Heidegger claims to radicalize Kantian finitude. He “wants to applaud Kant for appreciating the finitude of thinking — in Kant its dependence on sensible and pure intuition — also note the hidden importance of the imagination in Kant’s project, and yet also demonstrate that Kant has not broken free of the prior metaphysical tradition but remains solidly within its assumptions” (Pippin, The Culmination, p. 82).
“Kant treats our immediate familiarity with the world as an unimportant issue, since real knowledge of what really is resides in mathematical physics, and how things show up in ordinary experience is of no account” (p. 83).
Pippin is characterizing Heidegger’s view here. The last part strikes me as an overstatement by Heidegger. Kant aims, among other things, to give an account of ethics and human life that would be compatible with Newtonian physics, but never even comes close to suggesting that ethics could be explained in terms of physics.
“Heidegger claims that not only is freedom a problem of causality, but causality is itself a problem of freedom” (ibid).
Kant does occasionally mix up discussions of freedom and causality, as when he makes the unfortunate suggestion that we think of freedom as an alternate kind of causality besides the one exhibited in Newtonian physics. But in the main, he treats ethical freedom and mechanical causality as two very different registers. Heidegger is tendentiously assuming that for Kant, physics must provide the outer frame of reference for ethics. But despite Kant’s great reverence for Newton, he famously argues for the primacy of practical reason.
“Heidegger wants to explore the implications of the remarkably Fichtean formulation that anything actual must be understood to be ‘posited’, that being, the meaning of being, is ‘positing'” (p. 84).
This notion of positing has come up several times, in relation to Hegel (and Fichte, who first made it a major theme). It is closely related to the contested notion of judgment. As Aristotle might remind us, judgment is said in more than one way.
“Position or positing is treated throughout as judging, the discursive form of representing” (p. 85, emphasis in original).
Judgment in the sense I care about mainly names a kind of free inquiry where the outcome is not decided in advance, rather than a completed conclusion. It should be understood as subject to all the nuances that affect jurisprudence. Judging as an activity has to be an open process of interpreting, not the mere representing of something identified in advance or known in advance. Only in hindsight — with a conclusion already in view — can judgment even be expressed in terms of representation. But the early modern tradition in logic identifies judgments with propositions, assertions, or conclusions.
Pippin quotes Heidegger quoting Kant, “The concept of positing or asserting [Position oder Setzung] is completely simple and identical with that of being in general” (p.86).
To “be” X is to be well said to be X.
For Kant, Pippin explains, “We have the power to determine objectively when something exists or not, so that what there is can be understood as what this power can determine…. [T]he concept of something existing beyond our capacity to determine in principle if it exists (or if we cannot but believe it exists) is an empty notion” (pp. 86-87).
He quotes Kant again, “I find that a judgment is nothing but the manner in which given modes of knowledge are brought to the objective unity of apperception. This is what is intended by the copula is. It is employed to distinguish the objective unity of given representations from a subjective unity” (p. 87).
This will lead Heidegger to say that for Kant, the meaning of Being is unity of apperception. That seems plausible enough.
“The primordial mode of being of Dasein is not primarily as a perceiver but being-in-the-world” (p. 88).
Heidegger wants to disqualify any purely cognitive approach to these issues, and simultaneously to claim that all the philosophers do take a purely cognitive approach, which renders their conclusions invalid. This second claim is once again highly tendentious, because many of the philosophers take a normative approach that is in no way “purely cognitive”.
“Kant takes himself to have demonstrated that all that relation to an object, a determination of any being, can amount to is the objective unity of an apperceptive synthesis…. And there is no indication that he thinks that demonstration will show that the mind imposes a form on a formless matter” (p. 89, emphasis in original).
Hegel and Heidegger both at times blame Kant for using language that tends to suggest the two-stage, “impositionist” view.
“[Kant’s transcendental] deduction is not about ‘stamping’ but about demonstrating that there cannot be any intuited content (i.e., any cognitively relevant content) that is incongruent with the required a priori conditions…. But Heidegger is simply asserting that this unity is ‘subjective’ and imposed…. There is quite a lot, most of it simply assumed by Heidegger, packed into ‘Thinking is esconced in human subjectivity'” (p. 90).
“As a student of Husserl, Heidegger is certainly aware of the objections to any psychologistic account of judgment, and his suggestions about ‘stamping’ and being ‘sunk’ in subjectivity do not trade on any such psychologizing…. Judgment too is a mode of public comportment towards entities, a modality of being-in-the-world, and not originally an inner episode…. [H]e appears to think that locating the intelligibility of being in judgment unavoidably transforms the objects of judgment into mere present-at-hand entities. Given the claim that the primordial, fundamental, or original meaning of beings is as pragmata, equipment, read-to-hand, our fundamental mode of comportment towards beings is engaged and unreflective use, and any interruption of such unreflective use, such as a cognitive judging, must lose any grip on this primordial meaning and primordial comportment in favor of a present-at-hand substance” (p. 93).
Judgment as public comportment rather than inner episode makes good sense. Beings as pragmata are fine. But I simply do not see any “unavoidable” transformation of objects of judgment into present-at-hand entities. Yes, something like this fixing of presence-at-hand does occur in various circumstances. But the history of philosophy provides plenty of counterexamples, among whom I would include Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. Hegel even addresses the issue very explicitly, with his famous complaints about “dead” objects and such. It is disingenuous for Heidegger to ignore this.
Heidegger also appears to claim that unreflective engagement in the world is unequivocally superior to the best Kantian and Hegelian reflection. Unreflective engagement should be granted some role and dignity, but this goes way too far.
“Unless there is such a link between judgment as such and being as constant presence…, this mere link to a thinking subject… would not appear to justify any claim to a distortion or unthinking appropriation of the core metaphysical tradition” (p. 94).
I think we just established that there is no such unqualified link.
“[I]t would not be fair to Kant to insist that he understands this cognitive or judgmental modality as either exclusive or even privileged…. In fact, a good case can be made that one of Kant’s contributions to philosophy is his demonstration that our primary and most significant mode of comportment towards being ‘as a whole’ is not cognitive but practical, the experience of the moral law, our own status as free subjects, and our sensitivity to the beautiful and the sublime” (ibid).
Yes indeed.
“And Kant is famous for denying the possibility of ontology, claiming that the proud name of ontology must give way to the humbler analytic of the understanding” (p. 99).
And I say he is right to do so, and that Hegel follows him in this.
“But there is no moment in Kant that holds that the Being of beings is a matter of disclosure” (p. 100).
Indeed not. If anything, Kant is overly categorical in asserting the purely active nature of thought.
“There can be no undifferentiated mere matter of sensation that is then in a second step shaped by pure concepts” (p. 101).
As I mentioned, Pippin and Brandom have pretty conclusively refuted the old “two stage” reading of Kant on thought and intuition.
Pippin quotes a particularly outrageous claim by Heidegger, that “In order to understand the Critique of Pure Reason, this point must be hammered in, so to speak: knowing is primarily of intuiting…. All thinking is merely in the service of intuition” (ibid).
“This is not exactly Kant’s position. It would be more accurate to summarize it as: knowing is always a thinking intuiting and an intuiting thinking” (pp. 101-102).
Heidegger “even freely admits that Kant insists on a reciprocity between thinking and intuiting, but he proposes forging ahead anyway with his claim for the priority of intuition” (p. 104).
“The ‘basic faculty’ is the imagination, and it is ‘pre-ontological’ because it is the exercise of a nondiscursive, nonconceptual imagining” (p. 109).
I am myself fascinated by the role of imagination in Aristotle and Kant (see also Sellars on Kantian Imagination). I would not claim, however, that imagination is the root of all thought. Imagination in its immediate presentation is nondiscursive and nonconceptual, but Kant’s subtler point is that discursive and conceptual elements nonetheless get wrapped into it. Imagination in the broadest Aristotelian sense seems to be a kind of link between organic being and thought. Without imagination, an organic being cannot be said to think. But thought is more than just imagination. What makes thought rational is its non-arbitrariness. Kant would tell us that imagination cannot be completely arbitrary either, since the categories of thought also apply to it, as he argues in the famously difficult “transcendental deduction” in the Critique of Pure Reason. (See also Capacity to Judge; Figurative Synthesis.)
“More radically put: both intuition and understanding are derivative…. What he appears to mean by derivative is that there could be no role to play for the understanding and intuition conceived as distinct capacities, were there not an original imaginative projection of a horizon of possible encounterable beings” (p. 111).
This part seems unobjectionable.
“So, the question is not whether conceptual capacities are necessary for any experience…. The issue is rather the mode of conceptual actualization. The chess grand master has ‘immediately’ ‘in mind’ a sense of areas of threats, dangers, degrees of possibilities and probabilities, all because of the years he has spent playing and reading chess books. But those moves are determinate, and concepts are in play” (p. 114).
This illustrates what Hegel calls “mediated immediacy”.
“The point of all these metaphors is, of course, to find as many ways as possible to suggest some spontaneous activity in intuiting other than assertoric judging or acts of conceptual sorting, or deliberate rule-following” (p. 115).
In a Kantian context, spontaneous activity and intuition are mutually exclusive, though in real life we never get either of these purely by itself.
“The horizon-forming work of the imagination is not a determination of conceptual intelligibility but our comportment with a world everywhere always already ‘irradiated’ with meaning, significance” (ibid).
This again seems fine. The notion of horizon comes from Husserl’s phenomenology.
“He means that one cannot say of a Dasein, a human person, that this sort of being is simply ‘in time’, in some supposed ‘flow’ of temporal moments. It can, of course, for various purposes, be considered that way, as if Dasein were a table or a plant, but that aspect is derivative from how Dasein orients itself in in time, and in that sense ‘affects itself’…. Heidegger means, again in a way that involves the imagination, that we never experience time simply ‘passing’, but our temporal awareness always (again) involves the issue of meaning…. [T]he notion of time is presented as [a] kind of self-determining and so self-affecting, since time is a pure intuition, where that means not a pure intuited but a pure intuiting…. This is not an empirical event, and so there is not a self that ‘affects’ itself as already present to itself as a substance-like self, a subject” (p. 117).
Here we get to why Heidegger called his magnum opus Being and Time. He wants to give us anything but a boring mathematizing theory of uniform Newtonian time. A radical, nonuniform, constitutive experience of time is one of his more interesting thoughts. It seems to start from Kant’s notion of time as a “pure intuition”. (See also Ricoeur on Husserl on Memory; Ricoeur on Augustine on Memory.)
“A self is the way it stretches itself along in time” (p. 118).
“According to Heidegger, the world, a historical world, sets a horizon of possible meaningfulness — fundamentally the meaning of Being as such — and Dasein’s inheritance of and orientation from such a horizon does not require any self-conscious discursive orientation, but is a matter of simply being involved in the interrelated nexus of practical significances that amounts to the various tasks and projects of the world” (p. 120).
That orientation from a horizon is generally not self-conscious goes with the territory. The same might be said of a human’s uptake of culture.
Heidegger contrasts a good “ready-to-hand” with the bad present-at-hand. The good one is supposed to be original and primordial, which seems to mean it is that by comparison with which he will say everything else is effectively in bad faith (though that is not his term).
“[T]his primordial meaningfulness of entities should be understood as (although not exclusively as) the ready-to-hand, Zuhandenheit, affordances, and not the present-at-hand, at-handedness simply present before us, the vorhanden, primarily stable substances enduring through time understood as a sequence of nows, what Heidegger generally calls standing presence, ständige Anwesenheit. By contrast with empirical intelligibility, our understanding of the ready-to-hand is a matter of attunement and appropriate comportment, something like skillful involvement. This fundamental level of significance has been obscured by the metaphysical tradition since Plato and Aristotle. This is because of the mistaken assumption that our original familiarity with beings in a world is illusory and truth is a struggle towards cognitive intelligibility” (pp. 120-121).
I think something like attunement and comportment and skillful involvement is very much present in Plato and Aristotle (and in Stoicism and Epicureanism, for that matter), so for me the whole negative argument about metaphysics never even gets off the ground. Heidegger is reading what is really a modern issue too far backwards in history.
“Every projection of what matters to us into the future involves a being, Dasein, with no inherent teleology or universal or even available ground (an answer to the question of why what fundamentally matters in the world does or ought to matter). What originally matters is inextricable from our thrownness into a certain historical world, so what comes to matter is a question of contingency, what we plan out concerning what matters is subject to the massive contingency of our lack of control not only over our own ‘ground’ but over our fate or our ever-possible death” (p. 121).
We have not seen any argument why there is no “teleology or universal or even available ground” related to human being-in-the-world, though this is a common modern assumption.
“Most importantly for our present purposes, the priority of the ständige Anwesenheit assumption cannot be assumed in the question of our own being, how our own being is a meaningful issue, at stake for us. At the heart of Heidegger’s analysis in [Being and Time] is the claim that the authentic meaning of Dasein’s being can also crudely but accurately be summarized: anxious being-towards-death” (ibid).
Heidegger has exerted a very great influence on Continentally oriented discourse about the “question of the subject”. There does seem to be a kind of correlation between the broadly syntactic definition of substance as an “underlying thing” in Aristotle’s Categories, and what Heidegger calls “standing presence”, but this is precisely the definition that is superseded in the Metaphysics.
The whole notion that “anxious being-towards-death” is the most important aspect of human subjectivity — and the key to its “authenticity” — seems very implausible. I stand with Spinoza’s “The philosopher thinks of nothing less than of death”. This stuff about death is directly personal for me, as a recent cancer survivor. I choose to meditate on life — the good, the true, and the beautiful — and as much as possible to cherish every moment.
“Heidegger’s basic picture focuses on Dasein’s unique awareness of our own mortality, and so the question of whether one lives with a resolute readiness for anxiety, or a flight from such awareness by the tranquilizing notions like ‘everyone must die; we can’t do anything about it, so why worry about it?’ or ‘what a morbid way to look at life'” (pp. 121-122).
I choose neither of these. Heidegger tries to force us with a false dichotomy.
“This is also a dramatically isolating and individualizing approach. A background standing attunement to the constant impendingness of one’s own death is intensely private and unshareable, and with such a notion at the center it makes almost all of ordinary life escapist and even cowardly” (p. 122).
What Pippin correctly recognizes as a “dramatically isolating and individualizing approach” does not bode well for ethics.
Calling almost all of ordinary life escapist and cowardly sounds like emotional blackmail. This is of a piece with Heidegger’s very uncharitable account of the history of philosophy.
“If we ask this question of Kant in the register in which Heidegger asks it, then it would hardly be correct to suggest that for Kant, ‘primordially’, what it is to be a human, to exist in a distinctively human way, is to be a self-conscious knower…. Kant is under no illusion about the fact that our little ‘island’ of factual knowledge of nature, the pinnacle of which is Newtonian mechanics, is of no deep significance for human life. This is a radical rejection of so many conceptions of philosophy, from the Socratic-Platonic notion of philosophy as a way of life to the notion of philosophy as therapeutic in the Wittgensteinian sense. Human significance and worth are based wholly on a rational faith in our moral vocation. That is what primordially matters. We don’t ‘know’ that we have such a capacity, but its availability is a matter of its practical undeniability” (ibid).
For Kant, our status as what I would call ethical beings is more “primordial” than our status as knowers. I see harmony rather than conflict between the Socratic-Platonic notion of philosophy as a way of life, and a rational faith in our moral vocation.
“Heidegger understands this feature of Kant, that the true significance in being human does not for Kant reside in being a knowing subject” (ibid).
“It is not enough to acknowledge our finitude in this context by noting the inevitability of moral struggle. If there is moral struggle at all, that is already an indication that the moral law is not practically motivating just by being acknowledged. That would be what Kant calls a ‘holy will’. This is a pretty close analogue to his conclusion that the unity of the understanding and intuition requires that the nature of the understanding itself cannot be formulated in terms of the logic of judgment alone (that it requires the prior function of pure imagination). The bearing of pure reason on our sensible inclinations cannot be understood as a mere imposition on an independently conceived sensible nature. (There is also an analogue to Hegel’s early critique of Kant — that this picture of imposition means the law is experienced as wholly positive, an alien authority, as alien as a divine command theory of morality, the mere imposition of a law ‘from without’. It is Hegel’s way of raising the necessary question of what our moral vocation means to us, beyond merely ‘being commanded’.)” (p. 124).
Plato already has a well-developed alternative to a command theory of morality, as well as a good awareness of the importance of mixed forms (see Middle Part of the Soul). As Pippin has already suggested, Kant scholars now generally reject the attribution of an “impositionist” theory to Kant.
“Even if imperfectly, Kant realized that our access to the moral dimension of our being is through a kind of attunement…. As in so many other cases in Kant, what look like two steps, acknowledgement of our duty, then producing a consequent feeling of respect, is actually one moment” (p. 125).
Heidegger approves of Kant’s talk about moral feeling, but he wants to counterpose feeling to judgment in ways Kant would not accept. He does correctly make the important point that meaning is of greater import for ethics than causality.
“Feeling obligated is feeling respect. (A summary account of Heidegger’s point would be that the whole issue of respect looks different when the framework is not the question of practical causality but the meaning of our moral vocation)…. Respect is what gives the way morality fits into a life as a whole its meaning. This is why Heidegger applauds Kant so enthusiastically” (p. 126). Pippin quotes Heidegger, “This feeling of respect for the law is produced by reason itself; it is not a feeling pathologically induced by sensibility…. [M]y having a feeling of respect for the law and with it this specific mode of revelation of the law is the only way in which the moral law as such is able to approach me” (ibid).
“There is more ambiguity about this in Kant than Heidegger lets on. Heidegger’s interpretation of Kantian respect, at least prima facie, would ultimately not seem to be consistent with the notion of autonomy so important to Kant” (p.127).
Kant would not use a metaphor of revelation. He certainly would not call it the “only way” we encounter ethical principles. And he would not speak of the moral law approaching us. For Kant, it is we who are the agents, because it is we who are ethically responsible.
As a would-be experimental poet in my youth, I used to be fascinated by these metaphors of Heidegger, where Being reaches out to us, and so on.
“Heidegger does not think Kant can make any of the metaphysically significant distinctions he wants to make between a phenomenal or psychological subject and a moral or transcendental subject because he treats them all as substances underlying thought, action, and empirical sensations” (ibid).
Here we come back to the question of what a subject is for Kant. Heidegger is right that it should not be thought of as a substance in the sense of Aristotle’s Categories.
“The other conception of the thing or any being is what he calls primordial, authentic, originary, and closest to us — what is directly available in our ordinary comportments, a being always already irradiated, to use Wittgenstein’s word, with meaning” (p. 129).
This seems to be an immediate that is supposed to be more true than any mediation.
“We have somehow come to misunderstand and distort what is and always remains most familiar to us…. What we inherit is a world where the unreflective basic and orienting meaning amounts to an assumption about what matters (and therewith what doesn’t matter or matter very much), that what is cared about, what in the world has ‘prevailed’ (gewaltet), is manipulability, beings understood as manipulable stuff, available for satisfying human self-interests….We have even come to experience ourselves in this way, as things of a sort” (ibid).
There is a significant grain of truth here, but a similar insight can already be found in many of the world’s religious traditions; in a more philosophical form among the neoplatonists; and in a purely philosophical form in Hegel.
“We do not recognize our own openness to meaningful being. This is not like ignorance or a mistake…. There is a kind of self-evasion even in dealing with, comporting with, objects that makes them predictable and secure, manipulable all out of a kind of thoughtless, laziness, and instrumentalizing scientism” (pp. 129-130).
He seems to be saying that humans as a whole are dominated by a kind of willful bad faith that imposes shallowness on everything, and for which we are more culpable than if we were merely ignorant or mistaken.
“Mention is made again of the fact that ‘the essence of the thing [is] determined on the basis of the essence of propositions’…. Language, history, the work of art are all understood in terms of this ontology, which has now assumed the role of a pre-ontological orientation, distorting our self-understanding, our own experiences of ourselves. He even suggests that the reason poetry is so poorly taught (a claim he simply assumes) is because poetry teachers cannot distinguish between the distinct mode of being of a poem and a thing” (pp. 130-131).
To put it another way, Heidegger claims that humans in general — and Western philosophers in particular — distort everything in theoreticist and logocentric ways. It’s hard to know what to do with such sweeping condemnations. I earlier compared this to the circular logic of emotional blackmail, which basically tells us that if we disagree, we obviously must be part of the problem.
Pippin suggests that for Heidegger, at root this is an issue with the social dominance of modern science. I have my own criticisms of modern science, but I by no means see it in a purely negative light. The neo-Kantians who dominated German philosophy in the early 20th century seem to have been one of Heidegger’s main targets, both because of their relation to Kant and because of their strong advocacy of modern science.
“[I]t has proven to be inevitable that our self-understanding would have to change to accommodate the approach of scientific naturalism, and that was and remains the intent of the project. A look at how modern economics understands rational agents, or how psychiatry does, or the research paradigms in the social sciences and now even in the humanities make that clear…. Heidegger’s idea for a recovery, a new beginning in philosophy (which he accuses of complicity with this ‘standing presence’ project since its beginning) rests on the claim that such claims of scientific objectivity can be shown to be based on a distortion of a primordial level of meaningfulness” (pp. 134-135).
While I would put a modest notion of ethical being ahead of the requirements of science, I do also believe that there are requirements of science. Methodological criticism should not be confused with global dismissal. I generally disagree when philosophers globally dismiss other philosophers.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 