing? Nothing is the counterconcept to something. Like nothing, being is not an entity: it is no thing and so in a sense coincides with nothing. The metaphysical question Heidegger poses by way of introducing his audience to metaphysics is thus the very question at the heart of his own project in Being and Time, namely the question concerning the meaning of being. Now consider the “Postscript to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’” which Heidegger wrote 14 years later, in 1943. The “Postscript,” he explains, really ought to be read as a foreword. That is already a somewhat nervous gesture, as if preempting whatever impression the original lecture might make in its own words. In stark contrast to what he had said in 1929, Heidegger continues: The question “What is metaphysics?” questions beyond metaphysics. It springs from a thinking that has already entered into the overcoming of metaphysics. It belongs to the

 What Is Called Thinking? J.  Glenn Gray, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 8. What Heidegger meant by this emerges more clearly much later in the text when he says, “Science does not think in the sense in which thinkers think” (134). 7

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Further, on a distinctly equivocal note, he writes, This questioning must think metaphysically and at the same time think out of the ground of metaphysics, that is, in a manner that is no longer metaphysical. Such thinking remains ambivalent in an essential sense. (Wegmarken, 232)

In the 1929 lecture there had been no mention (or even hint) of questioning “beyond metaphysics,” or of entering “into the overcoming metaphysics.” On the contrary, by posing and pursuing the question of the nothing, which just is the question of the being, Heidegger had claimed to be “tak[ing] up a particular metaphysical question,” thereby letting us “be transposed directly into metaphysics” (Wegmarken, 82). Granted, Heidegger does say in 1943 that, although the kind of questioning he has in mind thinks “out of the ground of metaphysics” and is thus “no longer metaphysical,” it also nevertheless “must think metaphysically” at the same time, and is thus essentially “ambivalent.” Still, whereas in 1929 he insists that the question of nothing, hence the question of being, is itself a metaphysical question, by 1943 the question of the “truth of being,” though it requires us to think metaphysically, nevertheless questions “beyond” metaphysics, represents an “overcoming” of metaphysics, and is “no longer metaphysical.”8 A few years later, in the 1949 “Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’” Heidegger is even more emphatic about the limits of metaphysical thinking. There he writes, Metaphysics thinks entities as entities. Wherever the question is asked what entities are, entities as such are in sight. Metaphysical representation owes this sight to the light of being. The light itself, that is, that which such thinking experiences as light, no longer comes within the range of metaphysical thinking; for metaphysics always represents entities only as entities. Within this perspective, metaphysical thinking does, of course, ask about the entity that is the source (die seiende Quelle) and originator (Urheber) of this light. But the light itself is considered sufficiently illuminated through its granting the transparency for every perspective upon entities. (Wegmarken, 195)

The light of being as such, Heidegger now says, falls outside the purview of metaphysics. Metaphysics thinks entities, but only as entities; it does not think them in their being. In asking about the ground or truth of entities, metaphysics asks not directly about being as such, but about whatever entity enjoys a unique and privileged status as the “source” or “originator” of entities as a whole (Platonic forms, substance, God, the subject, the will). In so doing, it abandons the true “ground” of entities, and indeed its own ground, namely being: Metaphysics, insofar as it always represents only entities as entities, does not bear in mind (denkt nicht an) being itself. Philosophy does not gather itself upon its ground. It always

 Also, unlike in 1929, Heidegger in 1943 insists that metaphysics is essentially historical: “Metaphysics of the history of this truth,” namely the truth about entities (232). Heidegger (as far as I know) first refers to the history of being in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics (EM 70). There is no suggestion in “What Is Metaphysics?” that being itself might have a history. 8

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leaves its ground, and indeed by means of metaphysics. And yet it never escapes it. Insofar as a thinking sets out to experience the ground of metaphysics, insofar as such thinking tries to recall (andenken) the truth of being itself instead of merely representing entities as entities, thinking has in a sense abandoned (verlassen) metaphysics. (Wegmarken, 196–7)

Another telltale text is the Introduction to Metaphysics – or rather, the published edition of 1953, which in addition to the original 1935 lecture course includes several supposedly clarificatory insertions.9 The longest, near the beginning of the book, is a (rather muddled) excursus explaining the original lecture’s characterization of metaphysics, which Heidegger now says was sketchy and misleading – but, he insists, deliberately so! The lecture course begins with what Heidegger calls “the first of all questions” (EM 1). The question “first in rank for us as the broadest, the deepest, and finally the most originary question” (EM 2) is, Why is there something rather than nothing? This is not the same as the even deeper question concerning the meaning of being, but it presupposes it and, if we follow Heidegger, leads back to it. A few pages later he therefore says, “So, it turns out, the question, Why are there entities at all instead of nothing? forces (zwingt) us to the prior question, What about being (Wie steht es um das Sein)?” (EM 25). Notice that that assertion – that the question concerning entities as a whole forces us on to the question of being  – flatly contradicts Heidegger’s later critique of metaphysics, according to which (as we have seen) “the light of being … no longer comes within the range of metaphysical thinking” (Wegmarken, 195). For its part, Heidegger says in 1935, “The question we have identified as first in rank – Why are there entities at all instead of nothing? – is the fundamental question of metaphysics” (EM 13). The question of being as such, however, has never been asked explicitly: “In the treatise Being and Time the question concerning the meaning of being is posed and developed specifically as a question for the first time in the history of philosophy” (EM 64). Still, what Heidegger is doing in the 1935 lectures is introducing his students to philosophy as he himself understands it and practices it. As he says, “Metaphysics is the name of the definitive center and core of all philosophy” (EM 13). This is the point at which Heidegger inserts the rather convoluted addendum in 1953. “For this introduction,” he writes, “we have intentionally presented all this in a cursory and thus basically ambiguous way” (EM 13, emphasis added). Heidegger is certainly right that ambiguities have crept into the lecture. A few pages earlier, for example, he had said, “Φύσις is being (Sein) itself, by virtue of which entities first become and remain observable” (EM 11). On the very next page, however, he says, “Entities (das Seiende) as such and as a whole the Greeks call φύσις” (EM 12). So, is φύσις being or entities? Considering that the ontological difference between being and entities is virtually the cornerstone of Heidegger’s entire philosophy, this is an astonishing inconsistency. And it raises further questions. For example, when  The most famous among them is his attempt to explain away the obviously jingoistic reference to “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism as a supposedly dispassionate comment on the growth of modern technology (EM 152). 9

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the Presocratics said φύσις, what did Heidegger think were they thinking? Being or merely entities? And were they thinking “metaphysically”? Or, as Heidegger would later maintain, did metaphysics begin only with Plato? This degree of equivocation, it seems to me, is unaccountable absent a fundamental shift in Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics, including (but limited to) the meaning of the word “metaphysics,” not long after the 1935 lectures. By the time he writes the 1953 addendum, at any rate, Heidegger is acutely aware of the ambiguity and attempts to explain it away: According to our elucidation of phusis, it means the being of entities. If the question is peri phuseôs, about the being of entities, then the discussion of phusis, “physics” in the ancient sense, is already beyond ta phusika, beyond entities and is concerned with being. “Physics” determines the essence and the history of metaphysics from the inception onward. (EM 14)

In Aquinas, in Hegel, in Nietzsche, he continues, “metaphysics steadfastly remains ‘physics.’ The question concerning being as such, however, is of a different essence and a different provenance” (EM 14). This is no minor refinement. Here, in 1953, in stark contrast to the 1935 lecture, Heidegger draws a categorical distinction between the question of being that was alive in, indeed at the very heart of, the metaphysical tradition (the question of the being of entities), and a different question of being that was not (the question of being as such). In 1953, that is, Heidegger presents himself retrospectively as asking a question that falls outside of metaphysics altogether. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, and Nietzsche had all been doing “physics” in the ancient sense, that is, thinking the totality of entities – albeit, entities in their being. Heidegger is now not just carrying that tradition forward by making the question already inherent in it clearer and more explicit; he is asking a different question altogether, a question metaphysical thinking does not and indeed cannot ask. “To be sure,” he continues, “within the purview of metaphysics, and if one continues to think in its manner, one can regard the question concerning being as such merely as a mechanical repetition of the question concerning entities as such” (EM 14). But this is a mistake, in which “the question of being as such is misconstrued as coinciding with the question concerning entities as such” (EM 14). Heidegger then adds, “The ‘introduction to metaphysics’ attempted here keeps in view this confused state of the ‘question of being’” (EM 14). What is the “confused state of the question,” which Heidegger says the lecture course “keeps in view”? Considering its fundamental importance to him, it seems inconceivable that Heidegger himself would lose sight of the ontological difference between being and entities altogether. The confusion must instead have to do with what precise relation obtains between being and entities. Metaphysics, he says, in 1929 and in 1935, is concerned with entities as such and as a whole, or entities in their being, or even, as he sometimes allows, the being of entities. That is, it thinks the essential relation between entities and their being. Posing the fundamental question of metaphysics, the question concerning entities as such and as a whole opens up, leads to – indeed “forces” (zwingt) us on to – the question that is, as it were, just waiting to be asked, namely, What about being? Or, as he puts it in Being and Time, what is the meaning of being?

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Within a few years of the 1935 lectures, however, Heidegger insists that metaphysics does not – indeed cannot – pose the question of being. Metaphysics is not a path or a bridge from the question concerning entities to the question of being, but an obstacle, a blind spot, an eclipse of the question. The way he puts this in 1953 is to say that although, as he had said before, metaphysics thinks entities in their being, or even the being of entities, what it does not and cannot think is “being as such” (EM 15). In the 1953 addendum Heidegger makes it sound as if the 1935 lectures were merely reflecting a confusion inherent in the tradition. What has in fact happened is that he himself has in the meantime abandoned the concept of metaphysics on which the lectures were based, distinguished his own question more sharply from that of the tradition, and relegated metaphysics to a narrower domain in which it thinks entities (or “entities in their being”), but cannot think being (or “being as such”). In 1935 Heidegger clearly credited the entire philosophical tradition – not just as far back as Plato, but including the Presocratics – with asking about entities as such and as a whole, which is to say, entities in their being. This is why in 1935 he was able to slide so easily back and forth between saying on one page that φύσις means “being itself” (EM 11) and on the very next page that it means “entities as such and as a whole” (EM 12). Within just a few years of the 1935 lectures, that ambiguity had become intolerable, since it left no room for Heidegger to distinguish himself so categorically from the tradition, as he now very much wanted to do. Rather than owning up to the change, however, Heidegger instead maintained that his own question of being, even in Being and Time, had been nonmetaphysical from the outset.

Formal and Fundamental Ontology in Husserl and Heidegger John Rogove

Some Voraussetzungen One of the paradoxes of Heidegger-reception in the English-speaking world has been that, as Heidegger studies have come to be increasingly integrated into “mainstream” analytically-inspired currents of anglophone philosophy, his thought and problematics have had to be adapted to a conceptual framework whose origins are often to be found in metaphysical and methodological commitments that Heidegger rejected on a most fundamental level. However far so-called “analytic” philosophy may have moved from its origins in Logical Positivism (and how far indeed it has lost the identifying characteristics of a “school” or method with which it started can be seen in the increasing difficulty of identifying “analytic” philosophy as a unified movement or style at all), much of its underlying interrogative framework and many of its metaphysical presuppositions remain dialectically beholden to that initial moment’s commitments to things such as scientism, naturalism, nominalism or empiricism. As has been the case with other “Continental” thinkers, such as Hegel or Merleau-Ponty, the price of their admission was their integration into a reception-­ framework that attempted to digest them on the framework’s terms, rather than on their own. As Jean-Luc Marion once quipped, the Anglo-Americans “don’t study Heidegger, they use Heidegger”. His thought is one more tool in a kit made for tasks determined elsewhere and otherwise. The paradox in this situation can be most vividly illustrated by understanding that the philosophy in question, the one providing the conceptual reception-­ framework, might be taken to be directly or indirectly descended from Carnap, who in 1932 famously rejected Heidegger’s conceptual framework as literal “nonsense”, which rejection represents both the high point and the founding moment in J. Rogove (*) Archives Husserl de Paris, Paris, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_7

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analytical philosophy’s estrangement from its frère ennemi. For Carnap and for those inspired by him, for example, the central Heideggerian preoccupation with “being” and with the idea that the “question of being” is the most central and important one with which philosophy can occupy itself, is the result of a simple category-­ error, and of an egregious misunderstanding of the relation of foundation or presupposition that obtains between logic (and more specifically the formal mathematical logic invented by Frege and Russell) and philosophy in general. “To be”, as one of Carnap’s disciples put it, “is to be the value of a bound variable”,1 which means that being or existence refers to the quantification of a concept, quality or class which in itself can “logically” have no existence, since these quantifications are by definition merely “functions” (in the Fregean sense) under which extant entities can fall, or not, according to various quantifiers (all, some, none ...).2 This understanding of “being” obviously precludes anything like what Heidegger has in mind as the object of his famous “question”, and it is also precisely what Heidegger is proposing a radical critique of in his expositions of the historical processes by which “being has been forgotten” – which is to say, in Heidegger’s language, that the ontological difference has been forgotten. What might be called the “analytical” – Russellian and Neo-positivist – understanding of “being” is nothing more than the final, most extreme result of this historical process of “flattening out” of the ontological difference whereby being has been forgotten. Now, by “forgotten”, what Heidegger means is that it has become phenomenologically invisible. We have somehow lost the capacity to “see” it. However, what a good phenomenological description ought to do is to allow us to “see” what is there, or to allow itself to be faithful to what we truly do see. And the method by which it is able to do this is known as the phenomenological reduction – the act by which “metaphysical”3 presuppositions are neutralized, those presuppositions or prejudices which block or cover over our access to the “Sachen selbst” that are the phenomena – the true way of appearing of things. These prejudices can belong to the scientific gaze (one, for example, which would see mere “sense data” in place of objects), but also to a

 W.V.O. Quine, “On What There Is”, in From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1953, pp. 6–7, 11–15. 2  These categories are in turn heuristic fictions, or “constructions” (Aufbauen) according to Carnap. See Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, tr. R. George, University of California Press, 1967 (1928), esp. §§99–101. Cf. especially “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” (1932), in Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism, New York, MacMillan, 1959, pp.60–81, and A.J. Ayer’s popularization and simplification of these views in Language, Truth and Logic, London, Gollancz, 1936. 3  The “metaphysical” presuppositions that are to be bracketed by the phenomenological reduction must be understood to be “metaphysical” in the narrow, Kantian sense of dogmatically presupposed entities, structures or processes that cannot be given in experience. For a treatment of the critical differences between the Kantian and the phenomenological understandings of what it means for an entity to be given in experience rather than “metaphysically” presupposed, see J.  Rogove, “The Phenomenological a priori as Husserlian Solution to the Problem of Kant‘s ‘Transcendental Psychologism’”, in I.  Apostolescu and C.  Serban, Husserl, Kant and Transcendental Phenomenology, Berlin/New York, De Gruyter, 2019. 1

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religious world-view or to one conditioned by a political ideology. The work of the reduction is to remove systematically these cognitive impediments to seeing the phenomena as they really are – which in turn, of course, presupposes phenomenology’s working premise and starting point according to which the phenomena, the things in their appearing, are the things themselves. Indeed, the hypothesis that phenomena are merely the visible face of some metaphysical Hinterwelt of really existing but essentially inexperienceable things-in-themselves is precisely the kind of metaphysical hypothesis that the phenomenological reduction must suspend since it is incapable of being given. (Indeed, Husserl says that this hypothesis is absurd and contradictory, since the idea of something being an object and that of its being experienceable by a subject enjoy a relationship of a priori mutual implication.) It is the steady neutralizing of these metaphysical prejudices that cures us of our phenomenological “blindness” incompatible with an attentiveness to the things, and it is precisely this blindness that prevents us from perceiving the ontological difference on which the intelligibility of Heidegger’s “question ofbeing” depends. Indeed, such questions as “whether Heidegger was a realist or an idealist”, or “whether Being is mind-dependent”, by which much Anglo-American Heidegger-­reception is wont to be framed, are radically misled and misleading in that they have either fundamentally misunderstood phenomenology’s methodology, or they have underestimated the degree to which Heidegger remained committed to that method. Heidegger never ceased to place his thinking and his questioning under the sign of phenomenology and of the phenomenological method – a method which is totally consubstantial with the reduction. As Jean-François Courtine puts it, “What would a phenomenology without the reduction be? Does this question even truly mean anything?” Before going on nevertheless to pose this question at length, he recalls that for Husserl, “to misunderstand the reduction… is to pervert radically the meaning of the phenomenological way, and to miss that which, in phenomenology itself, is essentially method; but it also means barring the possibility of marking the clear separation between rigorous science and ‘speculation’, philosophy and Weltanschaung, and in the end phenomenology and anthropology”.4 We find ourselves before a sort of syllogism: phenomenology is inseparable from the method of the reduction; Heidegger always claimed to be inspired by and even radically faithful to the phenomenological method; therefore Heidegger’s method must be fundamentally dependent on the reduction. However, the fact that Husserl himself came to see Heidegger’s work from Sein und Zeit on as having departed from this inspiration and degenerated into anthropology, on the one hand, and that Heidegger came at about this same time to see Husserl as still beholden to a Cartesian-metaphysical tradition and thereby not to have been faithful to the radical promise of the phenomenological method either, on the other hand, has obscured this in the minds of many commentators. There has moreover very often been especially among certain Heideggerians a tendency to dramatize the “parricidal” aspects of Heidegger’s

 J.-F. Courtine, « Reduction phénoménologique-transcendantale et différence ontico-ontologique », in Heidegger et la phénoménologie, Paris, Vrin, 1990, p. 209. 4

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relation to Husserl. In few places, however, has this misunderstanding found more fertile ground than among those philosophers whose Vorbegriffe predispose them to a quasi-positivistic mistaking of being as such simply for all beings taken together – which is precisely the ontic, anthropologizing de-transcendentalization that Husserl feared. Taylor Carman5 is right to criticize the idea according to which it is possible to think that there could be entities without being, since the view he is criticizing mistakes “being” for our “human” (i.e., Dasein’s) apprehension of entities, of our taking them “as” entities, a view which is also echoed and amplified by Thomas Sheehan’s thesis according to which the “being of beings” can be translated as “how entities are meaningful to us”.6 However, both sides in this discussion, including Carman’s, seem to remain beholden at least in part to the naturalistic metaphysical conceptual apparatus necessary for making Heidegger seem intelligible to thinkers in this tradition. Whereas Olafson7 suggests that there would be no entities without Dasein’s understanding of them (i.e., without Being – since for Olafson “being” is equivalent to the mind’s grasping of beings), Carman rejects this idealism in the name of Heidegger’s supposed “realism”, according to which, much more modestly and common-sensically, while there would indeed be no “being” without our understanding of entities, the entities themselves (somehow deprived of their being), would still exist even in the absence of anyone real around to grasp them. However, Carman seems implicitly thereby to equate “entity” with physical or spatio-­temporal entity,8 and it is at this price that he gains for Heidegger the “mind independence” of the beings. He aims thereby to underscore the ontological difference, distinguishing the ontic level of “beings”, which exist whether we understand them or not, from the Dasein- or consciousness-dependent ontological level on which these beings have meaning, i.e. “being”, for us. But our thesis is that even this analysis has failed to make it entirely out of the “natural attitude” and into the phenomenological one by means of the phenomenological method of the reductionon which Heidegger remains radically dependent, and on which the full intelligibility of his method also remains dependent. Indeed, while it saves what Carman calls “occurrent [i.e. vorhanden] entities” (and by which he means spatio-temporal entities in the natural sense as possessing objectively inhering qualities independently of the observer) from real dependence on the “mind” (as Olafson’s position seems to maintain), the “mind” of which he has made these entities independent seems also in its turn to be a real entity. I.e., it is the human mind. What seems missing from this and other accounts is a sense of the radicality of the metaphysical neutrality of the objective and subjective correlates that are revealed by means of the reduction. Indeed, “being” cannot be mind-­ dependent in any kind of ontic understanding of “mind” any more than can  T. Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic, Cambridge University Press, 2003.  Th. Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift, Lahnam, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. 7  Frederick Olafson, Heidegger and Philosophy of Mind, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987, pp. 135–150. 8  Carman, Heidegger’s Analytic, op. cit., pp. 157–158. 5 6

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logico-mathematical entities or any of the other eidè that are constituted/revealed in the eidetic stage of the reduction. The sorts of confusion regarding the question of whether “entities” depend on “being” and whether, in turn, being is somehow “mind-dependent” can only result from an approach to Heidegger from outside of phenomenology, from an approach blind to the fact that Heidegger’s entire inquiry into being is taking place within and by means of the phenomenological method inherited from Husserl, and which presupposes the phenomenological reduction as its starting point. This approach then takes both terms in a profoundly non-phenomenological sense, one which is guilty of the same naïve realism of which metaphysical idealism is only a variety, and which results from the natural attitude, on the one hand, but which at the same time refuses to take seriously the non-metaphysical realism entailed by phenomenology’s tautological founding thesis according to which all consciousness is consciousness of something. As such, debates concerning whether or not Heidegger was a metaphysical “realist” or “idealist” recall the no less intractable ones concerning the very same question with respect to Husserl.9 What is missing from these accounts is a sense of the “neutralization” that is already taking place at the eidetic stage of the reduction, and only continues to be radicalized as it continues to unfold during the subsequent stages. I.e., they miss the phenomenological sense of the “intelligibility” of entities – the sense in which the eidetic intuition grasps this intelligibility qua mind-independent, or at least qua subject-independent (and therefore also as mind-independent by any ontic notion of “mind”). The reduction integrally isolates and thematizes the subjective conditions of the appearance of this intelligibility precisely so as all the more thoroughly and integrally to isolate its in se, objective intelligibility.

Logic, Psychologism, and the Science of Being In order to ground the points we are making, it is important to recall the purpose and origin of phenomenology’s “metaphysical neutrality”. The metaphysical neutrality of Husserl’s Logical Investigations is to be understood in the context of his radicalization (or systematization) of Brentano’s principle of intentionality, which itself is to be understood in the context of Husserl’s struggle against logical psychologism. An understanding of this process will put us in a position to appreciate better the gulf that separates Heidegger’s phenomenological approach from the metaphysical presuppositions underpinning the post-Carnapian tradition informing the approach

 This is not only valid for his Logical Investigations, with their famous and explicit declaration of “metaphysical neutrality”, but also for Husserl’s post-1912 phenomenology, whose supposed “idealism” – as we shall see, and as we have more thoroughly demonstrated elsewhere – is just as metaphysically neutral, and in the same sense, as is the supposed “realism” of the early Husserl of the Investigations. 9

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to Heidegger from outside of phenomenology. This tradition, as we have noted, puts a certain understanding of the place of logic at its center, one which understands it as the locus of truth. Now, the doctrine according to which logic is the site of truth is, following a certain common understanding of that doctrine, a version of psychologism. According to the most common, psychologistic, version of this doctrine (which is that for example of Logical Positivism, but also of Kant and of Wittgenstein), logic is a tool or a technology of human knowledge, an organon of the human understanding. It is the form and the norm according to which judgments must be formed in order to be correct. This is why the site of truth (which here is reducible to the correctness of judgment – formal correctness) is the judgment itself, rather than the object or content of the judgment. This psychologistic conception is the result of the classical empirico-Kantian doctrine of the subject and of its dogmatic division into the faculties of understanding (whose formal unity is governed precisely by the laws of formal logic, following the Humean doctrine of “relations of ideas”) and of sensibility (which consists in the passive reception of given manifold sense data, which Kant likewise inherits from the empiricists and specifically from the Humean notion of “matters of fact”). The former is an active faculty, consisting in the activity of the subject, namely the synthesizing of the raw unprocessed sense data that is the function of the faculty of sensibility to receive passively from outside the subject. This classical assignation of the categories of logic to the subjective end of judgments – whose thread can be seen running from the classical modern, Cartesian-Lockean-Humean understanding of logic as the rules governing the combination of the subject’s representations all the way down to the Neo-positivist-Wittgensteinian-Quinian representation of the categories of logic and language as a grammatical grid or conceptual scheme which we impose on reality and through which we filter it – results in a separation of the science of representations and their combinations (i.e., a science of subjectivity) from the science of being, or of what is insofar as it is. Since logical laws give only a description of the form of the subject’s representational function, the a priori necessity that belongs to those laws belongs to or resides only in the subject and its representational function; all being, i.e., everything that “comes in” from outside the subject, everything that it encounters as being outside itself, on the other hand, is fundamentally contingent and a posteriori – it obeys only the law of radical contingency of Hume’s “matters of fact”. All knowledge of the latter is obtained sensorially and can only be accumulated and stabilized according to empirical laws of induction, reproducibility and revisability of observational and experimental results, and it is this idea that forms the basis of the Schlickian or Carnapian understanding of “being” and the philosophical framework of their philosophical descendants. Psychologism results from the slippery slide from this division of the faculties and the assignation of the categories to the understanding towards the corresponding notion according to which logical necessity is an attribute inhering in the human mind.

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One strategy for avoiding this slippery slope is to insist upon the normative nature of logical laws, as Kant does.10 But this, for Husserl, does not resolve the problem of the a priori separation of the science of subjectivity from the science of being. Logical necessity is not, for phenomenology, a characteristic of the subject or of the simple structure of representations or of language, but it is rather a characteristic inhering in the things themselves and can thereby be the object or content of intuition, and is not limited to characterizing the mere form of intuition. As Husserl established in his Prolegomena to Pure Logic as well as throughout the Logical Investigations and in Formal and Transcendental Logic,11 the refutation of logical psychologism and the possibility of phenomenology depends on that of the constitution of logical necessity as an intentional object and as the content of judgments and consciousness rather than as mere formal-transcendental (but inexperienceable) condition of conscious experience and thought. This, however, necessitates the possibility of categorial intuition – which, along with intentionality and the reduction, on the one hand, and the discovery or elucidation of the material or phenomenological a priori, on the other, is phenomenology’s major breakthrough and contribution. Categorial intuition is first described in Husserl’s sixth Logical Investigation.12 In his 1925 lecture course the Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time,13 Heidegger includes this concept in this triptych of fundamental phenomenological breakthroughs that both made his own thought possible and separate Husserl’s thought from that of the tradition. Nearly 50 years later, during his final seminars given at Zähringen,14 he returns to this concept and restates the capital importance the reading of the sixth Logical Investigation had for his ability to ask the question of Being, i.e., to see it as a question. If this form of intuition represents such a fundamental breakthrough for Heidegger, this is because it represents such a fundamental break with the modern doctrine of intuition, whose most canonical formulation comes to us through Kant, whose understanding of what intuition and knowledge are is essentially empiricist. For Kant, as for both classical empiricism and for twentieth century logical empiricism, “intuition”, which is equivalent to the passive reception by the subject of data for which its spontaneity is not responsible and over which it has no control, and to which the subject is structurally open, can

 Kant, Logik (ed. Jäsche, 1800), Werkausagbe, Frankfurt-am-Main, Surkamp, vol. VI, pp. 432–582; and Vorlesung über Logik (AK GS, Berlin, de Grunter, 1966, vol. XXIV). 11  See for example: Hua XVIII, §§16, 49; cf. ibid., §14: For Husserl, the very concept of normativity requires that the normativity be itself founded on theoretical intuitions, whereby the very bindingness of the applicable norms can be adequately constituted in such a way that they may become binding. See also Hua XVII, pp. 44–48. What is “given” in experience – the “raw data” that must subsequently be processed by the subject  – includes “logical data [logischen Gegebenheiten]”; things like “the true”, “the non-contradictory”, etc., can and must, in order to be known, constitute the object of an intuitive experience or “insight”. 12  §§40–58, Hua XIX pp. 657–709. 13  GA 20, pp. 34–109. 14  Summarized by Jean Beaufret in Heidegger, Questions IV, Gallimard, 1977. 10

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by definition only ever be sensorial in nature. The very idea of intuition, for this tradition, opposes it to the categories, which are the form taken by the subject: the categories are then that which gives form to the raw unprocessed sense data, the a priori transcendental form taken by our grasping of the chaotic a posteriori stew of external reality (i.e., of being). From this point of view, then, the very idea of a “categorial intuition”, an intuition whose content or object is a formal organization of things rather than a mere sensory Mannigfaltigkeit, is a contradiction in terms, and neither the Husserlian nor the Heideggerian approach to a science of being is intelligible within the strict confines of the meaning this tradition attributes to these terms. Indeed, what Husserl demonstrates in the sixth Investigation is that the very concept of a sense datum is phenomenologically dependent on the complete intuition of an object or of a configuration of objects and is therefore perfectly incoherent outside of the notion of categorial intuition: we can never have direct experience of sense data, since they are merely theoretical constructions abstracted from concrete intuitions of objects,15 and the only way to speak about or envision them coherently is to make them into (necessarily eidetic) objects in their own right. By abstracting the red moment from my intuition of the red table, I am by that same token no longer attending to the table which is the concrete object of my perceptual intuition, but I am attending rather to redness itself as an eidetic object. However, this redness is not itself “really” contained as a concrete moment in my intuition of the object: “redness” is nowhere to be found in it, it exceeds the sensory moments of the object itself as I experience it.16 And yet, the ability to experience “redness”, to constitute it as an intentional object, seems to found my ability to have an experience of this red object at all. The sort of ideality that is the object of categorial intuition is not simply mathematical ideality but “sensory” intuitions such as that of the eidos “redness”: this supra-sensible intuition of what the empirco-Kantian tradition would consider to be the purely formal qualities of the objects of experience attributable to the faculties of the subject or of the human understanding is precisely what Husserl names “categorial intuition”; and it is this alone which allows methodologically, according to Heidegger, for the possibility of the question of being. Indeed, it can even be coherently claimed that categorial intuition is nothing other than the intuition of being itself, which is articulated into categories and which can indeed even be thought to be analytically identical to the idea of categories. Husserl, naturally, can have nothing much different in mind when he speaks of the intuitions we have of “the non-­ contradictory”, “the consequent”, etc., which are not operations of the consciousness but rather its objects.17 It is apparent, then, that a proper understanding of our intuitions of the categories, which in themselves are nothing else than an analytic of being, is the condition of the intuition of being. The “condition” of that intuition and

 Husserl, Logical Investigation V, §11.  See Jacques Taminiaux, « Heidegger et les Recherches logiques », in Le regard et l’excédent, Kluwer, La Haye, 1976. 17  See note supra. 15 16

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not simply the intuition itself, because this intuition itself is not reducible to the simple intuition of a state of affairs (“the paper is white”), even if a pre-­understanding of being is necessary for the latter to make sense or be possible. In order to accede to intuition of being itself, which has the structure of a question, what is needful is the phenomenological reduction.

 he Reduction(s) and the Science of Being: From Formal T to Fundamental Ontology This brings us back to the question, posed by Jean-François Courtine, of the extent to which the reduction remains present in Heidegger, and our follow-up question as to whether the reduction indeed conditions the question of being. The reception of this first question has, as we noted, been partially conditioned by two things: (1) a non-phenomenological set of metaphysical presuppositions regarding the relation between empiricity and categoriality, and (2) a historiographical “dramatization of the parricide” that is supposed to have taken place between Husserl and Heidegger.18 Central to a proper understanding of this question is a clarification of the relation between “phenomenology” and “ontology”. It is tempting to consider that Heidegger and Husserl are in disagreement over the question of whether “philosophy is essentially an inquiry into ‘being’ or a ‘science of consciousness’”,19 and to distinguish sharply a Heideggerian identification between phenomenology and ontology from a Husserlian opposition between the two and to consider that the “radicality of this opposition cannot, in any way, be minimized”.20 However, making too much of this very real terminological ambiguity between the two authors cannot but presuppose,  While French readings have generally been complicit in the latter, Anglo-American readings coming out of the “analytic” tradition have, as we have already noted, have often fallen victim to the former to such an extent that the repercussions of the latter have become secondary if not unintelligible for them. As J.-F. Courtine has thoroughly and judiciously shown, Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein in Sein und Zeit both presupposes a radical critique of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology and constitutes its methodological radicalization, with “anxiety” being the new methodological key which “constitutes a sort of ‘repetition’ of the Husserlian problematic of the épochè and of phenomenological-transcendental reduction” (op. cit., p.234). Our purpose in the present article is not to discuss again the ruptures and continuities between Husserl and Heidegger, but rather to underscore how, whatever their differences, Heidegger’s methodology presupposes the classical (Husserlian) phenomenological critique of the empirico-positivist metaphysical presuppositions as its own condition of possibility and intelligibility. The “radicalization” Heidegger carries out through his introduction of the theme of the existential analytic does not alter this basic fact. 19  Steven Crowell, “Heidegger and Husserl: the matter and method of philosophy”, in H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall, Blackwell Companion to Heidegger, p. 54. 20  Jean-Luc Marion, Réduction et donation, Paris, PUF, p.  65; « an sich… ist Ontologie nicht Phänomenologie » (Husserl, Ideen…III, Hua V, p.129); « Es gibt keine Ontologie neben einer Phänomenologie, sondern wissenschaftliche Ontologie ist nichts anders als Phänomenologie » (Heidegger, GA 20, p. 98). J-L Marion goes on to cite Hua V, p.76: “All ontologies fall victim to 18

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or at least play at presupposing, the very non-phenomenological understanding of “phenomenon” as “mere appearance” in opposition to a Kantian “thing in itself”, of which both were at constant pains to define the phenomenological method as a refutation. “Phenomenology as science of the a priori phenomena of intentionality… never, ever [nie und nimmer] has anything to do with appearances. To talk of phenomena as if they were something behind which are the things themselves is phenomenologically absurd [widersinnig]” (GA 20, p. 118). “Widersinn” is a Husserlian technical term designating a material a priori impossibility – something that cannot be constituted in consciousness –, and one of the canonical examples of this is precisely the Kantian separation between “phenomenon” and “thing in itself”, since the very idea of a being that is in principle unexperienceable is an absurdity of the same magnitude as a “square circle”.21 It is correspondingly clear that when Husserl speaks of “ontology having nothing to do with phenomenology”, that he does not have in mind anything similar to what Heidegger means by “ontology”: Husserl here, by “ontology”, means “positivity” – the positive “metaphysical” ontologies presupposed and/or posited by the natural and social sciences, for example.22 This clarity is contained, analytically as it were, in phenomenology’s founding principle, which Husserl calls the “principle of principles”,23 and which consists in a collapsing of the distinction between “phenomena” and “things in themselves” such that phenomenology’s superficially Kantian gesture of separating dogmatically presupposed entities not given in experience from the given phenomena represents in reality the inverse of the Kantian gesture whereby the positive (i.e. hypothesized) beings of the natural sciences are preserved and their supposed metaphysical shadows or correlates bracketed, attempting thereby to give a transcendental ground to empiricism.24 In this sense the only “break” with Husserl that occurs on Heidegger’s part in the second half of the 1920s is a radicalization of everything that was already distinctive about Husserl’s phenomenological method. Heidegger is doing no more and no less than taking the phenomenological critique of the metaphysical presuppositions of the positivism (and the psychologism) issuing forth from modern philosophy (and “modern” philosophy, according to Heidegger, begins with Plato!) to its furthest conclusions.

the reduction and disappear”, without however citing the passage that precedes and contextualizes this statement: see immediately infra. 21  Cf. Husserl, Erste Philosophie, “Beilagen”, Hua VII, pp. 401–406 et passim. 22  Cf. Hua V, loc. cit., “On the relation between phenomenology and ontology”: “In transcendental experience all ‘transcendent being’, understood in the normal sense as effective being [wahrhaftes Sein], is neutralized, bracketed. What should purely and simply be left over is consciousness itself in its own essence, with intentional being [Vermeintsein] in the place of transcendent being.” However, what is “left over” [übrig] after the reduction is what is “given through immediate intuition” and is the object of a “pure description”, and what is “bracketed” are the “dogmatic scienceentities [Wissenschaftsbestände] or all sciences such as physics and psychology”. 23  Ideen…I, § 24. 24  Cf. J. Rogove, op. cit.

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What is at issue in and with the question of the relation of phenomenology to ontology and its correlate, the question of the conditioning of the question of being by the reduction, is the idea according to which the reduction is the suspension all “factuality” or “facticity” with respect to beings. The eidetic reduction consists precisely in a suspension or neutralization of the positive “being” of beings in favor of their essence. I suspend or neutralize the question of whether the red I see before me in my visual field is “really there” before me as an external object in the natural world or not – i.e., I suspend the question of its “being”, of whether or not it is in the positive sense – in order to attend only to its essence or eidos, i.e., to the way in which it manifests itself to me, and to the structure of that manifestation; I attend only to the way in which it has to give itself to me, or to any subject in general, and, what amounts to the same thing, to the way in which I am constrained to receive it, to accept it, which is that whereby I know that it is so for any subject in general. As such, it is perfectly indifferent to me whether the red that I am grasping in this way is perceived, imagined, remembered, or dreamt, since all of these intentional modes equally afford me access to the essential properties of the intentional object – to “what it means to be” red, to be redness. This is because the essence of redness, being indifferent to the existence of this or that particular red, is to be found in the givenness, or in the being-given (Gegebenheit) of redness, i.e., in its manifestation. What matters, then, is that it be a constituted intentional object, regardless of the particular intentional mode, which is to say, without respect to the question of whether it positively is or not (i.e., whether it has presented itself as “really” existing or not, or whether it is on the contrary merely imagined, hallucinated, etc.). So, then, it might appear that the question of the “being” of beings is incompatible with the properly phenomenological questions that are only accessible within the reduction, precisely in that they have suspended the question of a thing’s “existence” in favor of that of its “essence”. However, Heidegger in his 1925 lecture course makes it clear that he understands his inquiry into being as a direct, systematic and radical application and extension of the phenomenological method in general, and of the reduction in particular. In the Prolegomena, Heidegger presents the process by which he arrives at the question of being in terms and in phases identical to those of Husserl’s canonical presentation of the reduction in Die Idee der Phänomenologie25: the eidetic phase of the reduction is a suspension of a being’s factuality (i.e., its real status in the natural world and according to the natural attitude: whether it is perceived or merely imagined, etc.) in favor of its essence. It is by bracketing the factual existence of this red thing here and by conceptually varying the noema of the red in order to find its limits and its possibilities (for example, that red, like any color, must be presented along with a colored surface, or that red, in particular, is incompatible with green) that I can come to constitute the essence of red: redness. This process of ideation or of eidetic intuition can be seen as parallel or even identical to the above-described process whereby categorial intuition constitutes the being of a complex state of affairs (which turns out to be what all objects

25

 GA 20, pp. 90–93; Hua I, passim.

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are insofar as they are not simple, unexperienceable sense-data). “Categorial acts constitute a new objectivity [Gegenständlichkeit]… ‘To constitute’ does not mean to produce as in to make or manufacture, but to allow the beings to be seen in their objectivity”.26 Heidegger continues: “The decisive point in the discovery of categorial intuition is the following: there are acts in which ideal entities [Bestände], which are not produced by these acts nor are they functions of thought, show themselves in themselves”.27 And the result of the reduction, for Husserl, is precisely to isolate the “eidetic” being of these objective correlates from their factual or real being. As such, “being”, as such and in itself, is the essence of all beings, just as redness is the essence of all instances of red. Just as the reduction aims to constitute the eidetic redness of red things, so does it aim to “bring to presence the being-ness [Seinscharakter] of the beings”.28 And so the path to the “question of being”, the one that interrogates the being of beings, is analogous with respect to its object and identical with respect to its method to the path (met-hodos) of access to other species of eidetic intuition. Just as the eidetic reduction affords the phenomenologist access to the essence (which is to say, the necessary structures of their appearing as such and in themselves) of specific regions of phenomenality, so does the transcendental stage of the reduction afford access to the being of the beings, i.e. insofar as they simply are, insofar as they belong to the arch-region of phenomenality itself (or of manifestation itself). Heidegger insists that the three fundamental discoveries of phenomenology, which both differentiate it from traditional philosophy forgetful of being and make possible his own thoughtful recovery of being, are “intentionality”, “categorial intuition” and “the true understanding of the a priori”.29 We’ve already seen how this is the case with respect to categorial intuition; but what enables the transformation of Husserl’s formal ontology into Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is more precisely to be found in the other two “discoveries”, and moreover in the sense in which they are to be taken together, as Heidegger indicates when he enigmatically defines phenomenology as “the analytic description of intentionality in its a priori”.30 I devote the rest of this discussion to an interpretation of what this means. We mentioned above that the reduction can be understood as following analytically from the very idea of intentionality. What is meant by this is that the reduction can be seen as a putting into motion or a dynamic deployment of the originary, static tautological principle according to which all consciousness is always, necessarily, consciousness “of” something. This idea can be unpacked as follows: the principle of intentionality is another way of formulating Husserl’s programmatic injunction: “to the things themselves!”, and phenomenology’s program consists in a radical and  “… nicht Herstellen als Machen und Verfertigen, sondern Sehenlassen des Seienden in seiner Gegenständlichkeit” (GA 20 p. 97). 27  Ibid. 28  Ibid., p.  136. Cf. Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 24, §§3–5, Wegmarken, GA 9, pp. 47–77, and Courtine, op. cit., pp. 226–229. 29  GA 20, pp. 34 et sq. 30  GA 20, p. 108. 26

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disciplined “taking seriously” of the objects of our consciousness precisely as they present themselves to it. Phenomenological description, then, scrupulously avoids attempting either to introduce entities that do not in fact appear or to explain appearing objects in terms of something other than themselves. In sum, it avoids reducing them to anything else (the reducing of “reductionism”), and instead carries out a radical epistemic askesis consisting in reducing our representations only to what appears (the reducing of the “reduction”), thus eliminating precisely those non-­ appearing entities to which dogmatic reductionism (which can also be idealist) reduces the sachen selbst. One of the most striking and clear concrete illustrations or applications of this is the already-discussed elimination of the Kantian distinction between thing itself and phenomenon. The ultimate criterion for this elimination is not simply the fact that a phenomenon is what appears and that it is logically then the realm of reality that “phenomenology” describes, but, much more radically and definitively, that eidetic variation reveals that the very idea of an object that cannot even in principle appear to a subject and become an object of experience is a (phenomeno-)logical absurdity (Widersinn). It is, quite properly, inconceivable, in the same way that a square-circle or a violation of the law of excluded middle are inconceivable. This eidetic “variaton” is, then, at least in part that in which this “dynamic deployment” or “setting into motion” of the “tautological” principle of intentionality consists. Next, in order to understand more fully what this “analytic description of intentionality in its a priori” consists, we need to examine what is meant by “analytic” in phenomenology and for Heidegger. When Heidegger says that the “phenomenological sense” of the a priori is one of the principal Husserlian argumentative or demonstrative accomplishments, he is referring to something which, in the eyes of phenomenology’s most radical foes, was the most disquieting and challenging of these phenomenological accomplishments: the most thorough and concrete rehabilitation of the synthetic a priori in the form of the material a priori. This properly phenomenological understanding of the a priori, which is precisely the analytical fruit of its method of eidetic intuition and variation, opposes itself radically to the neo-empiricist understanding of the logical positivists, and the distance between these two understandings can therefore be used as the yardstick by which to measure precisely and rigorously the distance separating Heidegger’ phenomenological method from the tradition’s culmination in logical positivism. Each school brings a diametrically opposed understanding of and answer to the Kantian problem of the articulations between the analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, with the logical positivists resolving the problem in the direction of the total identification of the a priori with the analytic and of the synthetic with the a posteriori, following the principle according to which that which is “a priori” is by definition prior to anything experienceable; whereas Husserl redefines the a priori to mean “universal and necessary”, and finds such truths within experience, which he of course defines more broadly than simple formless sense experience, as the content of eidetic intuitions (which are in turn a sub-species of categorical intuition). The neo-empiricist doctrine inherits the above-discussed Humean division into relations of ideas and matters of fact; the former are a priori and vice-versa: all necessity is

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prior to and brought to bear on experience, and is without content – it is strictly formal and empty. Wittgenstein and Moritz Schlick, who were the (respectively reluctant and active) leaders of the Vienna Circle, inserted Fregean/Russellian formal logic into the place kept warm for it in this division by the Humean “relations of ideas”: all necessary truths are in fact grammatical (which is to say, logico-­ linguistic) truths, and all logical truths are, according to them, in turn reducible to tautology (and ultimately to the principle of non-contradiction). However, they ceaselessly returned, in the 1920s and 30s, to Husserl’s material a priori, as if haunted by it, recognizing its force as a threat to their doctrine. The canonical example is that of the material a priori connection between color and extension, or among colors: it is an absolute, universal and necessary truth, meaning that it is true in all possible worlds, that color is impossible without a surface that is colored, or that the same surface cannot be both red and green. This truth is no less universal and necessary than the purportedly formal logico-mathematical truths, but it is only available within intuitive experience. I must be able to see color in order to access this necessary truth, just as I must be endowed with cognitive capacities capable of mathematical reasoning in order intuitively to access the content and thereby the a priori truths contained in that other region of being or phenomenality, mathematics. However, for the logical positivists, when we say “a surface x cannot at the same time be both red and green”, the necessity inhering in this truth says nothing about the world (i.e., about being), since it is strictly grammatical (i.e., it is a the result of a blend between the arbitrary definitions of the natural language I happen to speak and the logical truths reducible to tautology and derivable from the principle of non-contradiction), or is the result of the application of this grammatical grid or conceptual scheme to a posteriori sensory experience. It is only because I have (my language has) “defined” “red” and “green” as two things incompatible with each other – or, better, because the use of these terms in a sentence such as “this surface is both red and green” has been declared “ungrammatical”  – that their mutual exclusion can be said to be “a priori”. We’ve treated this debate exhaustively elsewhere31 and cannot go further into it in these pages; what is salient about it for the present discussion, however, is to notice that, according to Heidegger, it is the phenomenological doctrine of the a priori, and more precisely the discovery of the material a priori by Husserl, that conditions and leads to Heidegger’s ontology and thus to the “question” that can be asked in and of that ontology. Now, the phenomenological ontology that is presupposed by Heidegger’s questioning can then be understood and determined on the basis of the formal ontology Husserl outlines in his extensive description of the material a priori in the 3rd Logical Investigation. Here, we are first presented with the formal ontology that undergirds (and is revealed by) the eidetic variations affording us access to material a priori truths. This formal ontology is a mereology of separable and inseparable parts and wholes: what ultimately determines that a  In our soon-to-be-published doctoral dissertation, Une science sans présupposés? Intuition eidétique et structure méréologique entre réduction phénoménologique et réductionnisme logicoempiriste, Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2016. 31

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color without a colored surface is an absurdity in any possible world or for any possible consciousness is the eidetic fact that the various components of this Sachverhalt are inseparable parts of what can only be given intuitively as a concrete whole. For example, I intuit, or see that it is the case, that color without extension, an unexperienceable thing in itself, or a square circle are all widersinnige. The intuitions that reveal and afford us access to (allow us to constitute) these material a priori truths are then the same categorial intuitions that reveal to us various states of things (most of which are a posteriori, e.g., “the pen is on the table”), or states of beings. However, as Heidegger repeatedly emphasizes, while these intuitions bring us up to the threshold of the question of being, Husserl never takes the final step that he has given us the tools to take, even though Heidegger insists that it is his discovery of the material a priori and its attendant ontology that represents the fundamental breakthrough towards this question. Now, before going further, we have to take one last thing into consideration: the fact that, for both Husserl and Heidegger, the structure of intentionality itself, i.e., consciousness itself or the field of manifestation or phenomenality itself, is also a material a priori. This material a priori truth, according to which “all consciousness is consciousness of something”, can be expressed in the following mereological terms: an object without a subject, or a subject without objects, is absurd (widersinnig), no eidetic variation can constitute it. We can no more imagine it than we can a red and green spot. Subject and object, then, are two inseparable parts of the given concrete whole that is intentional experience. Although, on the one hand, Husserl distinguishes “formal” and “material ontology”, reserving the latter term for properly “regional” ontologies and using the former to refer to the “arch-region” of all regions, of the etwas or Gegenstand uberhaupt, of the something or the object in general with no further regional determination,32 on the other hand it is clear that both sorts of ontology are both formal and material. This is the case because both are formalizable insofar as the mereological laws presented in the third Logical Investigation are axiomatizable33 and describe the form of any object in general in its relation to other objects and to its component parts, and because both are material insofar as the properly “formal” ontology of which apophantic formal logic is an aspect or an expression34 is also dependent on the sorts of eidetic and categorial intuitions that are only available within intentional experience, and is formalizable in mereological terms in accordance with its status as what Husserl and Heidegger both call the “universal a priori of correlation”.35 As we saw above, the purely “formal” ontology to which formal logic and the logical structure of etwas uberhaupt correspond are correlated to the content of specific categorial intuitions, rather than being the simple transposition of an empty formal grid onto merely sensory content.

 Logical Investigations III and IV; Ideen…I, §§9–16.  LI III, ch. 2, §14; cf. Kevin Mulligan and Barry Smith, “Pieces of a Theory” in B. Smith, Parts and Moments. Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology, Philosophia Verlag, Munich, 1982, p. 44. 34  Formal and Transcendental Logic, Hua XVII, pp. 53–92. 35  GA 20, pp. 58–64; Hua VI, §46, pp. 161–163. 32 33

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So, when Heidegger says that phenomenology is “the analytic description of intentionality in its a priori”, he can be thought to be referring to two things, or rather to the same thing thought of in two ways: first, that the phenomenological method is an analytic description of intentionality itself, viz, the whole of experience, of manifestation itself. In this sense, it is nothing more (and nothing less) than the analytic elaboration on or unpacking of the original tautology of intentionality. Second, it means that this analysis is an unpacking of the universal a priori of correlation that grounds this tautology, and is thereby also an eidetic variation operated on this material a priori structure that is consciousness (or manifestation, or phenomenality) itself. Consciousness or the world in its appearing or manifesting can be described according to the mereology that characterizes it as a material a priori consisting of inseparable parts, which happen in this case to be the subjective and objective poles of intentionality or of phenomenality as such, and the transcendental phase of the reduction can then be thought of as an application of the eidetic variation to intentionality itself. But the structure of intentionality (or of phenomenality) reveals itself, following the reduction, to be strictly synonymous with being itself. And so this final leap that Heidegger presents as the ultimate, missing stage in the reduction that reveals the pure field of consciousness to be identical to being itself36 and therefore opens out onto to the question of being, represents a methodical leap from formal to fundamental ontology. The “question of being” is intentionality’s attempt to apprehend itself – or rather, the attempt by the subjective pole of that intentionality of which it is an inseparable part to apprehend this whole. It is possible, however, that this condition by which intentionality is forever condemned to attempt to apprehend itself from one end, and to attempt to ground and constitute itself as a whole from the point of view of what, despite the reduction, remains just one of its parts and remains moreover just one being among many, is why no absolute science of being is possible, but only an open-ended question of being. The attempt to constitute the essence of being in the way that one can constitute the essence of “red” must remain fundamentally incomplete and interrogative. But several layers of rigorous methodological progress, which we have attempted to sketch, separate the intelligibility of this fundamental ontology from the atomistic, naturalistic and psychologistic formal ontology of the logical positivists whose Voraussetzungen still hold sway over mainstream Anglo-American philosophy. This rigorous methodological progression, we have shown, is strictly phenomenological, and has its roots in the Husserlian struggle against this psychologism and this atomistic formal ontology. Its first step consists in the phenomenological suspension of the natural attitude with regard to beings; its second, eidetic step consists in the constitution of the absolute relations of dependence and independence among the various parts or moments of these constituted objects and of intentional experience in general – this step presupposes that we take the content of our everyday categorial intuitions seriously; and its final step involves the transcendental application of this eidetic variation to the whole of intentional experience, allowing its own

36

 GA 20, pp. 136–159.

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constitutive dependent parts to emerge as such. Only then can the question of being become intelligible, and only then can Heidegger be received and read on his own terms, which are phenomenological, and which presuppose the entire phenomenological methodological apparatus that so sharply distinguishes its understanding of being – i.e., of the nature and content of intuition – from the “analytic” understanding. Only then can we think with Heidegger, and allow ourselves to see whatever it is he has to show us, rather than simply “using” him to do whatever it is we intended to do anyway, in accordance with “tasks determined elsewhere and otherwise”.

The Topic of Sense in Being and Time Daniel O. Dahlstrom

Introduction On the opening pages of Being and Time Heidegger throws down the gauntlet at traditional ontologies. Prejudices of construing being as undefinable, self-evident, and the most universal and emptiest of concepts are, he charges, so widespread that raising the question of being itself is considered the mark of a methodological deficiency. Yet it is in fact “the most essential [prinzipiellste] question,” not least given the make-up of the sciences.1 Every science rests upon “basic concepts” of the entities making up its respective subject matter. In order to determine the adequacy of those basic concepts for the entities they putatively designate, it is necessary to interpret the entities on the basis of “the basic constitution” of their being (die Grundverfassung seines Seins). Since the sciences are thus founded upon ontologies (conceptions of being), it would be “naïve and lacking in transparency” to conduct research into how those entities are without discussing the sense of being at all. From these considerations, he draws the following conclusion (hereafter `S1’), italicizing it for emphasis. All ontology…remains blind and a perversion of the objective most proper to it if it has not first sufficiently clarified the sense of being. (SZ 11)

 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1967), 9 (hereafter ‘SZ’). No English translation is cited since the page numbers of the Niemeyer edition are given in the margins of both standard English translations. I am grateful to Andrew Butler and Al and Maria Miller for valuable critical comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 1

D. O. Dahlstrom (*) Boston University, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_8

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He accordingly also refers to the question of the sense of being as “the fundamental question” (Fundamentalfrage) and the “basic question” (Grundfrage) of all ontology (5, 231). Given the question’s fundamental status, he discusses what enters into a question in general (SZ §2) before turning to what is exceptional about the question of being (the theme of §3, where S1 occurs). Curiously, however, he does not – at least initially – clarify in a similar way how he understands a sense in general. Yet the question of the sense of being is puzzling since not only ‘being’ but ‘sense’ is said in many ways. In Being and Time no less, Heidegger uses the term in different ways, making it difficult to pin down the very theme of the work. Yet the intelligibility of the question of the sense of being turns on, among other things, our ability to determine the meaning of ‘sense’ in play. In §§31–32 of Being and Time Heidegger does get around to explaining how he understands the operative meaning of ‘sense’ in this regard but it is an explanation that is itself fraught with difficulties. In addition to being abstract and compendious to a fault, it relies precariously upon metaphors. Not surprisingly perhaps, there have been few detailed, sustained investigations of the topic.2 The following study examines Heidegger’s uses of ‘sense’ in Being and Time and his explicit treatments of the topic in the work. These treatments include the discussion of the topic generally (the thematic, existential meaning of ‘sense’ given in §§31–32) and the interpretation of the sense of being that is peculiar to being-here (the temporal, ontological meaning of ‘sense’ in §65). The examination has two complementary objectives. The first objective is to bring to light some of the difficulties and puzzles attending Heidegger’s elusive account of the concept of sense. The second objective is to suggest how, despite these hurdles, he wields the concept effectively in proposing an answer to the fundamental question of the sense of being.

Use and Mention: Semantic and Thematic Significance On the first page of SZ, Heidegger translates a few lines from Plato’s Sophist where the Stranger asks Theaetetus what he wishes to designate (semainein) by ‘being,’ since the Stranger admits that  – unlike Theatetus presumably  – he has become embarrassingly unsure of its meaning. The Greek does not have quotation marks, but the infinitive semainein suggests that the question should be understood as a semantic question. Heidegger seems to be following that suggestion when he translates the infinitive as “using the expression being [seiend]” (italics in the original) and immediately follows up the translated passage by rhetorically asking whether  Several authors have addressed the topic in general, often quite ably, but without providing a close analysis of the passages and language in which Heidegger gives his account of sense or meaning (as it is often translated), particularly as the Woraufhin of projection; see, for example, Blattner 1999, 39–40; Crowell 2013, 28–29; Dreyfus 1992, 221–223; Hoagland 2013, 149–159; Sheehan 2015, 88; McManus 2012, 115–117, 174n. 2

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we know today “what we actually mean [meinen] by the word ‘being’ [seiend].” The use of italics and the quotation marks, following the reference to an expression and word respectively, indicate mention not use of ‘being.’ So, too, in the penultimate sentence of this opening paragraph, he states that the work’s aim is to “work out concretely the question of the sense of ‘being’ [Sein],” both italicizing the term and marking it off with quotation marks, as he does earlier in the paragraph. The apparent assimilation of the gerundive and infinitive forms to one another is striking but not my main concern here. What I want to underscore is Heidegger’s formulation of his basic question, right at the outset of SZ, in semantic terms. In this formulation – “sense of ‘being’” – ‘sense’ appears to have a semantic significance.3 The immediate difficulty, especially for readers schooled in the use/mention distinction, is the fact that Heidegger in the same passage formulates the basic question of SZ by using, not mentioning, the word ‘being.’4 From the fact that we do not know “what we actually mean [meinen] by the word ‘being’ [seiend],” he infers the necessity of “positing the question of the sense of being anew.” From the fact that we are not embarrassed by our ignorance, he infers the need “to reawaken an understanding of the sense of the question.” So here he speaks of a “sense of being” and a “sense of the question” as well. Instead of speaking simply of the sense of ‘being,’ he also speaks, without blinking an eye, of “the sense of being.” In other words, in addition to formulating the basic question of SZ as the question of the sense of an expression, he formulates it as the question of the sense of what is expressed. Thus, in addition to its semantic significance (flagged by the mention rather than use of ‘being’), ‘sense’ appears to have some thematic significance. This analysis of the opening paragraph of SZ demonstrates that, at least as Heidegger introduces the aim of the work, he works with different if not equivocal senses of ‘sense’: one that is clearly semantic or linguistic, pertaining to an expression or word, and another that pertains to some theme designated by an expression or word. The fact that Heidegger moves back and forth between the two senses suggests that he does not see a discrepancy between them. Yet whether or not there is a discrepancy (indeed, whether or not he is conflating the two senses deliberately or confusedly), the nature of their relation is – prima facie at least – hardly apparent. The presence of these two senses in the same context is not confined to the opening paragraph. In the opening sections of SZ (§§1–2), Heidegger refers to both the sense of ‘being’ and the sense of being, what ‘being’ means and the understanding of being (SZ 4–5). This pattern continues throughout SZ.  For example, he speaks of the senses of ‘phenomenon’ and phenomenon (SZ 28ff, 35, 51, 63), ‘being-on-­hand’ and onhandness (SZ 45, 48f, 56), ‘being-in-time’ and time (SZ 18f), ‘references’ and reference (SZ 76f), ‘descriptive phenomenology’  The fact that quotation marks may be used not a indicators of mention of a term but as scare quotes for emphasis raises further difficulties for interpretation. 4  Contemporary discussion of difficulties besetting the use/mention distinction typically begin with the objection that mentioning a word is a way of using it and, indeed, a way that, while distinctive, is far from obvious; see Donald Davidson, “Quotation,” Theory and Decision 11/1 (1979): 27–40 and Herman Cappelen & Ernest Lepore, “Quotation,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2012). 3

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and phenomenological description (SZ 35, 37), ‘world’ and world (64f, 211), and ‘truth’ and truth (33, 220–26).5

Meanings and the Semantic Use of ‘Sense’ In SZ Heidegger frequently uses ‘meaning’ (Bedeutung) and ‘mean’ (bedeuten) to designate a term’s significance.6 He analyzes, for example, three meanings of assertions generally as well as three meanings of ‘being valid’ (SZ 154–57). At the same time he contends that assertions are derivative of understanding and interpretation, the existentials in which he embeds his explicit account of sense (more precisely, the thematic meaning of ‘sense’). So, too, he makes the point that what can be articulated discursively – i.e., in talk, the articulation of what is understandable – is the sense (again, construed in some thematic, not necessarily linguistic way). What is in fact divided up in a discursive articulation is a “whole of meaning” (Bedeutungsganze). That whole can be dissolved into meanings that are always “bound up with sense” (sinnhaft) (SZ 161). As this last phrase suggests, Heidegger characterizes meanings in terms of sense. Heidegger’s account of meanings in SZ is complicated by the fact that he assigns them a role that is both ancillary to sense and essential to the use of words. That is to say, on his account, meanings suppose sense rather than vice versa (and words suppose meanings rather than vice versa). Since the aim of this paper is to try to shed light on the thematic meaning of ‘sense’ in SZ, I forego further consideration of the complexities of his analysis of meanings. But, for the purposes of this paper, it is worth noting that the semantic meaning of ‘sense’ flagged above is equivalent to Heidegger’s standard use of ‘meaning’ and he analyzes meanings in a way that, in contrast to senses, links them primarily to discourse and language.7  Heidegger deploys the expression ‘sense of’ both with and without quotation marks surrounding the word that follows ‘of,’ presumably marking in this way semantic and thematic uses of ‘sense’ respectively. On the one hand, for example, he speaks of the sense of ‘seiend’ (SZ 6), ‘sum’ (SZ 24), ‘repetition’ (SZ 26), ‘hermeneutics’ (SZ 37), ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’ (SZ 42f), ‘empiricism’ (SZ 50), habito and diligo (SZ 54), ‘taking care of’ (Besorgen) (SZ 57), ‘interpreting’ (SZ 62), ‘within’ (SZ 62), ‘nature’ (SZ 65), ‘surrounding’ (Umherum) (SZ 66), ‘between four walls’ (SZ 68), ‘tool’ (SZ 74). Yet he just as often speaks of the sense of concepts (SZ 31, 34), assertions and judgments (SZ 32), questions and questioning (SZ 1, 8, 20f), belief (SZ 10), knowing (SZ 71), ontology (SZ 11, 27), ancient ontology (SZ 25), science (SZ 11), time (SZ 18) propositions (SZ 18), destruction (SZ 22), ens (SZ 24), research (SZ 34, 36, 50), covering up (SZ 36), analytic (SZ 38), structures (SZ 44), immersing (SZ 54), knowledge-problem (SZ 61), substantiality (SZ 63), occurring (SZ 80), creating signs (SZ 80), and so on. 6  For the most part, Heidegger uses ‘meaning’ (Bedeutung) together with quotation marks or italics, signaling mention not use; see, for example, his talk of the meaning of ‘phenomenal’ (SZ 37), ‘understanding something’ (SZ 143), ‘cura’ (SZ 199), ‘truth’” (SZ 256), ‘being guilty of’ (SZ 282). Yet there are several exceptions such as his talk of the meaning that the world (not ‘world’) has (SZ 65). 7  In short, ‘meaning’ = ‘sense’ but meaning ≠ sense. 5

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The Thematic Use of ‘Sense’ Heidegger thus distinguishes sense thematically from meaning, along the lines of the difference between the thematic and semantic uses of ‘sense’ noted at the outset. But he also closely links sense to meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit) as integral to the disclosure of being-in-the-world in understanding and interpretation. It is in the context of his analyses of understanding and its elaboration in the form of an interpretation that Heidegger first gives an explicit account of how he conceives sense thematically (§§ 31–32).

Meaningfulness, Purposefulness, and the Context of Relevance Understanding is for Heidegger a “fundamental existential,” something that is integral to what it means for us, being-here, “to be.” What it means is, first, to be “in the world” in a way that discloses that fact and, second, to be that “for-the-sake-ofwhich” we are in the world. We are in the world by virtue of understanding our way around it, i.e., by understanding its meaningfulness, a meaningfulness that is grounded in our understanding of what being-here is for-the-sake-of (Worumwillen): ourselves.8 As with his other analyses in SZ, Heidegger works on both “ontic” and “ontological” levels, designating an entity and its manner of being respectively, e.g., a paintbrush and the fact that is handy (Zuhandensein). In the case of being-here (our way of being), the corresponding levels are “existentiel” and “existential.” For example, on an existentiell level, understanding a paintbrush is knowing how to use it, and this understanding coincides with an existential disclosure of the paintbrush’s handiness (its being) and the potential-to-be (my being) that includes, among other things, what the brush is ultimately for. ‘Meaningfulness’ is Heidegger’s term for the ensemble of relevant connections among implements, e.g., the way that a brush refers to paint, brush and paint to a surface, and so on. The brush is meaningful because of its connection with the paint and because their connection is in turn connected with something further that is itself in a similar way meaningful. More precisely, the brush is made in order to paint, the paint is made in order to be applied with the brush, and what they are for is painting a surface, so that there is a setting where they become relevant and with what (e.g., a house badly in need of a paint job). This entire context of relevance (Bewandtnisganzheit) made up by these meaningful connections is, as already noted, for the sake of those who are here (e.g., in the suggested scenario, the painter

 Heidegger does not elaborate the nature and extent of this grounding, leaving open the question of the difference between meaningfulness and purposefulness. In order to avoid the clumsiness of employing ‘for-the-sake-of’ – Heidegger’s remake of Aristotle’s hou heneka – as a noun, I occasionally employ ‘purposefulness’ to translate Worumwillen. 8

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and the house’s owner). The “for-the-sake-of-which,” as Heidegger puts it, “points to [i.e., means, bedeutet] an ‘in order to’ [Um-zu], the latter a ‘what for’ [Dazu],” and the latter points in turn to where and with what they become relevant (Wobei, Womit). “We construe the character of the connection among these connections of referring as that of pointing-to [or meaning: bedeuten].... The connected whole of this pointing-to [one another] we call meaningfulness [Bedeutsamkeit]” (SZ 87). What implements are for and where they are relevant – their (relative) meaningfulness – depends upon how they contribute to the ultimate purposefulness of the context. But being the ultimate purpose of any such context is by no means the only way in which we are implicated in it. To the contrary, we are deeply and actively embedded in such contexts of meaning ourselves. Just as the brush and the paint point to one another, so they point to a painter and vice versa. In other words, we occupy an at once familiar and pre-eminent place in that context. That context, moreover, is part of the world into which we’ve been thrown. It has its own history. For example, in some states, it is now illegal to use trisodium phosphate to pre-treat the surfaces to be painted or to use oil-based paints. Contemporary painters have to adapt to the unavailability of these traditional tools, to learn to work with a different set of tools, and to develop practices different in some respects from past practices. The general point here is that understanding extends not only to what the implements and the relevant connections among them are for, but also to the context as a whole (including what the connections are, why they are relevant, how the implements work, and how to use them). Moreover, understanding on both levels, that of the implements and the context as a whole, amounts to recognizing various possibilities and knowing how to manage them. At the same time, of course, there would be no context of relevant connections without our implementation of it. Insofar as we understand, we are both the engine and the end of meaningfulness, so construed. Understanding is, as noted, an existential that coincides with some concrete behavior that can be described apart from its existential significance. In other words, even as it takes the mundane, existentiel form of painting a house, understanding is a fundamental way of existing (or, equivalently, being in the world) that itself discloses that existence. Understanding in the existential sense discloses the world’s meaningfulness thanks to our understanding of the reflexive purposefulness of being-here, i.e., being in the world for our own sake. “The disclosedness of understanding, as the disclosure of meaningfulness and purposefulness, affect the entire being-in-the-world,” Heidegger notes, and the fact that they are both disclosed in being-here means, he adds, “that being-here is the entity for whom, as being-in-the-­ world, what matters is itself” (SZ 143).9  As a metonym for ‘being-here,’ ‘being-in-the-world’ encompasses what we are more or less consciously doing (activities that define our worlds), what and how we encounter things within the world (innerweltlich), and to what end. These activities, encounters, and ends are woven into the understanding that defines us, disclosing that and who we are. We can say that we understand what we are doing, what we encounter and how, or for what end, but each of these instances of understanding supposes the other. But these various concrete instances of understanding and their reciprocity are based upon an existential understanding, an understanding of what it means for us to be here at all. 9

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The fact that being-here by way of understanding discloses itself structurally as that for-the-sake-of-which it is in-the-world is significant in at least two ways. (a) It is significant because it underscores that being-here is an unfinished process that it is, at bottom, a distinctive possibility. The distinctiveness lies in the fact that we exist as this possibility or, more precisely, a “potential-to-be” (Seinkönnen) that can go awry.10 In the case of purely logical possibilities or the contingencies of something on hand, possibilities piggyback on a concept of actuality. By contrast, it is not actuality but possibility that is “the most primordial and ultimate, positive, ontological determination of being-here” (SZ 143f). However, far from being indeterminate or arbitrary, this potential-to-be (the equivalent to being-here) is a determinate possibility into which it has been thrown (geworfen). While this point was made above on ontic and existentiel levels (by noting historical conditions of contemporary painters’ context), it also applies to the possibilities of existing authentically at all. Thus, Heidegger stresses that, insofar as it is thrown into the world, being-here is also “being free for the potential-to-be that is most its own” (SZ 144). (b) This reflexive purposiveness is also significant because we are allegedly more or less mindful of it. Describing understanding as a “disclosing potential-to-be,” Heidegger contends that whoever is here understands, i.e., “knows” that being free for this possibility is what, in the end, matters (SZ 144).11

Understanding as Projection Heidegger flags the twofold significance just described – unfinished as a potential-­ to-­be and more or less cognizant of the fact – by further characterizing the understanding as the way that being-here projects its being onto possibilities (SZ 148). For all the essential dimensions of what is disclosed in it, it presses forward into possibilities (SZ 145). He then makes a further observation about the pre-thematic, unplanned character of the understanding as a projection. Since he does so in the same terms that he subsequently uses to characterize sense, I cite the observation (hereafter ‘S2’) in full. ...[I]n each case, being-here has already projected itself and is projecting, as long as it is. Being-here always already understands itself and, ever after, as long as it is, on the basis of possibilities. The projective character of the understanding means, furthermore, that it does not itself thematically grasp that towards which [or in view of which] it projects, the possibilities [das, woraufhin es entwirft, die Möglichkeiten] (SZ 145).  Some commentators read Seinkönnen not simply as a potential but as an ability-to-be or “know how,” the very possibilities into which Dasein presses ahead; see Blattner 1999, 33–36, 40–42; Crowell 2013, 174, 179. 11  This gloss on understanding is abbreviated for the purpose of introducing Heidegger’s account of the topic of sense. A more accurate gloss would not sidestep the analysis of mattering, a notion underscoring that understanding is inseparable from affective modes of being-here, that being-here consists in being a thrown projection, or (as Heidegger sums up the same point) that it consists in caring (Sorge). 10

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This last reference (i.e., “towards” or “in view of” what the understanding as a projection projects) presents interpretive difficulties to which I return below. For present purposes, however, S2 underscores the fact that to be-here is to understand oneself on the basis of possibilities, without thereby behaving according to some sort of plan, and that those possibilities stand in apposition to what it projects upon or towards, or in view of which it does so. At this level of abstraction, Heidegger is no doubt speaking primarily of understanding as an existential. However, the same point applies to some degree on an existentiel level. Taking the brush in hand, exercising the know-how or understanding with respect to it, is, for example, a way of projecting possibilities for them. To understand the brush, the paint, etc., is precisely to project possibilities for them. The painter typically does so non-reflectively in the course of projecting herself onto possibilities, some of which coincide with the possibilities of those implements. “It [understanding] projects the being of being-here onto its purposefulness just as originally as onto the meaningfulness as the worldhood of the world” (SZ 145).12

The Structures of Understanding and Interpretation ‘Interpreting’ is Heidegger’s term for making explicit the understanding as the twin projection of possibilities generally and of being-here specifically onto possibilities. (These projections coincide since being-here and being-in-the-world are equivalent but not identical). When, for example, the painter understands her paintbrush, she projects possibilities by taking it in hand. When she makes her understanding of what the brush is for explicit, she interprets the implement as a paint-applicator or paintbrush. Similarly, we may read a quotation containing three periods, preceded and followed by words in the quotation, without stopping to reflect on their significance. But if we do so, we would typically interpret the three words as an ellipsis. The use of as in such sentences constitutes an interpretation. Heidegger is quick to add, however, that interpretation need not take the form of an assertion or an explicit use of ‘as’ (in the way that the two examples might suggest). The articulation of the as-structure is based upon the set of foregoing relevant connections that “the interpretation unpacks” (SZ 150). For this reason, he also notes, there is no experience of something purely on hand, as though the interpretation consisted in “throw[ing] a ‘meaning’ over something nakedly on hand” (ibid.). Instead, this as-structure of interpretation emerges from a structure of understanding, at least one aspect of which is already in place before interpretation of any sort makes it explicit. Heidegger elaborates three aspects of the structure of  Thanks to the way that this projection existentially constitutes the sort of being peculiar to being-­ here, it is always more than it factually is (were we to construe it as something merely on hand). But it is also never more than what pertains to its facticity, which is to say that it can project itself onto its authentic potential-to-be or not. 12

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understanding, albeit in each case with a view to how it grounds interpretation. (Since it is somewhat misleading to attribute the structure, as Heidegger occasionally does, merely to understanding, I refer to it as “the basic structure of understanding and interpretation.”) Heidegger’s account of this basic structure is compressed to a fault, particularly given its importance for his theory. In what follows I try to “put some meat on its bones” by revisiting the example exploited earlier. Everyday interpretation, the sort of interpretation that sees its way around a particular context, is based upon a tacit (unabgehobene) understanding. A painter’s understanding of what she does, her “know-how” coincides with her understanding of the context of relevance (Bewandtnisganzheit) in which paintbrushes, paint, house walls, and so on “point to” one another as well as to the painter herself. As discussed above (3.1), this reciprocal “pointing-to” makes up the “meaningfulness” and “purposefulness” of the painter’s world. A painter is able to paint because she “has” this context (and the relevance of what is handy within it) “in advance” (Vorhabe). Heidegger’s term for this first element of the structure, usually translated ‘fore-­ having’ or ‘pre-possession’ is a neologism that is open to different readings, especially given its closeness to the German term Vorhaben. Presumably, however, the neologism does not mean simply a plan or intention, as does Vorhaben, for the obvious reason that the understanding may be unplanned or unintended, at least in any explicit sense. An experienced painter does not “plan” to dip the brush into the paint or “form the intention” of doing so, even though what he plans to do entails his doing so. At the same time, Heidegger likely intends the –habe in Vorhabe (the ‘having’ in ‘fore-having’) to signify more than the fact that the painter already possesses a property, a position, or even a place (e.g., ‘I have the brushes,’ ‘I have the experience,’ ‘I’m a licensed painter,’ ‘I have the house’s north wall in front of me’). It also signifies that she has a task before her (so that his readers continue to hear reverberations of Vorhaben).13 Having this task entails, to be sure, already having/ possessing the context as a whole (including brushes, background, and, not least, proximity to the house). The paintbrush, the paint, the walls of the house, and so on all enter into the context of relevance that the painter, as just reviewed, has and understands in advance. Yet none of them need stand out in particular until the painter, guided by a certain viewpoint, puts some of them to use and thus “interprets” them. When the painter makes use of the things within the context, she does so with a particular view to that use, a guiding preview or fore-sight (Vorsicht) that fixes the aspect in terms of which what is understood is to be interpreted. A preview of what the house will look like when she’s finished guides her selection of paints, the sequence of using them, and so on. Against the backdrop of what she has in advance (vor-hat), she looks ahead (vor-sieht) to what she’ll make of it.

 The word-play on Vorhabe can be read as anticipating Heidegger’s later doctrine of time-space, where what we already have is a domain for decisions (a future). 13

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As with the terms for the other aspects of the forestructure, Heidegger is trying to make a point by stretching the ordinary meaning of a term. Thus, he deploys Vorsicht in a way that does not directly correspond to ordinary usage but without completely foregoing the reverberations of that usage. Thus, Vorsicht can ordinarily be translated with such terms as ‘caution,’ ‘attentiveness,’ ‘carefulness,’ and the like. For example, Vorsicht, die Lücke can serve to translate the signs at the London Tube that say “mind the gap,” alerting passengers to pay attention to distance between the platform and the train when entering or exiting. Heidegger likely supposes that his readers will associate this ordinary significance with his account of Vorsicht as a part of the forestructure of understanding. So, too, the painter’s pre-­ view or what she sees in advance entails being careful to work from the top down, to avoid applying too much paint, to start with a primer, and so on. In Heidegger’s gloss on fore-having, he stresses the pre-interpretive character of understanding, such that even when a context of relevance has been explicitly interpreted, it retreats back into a tacit understanding. In his gloss on fore-sight or preview, he identifies it with the aspect that dictates the terms for interpreting what is understood. In other words, in contrast to what is had in advance (Vorhabe) where no interpretation need take place, the preview (Vorsicht) is precisely what “tailors” what is taken (in what we have in advance) to a specific possibility of interpretation (SZ 150). What is so understood – what we have targeted and retained within the context that we have in advance – becomes conceivable (begreiflich) thanks to the interpretation. The interpretation can be faulty, to be sure. That is to say, it can draw on the conceptuality of the entity to be interpreted or it can force the latter into concepts that are at odds with the entity’s sort of being. In either case, however, the interpretation is grounded in a pre-conception (Vorgriff). Heidegger’s term for this third aspect of the forestructure of understanding has the same root as the German term for concept (Begriff), namely, greifen, but ordinarily signals not a concept but an anticipation. Thus, Vorgriff is typically used in the construction im Vorgriff auf, usually translatable as ‘in anticipation of’ or ‘in advance of,’ just as the verb vorgreifen signifies ‘anticipate,’ ‘pre-empt,’ or even ‘precipitate.’14 Once again, though, Heidegger can link this ordinary meaning to his basic contention that a conceptuality is in place in advance of, perhaps in some cases even anticipating the interpretation.

The Existential Meaning of ‘Sense’ The “as-structure of interpretation,” the interpretation of something as something, is based upon a structure that is already in place in understanding generally, the so-­ called “fore-structure of understanding” described in the foregoing section.

14

 Most literally perhaps, Vorgriff could be translated ‘prehension.’

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Particularly when the interpretation is explicit and thematic, it clearly supposes the tacit and pre-thematic character of understanding. Following his gloss on the relation between these two structures, Heidegger first explicitly addresses the theme of sense. But he introduces the theme by raising a pair of pivotal rhetorical questions regarding the relationship between the two structures. One might contend, he muses, that the elaboration of these two structures marks the end of the analysis, i.e., that these phenomena are in some sense “ultimates” (Letztheiten]. Signaling otherwise, he poses the following questions (hereafter ‘S3’): Or do the fore-structure of understanding and the as-structure of interpretation indicate an existential-ontological connection with the phenomenon of the projection? And does this refer back to a primordial constitution of being-here’s being? (SZ 151).

S3 is Heidegger’s way of intimating that the phenomenon of projection is connected with the structures of understanding and interpretation on a more fundamental, existentially and ontologically significant level, albeit a level that remains to be determined. But S3 also serves notice that this connection is indicative of what primordially constitutes being-here’s being.15 After adding that, based upon the analyses up to this point, we are hardly equipped to answer the questions raised in S3, Heidegger speaks of the need to inquire whether what those two structures have brought to light does not itself already present “a unified phenomenon.” The phenomenon he has in mind is much in use in philosophy but without having been explicated in the sort of ontologically original way that would correspond to it. ‘Sense’ is Heidegger’s term for the phenomenon in question. Heidegger introduces his account of sense by inserting it into the phenomenon of understanding, based upon the preceding analysis of the latter. Precisely in the course of projecting possibilities, the understanding discloses an entity with a view to this or that possibility peculiar to the type of being that the entity it is. For example, the painter projects and thus discloses the paintbrush as a possible means of applying paint. He does so by projecting a world, i.e., an entire context of meaningfulness and projecting the brush (as an entity within the world) onto it. The concern (Besorgen) of the painter (as a being-in-the-world) has already secured itself in the connections of referring one implement to another that are proper to that context. When, in this way, she comes to understand the brush, it may be said to have a sense (though, as indicated below, this way of using ‘sense’ is not quite accurate). Channeling Husserl’s conception of a noematic sense, Heidegger immediately adds that what is understood is, strictly speaking, not the sense, but the entity in question or its being. At this juncture, he gives his first explicit account (hereafter ‘S4’) of the thematic concept of sense. What is understood, however, is, taken strictly, not the sense but the entity or the being. Sense is that in which [the] understandability of something is maintained. What can be articulated in disclosing by way of understanding we call [its] sense. The concept of sense

 We can surmise that Heidegger has something time-related in mind here, since he has announced his intention of demonstrating that time is the sense of being-here’s being. 15

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encompasses the formal structure of what necessarily belongs to what the interpretation articulates, insofar as it understands. (SZ 151)

Although it is abstract and begs for clarification, S4 sets out certain defining features of sense. Sense sustains the possibility of understanding something or, more precisely, it is that in which the understandability is sustained or maintains itself (sich hält). It corresponds to what can be articulated (insofar as the understanding is disclosive) and, in this respect, the concept of sense spans (umfaßt) the formal structure of what belongs of necessity to what the interpretation articulates. Again, in an attempt to put some meat on these bones, it may prove helpful to return to our painter. We may ask the painter what sense it makes to use certain paints and brushes, to mix the paint, and so on. She may answer that it makes sense because these practices contribute to the overall sense of painting the house. The sense of painting the house is what sustains the understandability of certain things, namely, everything that enters into that project. By the same token, the sense of painting the house spans over and corresponds to whatever can be articulated about those same things, based upon how they are understood. The moment that the painter articulates, perhaps in answering our question, why and how she uses (i.e., understands and interprets) the paints or the brushes, the sense of painting the house grounds her answers. All the while, moreover, the sense of painting the house is relative to her (a point addressed below). Yet even if these attempted clarifications provide some elucidation of the function of sense signaled by S4, they leave unanswered what sense is such that it makes possible those understandings, interpretations, and articulations. Heidegger comes closest to answering this pivotal question by immediately appending to S4 the following lines (hereafter ‘S5’): Sense is the view-to-which [or, alternatively, the towards-which, the direction] of the projection [das Woraufhin des Entwurfes], on the basis of which something becomes understandable as something. The view-to-which of the projection is structured by the pre-possession, pre-view, and pre-conception. (SZ 151).

The sense is accordingly that in view of which the projection is made or what the projection is directed at or towards, such that things become understandable. I understand the paint and the brushes in light of the sense of painting, i.e., the view to which I project the possibility of painting or, alternatively, the direction that my projection of possibilities takes.16 The first sentence in S5 presents significant puzzles.17 One puzzle is apparent from the different translations suggested for das Woraufhin des Entwurfes, e.g., “the

 One might be tempted to equate the sense here with the fore-structure, but given Heidegger’s claim that the sense is structured by the fore-structure, he is distinguishing them in some way. Graham Nicholson’s interpretation moves in the direction of that equation when he states that “Verstehen projects a ‘fore-structure’”; see Nicholson 1999, 172. 17  I pass over a further puzzle concerning how we are to understand the ‘is’ in the opening sentence. Is the ‘is’ here an abbreviated way of saying ‘is identical to’ or of saying ‘is partly’? 16

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upon which of the projection,”18 “towards which it projects,”19 or, as suggested above, “the view-to-which” the projection is made. A case can be made for all these translations/interpretations and perhaps for others. A second puzzle concerns the meaning of the genitive here. Is it a possessive or objective genitive or both? In other words, however we take the nominalized relative pronoun before ‘of the projection,’ does it (Woraufhin) stand for something that depends upon the projection? Or does the projection require something at which it is projected that exceeds the scope of the projection itself? If Woraufhin des Entwurfes is translated ‘direction of the projection,’ how are we to understand the status of the direction relative to the projection? Exacerbating these puzzles is the fact that the literal use of the phrase in question is itself hardly common. To be sure, the term ‘draft’ or ‘projection’ (Entwurf) is common enough, signaling something produced on paper, in some medium or the other, or only in thought. So, too, is the corresponding verb, frequently taking as its direct object a ‘model,’ ‘picture,’ ‘rough draft,’ ‘outline,’ or ‘plan.’20 But project ‘upon’ is less frequent, though it has been used in connection with the phenomenon of casting an image, a shadow, or beams of light onto a screen.21 The problem with a metaphorical reliance upon this literal use – hence, by extension, with the translation “upon which” – is the fact that the screen, whether it be conceived as something on hand or handy, suggests something actual or already actualized. By contrast, neither the existentiel sense of painting a house nor the existential sense of being-­ here can be grounded in anything but possibilities. (Note that this grounding does not settle the question of the relation of the project to its direction.) Further complicating matters is the fact that the relative pronoun here nominalized (Woraufhin) can signify ‘whereupon’ or ‘after which,’ but also ‘with a view to which.’ In ordinary usage it is used as part of a question, e.g., Woraufhin hat er das getan? that can be translated as ‘what led him to do that?’ ‘In virtue of what, on account of what, or with a view to what did he do that?’ or, more literally, ‘what did he do that for?’ where ‘what’ can stand as an abbreviation of ‘what purpose,’ ‘what reason,’ etc. In such instances the word suggests a reason, motivation, or purpose of an action or even its intelligibility.22 As with his terms for the aspects of the fore-­ structure, Heidegger may well be appealing to more than one use of a term or phrase

 Macquarrie & Robinson translate it this way and Stambaugh follows their lead; see Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 193; Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: SUNY, 2010), 147. 19  Kisiel, 441. 20  Apparently, the entwerfen originally had a technical meaning in relation to weaving; see Kluge 1995, 224. 21  Fritz Schröter, “Zerlegungsmethoden des Fernsehens,” Handbuch der Bildtelegraphie und des Fernsehens: Grundlagen, hrsg. Von Fritz Schröter et  al. (Berlin: Springer, 1932), 40: “Sie [Bildchen] werden dann über ein Ablenksprisma auf einen Schirm entworfen.” 22  In this respect, the Woraufhin may correspond to the arche on the basis of which something comes to be known; see Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Delta 1 (1013a15–16). 18

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at once. Indeed, something makes sense, he observes at one point, when it comes to be understood (zu Verständnis gekommen ist) (SZ 151). Given these difficulties, how should we translate and interpret das Woraufhin des Entwurfes, the phrase that Heidegger uses (S5) to define sense? One possible clue is the use to which Heidegger puts the relative pronoun elsewhere in SZ. Throughout the text he principally uses woraufhin in connection with several key verbs to designate the aspect, regard, or direction in which something is disclosed or, equivalently, some disclosive act is performed. In these cases, it might be translated ‘with regard to which,’ ‘with a view to which’ or ‘in which direction.’ Thus he speaks of that with a view to which or in which direction (woraufhin) something is understood (SZ 6), freed up (SZ 85f), discovered (SZ 110), disclosed (SZ 143, 266, 365), eyed or envisaged (SZ 157), summoned (SZ 273).23 Given this usage, there is reason to think that das Woraufhin des Entwurfes is most accurately conveyed as ‘the viewto-­which of the projection’ or, more simply but also more loosely, ‘the direction of the projection’ (SZ 151, 324).24 Heidegger sheds more light on how to understand his gloss on sense when he makes his case that time is the sense of care, the being of being-here. But before turning to that account, there is a further dimension of his thematic treatment of sense that deserves mention, namely, its existential character. As noted above (S4), H stresses that the sense is not, strictly speaking, what is understood but rather what enables things to be understood and articulated. Sense itself then is to be construed as integral to the existential framework of the disclosiveness proper to understanding. As he puts it (hereafter ‘S6’): Sense is an existential of being-here, not a property that attaches to an entity... Only being-­ here ‘has’ [a] sense, insofar as the disclosedness of being-in-the-world can be ‘fulfilled’ through the entities that can be uncovered in it. Thus only being-here can be sensible or senseless [sinnvoll oder sinnlos]. (SZ 151).

This passage underscores the existential meaning of ‘sense,’ its role in the way that human existence is distinguished by the fact that, in its ways of existing, it is able to disclose the meaning of ‘being’ and uncover entities. Heidegger’s reference to fulfillment here is obviously meant to echo and complement Husserl’s analysis of cognition as the coincidence of empty and filled intentions.25 A further implication of S6 to which Heidegger draws attention bears on the second puzzle raised earlier, namely, the status of the relation of the sense to the projection. The contention that sense is an existential entails, Heidegger adds, that it is not  The list omits the use of woraufhin with ‘projected’ (145, 151, 324–25) and ‘being out for’ (SZ 210). 24  One might object that these locutions have too teleological a ring for what Heidegger has in mind, particularly if he is interpreted as arguing that the sense of being-here just is its being-­ possible rather than some end state. But such an interpretation runs afoul, I submit, of Heidegger’s insistence on an authentic potential-to-be, a projection of possibilities with a clear view to the possibility of the end of all possibilities. 25  The contrast of the nonsensical (unsinnig) and the absurd (widersinnig) on the following page (SZ 152) appropriates and re-writes Husserl’s own version of the contrast. 23

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something “behind” being or in “opposition” to it. To the contrary, to inquire into the sense of being is to inquire into being insofar as “it enters into the intelligibility [Verständlichkeit] of being-here” (SZ 152). The import of these remarks for our puzzle is that the sense is not independent of the projection, though it can very well be – indeed, in an existential respect, must remain – hidden from it. In other words, sense is existentially tied up with the projection of it (the solution to the second puzzle).

The Timely, Ontological Sense of Care My aim in this final segment is to examine how Heidegger develops the topic of sense in the place most central to his argument in SZ, namely, where he sets out to show that timeliness is the ontological sense of being-here, i.e., the sense of its being. After explicitly referring to the earlier gloss on sense (as the Woraufhin des Entwurfes), he explains that opening up (freilegen) that view-to-which means “disclosing what enables the projected” (SZ 324). Once again it is clear that the ‘view-­ to-­which’ (or however it is to be translated) does not signify what is projected but rather the direction of the projection. The projection projects possibilities and, we might add, a hierarchy of possibilities (e.g., where the possibility of painting the house entails the possibilities of getting paint, using paintbrushes, and so on). But when the projection projects these possibilities, it does so in view of something (Woraufhin), i.e., in a certain direction. In Heidegger’s initial gloss on the topic of sense reviewed above, he does not use this language of ‘enabling’ but it is certainly compatible with the earlier talk of ‘understandability’ and ‘articulability’ in S4 and S5. But the issue now is not the sense that makes it possible for me to understand paints and brushes, but for me to be the kind of being I am, i.e., being-here (Dasein). The being of being-here is care (Sorge) and care means “being ahead of itself, already in a world, amidst entities encountered within it” (SZ 192, 327). As such, it is – and concerns itself with – the potential-to-be that it is thrown into the world as, projecting that potential pre-ontologically and making what it thereby encounters present to it. This projection is what enables it to project and understand (to make sense of) various concrete, i.e., existentiell, ways of being – among other things, ways of taking care of its affairs (Besorgen) and being concerned about others (Fürsorge). The projection, furthermore, can be authentic or inauthentic. The existential analysis has made this projection explicit, converting it from a pre-ontological to an ontological projection. The question of the sense of being of being-here is then the question of that in view of which (again, woraufhin) the entity who is here projects possibilities for itself such that it can be a the sort of being who authentically cares, i.e., who projects its authentic potential-to-be. As this last remark suggests, when Heidegger explicitly turns to the question of what the sense of being of being-here is, i.e., what enables its projection of its possibilities, he takes his bearings, not simply from being here, but from being here authentically (SZ 331, 334).

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Being here authentically is an anticipatory resoluteness or, as he also puts it, “being for its ownmost, pre-eminent potential-to-be,” i.e., death (SZ 325). Anticipatory resoluteness is only possible if one is able to come to oneself in regard to this potential-to-be and to “hold out this possibility,” that is to say, Heidegger adds, to exist. To hold out this possibility, letting oneself come to oneself in it is the primordial phenomenon of the future. The future (Zukunft) here is not some not yet, but the “coming” (Kunft) in which being here comes to itself (auf sich zukommt). To come to itself is to come back to what being here in each case already has been. Just as the authentic future is not something not yet, so the character of having been (Gewesenheit) is not something that is no more. Instead what is authentically coming and what is authentically having been are inseparable, and in the union of them, resoluteness presents its situation. The future that has been (and remains so) releases from itself the present (Gegenwart) as a presenting (gegenwärtigend) As he puts it (hereafter ‘S7’) We call timeliness this sort of unitary phenomenon, namely, the future [in the process] of having been [and] present….Timeliness reveals itself to be the sense of authentic care. (SZ 326).

Only through this timeliness is authentic care, the genuine being of being here possible. From the fact that timeliness makes it possible to care authentically, Heidegger infers that it underlies the phenomenon of care as a unified whole, namely, “being ahead of itself, already in a world, amidst entities encountered within it” (SZ 192, 327). This timeliness is indicated by the adverbs ‘ahead’ (vorweg) and ‘already’ (schon) and the preposition ‘amidst’ (bei) in the definition of care where, however, their meanings are drawn, not from ordinary conceptions of time, but from the authentic understanding of time. The reason for this last caveat is patent. The terms of the ordinary conception of time apply to entities insofar as they are simply on hand, elapsing “in time.” If those terms are applied with their ordinary significance to being-here, “[t]he being of the entity with the character of being-here would become something on hand [einem Vorhandenen]” (SZ 327). Construed, to be sure, in this distinctive, “unitary” way, timeliness is the sense of care, the direction of the projection that is constitutive of being, in the case of being-­ here. Timeliness is that, with a view to which, being-here projects its possibilities. The earlier thematic and existential account of sense has prepared Heidegger’s readers to some extent for this conclusion. But a dimension of sense becomes even clearer in light of the argument that the sense of being for being-here at all is this timeliness. That timeliness is enabling but not as something other than being here itself. Instead it is enabling as a constitutive condition of its possibility. “The sense of this being, that is to say, of care, the sense that enables this care in its constitution, makes up primordially the being of the potential-to-be” (SZ 325). Shortly before making this observation, Heidegger notes that, strictly speaking, sense stands in relation to the primary projection (that of the understanding of being) that “affords” (gibt) the sense (SZ 324f). This affording suggests that the projecting is to some degree responsible for the sense. After noting that the sense of care (Dasein’s being) enables it in its constitution, making up the being of the

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potential-­to-be, Heidegger adds that “the sense of the being of being-here is not a free-floating something other and ‘outside’ it, but the self-understanding being-here itself” (SZ 325). This last remark echoes the point made above in suggesting an answer to the second puzzle (the puzzle about the relation of the sense and the projection). The sense is not independent of the projection, although it is not the same as the projection. Instead, drawing again on the adverbs written into the structural definition of care as a unified whole, Heidegger argues that timeliness is the sense of being-here’s being by virtue of enabling the unity of care and being constitutive of what makes it a whole. Avoiding any talk of timeliness as an entity or being, Heidegger contends that timeliness is the sense of care as a primordial timing, the timing that times itself, essentially and yet essentially unthematically.26 As such and only as such, is timeliness the sense of care. The level of abstraction here is daunting, and the fact that the argument draws upon a challenging account of being-here authentically (the resoluteness that anticipates death) complicates the argument even further. Yet consideration of the constitution of living organisms can perhaps shed some light on the way that timeliness as the sense of care is a constitutive condition of being-here’s being. For all living beings, continued self-preservation (via, for example, homeostasis, necessitating something akin to being-in-the-world) is the pre-eminent constitutive condition. So, too, something akin to care for continued existence (being active, striving for it) is basic to animal life, a necessary condition of it. Channeling Heidegger’s own phrasing, we might say that this continued existence is what matters to it. At the same time even a healthy organism with cognitive and affective powers has the capacity to project possibilities (e.g., repair, nourishment) with a view to or in the direction of sustaining itself in this condition, without in the process necessarily having any awareness that it is doing so. Nonetheless, oblivious or not, the organism exists by always being ahead of itself in a world into which it is already thrown with a certain potential to be (Seinkönnen) that comes to it in step with the way it is amidst things, making them present. As with organisms generally, so with care, the being of being-­ here, a timeliness  – signaled by the inseparable unity of being ahead of itself, already in a world, amidst things – makes it possible, and it does so by serving as a constitutive condition of its projection of possibilities for itself. In just this way, timeliness is the sense of being of being-here.

Conclusion At the outset of SZ Heidegger characterizes phenomenology’s task as that of making explicit “what is for the most part...hidden but is at the same time something that belongs essentially to what shows itself for the most part, such that it makes up its

26

 SZ 328: “Die Zeitlichkeit »ist« überhaupt kein Seiendes. Sie ist nicht, sondern zeitigt sich.”

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sense and ground” (SZ 35). From the foregoing paper it is hopefully clear, despite the interpretive hurdles, how Heidegger conceives sense as that in-view-of-which being-here projects possibilities without focusing on the sense itself and how he conceives timeliness as the sense of being-here, its constitutive but in principle unthematic condition. In this way, through his accounts of sense and timeliness, Heidegger carries out his self-appointed, phenomenological task of making explicit the hidden condition that makes up the sense of being-here.

Bibliography Blattner, W. 1999. Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism. Cambridge University Press. Crowell, S. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge University Press. Dreyfus, H. 1992. Being-in-the-World. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Hoagland, J. 2013. Dasein Disclosed. Harvard University Press. Kisiel, T. 1993. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. University of California Press. Kluge, F. 1995. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Bearbeitet von Elmar Seebold. 23., erweiterte Auflage. Berlin: de Gruyter. Sheehan, T. 2015. Making Sense of Heidegger. London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield. McManus, D. 2012. Heidegger & the Measure of Truth. Oxford University Press. Nicholson, G. 1999. “The Constitution of Our Being.” American Philosophical Quarterly 36/3 (1999): 165–187.

Life and World: Heidegger’s Phenomenological Metaphyiscs and Its Discontents Steven Crowell

What does phenomenology have to do with metaphysics? In his programmatic series of lectures published as Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Edmund Husserl viewed phenomenology in essentially Kantian terms: an “epistemological” project, the phenomenological “critique of cognition” is “the condition of the possibility of a metaphysics.”1 In subsequent years, mostly in unpublished working manuscripts, he began to sketch a metaphysics along the lines of Leibniz’s monadology. Yet just what metaphysics is supposed to be is never made entirely clear. A similar situation obtains in regard to Heidegger’s “ontological” interpretation of phenomenology. In Being and Time Heidegger claims that “only as phenomenology is ontology possible,”2 and while he distinguishes sharply between ontology and metaphysics, he suggests that the former entails the latter. But in what sense? Does metaphysics afford us knowledge of those “totalities” (self, world, God) that Kant ruled cognitively inaccessible? Can it adjudicate debates between metaphysical realists and idealists or decide between Leibnizian atomism and its physicalistic counterpart? Like Husserl, Heidegger never fully succeeded in articulating a positive conception of metaphysics, but some cautionary insight into the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics can be gained from his attempt. In Heidegger’s lecture courses prior to 1927, phenomenology stands in stark contrast to metaphysics, which he tends to identify with neo-Scholastic attempts to

 Edmund Husserl, Idea of Phenomenology, tr. William F.  Alston and George Nahknikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 1. 2  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 60. Henceforth cited in the text as BT. 1

S. Crowell (*) Department of Philosophy, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_9

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muster Aristotle and Thomas against the tide of neo-Kantian modernism.3 In 1927, however, Being and Time alludes to a metaphysics that would go beyond ontology to address questions that were then associated with philosophical anthropology, world-view philosophy, and Lebensphilosophie.4 In the years between 1927 and 1937 – which for convenience we may call Heidegger’s “metaphysical decade” – Heidegger frequently devotes his lecture courses to motivating and explaining what a phenomenologically grounded metaphysics is supposed to be.5 In this paper, I will focus on how Heidegger proposes to make the transition from phenomenological ontology to metaphysics. Can this transition be made without equivocating on key phenomenological insights? To state the issue summarily: Heidegger believes that phenomenological ontology is a form of transcendental philosophy, i.e., Sinnkritik, an inquiry that elucidates the “meaning” of being, and so of the various ontological “regions” of being. In contrast, he holds that metaphysics has to do not with “being” (Sein) but with das Seiende im Ganzen: beings, entities, as a whole; the “totality” of entities. How is the transition from a focus on being to a focus on entities to be made? For instance, in Being and Time Heidegger argues that phenomenology can identify the categorial commitments of the natural sciences (their “regional ontologies”), but this is still not a “metaphysics of nature,” which, on his view, is responsive to, but methodologically distinct from, natural science.6 Here I will argue that three conceptual problems, or discontents, block Heidegger from making the transition from transcendental phenomenology to metaphysics phenomenologically intelligible. By 1936 Heidegger himself had come to this conclusion and had begun to pursue a new task: “overcoming” metaphysics. But beyond the details of Heidegger-­ scholarship, I would argue that Heidegger’s aborted attempt calls into question much of what may be designated a “metaphysical turn” in contemporary  Steven Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), Part I. 4  For a comprehensive account of this period in German philosophy, see Joachim Fischer, Philosophische Anthropologie: Eine Denkrichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg: Alber, 2009). Some discussion of Heidegger’s relation to Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology can be found in Steven Crowell, “The Middle Heidegger’s Phenomenological Metaphysics,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University press, 2018), pp. 229–250. 5  See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, tr. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 232. Henceforth cited in the text as FCM. Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935) is something of an end point, since it is not devoted to establishing a phenomenological metaphysics but to Heidegger’s subsequent project of “overcoming” metaphysics. We need not settle the fine-points of periodization here, since our concern is simply to understand what Heidegger’s positive conception of metaphysics is. For an alternative periodization, see Stefan W. Schmidt, Grund und Freiheit. Eine phänomenologische Untersuchung des Freiheitsbegriffs Heideggers (Springer, 2016), pp. 1, 76. 6  On regional ontologies, see (BT, pp. 29–31). On the connection between metaphysics and the positive sciences Heidegger remarks that “we cannot separate metaphysics and positive research” since “the inner unity of science and metaphysics is a matter of fate” (FCM, p. 189). I will return to this in the Section “World-formation as play” below. 3

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phenomenology. For some time now, phenomenologists have invoked certain notions – e.g., life, nature, body, flesh, event, appearing as such, gift – in an intentio recta that supposedly outstrips the “correlationism” (or subjectivism) of transcendental phenomenology.7 In addition – though I can hardly establish the point here – Heidegger’s reflections provide a critical perspective on the resurgence of metaphysics in contemporary analytic philosophy which, after the demise of the “linguistic turn,” seems to be picking up the question of substance right where Spinoza and Leibniz left it.8 I mention this last point only because it provides a handy way of introducing a concept central to Heidegger’s positive understanding of metaphysics: “world-view.”

Prelude: Philosophy, Science, and World-View In their introduction to a collection on physicalism, Gillet and Loewer write: “Every era has its Weltanschauung and in much contemporary philosophy the doctrine of ‘physicalism’ plays this role.”9 Though Gillet and Loewer are not using the term Weltanschauung in any technical sense, their point is at the center of Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics. A certain picture of the world, one that takes physics (either in its current or in its ideally complete form) as definitive of what there is, provides many analytic philosophers with a commitment that establishes which sorts of investigation count as intellectually serious.10 Within a physicalistic world-­ view, metaphysics will construe its task as one of explaining how seemingly “spooky” things such as consciousness, modality, mental causation, freedom,

 From this perspective, the so-called “theological turn” would itself be a version of the broader metaphysical turn. Indeed, Heidegger himself embraces this broad sense of “theology” in his gloss of the division in Aristotle’s first philosophy between ontology (the question of being qua being, on he on) and theologike (the question of the highest entity, kuriotatos on). Heidegger interprets to theion as “simply beings – the heavens, the encompassing and overpowering, that […] upon which we are thrown.” See Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, tr. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 10–11. Henceforth cited in the text as MFL. 8  I have in mind here, especially, the metaphysical debates over mereological composition, which is framed by two extreme views: mereological “universalism, in which everything composes with everything (nothing but the whole is “fundamental”), and mereological “nihilism,” according to which nothing is composite and there are only “simples.” For a compendium of contemporary analytic views about what metaphysics is and how it can or should be pursued, see Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, ed. David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009). 9  Carl Gillet and Barry Loewer, Physicalism and its Discontents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. ix. My thanks to Andrea Staiti, who made reference to this remark in an as-yet unpublished paper. 10  This project is familiar at least since Quine’s scientistic version of “naturalism.” See W. V. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 69–90. 7

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normativity, and intentionality, are either reducible to, or compatible with, physics.11 The point is not that metaphysics is a philosophy of physics; rather, it is that metaphysics can go to work directly on problems of, for instance, consciousness, because its world-view, physicalism, provides a set of Spielregeln that are simply assumed and so allow metaphysicians to agree on the terms in which questions about consciousness are to be posed. Absent such a world-view, analytic metaphysics could not help itself to concepts from, for instance, neuroscience or evolutionary biology. Heidegger discusses this sense of world-view in his lecture course from 1927, Basic Problems of Phenomenology. A world-view is “not a matter of theoretical knowledge” but rather “a coherent conviction which determines the current affairs of life” – including scientific life – “more or less expressly or directly.”12 As with contemporary physicalists, many philosophers in Heidegger’s day envisioned a “scientific world-view”  – one “expressly and explicitly [...] worked out” on the basis of “theoretical speculation, to the exclusion of artistic and religious interpretations of the world” (BPP, p. 6). Such a world-view would address questions about “the whence, the whither, and the wherefore of the world and life” through an amalgam of “the results of the different sciences” (BPP, p.  7). However, Heidegger rejects this conception of philosophy as the construction of a scientific world-view, since it involves an unacceptable contingency. Philosophy can show “that something like world-view belongs to the essential nature of the Dasein,” and “what in general constitutes the structure of a world-view,” but the “formation of a world-­ view cannot be the task of philosophy” (BPP, p. 10, my emphasis). Still, this “is not to exclude but to include the idea that philosophy itself is a distinctive primal form of world-view” (BPP, p. 10). This claim proves decisive for Heidegger’s own attempt to move from phenomenology to metaphysics. Despite his rejection of any equation between philosophy and world-view formation, Heidegger recognizes a dependence relation between metaphysics and world-­ view, and he provides an extensive – if at times baffling – analysis of it in his lecture

 Here is not the place to try to be more specific about what exactly “physicalism” is, its relation to materialism, to methodological naturalism, or to the science of physics. For a good overview, see Daniel Stoljar’s article, “Physicalism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . But the general point I am making about “spooky” entities is familiar enough from efforts like Quine’s rejection of modal logic as “in conflict with the nonessentialist view of the universe” (W. V. O. Quine, “Reference and Modality,” in From a Logical Point of View. New York: Harper Row, 1963, p.  158), Daniel Dennett’s attempt of “explain” consciousness (away) (Consciousness Explained, New  York: Little, Brown, 1991), Hartry Fields’ Science Without Numbers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), Joseph Levine’s identification of an “explanatory gap” (Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), or Jaegwon Kim’s argument that mental properties are physically reducible via functional analysis (Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 12  Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 6. Henceforth cited in the text as BPP. 11

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course from winter semester 1928/29, Einleitung in die Philosophie. The gist of that analysis, which we will examine in some detail below, is this: Heidegger defines world-view as “world-having” (Welt-haben). Such “having” is not the contingent possession of some picture of how everything that is hangs together; rather, it is an essential feature of the human being, or “Dasein” as beingin-the-world. Dasein “is world-view, and indeed necessarily.”13 For Heidegger, this means that there can be only two fundamental types of world-view, grounded in different ways in which the basic categories of Dasein’s being – Geworfenheit and Entwurf – achieve relative priority in the work of establishing a “hold” (Halt) within the totality of beings (GA 27, p. 367). The first, characteristic of what Heidegger calls “myth,” seeks this hold through affectively “sheltering” (Bergen) oneself by means of supplication, ritual, and magic.14 The second, which displaces myth, turns to “bearing” or “conduct” (Haltung) to establish such a hold among beings through something like self-determination.15 Both world-views are subject to various forms of degeneration (Entartung). The first degenerates into a kind of scholasticism of rule-­definition and an emphasis on rote adherence, which Heidegger calls “business” (Betrieb), while the second degenerates into “subjectivism”: anthropologism, humanism, and existentialism (GA 27, pp. 373–75). Heidegger argues that philosophy depends on the world-view of Haltung, and his aim in the lecture course is to get students to recognize that, in taking up philosophy now, their “destiny” lies in counteracting Haltung’s degenerative tendencies in order to establish metaphysics through an authentic Grund-haltung (GA 27, pp. 377, 398–99).16 Should he (and so, perhaps, they) succeed in this, Heidegger hopes to reverse the fateful consequence of philosophy’s first beginning – namely, the “disempowering of being” (Entmächtigung des Wesens) through “logic” or reason – and usher in a “new beginning” for metaphysics, an “empowering of being” (Ermächtigung des Seins),17 which replaces the traditional view of human being as  Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. Otto Saame and Ina Saame-Speidel. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 27 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996), p.  344. Henceforth cited in the text as GA 27. 14  This discussion explicitly takes aim at Ernst Cassirer’s approach to myth. Heidegger had just finished writing a critical review of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2: Mythical Thinking, which was published in 1928. A translation appears as an appendix in Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphyiscs tr. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 180–190. Henceforth cited in the text as KPM. 15  In Crowell, “The Middle Heidegger,” I translate this term as “self-control” for the purposes of emphasizing the self-directed character of what Heidegger has in mind here, in contrast to the other-directed world-view of “sheltering.” Haltung could also be rendered as “stand” or “stance,” as in “taking a stand.” 16  This pedagogical strategy is also evident in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, where Heidegger understands phenomenology not as a science but as “preparatory” (vorläufig) thinking (FCM, pp. 173, 351) whose task is “not to describe the consciousness of man but to evoke the Dasein in man” (FCM, p. 174), to “tranform” our “understanding” into “the Da-sein in us” (FCM, p. 296). 17   These terms are drawn from the so-called “Black Notebooks.” See Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II-IV (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 13

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animale rationale with the phenomenologically more basic understanding of Dasein as care, transcendence. These matters shall occupy us below, but for now just two comments. First point: from a Heideggerian perspective the world-view upon which much analytic metaphysics depends is a form of myth. Though Heidegger argues that “science itself presupposes the world-view of Haltung” (GA 27, p. 88), when physics becomes the basis for metaphysics it is transformed into a fetish. Physicalism treats “world” as a domain of inscrutable powers in the midst of which we seek a hold by sheltering ourselves through the observance of scientific rules and rituals. When the latter are taken as ends in themselves, the business of analytic metaphysics can proceed as a kind of scholasticism or “scientific” philosophy. Second point: the new metaphysics that Heidegger hopes will emerge from a proper uptake of the world-view of Haltung – namely, philosophy as the Grund-­ Haltung or “explicit” enactment of transcendence (GA 27, pp. 376, 398) – remains an empty cipher. Since Heidegger, with Kant, admits that “a science of beings as a whole [das Seiende im Ganzen] is essentially impossible” (GA 27, p. 219), his new beginning for metaphysics looks suspiciously like the degenerate form of Haltung (existentialism, decisionism) That he himself rejects. Indeed, Heidegger ties his metaphysics to world-view as Führerschaft, which, along with science, is one of the two “powers that determine our Dasein in the university whether we like it or not” (GA 27, p.  401).18 Heidegger thus sees the connection between metaphysics and world-­view in essentially political terms, and in the Black Notebooks from this period he equates metaphysics with “meta-politics.” Though it will not be my theme here, Heidegger’s political engagement is philosophically grounded in a questionable view of the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics.19 One characteristic of that view – one that will concern us shortly – is Heidegger’s return, in 1928, to his pre-Being and Time obsession with a phenomenology of “factic life” and his attempt to develop the world-concept specific to life. This brings us to the “and” in my title: life “and” world.

2014), pp. 62, 89. Henceforth cited in the text as GA 94. 18  Heidegger’s invocation of Führerschaft in this context might be seen as a warning to his students to avoid the degenerate self-assertive posturing to which the world-view of Haltung might lead. But as with all such references in Heidegger’s metaphysical decade, there is an ambiguity: what Heidegger rejects at the ontic level of current university politics he appropriates at the ontological level of his own reinterpretation of the relation between philosophy and world-view. I discuss the way Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics informs his involvement with National Socialism in “Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks,” in Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941, ed. Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016), pp. 29–44. 19  With this I do not mean to overlook Heidegger’s remark to Karl Löwith that his concept of historicality led to the engagement with politics; I mean only to contextualize it by noting the connection between the concept of historicality – “destiny” as the “historizing of the community, of a Volk” (BT, p. 436) – and the metaphysics Heidegger began developing around 1928.

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The Problem of World In Einleitung in die Philosophie we read that “the world-problem is in original unity with the being-problem, and the being-problem and world-problem in their unity first define the genuine concept of metaphysics” (GA 27, p. 324). By “the being-­ problem” Heidegger means the question of the meaning of being, which, in Being and Time, demanded a phenomenological inquiry into Dasein’s “understanding of being.” But what, then, is “the world-problem”? Being and Time already defined “the phenomenon of world” as “the ‘wherein’ of an act of understanding” or “signifying,” and it defined the being (“worldhood”) of the world as the “relational totality of this signifying,” a “totality of significance” (BT, pp.  119, 120). This describes world in a transcendental-phenomenological sense, i.e., in relation to Dasein’s understanding of being. In this sense, Dasein is world-disclosing. For instance, Dasein discloses the world of carpentry by acting for the sake of being a carpenter. To so act is to “understand” myself as a carpenter, that is, to commit myself to being bound by the norms of what it means to be a carpenter, to measure myself in light of a certain standard of success or failure. In so doing, I “signify” a normatively ordered context, or “world,” in which things can show up as “significant” – as appropriate or inappropriate for the various purposes pertaining to carpentry – and thus be understood in their “being,” i.e., as the things they are.20 But this does not exhaust what Heidegger means by the “world-problem” in the Einleitung. In his metaphysical decade Heidegger returns to a concept of world which, in Being and Time, he had identified as “ontic”: world as “the totality of those entities that can be present at hand within the world” (BT, p. 93).21 And as we shall see, it is not irrelevant that he uses the expression “present at hand” (Vorhanden) here, since it abstracts these entities from their normative conditions of “significance” (Zuhanden). His lecture course from 1928 picks up this notion: “in their unity, fundamental ontology and metontology constitute the concept of metaphysics,” where “metontology” is defined as a “metaphysical ontic” which “make[s] beings thematic in their totality in light of ontology” (MFL, pp. 157–58). In Vom Wesen des Grundes (1928), Heidegger elaborates this sense of the world-­ problem with reference to two concepts of “world” that he finds in Kant: the “cosmopolitan” and the “cosmological.” The first he calls existentiell: “‘world’ is the designation for human Dasein in the core of its essence.” Worldly existence is engaged, a “‘participant’ in the game of life,” a player.22 In Being and Time this is  See Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially Part III. 21  Heidegger is not interested here in “regional ontology,” the corresponding “ontological” concept which “signifies the being of those entities,” for instance, that show up in the “world of the mathematician” (BT, p. 93). Metaphysics is not concerned with the being (meaning) of entities, but with the entities. 22  Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 120. Henceforth cited in the text as EG. 20

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“world” as “that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein as such can be said to ‘live’” (BT, p.  93), but here Heidegger remarks that this concept “prefigures the more recent appearance of the expression ‘Weltanschauung’” (EG, p. 120). This remark is significant because it introduces a concept of “totality” not found in Being and Time: “What is metaphysically essential” in Kant’s first world-concept is “the fact that it is directed toward the interpretation of human existence in its relation to beings as a whole” (EG, p. 121). And this implies the second concept of world found in Kant, namely, the “cosmological”: world as the “sum total [Inbegriff] of all appearances” (EG, p. 118). Heidegger’s metaphysics is characterized by the conviction that when the concept of “appearance” is phenomenologically freed from Kant’s commitment to the phenomena-noumena distinction, the cosmological concept of world becomes relevant within the ontological framework. Thus Heidegger’s transition from phenomenological ontology to metaphysics can be formulated in the language of his Antrittsrede (1929): What does it mean that Dasein, a being possessed of an understanding of being, represents “an irruption [Einbruch] by one being called ‘the human being’ into the whole of beings”?23 An example of what the world-problem, so conceived, is supposed to involve can be found already in Being and Time. There Heidegger alludes to “a ‘metaphysic of death’” which would take up questions of, for instance, “how and when death ‘came into the world’” or “what ‘meaning’ it can have [...] in the aggregate of entities [All des Seienden]” (BT, p. 292). Clearly, what Heidegger has in mind here is not “existential death” but rather what he called “demise,” an “intermediate phenomenon” that pertains to Dasein insofar as it too “may be considered purely as life,” i.e., as belonging to “that domain of being which we know as the world of animals and plants” (BT, pp. 290–91). If that is so, then a metaphysic of death must include some understanding of “world” as an aggregate of entities, and of life (animals and plants) within it. In Being and Time Heidegger does not say how such an understanding relates to the phenomenological approach to being, and in the Einleitung he confesses to his students that “if we are entirely honest, today we don’t even know how  Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 83. Henceforth cited in the text as WM. The term Einbruch plays a crucial role in Heidegger’s metaphysical decade. In “What is Metaphysics” (pp. 82–83) it is used to characterize the project of science which, as he notes, has become our “passion” – that is, our worldview: “our existence  – as a community of researchers, teachers, and students  – is determined by science,” which has a “proper though limited leadership in the whole of human existence.” Science is “supported and guided by a freely chosen stance [Haltung] of human existence,” one that is “exceptional” because, in its commitment to “impartiality of inquiring, determining, and grounding,” it is a “peculiarly delineated submission to beings themselves.” Science is thus a peculiarly delineated “irruption” of the human being “into the whole of beings,” one that allows beings to “show what they are and how they are.” Despite this positive evaluation of science, however, Heidegger argues that “the rootedness of the sciences in their essential ground has atrophied.” The worldview of science is thus a degenerate form of Haltung. The point of Heideggerian “metaphysics” is to restore this rootedness by recalling what sustains the irruption of science  – and all other irruptions in which beings are encountered as beings  – in the Grund-­ haltung of philosophy, the “primal form of worldview,” which he calls “transcendence” or “freedom for ground.” See Section “From metaphysics to metapolitics: world-view” below. 23

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to pose the question properly, let alone how to answer it” (GA 27, p. 148). Indeed, “with regard to the world-problem – not only in regard to answering but above all in regard to the specific structure of the problematic that it requires – we are fully in the dark” (GA 27, p. 394). How then does Heidegger manage to bring the cosmopolitan and the cosmological world-concepts together? I will approach this question against the backdrop of Heidegger’s understanding of Kant, and his debate with Ernst Cassirer over the ground of metaphysics in Kant. Heidegger presses the phenomenological categories of Being and Time into the service of a positive concept of metaphysics but, as I will argue, this gives rise to three conceptual difficulties, or discontents, which undermine the phenomenological intelligibility of this project. In the end, the metaphysical re-description of Dasein’s world-disclosure as world-formation must be understood as performative pedagogy meant to transform Heidegger’s students from rational animals into their “Da-sein.” The move from phenomenology to metaphysics thus substitutes exhortation for phenomenological Evidenz.

Transcendental Philosophy, Transcendence, and Life Heidegger rejected the neo-Kantian idea that Kant’s transcendental critique is an epistemology of the sciences. He accepts that Kant stands at some remove from traditional metaphysics – “Kant was the first to see [...] the transcendental” – and that his project “has nothing to do with realism and idealism” and other standard metaphysical tropes (GA 27, p. 209). Heidegger insists, however, that the Critique of Pure Reason intended to lay the groundwork for both metaphysica generalis (ontology) and metaphysica specialis (psychological, cosmological, and theological Ideas). But because Kant “shrank back” from his insight into the “transcendental power of imagination” (KPM, p. 112), he failed to recognize the ground of metaphysics – namely, “transcendence,” Dasein’s understanding of being – and instead remained committed to the ancient approach to being through logos or logic. To advance Kant’s new point of departure for metaphysics, then, requires phenomenological uptake: metaphysica generalis must be pursued as fundamental ontology (the being-problem) while metaphysica specialis must – it would seem – be pursued as the world-problem. Kant himself denied that a “rational cosmology” is possible. Apriori investigation into the “totality of conditions for a given conditioned” yields nothing but “dialectical illusion.”24 Nevertheless, at the conclusion of his 1929 Kantbuch Heidegger asks whether “there is not also a positive problematic to be found in this characterization of the Transcendental Dialectic, which appears to be only negative” (KPM, p. 172). What Heidegger means is far from clear, but one possibility is suggested by

 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 100 (A63/B88). 24

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his remarks on “finitude.” Whereas Kant defined the finitude of human reason in part by contrasting it with a divine intuitus originarius – thereby condemning as illusion (Schein) reason’s claim to govern things in themselves – Dasein’s finitude is understood in terms of thrownness and being-towards-death. In these terms, the cosmological world-problem does not first of all concern the rationality of knowledge-­claims about totalities that cannot be given in experience; rather, it concerns the “transcendental untruth” that belongs to all “transcendental truth” (KPM, p. 172). “Transcendental untruth” means that every disclosure of beings (“transcendental truth”), including through the use of reason, already presupposes our thrown “exposure” to das Seiende im Ganzen, which itself remains opaque.25 In his metaphysical decade Heidegger describes transcendental untruth as the “dispersal” (Zerstreuung) of Dasein. To liberate “the problem of ‘transcendental illusion’” from “that architectonic into which Kant forced it” – namely, Kant’s “orientation toward traditional logic” as the “ground and guide for the problematic of metaphysics” – is to open up a new path to understanding “man’s basic neediness as a being who has been thrown into beings” and thus “compelled to understand something like being” (KPM, p. 172).26 The world-problem is thus motivated by a development in Heidegger’s understanding of Geworfenheit, one that recalls his earlier interest in “factic life.” In Being and Time, thrownness was defined exclusively by its contribution to the being-problem, the disclosure of world as “significance.” Ontological inquiry is “metaphysically neutral” (EG, p. 122), that is, carried out “prior to every factual concretion” (MFL, p. 136) and so indifferent regarding any features of the entity possessed of an understanding of being except those which make such understanding possible. Considered neutrally, thrownness is the affective “enigma” of being-­ there in such a way that the world matters to one, an enigma that cannot be eliminated by any account of its “whence” or its “whither” (BT, p. 175). However, Heidegger now holds that “it belongs to the essence of this neutrality that, insofar as [Dasein] always factically exists, it has necessarily broken this neutrality” (GA 27, p. 146). For instance, “it is dispersed into bodiliness and thus into sexuality”: it is “captivated” by “nature” (MFL, pp. 137–38). In short, Dasein’s thrownness is now “metaphysically” specified as life and nature. Dasein is Mensch (homo sapiens), a “living being” into which Dasein is dispersed in the midst of “beings as a whole” (GA 27,  In his comments on a version of the present paper, delivered at the annual meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association (2015), William Blattner points out that Heidegger’s understanding of finitude here is not so different from Kant’s notion of the “receptivity” of all human cognition, a point which Heidegger himself emphasizes (KPM, pp. 18–19). The difference lies in the fact that Kant equates spontaneity (freedom) with reason, while for Heidegger the “free” counterpart to thrownness is “projection,” which is taken to be the ground of reason. As we shall see, this complicates Heidegger’s attempt to specify what might be called the “noetic correlate” of metaphysics. 26  The being-problem (ontology) is exclusive to a finite being in Heidegger’s sense of “finitude.” As he remarks in several places, it is a joke to imagine God doing ontology. At the same time, Heidegger now seems to think that the finitude which “compels” us to ontology also opens a positive approach to the cosmological world-problem. 25

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pp.  146–47). For this reason, as Günter Figal writes, “the concept of world conceived on the basis of meaningfulness cannot replace the understanding of the world as the entirety of what is.”27 The cosmological world-concept thus appears to demand not an account of the various worlds that Dasein occupies by acting for the sake of being something, but an account of the one world (kosmos) in which all such activities factically take place. But this leads to a serious question of method: If the ontological account of world in Being and Time is grounded in transcendental phenomenology, what can possibly ground or justify a “metaphysical ontic” account of world? On what basis can the one world be investigated? Here we encounter the first of three conceptual problems in Heidegger’s metaphysical project. According to transcendental phenomenology (the being-problem), life and nature are categorial regions whose meaning is grounded in one or another of Dasein’s projects (Entwurf). Some such meaning is at work in, for instance, the sciences of biology, anthropology, or psychology.28 It is clear, however, that the concept of thrownness as dispersal is delimited not in terms of such meanings but in terms of beings themselves as belonging to a “totality” to which the human being also belongs. Unfortunately, there is really nothing to be said about beings taken in this way. Heidegger admits as much when he says that “a science of beings as a whole is essentially impossible” (GA 27, p. 219). If meaning-­ questions are bracketed, so too are the normative frameworks necessary for any determination of such beings. All Heidegger can do, therefore, is revert to a negative concept of “power” – negative because it is not positively determined through some particular project, as is the notion of power or force in physics: Nature is simply “that over which Dasein has no power” (GA 27, p.  328). Nature (and history) become “Grundmächten des Seins selbst,” powers which “pervade and hold sway” (durchwalten) throughout beings as a whole (GA 27, p. 394). The phenomenological concept of thrownness gives way to a metaphysical picture: kosmos as a “world” of powers to which Dasein is exposed. Since Dasein’s being is constituted by projection as well as thrownness, a metaphysical-­ontic approach to the latter demands a metaphysical interpretation of the former too. In Being and Time “projection” is a name for Dasein’s ability-to-be (Seinkönnen) for-the-sake-of a possibility of its own; its “understanding of being.” The relation between understanding and possibility here derives from the phenomenology of Dasein, that being “for which, in its being, that very being is essentially an issue” (BT, p. 117). To “project possibilities” is not to deliberate over options; rather, it is to exercise an ability, to try to be something. Trying to be something – a teacher, for instance  – involves committing oneself to the standards of teaching, allowing oneself to be measured by what one takes them to be. What it means to be  Günter Figal, Objectivity. The Hermeneutical and Philosophy, tr. Theodore D. George (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), p. 147. 28  Life and nature show up meaningfully in everyday projects as well, not only in science. But this wrinkle, though interesting in its own right, does not affect the point at issue here – namely, that to show themselves as something determinate, and so thinkable, beings must be “discovered” within a project that involves a normative framework for their re-identification as something. 27

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a teacher is thus at issue in trying. In this way, projection discloses a world of meaning or significance, the world of teaching. But if, after Being and Time, Heidegger wishes to interpret projection metaphysically on the basis of Dasein’s thrown dispersal into “beings as a whole” (the cosmological world-problem), then Dasein’s being an issue for itself, its acting for the sake of something, must be conceived not as a disclosure of meaning but as a relation to beings. And as we saw, the human being is the being that “breaks in upon” (Einbruch) beings as a whole (WM, p. 83). How can projection, as breaking in upon beings as a whole, define a metaphysical conception of the “one world” that would be its correlate? Heidegger attempts to answer this question by developing some aspects of Kant’s notion of productive imagination (Einbildungskraft): if in Being and Time projection is world-disclosing, in Heidegger’s metaphysical project it is world-forming, Welt-bildend (EG, p. 123). Metaphysically, what is most important about projection is not that it discloses the meaning of being (which it also does) but that it is the factic ground of reason (EG, p. 134). In Vom Wesen des Grundes Heidegger elaborates this point: If throwness, metaphysically considered, is “grounding” in the sense of Dasein’s “grounding itself in the midst of beings” (Boden-nehmen), projection, metaphysically considered, is grounding as “establishing” (Stiften): projection “lets the world prevail” (EG, pp. 127–28). And this in turn allows for the “grounding of something” (Be-gründung), i.e., allows for the “manifestation of beings in themselves, the possibility of ontic truth” (EG, p. 129). Considered metaphysically, however, this complex of “grounding” should not be conceived as opening up a specific “world” – say, the world of teaching – but as “making possible the why-question in general” – “why are there beings rather than nothing?” (EG, p. 133) – and “also” as providing “the most antecedent answer” to this “why” (EG, p. 130). Metaphysics, world-forming, is the “antecedent answer” that grounds the one world. Can phenomenological sense be made of this idea? Consider again the example of teaching. What is normatively at issue in my trying to be a teacher (the meaning of teaching) may be seen as a Vorbild (exemplar) in light of which I myself and the things in the world of teaching are measured in advance.29 This Vorbild is the ground or reason in things; it is why things (in the world of teaching) ought to be a certain way, and it underwrites the reasons I give to myself and others for what I do  – grounding as “legitimating” (EG, p.  130). In “binding” myself to the normative Vorbild of teaching, beings themselves become “more in being” (EG, p. 123) and can themselves become binding upon me.30 Heidegger’s metaphysics depends on generalizing this transcendental analysis into a cosmological world-concept, a world-forming that yields a “picture” (Bild) or Vor-bild of, for instance, nature, animality, or life, an “antecedent answer” or reason for why we are here, something like a story about the “whence, the whither, and the wherefore” (BPP, p. 7) of the human being’s destiny as Einbruch into the totality of beings.

 On the importance of Vorbild in Heidegger’s account of concepts, see Sacha Golob, Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom, and Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 30  How this works is analyzed in detail in FCM, pp. 339–49. 29

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To say that Dasein is world-forming, then, is to say that “it lets world occur and through the world gives itself an original view (form [Bild]) that is not explicitly grasped, yet functions precisely as a paradigmatic form [Vor-bild] for all manifest beings, among which each respective Dasein belongs” (EG, p. 123). But what can such a universal Vor-bild be like, and where is it to be found? It cannot be the Vor-­ bild that guides science – “objectivity” as a “submission to beings,” a commitment to giving “the matter itself explicitly and solely the first and last word” (WM, p. 83) – since science is a particular project which concerns the whole of beings only in light of the norms of theoretical “thematization,” in which entities become “objects” by “‘throwing themselves against’ a pure discovering” (BT, p.  414).31 Since metaphysical transcendence is conceptually prior to any such restriction, Heidegger holds that no science of beings as a whole is possible. Here, then, is where Heidegger’s interpretation of projection in terms of Kant’s productive imagination (Einbildungskraft) becomes relevant. In his disputation with Heidegger at Davos in 1929, Ernst Cassirer acknowledged the importance of Heidegger’s emphasis on the productive imagination (KPM, p. 194).32 Indeed, it is the basis for Cassirer’s own conception of reason as the telos of the human capacity for operating with “symbolic forms.” But he believes that Heidegger violates the spirit of Kant’s Copernican Turn (KPM, p. 205), since his account of Dasein fails to make the shift “from a merely practical ‘grasp’ (Greifen) to true ‘conceptualization’ (Begreifen)” and so fails to achieve the “critical” distinction between “functional” concepts (apriori reason) and merely “substantive” ones (empirical “graspings”).33 In the course of the debate, Cassirer repeatedly calls upon Heidegger to explain how the latter’s view, which grounds reason in Dasein’s finitude, can account for the “universal validity” of truth. Heidegger – who believes that the Greek turn toward the logos, toward “logic,” as a guide to “what is,” is precisely what led metaphysics into dialectical illusion  – avoids the question. For him, reason is not primitive but is grounded in transcendence. Cassirer’s appeal to reason altogether ignores the fact that because Kant does not raise the being-question, he cannot really get at the world-question either. For Cassirer, in turn, Heidegger’s position is scarcely distinguishable from philosophical anthropology. By reading Cassirer’s Davos lecture on Max Scheler as a veiled criticism of Heidegger, Gordon identifies the point where Heidegger’s conception of metaphysics is indeed vulnerable: “in philosophical anthropology the rigors of phenomenological method had been displaced by a ‘metaphysical interest’”; and thus “what should have been a set of merely functional categories for  For a discussion of these points see Steven Crowell, “Competence Over Being as Existing: The Indispensability of Haugeland’s Heidegger,” in Giving a Damn: Essays in Dialogue with John Haugeland, ed. Zed Adams and Jacob Browning (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017), pp. 73–102. 32  A comprehensive account is found in Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). While historically illuminating, Gordon’s account is philosophically hampered by interpreting Heidegger essentially as a pragmatist. Phenomenology is given little consideration. 33  Gordon, Continental Divide, p. 117ff. 31

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philosophical description such as ‘life’ and ‘spirit’” are turned into “substantive absolutes.”34 In Kantian terms, philosophical anthropology and Heidegger’s metaphysics both remain “dogmatic.” Heidegger will rightly reply that transcendental concepts expressing Dasein’s ontological constitution are neither functional nor substantive,35 not a “framework” (Rahmenbau) in which Dasein is simply “found.” Instead, “[t]hese structures participate essentially in the manner in which Dasein exists” (GA 27, p. 338). They have the character of exemplars whose meaning is at issue in what Dasein is trying to be.36 But even if Heidegger’s ontological concepts cannot be captured by Cassirer’s functional-substantive distinction, Cassirer’s point is well-taken. Heidegger’s pursuit of a metaphysics of life does belong within the horizon of Scheler’s or von Uexküll’s philosophical anthropology, and his world-problem does share the meta-phenomenological aspirations of Scheler’s search for “man’s place in nature” and “man’s place in the cosmos.”37 Cassirer was right to wonder whether Heidegger could be any more successful than Scheler had been in pursuing a metaphysics of life without abandoning transcendental philosophy. That Heidegger wanted to stay within the scope of transcendental philosophy is clear  – not only because in his own later work he complains that his writings from this period suffered from that very desire,38 but also because without Kant’s Revolution der Denkungsart Heidegger cannot really define how his own positive conception of metaphysics is supposed to differ from the traditional “dogmatic” one. The transcendental role Kant ascribed to the imagination suggested a phenomenological way to overcome the “logical prejudice”39 that had led metaphysics into  Gordon, Continental Divide, pp. 121–22.  See the dismissal of Cassirer’s distinction already in Being and Time: “Functional concepts are never possible except as formalized substantial concepts” (BT, p. 122). 36  This view of ontological concepts (“formal indications,” FCM, pp. 291–94) as “at issue” in existing itself underlies Heidegger’s Davos remarks about freedom. For both Heidegger and Cassirer, following Kant, “freedom is not an object of theoretical apprehending but is instead an object of philosophizing,” where the latter – for Heidegger, though not for Cassirer – means that “the sole adequate relation to freedom in man is the self-freeing of freedom in man.” This is the performative dimension of philosophy, “the sole and central [thing] which philosophy as philosophizing can perform”: the “setting free of the Dasein in man” (KPM, p. 200). The whole point of a metaphysical picture of kosmos, of das Seiende im Ganzen, thus seems to be to set the stage for this performance, provide something like a reason for it. 37  In a Nachruf for Scheler that he inserted into his 1928 lecture course, Heidegger praises Scheler in terms that mirror his own metaphysical project (MFL, p. 51): Scheler had an “irrepressible drive always to think out and interpret things as a whole.” Indeed his “philosophical anthropology [is] an attempt to work out the special position of man” within “the whole of philosophy in the sense of Aristotle’s theology” – that is, in light of what Heidegger himself is pursuing as the world-­problem. On “theology” see note 7 above; on Scheler see also FCM, p. 192. 38  For a concise discussion of some important passages see Daniel O. Dahlstrom, “Transcendental Truth and the Truth that Prevails,” in Transcendental Heidegger, ed. Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 63–73. 39  See Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Das logische Vorurteil (Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1994); translated by the author into English as Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University 34 35

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t­ranscendental illusion and on to Hegel’s hyper-conceptualism (GA 27, p.  317). According to Heidegger, a positive conception of metaphysics that avoids this fate is possible only if the world-question is preceded by the transcendental being-­ question grounded in Dasein’s transcendence: understood as self-binding (commitment) or “freedom for measure,” transcendence is oriented “beyond being” (epekeina tes ousias) – beyond eidos and ousia toward ta agathon, which is thus prior to logic and to being-as-idea (EG, p. 124; MFL, pp. 116, 184). Thus a proper response to Cassirer’s claim that Heidegger substitutes “substantive absolutes” for genuinely apriori (transcendental) categories turns on whether the phenomenological analysis of Dasein in Being and Time, the essentials of which are carried over (as the productive power of imagination) into the metaphysics of human being as world-forming, provides sufficient basis for a cosmological account of world as das Seiende im Ganzen. Such a basis would have to make intelligible how a determinate world-concept  – an “antecedent answer”  – can emerge from transcendence (world-forming) as “freedom for measure” alone, i.e., how metaphysical projection can form a world prior to any (rational) “idea.” However, Heidegger’s own ontology already suggests reasons to doubt that it can, and this yields a second conceptual difficulty in Heidegger’s metaphysical project. The ontological concept of projection holds that beings can be understood as something only because Dasein’s being for the sake of some ability-to-be involves orientation toward some specific normative possibility of success for failure. But this model cannot apply to Dasein’s “irruption” into things that it cannot try to be: life, nature, human being. No one tries to be an animal, a human, or a living being; this is not something “for the sake of which” I can be.40 Thus, since meaning is disclosed in acting for the sake of something, the cosmological approach to beings as a whole is faced with an uncomfortable methodological choice. It can single out some particular project that is supposed to provide beings with an overall meaning. This is the route of physicalistic naturalism when it moves from the project of physics to a “scientific” metaphysics of beings as a whole, but Heidegger’s Kantian rejection of the possibility of a science of beings as a whole precludes this option. Or it can invent a vocabulary that is not tied to any particular project – talking “emptily” about Grundmächten des Seins, for instance. But when such terms (and others, like event, sending, or gift) are given any specific meaning (e.g., glossed as “nature”) they become the very paradigm of what Gordon called “substantive absolutes.” Is there perhaps another option here? Might the concept of world-forming itself provide something like a universal normative horizon beyond the partial horizons defined by the norms of particular projects? When Heidegger claims that Dasein’s “freedom,” our “understanding of being” as such, is “the most antecedent answer” to the why question (EG, p. 130), he seems to suggest that Dasein’s being can itself be treated as a project whose horizon, or Vor-bild, would be the cosmological Press, 2001). 40  Of course, there is a normative sense of “human being” (as in perfectionist ethics, for instance) that I can try to live up to, but, as we shall see, this is not what Heidegger means by Dasein’s dispersal into homo sapiens (FCM, p. 172).

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world-­concept. And while this suggestion lies at the heart of the Einleitung, it leads to a third conceptual difficulty in Heidegger’s attempt to move from transcendental phenomenology to metaphysics, one that appears to turn the above-mentioned uncomfortable methodological choice into a baffling metaphysical dualism.

World-Formation as Play Many commentators have observed that the transcendental phenomenology of Being and Time, with its emphasis on praxis, seems ontologically limited. Günter Figal, for instance, concludes that “for Heidegger there are neither things nor objects” but only equipment.41 What about all the other beings in the world? Do we really want to say that they too show up in “relation” to what I am trying to be; that the world-whole is only an extension of the workshop or some other “relevance totality” disclosed in my practices? By 1929, Heidegger was already acutely sensitive to such objections, and he dismisses them curtly: in approaching the concept of world through the example of the workshop, “it never occurred to me to try to prove that the essence of man consists in the fact that he knows how to handle knives and forks or use the tram” (FCM, p. 177). Still, Being and Time is none too clear on how care/transcendence reaches out to the totality of beings in their ontic manifoldness. In his metaphysical decade, however, Heidegger believes that he can provide such an account, drawing on the concept of play (Spiel). Transcendence, as world-forming, yields “the specific totality of the metaphysical apriori Spielregeln which make any given factic Spiel des Lebens possible” (GA 27, p.  309). If in Being and Time the ultimate ground of world-disclosure (understanding of being) is found in Dasein’s responsiveness to the call of conscience and its demand to “take over being a ground” (BT, p. 330) – i.e., the demand to measure things in light of better or worse  – Heidegger now locates the ultimate ground of beings as a whole, the “antecedent answer” to the why-question directed toward beings as such, in a kind of constructivism: worldforming as “free world-­projection” (GA 27, p. 396). In displacing the idea of world-disclosure by that of world-formation, Heidegger hopes to unite the two world-concepts which, in Being and Time, had been kept apart: the existentiell concept, which yields a particular Bedeutungsganzes tied to one of Dasein’s projects, and the cosmological concept, which demands a universal characterization of beings themselves. The concept of Spiel – as both playing and the game that is played  – is supposed to achieve such unification. Starting from Kant’s characterization of the existentiell world-concept as the “man of the world” who is “a ‘participant’ in the game of life” (GA 27, p. 308; EG, p. 120), Heidegger allows himself a “free world-projection”: world itself “has the character of a game” (GA 27, pp. 308–310).

41

 Figal, Objectivity, p. 136.

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While much of this discussion can be understood in terms of the analysis of projection in Being and Time, something new is introduced when Heidegger emphasizes that transcendence is not exhausted by the understanding of being (GA 27, p. 315). Instead, it requires that “world” be grasped as “the specific totality of the manifold of beings” in its “inner organization” (GA 27, p. 309).42 Such organization is not equivalent to (Kantian) “nature” as the correlate of “theoretical-scientific experience” – science, too, is but one project among many – nor is it a “catalogue” of such “regions” – nature, history, things of use (GA 27, p. 309). What, then, is its “inner organization” supposed to be? As a metaphysical interpretation of projection, play defines the sort of enactment (Vollzug) that belongs to my being for the sake of what I am trying to be. Ontologically, such trying is always exercised within some already established framework (Reglung)  – for instance, the publicly accepted “rules” for being a teacher, the teaching game. But “playing is never just the following of Spielregeln, acting in accord with them” (GA 27, p. 311). Rather, to speak of “play” here is to acknowledge that what it means to be what Dasein is trying to be is always at issue for it. Though the “rules” of teaching (what a teacher should be and do) are in a sense already present in the social whole to which I belong, their meaning is not simply given but is at stake in my commitment to them. Such norms constrain me not as rigid laws but as exemplars or guides whose meaning must be interpreted and often revised. That is to say, there is “free play” in taking up the project of teaching. Indeed, “the rules form themselves [bilden sich] first of all in playing;” the Spielregel is “no norm fixed in relation to who knows what, but is mutable in and through the playing” (GA 27, p.  312). What is “decisive” in playing is not what gets done (Handlung und Tun) but “how I am attuned [Zustandscharakter]” (GA 27, p. 312) – that is, what is decisive is that I am in play, playing, and not, for instance, just going through the motions. Playing is free in its rule-beholdenness.43  In the background here is Heidegger’s proposal to “radicalize” Leibniz’s monadology (GA 27, p. 145), a topic that deserves more attention than I can give it here. As characterized in the 1928 lecture course, Leibniz’s monad is a “universal” concept of being and so “must also explain the possibility of beings as a whole.” What implication does the monad-concept have for “the way beings exist together in the whole universe” (MFL, p. 83)? Heidegger’s method in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics starts with an analysis of how things show up in the Grundstimmung of “boredom,” a kind of “everydayness” characterized by a “remarkable undifferentiatedness” of beings as a whole: “here the beings that surround us are uniformly manifest as simply something present at hand in the broadest sense” (FCM, p. 275). Such a mood allows Leibniz’s question of “the way beings exist together” to arise when, “seized by terror [Schrecken],” the “Da-sein in man launches the attack [Angriff] upon man” (FCM, pp. 366, 21). What this might mean will concern us below. 43  This, as Heidegger notes, raises the specter of “irrationalism”: if such play is not intrinsically guided by reason, how are we to account for philosophy’s conceptual authority, the possibility of its grounded validity? Heidegger does not address the question head-on here, either. Again he comments that traditional metaphysics is misled in thinking of the understanding of being in terms of idea, logic, logos and insists that metaphysics requires “a fundamental revision and radical repetition” of its “initial dawning” in Plato (GA 27, pp. 321–22). Until reason is reconceived on the basis of care – in Kantian terms, “transcendental imagination” – it will be impossible to decide whether 42

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Nevertheless, the game does not “play itself out in a subject”; rather “in this play of transcendence every entity toward which we comport ourselves is up for grabs [umspielt] and all comportment is co-ordinated [eingespielt] by this game” (GA 27, p. 313). If Heidegger now argues that “world is the title for the game that transcendence plays” (GA 27, p. 312), then projection (playing), metaphysically considered, does not disclose the world but forms it. Further, since metaphysical projection is supposed to provide the “inner organization” of beings in their “totality,” it cannot be equivalent to any particular game that Dasein plays. If a certain Spiel des Lebens  – say, teaching  – forms a world, the world of beings as a whole thereby comes into play as well. But how? It cannot be that the totality of beings becomes a function of the world of teaching, if for no other reason than that we play many different roles – act for the sake of many different ways to be – whose co-ordination is precisely the issue here. But then, what sort of world-forming can reach out to this totality of beings? To answer this question we must return to the second dimension of the care structure, thrownness. If in relation to projection the concept of play does little more than spell out, more fully than in Being and Time, the phenomenological character of Dasein’s being an issue for itself – its way of being oriented by norms – the relation between play and thrownness poses a serious challenge to that phenomenology. In Being and Time thrownness is “formally-indicated” as the “enigma” of existing whose “whence and whither” remain inaccessible (BT, pp.  173). In its contribution to the being-­ problem, thrownness cannot be further defined by reference to any region of entities within the world (e.g., language, nature, history), since these gain any determinate meaning they have only within one or another of Dasein’s projects.44 In terms of the world-problem, however, thrownness signifies not the enigma of being but Dasein’s “abandonment” (Preisgabe) to the Mächten und Gewalten that “overpower” it (GA 27, pp. 324ff). As we noted above, Heidegger immediately deformalizes the negative concept of power by appeal to nature and history, and in so doing he characterizes the game of life in terms of a specific Reglung or “inner organization” of beings as a whole. Here he goes further: the player in the game of life is the “human being” (Mensch): As “abandoned” in the midst of beings, Dasein does not merely turn up among other beings but is “pervaded [durchwaltet] by the beings to which it is abandoned;” it is “Körper, Leib, and life;” Dasein “is nature,” and as thrown transcending, it is always already “thoroughly pervaded and attuned, held in sway” as nature or life (GA 27, p. 328).

the charge of irrationalism has any currency (GA 27, pp. 319–20). Nor can the concept of transcendence as “play” be derived from Lebensphilosphie (GA 27, p. 320) or philosophical anthropology (GA 27, pp. 313–14). 44  For the argument, see Steven Crowell, “Responsibility, Autonomy, Affectivity: A Heideggerian Approach,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and the Self, ed. Denis McManus (London: Routledge, 2014). See also Steven Crowell, “Facticity and Transcendental Philosophy,” in From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental, ed. Jeff Malpas (London: Routledge, 2002), 100–121.

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Metaphysical dispersal in beings as a whole is thus Dasein’s nature as an entity: life, animality. In his metaphysical decade Heidegger devotes a great deal of attention to this deformalization of Dasein’s thrownness. But if, as we have argued, nature, life, embodiment, and animality are not things for the sake of which Dasein can be, where does Heidegger get the determinate content he ascribes to these notions? The answer  – which leads to the third conceptual difficulty besetting Heidegger’s approach to metaphysics  – is found in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: “We cannot separate metaphysics and positive research” since “the inner unity of science and metaphysics is a matter of fate” (FCM, p. 189).45 The metaphysical projection of Dasein’s thrownness as animality and life must draw upon the empirical findings of the sciences of biology and zoology. Since, as the Einleitung puts it, science is the project that acts “for the sake of being in truth, for the sake of truth” (GA 27, p. 369), science just is the project that is normatively oriented toward beings as beings. Metaphysics, in contrast, has no independent access to the truth of beings as such and as a whole. Thus even though Heidegger’s approach to the Reglung (normativity) of world as the game of life is not a matter of co-ordinating regional ontologies into a systematic whole, he too has no choice but to “seek assistance from the fundamental theses” of science – in this case, “zoology” (FCM, p. 212). And if, having drawn upon the sciences, metaphysics presumes to say something about beings in its own voice, this will be for the sake of something other than saying the truth about them. What, then, does Heidegger learn from this fated connection with science?46 Biology, which Heidegger praises for resisting reduction to the categories of physics, shows us that animal life is a kind of “captivation” (Benommenheit, a term borrowed from Scheler). Through the prescriptive character of its “drive” (Drang, Trieb), the organism is a kind of “openness” that does not comport itself toward things but is “taken by” them (FCM, p. 247). The animal body is itself an “organ” of the drive – i.e., of the organism as the species-specific Umring that makes up its environmental Spielraum (FCM, pp. 249, 258). The animal’s environmental access, however, is neither access to beings as beings nor to beings as a whole (FCM, p. 269); hence the animal is “world-poor” (FCM, p. 196). Because the human species is an animal organism, poverty of world characterizes human beings as well: “living nature holds us ourselves captive as human beings” (FCM, p. 278). Heidegger comments that “poverty” of world is not a lower form of world-having but is a way of not having world (FCM, p. 270). Thus, strictly speaking, the human being into which Dasein is dispersed does not “have” world at all. It shares instead in what St Paul called “the yearning expectation of creatures” (FCM, p. 273), which is Heidegger’s gloss on “deprivation” of world: a “kind of pain and suffering” that “would have to permeate the whole of the animal realm and the realm of life in general” (FCM, p. 271). In contrast, world-having is world-view;

 In contrast, metaphysics in the Medieval period was “fatefully” tied not to science but to religion.  For a detailed account see Steven Crowell, “We Have Never Been Animals: Heidegger’s Posthumanism,” Études phénoménologiques / Phenomenological Studies Vol 1 (2017), 217–240. 45 46

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that is, Da-sein (GA 27, p. 344). Thus “nature” both is, and is not, the metaphysical name for beings as a whole. As a Grundmacht des Seins “nature” names the whole of what is, but as specified in terms of life or animality, a specific scientific region, it draws its sense from one of Dasein’s projects, a particular game that Dasein plays. Hence, as Heidegger remarks, nature “is not to be regarded as the plank or lowest rung of the ladder which the human being would ascend” (FCM, p. 278); rather, Da-sein must be liberated from its “captivation” in the human animal. From the perspective of the world-problem, the ontological difference between an entity (human being) and its “being” (Dasein) becomes a metaphysical difference between two beings: man, and the “Da-sein in man.” Metaphysically, the being of human being now becomes a being “in” the human animal. If the metaphysically neutral analysis of authenticity (Entschlossenheit) in Being and Time demonstrated how Dasein could be brought back to itself from its lostness in das Man, thereby illuminating a necessary condition for any understanding of being, describing thrownness as Dasein’s “dispersal” into beings as a whole seems to require an ontic version of this recovery of individuation. Man, as animal, must “collect” itself (Sammlung) from its dispersal into life or nature so as to allow the “Dasein in man” to occur (GA 27, p. 377). If the stakes of Heideggerian metaphysics cannot be the (impossible) “science of beings as a whole” (GA 27, p. 219), the game it plays now appears to be some sort of gnostic liberation of one entity from another.47 Thus Heidegger’s “metaphysical” turn to biology and zoology for the content of his cosmological world-concept  – his own free world-projection of the game of life – provides the “antecedent answer” to the question of why there is a being who understands being amidst the totality of beings: the telos of this “irruption” is the “self-freeing freedom in man” (KPM, p. 200), world-formation itself. Seen metaphysically, the understanding of being is an event, an occurrence (Geschehen) that inaugurates “history” (Geschichte) – that is, a “future” in the sense of a “destiny” (GA 27, pp. 398; FCM, p. 362). Thus it is not that biology has afforded Heidegger a genuinely phenomenological way to determine beings as a whole ontically (“metaphysical ontic”); rather, he has used the way nature shows up in the project of biology as a springboard for making something happen. Trying to philosophize metaphysically (the world-problem) is thus essentially performative: through a free world-projection (Bild), metaphysics stages the conditions for something that must be brought about, namely, the “transformation into our Da-sein.” Thus, what the phenomenological ontology of Being and Time identified as Dasein’s being an issue

 In this, Heidegger (who dedicated Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics to Eugen Fink) probably served as the model for Fink’s revisions of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, the so-called “Sixth Cartesian Meditation,” which also advocated something like this gnostic model for phenomenology – a proposal that Husserl vigorously resisted. See Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning, ch. 13: “Gnostic Phenomenology.” Chad Engelland, “Heidegger and the Human Difference,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1/1 (2015), pp. 175–193, recognizes that Heidegger courts metaphysical dualism here, but he argues that Heidegger ultimately avoids it. For my response, see Crowell, “We Have Never Been Animals,” p. 228, n. 11. 47

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for itself is now taken to be a metaphysical wager (Wagnis, dare; MFL, p. 13) on the future “transformation” of one entity into another.

From Metaphysics to Metapolitics: World-View In our attempt to understand Heidegger’s metaphysical elucidation of the world-­ problem  – an answer to the question about dispersed Dasein’s “irruption” into beings as a whole – we have encountered three conceptual roadblocks: First, the ontic story of “dispersal,” unlike the ontological story of Dasein’s thrownness, must be able to characterize beings as a whole; however, without reference to some particular project there is nothing to be said about beings as a whole, a fact that becomes evident in Heidegger’s vacuous invocation of “powers.” This is because, second, such dispersal situates Dasein in “nature” – that is, in life, animality, human being – none of them things that Dasein can try to be; they are not at issue in Dasein’s being. Thus the world-forming that is supposed to be the metaphysical equivalent of Dasein’s ontological world-disclosure has no implicit normative orientation (Reglung) and amounts to little more than a kind of arbitrary dogmatism (“substantive absolutes”). Thus, finally, in an effort to say what is at stake in metaphysics – to provide a Welt-bild as the “antecedent answer” to the ontic question of the “inner organization” of beings as a whole, including Dasein itself – Heidegger must nevertheless turn to science to provide determinate content to his talk of animality, nature, life. Metaphysical phenomenology simply has no independent access to beings and, because it is not science either, the cosmological world-concept it seeks cannot be for the sake of a truthful account of beings. Rather, it is “free world-projection,” a “picture,” whose sense is performative: a wager oriented toward making something happen in the future. Given these conceptual problems, then, Heidegger’s move from phenomenology to metaphysics begins to look quite like what he claimed it was not – namely, an attempt at world-view formation (BPP, p.  10). If nevertheless it stands at some remove from how world-view was described there, this is because Heidegger is most interested in cashing in his further claim, namely, that “philosophy itself is a distinctive primal form of world-view” (BPP, p. 10). If world-view is not a philosophical construction but “world-having”  – which Heidegger in the Einleitung describes as “ethos” or “dwelling” (GA 27, p. 379) – the whole point of Heidegger’s metaphysics seems to be to motivate his students to overcome their “degenerate” form of dwelling, represented by the university’s business as usual, and awaken them to the world-view that philosophy itself is, the Grund-haltung in the midst of beings that belongs to “the Da-sein in us.” And as we have seen, this entails a picture or antecedent answer in which, though the human being is “thoroughly amidst nature through its bodiliness,” as Dasein it is “beyond nature,” indeed “something alien to nature” (MFL, p. 166). How then is the world-view or Grund-Haltung of philosophy to be characterized?

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Heidegger’s metaphysics emerges from an attempt to deformalize the concept of thrownness, understood as Dasein’s “abandonment” in the midst of beings as a whole. To be abandoned is to lack “ground.” Unlike animals (including human beings), who are “captivated” by nature through their drive-structure, Dasein is Halt-los, without purchase on things (GA 27, pp. 337, 342, 339). In its Haltlosigkeit, then, Dasein is defined metaphysically as “orientation toward Halt;” the game of life is an attempt to establish a ground in the midst of beings. The yield of this play is Welt-anschauung, the “intuitive givenness” of world (GA 27, p. 344). As we noted above, Heidegger identifies two basic types of world-view, which he elucidates historically: the mythical world-view arises first and is a kind of sich-­ halten that seeks shelter from the overpowering by abnegating its own powers. The Haltung world-view, in contrast, is a “contest” (Auseinandersetzung) with beings, including the being that Dasein itself is, its being an “issue” for itself (GA 27, pp. 366, 387). It is thus the ground of something like an ethos, a dwelling for the placeless. According to Heidegger, this later form of world-view emerges for philosophical reasons: philosophy is the “most fundamental kind of Haltung: Grund-­ Haltung” (GA 27, p. 379) – the “explicit” carrying out of transcendence – which, in its Greek inception, grasped transcendence as rationality. But the Greek ground of ethos falls victim to the “degenerate” versions Heidegger calls “subjectivism” or existential decisionism. For this reason, Heidegger goes to great lengths to undermine the traditional metaphysical concept of human being as rational animal, in favor of Dasein as world-forming, and this results in treating philosophy as a performative enactment of the liberation of Da-sein from the rational animal. The historical beginning of philosophy left Dasein (transcendence, “freedom for ground”) in limbo, so to speak: not in the play of the world as such, but halfway between the animal and the supersensible. A new phenomenological beginning for metaphysics requires a conceptual liberation story: an explicit “pedagogy [Ausbildung]” of the “transcendence of Dasein that we call freedom,” which yields “the playing-field for the irruption [Einbruchsspielraum]” of Haltung itself,” and so for Dasein as “concretely historical” (GA 27, p. 398). Here a radically new hold (Halt) in beings is achieved by freeing the “Da-sein in the human being.” Such liberation is not achieved through phenomenological description of the ontological structures of Dasein and world, however (GA 27, p. 395). Rather, “transcendence toward the phenomenon, toward letting it show itself, means first of all letting it be formed [bilden lassen] from out of the ground of its essence” (GA 27, p. 395). What is such a performing forming like? This question cannot be answered, since the whole thing is based on a wager, a bet on the future. Who is to cash in on the bet? Those who, in being exhorted to avoid degenerative forms of world-view such as subjectivism, can transform themselves into their Da-sein. There is no telling who that might be, but Heidegger seemed to think that Germans – especially the German youth, who (he initially thought) had not yet been corrupted by the subjectivism of earlier twentieth-century philosophy – were “closer to the source” (i.e., had a unique relation to the original Greek beginning that needed to be released into a new one). The project of a phenomenological metaphysics is a pedagogy for such students; and, since “a science of beings as a whole is essentially impossible” (GA

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27, p. 219), metaphysics could only take the form of what Heidegger, in the Black Notebooks from this period, calls “meta-politics”: a political program based on a story about the vocation of philosophy in the midst of the totality of beings (GA 94, p. 116 et pass.) The failure here, as Cassirer intuited, is that as part of Heideggerian metaphysics, the world-problem starts from a transcendental inquiry into conditions of possibility and then, in a way that is opaque from a methodological point of view, abandons the critical-reflective-regressive mode of argumentation for a “substantive” one. Such a move tries to enlist phenomenological insights  – for instance, projection (Worumwillen) as acting for the sake of some particular possibility for being – but these no longer work in the same way when world-forming is substituted for world-­ disclosing. The latter has an internal normative guide; the former can only be established in the manner of a political program that presents itself as a “destiny” or a “dare” that demands decision and choice. Heideggerian metaphysics thus entails precisely those decisionistic elements that the ontology of Being and Time is wrongly accused of advocating. A “metaphysical ontic” can never be anything more than a political program, a way of forming and maintaining agreement on certain background standards that will henceforth define what “we” take to be intellectually or ethically respectable. There is no necessary connection between this conception of metaphysics and the völkisch rhetoric that pervades Heidegger’s work during this period, but there are certainly intimate ties between them. And so we conclude where we began: physicalism is the degenerate form philosophy takes when it operates within something like the mythical world-view; what Heidegger called “spiritual national socialism” (GA 94, p. 114 et pass.) may be the degenerate form philosophy takes when it operates within the “metaphysical” world-view of Haltung. Neither one is a place where philosophy wants to be. And while Cassirer was wrong to think that Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology leaves no room for the “absolute validity” of truth and reason, he was right to think that Heideggerian metaphysics is something like a reversion to dogmatic “substance-­ concepts.” Heidegger himself came to share a similar view. His ideas for a metaphysical ontic  – an account of the totality of entities that would remain phenomenological –came to nothing, and he came to believe that the world-problem was one that could be approached only by “overcoming” metaphysics. But even this project was eventually abandoned in favor of a renewed appreciation for the potential of phenomenology itself – a story for another day.

The Pragmatist Reading of Being and Time Aaron Shoichet

In the introduction to Being and Time, Martin Heidegger states that he intends to raise the question of the meaning of being, and the first step in raising this question is an examination of human being “as it is proximally and for the most part—in its average everydayness” (in seiner durchschnittlichen Alltäglichkeit).1 It turns out that much of Division I of Being and Time is an analysis of how things appear in average everydayness. In average everydayness one is not passively perceiving neutral objects with properties but instead actively dealing with things and using things in one’s immediate environment. Examples Heidegger uses to illustrate human being in its average everydayness are taken from the sphere of practice. He suggests the Greeks had some understanding of this phenomenon, reflected in the term they used to capture everyday things, namely, pragmata: “that is to say,” Heidegger states, “that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings (praxis).” Yet they did not see the need to articulate this understanding or to incorporate it explicitly into their theoretical inquiries, which in turn had important consequences for their ontology.2 While the concept of everydayness is introduced with a reference to Greek thought, and may be seen to have been inspired especially by Aristotle’s practical philosophy, the examples Heidegger uses to illustrate the concept of everydayness reflect a narrow sense of practical—practical in the sense of instrumental.3 They are  Heidegger, Being and Time, 37–38 (Sein und Zeit, 16).  Heidegger, Being and Time, 96–98 (Sein und Zeit, 68). 3  In several papers published in the 1980s and 1990s, Franco Volpi argues that Being and Time not merely exhibits certain Aristotelian motifs, but that there are, as Volpi puts it, numerous homolo1 2

A. Shoichet (*) Leipzig, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_10

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taken from our dealings with tools and artefacts, for example, using a door handle to open a door, or, to take Heidegger’s famous example, using a hammer to hammer something such as a nail into a board. Seeing these practical examples and especially this emphasis on instrumentality to be key to Heidegger’s analysis of everydayness, and this, in turn, key to his critique of past philosophy and his project as a whole, is the first step to reading Being and Time in a certain light, what I will call the “pragmatist reading.” Pragmatist readers—in the specific sense in which I will be using the term on the following pages—make two decisive assumptions when reading Being and Time and interpreting the concept of everydayness. First they attribute an explanatory and ontological primacy to these practical examples and the concept of practice more generally, in which they believe to find some of the most important and interesting features of Heidegger’s work. Second, they interpret Heidegger’s concept of practice essentially instrumentally, assuming that the examples Heidegger gives of door handles and hammers illustrate quite literally the very kind of practice that defines our most basic way of being in the world. Taken together, these two claims amount to a kind of instrumental primacy in his view of human being, which has important implications for Heidegger’s concept of truth and is considered key to understanding his critique of the traditional concept of philosophy. Following this critique, science and philosophy are now grounded in instrumentality. Theory is derivative of practice and its success or validity is defined in terms of its efficacy in helping us fulfill other projects we deem worth pursuing. Thus the aim of theory, according to this reading, is not truth or knowledge for its own sake but instead something like the improvement of one’s practical engagements, of one’s ability and efficiency in achieving one’s aims.4 Three prominent advocates of such a reading are Richard Rorty, Mark Okrent and Robert Brandom. In the introduction to a paper from 1990, Rorty touches upon two central thoughts of this reading in reference to Okrent: the idea that “assertions are tools” and “theory is an instrument of practice.”5 He does not expound these thoughts himself but

gies between Heidegger’s and Aristotle’s texts. He argues, moreover, that it is not merely Aristotle’s theoretical philosophy and the Metaphysics that is decisive in the inception of Being and Time, but especially Aristotle’s practical philosophy and the Nicomachean Ethics. Franco Volpi, “Dasein comme praxis: L’assimilation et la radicalisation heideggerienne de la philosophie pratique d’Aristote” and “Phenomenology as Possibility: The ‘Phenomenological’ Appropriation of the History of Philosophy in the Young Heidegger.” To be sure, Aristotle’s importance for Being and Time was already known and had already been documented, or at least alluded to, before Volpi’s publications. Consider, for example, the work by Thomas Sheehan. 4  The difference between science and philosophy will be important in Part Three in distinguishing the specific temporal form of philosophical thought. 5  Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 190. Rorty summarizes the central thesis of his reading of Being and Time in reference to Mark Okrent’s: “If one reads paragraphs 31–3 of Being and Time as I should like to, and as Mark Okrent has in his book Heidegger’s Pragmatism, Heidegger will be seen as making theory an instrument of practice, as construing assertions as tools for the accomplishment of some human project.” Paragraphs 31to 33 refer to the central pieces of Heidegger’s hermeneutics where he examines the relation between understanding (Verstehen), interpretation (Auslegung) and assertion (Aussage).

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instead refers the reader approvingly to Okrent’s and Brandom’s writings. Together their writings illustrate well this instrumental pragmatist reading. Examining these two claims should make clear that one of the challenges, if not the main challenge, in understanding the concept of everydayness is figuring out what Heidegger ultimately wants to show with these practical examples, given that the concept ought to contribute to the central question of Being and Time. This challenge is connected, I believe, to the more general challenge that readers face in articulating Heidegger’s position towards past philosophy. On the one hand, Heidegger’s reference to “the Greeks” in introducing the concept of everydayness suggests that the concept is a positive retrieval of some insights of Greek (and possibly Scholastic) ontology, even though it is unclear what exactly Heidegger takes from the Greek conception of being for his concept of everydayness. On the other hand, it is clear that this retrieval is also a critique, for Greek philosophy apparently failed to properly articulate this concept, which in turn had pernicious consequences for their philosophy. But here again the reader faces the same difficulty, for what exactly these consequences are and what exactly Heidegger intends to correct in the traditional view remains unclear. He says strikingly little concerning the historical background motivating his analysis, and even less concerning how his own discussion of instrumental examples ought to be understood against this background. I believe it is this reticence that enabled the pragmatist reading to arise in the first place, and it is by overlooking the positive role of past philosophy throughout Being and Time that the pragmatist reading retains its appeal. This latter point is particularly visible in Hubert Dreyfus’s commentary. To be sure, Dreyfus does not read everydayness in purely instrumental terms, yet he nonetheless assumes in line with the pragmatist reading that the concept represents “a profound critique of traditional ontology and epistemology,” the basis of which lies in Heidegger’s novel account of the practical dimension of being-in-the-world.6 Dreyfus’s claim exemplifies how the pragmatist reading overlooks or underestimates the positive role of past philosophy. One could assume that “traditional ontology” includes Greek and Scholastic philosophy. It turns out, however, that this cannot be what Dreyfus had in mind by “traditional ontology,” for the target of Heidegger’s analysis of everydayness is instead something like a version of post-­ Cartesian empiricism—relatively modern philosophy that has assumed that the proper starting place for accessing things and the world is a mind acting as a tabula rasa, abstracted from our day-to-day existence. Dreyfus could have been more precise in specifying the specific kind of philosophy that is at issue. The reason he was not is that—as I read him—he underestimates the importance of Greek and Scholastic philosophy in Heidegger’s thought more generally. He does not see, for instance, that the concept of everydayness was likely not conceived as a critique of Greek and Scholastic philosophy. In overstating or misconstruing the scope and status of the critique, including the function of the practical dimension of everydayness, one risks missing what Heidegger’s critique of Greek philosophy exactly

 Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, vii–viii.

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consists in. The fault in this general tendency is difficult to see in reference to Being and Time alone, but I think we can find some intimations of it by examining more closely the two pragmatist claims outlined above, and considering them also in reference to some of the lectures Heidegger held during that time. I will first expound the pragmatist thesis that “assertions are tools” by briefly rehearsing some well-known passages of Heidegger’s analysis.

Assertions as Tools To understand the pragmatist reading of Being and Time, it is helpful to first consider Heidegger’s thesis concerning the primacy of Zuhandenheit over Vorhandenheit. Heidegger introduces this thesis in section 15 with the remark that, in everydayness, one does not come upon “mere things” in one’s everyday dealings, upon independent objects with properties, things vorhanden that we discover and observe. Rather, what we encounter in everydayness are things we use “for writing, sewing, working, transportation, measurement”—in other words, things one uses to carry out certain projects and to complete certain tasks. He designates the ontological form of these things according to a means–end schema as “something in-order-to” (etwas um-zu . . .). For instance, one uses the pen in order to write on the paper, the door handle in order to open the door, the hammer in order to hammer the nails into the wood. Each thing, by virtue of the structure of its in-order-to, refers to other things and is what it is in reference to a totality. The pen refers to the paper and the desk, the door handle to the door and the room, the hammer to the nails and wood.7 Heidegger calls the being of these things Zuhandenheit and claims that these things are more originary than things vorhanden, that is, more originary than things that are merely “at hand.” By “more originary” one is to assume they occupy not merely an explanatory but also an ontological primacy. This thesis appears to be part of a critique of a certain kind of ontology that assumes things appear firstly as neutral objects with properties, for instance, things of nature, which are, through our subjective interests, subsequently imbued with values and purposes. This alternative ontology sees a world of neutral objects with properties as the foundation and starting place for determining what something is.  Heidegger, Being and Time, 97–98 (Sein und Zeit, 68). In the Grundprobleme he puts this thought as follows: “Jedes einzelne Zeug ist seinem Wesen nach ein Zeug-zum, zum Fahren, zum Schreiben, zum Fliegen. Jedes Zeug hat den immanenten Bezug auf das, wozu es ist, was es ist. Es ist immer etwas um-zu, verweisend auf ein Wozu” (233). Here is the English translation from the Basic Problems: “Each individual piece of equipment is by its own nature equipment-for—for traveling, for writing, for flying. Each one has its immanent reference to that for which it is what it is. It is always something for, pointing to a for-which” (163–164). In Sein und Zeit, he puts this thought in the following way: “Ein Zeug »ist« strenggenommen nie. Zum Sein von Zeug gehört je immer ein Zeugganzes, darin es dieses Zeug sein kann, das es ist” (68). “Taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is” (97). 7

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Through our interests and desires, we turn these neutral objects of nature into instruments and artefacts that serve our interests. Heidegger’s analysis suggests that this view of neutral objects actually gets the ontological order backwards. According to Heidegger’s concept of everydayness, one’s understanding starts not with neutral objects of nature but instead with the things in one’s nearby environment, the things which one is already familiar with in one’s everyday dealings, and these are—as his examples suggest—essentially things that we use like door handles and hammers. In the quotation referred to in the introduction of this paper, Rorty makes reference, however, not to sections 15 to 17 where Heidegger discusses Zuhandenheit, but to a corresponding thesis that Heidegger expounds in sections 31 to 33. This is the thesis concerning the primacy of the “hermeneutical as” over the derivative “apophantical as.”8 In effect, this second thesis may be seen as an extension or corollary of the primacy of Zuhandenheit, for the “hermeneutical as” is taken as the name for our originary mode of interpreting something in our involvement with it in a practical context.9 To understand (verstehen) something means to interpret (auslegen) what and how this thing is. For example, I understand this thing in front of me as a desk, as something to sit at with a chair, and the laptop as something to use for writing. A neutral interpretation, a pure perception of a thing that does not include its function or use in a social context, which corresponds to the logos apophantikos, is derivative of this more primordial “hermeneutical as.” Heidegger calls the derivative interpretation that defines the logos apophantikos a privation of the “hermeneutical as.”10 Thus we see a parallel between these two theses, between the thesis concerning the primacy of Zuhandenheit over Vorhandenheit and the thesis concerning the primacy of the “hermeneutical as” over the “apophantical as.” At issue in both cases is the correct phenomenological order in determining what something is. According to Heidegger, one first uncovers what and how something is in this practical context of involvement in which one makes use of the things in one’s environment. Since the pragmatist reading understands the category of Zuhandenheit ultimately in terms of instrumentality, the primacy of Zuhandenheit amounts to the primacy of instrumental-practical relations in defining how we have access to things and where an inquiry into the meaning of being must begin. The reason for rehearsing these well-known passages concerning the primacy of Zuhandenheit and the “hermeneutical as” is that they underlie the pragmatist thesis  Heidegger, Being and Time, 200–201 (Sein und Zeit, 158).  He is more explicit concerning its practical nature in his lecture on Kant in GA 25: “Zu diesem vorliegenden Seienden verhält sich das Dasein zunächst und zuerst in der charakterisierten Weise des praktischen Umgangs” (24). Here is the English translation: “Dasein comports itself towards the beings which lie before it primarily and from the beginning in the manner of practical dealing—as we have characterized it” (17). 10  In Being and Time Heidegger speaks of the apophantical “as” in terms of a deficiency in our involvement with things, which may be read in line with the concept of privation. “Damit Erkennen als betrachtendes Bestimmen des Vorhandenen möglich sei, bedarf es vorgängig einer Defizienz des besorgenden Zu-tunhabens mit der Welt. Im Sichenthalten von allem Herstellen, Hantieren u. dgl. legt sich das Besorgen in den jetzt noch einzig verbleibenden Modus des In-Seins, in das Nurnoch-verweilen bei . . .” (61). 8 9

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that “assertions are tools” and are accordingly important for understanding why one attributes this thesis to Heidegger. There are several passages that the pragmatist reader points to in support of the idea that Heidegger understands assertions as a kind of instrument. There is a passage, for instance, in section 44 where Heidegger states that an assertion, once spoken out, becomes “something ready-to-hand within-­ the-­world [wird gleichsam zu einem innerweltlich Zuhandenen] which can be taken up and spoken again.”11 But perhaps more important for Okrent’s and Brandom’s readings are sections 33 and 69 where Heidegger analyzes an assertion about a hammer and suggests that an assertion such as “the hammer is too heavy” is only understandable in reference to the practical context in which one uses the hammer to do things, for example, to hammer nails into wood in order to build something like a house. Someone who is using a hammer and asserts that “the hammer is too heavy” has not made a theoretical assertion about an object with the property of heaviness, but instead communicated something about his or her interpretation of the situation and perhaps informed someone standing nearby that the hammer is not suitable for the task at hand, that a lighter hammer would be better.12 The assertion is spoken out by someone using the hammer and the assertion itself is being “used,” so to speak, in order to improve the activity of hammering. Okrent takes these passages in connection with Heidegger’s analysis of everydayness to justify drawing the conclusion that for Heidegger “assertions themselves are considered to be a special kind of tool: they are tools for communicating interpretations.”13 Similar to other tools like door handles and hammers, one uses assertions too as tools, namely, as a means of communication in order to improve an activity or solve a practical problem. Now the pragmatist takes an important step beyond Heidegger’s analysis in these passages. The pragmatist reader concludes that not just certain assertions like the one about the hammer, asserted in a context in which one is hammering nails into a board to build a house, qualify as tools; rather—as Okrent and Brandom read Heidegger—assertions in general are tools. They believe that the property of being useful in communicating interpretations defines what an assertion is, in the same way that the property of being able to hammer other objects like nails into boards defines what a hammer is. Essential to the definition of an assertion is that it is something one uses in order to communicate and make inferences. This function constitutes, so to speak, the essence of an assertion. There are nonetheless, broadly speaking, two different kinds of assertions according to the pragmatist reading:

 Heidegger, Being and Time, 266 (Sein und Zeit, 224). Heidegger refers to assertions as zuhanden in his discussion of the derivative nature of the traditional conception of truth in § 44. 12  Ibid., 412 (Sein und Zeit, 360). In his Marburg lectures on logic in the winter semester of 1925/26, Heidegger illustrates this thought with the example of a piece of chalk.“Würde ich sagen, während des Schreibens: Die Kreide ist zu hart, oder sandig, oder irgend so etwas, dann würde ich eine Aussage machen innerhalb des Verrichtens, innerhalb des Schreibens, eine Aussage, die ich in keiner Weise interpretieren dürfte: Diese Aussage: »Die Kreide ist zu sandig« ist nicht nur ein Bestimmen der Kreide, sondern zugleich ein Auslegen meines Verhaltens und Nichtverhaltenkönnens – nicht »recht« schreiben können” (GA 21, 158). 13  Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism, 74. 11

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practical assertions about other tools and theoretical assertions about neutral objects in the sciences and philosophy. Assertions about other tools, according to Okrent, function like highway signs. As he puts it, “Their primary function is to orient us within a particular equipmental context and thereby show us how to achieve some end by using some items of equipment.”14 They are a kind of all-purpose tool, assisting us in our daily actions and in carrying out projects. They help us to coordinate activity and make better use of other tools, and to accomplish other tasks we deem important and worth pursuing. By contrast, scientific and philosophical assertions bring one in contact with “purely natural, non-instrumental determinations.”15 They bring one in contact with things as neutral objects, with things vorhanden, which are not defined in terms of their function or usefulness. We use such assertions to communicate and make inferences, and they are in one sense more useful than practical assertions about other tools in a practical situation. An assertion such as “the hammer is too heavy” refers to a particular context, a particular situation and a particular moment, and is accordingly limited in its use in making inferences and further assertions. It cannot be generalized beyond the particular act of using that particular hammer. By contrast, a theoretical assertion about the atomic structure of lithium may be used in many contexts to make many inferences, which in turn authorize further inferences that can be further communicated. This points to a second parallel between assertions and tools like hammers: assertions too belong to a referential totality. Just as the hammer refers to the nails and the wood and the work bench, an assertion refers to other assertions, each occupying a place within an inferential system of references in which each assertion is at once the consequence of one assertion and also the premise of another. But whereas the function of a hammer is practical in nature—to nail boards together, for example, to construct a house—the function of assertions is primarily theoretical. They communicate interpretations of things and allow us to make further assertions. A third parallel is that using an assertion entails being in possession of certain practical capacities. In the same way that using hammers implies knowing how to hold the hammer and how to swing it correctly to hammer nails into wood, using assertions implies knowing how to formulate them correctly and when to assert them. It presupposes a minimal linguistic mastery and a minimal capacity for rational thought. One must know not only how to speak a language, but also when to assert, for example, “the hammer is too heavy” or “this thing is red.” Using an assertion correctly in the fullest sense, according to Brandom, entails knowing which commitments and entitlements follow from it. Knowing how to use the assertion “this thing is red” means knowing that it authorizes the assertion “this thing is coloured,” that is, it entails knowing how to make inferences.16 From this instrumental conception of theoretical assertions, the pragmatist reading takes a second significant step beyond Being and Time. Not merely individual

 Okrent, Heidegger’s pragmatism, 86.  Ibid., 79. 16  Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time,” 402–3. 14 15

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theoretical assertions but also the activity of theory as such is seen to be useful in bringing forth other ends, in assisting one to carry out projects that are non-­ theoretical. In Rorty’s words, if we read Being and Time in a pragmatist spirit, “Heidegger will be seen as making theory an instrument of practice.” While the natural sciences may be seen to be useful in the development of technology, and thus in improving our lives in a practical sense, philosophy is useful in generating new interpretations of ourselves and of the world. Philosophy is a form of creative expression.17 It is edifying, which means it aims at “carrying on a conversation rather than at discovering truth.”18 For Rorty “carrying on a conversation” means that wisdom consists not in revealing the truth, but instead in a capacity to generate new descriptions of ourselves, to define and redefine ourselves in new and interesting ways.19 Okrent has a similarly instrumental view of theory and discursive praxis, but he interprets its function slightly differently. He believes discursive praxis is valuable not because it facilitates creative re-descriptions of ourselves and of the world but simply because it has relevance for one’s practical engagements. Paradigmatically this means it helps us to carry out practical projects or to achieve ends that we consider worth pursuing and which exist independently of language.20 In a more recent paper, by contrast, Brandom is critical of just such a picture of discursive praxis, which he himself had at one point found compelling. He came to the conclusion that such a view of language as a tool that the individual uses to achieve various goals misconstrues the nature of language and the way language functions. While he believes this picture of language  avoids some of the fundamental pitfalls of the  Ibid., 96. Okrent hints at this idea in the following way. “Once the system is established, it is possible for Dasein to develop an interest in the extant as such. In that case the point of the system is to generate new, unexpected, and previously unobserved determinations of the extant [Vorhandenheit]. It is even possible to use language in order to come to an interpretation of language, odd as that may seem.” 18  Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 373. 19  Ibid., 378. Perhaps this idea is expressed best or at least most explicitly by Charles Guignon in a passage near the end of his book, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge. There one reads the following: “The description [of Dasein] is measured not by criteria of correctness, but by criteria pertaining to its consequences for our lives. For example, does it give us a deeper and broader sense of who we are? does it enable us to assume our existence with renewed clarity and vigor? does it liberate us from obsessive and futile puzzles? does it enable us to see connections among a wide range of phenomena? does it bring us into accord with deep and pervasive resonances of our heritage? does it offer us a richer and more illuminating vocabulary for describing and interpreting ourselves? These criteria point less to the question of finding a better ‘model’ or ‘representation’ than they do to transforming our lives” (251). 20  Okrent hints a this idea in his approving reference to Brandom in the following passage from Heidegger’s Pragmatism: “Clearly, however, the main point of using language about the extant is to generate successful new ways of coping practically with things in order to attain practical ends. In this linguistic practice has been wildly successful. As Robert Brandom puts this Heideggerian point: ‘Assertions about the present at hand can be practically relevant. We can use information about the merely present at hand properties of things, such as the heaviness of the hammer. Without the possibility of language exits through non-assertional performances, theoretical or intralinguistic inference would lose much or all of its point’” (96). 17

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traditional picture, the problem is that it depicts the instrumental nature of language simplistically, as though the goals we pursue with language could be conceived of independently of the instrument. Yet, as Brandom later observed, without language, it is not possible to conceive of these goals, let alone reach them. Most things we want to do we can do only because we can talk. Yet despite his own change of view of the function of language, his assessment of Heidegger’s view of language in Being and Time did not change. Heidegger, Brandom continued to maintain, locates discursive praxis in a similar category as other tools, and “sees its use in the possibility to use it as a means to reach what we want.”21 While one would be hard pressed to find in Being and Time direct support for these more contentious claims concerning the instrumental basis of philosophy and discursive praxis, this is not the case for the more specific claim that assertions are tools. As indicated above, one can find passages in which Heidegger refers to assertions as things zuhanden, and where assertions are treated as tools within a practical context. There is, as I see it, also little reason to question whether there is textual support for the thesis concerning the primacy of Zuhandenheit. Here too one finds numerous statements that articulate unambiguously this very thesis. By contrast, one could surely question whether the thesis concerning the primacy of Zuhandenheit ought to be interpreted instrumentally as the pragmatist reads it. Yet I think the greater weakness of the pragmatist reading becomes visible once one takes a step back and asks how these passages fit within the work as a whole, and asks what status and function ought to be attributed to the instrumental examples Heidegger uses to illustrate the concept of everydayness. What role is this thesis supposed to play in relation to the rest of the text, and what exactly is it supposed to demonstrate about the question of the meaning of being? I believe it is in light of these questions that the weakness of the pragmatist reading becomes most apparent.

Heidegger’s Definition of Aussage In the next two sections, I will consider two points. The first point, which I will examine in this section, concerns Heidegger’s definition of assertion (Aussage). In section 33 he defines assertions in terms of three significations, which together “encompass the full structure of assertion.” His analysis begins with the claim that the “primary signification of ‘assertion’ is ‘pointing out’ (Aufzeigen) . . . letting an entity be seen from itself.”22 The second and third significations of assertion are  Brandom, “Pragmatik und Pragmatismus,” 54. Brandom expresses this idea as follows in a text that was printed in German: “Der globale discursive Instrumentalismus, auf den ich hier eingehen möchte, wirft die diskursive Praxis in den gleichen Topf wie Erreichung dessen, was wir wollen, zu verwenden. Das Bild der Sprache als Werkzeug eint Autoren wie den frühen Heidegger und den späten Wittgenstein, die im übrigen (trotz des beiden gemeinsamen Fundamentalpragmatismus) völlig verschieden sind.” 22  Heidegger, Being and Time, 196 (Sein und Zeit, 154). 21

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predication and communication respectively. Stating that “pointing out” is the primary signification of assertion indicates, as I read it, that Heidegger attributes an ontological and explanatory priority to this signification in his definition of assertion. This view is reinforced by his references to the Greek conception of assertion as the logos apophantikos. Because an assertion is a “pointing out,” it can be either true or false, for it may either point things out as they are or not point things out as they are. This is what distinguishes this form of speech from other forms such as requesting (Bitten). Thus, predication, the second signification, is not only listed second but is also—as I read his definition—secondary in terms of defining this form of speech, which has its basis in the first. Likewise, communication (Mitteilung), the third signification, is dependent on the first two. That is, we understand assertion as communication only in terms of pointing out and predication.23 In his lectures from 1929/30 Heidegger is more explicit in underlining the primacy of pointing out. Heidegger equates it with that which defines assertions as such and refers to this capacity of an assertion to be either true or false as its essence (Wesen): “The essence of the λόγος consists in its containing as such the possibility of ‘either true or false,’ of ‘both positive and negative’. It is precisely the possibility of all these kinds of transformation—which have merely been outlined in a rough and ready fashion— that comprise the innermost essence of the λόγος.”24 A characteristic feature of the pragmatist reading of section 33 is that it rearranges the hierarchy of these significations that define for Heidegger the essence of assertion. Instead of seeing the primary signification to be “pointing out,” the pragmatist emphasizes the second and third significations, namely, predication and communication. Brandom’s reading makes this rearrangement explicit. For instance, he states that “Assertion is the topic of Section 33, which offers three ‘significations’ of assertion. The central one of these is that ‘assertion means communication.’” Brandom continues: “Asserting thus has the significance of issuing a re-assertion license to other community members. The assertion is produced as something useable by others.”25 It is striking that Brandom, while referring to the passage where Heidegger defines assertion, insists that communication is the “central”

 Ibid., 197. Here is the passage where Heidegger introduces the third signification of assertion: “3. ‘Assertion means ‘communication’ [Mitteilung], speaking forth [Heraussage]. As communication, it is directly related to ‘assertion’ in the first and second significations.” “Aussage bedeutet Mitteilung, Heraussage. Als diese hat sie direkten Bezug zur Aussage in der ersten und zweiten Bedeutung. Sie ist Mitsehenlassen des in der Weise des Bestimmens Aufgezeigten” (155). 24  Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 337. Here is this passage in the original German: “Das Wesen des λόγος besteht gerade darin, daß in ihm als solchem die Möglichkeit des ›entweder wahr oder falsch‹, des ›sowohl positiv als auch negativ‹ liegt. Gerade die Möglichkeit zu all diesen, und zwar roh bestimmten Weisen der Abwandlung ist das innerste Wesen des λόγος” (GA 29/30, 489). He repeats this thought two pages later in the same lecture: “Erst wenn wir die Frage nach dem Grunde der Möglichkeit des λόγος so ansetzen, daß wir fragen nach der Ermöglichung seines inneren Wesens, nämlich des Vermögens zum ›entweder-oder‹ des Wahrseins oder Falschseins, haben wir die Sicherheit, den λόγος in seiner Wesensstruktur wirklich ergründen zu können” (491). 25  Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time,” 401. 23

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signification. That the “central” signification of assertion is communication fits into Brandom’s way of reading Heidegger as a normative pragmatist. Yet his claim evidently misconstrues Heidegger’s analysis, for Heidegger does not state that communication is the central signification of assertion. In fact, as we saw above, communication is the third signification, and the “primary” signification of assertion is pointing out, the fact that an assertion may be either true or false. (“Aussage bedeutet primär Aufzeigung.”). In rearranging Heidegger’s analysis by giving priority to communication, Brandom may be articulating what he believes Heidegger actually meant to say or should have said in order that his conception of assertions correspond better with the rest of the text, or, as I read Brandom, so that Being and Time corresponded better with Brandom’s normative pragmatism. But then it would mean that Brandom’s reshuffling reflects more his own view of assertions than Heidegger’s. Because Brandom reads Being and Time in terms of his own normative pragmatism, he believes that the first signification is only comprehensible in relation to the third, that the truth of an assertion is defined in reference to the communicative function the assertion plays in a given discursive practice. Accordingly, the main signification of assertion is not what is said in the assertion, what is pointed out, but what one does with the assertion, which inferences can be made with it, what function it serves in society and may play in the discursive practice of giving and asking for reasons. This reshuffling of Heidegger’s treatment reflects a fundamental difference between Brandom’s view of assertions and the view that Heidegger presents in Being and Time. A second striking feature of the pragmatist reading of assertions as tools is that it ignores the context in which Heidegger speaks of assertions in this way. In the one passage where Heidegger explicitly refers to assertions as things zuhanden, his intention is not to clarify what an assertion is, but rather to elaborate a separate thesis, which he believes is important for the subsequent analysis. This is the thesis concerning the derivative nature of the traditional conception of truth.26 According to this thesis, the truth of an assertion in the sense of correctness is derivative and only possible on the basis of already having access to things and to the world, which he refers to as “primordial truth.” His thesis that the truth of assertions is a derivative phenomenon means that it is not possible to clarify the phenomenon of “pointing out,” of truth in the sense of correctness, without making recourse to the fact that we already, both practically and theoretically, have access to things that can be pointed out. The thesis concerning the derivative nature of propositional truth is connected to a second thesis. Assertions are not only true or false in the sense of pointing things out or not pointing them out as they are; they may also bring about, in Heidegger’s terminology, a more fundamental untruth in the form of idle talk (Gerede). Heidegger’s discussion of idle talk is the background against which one finds the statement that assertions are things zuhanden and may be used as instruments. As I

 This thesis is captured by the title of the section: “The primordial phenomenon of truth and the derivative character of traditional conception of truth.” 26

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read Heidegger, the concept of idle talk is conceived in opposition to his concept of phenomenology, and this means in opposition to the primary function of logos as a pointing out. Idle talk is a privation of logos; it is a privation of one of the two defining elements of “phenomenology.” When Heidegger’s statement concerning assertions as things zuhanden is read against the backdrop of his discussion of idle talk, this statement appears as an account of how idle talk is able to come about in the first place: the fact that assertions are, so to speak, easy to use. In order to use them to communicate information, one need not have seen with one’s own eyes or grasped for oneself the things referred to in the assertion. They may be used to pass on information and make further assertions without bringing the person using them “face to face with entities themselves in an ‘original’ experience.”27 Nor is it necessary that one be capable of justifying the truth of what one is talking about in order to use the assertion correctly in the discursive practice of the community. One has at least a superficial understanding of what is said and accepts “things are so because one says so.”28 For this reason, assertions are “free-floating” (freischwebend): their function in discursive practice is to a certain extent free from what is referred to by them and the inferential commitments that follow from them. It is not necessary that the speaker appropriate the content, neither in the sense of uncovering firsthand what is said in the assertion, nor in the sense of knowing all the inferential consequences that follow from it. Because assertions may fulfill the function of communication in discursive practice without being grounded in either of these two senses, it is possible for a deficient discourse to arise, a discourse that consists merely in passing on what others have said, of mere idle talk. This highlights the critical dimension to idle talk, namely, the possibility of merely repeating what one has been told without fully understanding or taking responsibility for what it is that one is saying. The concept of idle talk may be seen to also contain a positive dimension. Seen positively, this concept reflects an essential characteristic of language and of the theoretical disciplines—that knowledge does not require each person to have seen or grasped the thing spoken about with his or her own eyes. We believe what others tell us and we can use what we learn from others to make new inferences. This is an essential feature of language and goes hand in hand with the division of intellectual labour central to the sciences. The pragmatist reading typically either struggles to find a place for the critical dimension of idle talk, or else interprets it, as Brandom does, exclusively in terms of the normative demand of giving and asking for reasons. This outcome follows directly, I believe, from having rearranged the definition of assertion. As we saw in Heidegger’s definition of assertion, the primary signification is its capacity to “point out,” to be either true or false, while its third signification is communication. In  Heidegger, Being and Time, 266 (Sein und Zeit, 224).  Heidegger, Being and Time, 212 (Sein und Zeit, 168. “Und weil das Reden den primären Seinsbezug zum beredeten Seienden verloren bzw. nie gewonnen hat, teilt es sich nicht mit in der Weise der ursprünglichen Zueignung dieses Seienden, sondern auf dem Wege des Weiter- und Nachredens.”) 27 28

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connection with seeing the essence of assertions to consist instead in communication, Brandom interprets idle talk in line with his conception of entitlement and authority. Entitlement means that one is justified in inheriting and re-asserting what someone else has already asserted, which in turn may again be re-asserted by someone else. Authority refers to how each assertion, in virtue of being an element within an inferentially connected whole, permits and authorizes further assertions. Each assertion may be the premise of an inference, and each conclusion of an inference may in turn serve as the premise of further inferences. He believes the essential difference between idle talk and logos consists in the idea that idle talk is parasitic on the social structure that makes such talk possible. In idle talk, in contrast to logos, “the authority structure distinctive of talking is not acknowledged by those who are nonetheless dependent on that structure.”29 Idle talk acknowledges only the communicative structure of authority but not the inferential: “‘What-is-said-in-the-talk’ is passed along, but never grounded in ‘what-is-talked-about’—it does not have to answer to any justificatory demands beyond a communicational provenance.”30 Idle talk means, then, talking without justifying one’s claims or being able to justify one’s claims, without participating in the discursive practice of giving and asking for reasons in the way that one ought to in order to be a full participating member of a normatively bound discursive community. Though one ought to be able to give reasons for what one asserts, it is not necessary that one be able to give reasons in order to qualify as knowing how to use assertions and thus participating in the discursive community. Brandom’s account of idle talk follows from his definition of assertion that places predication and communication above pointing out (truth). Heidegger states that the primary signification of assertion is not communication and predication, as Brandom assumes, but instead pointing out (truth), because—as I read him—he believes truth is more fundamental in defining what an assertion is. Brandom's and Heidegger’s different definitions of assertion reflect the different philosophical traditions in which Brandom and Heidegger situate their own concepts of philosophy. Thus for Heidegger, the inferential function of an assertion, as it is manifest in the discursive practice of giving and asking for reasons, while important, occupies nonetheless a secondary function. Idle talk, which is a deficient form of logos, is discourse that is divorced of original truth. One does not have original access to that which one is talking about; one fails to uncovere for oneself the truth that is preserved in the assertion. The discursive practice of giving and asking for reasons is derivative of the more basic fact that things show themselves to us

 Brandom, “Dasein, the Being that Thematizes,” 338.  Ibid., 339–40. Here is the rest of the passage where Brandom elucidates Heidegger’s concept of idle talk: “Thus the function of what is talked about, das Beredete, is to ground the authority of the contents that are communicated. Taking a claim back to its ground is justifying it in some way other than by appeal to what others say. It is taking responsibility for it oneself, justifying it by appeal to other claims, including but not limited to perceptually acquired ones, that the individual also takes responsibility for. Gerede is a practical stance that ignores such grounding in das Beredete, and cleaves only to das Geredete, ignoring grounding in favor of just passing things along.” 29 30

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meaningfully in the first place. For Heidegger, what is primary is not the capacity to make inferences but instead the very basis for being able to say anything true at all. Idle talk is not merely a failure to take responsibility for what one says but rather a specific form of not letting things be seen as they are, of covering things up, of being in untruth. Whereas Brandom finds in idle talk his own concept of failing to fulfill fully one’s normative discursive responsibility, Rorty sees in it something fundamentally antithetical to his own concept of pragmatism. He sees in it Heidegger’s desire for “purity,” to rise above the social practice in which he found himself, to find “something more important than anything empirical science might offer,” a place for philosophy (and later “thinking”) beyond the mundane discourse that accompanies our everyday concern with things, “a place which, if not above the heavens, is at least beyond chatter, beyond Geschwätz.”31 This is, in Rorty’s eyes, one of the metaphysical vestiges the pragmatist reader must discard before effectively appropriating Heidegger’s thought. I think Rorty sees more astutely than Brandom what is at stake in Heidegger’s concept of idle talk. He sees that the concept stems from a rather traditional view of theoretical thought, which is in direct conflict with the more modern pragmatist tradition. He recognizes that Heidegger is still bound to the metaphysical tradition.

Difficulties with the Pragmatist Reading of Zuhandenheit While I have attempted to show some of the difficulties one faces in harmonizing the thesis that “assertions are tools” with Heidegger’s definition of Aussage in Being and Time, one may rightfully find the basis of the pragmatist interpretation of assertions to consist in the more general thesis I called “the primacy of practice,” namely, that practical interactions with things in one’s immediate environment have an ontological and explanatory primacy over theoretical modes of relating to things. Central to the pragmatist interpretation is the idea that Heidegger’s category of Zuhandenheit is defined by a “means–end” structure.32 The pragmatist understands Heidegger’s reference to pragmata in the narrow sense of poiesis, in terms of use and production, in reference to things one uses to attain an end or to carry out a project, like the hammer one uses to nail boards together to build a house or the door handle one uses to open the door to enter a room.33 For the pragmatist, something zuhanden is  Rorty, “Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism,” 61 and 65.  Carl Friedrich Gethmann uses the term means-end rationality (Mittel-Zweck-Rationalität) in his interpretation of Zuhandenheit in his paper, “Heideggers Konzeption des Handelns in Sein und Zeit.” 33  Part of the difficulty in understanding Heidegger’s reference to the Greek term pragmata is that the words pragmata and praxis have more than one meaning. Robert Bernasconi observes that in a lecture in 1935 Heidegger identifies five meanings to the word pragmata. Bernasconi suggests the fourth meaning corresponds with the meaning Heidegger invoked in Being and Time. The 31 32

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something that is either appropriate or inappropriate for achieving a certain end. Accordingly, Heidegger uses examples with simple tools to illustrate the category of Zuhandenheit because this is the ontological form that all things exhibit: they are what they are in virtue of what we use them for or what they are made for.34 In Brandom’s reading, they are either used in order to produce or accomplish something, or else they are themselves the aim or result of a productive act.35 Use and production are for Brandom the two defining features of Zuhandenheit. If the thesis concerning the primacy of Zuhandenheit applies exhaustively to our relations with things within the world, then it is necessary that it also apply to relations to things of nature, to things that are not made by human hands but simply discovered. Indeed, according to the pragmatist reading, one finds passages in Being and Time where Heidegger speaks of nature as material for the production of a work or artefact, for example, the way the hammer and the nails refer to the wood and steel, the shoes to the leather, and this in turn to the skins of animals. Another example is the way one encounters the weather by means of the covered railway platform that protects one from the rain, and one encounters the movement of the sun by means of a clock to tell the time in the official astronomical manner.36 Not only nature but even, to a certain extent, other humans may be encountered, according to Heidegger, in terms of the useability and serviceability of tools and equipment. The farmer is revealed by the field one walks along, and the owner of the boat by the boat one stumbles upon.37 We do not produce things of nature, yet we use fourth meaning of pragmata corresponds to “die Dinge, sofern sie überhaupt solche sind, womit wir zu tun haben, sei es, daß wir sie bearbeiten, verwenden, umgestalten oder nur betrachten und durchforschen – πράγματα, auf πράξις bezogen, πράξις hier ganz weit genommen, weder in dem engen Sinne der praktischen Anwendung (vgl. χρησ—), noch im Sinne der πράξις als Handlung im Sinne der sittlichen Handlung; πράξις ist alles Tun und Betreiben und Aushalten, was auch die ποίησις einschließt”(Die Frage, 54). Here poiesis in the sense of making and using is only one element of this conception of praxis and is not exhaustive of those things we are involved with in our everyday interactions. Bernasconi believes Heidegger invokes this broad sense of πράγματα in Being and Time (Bernasconi, 115). He may be right. It is nonetheless difficult to substantiate this observation with passages from Being and Time. It is much easier to find support for the pragmatist’s claim that Heidegger’s category of Zuhandenheit corresponds to the narrower conception of praxis as poiesis, things in the sense of production and use. See also Karl Mertens’s paper, “Die Kontextualität des Verstehens,” 199–200. 34  Cf. Gethmann’s article, “Das Realitätsproblem: ein Skandal der Philosophie?” in Dasein: Erkennen und Handeln. 35  Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time,” 393–94. 36  Heidegger, Being and Time, 100 (Sein und Zeit, 70–71). There is little doubt that in this passage Heidegger speaks of nature in this way. The following statement captures this thought unambiguously: “Im gebrauchten Zeug ist durch den Gebrauch die ‘Natur’ mitendeckt, die ‘Natur’ im Lichte der Naturprodukte” (70). 37  Heidegger, Being and Time, 156 (Sein und Zeit, 120). Karl Mertens emphasizes both this instrumental interpretation of praxis in the sense of poiesis, as well as the idea that we encounter others within this instrumental context. “Denn die soziale Praxis, die Heidegger analysiert, wird ganz aus dem Zusammenhang eines gebrauchenden und herstellenden Tuns, einer – mit Aristoteles gesprochen – poiêsis bestimmt. Die Anderen, von denen hier die Rede ist, begegnen in Kontexten des herstellenden technischen Tuns” (Mertens, “Die Kontextualität des Verstehens,” 199–200).

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them to carry out projects, to build houses, to produce electricity, etc. Such passages, which are certainly not numerous, nonetheless lend support to a reading that sees the primacy of instrumentality to be all-encompassing, the means–end structure to be exhaustive of our primary way of relating to things, according to which all other modes of interpreting things are ontologically derivative.38 Following from these two claims about the category of Zuhandenheit—that it is essentially instrumental and that it is exhaustive of our primary relations to things within the world—is the idea that our only access to things vorhanden, to things that have “purely natural, non-instrumental determinations,” is by means of a certain instrument, namely, by means of assertions. Only by using assertions, which are themselves a kind of instrument, does one have access to something non-­ instrumentally. Brandom develops this idea in some detail in his two papers on Heidegger, which Okrent takes up in his book Heidegger’s Pragmatism.39 Once things of nature are subsumed under the primacy of Zuhandenheit, Heidegger’s analysis amounts to a conception of human existence that is thoroughly instrumental, for the possibility of relating to something non-instrumentally is derivative of a more fundamental and all-encompassing instrumentality.40 I think the pragmatist reading has acquired a significant following because it offers a more or less coherent interpretation of these difficult passages. Yet it is   Gethmann, whom I count as a representative of pragmatist reading, argues in “Das Realitätsproblem” that the category of Zuhandenheit is not only to be understood instrumentally, but that all other ways of relating to things are deficient in relation to this instrumental category: “Da der umsichtige Umgang nicht ein Vollzug neben anderen ist, sondern den Grundvollzug ausmacht, in den alle anderen Vollzüge als Sondervollzüge eingebettet sind, ist die Zuhandenheit zunächst der universelle ontologische Modus. Gerade deshalb entsteht das Problem, wie man das Auftreten weiterer Einstellungen und entsprechend anderer ontologischer Modi vestehen kann. Heideggers prinzipielle Antwort darauf ist einfach: Andere Modi sind als Defizienzen gegenüber dem umsichtigen Umgang mit zuhandenem Zeug zu interpretieren” (Dasein, 219–220). 39  In a paper on Heidegger, Brandom argues “that the category of the present-at-hand consists of ready-to-hand things which are appropriately responded to by a certain kind of performance, qua things that can only be appropriately responded to by such a performance. That categorically constitutive kind of responsive recognition performance type is assertion” (Categories, 399). Brandom continues afew pages later: “The present-at-hand may thus be defined as what is ready-to-hand as a with-which for the practice of assertion, that is, as what is responded to as such only by making a claim about it” (404). Here is the passage from Okrent’s book where this idea is made explicit: “To interpret something as a tool, one can either use it or improve it or make functional assertions concerning it. To interpret something as having any other sort of being or any other sort of property, one can only make assertions” (83). 40  On these two points Gethmann is explicit: “Der mit dem Primat des umsichtigen Umgangs mitgesetzte ‘ontologische’ Begriff ist der der Zuhandenheit. Der umsichtige Umgang präsupponiert, daß ihm das Seiende als ‘Wozu’, als ‘Dienlichkeit’, als ‘Zeug’ erscheint. Das Seiende ist präsent als das, worauf sich das umsichtige Umgehen mit etwas bezieht. Da der umsichtige Umgang nicht ein Vollzug neben anderen ist, sondern den Grundvollzug ausmacht, in den alle anderen Vollzüge als Sondervollzüge eingebettet sind, ist die Zuhandenheit zunächst der universelle ontologische Modus. Gerade deshalb entsteht das Problem, wie man das Auftreten weiterer Einstellungen und entsprechend anderer ontologischer Modi verstehen kann. Heideggers prinzipielle Antwort darauf ist einfach: Andere Modi sind als Defizienzen gegenüber dem umsichtigen Umgang mit zuhandenen Zeug zu interpretieren” (Dasein, 217–18). 38

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coherent only so long as one does not step back and ask how these passages fit into the greater project. Then it becomes apparent that it is not at all self-evident what function everydayness is supposed to play in the context of the project as a whole, but it is clear at least that it is only comprehensible in connection with Heidegger’s interpretation of past philosophy, which is at play throughout Being and Time. The importance of past philosophy becomes visible if one considers Heidegger’s lecture from 1927, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, which, as we now know, was originally conceived in conjunction with Being and Time. In this lecture Heidegger discusses four traditional metaphysical theses that are directly relevant to the central question of Being and Time. Particularly interesting for the present discussion is the second thesis, which is presented in the context of an interpretation of Scholastic philosophy. This is the thesis that every being is characterized by both existentia and essentia. Robert Bernasconi observes that Heidegger’s discussion of this thesis, especially his choice of terminology, is striking in light of Being and Time. In his discussion, Heidegger remarks that the Scholastics and the Greeks understood being as Vorhandenheit. The concept is of course familiar to us, yet in this lecture Heidegger defines this category differently, for he specifies that the Scholastics and the Greeks understood being in terms of production, bringing-forth (Herstellen). Here Vorhandenheit is understood in the sense of poiesis and not in reference to neutral objects with properties, to things of nature, free of human interests. In light of Being and Time, Heidegger’s choice of terminology is confusing: his definition of Vorhandenheit looks awfully similar to his definition of Zuhandenheit in Being and Time. Setting aside the question concerning the plausibility of Heidegger’s interpretation of Scholastic and Greek philosophy, one can consider what this tells us about Heidegger’s concepts of Zuhandenheit and everydayness in Being and Time. Considering that the Grundprobleme was originally intended as the third division of the first half of Being and Time, one is compelled to assume that he cannot be expressing a fundamentally different view, nor for that matter a fundamentally different understanding of the same concept. One thing at least that can be gathered from Being and Time is that the term Vorhandenheit is ambiguous: it has both a narrow and a broad sense. In its narrow sense, it is conceived as part of a contrasting pair with Zuhandenheit, whereas in its broad sense it is used to designate everything one may encounter within the world, including tools and artefacts. In its broad sense it includes both Vorhandenheit in the narrow sense and also Zuhandenheit. Now it is possible that in this lecture he is using the term in the broad sense. Yet this still does not explain why he explicitly defines it in terms of production (Herstellen). What exactly accounts for this change in terminology is perhaps less interesting than what the reader may learn from the conclusion Heidegger draws near the end of his analysis. Near the end he asks whether everything can be captured in this way as vorhanden in the sense of production (Herstellen), or if there is not something that categorically eludes such a designation. He answers his own question. Indeed there is something that is never vorhanden: the being that we are, that is, human

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being.41 What the Greeks and Scholastics left in obscurity, Heidegger concludes, is precisely what it means for us to be, and this is because they did not adequately grasp the radical difference between an understanding of our own being (in the first person) and an understanding of the being of the things we encounter (from the third person). Thus, in doing away with the distinction—so central to pragmatist readings—between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit, these passages shift the emphasis. Now the emphasis is no longer on different ways of relating to things, whether as tools or as neutral objects, but instead on the fundamental difference between the being of things—and this means all things—and our own being. In other words, the emphasis here is that human being cannot be understood as a thing. This leads to several points that have direct bearing on Heidegger’s concept of everydayness. In view of Heidegger’s comments from the Grundprobleme, it is quite possible that Zuhandenheit in Being and Time is the term Heidegger coins to capture the conception of being that he believes was taken as given in Scholastic and Greek philosophy, and his claim concerning the primacy of Zuhandenheit is an affirmation of this very conception. In other words, this claim is not conceived as a critique of the traditional conception of being; on the contrary, it is Heidegger’s attempt to articulate precisely this Greek and Scholastic conception. It is not a novel insight but rather a retrieval of the traditional conception of being in its average everydayness. This would mean that Heidegger’s reference to the Greek conception of things as pragmata should be taken as thoroughly affirmative: they rightly took as given that our everyday dealings with artefacts and tools is the basis for working out an interpretation of being. Most importantly, such a change of view would mean that it is misleading or at least presumptuous to conclude Heidegger’s concept of everydayness represents his own position in contrast to past philosophy, that is, that he believes, without qualification, that we ought to understand our primary way of relating to the world exclusively instrumentally.42 Not only is this not his own thesis, but there is reason to think that Heidegger’s intention is to place this very thesis in question. His intention is to highlight—with greater acuity than had been achieved previously—not merely

 Here is the critical passage from the Grundprobleme: “Die Frage bleibt jedoch, ob alles Seiende durch das Vorhandene erschöpft ist. Deckt sich der Bereich des Vorhandenen mit dem Bereich des Seienden überhaupt? Oder git es Seiendes, das seinem Seinssinne nach gerade nicht als Vorhandenes begriffen werden kann? In der Tat, das Seiende, was am wenigsten als Vorhandenes begriffen werden kann, das Dasein, das wir je selbst sind, ist gerade dasjenige, auf das alles Verstehen von Vorhandenheit, Wirklichkeit zurückgehen muß. Der Sinn dieses Zurückgehens ist zu klären” (168–69). 42  The pragmatist reading fails to recognize Heidegger’s ambivalent, even critical, stance towards this conception of being. I think one sees this critical attitude in statements such as the following from the Grundprobleme: “Aus der Frage, warum gerade das Herstellen der Horizont für die ontologische Intepretation des Seienden ist, erwächst die Notwendigkeit, diesen Horizont auszuarbeiten und seine ontologische Notwendigkeit ausdrücklich zu begründen” (164). “From this question, why it was precisely production that served as horizon for the ontological interpretation of beings, arises the need to work out this horizon and give explicit reasons for its ontological necessity” (Basic Problems, 116). 41

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the legitimacy but also the fundamental limitations of such a concept of being, to demonstrate ultimately the fundamental ontological difference between human being and things within the world. That is, his critique of Scholastic and Greek philosophy is that they took pragmata, things zuhanden, as the ultimate point of reference for understanding human being and being in general.43 They were, then, in one sense right to conceive of being in terms of production, but wrong to assume this conception of being alone is adequate for understanding what it means (for us) to be. Now I will summarize the implications this change of perspective has for understanding Heidegger’s analysis of everydayness. The first point is that this analysis is not firstly intended as a critique but instead as an articulation and affirmation of past philosophy, as an attempt to articulate an insight he attributes to the Scholastic and Greek interpretation of being. This is the insight that they took things in their immediate environment as the starting point for their theoretical inquiries. The second point is that, by articulating the view of being that the Greeks and Scholastics took as given, it becomes possible to place it in a critical light for having, if anything, understood human existence too instrumentally. From the perspective of the pragmatist reading, this would be a paradoxical outcome. The problem, then, from Heidegger’s perspective is not that traditional philosophy needs to become more pragmatic, but rather that it was already, if anything, in one sense too pragmatic. It was too pragmatic in the sense that it understood human being, too, within the same rubric in which it understood things in one’s immediate environment. This takes us to the third point, namely, that everydayness represents for Heidegger a fundamental problem. It belongs precisely to our everyday way of being that we fail to grasp the fundamental difference between human being and things within the world. Phenomenology must in the end counter one’s everyday tendency to cover over one’s own way of being, of falling into the world and away from oneself.44 This sense in which Heidegger conceived of everydayness as an obstacle that we must overcome in understanding ourselves is also evident in other lectures he held shortly prior to the publication of Being and Time, for example, in his lecture on the basic concepts of Aristotle’s philosophy in 1924 and in his lecture on the Sophist in the following winter semester of 1924 to 1925.45 He states in the introduction to the Sophist that the task of philosophy consists firstly in freeing us from the twofold sense in which our everyday way of being is characterized by concealment (untruth). He depicts the work of the Greek thinkers as an attempt to fight this everyday tendency of human being.46 This critical dimension of everydayness has important consequences for interpreting the status of the practical and especially instrumental examples used to  I think Jacques Taminiaux is getting at a similar idea with his suggestion that Heidegger assigns artefacts an explicit place within his ontology so that they do not implicitly take over our complete field of understanding of being (Lectures de l’ontologie fondamentale, 161). 44  Ibid., 311. 45  Heidegger, GA 18, 277. 46  Heidegger, GA 19, 16. 43

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illustrate everydayness. The fact that Heidegger sees in everydayness a hindrance to our capacity to think about our own being puts into question the assumption that the concept of everydayness was intended to be all-encompassing, that instrumentality is supposed to be exhaustive of our primary relations with things in general. Contained in the concept of everydayness is the possibility of seeing beyond how we see things in our everyday dealings. Conceptualizing this limit points beyond the everyday understanding.47 If Heidegger’s aim in his analysis of everydayneses is not to demonstrate the primacy and exhaustiveness of instrumental relations with things within the world, then what does Heidegger intend to demonstrate with the examples of door handles and hammers? I will conclude this paper with two thoughts concerning how I would approach this question, which may be gathered from the preceding discussion. I would read Heidegger’s analysis of things not primarily as a thesis about how we relate to things, but instead as an indirect thesis about the being of human being. And the first lesson to be gathered here, which is made clear on the first pages of the text, is that human being is not a thing within the world, and that describing the nature of human being demands a different approach from approaches used to describe the nature of things within the world. Heidegger’s discussion of the Scholastic distinction between existentia and essentia from the Grundprobleme reinforces this thought. Then the question is focused no longer on how the examples of door handles and hammers reveal something about things as we encounter them in the world but instead on what they tell us about our own way of being. One thing they tell us, Heidegger believes, is that we are concerned for our own being and that the underlying structure of our being is characterized by care (Sorge). Using tools reflects this concern for our own being, for we use things to achieve ends that matter to us. This allows one to understand Heidegger’s comment near the end of the Grundprobleme where he states that even purpose-free relations are grounded in this concern that characterizes our being. From this exemplary mode of “being involved with things instrumentally,” even a disinterested theoretical observing of things, which is not instrumental in a practical sense, is nonetheless a way of being concerned and interested in things which ultimately leads back to our being.48 But certainly the much more important feature made visible in the way we use simple tools such as door handles and hammers is that we understand the being of things in relation to time. This suggests, in turn, that the main target of Heidegger’s critique is not certain strands of post-Cartesian empiricism, which sees the starting place for science and philosophy to be neutral objects with properties. Rather, the main target of his critique is a certain way of understanding time, which Heidegger believes underpins not merely modern philosophical positions but also “traditional”

 One reason Angst is of interest to Heidegger is that it pulls us out of our fallenness and takes away from us the possibility of understanding ourselves in terms of the world of things. (Sein und Zeit, 189). 48  Heidegger, Being and Time, 238–239 (Sein und Zeit, 194). 47

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philosophy, that is, also the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Dreyfus’s decision to omit Division II from his commentary is indicative, I think, of how the pragmatist reading misses the main target of critique in Being and Time, and thus perhaps also its central question.

Work Cited Bernasconi, Robert. “The Fate of the Distinction Between Praxis and Poiesis.” Heidegger Studies. Vol. 2, (1986): 111–139. Brandom, Robert. “Dasein, the Being that Thematizes.” In Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time.” The Monist, Vol. 66, (1983): 387–409. Dreyfus, Hubert. Being-in-the-world: A commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991. Gethmann, Carl Friedrich. Dasein: Erkennen und Handeln. Heidegger im phänomenologischen Kontext. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993. Guignon, Charles B. Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982. ———. Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962. ———. Grundbegriffe der Aristotelischen Philosophie. Marburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1924. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 18. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002. ———. Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Freiburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1929/30. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 29/30. Frankfurt amMai n: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992a. ———. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Marburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1927. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 24. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975. ———. Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. Marburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1925/26. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 21. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976. ———. Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Marburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1927/28. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 25. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977. ———. Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997. ———. Platon: Sophistes. Marburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1924/25 Gesamtausgabe Bd. 19. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992b. ———. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006. ———. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. Mertens, Karl. “Die Kontextualität des Verstehens in Heideggers Daseinshermeneutik und Brandoms inferentialistischer Heidegger Interpretation.” In Verstehen nach Heidegger und Brandom. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2009. Okrent, Mark. Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. “Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism.” In Essays on Heidegger and others: Philosophical Papers Vol. 2. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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———. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979 ———. Philosophy and Social Hope. London, England: Penguin Books, 1999. Taminiaux, Jacques. Lectures de l’Ontologie Fondamentale: Essais sur Heidegger. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1989. Volpi, Franco. “‘Das ist das Gewissen!’ Heidegger interpretiert die Phronesis (Ethica Nicomachea VI, 5).” In Heidegger und die Griechen, edited by Michael Steinmann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007. ———. “Dasein comme praxis: L’assimilation et la radicalisation heideggerienne de la philosophie pratique d’Aristote.” In Heidegger et l’idée de la phénoménologie. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988. ———. “‘Sein und Zeit’: Homologien zur ‘Nicomachischen Ethik.’” PhilosophischesJahrbuch. 96., (1989): 225–240.

Conscience, Its History and Being and Time: On Selfhood, Autonomy and an Experiment with Norms Denis McManus

One of the most puzzling elements in Being and Time’s notoriously difficult exploration of authenticity is its discussion of conscience. I will present here a reading of that discussion informed by two hypotheses. The first is that we can learn something about Heidegger’s discussion of conscience by considering the history of that notion. The second hypothesis is that Heideggerian authenticity requires what one might call ‘the owning of norms’. Steven Galt Crowell and Rebecca Kukla have argued in their different ways in favour of this second hypothesis and I will explore here two interpretations of it of my own. I begin the chapter by setting out some of the interpretive puzzles that Heidegger’s discussion of conscience poses and objections that critics have raised against it. I then introduce the notion of ‘owning norms’, setting out its bearing on issues concerning autonomy, and interpretive worries that it raises, including one of my own. I go on to set out three possible visions of what it might be to ‘own a norm’, which I will use as reference points in developing two more. I do that in the light of two themes that I identify in the history of the discussion of conscience: conscience as the application of norms and as self-understanding. On the basis these provide, I explain the first of our alternative visions of norm-ownership—as the bringing to bear of one’s norms in action—a vision which I will show could be expressed in some of the very terms that Heidegger’s puzzling discussion of conscience deploys. But I will go on to identify  two interpretive objections to this reading, key to which is Heidegger’s tying of conscience to the ‘accomplishment of selfhood’. In light of these objections, I develop a further vision of norm-ownership, building on the earlier and a closer examination of Heidegger’s description of inauthenticity. This vision presents the bringing to bear of norms as a requirement not only of D. McManus (*) Philosophy, University of Southampton, Southampton, Hampshire, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_11

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self-­understanding but of selfhood—not only of making one’s norms one’s own but of there being such a thing as ‘one’s norms’. The closing sections of the chapter return to the theme of autonomy. I consider the objection that the second vision I present involves an inescapable heteronomy. This objection helps make clear that that vision does not identify a sufficient condition of norm-ownership; it also raises the interesting question of the place of reflection and choice in the achievement of authenticity. But it does not undermine the claim that the vision identifies an important necessary condition of norm-­ownership. Indeed I conclude the chapter by arguing that the view’s tying of selfhood to normownership offers a solution of sorts to a long-standing worry about the Kantian proposal that heteronomy can only be avoided through self-legislation: the key thought will be that one cannot stand in a heteronomic relation to norms the ownership of which renders one a self. Before beginning, I will comment briefly on our first hypothesis. Little note has been taken of how earlier discussions of the concept of conscience might shape that to be found in Being and Time,1 despite Heidegger precisely stressing in an earlier work of his the need for ‘the history of this “concept”’ ‘to be examined in connection with the problem of existence’—‘existence as the particular “how” of the self (of the I)’ (KJPW 28–29, 25).2 One reason why readers of Heidegger may not have  Van Buren is an exception, though his treatment too is brief. See van Buren 1994: 182–86.  ‘Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews’, trans. J. van Buren, in P (see below), pp. 1–38 (referred to hereafter as KJPW). Other works by Heidegger cited here are: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982 (referred to as BPP), Being and Truth, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010 (referred to as BTr), The Concept of Time, trans. W. McNeill, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 (referred to as CT), The Concept of Time, trans. I. Farin with A. Skinner, London: Continuum, 2011 (referred to as CTR), ‘On the Essence of Ground’, trans. W. McNeill in P, pp. 97–135 (referred to as EG), The Essence of Freedom, trans. T. Sadler, London: Continuum, 2002 (referred to as EHF), Geschichte der Philosophie von Thomas von Aquin bis Kant, ed. H. Vetter, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann (referred to as GPTAK), History of the Concept of Time, trans. T. Kisiel, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1985 (referred to as HCT), Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. D. O. Dahlstrom, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005 (referred to as IPR), Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. T. Sheehan, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010 (referred to as L), The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. [1928] (referred to as MFL), Off the Beaten Track, trans. J. Young and K. Haynes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 (referred to as OBT), ‘On the Essence of Truth (Pentecost Monday, 1926)’, trans. T. Kisiel, in Becoming Heidegger, eds. T. Kisiel and T. Sheehan, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007, pp. 275–88 (referred to as OET (PM)), Pathmarks, ed. W.  McNeill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 (referred to as P), Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, trans. R.  Rojcewicz, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001 (referred to as PIA), Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression, trans. T. Colony, London: Contiuum Press, 2010 (referred to as PIE), Plato’s Sophist, trans. R.Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997 (referred to as PS), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977 (referred to as QCT), Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 17th edition, 1993 (referred to as SZ) and ‘Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the Struggle for a Historical Worldview’, trans. C. Bambach, in Supplements, ed. J. van Buren, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, pp. 147–76 (referred to as WDR). I use the established translations of Heidegger’s works in most 1 2

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followed up this clue is that, as William Lyons has noted,3 the very notion of conscience is rarely discussed in contemporary philosophy. A second is that Heidegger frequently warns his readers that, though he uses familiar terms, he uses many in idiosyncratic ways.4 But his choice of terms is also surely not coincidental but rather deliberately thought-provoking. A third reason is that—as we will see—the history of discussion of conscience is played out principally against an ethical or theological background, while Heidegger explicitly insists that—despite the moralistic tone of its discussion—authenticity is not an ethic,5 and that Being and Time’s ‘ontological analysis of conscience’ is ‘distant from a theological exegesis of conscience’ (SZ 269). But in saying that, he distances it more specifically from ‘any employment of this phenomenon for proofs of God or for establishing an “immediate” consciousness of God’ (SZ 269); and the reading I will sketch imposes no such aims upon Heidegger. But it does suggest that the discussion of conscience amongst the theologians might yet shed light on what is at stake in its discussion in Being and Time.

Puzzles to Be Solved Heidegger’s discussion of conscience presents many puzzling features. I cannot address all of them here but will instead focus on six: 1. The caller and the called Heidegger reflects at length on ‘who is called by the call [of conscience] but also who does the calling’ (SZ 274). Benjamin Crowe captures many readers’ reaction when he describes this as a ‘mysterious question’, Heidegger’s concern with which seems a ‘curious insistence’.6 There are signs that Heidegger anticipates this reaction: ‘is it at all necessary to keep raising explicitly the question of who does the calling?’, he asks (SZ 275). But it is his answer to that question that really seems mysterious: ‘In conscience Dasein calls itself’, ‘[t]he call com[ing] from me and yet from beyond me’ (SZ 275).7 But what is it for ‘Dasein [to] call itself’, especially when—as most commentators would seem to agree8—Heidegger rejects romantic notions of a deeper, hidden, ‘true’ self? And if ‘[t]he one to whom the call is made cases, generally following the translation of Macquarrie and Robinson of SZ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). 3  Lyons 2009: 477. 4  E.g., he tells us that, in arriving at his notion of ‘guilt’, the ‘ordinary phenomena of “guilt” … drop out’ (SZ 283). 5  See, e.g., HCT 273, 281, 283 and SZ 316. 6  Crowe 2006: 185. 7  Macquarrie and Robinson italicise the latter ‘me’ but the German does not. 8  See, e.g. Carman 2003: 295 and Crowe 2006: 186.

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is this very same Dasein’ (SZ 277)—and failing to hear the call is ‘failing to hear oneself’ (SZ 279)—what can ‘the call of conscience’ have to tell its hearer anyway? It does not resolve our perplexity to be told that it ‘has nothing to tell’ … 2. The Silence of Conscience One of the most striking of Heidegger’s claims is that ‘[c]onscience discourses solely and constantly in the mode of keeping silent’: What does the conscience call to him to whom it appeals? Taken strictly, nothing. The call asserts nothing, gives no information about world-events, has nothing to tell. (SZ 273) ‘[A]n expectation of anything like a communication’ from conscience will be disappointed as it ‘gives the … ear nothing to hear which might be passed along in further retelling’. (SZ 274, 277)

3. A Call to Self-Understanding According to the broader account of which the conscience discussion is part, ‘[a]uthenticity … must be understood in the literal sense of “having itself for its own in intimacy with itself”’ (HCT 282), and this is constituted at least in part by a form of self-understanding: Self-understanding should not be equated formally with a reflected ego-experience but varies in each case with the mode of Being of the Dasein and in fact in the basic forms of authenticity and inauthenticity. (BPP 175)

Heidegger draws on the notion of ‘conscience’ in articulating this thought: the ‘inner voice of conscience is what properly discloses Dasein to me, to the extent that I am intimately with [bei] myself’ (OET (PM) 286). Heidegger distinguishes this disclosure from ‘psychoanalysis and psychic sleuthing’ (OET (PM) 286)—from ‘a “soliloquy” in the Self’, in which Dasein ‘dissects its “inner life” with fussy curiosity’ (SZ 273). But how then are we to understand this sought-after self-understanding? 4. The Accomplishment of Selfhood Heidegger sees the call of conscience as key not only to self-understanding but also to what he calls the ‘accomplishment [Vollziehung]’ of a self, a possibility which ‘is attested by that which, in Dasein’s everyday interpretations of itself, is familiar to us as the “voice of conscience”’ (SZ 268). ‘Being-one’s-Self’ is for Dasein a ‘potentiality’; and ‘[t]he call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to [this] potentiality’ (SZ 269). ‘Selfhood [is] a way of existing ’ (SZ 267), Heidegger proposes, one in which some Dasein engage and some do not. Critics of Heidegger have understandably seized upon the above features. I suggest below that in approaching Heidegger’s discussion of conscience we might profit by bearing in mind the history of that concept within the Christian tradition; but Lyons has recently proposed that ‘the classical Christian account of conscience’ is ‘a cognitive account of conscience’, one of ‘a voice’ that delivers ‘message[s]

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about right and wrong conduct’.9 Yet Heidegger’s ‘call of conscience’ is silent, and that prompts criticisms such as Paul Strohm’s that this call has been ‘emptied of persuasive or morally admirable ethical content’.10 Strohm elaborates on this criticism by depicting the Heideggerian call as ‘a call somehow enclosed within the self’, ‘more concerned with self-differentiation of the self from the multitude than with any characteristic ethical content’; such a vision of the Heideggerian ‘man of conscience’ as ‘self-obsessed’11 is a familiar one, though it can take a number of different forms: for example, it can be seen as recommending a repugnant egoism, or as requiring a kind of disengagement from the ordinary course of one’s practical life, a worry with which sympathetic readers of Heidegger have struggled too.12 Now Heidegger specifically rejects any such notion of disengagement when he insists that the call of conscience is … 5. A Call to Action Though conscience summons Dasein to itself, this ‘appeal to the Self … does not force it inwards upon itself, so that it can close itself off from the “external world”’: instead ‘[t]o hear the call authentically, signifies bringing oneself into a … taking-­ action’ (SZ 273, 294). But—again—what kind of summoning to oneself can the call then be? Reflective self-awareness would certainly seem—as Beatrice Han-Pile puts it—to ‘prevent us from responding appropriately to the affordances of the world’.13 So how can the call of conscience be Janus-faced in this way—calling us back to ourselves in some way but also bringing us ‘out’ into the world in action—the resoluteness of “taking action”’, into which heeding conscience ‘brings one’ (SZ 310), also being Dasein’s ‘having itself for its own in intimacy with itself’? Before moving on, let us add one more puzzle to our list: 6. Choosing Oneself and Choice Heidegger also links conscience in complex ways to the notion of choice. ‘In understanding the call, Dasein … has chosen itself’ (SZ 287) and, in doing so, ‘it has thereby chosen both itself and choice’ (WDR 168). As mentioned, there are many other puzzling remarks that Heidegger makes about conscience, many of which draw on other notions woven into his broader discussion of authenticity. But the reading I sketch in the present paper does not attempt to provide an account of

 Lyons 2009: 481.  Strohm 2011: 104. 11  Strohm 2011: 104. 12  See, e.g., Frede 1993 (p. 57) and Kukla 2002 (p. 13), and, for further versions of the emptiness and egoism charges, Wolin 1990 (pp. 41, 65) and Nykänen 2002 (p. 384) respectively. 13  Han-Pile 2013: 293. 9

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all of these remarks or of all of these notions. I will indicate how that reading suggests we might approach two of the latter notions: ‘resolution’ and ‘constancy’. But these can be no more than suggestions here, and particularly conspicuous by their absence will be discussions of ‘anxiety’, ‘being-­towards-­death’ and ‘guilt’, notions intimately connected to that of conscience.14

Owning Norms ‘Eigentlichkeit’ is Heidegger’s term that is typically translated as ‘authenticity’. In ordinary—non-Heideggerian—German, ‘eigentlich’ means ‘real’, ‘actual’ or ‘genuine’. But it has often been noted that a more literal translation of ‘Eigentlichkeit’ would be ‘own-ness’ or ‘owned-ness’15; and in introducing the term, Heidegger says it is ‘chosen terminologically in a strict sense’, pointing us to the fact that Dasein ‘is essentially something which can be eigentliches—that is, something of its own’ (SZ 43, 42). A notion I will experiment with here is that such ‘owning’ might be usefully thought of as involving the ‘owning’ of norms. Crowell glosses the notion of taking up a norm as ‘my own’16—through which ‘one’s reasons can be my reasons’—in a number of ways: for example, as a condition of our ‘responding to norms as norms’, of ‘recogniz[ing] [a] norm as normative’, and our ‘act[ing] not merely in accord with norms, but in light of them’. He juxtaposes these feats with treating a norm as ‘something imposed on me from the outside’, my ‘following it in the way an animal would follow its instinct’ or through ‘social conditioning’, as well from ‘quasi-mechanical conformism’ and my ‘simply going along with those ways of being in which I find myself … as though they were quasi-natural “givens”’.17 Now there are reasons—to some of which I will return—to doubt whether these different notions and the distinctions they inform line up in quite the way Crowell suggests. But I take it to be clear that he is pointing us to an important issue and one with philosophical pedigree, including, most obviously, Kant’s concern with heteronomy—our acting on principles that are not ‘our own’—which he saw as our acting under the ‘influence’ of an ‘alien interest’ in a way beneath ‘the dignity of a human being and of every rational nature’.18

 See SZ 269, 296 and 309. For some relevant discussion of ‘anxiety’, ‘being-towards-death’ and ‘guilt’, see McManus 2015a, b, d respectively. 15  See, e.g., Macquarrie and Robinson’s note to SZ 43. 16  See Crowell 2001: 446, 434, 2007a: 53, b: 12 and 2013: 4. 17  See Crowell 2007a: 54, b: 12, 2001: 446, and 2013: 222 n. 7. Kukla invokes similar notions, such as our taking norms ‘as laws of nature’ (2002: 31 n. 5). 18  Kant 2012: 52, 48. 14

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Norms in Heidegger? Really?? To focus on norms when trying to understand Heidegger may strike the reader as odd, and for several reasons. Firstly, it is natural to ask, ‘So where does Heidegger talk about norms?’ He talks about having possibilities of one’s own19; but what has that got to do with norms? Secondly, when Heidegger does mention norms—for example, on the merely two occasions on which the equivalent German term appears in Being and Time20—his tone seems negative.21 Thirdly, a stress on norms may seem to run counter to Heidegger’s on the authentic person’s being ‘open to the ‘“concrete Situation” [konkreten Situation] of action’, while ‘the They know only the “general situation” [“allgemeine Lage”]’ (SZ 302, 300). Fourthly, a stress on norms may seem to run counter to Heidegger’s supposed prioritising of knowing-how over knowing-that. Fifthly, norms may seem of a piece with ‘the normal’, such that conformity to norms is inherently a brand of conformism: if anyone excels in subjecting their lives to norms, it might be objected, it’s the inauthentic. To take the first of these objections, one could—at least on the face of it—naturally ‘translate’ Heidegger’s talk of our having ‘possibilities of our own’ into talk of ‘norms of our own’; indeed it is a potential strength of the proposal with which I am experimenting here that one can do so, given that the former talk is less than transparent. When following a norm, we place the objects and events around us within a framework of possibilities; we see them as endowed with particular meanings— events, for example, divided into those we wish to bring about and those we wish to prevent. Just how they are divided and just why we feel the way that we do about them depends on the particular framework of possibilities which the norm in question determines and, in this way, our having adopted that norm is our appropriating that framework as that within which we will place the events we find around us.22 On the second objection, when one views the negative remarks that Heidegger makes about norms and rules in context, it is conspicuous how many aim at specific notions of ‘norm’ and ‘rule’, hence providing no more than questionable evidence of his—in some way—condemning norms and rules as such.23 This has a bearing on the third objection. To think that openness to concrete situations requires a setting aside of norms is to presuppose an understanding of norms which we have little reason to think that Heidegger—as a good Aristotelian, for example—shared. As the advocate of a conception of rules that is explicitly Aristotelian in inspiration puts it, mastery of norms may require ‘concretely situation-specific discernment’.24 If so,  See, e.g., SZ 270 on Dasein ‘project[ing] on possibilities of its own’.  See SZ 248 and 288. 21  See also, e.g., PIE 151, SZ 268 and BTr 129. 22  See Crowell’s discussion of EG and MFL in Crowell 2001, 2013 for further textual support for this ‘translation’. 23  See, for example, SZ 288’s comment on ‘manipulable rules and public norms’. 24  McDowell, J. (2007) ‘What myth?’ Inquiry 50, 338–351. 19 20

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as Heidegger himself says of principles, ‘we mistake them’ when ‘we see in them … merely a “matrix” or a “lattice”, versus the fullness of the concrete’ (PIA 24).25 There are passages in Heidegger that might seem to associate norms specifically with the They.26 But lest they be seen as condemnatory of norms, we must not forget that Heidegger depicts the They as ‘an existentiale … that belongs to Dasein‘s positive constitution’—‘a primordial phenomenon’ that ‘governs every interpretation of the world and of Dasein’ (SZ 129, HCT 246). Add to that the fact that readings that depict Heidegger as a ‘radical antinomian’27 seem to read serious difficulties into his thought—Rentsch’s, for example, being an explicitly critical reading—and it would appear that a sympathetic reading of Heidegger’s thought will need to explain how norms figure in inauthentic and authentic life, rather than depicting the former as norm-governed and the latter as not. My response to the fourth and fifth objections will emerge below. But to comment briefly on the fourth, Heidegger certainly is concerned to combat philosophical confusions that a focus on assertions—and perhaps norms when understood as ‘explicitly formulated rule[s]’28—might prompt. For Heidegger, assertions having the content that they do stems from their being embedded in what one might call ‘practical’ forms of understanding, forms which, in much of its history, philosophy has overlooked. But I have argued elsewhere that Heidegger’s concern with practice is, among other things, a concern with a substructure that gives ‘life’ to assertions29; and the reading I sketch here makes a parallel proposal about the ‘life’ of norms— that it depends on their being ‘owned’, a feat that also takes a recognizably ‘practical’ form. None of this is to deny that a focus on norms might be problematic. Indeed I believe it is, though for reasons I present elsewhere.30 What I aim to do here is identify what I think may be the most plausible way of seeing Heideggerian authenticity as the ‘owning of norms’, along with some of the philosophically-interesting thoughts that this then suggests.

Visions of Ownership How then might we understand ‘the owning of norms’? There are two obvious accounts one might offer, and which might seem to have some basis in Heidegger’s work. Both identify the norms we own with norms we choose; but they differ over whether this choice is reason-based.

 For further evidence of such a view in Heidegger’s understanding of norms, see McManus 2018.  E.g., SZ 268 and 288. 27  Rentsch 1989. 28  Crowell 2013: 2. 29  See McManus 2012. 30  See McManus 2018, forthcoming. (Note that the latter piece expresses a rather different understanding of Heideggerian authenticity to the one set out here.) 25 26

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What one might call the ‘Pure Choice Vision’ (PCV) says it isn’t. Such a vision finds echoes in readings of Heidegger according to which certain experiences suspend the influence over us of previously accepted norms and open up the possibility of simply choosing norms to follow. Friedman, for example, proposes that ‘in “being-towards-death” Dasein recognizes, for the first time, that its normal or everyday practical context is simply one possibility among others, one which is thereby subject to its own free choice’.31 Instead of acting on a set of merely inherited possibilities—or norms—the authentic person chooses her own, doing so without any ‘taken for granted background framework at all’, in ‘a “resolute” and thoroughgoing decision, a decision that goes all the way down’.32 What one might call the ‘Assessment and Endorsement Vision’ (AEV) understands such a choice of norms as instead based on an assessment of—very roughly speaking—their legitimacy. This vision finds echoes—though only partial ones33— in Kukla’s reading of Heidegger. She distinguishes our being ‘merely carried along’ by norms—our ‘merely happening to act appropriately’—from norms ‘binding us in virtue of our recognition of their force’, where we see a norm as ‘hav[ing] its binding force in virtue of its legitimacy’: I must always be able to ask for a justification of the legitimacy of a claim at any point, for if such a question becomes impossible to address, then the claim ceases to have normative authority at that point, and any remaining force it has can only be violent or coercive.34

A third possible vision of norm-ownership would be a brand of constitutivism, according to which we ‘own’ certain norms by virtue of our basic character—say, that of being an agent or rational agent.35 In its Kantian form, this view proposes that those norms are precisely the only ones one is autonomous in following, also proposing, of course, that these are also identifiable with moral norms. There seems little reason to think that Heidegger endorses the latter kind of view as there is little reason to think he sees his reflections on authenticity as grounding particular first-­ order norms of conduct: his denial that these reflections embody an ethic is one reason to think—to echo Wiland—that he was not seeking to pull that particular rabbit out of the hat.36 But as the final section of the chapter will show, the view that I will develop here might perhaps be seen as a ‘non-standard’ or ‘minimal’ form of constitutivism, in that it ties selfhood to the owning of norms, but not to particular  Friedman 2000: 51. The chapter’s final sections will return to the notion of ‘freedom’, reclaiming it from the use that is made of it here. 32  Friedman 2000: 51–52. 33  See the following note. 34  Kukla 2002: 4, 15, 19. An indication that Kukla thinks this vision limited is her insistence that ‘a complete, fully sufficient explanation’ of the ‘normative force’ of a norm would actually leave the norm ‘functioning as a mere force of compulsion and not as normatively binding’ (2002: 19, 12). 35  See, e.g., Korsgaard 2009 and Velleman 2009. 36  Wiland 2012: 141. See also Heidegger’s discussion of Kant’s constitutivism in EHF, which— though largely expository—concludes with the critical claim that ‘the categorical imperative is a specific sociologically determined philosophico-ethico ideology, i.e. by no means is it the most general law of action for all rational beings as maintained by Kant’ (EHF 195). 31

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first-order norms.37Though I will raise a philosophical objection to the notion that either PCV or AEV can provide a comprehensive account of norm-ownership, beyond that I won’t examine their philosophical—or interpretive—vices or virtues here,38 nor constitutivism’s as that view is standardly understood. I present those visions here principally as reference points for the discussion that follows, and I will turn next to our other hypothesis.39

 onscience as Knowing-with: Two Themes in the History C of the Discussion of Conscience The history of reflection on conscience is complex and long, ranging from classical discussions to those of Nietzsche and Freud; but it is in the Christian tradition that the concept has been examined most intensively, and in its medieval period in particular.40 The latter discussions take in a range of issues, including whether conscience is intellectual, motivational, or affective in character, whether it is a fallible or infallible guide, whether it is best understood as a faculty, a habit, or an act, etc. But I will focus on two particular themes. It is notable that in its medieval discussions conscience is a notion intimately tied to that of norms. There synderesis, understood as insight into the general and fundamental norms of right action, is distinguished (in a variety of ways) from conscientia, understood as the faculty of applying such norms in deliberation and action. So, for example, according to Aquinas, synderesis embodies our knowledge of ‘the first practical principles’, while ‘conscientia is concerned with particular acts’: ‘through conscientia the knowledge of synderesis [is] applied to the examination of a particular act’.41 Part of the importance for Aquinas of the synderesis/conscientia distinction is its allowing him to maintain both the possibility

 For other interesting parallels with themes in the constitutivist literature, see n. 70 below.  For other criticisms of PCV, see McManus 2015a, 2018, and of Haugeland’s version of AEV (see his 2000), McManus 2015c. 39  I won’t discuss how to place Crowell’s view in relation to these models because I am uncertain quite what his view is. He talks of our ‘choosing’ norms (2007a: 57, b: 12) but he clearly rejects PCV (2001: 449 and 2002: 116), insisting instead that I ‘endorse’ norms ‘in light of what is best’ (2013: 222). He proposes that ‘[t]o act in light of norms is to recognize them as claims to validity… [by] measuring them against an altogether different sort of standard—a “meta-norm” that Heidegger, following Plato, calls “the good”’ (2001: 446, cf. 2013: 223); and more recently, Crowell has suggested that ‘my decision about what is best can be assessed normatively’ in the light of a ‘norm of universality’ (2013: 227). But I am unsure how he envisages such assessments working. 40  For an overview, see Strohm 2011, for the classical period, Sorabji 2010, and for the medieval period, D’Arcy 1961, and Potts 1980, 1982. 41  Aquinas 1947: Q. 79, Art. 12, Reply to Objection 3 and 1953: Q. 17, Art. 1, Difficulties (Second Series), 1, and Art. 2, Reply and cf. 1953 Qu. 16, Art. 1. 37 38

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of sin and the belief that ‘God endows our nature with knowledge of first principles’: Synderesis never falls down in a general principle, but error can happen in some applications of a general principle to some particular case … [What the possibility of sin shows] is not that synderesis simply falls headlong, but that conscientia does, which applies the general judgment of synderesis to particular matters.42

Indeed Aquinas maintains that ‘synderesis is never destroyed’, going so far as to claim that ‘this light belongs to the nature of the soul’,43 a claim to which I will return.44 It has often been noted that ‘conscientia’ literally means a knowingwith—a con-scientia.45 Aquinas does so himself—‘conscientia may be resolved into “cum alio scientia”’—and, in line with the view above, he glosses the ‘cum’ in question as a matter of ‘knowledge applied to an individual case’: conscience is the bringing of our knowledge together with the world in which we act by ‘the actual application of [that] knowledge to what we do’.46 But there is another way of understanding conscience as a knowing-with which is also prominent in Christian discussions of the concept and which will be my second theme.47 According to this understanding, conscience is key to the overcoming of self-­ estrangement—to the achievement of a knowing-with in the form of a self-­ understanding. We see this, for example, in a passage from St Paul that greatly influenced later discussion of conscience: ‘[w]hen God judges the secrets of human hearts’, ‘[t]heir conscience is called as witness, and their own thoughts argue the case on either side, against them or … for them’.48 Similarly, St Augustine describes the day on which his ‘conscience upbraided’ him as that on which he ‘stood naked before [his] own eyes’;49 and Calvin insists that ‘conscience … does not suffer a man to suppress what he knows within himself, but pursues him till it brings him to conviction’.50

 Aquinas 1953: Q. 17, Art. 1, Answers to Difficulties to the Contrary (First Series), 6 and Q. 16, Art. 2, Answers to Difficulties, 1. 43  Aquinas 1953: Q. 17, Art. 1, Difficulties (Second Series), 1. 44  Aquinas’ account raises many issues, concerning, for example, the level of abstraction that characterises the content of synderesis (see D’Arcy 1961: ch. 3), and how precisely we are to understand the notion of applying general principles that specifies conscientia’s role (see Potts 1980: 52–54, 63). These matters are not without importance for our discussion, but I set them aside here. 45  See, e.g.. Strohm 2011: 8 and 10, but also Sorabji 2010: 363. ‘Synderesis’ actually has the same structure which reflects the complex and changing role that this term and its juxtaposition with conscientia has played in the history of discussion of conscience. 46  Aquinas 1947: Q. 79, Art. 13 47  Inwood’s discussion of conscience points to Aquinas’ but distinguishes it from Heidegger’s in insisting that ‘[c]onscience is not, for Aquinas, a ‘voice’ or a ‘call’ … nor does it involve bifurcation of the self’ (Inwood 1999: 37, see also p. 38). The second theme I identify here points us to these latter features. 48  Romans 2: 15–16. 49  St Augustine 1961: 169. 50  Calvin 1956: 42. 42

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Etymologically, Heidegger’s ‘Gewissen’ is a knowing-with too—adding to Wissen ‘the prefix Ge- [which] in Heidegger’s usage denotes a gathering, a collecting, a centering’51—and the two forms of knowing-with identified above do, of course, fit naturally together too and in much the Janus-faced way that Heidegger’s own concept seems to. Our not applying—or our not being ready or willing to apply—our moral knowledge to the world reveals a divided self; if his conscientia fails to bring his synderesis to bear, a person ‘suppresses what he knows within himself’. In the next section, I will show how combining our two historical themes yields an alternative vision of norm-ownership and an alternative interpretation of our first hypothesis, one which does indeed suggest a reading of many of the puzzling textual motifs that the first section of the chapter identified.52

 ‘New’ Vision of Norm-Ownership and an Initial Reading A of Heidegger The core thought of this vision—and it is a simple enough thought—is that one owns norms one consistently acts on.53 We are led to this same notion of ownership when we note that after a person has performed the kinds of ‘en-owning’ acts that PCV and AEV envisage, we can still ask whether she actually ‘owns’ the norm in question, a matter we settle by seeing whether she acts on that norm. One might say that it is by reference to this notion of ownership that we decide whether these other

 Taminiaux 1994: 286. Cf. QCT 19 on the notions of ‘gathering’ and ‘togetherness’ in expressions like ‘Gebirg’, ‘Gemüt’ and ‘Gestell’, a point made explicitly in connection with Gewissen in OBT 182. 52  What can we say about Heidegger’s own possible knowledge of the above historical sources? As is now well-known Heidegger’s engagement with the theological tradition was intense, and especially with the Pauline/Augustinian protestant tradition. (See McManus 2013a, b for discussion of some aspects of this engagement and for references to other relevant studies.) Regarding Heidegger’s knowledge of Aquinas in particular, his earliest serious studies saw him—as van Buren puts it—‘immersing himself in Thomas Aquinas’ (1994: 53); and though he is the patron saint—if you will forgive the expression—of the kind of scholasticism from which Heidegger went on to distance himself in the early 1920s, Heidegger returned to Aquinas at around the point at which the topic of conscience begins to surface with some consistency in his writings: Heidegger taught seminars focusing on his work in the summer semester 1924 and the winter semester 1924–1925, and lectured on Aquinas in the winter semesters 1923–1924 and 1926–1927. (For some discussion of the former lecture series, see McManus 2012: 133–34.) Although he no more than mentions Aquinas’ discussion of conscience in these lectures (see IPR 120 and GPTAK 47), his principal texts in both cases are the Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, which contains Aquinas’ most sustained discussion of synderesis and conscientia. It is also noteworthy that this distinction is a central (critical) focus of Stoker’s Das Gewissen, the only work on conscience upon which Heidegger comments at any length in SZ. See SZ 272 n. vi, Stoker 1925: 25–30 and 264–67, and, for some discussion of the latter, Kasowski 2011. 53  Here I concentrate, of course, on what Heidegger may have taken from the earlier discussions described, not on what he leaves behind. E.g., it is no part of my reading of Heidegger that he believes that ‘God endows our natures with knowledge of first principles’. 51

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‘en-owning’ activities succeed—whether we really choose, or really assess and really endorse, a norm.54 Or one might be tempted to say that after such activities have been performed, the real work of owning any such norm remains: that of bringing that norm to bear in one’s life. Without that, such choices, assessments and endorsements would appear to be so much Gerede—‘idle talk’ (SZ 167). It is tempting to go further and describe those activities—as Wittgenstein might put it—as empty ‘ceremonies’ or ‘unnecessary shuffles’.55 But we must not overstate the case. Indeed I will argue later that species of assessment and evaluation surely must play an essential role in any full account of the owning of norms. But I will also argue there that our thoughts and deeds generally falling into line with the relevant assessments and endorsements—the latter being ‘owned’ in something like the sense I am stressing here—is a precondition of such assessment and endorsement—to use expressions  that I used above—having life, their being capable of being taken seriously. But for now, let us develop our understanding of the ‘new’ vision on offer by noting how a construal of it might be seen as informing the motifs that populate Heidegger’s discussion of ‘conscience’. That the call of conscience is silent makes sense—indeed is over-determined— on this vision. Drawing on the first of our historical themes, the demand that conscience is meant to meet is recognizably a demand which the provision of more instruction—more ‘information about events’ (SZ 280) or ‘messages about right and wrong conduct’56—simply will not meet. When we need to hear conscience’s call, we are failing to bring our judgment to bear—failing to do what we know must be done. The challenge we face is—to echo Aquinas—‘the actual application of [that] knowledge to what we do’. But further instruction will simply provide further such knowledge that we, in that condition, will fail to bring to bear. At best, we will misapply such instruction too: it will not shape the way we go on to behave any more than the norms we already avow do.57 But our second historical theme points to a second reason why the call of conscience is silent, a reason that might also find expression by saying that the call ‘comes from me and yet from beyond me’. As indicated above, when we hear the ‘call’, it is not—so to speak—orders that we are receiving. It is our own understanding of what must be done—our own norms—that are calling for application. In this sense, the call comes ‘from me’. What those who fail to hearken to the call lack is precisely not then ‘information’— knowledge of what to do—but a readiness to do what they already know must be done; the problem is that they are not applying that knowledge: I know what to

 Cf. Frankfurt 1999: 101: ‘When the chips are down [an agent] may discover that he is not, after all, decisively moved by the preference or motive he supposed he had adopted’. 55  Wittgenstein 1967: §§258, 213. 56  See Lyons, quoted above. 57  Kukla (2002: 8–9) makes a similar point, and it echoes, of course, Kant’s insistence that ‘judgment’—‘the faculty of subsuming under rules’—is ‘a peculiar talent which … cannot be taught’ (Kant 1961 A133/B172). For discussion, see McManus 2006: chs. 13–14. 54

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do—and hence the call comes from me—but, here and now, I am not doing it—and hence the call comes from beyond me here and now. As indicated above, this represents one particular construal of the work that synderesis leaves conscientia to do; but in its light, it would be precisely right to say that, through conscience, ‘nothing’—‘no information’—‘gets called to the Self’, because instead Dasein ‘has been summoned to itself’—to bring to bear in its actions knowledge that it already has and thereby to ‘tak[e] hold of itself’ (SZ 273, 188). To move on to another of the puzzling textual motifs that our opening section identified, this perspective could also explain how answering conscience’s ‘appeal to the Self’ does not ‘close [one] off from the “external world”’ but instead calls for one to ‘bring[s] oneself into a factical taking-action’. In line with our first historical theme above, one owns norms when one brings them to bear in one’s life; one does that by looking to see whether and how they call for action in each situation in which one finds oneself, and then acting upon those judgments. In line with our second historical theme above, we see here too a kind of self-­ acknowledgement and the possibility of a kind of self-estrangement. Setting aside honest mistakes based on excusable factual error, failures to bring what are meant to be my norms to bear—when I otherwise could—cover a range of cases. If I recognize this failure—perhaps as a case of laziness or weakness of the will—I recognize a dissociation within myself, a failure to act on my intentions and to be what I want to be. If instead I do not recognize this failure, then this is a case of self-­ deception. But in all such cases, one might ask of such a person, ‘Does he really own these norms?’, or—more idiomatically—‘Does he really believe what he says he believes?’ Conscience would then be a Janus-faced concept: being true to myself requires that I bring my judgment to bear on the world around me, in that this is what is required if what I take to be my norms really are to be my norms. In a homely, familiar sense, the person who is responsive to conscience understands herself in that she really believes what she says to herself she believes and really desires what she says to herself she desires. Finally, this reading could also be seen as accommodating authentic Dasein’s ‘choosing both itself and choice’, a motif which might otherwise seem to favour in particular the PCV’s image of norm-ownership. As set out above, listening to one’s own knowledge of what should be done is a matter of judging the situation before one. In doing so, one can be said to have chosen oneself: one has chosen oneself as one’s ‘guide’ in allowing one’s own understanding of what should be done guide one’s actions, rather than—say—taking others’ understanding as one’s guide. In doing so, Dasein could also be said to choose choice: it chooses to choose itself its course of action, deciding to decide itself what should be done. But one of our puzzling motifs remains: the ‘accomplishment of selfhood’. To address this, which will require us to revisit all the rest, let us consider two objections that our discussion so far invites.

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Two Objections, and a Range of Cases The first is: doesn’t the approach I have sketched depict Heideggerian inauthenticity as a matter of akrasia or self-deception, and is that really what it is? The second is: isn’t this approach essentially ‘ontic’—taking its bearings too closely from familiar and ordinary experiences of conscience—when Heidegger’s interest is instead ‘ontological’? Indeed doesn’t he precisely state that the ‘call of conscience’ that concerns him is ‘the ontological foundation’ (SZ 269)—a condition of possibility, one might say—of what we ordinarily call ‘the call of conscience’? A possibility that I want to explore is that what is right about the first worry points us to a solution to the second, and to one possible understanding of what Heidegger understands the ‘accomplishment of selfhood’ to be. As mentioned above, ‘failure to own norms’ covers a range of cases: to revert to Aquinas’ terms, failures of a person’s conscientia merge with cases that lead us to question instead her synderesis. As we saw above, Aquinas sees sin as a failure of conscientia, a failure to apply what—in possessing synderesis—we know to be right. But there is a limit to the range of cases to which such a view can be applied. Consider another part of the passage from St Paul from which I quoted above: It is not by hearing the law, but by doing it, that men will be justified before God. When Gentiles who do not possess the law carry out its precepts by the light of nature … they display the effect of the law inscribed in their hearts.58

But if we take someone’s ‘carry[ing] out its precepts’ to display that ‘the law [is] inscribed in their hearts’, their failing to ‘carry out its precepts’—where that goes beyond occasional lapses59—would seem at least to suggest—if not quite ‘display’—that ‘the law’ is not ‘inscribed in their hearts’, that it does not embody their norms.To imagine someone trying and failing to follow a norm, one must imagine that norm having some sort of anchor in that person’s thinking and behaviour; and if her behaviour fails to conform to that norm to a significant extent, we no longer have grounds for thinking that she is attempting to follow that norm, that it—rather than some other—is her norm. So when the norms a person ascribes to himself part company with his actions, we may say ‘He does it but he knows he shouldn’t’; but as that gulf widens, we find ourselves instead saying ‘He can’t think it’s wrong or he wouldn’t do it’. Failure to do what the person thinks is right merges here with not really thinking that that course of action is right after all. The vision sketched above—and the reading of Heidegger it suggests—orients itself by cases of which we might say that the person ‘does not truly own the norm’, or ‘hasn’t really made it his own’; such an individual could be said to be a ‘divided self’, in that he ‘suppresses his knowledge’, though it may one day ‘argue the case against’ him. But such cases merge with cases in which we wonder what it is that the person ‘knows’—what the norms might be that he is failing to ‘truly own’. And

58 59

 Romans 2: 14–15.  See the following note.

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those cases merge, in turn, with others in which we wonder whether the person ‘knows’ anything at all—whether there are any particular norms that he might be seen as striving, but failing, to ‘own’. Such a person fails to ‘own norms’ in a rather different sense: here we move from suspecting that the person—while avowing one norm—actually cleaves to another to suspecting that they cleave to none at all. What I will explore in what follows is the possibility that Heidegger’s uneigentlich person fails to own norms in this latter way. In them, nothing corresponds to ‘the unchangeable rules which guide our judgment’ that Aquinas identifies with synderesis.60 According to this picture, rather than failing to apply their norms, the inauthentic have no norms of their own to apply. Rather than failing—as one might put it—to listen to their own judgment, they fail to have a judgment of their own to listen to. Similarly, while our earlier reading construed our second historical theme—and its image of the agent divided by ‘thoughts argu[ing] the case on either side’—as one concerning self-understanding and self-acknowledgment, our second reading presents the uneigentlich as lacking selves to understand or acknowledge. The most common English rendering of akrasia is ‘incontinence’, with its etymological root—that it shares with ‘continuum’ and the unbroken land-mass that is a ‘continent’—suggesting a failure to hold together, com tenere. On our second reading, the inauthentic fail to do so and hence are in-continent in a more radical way: they are—to use terms to which we will return—‘dispersed’ and ‘fragmentary’. Alongside a further vision of what a person’s ‘owning norms’ might be, we will see emerge a recognizably ontological concern with what it is to be—or ‘accomplish’— a self, and what it is to fail to.

‘ Dispersal’ in the They, and a ‘Summons’ to One’s ‘Ownmost Potentiality-for-Being-a-Self’ It is not enough to emphasise [a] principle (thereby we do not at all adhere to the principle as such; we simply speak of it, take and pass along cognizance of it); on the contrary we must ‘possess’ the principle qua principle … [T]o possess the principle genuinely [is] … to take it up and ‘retain’ it … (PIA 20).

 Aquinas 1947: Q. 79, Art. 12, Objection 3. As my above talk of ‘merging’ is meant to indicate, there may be no simple way to determine into which of our three groups of cases particular cases fall. For example, reasons to think that an act out of line with a norm that a person avows is an instance of failing to apply an owned norm rather than indicative of that norm not being owned after all might concern the likelihood of the act resulting from perceptual error, lapse of concentration or extreme duress. But when do such errors and such lapses point to a lack of concern that the norm be applied? And how extreme is ‘extreme’? That these boundaries are hazy need not entail, however, that there are no such boundaries. Indeed any view that rendered these precise would seem to falsify our experience of them, the familiar difficulties that we do face in making such judgments. It would also be inhospitable to Heidegger’s suggestion—in, e.g. L 224 and 229–30— that there might be a scale of conditions with authenticity and inauthenticity as extremes and ‘mixed forms’ in between. 60

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There is some plausibility to the notion that failing to own norms in the further sense that I have identified has implications for what one might call ‘the accomplishment’ that is ‘selfhood’. Beyond what one might see as failures of conscientia—‘error … in some applications of a general principle to some particular case’—here ‘synderesis … falls headlong’ in that there are no principles which can be identified as one’s own. To use a term to which we will return, one lacks ‘a position’ (SZ 322), an over-arching perspective on things that can be identified as one’s own and that is embodied in norms that can themselves be identified as one’s own. For such a person, nothing corresponds to Aquinas’s synderesis, which he would see as impossible in that that is the ‘light [that] belongs to the nature of the soul’; on the reading I am setting out here, Heidegger disagrees in thinking that distinctly possible, but agrees in what that possibility would amount to: those human beings in which that ‘light’ does not ‘shine’ fail to ‘accomplish’ selfhood—‘soulhood’. We might see a failure to make this ‘accomplishment’ in Heidegger’s picture of the uneigentlich person, whose actions express a shifting and fluctuating conglomeration of norms, none of which can be said to be ‘his own’. He ‘understands himself in terms of those very closest events and be-fallings which he encounters … and which thrust themselves upon him in varying ways’ (SZ 410). ‘Busily losing himself in the object of his concern’ (SZ 410), such an individual can merely be depended upon to respond with conduct befitting the various contexts in which he happens to find himself and the various roles he happens to occupy. In one sense, his acts are norm-governed: when lost in the ‘They’, he follows norms in that he thinks what ‘they’ think and does what ‘they’ do; but the inauthentic person picks up and drops those norms in moving from one context to the next. It is a life characterised by ‘turbulence’ and ‘the inconstancy [Unständigkeit] of distraction’, in which one is ‘absorbed in the everyday multiplicity and the rapid succession of that with which one is concerned’, ‘the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one’ (SZ 178, 390, 337, 321, 384). In the midst of this ‘jumble of hovering possibilities’, one instead ‘drift[s] back and forth between “worldly” possibilities which [one] has not seized upon’ (SZ 342, 344). One’s acts are not governed by broader norms which might be said to be one’s own, but instead by the ambient norms that any other fulfiller of the role that one happens to occupy at that moment would respect.61 ‘Dasein in the They moves as it were in a whirlwind’, ‘whirl[ing] it into the They, and thus tear[ing] it away from what matters and from itself’, ‘draw[n] into the constancy of being deflected from its course’ (HCT 280), to the point indeed that we struggle to identify such a ‘course’ and an understanding in such a person of ‘what matters’ that is genuinely his own. To return to the fifth objection that I identified earlier to drawing on the notions of norms in understanding Heideggerian authenticity, it is striking that the  In this respect, it seems to me forced to say that the inauthentic do not act on norms and—taking us back to earlier worries that Crowell’s formulations raised—do not ‘respond to’ or ‘recognize’ ‘norms as norms’, and instead act ‘merely in accord with norms’, not ‘in light of them’. The fact that we must distinguish a norm’s being one’s own from both (1) one’s acting on it as the inauthentic do, and (2) merely acting in accord with it, does not entail that we should identify (1) and (2). 61

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above  terms  are those that Heidegger uses in describing the inauthentic. We see there a vision of the inauthentic as routinised and regulated, as bound by norms in a way that will make sound absurd the proposal that it is they who distinctively fail to own norms. But the above textual evidence presents the inauthentic as routinised in being bound by how the They handles the different contexts in which they find themselves, any regularity with which this endows the lives of the inauthentic depending on how regular the dictates of the They are. If the inauthentic have the good fortune to stay in broadly the same contexts with the same ambient norms, their lives will exhibit regularity; if instead they move from context to context—the demands of the They changing with each step—then they will not. To echo the lectures from which I quoted in opening this section, in such movement, the lives of the inauthentic could be said to be ‘transported’: The realms of significance which are encountered in the course of the maturation of life, and which become different as the world changes, transport life. … Life abandons itself to a certain pressure exerted by the world … [and] becomes disperse. … Life becomes played out in its world at random, following whatever comes ‘out of the blue’. (PIA 76).

What regularity the behaviour of the inauthentic exhibits then is not down to them, so to speak—to their applying norms of their own—but is instead contingent on their environment. In this sense, one might indeed be tempted to say that it is the inauthentic who are distinctively ‘open’ to their situation, responsive to context in a way that the authentic—in their ‘constancy’ (see below)—are not. But what the inauthentic are open to is how the They judge such situations, to how ‘one’ acts in them. They are not open to the situations themselves, in that the inauthentic themselves do not judge the situations: indeed they have no ‘position’ of their own through which they might do so. On this reading, inauthenticity is then a species of conformism but one in which the ‘constancy’ of the self breaks up. The inauthentic are recognizably ‘dispersed into the “They”’ (SZ 129); the ‘falling away of Dasein from its authenticity’—‘the disappearance of Dasein in the They’—is ‘a falling apart of Dasein’ (HCT 282). ‘[T]he inauthentic Being of Dasein’ is ‘als unganzes’— ‘less than a whole’, or as Stambaugh puts it, ‘fragmentary’; and the unifying ‘Self’ that might be taken to be the source of his actions is instead ‘indefinite and empty’ (SZ 233, 322). In this condition, ‘[n]o one is himself’: What someone is, and how he is, is nobody: no one and yet everyone with one another. Everyone is not himself. (CT 8–9).

This reading would confirm the impression that Heidegger’s talk of ‘accomplishing a self’ suggests that he sees selfhood as something that some human beings do not achieve.62 Their acts do not express their own judgment—not because they are akratic but because they do not own norms that would give such a judgment content. This would give a sense to Heidegger’s characterisation of heeding the ‘ontological’ call of conscience as a condition of possibility—‘the ontological foundation’—of

 This is not a view without precedent. Compare, for example, Nietzsche’s Nachlass remark that ‘one should not at all assume that many humans are “people” … the “person” is a relatively isolated fact’ (1988 vol. 12 p. 491, translation quoted in Gemes 2006: 328). 62

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hearing the ‘ontic’ call of conscience: a call to bring one’s own judgment to bear presupposes that there is such a thing. The acts of the inauthentic person instead express the ‘inconstant’ ‘jumble’ that is the ‘dispersed’ and ‘fragmentary’ voice of the They, in all its ‘manifold ambiguity’ (SZ 271). To be so is to fail to fulfil one’s ‘ownmost potentiality-of-being-a-self’ (SZ 273), to fail to amount to a holder of a ‘position’ by failing to bear the ‘burden’ of being an owner of norms.This suggests a sense for some of Heidegger’s most puzzling remarks. He says of Dasein that ‘[t]he “essence” of this entity lies in its “to be”’ (SZ 42); the ‘fundamental determination’ of Dasein is that it ‘is the entity which I myself am in each instance, … an entity which is in each instance to be it in my own way’: This determination indicates the distinctive relationship of being which we ‘have’ to this entity: to be it itself. (HCT 152–53)

The above reading gives us a sense of how—to pick up on the ordinary German use of ‘eigentlich’—authenticity could be a condition of really being Dasein, in that it is a condition of being an actual holder of views, a genuine subject; and that is a matter of ‘owning’ as the term’s literal sense suggests: to possess an identity—to own a particular perspective on things—is to bring to bear in the diverse situations in which one finds oneself that which can then be seen as one’s own norms, the norms in which that perspective is embodied. When uneigentlich, one eignet sich keine dieser Normen an—appropriates none of these norms; one macht sich keine zu eigen—makes none one’s own. Instead Dasein is ‘reliev[ed] … of its choice, its formation of judgments, and its estimation of values’ by the They; in doing so, the They ‘take Dasein’s “to-be” away’—‘reliev[ing] Dasein of the task … to be itself by way of itself’ (HCT 247), leaving behind not an actual holder of views—a real subject—but an ‘indefinite and empty’ ‘nobody’.63

Our Puzzles Revisited So let us now revisit the glosses we gave above on the puzzling textual motifs with which we began. The visions of norm-ownership and of authenticity at which we have now arrived give a radicalizing twist to our earlier discussion of self-­ understanding. The norms that an inauthentic person might correctly cite as the basis upon which he presently acts do not inform his life more broadly and, in that sense, cannot be taken as an expression of a view that is his. We may still say—in line with the earlier  reading  that I formulated—that such an individual does not really believe what he says he believes, or really desire what he says he desires, and that such statements by such an individual do not express self-understanding. But in  Equally, one might be ‘dispersed’ without being ‘dispersed into the They’ in that one’s life might be chaotic without that chaos being mediated by conformism with—being ‘transported’ by—the demands of the They. Heidegger’s focus on the latter form of dispersal could reflect, nonetheless, a belief that as a matter of fact this is how dispersal in general arises. 63

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the more radical failure to own norms that inauthenticity—for the previous section’s reading—represents, that is so because there is no self there to be understood: there is nothing that such an individual really believes or desires—no beliefs or desires that we can ascribe to this entity. We also get a radicalizing twist on our earlier discussion of conscience’s calling to action. Heidegger stresses that, as an inauthentic non-self, I am, of course, active—indeed ‘busying [my]self head over heels’ (SZ 245). So why isn’t this the action to which conscience calls me? That call is to ‘let [my] ownmost Self take action in itself’; but when inauthentic, according to our second reading, there is no self to act; there are no such things as ‘my desires’ or ‘my beliefs’ which this creature’s acts might express. A similar revision applies to our earlier gloss on Dasein’s ‘choosing both itself and choice’ as its attending itself to the situation before it, allowing its own sense of what matters to determine—decide, choose—its acts. In the inauthentic, according to our second reading, there is no such sense to turn to. Instead one ‘gets carried along by the nobody’, lacking an outlook of one’s own—an ‘estimation of values’— on the basis of which one might decide how to act. In being ‘relieved of the task to be itself by way of itself’ Dasein is thus ‘reliev[ed] … of its choice, its formation of judgments’.64 We can also now revisit the notion of the call of conscience ‘com[ing] from me and yet from beyond me’. Our earlier ‘ontic’ gloss on this proposal is that this is a call from—as it were—the better self that is my synderesis to my actual here-and-­ now self, which embodies my succeeding or failing to bring that synderesis to bear. But our second reading characterises the inauthentic as lacking synderesis, that ‘light [that] belongs to the nature of the soul’, without which they fail to ‘accomplish selfhood’—‘soulhood’. The ontological ‘call’ which authentic Dasein heeds is a ‘summons’ to the ‘potentiality-for-being-itself’: what I am being called to is not the following of some particular norm or the holding of some particular role but to the condition in which I am a self—myself. So one might indeed say that the call comes ‘from me’. But equally, in my present inauthentic state, I am failing the ‘task’ of being me; so the call comes ‘from beyond me’, where ‘me’ refers to the creature that stands before us now: for that creature, being a self—myself—is still an unrealised ‘potentiality’. That creature remains instead the ‘nobody’ that is ‘dispersal’ in the They. Finally, what of the silence of the call? I formulated earlier a gloss which depicts the call’s silence as a consequence of its being one’s own voice that one has to heed, and one does that by looking for oneself at the situation in which one finds oneself, letting forth one’s own view on what should be done. But it is a precondition of that, of course, that one has a view—that one has something to say; and it is to that that we have seen the ontologically-construed call to be a call. Just as the ‘expectation of anything like a communication’ from conscience—its having something ‘to tell’ us—is disappointed on the ontic level because—as the  reading I  formulated

 N. 75 will return to this ‘choice’ motif.

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earlier proposes—it is a summons to one’s own view of matters, so too on the ontological level—and according to our second reading—the call fails to provide us with a view that we might adopt because it is a summons to be a possessor of views: as a precondition—the ‘ontological foundation’—of holding a view—of being a creature in which a view might take root, one might say—authenticity could not be brought about by the passing on of a view.

The Broader Picture Our second reading invites some significant questions, to some of which we will return. But let us note here how it would spare Heidegger the criticisms—that our opening section also set out—that his Eigentlichkeit is empty or egoistic. In both cases, a key realisation would be that authenticity does not dictate that Dasein follow any particular first-order norms, but is instead a precondition of being an owner of such norms. What distinguishes the authentic is that they own norms, not which norms they own65; and the ‘vice’ of inauthenticity is to fail to own any particular norms—be they cruel or kind, egoistic or altruistic, etc. In lectures given shortly after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger insists that the ‘selfhood’ that interests him is not that of ‘individualistic egoism’—‘an existentiell, ethical egoism’—but that ‘on the basis of which Dasein can, in the first place, ever be egoistic or altruistic’ (MFL 187).66 Our second reading sees this ‘basis’ as Dasein’s possession of some outlook or other with which it can be identified, an outlook the possession of which requires the ownership of norms. We can see also how the charge of disengagement would miss its mark, and in doing so begin to see how the second reading might give sense to other concepts that Heidegger weaves into his discussion of authenticity. For example, Heidegger describes the authentic as exhibiting Entschlossenheit, which is typically and naturally translated as ‘resolution’ but which more literally means a kind of openness. As interpreted here, authenticity requires one to be true to what we then think of as one’s own norms; but that is something one achieves by bringing those norms to bear in the here and now.67 The authentic also exhibit Ständigkeit, which is naturally translated as ‘constancy’. This is another Janus-faced ‘knowing-with’, Heidegger insisting that that it is a ‘constancy of the self’ in a ‘double sense’ (SZ 322). Heidegger contrasts  Hence, the authentic need not follow norms other than those that the inauthentic follow—engaging in ‘marginal practices’, ‘alternative possibilities [that] do not make good, average, everyday sense but rather seem old-fashioned, trivial, or meaningless’ (Dreyfus 1991: 329). Instead ‘[a]uthentic Being-one’s-Self’ can indeed be ‘an existentiell modification of the “They”’ (SZ 130). 66  Cruel or kind, one might add; and herein could lie the key to Heidegger’s insistence that authenticity is not an ethic but instead a ‘condition for the possibility of the “morally” good and for that of the “morally” evil’ (SZ 286). 67  For further discussion, see McManus 2018: sec. 9. 65

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Ständigkeit with Unselbstständigkeit, a failure of independence and more literally a failure to stand by—or with—oneself68; but a temporal connotation is also clearly intended, which the above reading sees in the dealings of the authentic person being bound together by—as I put it above—her bringing her norms with her. The claim of her norms on how she acts imposes a constancy—a co-hesion—on her actions, ‘a steadiness that has been stretched along’ (SZ 390) and is resistant to the ‘multiplicity and … rapid succession’ of the ‘events and be-fallings … which thrust themselves upon’ her.69 This reading may seem implausible to those who see Heidegger as revealing the mythic status of the self and the impossibility of attaining determinate self-­ conceptions; but we could see him instead as revealing how reifying conceptions of the self mythologize what it takes for a self to exist and what the fixity of selves and self-conceptions actually requires. On the basis of this reading, one might indeed say—with Heidegger—that ‘the constancy of the self, as the supposed persistence of the subjectum, gets clarified’ as a form of ‘steadfastness [Standfestigkeit]’, as a matter of ‘its having achieved some sort of a position [Standgewonnenhaben]’ (SZ 322).70 Clearly, much more needs to be said, both interpretively—if the reading is to be shown to lie within a tenable account of Heidegger’s early thought on authenticity and more broadly71—and philosophically—in assessing whether the outlook that the reading presents can meet the many worries that no doubt it raises. In the confines of this paper, I have addressed only some of these worries and the closing sections of this paper will consider one last one. As I indicated earlier, the interest of our first hypothesis lies in part in its relation to concerns such as Kant’s with autonomy, and the final sections will also sketch in outline how a number of related issues may play out in the light of our second reading.

Autonomy, Manipulation and Reflection According to that reading, there is indeed a sense in which the authentic are autonomous: the authentic act on their own norms, and have, in this sense, the ‘dignity’ of being their own masters. But in requiring that we be moved by norms in a way that  See Macquarrie and Robinson’s note to SZ 117.  Does this view rule the notion of an authentic ‘conversion experience’? I think not, for reasons set out in McManus 2018. 70  Regarding parallels with constitutivism, the above picture may bring to mind Korsgaard’s vision of unity as a condition of agency and autonomy (2009: 213)—where she understands that unity, as Katsafanas has argued, as ‘having commitments’ and ‘a kind of diachronic stability’ (2013: 94, 93)—as well as her proposal that those who fail to act autonomously ‘fall apart’, ‘drop[ping their] projects in the face of the slightest temptation or distraction’ (2009: 177, 175). 71  For some discussion, see the works mentioned in n. 14 above. Our second reading could draw on elements of the understanding of ‘anxiety’ that McManus 2015a presents. But it should be noted that that paper fails to distinguish properly between the two readings that I have formulated and distinguished here. 68 69

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is not brought about by our having chosen those norms ourselves or having assessed and endorsed them, this account can also seem to usher in a species of heteronomy: it is tempting to say one must simply find oneself moved by norms, and what can this then be but—in Kant’s terms—the ‘influence’ of an ‘alien interest’, and—in Kukla’s—a ‘violent’ form of ‘coercion’? Some forms of finding oneself so moved certainly would intuitively seem heteronomous: for example, those resulting from brainwashing or similar forms of manipulation. But that is a fatal objection only if we take the above reading to propose a sufficient condition of autonomy. A full account of that notion would also require a version of the kind of ‘historical’ condition that is familiar from the philosophy of action literature,72 stipulating that knowledge of how one came to be moved by a norm must not undermine one’s being so moved. Other reflective feats might be claimed as necessary too if genuine owning of norms—and with it, genuine autonomy—is to be possible: for example, one might perhaps argue that one’s norms must form a coherent set, or must be known to be true.73 One might then come to worry that such additions would render redundant the account that our second reading presents, some version of the AEV doing all the work perhaps. But I think they wouldn’t, for reasons indicated above. I described earlier the owning upon which I have focused as a substructure—a foundation, one might say—on the basis of which reflection can have life, can be taken seriously; and one can see the relevance of such a substructure to our envisaged additions. Take our historical condition, for example. With the profoundly brain-washed, the historical knowledge in question might well not have the effect envisaged: such a person might be presented with conclusive evidence of how he came to be moved by the norms in question and still be moved by them. Would this mean he passes the condition’s test, and that these norms merit the label ‘norms of his own’? Our reluctance to say that comes with an uncertainty about how to characterise the person. Does he genuinely appreciate what he is being told? Might one say that he knows these historical facts but cannot give them application in his life? Our inclination to say instead that he doesn’t actually know them arises precisely out of the fact that he gives them no such application, settling whether the historical condition is genuinely met here requiring us to turn to considerations of ownership in the very sense that our second reading stresses. So at least prima facie, supplementing the account it offers in the way described would not seem to render it redundant.74

 I have in mind ideas such as Fischer and Ravizza’s ‘mechanism ownership’ (1998: ch. 8) and Katsafanas’ ‘equilibrium’ (2013: ch. 5). For such a condition as part of an account of reasons of one’s own, see Baker 2004. 73  The former thought relates in complex ways to issues mentioned at the end of  the section  in which I considered reasons why turning to norms in discussing Heideggerian authenticity might seem inappropriate, while the latter thought may seem to follow from proposals in the literature on externalism about reasons, a literature that I have otherwise aside here. 74  Similarly, the inauthentic may be capable of feats such as articulating and arguing that a norm possesses various kinds of ‘legitimacy’—say, being warranted ethically, epistemically, aesthetically, etc.—without owning it in the sense our second reading identifies. The question that discussion of the latter notion addresses is not ‘Ought I to own this norm?, but ‘Do I?’ 72

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Why though—pace advocates of AEV-inspired readings—do we not find such additional requirements articulated in Heidegger’s work? One possibility would be that this reflects a more general concern with the sub-structures that give life to reflection, philosophy having confusedly focused on the latter at the expense of recognizing the former—or so Heidegger seems to believe. But this provides further motivation for another question often raised: what role can reflection play in bringing about authenticity? If authenticity is a condition of reflection we can take seriously, then prior to attaining authenticity, our thought would seem to be as ‘idle’ as our talk. Indeed if authenticity is a condition of selfhood and of action, how can I act in any sense so as to bring it about? Already being authentic would seem a pre-­ condition of significant reflection, action, and indeed volition—so the idea that being authentic is something one might choose to be would also be in doubt.7576 But equally, the reading does not entail that we see authenticity as a gift some receive and others do not, some mysteriously predestined to own norms and others to ‘dispersal’. It is an arid psychology that sees the above and reflective choice as the only possible shaping influences on our thoughts and deeds. But for present purposes it suffices to note that any reading that takes seriously Heidegger’s depiction of authenticity as a condition of selfhood, action and non-idle talk is going to face worries of this kind.

Selfhood and Self-Legislation I will end by noting a philosophical benefit that our second reading promises, a solution of sorts to a long-standing difficulty for the Kantian proposal that autonomy requires self-legislation. According to that proposal, an agent is free when ‘obeying only those [laws] it gives itself’.77 By that standard, the need for us to find ourselves moved by norms in a way that is prior to—and indeed foundational for—reflection

 Our second reading is at least consistent with its not being so. The second reading I have formulated here  suggested senses for the thoughts that the authentic person ‘chooses herself’ and ‘chooses to choose’ based on the claim that being inclined to bring ‘one’s own norms’ to bear by choosing how to act is a requirement of there being norms that merit that description, and a condition of there being a self whose judgment might then be seen as being expressed. But being inclined to make such decisions—such choices—need not be something one also chooses to be: not only choosing oneself but choosing to choose oneself, and choosing to choose to choose! (Might such potential misunderstandings lie behind Heidegger’s scare-quotes when he declares that ‘Dasein … can, in its very Being, “choose” itself and win itself’ (SZ 42)?) The choices that our second reading identifies might be described as ‘internal features’ of authenticity: they are part of ‘what makes someone authentic’ in being part of what it is to be authentic, not of what brings authenticity about. (This view would also accommodate the suspicion that owning a norm may be something one can choose to do no more than doxastic involuntarists think one can choose what to believe.) 76  The question of whether authenticity is a condition one should want to bring about—an ideal state to be sought—is another I set aside here. For discussion, see McManus 2015c. 77  Kant 2012: 47. 75

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and choice might well seem to condemn us to heteronomy. But that proposal itself faces the difficulty of explaining how self-imposed laws can be any imposition at all; as Jerry Cohen put it, If you are the author of the law, then it cannot bind you. For how can it have authority over you when you have authority over it? How can it bind you when you, the lawmaker, can change it, at will, whenever you like.78

A way forward that our second possible reading of Heideggerian authenticity offers emerges out of its claim that selfhood is an ‘accomplishment’ that requires the owning of norms. Both authenticity and autonomy are often thought of as a matter of being true to oneself; and, in Heidegger’s discussion, reflections on that theme run in tandem with reflections on what a self is.79 According to our second reading, a necessary condition of ‘being true to oneself’ is being true to what one believes—to one’s own norms—and not to some (romantic, deeper, hidden, ‘true’) self which stands behind—or apart from—those beliefs or norms (with some mysterious authority or worth such that one’s words and deeds should ‘be true to’ it); rather, without owning such norms, one does not constitute a self. So although the ‘surface grammar’ of ‘being true to oneself’ and of ‘a self owning norms’ suggests relations, for the Heidegger that our second reading presents, these are fundamentally internal relations: it is only someone who is largely ‘true to herself’—by being true to what we then think of as ‘her norms’—that has a self to be true to. The up-shot of this would seem to be that selves happen when norms obtain a certain actual hold on human lives.80 Without that hold—without owned norms in the sense stressed—there is no self, but equally no self to imagine resisting the norms in question—to experience them as ‘something imposed from outside’. So, in response to the charge that such a taking hold must be a heteronomous ‘alien influence’, we could ask: upon whom might the norms in question be such an ‘influence’? My wariness about calling this a solution to the puzzle of self-legislation stems from the fact that it depends upon the rejection of a basic element in the formulation of that puzzle, namely, the existence of the self prior to the taking hold of norms. But that this should be rejected might be the truth in the Kantian proposal.81  Cohen 1996: 167. Famous formulations of the difficulty are to be found in Hegel 1991: sec. 140A and Kierkegaard 1983: 69–70. 79  In doing so, they illustrate a broader pattern in Heidegger’s reflections that McManus 2012: ch. 1 discusses. 80  Should this sound like a rather mysterious intervention on the part of norms, this view would be consistent with the possibility of evolutionary accounts of such a hold arising, its having done so in a particular creature allowing that creature to do many things that creatures in whom it has not arisen cannot. 81  Material on which this paper is based was presented at the Universities of Cardiff, Southampton, Sussex and Vienna, the 2014 conference of the International Society for Phenomenological Studies, and the conference, ‘La Réception Anglo-Américaine de la Pensée de Martin Heidegger’, hosted in 2015 by the University of Chicago Centre in Paris and the Husserl Archive. For helpful comments on that material, I would like to thank Bill Blattner, Tony Booth, Taylor Carman, David Cerbone, Richard Coyne, Paul Davies, Sacha Golob, Chris Janaway, Tobias Keiling, Sophie Loidolt, Conor McHugh, Samantha Matherne, Michael Morris, Sasha Mudd, Mahon O’Brien, 78

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Further References St Thomas Aquinas (1947) Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Benziger Bros. ed., http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/ ——— (1953) Questiones Disputatae de Veritate, trans. J.  V. McGlynn, S.  J., Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. St Augustine (1961) Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Baker, L. R. (2004) ‘On Being One’s Own Person’, in M. Sie, M. Slors and B. van den Brink (eds.) Reasons of One’s Own, Aldershot: Ashgate. Calvin, J. (1956) On God and Political Duty, ed. J.  McNeill, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing. Carman, T. (2003) Heidegger’s Analytic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, G. A. (1996) ‘Reason, Humanity, and the Moral Law’, in Korsgaard 1996. Crowe, B. D. (2006) Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Crowell, S.  G. (2001) ‘Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time’, Inquiry 44: 433–54. ———. (2002) ‘Facticity and Transcendental Philosophy’, in J.  Malpas (ed.) From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental, London: Routledge. ———. (2007a) ‘Conscience and Reason: Heidegger and the Grounds of Intentionality’, in S. G. Crowell and J. Malpas (eds.) Transcendental Heidegger; Stanford: Stanford University. ———. (2007b) ‘Sorge or Selbstbewußtsein? Heidegger and Korsgaard on the Sources of Normativity’, European Journal of Philosophy 15: 315–333. ———. (2013) Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Arcy, E. (1961) Conscience and its Right to Freedom, London: Sheed and Ward. Dreyfus H. L. (1991) Being-in-the-World, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Fischer, J. M. and Ravizza, M. (1998) Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frankfurt, H. (1999) Necessity, Volition and Love, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frede, D. (1993) ‘The Question of Being: Heidegger’s Project’, in C. Guignon (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, M. (2000) A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, Peru, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company. Gemes, K. (2006) ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy and the Sovereign Individual’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 80: 321–38. Guignon, C. (2004) On Being Authentic, London: Routledge. Han-Pile, B. (2013) ‘Freedom and the “Choice to Choose Oneself” in Being and Time’ in M. A. Wrathall (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Being and Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haugeland, J. (2000), ‘Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism’, in M. A. Wrathall, and J. Malpas (eds) Heidegger, Authenticity and Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hegel, G.  W. F. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.  B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inwood, M. (1999) A Heidegger Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell. Mark Okrent, Richard Polt, Joachim Raich, Matthew Ratcliffe, Aaron Ridley, Simon Robertson, Joe Rouse, Joe Schear, Philipp Schmidt, Genia Schönbaumsfeld, Philipp Schmidt, Tom Sheehan, Matthew Shockey, Tanja Staehler, Alessandra Tanesini, Jonathan Way, Jonathan Webber, Kate Withy, Fiona Woollard and, in particular, Steven Galt Crowell, Pietro D’Oriano, Joachim Raich, George Reynolds, Aaron Ridley and Daniel Whiting.

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Kant, I. (1961) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan. ———. (2012) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. M.  Gregor and J. Timmermann, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kasowski, G.  B. (2011) Conscience and Attestation: The Methodological Role of the ‘Call of Conscience’ (Gewissensruf) in Heidegger’s Being and Time, Ph.D thesis, Université de Montréal and Université de Paris IV-La Sorbonne. Katsafanas, P. (2013) Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kierkegaard, S. (1983) The Sickness unto Death, trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Korsgaard C. M. (1996) The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (2009) Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kripke, S.A. (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Oxford: Blackwell. Kukla, R. (2002) ‘The Ontology and Temporality of Conscience’, Continental Philosophy Review 35: 1-34. Lyons, W. (2009) ‘Conscience – An Essay in Moral Psychology’, Philosophy 84: 477-94. McManus D. (2006) The Enchantment of Words: Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2012) Heidegger and the Measure of Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (2013a) ‘Heidegger, Wittgenstein and St Paul on the Last Judgment: On the Roots and Significance of the “Theoretical Attitude”’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21: 143–64. ———. (2013b) ‘The Provocation to Look and See: Appropriation, Recollection and Formal Indication’, in S.  Reynolds, D.  Egan, and A.  Wendland (eds.) Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Routledge. ———. (2015a) ‘Anxiety, Choice and Responsibility in Heidegger’s Account of Authenticity’, in D. McManus (ed.) Heidegger, Authenticity and the Self: Themes from Division Two of Being and Time, London: Routledge. ———. (2015b) ‘Being-towards-death and Owning One’s Judgment’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91: 245–72. ———. (2015c) ‘Heidegger and the Supposition of a Single, Objective World’, European Journal of Philosophy 23: 195-220. ———. (2015d) ‘On Being as a whole and Being-a-whole’, in L.  Braver (ed.) Division III of Heidegger's Being and Time: The Unanswered Question of Being, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ———. (2018) ‘Vision, Norm and Openness: Some Themes in Heidegger, Murdoch and Aristotle’, in M. Beaney, B. Harrington and D. Shaw (eds.) Aspect Perception after Wittgenstein: Seeing-As and Novelty, London: Routledge. ———. (forthcoming) ‘On a Judgment of One’s Own: Heideggerian Authenticity, Standpoints, and All Things Considered’, Mind. Nietzsche, F. (1988) Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden, G. Colli and M. Montinari (ed.), Berlin: de Gruyter. ———. (1989) On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books. Nykänen, H. (2002) The ‘I’, the ‘You’ and the Soul, Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press. Potts, T. C. (1980) Conscience in Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (1982) ‘Conscience’, in N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg (eds.) The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rentsch, T. (1989) Das Sein und der Tod, Munich: Piper. Sorabji, R. (2010) ‘Graeco-Roman Origins of the Idea of Moral Conscience’, Studia Patristica 44: 361–83. Stoker, H.  G. (1925) Das Gewissen: Erscheinungsformen und Theorien, Bonn: Verlag von F. Cohen.

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Strohm, P. (2011) Conscience: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taminiaux, J. (1994) ‘The Husserlian Heritage in Heidegger’s Notion of the Self’, in T.  Kisiel and J. van Buren (eds.) Reading Heidegger from the Start, Albany: State University of New York Press. Velleman, J. D. (2009) How We Get Along, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Buren, J. (1994) The Young Heidegger, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Wiland, E. (2012), Reasons, London: Bloomsbury. Wittgenstein, L. (1967) Philosophical Investigations, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell. Wolin, R. (1990) The Politics of Being, New York: Columbia University Press

Death, the Brother of Sleep Michael Inwood

Being and Time, the only work in which Heidegger discusses death at length, makes no mention of sleep. In his paper I shall discuss some of the similarities and differences between these two phenomena. It is easy enough to conceive of the permanent insomnolence of some of us or even all of us. It would not have such drastic consequences as the permanent immortality of all, or even some, of us. It is true that sleep punctuates our lives, dividing it into manageable segments, enabling us to organise our daily routine. But alert insomniacs could surely find some way of handling this – reading more books, writing more papers, or watching more television. By contrast, immortality would arguably disrupt our lives radically, leaving us no good reason for doing something now rather than later, in fact much later.1 Nevertheless, whether or not it would be desirable, human immortality, or at least greatly increased longevity,2 is quite likely within our reach: death from ageing and from disease – though not from trauma – may well be overcome. Heidegger takes no account of this possibility and presents at least

 For further discussion of the supposed disadvantages of immortality, see e.g. J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nohingness, pp. 531–553; T. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (London: Routledge, 2003); B. Williams, ‘The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality’, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 2  It is important to remember that, assuming that someone was born at a certain time and had not already lasted forever, then at any later time he or she has only lived for a finite time and has not yet actualised his or her supposed immortality. Whether he or she is strictly immortal would always remain a matter for conjecture. 1

M. Inwood (Deceased) (*) Philosophy, Trinity College, Oxford, Oxford, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_12

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eight claims about death.3 In what follows I shall consider these claims and ask how they square with what I have said so far. I shall then raise some other issues bearing on death and Heidegger’s treatment of it.

It Is Certain that I Shall Die With the qualification that I may be chosen for indefinite life-extension, this is true. It is also true that it is certain that I shall fall asleep at some time, assuming that I am not gifted with permanent insomnolence.

It Is Not Certain When I Shall Die This is also true, though again with a qualification: it is certain that I shall die before my 130th birthday. Moreover, in special situations, such as if someone has fallen off a skyscraper, there will probably be a brief period during which the victim is fairly sure of their imminent death. It is also uncertain when I shall fall asleep. But sleep is within my control in a different way than death is: I can keep myself awake with coffee, etc., and regulate my periods of sleep by going to bed early, or late, reading an exciting book, etc.

It Is Possible that I Shall Die at Any Moment This is true, though the probability of my dying varies with my situation and also my age: it is higher in infancy and old age. The probability of my dying at any given moment is vanishingly small. It is also possible that I shall fall asleep at any moment, but the probability of my doing so varies with circumstances that are, to a great extent, within my control. The word ‘probable’ (wahrscheinlich) does not occur in Being and Time, and in his account of death Heidegger mentions ‘data and statistics about the longevity of plants, animals and men’ (BT 246) only to subordinate them, as an ‘ontical’ matter, to the ‘ontological‘analysis of death and ‘dying’, i.e. ‘that way of Being is which Dasein is towards its death’ (BT 247). It is, however, a mistake to suppose that our everyday assessments of probability generally depend on scientific investigation and that they play no part in our way of Being towards our death. No doubt I may die at any moment, but the possibility of coherent rational action depends on the assumption that I will not die in the immediate future. Even if I am tiptoeing through a minefield, I believe that imminent death is neither certain nor impossible.  I have discussed these claims in Inwood (2000), pp. 69–78.

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 eath Will Terminate All My Possibilities; I Cannot Do D Anything After I Am Dead This is true. Even if we allow (as Heidegger seems to do) the possibility of some sort of afterlife, I cannot plausibly be supposed capable of freely producing effects in the world of the living after I have departed from it. I may, of course, do things before my death that are intended to produce effects after my death, such as write a will: but whatever I do must be done before I die. Moreover, the extent of my pre-­ mortem control over post-mortem events tends to diminish with time: I exert considerable control over who will inherit my property immediately after my death, but hardly any control over the fate of my books in a hundred years time. Sleep is quite different in this respect, because I can do things involuntarily (or in an attenuated sense of ‘voluntarily’) while I am asleep, such as urinate, ejaculate, talk, walk, and of course dream. I can not only do things today that will take effect tomorrow; I can also make plans today to do things tomorrow. Moreover, in virtue of the expectation that I shall wake up again, I can be described as doing things in the present tense while I am asleep and, in the occurrent sense, doing nothing of the sort. Suppose, for example, that I am in the process of writing a paper or buying a house, then fall asleep, and when I wake up continue my house purchase or paper-writing. Then someone can say of me, while I am asleep: ‘He is writing a paper/ buying a house.’ If perchance I die in my sleep, this claim will have to be modified and transposed into the past tense: ‘He was writing a paper/buying a house.’ This point can be generalised to cover not only overt actions, but moods, emotions, and possibly beliefs. (Arguably, beliefs are already dispositional in one’s waking state. If so, then they cannot change from occurrence to dispositionality when one falls asleep.4 Nevertheless, death still transposes the ascription of them from the present to the past tense.) A dead person is no longer ‘in the world’ in Heidegger’s sense. Is a sleeper still in the world or is s/he temporarily out of it? A sleeper is temporarily out of the relevant contact with other things and people, but is likely to regain contact with them if s/he awakes. In virtue of this we apply to a sleeper the same terms as we do to a person awake, but in a dispositional rather than an occurrent sense. Thus before s/he fell asleep, X was angry about, say, Brexit and will be angry about it when s/he awakes. S/he had, and will have, feelings of such anger in the occurrent sense. Because of this we can reasonably say that s/he is angry about Brexit, and therefore in the world, even when s/he is asleep and has no such occurrent feelings or attitudes. It is, of course, conceivable, and no doubt sometimes happens, that a person falls asleep with one belief or attitude, as, say, a remainer, and wakes up with a contradictory belief or attitude, as, say, a leaver. If the change is not merely temporary, we will not know how to characterise his/her state during sleep, except in the unlikely event that we can pinpoint the time at which the change occurred, as, say, the result of a dream about the benefits of Brexit. But even so, the sleeper is still  I owe this point to Edward Kanterian.

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(dispositionally) in the world during sleep, since s/he is still in the world (occurrently) after waking up, even though some of his/her attitudes have changed in the meantime.5

I Have to Do My Dying for Myself This is also true, on the assumption of our present quite limited life-extending technology. Although another may, in a certain situation, die in my place – donating his/ her heart to me, for example, or going to the gallows in my stead, − sooner or later I will die for myself, not by proxy. The same is true of sleep. In a specific situation, another may sleep in my place, if, say, I deputize for him/her on night duty, but the normal person is bound to fall asleep sooner or later – unless he or she dies in the meantime. It is also true of eating: if I eat, then, whoever I eat with, I do my own eating. But I do not have to eat in the way that I have to die.

 eath Is ‘Non-relational’: It Severs All My Relationships D to Others Death is ‘non-relational’ in two ways. Firstly, dying itself is a solitary business. It cannot be a joint enterprise, like a conversation or a game of chess. Even if I die surrounded by my loved ones or in a suicide pact, there is a sense in which each of us dies alone. Secondly, when I am dead all my relations with others are one-sided and depend exclusively on what living others do. Others may love me, admire me, remember me, etc., but I cannot reciprocate. I may have loved them in the past, but I cannot love them now. There is a sense too in which I invariably sleep alone. But there are two ways in which a sleeper may relate to others in a way in which a dead person cannot. Firstly, I may dream about others and, secondly, in virtue of my occurrent relationships to others in my waking state, I may be described as sustaining such relationships dispositionally even in my dreamless sleep. A sleeping lover loves his or her beloved, but a dead lover can only have loved him or her.

 There are curious exceptions to our reluctance to describe the dead in the present tense. We are happy to say that ‘Socrates is a philosopher’, but not ‘Socrates is short and ugly’. Conversely, we would prefer to say, of some recently dead colleague, ‘S/he was a philosopher’ rather than ‘S/he is a philosopher’, and ‘Pericles was a Greek politician’ rather than ‘Pericles is a Greek politician’. This variation may depend on the present cultural significance of the person in question and of the characteristics ascribed to them, but it also depends on the context of the utterance. As an answer to a quizz question, ‘Who is Pericles?’, the reply that he is a Greek politician would be appropriate, though probably not that he is the lover of Aspasia and a friend of Anaxagoras. It also depends on whether the person’s achievements are currently accessible to us: Socrates’s are, but Pericles’s are not; Virgil is a poet, but Gallus was a poet, since little if any of Gallus’s work survives. 5

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 hat I Shall Die Is Not Merely Empirically Likely or Even T Empirically Certain: Anyone Who Seems Not to Know About Death Is Really ‘Fleeing in the Face of Death’ (BT, 251) It is quite certain that everyone dies and that the vast majority of us sleep. But how do we know this? Sleep is fairly unproblematic, as long as we are ready to shelve familiar doubts about induction. At a fairly early age I learn from my own experience and from what others tell me that I sleep at regular intervals, and later I learn that others sleep too, again from my own observations and what others tell me. Conversely, the first-hand evidence that everyone dies, including oneself, available to an individual – at least in modern industrial societies – is quite sparse. Aside from films and TV it is easy not to see a corpse until one is fairly old and even then one may be told that the dead person is simply asleep. Moreover, the media tend to sensationalise death, focusing on deaths in war and the deaths of celebrities, implying that death is an unusual event, requiring a special explanation.6 The evidence that I too will die is even more slender. Like Russell’s inductivist chickens, I wake up alive every day and, in my youth, gradually growing stronger. It is easy to assume, unless one reflects and until one begins to decline, that elderly people are a distinct species, doomed to die in a way that I am not. Max Scheler presented a more explicit argument than any offered by Heidegger for the view that non-empirical certainty of one’s own death stems from the observation that the range of possibilities open to one narrows as one’s life advances and seems to converge on the limit of a single possibility, if not to vanish altogether.7 It can be objected, however, that the progressive contraction of my range of options is inferred from empirical observation, and it depends, in any case, on my mortality: if eternal youth were granted to me, I could become a general or an actor – options that are now denied to me not by life as such, but by the ageing and mortality known to me in other ways. It is, moreover, clear that the maximum possible length of a human life is known empirically rather than a priori. How, in that case, can we know a priori that there is any such maximum at all? In so far as we do know that everyone dies and that therefore I too will die, it seems to depend on our collective experience rather than simply my own personal experience. There is, that is, something inauthentic about my conviction that I will die and that the dead do not awake.

 In comparisons of the villainy of Stalin and Hitler, the question is sometimes posed: ‘How many people died under Stalin?’ The question intended is: ‘For how many deaths was Stalin responsible?’ and this is an entirely different question. 7  Max Scheler, ‘Tod und Fortleben’, in Die Zukunft des Kapitalismus und andere Aufsätze (Munich: Francke, 1979) pp. 18ff. 6

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Death Confers Wholeness on Dasein ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ said Christ in the Sermon on the Mount.8 The message is that we should live for the present and not worry too much about the future. It seems rather arbitrary to pick on the day rather than the hour or even the minute. A minute is no doubt too short to accommodate a fully fledged action, but an hour would be long enough. That we privilege days instead of longer or shorter periods depends in part on sleep. A day is a manageable segment in which we can organise our lives. The end of a day punctuates one’s life with a ‘comma’, from the Greek ‘komma’, a piece cut off. The end of a year, whenever that might be, is a semi-colon. But death is a full stop at the end of the sentence. Only at the end of a sentence can we know what the sentence says and only at the end of a life can we know the meaning of that life. But death leaves loose ends. Can we, even after the end of someone’s life, be sure of the meaning of the life? For one thing, we can ask what someone would have done if s/he had not died when s/he did, but later, or if, for that matter, other circumstances had been different. Sartre says that no answer to this question can count to a person’s credit: “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.” This is not simply because no such counterfactual conditional could be conclusively verified. If someone dies 15 minutes before the end of a film s/he is watching, we can say with some, though not complete, confidence that if s/he had lived for another hour s/he would have seen the end of the film. Or again that if Henry Moseley had not died in 1915 he would have received the 1916 Nobel Prize in physics. It is because, in Sartre‘s view, there is no essence of a person beyond their existence, beyond the life they actually live. This implies that a person’s obituary can be definitively written, without any such rider as ‘S/he did not fulfil his or her potential.’ Sartre‘s argument would be stronger if we added the premise that the time and nature of a person’s death is inherent in the nature of their life, that it is, as we might say in an unsartrian spirit, an integral part of the person’s essence.9 Then to ask what, say, Sartre would have done if he had not died when, and as, he did would be as pointless as asking what he would have done if he had been Chinese instead of French or a waiter rather than a philosopher. But it is surely more plausible that the time and manner of someone’s death is often a sheer contingency, determined by a stray bullet or a falling brick rather than by his or her intrinsic nature. In Being and Nothingness Sartre supplies another argument bearing on this theme: that a person, once dead, is a ‘prey to others’. What I do in my life is, after my death, open to interpretation by others and I have no say in the matter. The words that Heidegger wrote in his lifetime are

 Matthew 6:34.  Hegel has a tendency to explain a person’s death in terms of their deep nature, especially their philosophical and religious thought. See e.g. M. Inwood, Hegel (London: Routledge, 1983), p.4 45, on the death of Spinoza and the implicit reference to the death of Novalis in Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶658. 8 9

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established before his death, but whether he was a significant philosopher or not depends on the response of others, on how they interpret him, on whether they accept and develop his ideas or, alternatively, reject or even forget them. Officially and explicitly, Heidegger took no account of a person’s posthumous fate, but he took great care to ensure that all his own writings would be published after his death. This suggests that a definitive obituary cannot be written. Even scorn and neglect might be followed by a revival. We can never be quite sure that the ripples left by a person’s life have finally subsided. Sartre‘s first argument suggests that death does confer wholeness on Dasein, his second suggests that it does not. It is difficult to resolve this dilemma, unless we insist that someone’s posthumous fate should not figure in their final balance sheet, because they are then no longer Dasein, no longer in the world.

Birth and Death In his chapter on death (BT II.1) Heidegger does not mention birth. He refers to birth only in Chapter II.5, where he discusses the ‘connectedness of life’, the ‘way in which Dasein stretches along between birth and death,’ a ‘historizing’ or ‘happening’ (Geschehen) that forms the basis of ‘historiology’ (Historie), the academic study of the past. There is a certain affinity between awaking and birth. I am thrown or cast into wakefulness in something like the way in which I am ‘thrown’ into life, though I can take steps to ensure that I wake up ‘on time’, whereas I cannot have any say in the time or circumstances of my birth. There are other differences too. The world into which I awake is familiar to me; it is very similar to yesterday’s world and, I assume, to the world tomorrow. By contrast, the world into which I am born is entirely novel. I have encountered nothing like it before, though I soon become accustomed to it and it acquires the feel of familiarity. After waking up I remember the events of the day before and later on I remember waking up. By contrast, I remember nothing, in the relevant sense, of the events before my birth and I do not remember being born. My knowledge of the time and place of my birth depends entirely on hearsay. If it were not for hearsay and my subsequently acquired knowledge of the maximum human life-span, I might well believe that I had lived for a thousand years or even forever, with, however, a curious forgetfulness about my earlier life.

Between Birth and Death We might ask: Why is Heidegger more concerned about death than he is about birth? This is perhaps related to a question raised by Lucretius and later by Schopenhauer: Why are we more disturbed by the fact that we will die and cease to exist for eternity than we are by the fact that we were born at a particular time and

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did not exist for an eternity? There is no interesting analogous question concerning sleep. If I worry about sleep, it may be at either end of the day: I missed the end of a play because I fell asleep and I may miss the end of a play because I am likely to fall asleep. But except in unusual cases, these are trivial worries. Falling asleep is not usually painful and is often quite pleasant. Dying, by contrast, is often painful. It is quite likely that being born is painful too, but that is in the past. However, since a fairly painless suicide is generally available to us, but chosen by few, pain cannot be the only objection that we have to death. One significant difference between birth and death, is that we have, or can acquire, a good deal of knowledge about what happened before our birth, we know very little about what will happen after our death. This perhaps helps to explain Heidegger’s relative neglect of birth. He is after all interested in philosophers who wrote before his birth, and whether a philosopher wrote before his birth or during his lifetime is of little significance, whereas he can know next to nothing about what philosophers will say after his death. By contrast, one’s own birth becomes relevant when making decisions about how to conduct one’s life, whether, say, to become a priest or a philosopher. That people are born as well as die is also relevant to history and to ‘historiology.’ One objection to death, then, might be that it deprives us of knowledge in a way that birth does not. King Harold’s death at the Battle of Hastings deprived him of knowledge of the battle’s outcome. If I die soon I shall never know what form Brexit takes or whether Jeremy Corbyn ever becomes Prime Minister. A.N.  Whitehead objected to death on this score and said that he would like to return every 50 years or so, to see what had happened in the meantime. This seems rather a specialised objection, however, and it is hard to see how matters would be improved if the strange possibility floated by Russell – that memory and foresight were reversed and that we foresaw as much of the future as we now remember of the past, and remembered as little of the past as we now foresee of the future – were to be actualised. I might well regret that I shall miss the present experience of the events I foresee more than I regret, say, my absence from the Battle of Hastings or my inability to ask the Minoans about the meaning of Linear A.  A Heideggerian, and perhaps a Bergsonian, objection to Lucretius‘s and Schopenhauer‘s question is that it treats the time-span of my life as a present-at-hand thing that I survey from above as I would a line, without direction or movement or a location for myself, as the questioner, on the line. This is connected with more specific objections. Within my life I have plans, projects, and commitments that death may prevent me from fulfilling; but I cannot have plans, etc. whose fulfilment is thwarted by my late birth, since I did not exist before my birth. (I may now have an unusual project, e.g. to seduce Marie Antoinette or to rescue Queen Mary of Scotland, but that is as eccentric as a desire to seduce Madame Bovary.) More generally, it is I who am harmed by my death, but there is no reasonable answer the question who was harmed by my late birth; others may have been, but not I myself. We live life forwards and fear for the future; the missed opportunities of our past occasion only a gentle regret, and sometimes shame or remorse.

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Death, Sleep and History We speak of the evening of our life10 and of a significant event as, or as heralding, a new dawn.11 But these are only metaphors. In literal reality the dawn and the evening, the customary boundaries between our sleep and our waking life, are quite different from birth and old age, or death, the boundaries of our life as a whole. When I awake in the morning, the world is usually much the same as it was the day before, and much the same as it was on many days before that. When I go to sleep in the evening I assume that the world tomorrow will be much the same as it was today and I make my plans and preparations accordingly. There are occasional suprises, such as an unexpected election result or an offer of a new job, but these generally leave the familiar world in place. More significant are the gradual changes accumulated over a lifetime: ‘Well said, old mole! Canst work i’th’ earth so fast?’ Hamlet is referring to his father’s ghost,12 but Hegel, in the conclusion of his lectures on the Philosophy of History, employs the image to represent the enormous change that the spiritual world undergoes by the accumulation of small increments. What was in my childhood unknown, such as the iPad, or an object of wonderment in a science museum, such as the automatic door, is now commonplace; the enthralling debris of world war has been replaced by unaffordable houses; the car I bought in my youth is now a valuable antique; tobacco has replaced gay sex as the scourge of civilisation. Not only that, but the present contains remnants of the past: the cigarette cards I collected in childhood, the refurbished antique car, the grandfather clock in the hall, as well as the relics and documents stored in museums. Such changes, and many others, are the stuff of which history is made. This sets the stage for Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s ‘historizing’. Roughly speaking, it is this. In deciding how to live, I anticipate, or ‘run ahead’ (vorlaufen) to, my ever possible death. If I were gifted with immortality and eternal youth, there would be no need, nor even the possibility, of such a decision. I then rebound back to my birth. If I had already lived forever, with all my physical and mental capacities intact, there would again be no need of a life-determining decision: my organization of this phase of my beginningless life would be no more momentous or problematic than my organization of my daily routine after awaking this morning. Nevertheless, the range of possibilities open to me is not unlimited. If it were, that again would hamper my decision: how could I possibly make a reasonable choice if I could opt for anything whatsoever? Fortunately, a limited range of options open to me is inherited from the past and these are known to me from the remnants of the past in the present. I can become a philosopher – though I cannot, without more ado, simply declare that everything consists of water. I cannot become a knight in shining armour, since that option disappeared many years before my birth, though I may become its modern equivalent, a soldier, say, or a charity worker. What I do is ‘retrieve’  St John of the Cross: ‘In the evening of life, we shall be judged on love alone’.  William Wordsworth: ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive’. 12  Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5. 10 11

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(wiederholen) possibilities left among my heritage from the past. I do not simply ‘repeat’ (wiederholen) them: I take them up again and continue or replay them in my own way.

How Long Should a Good Life Be? We can ask an analogous question about sleep: how long should I remain awake for the day? This seemingly unpromising question raises one interesting issue: why do we worry so much about extending our lives when we could greatly extend our waking lives by reducing or even eliminating our need for sleep? Here we recall that Sartre used amphetamines to enable him to write the Critique of Dialectical Reason and his biography of Flaubert, The Family Idiot. He thereby extended his waking life, while no doubt shortening his life as a whole. Nevertheless most of us worry more about the length of our lives rather than simply the length of our waking lives. What does it mean to say ‘S/he died too young’ or, alternatively, ‘S/he had a good innings’? One answer, suggested by Heidegger’s use of the word ‘average’ (durchschnittlich), is that a good life should be above the average length. This is not, of course, a sufficient condition of a good life: a long life might be thoroughly wretched in other respects. Nor does it seem to be a necessary condition. The deaths of Christ and of Alexander the Great at 33 does not mean that they lived bad lives, though we might think that their lives would have been better had they been longer. One problem here is that the average life-span, even if we exclude deaths at birth and in infancy, varies over time. Aristotle died at 62, Hegel at 61, and Shakespeare at 52. But we do not say of them, as we might of a contemporary, that they died too young – though this may owe as much to their achievements as to the average life-­ expectancy in their time and place. Another suggestion might be that death is appropriate when one has fulfilled one’s potential, which is perhaps one of the things Nietzsche had in mind when he urged us to ‘Die at the right time!’ This might require a fairly early death as when Achilles is said to have preferred a short life of glory to a long life of mediocrity. It is, however, hard to disagree with Sartre (and Jaspers) when they respond that there is no right time to die, since a person does not usually have a fixed potential, an essence, that they may or may not fulfil in their lifetime. Achilles was after all offered only two alternatives, a glorious death in battle or oblivion. It did not occur to him to switch his career to a novelist or a philosopher. In those heroic days there was a generally shared conception of what a good life should be, and that is no longer available to us. The question how long a good life should be is vulnerable to the Heideggerian objection we raised above against Lucretius and Schopenhauer, namely, that it regards a life, whether one’s own or someone else’s, from the outside and does not situate the questioner within the life they are, or were, living. As we mentioned above, to a liver of a life within that life it is not at all obvious when s/he was born or, therefore, how long s/he has lived so far. An assessment of this depends on official records and a comparison of my condition with that of others. Suppose, then,

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that I am in a decent state of health, both physical and mental, and I believe that I am 70 years of age. I am then informed by several reliable doctors that I have only another year to live and I am naturally distressed by this. Suppose, further, that I am now informed that there has been a mistake in the records and that I am in fact 90 years old, not 70 after all, but that I will die within the year in any case. Will my distress be relieved or diminished by the discovery that my life will now be longer than I believed and longer than the average? Surely there is no good reason for it to be. The extra years granted to me are a dim memory in the remote past and have no apparent effect on my present state. My health and my achievements are the same as they were before, and so are my plans and commitments. My essence and my potential, if such there be, have not discernibly altered. It would be the same, too, if I had lived for a thousand years. Methuselah will feel much the same about his forthcoming death as we do about ours.

Conclusion A waking day has a beginning and an end. A life begins with birth and ends with death. A paper conventionally opens with an introduction and closes with a conclusion.

Dilthey, Heidegger and the Actualizing-­Sense of History Rudolf A. Makkreel

When teaching at Freiburg from 1915–1923, Martin Heidegger often incorporated the theme of phenomenology in the titles of his lecture courses. But he was anything but an orthodox phenomenologist. Heidegger made it clear that the alternative posed by Edmund Husserl between phenomenological philosophy as a universal rigorous science (strenge Wissenschaft) and philosophy as a worldview (Weltanschauung) was not the right one. Phenomenology should not be conceived as a science producing timeless theoretical truths nor should philosophers be in the business of formulating a worldview to suit the relative historical needs of their own age. Husserl had used the term “worldview-philosophy” to attack Wilhelm Dilthey and his school for being relativistic. Heidegger, however, defended Dilthey’s philosophy of the human sciences (Geisteswissenchaften) and its understanding of worldviews as being much more incisive than that and as path-breaking for a genuine phenomenology.

Life and History as Meaning or Sense-Contexts Heidegger’s initial contribution is to acknowledge Dilthey’s philosophy for articulating the general life-nexus on the basis of which a particular worldview can arise. As early as his Freiburg lectures of 1919, Heidegger emphasizes Dilthey’s importance in bringing out the pre-theoretical context that motivates the search for meaning and value in human existence. He uses Dilthey’s language of lived experience (Erlebnis), life-context or nexus (Lebenszusammenhang), life-concern (Lebensbezug), factical life-experience (faktischen Lebenserfahrung), and self-­ reflection (Selbstbesinnung) to situate the problematic of value philosophy as it had R. A. Makkreel (Deceased) (*) Philosophy, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_13

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been developed by Neo-Kantians such as Wilhelm Windelband. The following passage in the 1919 summer semester lectures on “Phenomenology and Transcendental Value Philosophy” is characteristic: Windelband completely downplays the contributions of Dilthey, who was less concerned to revive Kant than to draw from deeper sources to relate the problem of a critique of historical reason to the development of historical consciousness. Dilthey did this in a comprehensive way more than a decade before Windelband gave his often cited 1894 Straßburger Rektoratsrede on “History and Natural Science.”1

The main Dilthey work that Heidegger is here referring to is the Introduction to the Human Sciences of 1883, in which some of the methodological and normative issues that set the human sciences apart from the natural sciences were defined. Important here are Dilthey’s efforts “to stress the importance of attending to what is singular”2 when it comes the understanding of human history. Heidegger continues by underscoring the crucial role that “self-reflection” and “description” play in Dilthey’s interpretive project of the human sciences. The description of individual spiritual phenomena requires self-reflection to provide the proper framework for their understanding. Heidegger cites the following passage from Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences: “Only in self-reflection do we find the continuum of our life-unity which supports and contains all our relationships.”3 It is illuminating to see how in “On the Essence of the University and Academic Study” (also from summer semester 1919), Heidegger begins to transform Dilthey’s language of “life-context” into his own language of “situation.”4 A situation is a temporal kind of life-context. “What happens in a situation is not the process that is observed in the theoretical attitude;” it is an event (Ereignis) that involves and influences us. Similarly, Heidegger notes that Dilthey’s life-concern (Lebensbezug), which ties individuals to their historical context, is more than a theoretical directedness. Or as he writes: “The life-concern of the situated I is not only a being-directed at mere objects.”5 He agrees with Dilthey that it is the task of the human sciences to recover the original kind of engagement we have with the world that underlies the theoretical way in which natural scientists observe the objects of their inquiry. Then he supplements Dilthey’s claim that the natural sciences are primarily about explanation and that the human sciences are mostly about understanding with the comment that the former provide a “maximum of theorizing” and a “highest

 Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie in Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe, Zweite Abteilung: Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1987), 56/57: 163. All translations are mine. 2  Heidegger, Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie, 56/57: 164. 3  Heidegger, Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie, 56/57: 164 4  See Martin Heidegger, Über das Wesen der Üniversität und des akademischen Studiums, in Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe, Zweite Abteilung: Vorlesungen (Frankfurt Am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1987), 56/57: 205. 5  Heidegger, Über das Wesen der Üniversität, 56/57: 206. 1

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possible effacement of the situation,”6 and the latter a “minimum of theorizing” and a “highest possible preservation of the situation.”7 As far as the early Heidegger is concerned, Dilthey’s distinction between the natural and the human sciences is not just about theoretical methods, but an attempt to understand how human thought can be brought in relation to the fullness of historical life. Accordingly, he makes a distinction between cognitive inquiry (Erkenntnisnahme) that involves method and cognitive discovery (Erkenntnisfindung) that he defines as research (Forschung).8 Cognitive inquiry is derivative; cognitive discovery is an original mode of research. It is thus worth noting that Heidegger always speaks of Dilthey’s work as a mode of research. What Dilthey says about the human sciences as a kind of thoughtful research is not only relevant to the understanding of history, but also to how Heidegger wants to conceive phenomenology. According to Heidegger, Husserl was able to execute the “principled foundation” of phenomenology, but Dilthey made the “first research breakthroughs (erste Durchbrüche und Forschungen)” that could give phenomenology “its far-reaching importance.”9 Heidegger sums up this significance of phenomenology as follows: “intuitive, inductive phenomenology, the philosophical archetypal science, is an understanding science.”10 We see that phenomenology is not just a descriptive science, but a basic science that is rooted in ordinary life-situations and can in turn produce an understanding of them. This way of reconceiving phenomenology looks to Dilthey’s probing research into life to provide it its “motivational context” as well as its “goal,” namely, understanding. Phenomenology can thus encompass the problem of worldview formation. No longer dismissing a worldview as merely the end-­ product of the specific outlook of a time, Heidegger’s lecture entitled “Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression” (summer semester 1920) characterizes a worldview as an expression that is rooted in a more fundamental life-view (Lebensanschauung). A worldview “is a formation whose sense, both in terms of content (Gehalt), referential concern (Bezug), and actualization (Vollzug), belongs fully to the basic structure of factical life-experience (faktischen Lebenserfahrung).”11 Before analyzing these three modes of sense, it should be noted that it is the actualizing-sense (Vollzugssinn) of a worldview that will most explicitly disclose its basis in life-experience. The more general problem that is addressed in these lectures on “Intuition and Expression,” is how phenomenology can recover the intuition that goes into any of the expressions that constitute culture. This requires a process of regression, even

 Heidegger, Über das Wesen der Üniversität, 56/57: 207.  Heidegger, Über das Wesen der Üniversität, 56/57: 207. 8  See Heidegger, Über das Wesen der Üniversität, 56/57: 211. 9  Heidegger, Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie, 56/57: 165. 10  Heidegger, Über das Wesen der Üniversität, 56/57: 208. 11  Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks in Gesamtausgabe, Zweite Abteilung: Vorlesungen (Frankfurt Am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1993), 59: 10. 6 7

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destruction. If culture is conceived of as an “objectification or expression of life,”12 then its living source must be revived. But how is life as the source of culture to be understood? Heidegger indicates that it can be characterized in two ways: (1) “life as an objectifying, a shaping …that goes beyond itself (Gestalten, Aus-sich-­ heraussetzen)” and (2) “life as a lived experiencing that assimilates (Erleben, Einholen).”13 Although Dilthey’s approach encompasses both senses of life, Heidegger examines his work mainly for clues about the active shaping of culture, and the work of his teacher Paul Natorp for clues about reconstituting the lived experience of culture. As a Neo-Kantian, Natorp refers to subjectivity as the source of all modes of objectification. That which we are conscious of in lived experience is the objective content (Gehalt), but the constituting subjectivity “is simply a reference point (lediglich Bezugspunkt) . . . and therefore, not itself given.”14 Heidegger accepts the idea that the objectively meant content-sense (Gehaltssinn) of the lived experience of culture must be rooted in some initial referential-sense (Bezugssinn). But he rejects Natorp’s transcendental reference to a subject as a mere formal limit that cannot be phenomenologically accessed. Natorp regress to consciousness as a mere relational context (Beziehungszusammenhang), leaves us with an infinite, empty field that can never be actualized according to Heidegger – it remains a pure potentiality. Heidegger ends up returning to more Diltheyan “contexts of lived experience (Erlebniszusammenhänge) that actualize themselves (sich vollziehen)”15 as the concrete, finite sphere that can be phenomenologically understood to open up a third kind of meaning that he calls an actualizing-sense (Vollzugssinn). Whereas referential-sense (Bezugssinn) and content-sense (Gehaltssinn) disclose purely theoretical types of meaning, only an actualizing-sense (Vollzugssinn) can constitute the historical meaning of our involvement with life. To get at the latter mode of sense, Heidegger takes into account several advances made by Dilthey in his last major work, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences of 1910. The first advance is Dilthey’s move away from the tendency to define the life-nexus as a purposive system (Zweckzusammenhang) that is judged by a fixed terminus, and to reconceive it as a productive nexus (Wirkungszusammenhang) that is always temporally on the way (unterwegs) and in transition (Bewegung). Heidegger adopts this term Wirkungszusammenhang from Dilthey and uses it to characterize the efficacy of life. He also notes Dilthey’s distinction between intuitive knowledge (Wissen) and conceptual cognition (Erkenntnis), and the more emphatic realization that the human sciences are not just theoretical sciences aimed at cognition. Paraphrasing a passage from one of Dilthey’s preliminary studies for the Formation of the Historical World, Heidegger asserts that “the domain of the human sciences includes not only the knowing (Wissen) of theoretical cognition (Erkenntnis), but also the knowing of values and

 Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, 59: 16.  Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, 59: 18. 14  Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, 59: 124. 15  Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, 59: 147. 12 13

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purposes, of establishing rules, of religious belief.”16 Dilthey’s own characterization of the human sciences was as follows: “Their foundation must refer to all classes of knowledge (Wissen). It must extend to the conceptual cognition (Erkenntnis) of reality, to the positing of values, and to the determination of purposes, and the establishment of rules.”17 Against those who raise doubts about Dilthey’s philosophical contribution and who consider him a mere theoretician of the methods of the human sciences, Heidegger counters that Dilthey’s reflection on the human sciences are philosophically motivated by a concern “to interpret life from within itself, to draw it out from its origin.”18 Siding with Dilthey rather than Natorp, Heidegger continues: “Life-­ philosophy is for us a necessary phase on the path of philosophy, in contrast to the empty formality of transcendental philosophy.”19 It is the merit of Dilthey’s philosophizing not to rush to judgment and to defer a final systematic formulation of his thought. “It is not the case that Dilthey could not have reached a conceptual formulation of his thinking. Rather he held back from a systematic conclusion till the end.”20 Similarly, the actualizing-sense of our experience is not conclusive or complete. What Heidegger attempts to capture is not the “execution or fulfillment of the conditions and demands of actualization, but their initiation.”21 The actualizing-­ sense is not actualized. It is not ready to be finalized in a judgment (judication), but is merely a preliminary phase of deciding (dijudication). Dilthey provides the genetic productive context that allows lived experience to be understood in the fullness of its meaning, but he is not as insistent that the decisive moment of its initial dawning be captured. Like Heidegger, Dilthey shied away from final, totalistic formulations, but he was willing to rely on human expressions to complete (ergänzen) lived experiences. Indeed, Dilthey claims that expressions, especially those inspired by the poetic imagination, can capture more than what was conscious in a lived experience. The whole tenor of his philosophy of the human sciences was to uncover a gradual development of meaning fullness whereby the inherent sense of ordinary experience is explicated over time. Having accused Kantians of imposing a constructive order (Konstruktion) on the world of nature, Dilthey aimed to draw out the inherent formative order (Aufbau) of the historical world. Heidegger agrees that this kind of formative development from life itself is much more promising than a constructive transcendental approach. Yet ultimately, he believes that even a formative buildup (Aufbau) must be kept in check by a kind of dismantling (Abbau), if it is not to become static and rigid. Dilthey is accused of  Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, 59: 153–154.  See Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Selected Works, volume 3, edited by Rudolf A.  Makkreel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 25. 18  Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, 59: 154. 19  Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, 59: 154. 20  Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, 59: 153. 21  Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, 59: 141–142. 16 17

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pushing his project of a historical formation too far. His turn to objective spirit as the medial embodiment of past human experience is to be retraced and retracted. Heidegger concludes that Dilthey “approaches psychic or mental life merely from the outside; to be sure, not from the outside of nature, but from the outside of the history of human spirit; what is living is given a state-like shape and aestheticized (the ideal of harmony).”22 Heidegger sees the danger of an aesthetization of history in Dilthey and begins his own move toward a more decisive grasp of historicity. The actualizing-sense of history is to be found in a projective movement that can only be kept alive in a regressive dismantling back to some original decision. As Heidegger writes: The regress to authentic sense contexts and the articulation of the genuine sense directions contained in them is the ultimate phenomenological task. The sense context of history, for instance, demands not only that the what-content be understood in a broader genetic connection with others, but also that critical destruction leads to what has been called phenomenological diiudication . . . This diiudication is the decision about the genealogical place that the sense context is to be assigned in light of its origin.23

Heidegger seems to think that by recovering the moment of decision or resolve that initiates a historical movement, a philosophical sense of historicity can be activated. Dilthey, for his part, would think it naive to search for such a decisive moment. It would have reminded him of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s appeal to an authorial seminal decision (Keimentschluß) to explain the core meaning of a text. In his Life of Schleiermacher, Dilthey criticizes the idea of a seminal decision for suggesting that a work merely unfolds from one point in the author’s life-course. True historical understanding of the creative process must allow for the intersection of many distinct lines of influence. No historical productive nexus or system is monolithic. It is precisely because these intersecting lines of influence are difficult to unravel that objectifications are important to consider. Dilthey’s hermeneutical approach involves the triad of lived experience, expression, and understanding. The lived experience of the author is an important starting point for understanding, but by itself it only provides a kind of self-evidentness (Selbst-verständlichkeit) that is elementary and probably superficial. We need the intermediary of objective expressions to gain the perspective that can produce a deeper understanding (Verständnis). The way we express ourselves gives access to depths that even self-consciousness cannot reach or tap. For his part, Heidegger assumes that expression constitutes a kind of terminus of understanding that permanently fixes things. That is the reason he wants to defer objectification and judgment and remain at the level of prejudgment and initial decision. For him, the actualization of historical understanding should not be fulfilled or finalized. It should always remain preliminary or provisional (vorläufig). We see this confirmed in the 1921/22 lectures entitled Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle. There Heidegger says: “To actualize the understanding of a formal

22 23

 Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, 59: 167.  Heidegger, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, 59: 74.

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indicative definition is precisely to begin to work oneself into a situation.”24 Understanding for Heidegger should remain preparatory and on the way. This is difficult to reconcile with his view in Being and Time that authentic understanding already “articulates” an “as-structure.”25 One cannot articulate understanding without aiming at some determinacy. Instead of deferring determinacy by means of a dismantling or destruction that inquires into the original influence (Wirken) that generates a productive context (Wirkungszusammenhang), Dilthey makes it possible to recognize that the continual efficacy (Fortwirkung) involved in any dynamic productive nexus (Wirkungszusammenhang) seldom allows for any final determinacy. Most meaning formation remains determinate-indeterminate.26 Meaning must not only be worked through (erarbeitet) as a Heideggerian might say; it must also be worked out (ausgearbeitet) to the extent possible. Instead of seeing the human sciences as an end point for human understanding, Dilthey regards them as means of cognitive clarification, which then need to be individually appropriated to produce a kind of reflective knowing.27 Dilthey gears the process of articulating meaning of life to his conception of an acquired psychic nexus that registers, filters, and organizes the experiences we have accumulated over time. This acquired psychic nexus, which is only partly conscious, in turn frames and influences all further human experience. Each human being acquires a unique fund of experience whereby new stimuli are assessed and assimilated. Thus, human experience is psycho-historical at its core. Each acquired psychic nexus is a constantly developing structure; only in old age does it assume a fixed shape.28 Heidegger acknowledges this dynamic and open-ended conception of the structuring of consciousness in his 1925 Kasseler Vorträge entitled “Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the Present Struggle for a Historical Worldview.” Like Dilthey, Heidegger speaks of structures that can be experienced: “the true or authentic structure of consciousness …is what experience draws from life itself.”29 Again he points to Dilthey’s insistence “that the structural nexus of life is acquired, that is, that it is determined by its history.”30

 Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, in Gesamtausgabe, Zweite Abteilung: Vorlesungen (Frankfurt Am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1985), 61: 72. 25  See Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010, §32, 145. 26  See Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World, Selected Works, 3: 241. 27  See Rudolf Makkreel, Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, 21–27. 28  See Dilthey, “Ideas for A Descriptive and Analytical Psychology” (1894) in Selected Works, volume 2, edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi ((Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 187–191. 29  Heidegger, “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit und der gegenwärtige Kampf um eine historische Weltanschauung” in Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992–1993), 8: 156. 30  Heidegger, “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit,” 8: 157. 24

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Another theme that Heidegger stresses in these Kasseler Vorträge is that Dilthey conceives the life-nexus as primarily practical. He writes that ever since his work on Schleiermacher, Dilthey had stressed the importance of what is practical in life. This is very true, but Dilthey did not use the centrality of the practical to denigrate the role of theory in understanding life. Heidegger, however, regards practice and theory as exclusive. In the “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle,” a short essay that he sent to Natorp as well as to Dilthey’s student, Georg Misch, Heidegger claims that of the three manifestations of nous known as phronesis, sophia, and episteme, only the first two actualize reason. He speaks of phronesis as circumspection (Umsicht) and of sophia as authentic understanding (Verstehen). Phronesis is the kind of circumspective thinking that can adapt to different objective contexts, and sophia involves the kind of thinking that authentically reflects the life-concerns and attitudes of the genuine researcher. They are both practical modes of thought. Epistemé, by contrast, introduces a theoretical determination that is said to close off this kind of practical understanding--it merely fixes content-sense (Gehaltsinn) as cognition (Erkenntnis). For Dilthey, however, it is possible to hold the theoretical and practical together in his conception of a knowing (Wissen) that is responsive to life.

Pre-ontological Projections of Historicity Heidegger begins the last of his tenKasseler Vorträge with a characterization of Dilthey that allows him to then launch an ontological approach to history: Dilthey’s authentic question concerned the sense of history. It coincided with a tendency to understand life from within itself rather than on the basis of an alien reality. This entails that what constitutes life itself must be made visible. Dilthey has shown and stressed that its fundamental character is its being-historical. He left it at that and did not ask what being-­ historical is and the extent to which life is historical.31

Of these two complaints, the latter seems especially unwarranted, for it is difficult to think of many philosophers who have stressed the historicity of life and its facticity as much as Dilthey. The former ontological complaint is unfair as well, for Dilthey expressed the insight that we cognize history because we already are historical in our very being. As part of this, he reflected on how we experience time and our relation to the past and the future. To be sure, many of Dilthey’s characterizations of lived time were not available to Heidegger then. But Dilthey’s third preparatory study for The Formation of the Historical World entitled “The Delimitation of the Human Sciences,” with which Heidegger was acquainted, already contains the following extensive passage that decisively contrasts the linear form of the abstract time of the natural sciences with the real experience of time:

31

 Heidegger, “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit,” 8: 173.

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The determination of the temporality of life is contained in the course of a life; the expression “course” designates just that. Time is not merely a line consisting of equivalent parts, a system of relations.... Concrete time, however, consists in the restless advance of the present, in which what is present continually becomes past and the future becomes present. The present is the filling of… a moment of time with reality. It is a lived experience in contrast to the memory of one…. It is this being fulfilled with reality, then, that always and continually exists in advancing time, while what makes up the content of the lived experience constantly changes.32

What Dilthey is characterizing here is what Heidegger calls the actualizing-sense of time as we know it in our own life course, not the content-sense of represented time as cognized by the intellect. The real difference between Dilthey and Heidegger is not that Dilthey did not understand our being-historical (Geschichtlich-Sein), but that he did not pursue this ontological awareness to also ask the question what being-historical discloses about being as such. It is in the pursuit of the ontological implications of the being of history that Heidegger indicates the need to move on to a multi-leveled analysis of historicity to which we will once again be able to apply his threefold distinction between a referential, content, and actualizing sense. According to Heidegger, the question of historical being must be prepared for „an analysis of Dasein and its authentic actuality (eigentlichen Wirklichkeit), namely, time.”33 This analysis provides the sufficient ground for the question of historicity, which we will treat in three stages: 1. History and Historicity. 2. Historicity und Historiography. 3. An Example of Historical Cognition as a Possibility of Being-Historical: Philosophical-­Historical Research.34 The first stage of research into historicity formally opens up its referential sense. In that it searches for “what happens as such”35 in history, this referential sense can be said to be ontological. The second stage uses historiography, namely, the theoretical “cognition”36 that historians provide about history. Historiography can provide merely the ontical content-sense of historicity. By moving to the third stage, we focus on Dasein as the distinctive being that makes possible true research into the being of historicity. The third stage is thus a regress that seems to locate the pre-­ontological actualizing sense of being-historical. We humans can know history because we have a pre-ontological understanding of historicity. We can now more fully define the three types of sense that Heidegger wants to distinguish. A referential sense can be formal and transcendental, but also ontological. A content-sense specifies

 Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World, Selected Works, 3: 93.  Heidegger, “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit,” 8: 173–174. 34  Heidegger, “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit,” 8: 174. 35  Heidegger, “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit,” 8: 174. 36  Heidegger, “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit,” 8: 174. 32 33

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theoretical content and is merely ontical. An actualizing sense activates a more encompassing understanding, but is always preliminary and pre-ontological. Elaborating on this fuller import of the actualizing sense of being-historical, Heidegger writes: We are history or our own past. Our future draws its life from the past. We are burdened by the past and still tied to it. This is manifested in our being with one another, in our being part of a generation. Dilthey has discovered this concept of generation and made it important for the phenomenon of historicity. Each of us is not only himself, but his generation.”37

Dilthey’s idea of generation articulates both the being-after-and-with-each other (Nacheinander- und Miteinander-Sein) of our temporal existence at the level of a pre-ontological actualizing sense. But to the extent that this idea of generation readily translates into historical identifications of generations–each with its ontical content-­sense – Heidegger points to the need to also let Dasein’s historicity make “the sense or meaning of being experienceable.”38 This ontological turn is especially evident in the last of the Kasseler Vorträge, where we find certain anticipations of §77 of Being and Time that appeared two years later in 1927. In both works, Dilthey’s conversation partner Count Yorck von Wartenburg ends up as the true hero. In the Kasseler Vorträge, Heidegger concludes that as much as historicity opens up the ontological question of being, we can only hope to find an answer through “the re-understanding of the ancients. We must learn to again measure up to the kinds of questions that the Greeks posed. The need for this kind of historical reflection was perhaps more evident to Yorck than to Dilthey.”39 In §77 of Being and Time, we again find Heidegger giving the edge to Yorck von Wartenburg. Heidegger writes that he can only contribute to Dilthey’s research project insofar as he “is resolved to cultivate the spirit of the Count of Yorck.”40 He now maintains that whereas Dilthey’s historical research tends toward what is visually shaped and ontically specified by describing historical outcomes, Yorck had a better sense of the underlying ontological force of history. Although Dilthey had himself explicitly criticized the ocular approach to universal history of Leopold von Ranke, in whose seminar he had participated, Heidegger agrees with Yorck’s claim that Dilthey sometimes went too far in that direction himself when writing about the history of human thought. He thus concludes that Dilthey was unable to prevent the ontological question of historicity from lapsing into the ontical concerns of historiography. In response, I would argue that it is important to bring ontological considerations into contact with ontical matters.41 Even if it is the case that Dilthey does not adequately probe history ontologically, his work clearly addresses the pre-ontological  Heidegger, “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit,” 8: 174–175.  Heidegger, “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit,” 8: 176. 39  Heidegger, “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit,” 8: 177. 40  Heidegger, Being and Time, §77, 383. 41  For more on the need to relate ontological and ontical meaning analysis, see Makkreel, Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics, 27–33. 37 38

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experience of historicity. Indeed, it is interesting how much of Heidegger’s preparatory existential analysis of Dasein and its experience of the future as haunted by death resembles Dilthey’s own concern with death as the corruptibility of life. The eighth Kasseler Vortrag about Dilthey contains some striking passages about facing death that anticipate the well-known discussions in Being and Time and are reminiscent of Dilthey’s own musings about how human religiosity stems from disquietude about death. There is no need to cite the familiar account of facing our own death from Being and Time. I shall merely quote some passages from the Kasseler Vorträge and then some from Dilthey’s The Formation of the Historical World. In Heidegger we read: Death is a limit that is there for Dasein itself. The imminence of this limit as an indeterminate and certain possibility characterizes what human life is. Yet in its everyday existence, Dasein evades this possibility.... To stand up to death as a possibility, means facing it purely as it is, indeterminate in its whenness, but certain in its thatness…. It means to anticipate death.42

For Heidegger, we only live authentically if we resolutely face the future as involving the inevitability of our own death. “This anticipation of the most extreme possibility of myself, of what I am not yet, but will be, is to be futural (Zukunft-Sein).”43 Being-futural involves a temporal self-transcendence. Existentially, it means not being absorbed in the visibility of the present. We see clear anticipations of this in passages on religiosity that are among Dilthey’s final writings. Being religious relates humans to something that transcends them, but this need not be conceived as something otherworldly. Dilthey writes that true religiosity is not to be found in the dreams of sentimental souls about otherworldliness; rather, life itself experienced according to its true nature – full of hardship and a singular blend of suffering and happiness throughout  – points to something strange and unfamiliar, as if it were coming from invisible sources, something on life from outside, yet coming from its own depths.44 This paradoxical sense of the invisible as both exceeding life and stemming from its own depths, applies especially to our sense of death. Death is the inherent corruptibility of life itself, and it is this awareness that haunts every moment of a deeply religious individual like Calvin, according to Dilthey. To be religious means to relate what is visible in life to something invisible. It is all too easy to evade or suppress this dimension of life as part of an unreflective living from day to day (Dahinleben). In a passage that is remarkable for the way it anticipates Heidegger’s warning against inauthentic existence and its forgetfulness of death, Dilthey writes: The decisive thing is always that in the religious genius there be no evasion, no yielding to the superficiality of being caught up in life, nor to the everyday forgetfulness of past and

 Heidegger, “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit,” 8: 168.  Heidegger, “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit,” 8: 169. 44  Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World, Selected Works, 3: 285. 42 43

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future. There may be no flight of phantasy and no satisfaction in the secular exercise of power, which betokens the forgetfulness of death and of the salvation of the soul.45

Here Dilthey opens up a way of understanding religion that is neither merely institutional or doctrinal nor purely private or emotional. A religious stance only comes about as part of realizing one’s life in an authentic way. It involves a mental mood or mode of attunement (Gemütsstimmung) that is not just a psychological state, but a way of relating an individual’s life to the world at large. Attunement is an important constituent in the way lived experiences relate to the world. In defining our ontological situatedness (Befindlichkeit), Heidegger notes how a mental mood (Stimmung) is always already a mode of being attuned (Gestimmtsein) to the world.46 In Von deutscher Dichtung und Musik, Dilthey had already shown that music can express religious feeling in an “objective mode of attunement (gegenständliche Stimmung),”47 that spreads and diffuses into the infinite. Similarly, every worldview, whether it be embodied in works of art, in religious testimonials, or in philosophical reflections, is established on the basis of a mode of attunement toward life (Gemütsstimmung dem Leben gegenüber) according to Dilthey. When it comes to living our life we can allow ourselves to be carried along by its forward thrust. But we can also stand back and consider our individual place in what happens in the world, not in terms of causal and final conditions, but purely in terms of existential “life-concerns (Lebensbezüge)” that probe the “substratum of life (Untergrund des Lebens).”48 When I consider my life-concerns, I gauge my relations to the things and people around me–some are favorable and “expand my existence (Dasein),” others “exert pressure on me and limit me.”49 But this direct way of judging how I stand in my own world does not yet provide understanding according to Dilthey. At this level, “human individuals who seek to bring their life-concerns and the experiences based on them together into one whole, are unable to do so. Conception, birth, development, and death are at the heart of all those things that cannot be understood. As living beings, we know about death, but cannot understand it.”50 The next phase whereby we appropriate the world is mediated by life-experiences (Lebenserfahrungen) that are gathered to produce more determinate “life-moods” that orient us to the world in a more communal way and better prepare us to understand the enigmas of life. We see here a transformation of singular life-concerns into “communal life-moods” that prepare the ground for a worldview that attempts to  Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World, Selected Works, 3: 285.  Heidegger, Being and Time, § 29, 130. See also Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979, 134. 47  Dilthey, Von deutscher Dichtung und Musik, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: B.G.  Teubner/Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1957), 221. 48  Dilthey, Die Typen der Weltanschauungen und ihre Ausbildung in den metaphysischen Systemen in Gesammelte Schriften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1960), 8: 78. Translation forthcoming in Selected Works, 6. 49  Dilthey, Die Typen der Weltanschauungen, 8: 78–79. 50  Dilthey, Die Typen der Weltanschauungen, 8: 81. 45 46

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understand the meaning of life more determinately. This move from the indeterminate mood (unbestimmte Stimmung) of lived experience to the determination (Bestimmung) of life-experience is important for the understanding how worldviews are generated. In a section on how worldviews are formed, Dilthey writes: Life as a whole receives from each life-concern a coloring and an interpretation …. Universal moods or modes of attunement arise. These life-moods involve innumerable nuances of attitude to the world that form the foundation for the development of worldviews. On the basis of life-experiences in which the manifold life-concerns of individuals about their world are operative, these life-moods initiate attempts to solve the riddle of life.51

Each philosophical worldview is a more or less elaborate effort to articulate our understanding of life in holistic terms. It will attempt to provide not only an overall cognitive world-picture (Weltbild), but also a general life-assessment (Lebenswürdigung) and a sense of what is worth striving for.

Conclusion We can now return to the opening question about the proper relation between philosophy, phenomenology, and worldviews. According to Dilthey, worldviews can find expression in religion and poetry as well as in philosophy. If the literary arts tend to focus on the visible aspects of life, and religion on the invisible, philosophy is especially concerned to give a systematic conceptual formulation to worldviews. Traditionally, this has resulted in many different kinds of metaphysical worldviews, each claiming to be universally valid. Since the scientific norm of universal validity is premised on limiting one’s scope of inquiry, totalizing worldviews cannot adequately defend their legitimacy according to Dilthey. Doing a kind of phenomenology of metaphysical worldviews, he discerns three competing types that have recurred over time. The first is naturalism, which gives priority to our cognitive capacities in accounting for our overall attitude to reality. The naturalism of Democritus, Hobbes, and Hume tends to be reductionist and has provoked the idealism of freedom of Plato, Kant, Fichte, and others that prioritizes our volitional nature and views the world dualistically. The third worldview type is a more inclusive monistic objective idealism that evaluates reality in terms of our affective and contemplative attitudes and has manifested itself in Stoicism, Leibniz, and Hegel, among others. Although Dilthey never commits to the legitimacy of objective idealism, he clearly finds its inclusive approach attractive. As an opponent of metaphysical speculation, Dilthey concludes that philosophy’s true role in relation to worldviews should be restricted to the initial level of clarifying why and how they are generated and at the final level of judging their contribution to our understanding of life. As an attempt to do conceptual justice to the totality of life, each metaphysical worldview can at best be typical. The universality that philosophical reflection 51

 Dilthey, Die Typen der Weltanschauungen, 8: 81–82.

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strives for is to be found by returning to the sources that worldview-formation draws on. It lies in understanding how universal life-moods are able to transform particular life-concerns into the individual content of a worldview. We can merge this with Heidegger’s language to describe a movement from (1) the particular referential-­ sense of an enigma of life, through (2) the universal actualizing-sense of a being-­ attuned to the world, to (3) the overall content-sense of an actual worldview. The differences between Dilthey and Heidegger about worldviews are thus not all that major. Neither of them thinks that it is the task of philosophy to produce some definitive worldview. Since worldviews arise naturally from many quarters, philosophy should provide a framework for making sense of their formation and for assessing their import. But whereas Heidegger dismisses the ontical content-sense of historical worldviews in order to concentrate on their ontological import, Dilthey appeals to expressive completion to explore the content-sense of various worldviews to more fully bring out their existential and pre-ontological ­ presuppositions.52

 This is a revised and expanded version of an earlier German talk, “Dilthey, Heidegger und der Vollzugssinn der Geschichte,” that was published in the first volume of the Heidegger-Jahrbuch, ed. by Alfred Denker, Hans-Helmuth Gander, and Holger Zaborowski, Freiburg/Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2004, 307–321. 52

An Ethics of Courage and Honesty in Wittgenstein and Heidegger Lee Braver

Abbreviations AWL BB

Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932–1935, ed. Alice Ambrose The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ BT Being and Time Conv Wittgenstein Conversations 1949–1951 CV Culture and Value HCT History of the Concept of Time LC Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief LFM Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics: Cambridge 1939 LRKM Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore LWL Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1930–1932, ed. Desmond Lee LWPPI or II Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology (Two Volumes) LWVC Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann OC On Certainty PG Philosophical Grammar PhR Philosophical Remarks PI Philosophical Investigations, 3rd Rev. Ed. 2001 PO Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951 PPO Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions L. Braver (*) Philosophy, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Rogove, P. D’Oriano (eds.), Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception, Contributions to Phenomenology 119, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_14

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Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Rev. Ed. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (Two Volumes) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Zettel

“Once, Russell asked: ‘Are you thinking about logic or your sins?’ ‘Both’, Wittgenstein replied, and continued his pacing.”1 What, after all, is Wittgenstein up to? Philosophers are often enigmatic, but it is surely surprising that for a philosopher this important, who left behind so many writings and has been the subject of so many more, the basic question of just what he is saying—or even if he is saying anything at all—remains unsettled. We know he isn’t discovering facts or stating and arguing for theses, as most philosophers do, because he does not think that philosophy is in that business. So what, after all, is he doing? We have all heard the answer. Wittgenstein’s philosophy is a negative process that dissolves confusions by loosening the tangles snarled in everyday language. Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.2 Throughout his career, he casts ordinary language as the source of confusions that are so deep that we take them to be profound insights. Philosophy’s true job is not to replace these mistaken views with correct ones, but to disabuse us of the idea that there are philosophical insights to be had on such matters at all, returning us to the commonplace knowledge we use in our everyday lives. We complete our task not when our questions are answered, but when we see that they weren’t legitimate questions in the first place; the proper study of philosophy is philosophy. This explanation, however, does not clear away all of the puzzles. If good philosophy is simply a matter of clearing away bad philosophy, why devote one’s life to it, especially with the passion and intensity that mark Wittgenstein’s extraordinary devotion? Dispelling linguistic phantoms—or, rather, semantic superstitions that were never really there in the first place—hardly seems worthy of such soul-­ wracking labor.3 Yes, Wittgenstein discouraged his students from the profession, but his own commitment to his work was boundless, as often noted by his friends. Norman Malcolm, for example, observes that, “the intensity and the completeness  Monk 1990, 64.  PI §118. See the end of the paper for a list of abbreviations. 3  Stanley Cavell (1982) finds considerable emotional weight in Philosophical Investigations, in particular the worry that we might somehow lose contact with each other, but I have never found this tone of anxiety there, as fruitful as Cavell’s views are. The interlocutors’ worries seem to me the artificial results of confusions rather than genuine concerns. 1 2

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with which Wittgenstein was occupied by the problems of the Investigations could hardly be exaggerated. I say ‘occupied by the problems’ advisedly, for they truly took possession of him” (Fann 1967, 71). Or Erich Heller, who says that “philosophy, for Wittgenstein, was not a profession; it was a consuming passion; and not just ‘a’ passion, but the only possible form of his existence: the thought of losing his gift for philosophy made him feel suicidal” (ibid., 91, see also ibid., 57).4 I find it hard to understand how one could be obsessed with, could devote one’s life to, clearing up confusions about what we say to one another in everyday parlance. A second, connected puzzle: the particular topics Wittgenstein takes up—language, logic, mind, mathematics—while certainly important and interesting, are not particularly fertile ground for the kind of existential angst that roiled his days. They may make one think very intensely, but they’re not the sort of things that typically drive a person to the verge of suicide or the isolation of a Norwegian hut. These questions gripped Wittgenstein with a ferocity, a wild fervor that seems out of proportion to the subject matter, and this is not just my evaluation—he himself often called them trivial. We know from biographies, letters, and diaries how critical his work was to him. He spent long tracts of time in solitude to improve it, feeling worthless—even suicidal—when it went badly. Records of his classes describe how torturous the process was for him, conceptual labor pains wracking and exhausting him but never deterring him from tenaciously pursuing a line of thought.5 This lifetime of intense, angst-soaked effort seems incongruous with elucidating the nature of mathematical propositions, say, or surveying the circumstances under which we might say that we know our finger hurts. It is hard to imagine, e.g., Austin or Ryle tossing and turning for nights on end, cursing themselves, decamping to an isolated fjord or contemplating suicide for failing to work out the difference between accidents and mistakes.6 I’m not saying that these matters are insignificant, but the way that philosophy was essential to living a good life for Wittgenstein, the agonized struggle that marked his attempts, seem distant from the writings he produced, and out of keeping with much of what he says about philosophy. One of the more puzzling features of Wittgenstein’s work—and there are many—is this disparity between the tone and topics of his later writings on the one hand, and what we know of his life and his attitude towards his work on the other.7

 Georg Henrik von Wright claims that “philosophy was an integrated part of his own being” (Johannessen et al. 1994, 165). 5  Fann 1967, 34, 52, 81. 6  As his friend G.H. von Wright notes, “it is surely part of Wittgenstein’s achievement to have made concern for language central to philosophy. But few only of those who shared Wittgenstein’s concern for language also shared the peculiar motivation which aroused his concern for it. One aspect of Wittgenstein’s all too obvious alienation from his times is his feeling that not even those who professed to follow him were really engaged in the same spiritual endeavor as he” (1984, 204–5). 7  I am not alone in noting this discrepancy. Brian McGuinness writes, “he brooded over his own defects and difficulties. He was a fierce critic of failings, especially those of honesty, in others. He came to write a book whose main point (he said himself) was an ethical one. What had the foundations of mathematics in common with propensities like these?” (2005, 77, see also Shields 1993, 1). 4

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His early work accommodates this disparity between what he describes as the triviality of the problems he took up and the magnitude of effort he devotes to them by distinguishing between the neutral world of facts we can make statements about, and the transcendent realm of values that surpasses all talk. This division yields a curious sort of semantic ethics: we seek the limits of language in order to cordon it off from the transcendent, for attempts to talk about these values can only defile them. Philosophy cannot express the inexpressible, but it can tell us to keep silent when all such attempts sully the inviolable. Here, the drabness of the philosophy is actually a sign of success, for it shows that the speaker is staying within the gray territory of mere facts (see T 6.538). The Tractatus teaches me the language to say the things I can, the resolve not to say the things I can’t, and logic to tell the difference. Wittgenstein’s later work, however, cannot be in the service of protecting hallowed transcendence because he no longer believes in such a thing. His later work gives up the notion of something precious and sacrosanct that must be protected from defilement. There is nothing sacred in a game of chess, only pieces of different value; nothing blasphemous, just the misapplication of rules. Whereas his early work sought the innermost secret essence of all language in order to instruct us how we must speak, the later work’s patient taxonomy of the ways we actually talk about, e.g., reading or adding simple sums is strikingly prosaic and unromantic. Indeed, it is intentionally so, for he is trying to wean us off the seductive notion of attaining insights into secret essences: “we want to replace wild conjectures and explanations by quiet weighing of linguistic facts.”9 Wittgenstein repeatedly denigrates the importance of understanding these topics correctly; in fact, he downplays the significance of intellectual matters in general in comparison with ethics. The correct use of the intellect counts for very little as opposed to the will; understanding correctly means far less than being good. What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life…. You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other peoples [sic] lives.10 Here Wittgenstein draws a stark contrast between the philosophical gains of better insight into various issues—some of which are the very issues he spent his life thinking about—and the ethical goal of being a better person, with all importance falling on the latter. As he wrote to Russell early on, “how can I be a logician  All abbreviations given above.  Z §447. His target is always “a philosophical trouble… an obsession, which once removed it seems impossible that it should ever have had power over us. It seems trivial” (AWL 98, see also CV 11, 48, LC 28, RFM 137, 272, PG 169, RPPI §65, §378, §380, §417, §751, §1015, §1074, PI §§105–6, §§435–6). 10  Malcolm 2001, 93–4, see also ibid., 51–2; Monk 1990, 506–7; McGuinness 2005, 192; Rhees 1984, 77, 94, 172–3, 186; PPO 209, 241; CV 19, 38–9. 8 9

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before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!”11 If this is true, should we not ask of Wittgenstein what was once asked of Heidegger: why does he not give us an ethics? Why are his writings focused almost exclusively on the issues he dismisses as unimportant and largely pass over in silence the ethics which he considered all-important? And why, as we know from multiple biographical sources, did he think about the former issues with obsessive, white-hot intensity? The hypothesis I want to explore in this paper is that his later writings are an ethics, albeit one not explicitly stated. Like the duck-rabbit, Wittgenstein’s later works appear very differently depending on how you look at them. Seen from one angle, the work is a dispassionate analysis of fairly traditional philosophical problems; from another perspective, the same texts take on a moral tint. Such a reading abides by his dictum: “working in philosophy… is really more a working on oneself.”12 In fact, Wittgenstein wrote a good deal about how to make texts mean something beyond what they explicitly state. On the standard reading of the Tractatus, the entire book commits nonsense which must be taken in a certain way—read askew— in order to be informative, and then discarded. In a 1919 letter about the book, Wittgenstein writes that, “the book’s point is an ethical one…. Where many others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it.”13 He writes that “the spirit of a book has to be evident in the book itself and cannot be described…. It is a great temptation to try to make the spirit explicit” (CV 7–8). His early work repeatedly criticizes logicians for breaking into their works to explain to the reader what is going on in everyday language rather than letting the logic speak for itself.14 In a late letter, he says of Tolstoy, one of his favorite authors, that when he explicitly states the moral of the story, it loses all its power; its meaning must remain tacitly within the story if it is to work (Malcolm 2001, 98). Discussing Kierkegaard, an author who thought that philosophizing sometimes requires indirect communication, Wittgenstein says of the Scripture, “isn’t it possible that it was essential in this case to ‘tell a riddle’? And that, on the other hand, giving a more direct warning would necessarily have had the wrong effect?” (CV 32). As Brian McGuinness writes, “Wittgenstein was always distrustful of the attempt to convey any moral teaching in print” (2005, 109). All of

 LRKM 57–8. In 1937, while writing the first part of Philosophical Investigations, he wrote, “but if I am to be REALLY saved, − what I need is certainty – not wisdom, dreams or speculation – and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind” (CV 33, see also CV 17, 53, 56, 61, 62, RFM 132, 302, PPO 217; Fann 1967, 64, 91, 94). One of his intellectual heroes, Karl Krauss, felt the same way (Janik and Toulmin 1973, 69, 81). 12  CV 16, see also Klagge 2001, 27–8, 177; McManus 2004, 178; Johannessen et al. 1994, 172; McGuinness 2005, 57. 13  Engelmann 1967, 143. 14  T 3.331, 5.132, 5.451–5.452, 5.535, NB 104. 11

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this suggests that Wittgenstein might have made his later writings hermeneutically complex, making us do some interpretive work to draw out their ethical implications. To illuminate this later ethics I will briefly compare it with Heidegger, whose work I have brought into dialogue with Wittgenstein elsewhere.15 Although Heidegger is more comfortable with the idea that philosophy makes discoveries, he too thinks of philosophy as a process rather than a means of generating propositional results.16 Heidegger’s early masterpiece, Being and Time, applies this approach to ethics in the sense of living the right kind of life. Dasein—basically his word for entities like us who can be aware of beings—start off sure of their place in the world. We are born into a community that presents its understanding of life—what is good and what bad, which values ought to guide one, what makes a happy life and/or a good person—as if it were simply an objective fact about the universe. As long as we lay trustingly in the bosom of our family and culture, we unthinkingly absorb their values as self-evident, as our own. This state of unguarded immaturity is comforting and comfortable but as long as we remain in it, we are in a sense not yet living; we are being lived. We are not leading our lives, but following. As with Adam and Eve’s “happy fall,” this innocence cannot last. It is in our nature to question our nature or, in Heidegger’s first definition of Dasein in the book (a definition whose multi-faceted implications, I think, much of the rest of the book unfurls), “in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (BT 30/12). There comes a time when we start unsettling what had been settled, questioning that which we are not supposed to question. What makes our way of doing things the right one? Are grown-ups just making it up as they go along, like us just more practiced? Does any of this mean anything if we’re all just going to die? Now, a moment of disillusionment with inherited values is a common phase in many ethical systems. This is the moment when our chains are loosened, letting us see what we had taken to be solid reality for the play of shadows that it is. This stage is normally followed by the philosopher taking us in hand and leading us out of the cave into the light, putting us in contact with true reality which provides a firm, objective foundation for our lives. Heidegger does not take this path. Indeed, it is one of the basic tenets of existentialism that we cannot escape making decisions on our own by appealing to something objective; we are, in Sartre’s phrase, doomed to be free. Nietzsche proclaims  See my Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. MIT Press, 2012; and “Disintegrating Bugbears: Heidegger and Wittgenstein on Basic Laws of Thought.” In Wittgenstein and Heidegger: Pathways and Provocations. Eds. David Egan, Stephen Reynolds, and Aaron Wendland. New York: Routledge, 2013. 16  For example: philosophical questions “are bent, not on increasing an identical stock of propositions, but instead on bringing the one questioning, in his being, to a being and domain of matters…. In this type of questioning, the possibility exists that the answer is an answer precisely when it understands how to disappear in the right way” (Heidegger 2005, 55–6). I take it that the similarity with the Tractarian ladder to be thrown away once claimed is obvious. On Heidegger’s view of philosophical questions and answers, see my “Strange Questions: The Question of the Question in Later Heidegger,” unpublished. 15

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that His timely death renders God unable to issue commandments, leaving morality radically open. Kierkegaard’s God may be alive but that hardly helps since He gives us bewildering commandments which, hard as they are to follow, are impossible to understand and build a system of ethics around. Sartre calls the belief in objective values “bad faith,” a form of self-deception we desperately seek in order to escape the responsibility that comes with freedom.17 Heidegger’s early work follows this existentialist line of thought. Calling the early Heidegger an existentialist is controversial,18 and I am certainly not claiming that he fits neatly into the category, but there is significant overlap. He sees anxiety and the anticipation of death prying us out of the unthinking acceptance of the ideas we were raised on, but not to any particular position. Dasein is essentially in-the-­ world; there can be no appeal to a higher realm of Ends or Ideas for instructions on how to live.19 We discover that there is no Right Way to Live, no activity or occupation that enjoys God or Being’s blessing. Heidegger’s being is not Plato’s Being. No home has been provided us in this world. This is not where things end, however. The existentialists pull off the neat trick of turning this lack of values into a value: the only thing that we can call good in itself, the only value we can root in reality, is the willingness to face up to this absence of values. One must acknowledge this dreadful void and live in accordance with it, despite the abysmal anxiety of groundlessness. Those who fail this test are inauthentic for early Heidegger, smug residents of the ethical sphere for Kierkegaard, weak herd animals for Nietzsche, in bad faith with the spirit of seriousness for Sartre. Throughout these thinkers’ work the same demand resounds: dispense with all false comfort and face up to the unsettling facts of existence. Thus, while there is no objective ethics in the sense of a set of rules to obey, this absence itself becomes the foundation for a foundationless ethics that does yield at least the form of a proper way to live. These philosophers do not pick particular actions as the ones that our nature or reality or God determines as Right: not being just or reasoning excellently or worshipping God or mastering nature or obeying our

 See Nietzsche: “whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created the world that concerns man!—But precisely this knowledge we lack” (1974, §301). Or Sartre: “the existentialist… finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven…. It is nowhere written that ‘the good’ exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men” (in Solomon 2005, 211). 18  Thomas Sheehan (2001), for instance, argues that what he calls the existentialist paradigm of Heidegger interpretation was the initial reception, but it was corrected as more texts became available. Lawrence Vogel (1994) considers the existentialist reading of Being and Time “plausible,” by which he means that “a thoughtful reading of the text might yield [such an] interpretation” (7), although he ultimately rejects it (47–8), largely, it seems to me, on the basis of later Heideggerian texts rather than Being and Time itself. See also Aho 2003. 19  BT 168/130, 344/297–8. “Dasein faces himself when he accepts that it is up to him to establish his own priorities in life: that there is no blueprint for how one ought to lead one’s life as a whole” (Vogel 1994, 23, see also Caputo 1988, 258). 17

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inner reason or maximizing happiness, none can be defended as the one true master value that supersedes all others, the one that we must obey on pain of not being true to something important—God, the world, our inner selves. But this fact that there is nothing to live up to is itself pressed upon us by reality; living up to this absence is the one commandment that can still be issued by a dead God. If the one inescapable moral fact is that there are no moral facts, then the only essential moral qualities are the honesty to admit it and the courage to face up to it and live in accord with it. This commitment to unflinching honesty runs throughout the canonical existentialists. Kierkegaard’s knight of faith must deny herself the crowd’s reassurance of the ethical; she must courageously wind along the windy paths of faith, knowing that she can never know if her wretched task was given her by God, a devil, or the murderous murmurings of her own mad mind. Nietzsche’s Übermensch is the one who is honest and strong enough to forgo the comfort of a deity blessing his work and cursing his enemies, to stare into the abyss and create his own values ex nihilo. Although Sartre has problems setting up a stable state of good faith, it certainly involves ridding oneself of the illusions and self-deceptions of bad faith. For Heidegger, authenticity does not mean finding something higher than average everyday life—we are essentially, inescapably in-this-world20—but it does mean inhabiting it in a new way, with critical distance rather than unquestioning trust. We no longer take the way we were raised as just the way one lives, but rather as just one way to live. In this way, the existentialists—including early Heidegger—turn the lack of an answer into an answer. The absence of objective values gives rise to one objective value: the courage to face and face up to this absence. What is morally wrong in this austere ethical landscape? Deceiving oneself, relying on the comforting mirage of answers. What is right? Courage and honesty.21 My claim is that something similar to Heidegger’s existentialist ethics of courageous honesty informs Wittgenstein’s later work. Wittgenstein certainly does not give us anything like overt ethical principles. He doesn’t argue for the goodness of one kind of behavior or the wrongness of another, and as for rules—well, we all know the issues he had with those! But we also know from biographical sources that

 “Authentic Being-one’s-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the ‘they’; it is rather an existentiell modification of the ‘they’” (BT 168/130). 21  Others have made similar claims about Heidegger. See for instance Olafson: “In Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, or human existence, there can be no question of an authentication of our projects by reference to preexisting rules or truths of any kind…. Views of this kind would not seem to afford a basis for ethical distinctions among the various kinds of choices that human beings make; but it is apparent from Heidegger’s account that an existential ethic would recognize at least one positive virtue. This would be a capability for living in full awareness and acceptance of one’s ontological situation…. Typically, human beings seek to suppress such self-knowledge… by an illusory sense of there being determinate and preestablished norms that define the individual’s situation and his action for him” (Olafson 1973, 29–30). He calls this virtue “ontological courage” (ibid.). Marjorie Grene writes that for existentialists, “the ultimate value is honesty rather than freedom” (1959, 143). 20

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living the right kind of life mattered to him more than anything else. Work that merely cleared up linguistic confusions would not be “serious” in his term; it would not address what he considered the most important subject—becoming a good person. Let us briefly turn to biographical sources to help illuminate the ethics hidden in his later writings. Wittgenstein’s correspondence and diaries continuously return to the topics of cowardice, dishonesty, and vanity, vices he accuses himself over and over again of harboring: “everything or nearly everything I do, these entries included, is tinted by vanity.”22 He once said that, “wounded vanity is the most terrible force in the world. The source of the greatest evil” (Rhees 1984, 77), a rather surprising evaluation. He reproaches himself for being overly concerned with what people think of him because this is what leads him to dishonesty, binding these topics together: fearful of losing people’s high opinion, he protects his vanity by deceiving them and himself. Wittgenstein sets a frighteningly low bar for what counts as deception: simply not preventing a minor potential misunderstanding counts as an outright lie.23 As a teacher and famous philosopher, perhaps the most common dishonest impression he fosters is knowing things that he does not. “My work (my philosophical work) is also lacking in seriousness & love of truth.—Just as in my lectures I have also cheated often by pretending to already understand something while I was still hoping that it would become clear to me.”24 Creating this impression must have been particularly worrying to a philosopher who believes that philosophy does not consist in knowledge. Battling these vices of vanity, dishonesty, and cowardice, requires ruthless honesty, especially when it is painful, when it punctures one’s vanity and risks others’ opinion, a trait often noted by those who knew Wittgenstein.25 It is essential for a teacher to let students know when he doesn’t know something, which requires courage because such admissions may lower others’ opinion of him. “If I told people about me what I should be telling them, I would expose myself to the contempt &  PPO 23, see also PPO 93, 97, 113, 125, 139, 153, 157, 185, 193, 205, 207, 213, 225, 231, PhR 7, PI x, Klagge 2001, 9–10, 163; Rhees 1984, 127, 138; Fann 1967, 74; Johannessen et al. 1994, 173. 23  One example is the time he beat himself up and apologized deeply to friends for not correcting the impression that his parentage was ¼ Jewish and ¾ Christian rather than the reverse proportion (PPO 281, Rhees 1984, 35, 120; Monk 1990, 412). Fania Pascal writes that his less than forthcoming account of having struck a girl in the Austrian school he briefly taught at became a “crisis…burdening his conscience forever” (Rhees 1984, 37–8). Note that it is his not being fully forthcoming, not the act of striking a child, that haunts him. 24  PPO 153, see also PPO 295, 301–3, McGuinness 2012, 233, 326, 332; Monk 1990, 317. 25  Many of his contemporaries comment on the importance of honesty to him. Russell wrote that “no one could be more sincere than Wittgenstein or more destitute of the false politeness that interferes with truth…. He is always absolutely frank…. He is not a flatterer but a man of transparent and absolute sincerity” (quoted in McGuinness 2005, 102). Brian McGuinness writes, “Wittgenstein wanted nothing but honesty” (McGuinness 2012, 4) and says that he was “fiercely concerned about any departure from the truth even for the sake of giving pleasure to others” (McGuinness 2005, 48). Fania Pascal writes that she “never met anyone more incapable of telling a lie” (Rhees 1984, 37). Von Wright speaks of Wittgenstein’s “unconditional veracity and candour” (Johannessen et al. 1994, 165, see also Fann 1967, 57; Malcolm 2001, 26, 60). 22

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derision of nearly everyone who knows me…. The conscience burdened by guilt could easily confess; but the vain person cannot confess.”26 It is courage that enables one to defy one’s vanity, to be honest with oneself and others about one’s faults, and in particular about the limits of one’s knowledge. These themes come together in a description of Wittgenstein by Rush Rhees, one of his closest friends. He said he wished that he might become a different man—that he could be rid of self-deception regarding his own failings and in this way lead a different life. Becoming clear about himself, recognizing, for example, that in his relations with other people he had been performing for himself in a character that was not genuine, was difficult: not because he wasn’t clever enough to discern it, but because he hadn’t the will—and could not recognize this. He could not become clear by intellectual examination and argument with himself… but only by doing something he found difficult, something that needed courage—such as writing out a confession (Rhees 1984, 172–3). Here we have the urge to become a better person through ending deception of others and himself; this cannot be accomplished intellectually but only by confessing his shortcomings to himself and to those he has mislead. As this is painful, it requires courage and will power, not mental acumen. And this choice between honesty and deception determines one’s thoughts as well. To be a good philosopher one must be a good person in the sense of being absolutely honest, first with oneself, regardless of the cost: “if you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit. If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing.”27 This is why Wittgenstein writes in a letter that “thinking is sometimes easy, often difficult but at the same time thrilling. But when it’s most important it’s just disagreeable, that is when it threatens to robb [sic] one of ones [sic] pet notions and to leave one all bewildered and with a feeling of worthlessness. In these cases I and others shrink from thinking.”28 Here he connects the plainness of his later philosophical thought—the unthrilling “quiet weighing of linguistic facts”—to the humbling of pride, an essential component of his ethics. “The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work.”29 Dismantling philosophical pride means reminding himself that the discipline does not reveal anything like the deep structures of language or the world, as he had thought he was doing in his early work, but just tidies up messy corners. The interesting thing here is the connection of this humble account of philosophy’s limitations with the moral qualities of honesty, courage, and pride. Wittgenstein often ties the quality of a person’s thought to  PPO 125, see also PPO 105, 133, 141, 201, 221.  Rhees 1984, 174, see also Johannessen et al. 1994, 172. “No one can speak the truth; if he has still not mastered himself. He cannot speak it;--but not because he is not clever enough yet. The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it” 9CV 35). 28  McGuinness 2012, 367. “You can’t think decently if you don’t want to hurt yourself” (Monk 1990, 475, see also ibid., 278, 366–7, PPO 297, Malcolm 2001, 93–4). 29  CV 26, see also CV 77, Monk 1990, 371. 26 27

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her moral character,30 in particular to her courage: “you could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.”31 When he writes that philosophical problems “are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings in spite of an urge to misunderstand them,”32 one source of this urge to misunderstand is pride. The sublime revelation of metaphysical secrets flatters our vanity in a way that quietly weighing of linguistic facts cannot. He fought this urge in his personal life by baring his sins to all: “a confession has to be part of your new life” (CV 18). In 1937, Wittgenstein did in fact make a series of painful confessions to his closest friends, often concerning matters they found trivial, in a process he considered crucial to becoming a better person.33 We can now use this biographical background to bring out a tacit ethics of courageous honesty in his later philosophy. Wittgenstein seems to endorse such a parallel: “the movement of thought in my philosophizing should be discernible also in the history of my mind, of its moral concepts & in the understanding of my situation.”34 At roughly the same time that he was confessing to his friends in 1937, he was also composing the first 188 paragraphs of the Philosophical Investigations, the only portion published as he intended it. I think that the book as a whole can be seen as a kind of philosophical confession. The Preface presents the book as a correction of his widely influential but “gravely mistaken” Tractatus, and requests that this earlier, wrong-headed book be published alongside the new one so that readers may hear his logical sins, if you will (PI x). It even opens with a quotation from Augustine’s Confessions, which Wittgenstein considered possibly “the most serious book ever written.”35 Confessing is not just a one-time correction of previous errors; Wittgenstein develops it into a method of approaching philosophical problems. He abandons the Tractarian view of nonsense as what occurs when language strays from its single proper essence; straying, he now sees, is what language does. One could almost say, with Derrida, that straying from any essence is its essence. The problem is that as  PPO 155, 181, 211, 247, 404. Wittgenstein praises G.E. Moore for “his love of truth and freedom from vanity” (Fann 1967, 23, see also PPO 301, Malcolm 2001, 56) and says of William James, “that is what makes him a good philosopher. He was a real human being” (Fann 1967, 68). 31  CV 52. “One might say: Genius is talent exercised with courage” (CV 38, see also CV 44, Conv 55). He also proclaims as a general motto: “courage, not cleverness” (CV 38). 32  PI §109. Compare with Heidegger’s claim that attempts to accurately describe Dasein “should capture the Being of this entity, in spite of this entity’s own tendency to cover things up” (BT 359/311, see also BT 61/36, 96/67, 151/115, 155/119, 167/129, 255/212, 265/222, 285/241, 428/376, 439/387, HCT 29, 87, 128–30, 136). 33  As Fania Pascal, one of the recipients, writes, “to make a confession must have appealed to Wittgenstein as the most natural way of relieving his mind of an oppressive burden of guilt” (Rhees 1984, 36, see also ibid., 120; McGuinness 2005, 274). 34  PPO 133, see also Klagge 2001, 177. 35  Rhees 1984, xvi. McGuinness says that “writing was a necessity for him… and its fundamental purpose, as far as he could see it, was to reach a true understanding of, to come to terms with, his life as it actually was: to settle accounts with himself” (2005, 57). 30

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competent speakers, we pay little attention to how we talk, like Dasein’s unthinking use of inconspicuous tools and indulgence in “idle talk.” Speaking on “auto-pilot” leaves us vulnerable to mixing up profoundly different types of speech because of superficial similarities between them, unwittingly jumping the track to talk about one thing in terms appropriate to something entirely different. The characteristic trouble we are dealing with is due to our using language automatically, without thinking about the rules of grammar. In general the sentences we are tempted to utter occur in practical situations. But then there is a different way we are tempted to utter sentences. This is when we look at language, consciously direct our attention on it. And then we make up sentences of which we say that they also ought to make sense…. Thus, for example, we talk of the flow of time and consider it sensible to talk of its flow, after the analogy of rivers.36 One example of this confusion, discussed by both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is talking about thoughts inside one’s head the way we talk about things contained inside a box, which conflates two very different senses of inclusion. This leads to all sorts of confusions—such as the apparent absolute privacy of thoughts and feelings concealed inside the mind-box—and fake problems—such as how, trapped as we are within our own minds, we can compare our representations with what’s outside our or in other mind-boxes, confusions that we would normally call the history of philosophy. When this happens, Wittgenstein says that we have become seduced by a picture. For the most part we lack explicit knowledge of the rules governing these terms since we generally don’t consciously use them, any more than an experienced driver consults express rules about distances to determine when to start slowing down for a turn, as Hubert Dreyfus discusses. This tacit understanding, however, leaves us unsure about what to say in new situations: “we learn to use the word ‘think’ under particular circumstances. If the circumstances are different we don’t know how to use it.”37 In these disorienting cases, we grab onto images arising in our imaginations. For instance, since we talk about ideas “inside” of us, the picture of the mind as a kind of container imposes itself, guiding us when we don’t have a clear, natural way to talk about the topic in unprecedented applications, just the kinds of bizarre circumstances and thought experiments that philosophers devise for a living. This simile of “inside” or “outside” the mind is pernicious. It is derived from “in the head” when we think of ourselves as looking out from our heads and of thinking as something going on “in our head”. But we then forget the picture and go on using  AWL 13. “We make many utterances whose role in the investigation we do not understand. For it isn’t as though everything we say has a conscious purpose; our tongues just keep going. Our thoughts run in established routines, we pass automatically from one thought to another according to techniques we have learned. And now comes the time for us to survey what we have said” (CV 64, see also LWL 22, 50, 53, 84, 101, LLVC 77, 153, 248, AWL 43, PG 50, 62–63, 80, 85, 96, BB 15, 25, PO 202, 456, RPPII §417, §603, §736, Z §86, §111, §118, Conv 23–25, RFM 210, LFM 61, 183, PI §150, §199, LC 68, OC §46). For more on this connection with Heidegger, see Braver 2012, 23–34. 37  LWPPI §41, see also LWPPII 46, 86, BB 9–10, 62, PO 214, 222, 235, RFM 75, RPPI §65, RPPII §235, LFM 18, 21; Pears 1988, 426–7; Kenny 1973, 164. 36

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language derived from it…. We can only safely use such language if we consciously remember the picture when we use it.38 When the guidance provided by normal usage runs out, we rely on intuitions piped in from other linguistic realms where we do know our way around. I know how things in a box behave so I apply that understanding to mental entities, which then tells me what to say about otherwise-perplexing philosophical thought experiments. These kinds of linguistic worm-holes between wildly disparate regions of language are deeply misleading, however, producing what counts as nonsense in Wittgenstein’s later thought. As a matter of fact, we don’t talk about thoughts the way we talk about things inside a container, and just a few “reminders” (PI §127) of the way we do talk can return to us our average everyday linguistic orientation. What I am suggesting in this paper is that Wittgenstein not only finds the reliance on such pictures an intellectual confusion—ultimately, getting these issues correct just isn’t that important; why should he care so deeply about speaking correctly about thoughts in one’s mind?39—but a form of dishonesty. When we encounter a situation we’re unsure of, we philosophers don’t admit that we don’t know what to say—that, for example, we can’t be sure what we could know with absolute certainty were a demon set on deceiving us. Instead of sacrificing our vanity and confessing our uncertainty, we lean on a picture as a conceptual crutch to fake our way through, to pretend to knowledge we don’t have, indeed, knowledge we couldn’t have. Pictures seem to give us reassuring insights into proper use the way das Man supplies a comforting sense of appropriate behavior. They let us convince ourselves and others that we know what we’re talking about concerning these made-up matters, just the kind of gassing that Wittgenstein is fighting. In other words, succumbing to the pictures that are the source of many philosophical problems amounts to a kind of deception, the cardinal sin in Wittgenstein’s later philosophical ethics, and this is what gives the clearing up of linguistic confusions its ethical importance. “While the clarity of thoughts is not in & of itself the most important thing, it becomes exceedingly important where lack of clarity could lead to self-deception” (PPO 299). Among these seductive pictures that tempt us to deceive ourselves and others into believing ourselves to know more than we do, perhaps the most dangerous is the one he himself fell victim to in his early work—the picture of picturing. The Tractatus claims that since language pictures the world by describing it, its form must mirror the form of reality. Logic, then, captures this form, seeing into the skeleton of the world like a semantic X-ray. Wittgenstein thought he had found a metaphysical loophole, a linguistic backdoor to those secrets of the universe that philosophers had always sought. Logicians can now unabashedly don the garments of oracles and, on the basis of dry tomes of grammar, make portentous

 LWL 25, see also LWL 45, AWL 77–78, BB 26, 40–1, PhR 82, 172–73, RFM 115, RPPI §498, §824, PI II.xi p. 167; Fann 1967, 47; Fogelin 1995, 109. 39  “What I do think essential is carrying out the work of clarification with COURAGE: otherwise it becomes just a clever game” (CV 19). 38

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proclamations on such matters as transcendent values, the non-existence of the soul, and the meaning of life. What could stroke one’s ego more? Now he thinks that there is no one thing that language does, no form of reality to be uncovered, no secrets to be had. Linguistic matters have no objective status beyond what we do with words, the way castling just is whatever the rules of chess determine it to be. This idea that meaning is wholly immanent to language once again brings Wittgenstein close to Heidegger. Compare Wittgenstein’s discussion of language—“a sentence has not got its sense ‘behind’ it; it has it in the calculus in which it is used”40—with Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology—“one cannot ask for something behind the phenomenon at all, since what the phenomenon gives is precisely that something in itself.”41 This accounts for their preference for description over explanation: we need not look behind or beneath anything but just capture what is manifest, for “nothing is hidden.”42 Wittgenstein repeatedly warns us that the mundane, grubby messiness of ordinary language tempts us to seek an other-worldly sublime, to try “to view the world sub specie aeterni,”43 a task pleasing to our vanity. As with the existentialists, he often fleshes this notion of transcendent truth out theologically, in pictures of God’s knowledge. Our thinking plays us a queer trick. We want, that is, to quote the law of excluded middle…. “In the decimal expansion of π either the group ‘7777’ occurs, or it does not—there is no third possibility.” That is to say: “God sees—but we don’t know.” But what does that mean?—We use a picture; the picture of a visible series which one person sees the whole of and another not. The law of excluded middle says here: It must either look like this, or like that. So it really—and this is a truism—says nothing at all, but gives us a picture…. And this picture seems to determine what we have to do, what to look for, and how—but it does not do so, just because we do not know how it is to be applied.44

 AWL 61, see also RPPI §889, PI §164, LFM 137.  HCT 86, see also HCT 72, 81–5, 112, BT 51–5/28–31, 60/36; Dreyfus and Hall 1992, 96. Both even employ the same metaphor of a symptom of a deeper illness to depict their target (RPPI §292, BT 52/29, HCT 80), as does Austin (1979, 105). 42  PI §435, see also PI §92, §126, §559. Baker and Hacker connect Wittgenstein’s anti-metaphysics with his methodological commitment to description: “philosophy is purely descriptive…. Explanation would be possible only if it made sense to get behind these rules and supply a deeper foundation…. But there is no behind…. This insight shapes the whole of Wittgenstein’s philosophy” (1985, 22). 43  T 6.45. In one of his rare references to the history of philosophy, Wittgenstein acknowledges the long pedigree of this aspiration: “men have always had a presentiment that there must be a realm in which the answers to questions are symmetrically combined—a priori—to form a self-contained system” (T 5.4541). At this point in his career, he does not reject this quest, believing that he has succeeded in it: “that utterly simple thing, which we have to formulate here, is not a likeness of the truth, but the truth itself in its entirety” (T 5.5563). 44  PI §352, see also PI §222, RFM 45–6, 64, 266–9, PO 94, 435, PG 481, LFM 131–2; Wright 1980, 220, 275–6, 312, 372; Baker and Hacker 1985, 236; Dummett 1978, 185. 40 41

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This is just a picture which cannot actually inform our ways of understanding and talking in any way, a prayer wheel that spins freely without affecting the mechanism. Metaphysical speculations are vain, and in vain. “‘For us human beings, the best thing we can arrive at, the nearest we can get, is that we always get it, or someone who had a lot of experience always got it.’ As if only God really knew…. There is nothing there for a higher intelligence to know—except what future generations will do. We know as much as God does in mathematics.”45 This is Wittgenstein’s death of God moment, if you will, spoken by a mathematician instead of Nietzsche’s madman. Without the picture of theological omniscience knowing the really real to support the notion of a truth beyond our grasp and practices, questions about reality revert to questions about what we do and what we say about what we do. This is how I understand his cryptic claim that, “essence is expressed in grammar…. Grammar tells what kind of object anything is” (PI §§371, 373). Heidegger’s version of this, in the early work, is that “only as phenomenology, is ontology possible” (BT 60/35), while in the later work he comes even closer to Wittgenstein by turning it linguistic. This apparent loss of absolute objectivity, of Putnam’s God’s-eye view, creates a sense of anxiety at the suddenly precarious basis of all human communication and knowledge—“one would rather say ‘it rests on nothing’; but this gives a feeling of insecurity”46—rather similar to Dasein’s angst at the loss of metaphysical foundations. Yet we must resist the temptation to resort to comforting illusions that appeal to something beyond the human that can legitimate our practices: “the danger here, I believe, is one of giving a justification of our procedure where there is no such thing as a justification and we ought simply to have said: that’s how we do it.”47 We have to courageously, one could perhaps say resolutely, admit the emptiness of such pictures, the fact that all we have is what we do. “The difficulty,” as Wittgenstein puts it in his final work, “is to realize the groundlessness of our believing” (OC §166), virtually the same thing that the existentialists tell us—think of Heidegger’s frequent talk of groundlessness—only transcribed into an epistemological, semantic key. It’s the same impulse, transferred from nihilism and death to decidedly less Romantic topics like math and the grammar of the phrase, “I know.” In both cases, we crave an absolute foundation beneath the way we talk or follow rules, but we cannot have it: “my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons.”48 Surely this is related to the nothing that anxiety and death show us gaping beneath our beliefs and actions, permeating our lives.

 LFM 103–4, see also LFM 137–9, PI §426, PI II.xi, p. 185, 192; PhR 149, 212, 237, PO 94, LC 71, RPPI §139, Edwards 1990, 139. 46  PO 408, see also PO 73. Wittgenstein’s interlocutors worry about cognitive nihilism: “but what becomes of logic now? Its rigour seems to be giving way here” (PI §108, see also OC §108, LC 64). Michael Dummett appears to subscribe to this view: “if Wittgenstein were right, it appears to me that communication would be in constant danger of simply breaking down” (1978, 176–7). 47  RFM 199, see also RFM 102–3, 205, 323. 48  PI §211, see also PI §219, §228, §289, §292, §323, §377, PI §485, AWL 5, OC §358, PO 381, 395, PG 47, RFM 46, 326, 330, 333, 337, 350–51, Z §314, LFM 199, 234, 289, RPPII §314, §402, §453. 45

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Wittgenstein says that “a philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’” (PI §123), but philosophers exacerbate their disorientation by vainly refusing to admit that they’re lost or ask for directions, insisting on using maps of other countries. Moreover, in refusing to admit their ignorance honestly, they lead others onto the same dead-ends, as Wittgenstein felt his early work had done. The Investigations can be seen as one long confession that in his philosophizing he had not been honest with himself, that he had committed the pedagogical sin of claiming to know things he didn’t know, things no one could know. He had believed that he was peering deeply into the fundamental nature of language and the world, when he had merely been in the grip of a picture. Many of the Investigations’ admonishments are directed, I think, to himself. When we believe that we must find that order, must find the ideal, in our actual language, we become dissatisfied with what are ordinarily call ‘propositions,’ ‘words’, ‘signs’…. Here it is difficult as it were to keep our heads up,—to see that we must stick to the subjects of our every-day thinking, and not go astray and imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties.49 He once said, upon hearing about great philosophical systems of the past, “for some people to forsake this kind of thinking demands of them an heroic courage.”50 He could very well have been talking about his own progression as a thinker, an arc which would have been on display in his planned edition of the Tractatus and Investigations published together in a single volume. Now that he understands and acknowledges his former condition, he must warn others, demonstrating the “therapies” he used on himself (PI §133). A little like Freud, of whom Wittgenstein once called himself a disciple (LC 41), this is a talking cure where one tells of the pictures in philosophy’s “dream of our language” (PI §358). Just as Freud learned how to treat patients from analyzing himself, modeling the courage to expose the tawdry corners of his own psyche for them to follow his example, so Wittgenstein writes, “I ought to be no more than a mirror, in which my reader can see his own thinking with all its deformities so that, helped in this way, he can put it right.”51 Like Kierkegaard, an author Wittgenstein admired greatly,52 he realizes that he cannot come right out and tell his readers they’re spouting nonsense. He must draw them into this realization by showing himself as an example of someone who had fooled himself, just as some of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms present themselves as worse Christians than the reader.53 Seeing the author’s mistakes may  PI §§105–6, see also PI §107, §§435–6, PhR 52, 61, 188; Harries 1968, 285.  Rhees 1984, 82, see also 105. 51  CV 18. “At the end of my lecture on ethics I spoke in the first person. I think that this is something very essential. Here there is nothing to be stated any more; all I can do is to step forth as an individual and speak in the first person” (LWVC 117). 52  He once called Kierkegaard “‘by far the most profound thinker’ of the nineteenth century” (Rhees 1984, xvi), and discusses Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication in his diaries (PPO 83, 131). 53  Or, if we are cynical, like Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Camus’ The Fall. I am grateful to Onur Karamercan for this suggestion. 49 50

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lead readers to reflect on their own shortcomings, puncturing their vanity from behind, as it were.54 Not only is the Investigations a confession, it works by confessing, describing the pictures that the author himself succumbed to, in order to induce confession, bringing us to acknowledge their presence in our own thoughts. This approach also connects Wittgenstein’s project to Socrates’ attempts to get smug know-it-all’s to admit that they do not know what they think they know. Socrates too—at least in the early dialogues—offers no ethical principles beyond honestly admitting one’s ignorance, something his interlocutors fight stubbornly against, resorting eventually to hemlock: “the difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know” (BB 45). Fittingly, Wittgenstein also uses the dialogue form to draw his readers into examining their own thoughts, to ask themselves whether they actually know what they are talking about or if they are just relying on a picture. Much of Wittgenstein’s later work consists in precise descriptions of the mental images and analogies he associates with various phrases, so that his readers, recognizing similar notions occurring in their own thoughts, will realize what flimsy support their ideas have, helping them exchange their disguised nonsense for patent.55 Wittgenstein’s later writings serve as a midwife, guiding readers along the paths of their own thoughts until they see that they’re mere wind-eggs or “gassing.” Thus, a slight turning of our heads changes these writings from reflections on esoteric philosophical matters of math and language, of logical negation and psychology, into a deeply personal quest, a soul-searching; the dry philosophical duck becomes an angst-soaked ethical rabbit. As dispassionate as its tone may be, the Investigations represents Wittgenstein laying bare his mind, showing us all the illusions leading him into philosophical temptation the way a Catholic confesses the sinful thoughts that beset her. As he wrote to Ficker of his early work, as he said of Tolstoy’s morality stories, keeping explicit moralizing out of the work deepens its ethics. He is presenting a model of intellectual honesty, one that is shown rather than said: “even in a lecture a person affects more through the example he gives than through the stated opinion.”56 Simply stating outright that he is being honest and that you ought to as well runs into Kierkegaard’s psychological problem of offending rather than edifying readers, and reinforces the author’s own vanity which the project is trying to undermine. Wittgenstein’s later quest to clear up confusions amounts to an ethical attempt to live in complete honesty with himself by confessing the pictures he is leaning on and resisting temptations to the transcendent, a rather Kantian project. Now nothing is more important than making clear to ourselves which phenomena, which simple, home-spun cases are the original picture of this idea. That is,

 “One must reveal the source of error, otherwise hearing the truth won’t do any good. The truth cannot force its way in when something else is occupying its place. To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth” (PO 119). 55  “What the other person acknowledges is the analogy I am proposing to him as the source of his thought” (PO 165, see also PO 119, PI §464, §524, AWL 90). 56  PPO 301, see also PPO 366. Wittgenstein often said this about G.E. Moore, a man whose mind he didn’t respect but whose character—especially his honesty and humility—he revered. 54

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When you are tempted to make general metaphysical statements, ask yourself (always): What cases am I actually thinking of?—What sort of case, which conception do I have in mind here? Now something in us resists this question for we seem to jeopardize the ideal through it: whereas we are doing it only in order to put it in the place where it belongs (PPO 171). It is less a matter of getting the right answers than becoming the right kind of person, the over-riding drive that comes out clearly in Wittgenstein’s letters, diaries, and his friends’ testimonials. And this means being ruthlessly honest with yourself and others, admitting, in his case, that when you feel like you’ve made a deep discovery about the essence of some timeless profundity or other you’re really just confused, using a picture to appear to know more than you do. The right thing to do—both intellectually and, more importantly, morally—is to follow the thread of your conceptual steps back through your line of thought, unravelling as you go. “Let me hold on to this that I do not want to deceive myself” (PPO 175). To Cavell’s question, must we mean what we say, Wittgenstein responds that perhaps not but we ought to; we have a moral responsibility to sift through what we think and say to make sure that we do in fact mean it instead of “gassing” by relying on pictures. Unthinkingly going with the flow of our thoughts, letting them carry us to misleading ways of talking, is like Dasein’s being lived by “das Man”—just doing what one does and saying what one says. Dasein’s idle talk, where you merely pass on clichéd phrases and opinions you have heard without thinking about whether you mean them, comes close to Wittgenstein’s auto-pilot picture-driven talk. Where Wittgenstein wants us to mean what we say, Heidegger’s authenticity amounts to something like meaning what you do. And both have ethical implications, understanding ethical broadly here. One of the interesting features of this reading, if it is correct, is the role played by biographical information. Although it is always a difficult question whether we ought to bring this kind of information into the analysis of a thinker’s ideas, in this case I find that facts about Wittgenstein’s life offer insights that I would not have been gleaned from his philosophy alone. Had I not known how passionate he was about living the right kind of life and the disdain he had for merely intellectual accomplishments, I might never have looked for an ethical depth to his later works. And it was his repeated emphasis on vanity, courage, and honesty—both in his letters and diaries and in the accounts of his friends—that pointed me in the direction of the particular reading I have given. And what do we see when we turn this gaze on Heidegger? We turn from Wittgenstein, a man who confessed everything, even the most trivial infractions, to a man who confessed nothing, even the most heinous. We turn from a man who used reflections on technical subjects such as the nature of the proposition and the grammar of colors to express deeply personal truths about himself and his views on what is most important in life, to Heidegger, whose philosophy asserts the inseparability of the philosopher and the philosophy and the Kierkegaardian notion that a person’s philosophizing must be wrenched from their soul, but whose philosophy comes across as impersonal, detached from author, time, and place, separated from individual struggle, passion—work so cool from a philosopher so committed to the

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importance of mood! One almost wants to say of the author of his works what Dilthey said of the Kantian subject, that “no real blood flows in his veins,” despite the fact that part of the point of the idea of Dasein was to correct this mistake. All of which raises the question, which of these philosophers was the real existentialist? Or, if that word is not to your liking, who truly lived their philosophy and philosophized their life?

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Heidegger on Truth as Opening Possibilities Pirmin Stekeler

From Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic to Being and Time In order to understand Heidegger’s notion of truth, we have to distinguish between evaluations of sentences or assertions as correct according to some formal criteria and evaluations of acts of material thinking that refer directly to my world of living experience or indirectly to the world of objective things and matters, as we may say. The distinction between merely formal truth and material truth should already be clear to anybody who knows enough about our schematic definitions of abstract truth-values for mathematical sentences. Systems of such sentences define, as we learn from Gottlob Frege, purely sortal domains of entities (such as pure numbers, sets or courses-of-values) and relations (like the ordering of numbers and the so-­ called element relation).1 Without analogical projections onto our world of practical interaction with our environment, no structure of this sort says anything about me or about the world.

 I talk about a sortal domain here if we (can) presuppose a relatively fixed system of naming devices (as expressions like number terms t, t* or as designations in utterances by which we can refer to this stone in contrast to that one etc.) We also have to assume a fixed system of (relational) predicates φ(x) about the objects named (like t