Habermas on Heidegger

I don’t usually like to dwell on the negative, but Heidegger has aggressively demeaned Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Western philosophy as a whole, and I just stumbled on this. In the 2023 English translation of the first part of his Also a History of Philosophy (German ed. 2019), leading German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas has some very sharp remarks.

Habermas was only four years old when Hitler took power in 1933. Like many children, he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he “was shaken to his core by what he learnt of the Nazi atrocities from the Nuremberg Trials, and news coverage of the Holocaust. Thus, although still in his teens, he experienced 1945 as a turning point that would shape his political and cultural outlook”. In 1953, Habermas was again extremely disturbed when Heidegger published his 1934 Introduction to Metaphysics lectures, without removing a reference to “the inner greatness” of national socialism.

Speaking about Heidegger’s student the philosopher Karl Löwith, who was Jewish and was forced to emigrate, Habermas says “Löwith wants to strip away everything forced and solemnly exalted from the necessary return to the ancient understanding of nature, that gesture of elitist self-dramatization he had come to detest above all in the teaching and comportment, in the character and attitude, of his teacher Martin Heidegger” (p. 26). Elsewhere I read that Löwith himself recounts that when he met Heidegger in Switzerland during the war, Heidegger was wearing his swastika pin. This colors Heidegger’s claim that he had no more identification with the Nazis after 1934.

“[W]ith his concept of the ‘history of being’, Heidegger radicalized [philosophy of history] into a dubious second-level historicism…. Underlying this problematic figure of thought is the infallible claim to truth that Heidegger himself raises for the assertion of a metahistorical ‘occurrence of truth’, which in turn outstrips the already excessively strong claims to truth of the major systems of Western metaphysics” (p. 28).

“Being and Time could still have been situated in the context of those major nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual movements, which, since the Young Hegelians, contributed to a detranscendentalization of the world-projecting spontaneity of Kantian subjectivity” (ibid). “But in fact Heidegger’s pretension overshoots all attempts to merely desublimate the transcendental world-projecting subjectivity of the human mind into a spontaneous mode of life in the world” (pp. 28-29).

“Heidegger is indeed a master when it comes to explicating the habitual performative knowledge that enables us to engage in the everyday practices of dealing with whatever we encounter in the world. These convincing analyses of a broad spectrum of lifeworld references of human ‘Dasein’ are, however, deflected onto a different path when Heidegger short-circuits the examination of human beings’ mode of existence with the ontological intention of grasping the being of beings as such…. But since the question of being is internally connected with the question of truth, the ontological redirection of the analytic of Dasein to the question of the being of beings leads to a far-reaching prejudicing of the understanding of truth — namely, the confusion of truth with world disclosure” (p. 29).

This “world disclosure” is a comprehensive name for all immediate experience of appearance, or immediate consciousness. While at some level appearance does deserve a kind of embrace as a necessary condition of life, a resolve to treat immediate appearance as having the final character of an unquestionable revelation makes dialogue impossible.

“By transforming the performatively known ‘how’ of standing in the horizon of our lifeworld into an explicit ‘knowledge’ of ‘what’, Heidegger brings a network of categories and attitudes (the so-called existentials) to consciousness that enables us to see the world and occurrences in it from a certain perspective, to experience it in certain emotional states and to address it under certain aspects. It is the ontological radicalization of this topic of linguistic world disclosure (as he would put it following Humboldt) into the metaphysical question of being and truth that misleads Heidegger into assimilating ‘truth’ to ‘world disclosure’. Heidegger de-differentiates the clearly defined concept of propositional truth by assimilating it to the concept of ‘revealing’ world disclosure” (pp. 29-30).

As a young person, I was seduced by 1960s talk about immediacy and spontaneity, and for a while even took up the idea that what the world needed was a kind of renunciation of the non-immediate.

“The mistake, already implicit in Being and Time, of confusing the truth of propositions with a world disclosure that is ontologized and therefore immune to objections, is what lends the concept of the history of being its force” (p. 30). “In this way, the a priori of ‘world disclosure’ swallows up the critical potential of the ‘claim to truth’, because the power of the capacity to say ‘no’ can no longer extend to the basic conceptual structure in which being interprets itself. The crisis-proneness of the history of being is explained by the dialectical character of this self-interpretation of being: it simultaneously reveals and conceals itself in its epochal destinies. By withholding itself from apprehension, it makes itself felt by human beings as the calamity of God’s ‘absence’ or — in the Hölderlinesque neo-pagan jargon of the zeitgeist — of the gods” (ibid).

It is this immunity to objections that I object to as extremely dangerous.

“With the concept of the history of being, Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s notion of genealogy in a way that retains from the concept of ideology the moment of historically imposed illusion, but at the same time excludes the possibility of illumination through reflection” (ibid).

The exclusion of reflection and questioning that follows from a fixation on immediacy is the real disaster. All the higher achievements of spirit depend on reflection and mediation. Heidegger claims to expose the dogmatism of all other philosophy, and makes a lot of noise about it. This deflects our attention from the fact that giving strong normative status to immediacy effectively rules out any alternative to dogmatism. There is bad faith in these accusations, and if we try to resist, bad faith will be unfairly projected onto to us, which is the most insidious aspect of all this.

“Heidegger blames science and technology for the crisis from which supposedly only a return to the origins of Greek mythology — reaching back behind even the axial threshold of the Platonic logos and the God of the Old Testament — can rescue us. His fixation on the question of being leads him to focus on the deficiencies of theoretical and not — as in Schmitt and Strauss — of practical reason. Ultimately, the fateful alienation from the origin is implicit in reason itself” (pp. 30-31).

This discussion of Heidegger is part of a larger critique by Habermas of 20th-century claims by conservative authors like Schmitt and Strauss that central Enlightenment values like reason, freedom, and equal rights inevitably lead modernity into moral crisis.

“Even simple predicative statements, with which the discursive unfolding of possible cognitions as such begins, already involve an objectivistic ‘distortion’ of the pre-predicative, purely performative ‘know-how’. This deficiency inherent in the operations of reason is supposed to be the result of an act of objectivization that suppresses all connections and holistic references with which we are acquainted only in performance — and fatefully ‘forgets’ them” (p. 31).

There is a huge difference between recognizing that simple predications can be taken in a dogmatic way, and claiming that they inevitably, intrinsically lead to crisis and disaster.

As Habermas writes with obvious irony, “Against this background of a devaluation of the ‘normal’ concept of reason, philosophers are promoted into thinkers and, together with the poets, are sworn to a nondiscursive ‘apprehension of being'” (ibid).

Henceforth, according to Heidegger, philosophy should concern itself exclusively with putative poetic revelation, and reject everything that is not such a revelation. Opposite to this, I think both poetry and religion fare better when what is called revelation is understood as a kind of poetic expression that may be intensely meaningful for us, but does not serve to exclude anything.

What gives standard assertion its weight or “bite” is the fact that it has meaning by virtue of distinguishing from what would contradict it. But one poetic expression does not contradict another. Treating poetic expression as a “revelation” of truth rather than as figurative undoes its character as poetic expression. Claims of revelation introduce a literalism or incipient fundamentalism that is the opposite of a poetic spirit.

Form vs Action

Lately I’ve been assembling materials for a contrast between two different “root metaphors” that have been used in making sense of life, the world, and things — one a notion of form associated especially with Aristotle, and the other a Latin scholastic and modern notion of action. This is also related to the historical transformation of the notion of efficient cause and of causality in general.

The first thing to note is that these are families of metaphors rather than uniform applications of the “same” two concepts. Literal shapes, linguistic meanings, and patterns of activity are all called “forms”, but do not reflect the same concept. The “action” of creation from nothing and that of mechanical impulse are two entirely different concepts.

The unifying themes, I think, are that “action” is supposed to be something more or less simple, immediate, and instantaneous, supporting what is supposed to be a kind of bottom-up, foundational explanation of things, whereas “form” always involves some “intensional” complexity and mediation; may involve extension in time and space that further ramifies that intensional complexity and mediation; and supports a kind of “middle-out” explanation that begins with reflection on middle-sized elements of actual experience, rather than a posited foundation of ultimate simple constituents.

(For some additional complications regarding the above simple picture of action, see A Thomistic Grammar of Action.)

Ricoeur on Imagination

Paul Ricoeur’s essay on imagination in From Text to Action invites us “to see in it an aspect of semantic innovation characteristic of the metaphorical use of language” (p. 171). The term “image”, he says, has acquired a bad reputation from its misuse in the empiricist theory of knowledge. It “corresponds to two extreme theories, illustrated by Hume and Sartre, respectively” (p. 170). Hume sought to derive images entirely from sense perception, while Sartre related them starkly to the absence of a real object. According to Ricoeur, “To say that our images are spoken before they are seen is to give up an initial false self-evidence, which holds the image to be first and foremost a ‘scene’ unfolding in some mental ‘theater’ before the gaze of an internal ‘spectator’. But it also means giving up at the same time a second false self-evidence, holding that this mental entity is the cloth out of which we tailor our abstract idea, our concepts, the basic ingredient of some sort of mental alchemy” (p. 171).

He suggests that we take the poetic image as paradigmatic. The poetic image is unfolded through what Eugène Minkowski and Gaston Bachelard called a kind of “reverberation” of things said. Metaphor for Ricoeur operates not just as substitution for nouns, but rather in a refiguration of whole sentences. Use of what would otherwise be “bizarre predicates” produces a kind of shock that leads us to “produce a new predicative pertinence that is the metaphor…. [A]t the moment when a new meaning emerges out of the ruins of literal predication[,] imagination offers its specific mediation” (p. 172). “[S]emantic shock… ignites the spark of meaning of the metaphor…. Before being a fading perception, the image is an emerging meaning” (p. 173). (See also Beauty, Deautomatization.) He says that in a Kantian sense, imagination schematizes emerging meaning, giving it concreteness.

The reverberation of meaning is not a secondary phenomenon, but rather essential to the constitution of meaning as such. Ricoeur suggests that “the power unfurled by poetic language” (p. 174) affects not only meaning, but reference too. Poetic discourse abolishes “our first-order interest in manipulation and control” (p. 175), but brings to the foreground a second-order reference to “our profound belonging to the life-world” and the “tie of our being to other beings” (ibid). This second-order reference “in reality is the primordial reference” (ibid). (See Rule of Metaphor.) Such a perspective goes along with the idea that reference is constituted by meaning, rather than vice versa. In Fregean terms, sense is prior to reference.

“The paradox of fiction is that setting perception aside is the condition for augmenting our vision of things” (ibid). According to Ricoeur, work in model theory suggests that not only in poetry but also in science, fiction plays a necessary heuristic role in articulating new meanings (see also Searching for a Middle Term). Further, “the first way human beings attempt to understand and to master the ‘manifold’ of the practical field is to give themselves a fictive representation of it” (p. 176).

Referring to Aristotle’s Poetics, he says “poetry goes right to the essence of action precisely because it ties together mythos and mimesis, that is, in our vocabulary, fiction and redescription” (ibid). In a Kantian vein, Ricoeur adds that “Its referential force consists in the fact that the narrative act, winding through the narrative structures, applies the grid of an ordered fiction to the ‘manifold’ of human action” (pp. 176-177; see also Narrated Time.)

Beyond its mimetic function, imagination also has a projective aspect. “Without imagination, there is no action…. And it is indeed through the anticipatory imagination of acting that I ‘try out’ different possible courses of action and that I ‘play’, in the precise sense of the word, with possible practices…. It is imagination that provides the milieu, the luminous clearing, in which we can compare and evaluate motives as diverse as desires and ethical obligations, themselves as disparate as professional rules, social customs, or intensely personal values” (p. 177). “Finally, it is in the realm of the imaginary that I try out my power to act, that I measure the scope of ‘I can'” (p. 178). (See also Free Play; Practical Judgment.)

Imagination is also involved in our recognition of others as like us. “[I]ndividuals as well as collective entities… are always already related to social reality in a mode other than that of immediate participation, following the figures of noncoincidence, which are, precisely, those of the social imaginary” (p. 182).

“[T]he analogical tie that makes every man my brother is accessible to us only through a number of imaginative practices, among them ideology and utopia” (p. 181). Ideology “seems to be tied to the necessity for any group to give itself an image of itself, to ‘play itself’, in the theatrical sense of the word, to put itself at issue and on stage…. [S]ymbolism is not an effect of society, society is an effect of symbolism” (ibid). Ideology covers over the real gaps in all systems of legitimacy. Utopia exposes these gaps, but also tends to subordinate reality to dreams, and to be fixated on perfectionist designs. Ideology and utopia are mutually antagonistic, and both tend toward a kind of pathology that renders their positive function unrecognizable. “[T]he productive imagination… can be restored to itself only through a critique of the antagonistic and semipathological figure of the social imaginary” (p. 181).

Rule of Metaphor

In The Rule of Metaphor, which contains essays from the early 1970s, Ricoeur aimed among other things to refute Frege’s apparent claim that poetry has no reference or denotation, but only a sense or connotation. According to Ricoeur, poetic language achieves a kind of “second-level reference” by suspending first-level reference. I tend to think all reference presupposes higher-order constructs, so I am sympathetic. This is also an argument for the general importance of metaphor.

In an appendix, he describes how the rise of structuralism in the 1960s — of which he remained critical — led him from a kind of existential phenomenology to a much closer engagement with language. His earlier emphasis on symbols gave way to a more general approach to hermeneutics, and he began to also engage with analytic philosophy.

At the beginning of the book, he notes how the study of rhetoric became much narrower after Aristotle, losing its connection with dialectic and philosophy. Later, he goes on to argue that meanings of sentences take precedence meanings of words, and meanings of whole discourses take precedence over meanings of sentences.

Apparently, some structuralist writers on rhetoric argued for the contrary, bottom-up approach starting with meanings of words. My own past interest in so-called structuralism never led in this direction; I was initially more concerned with the priority of relations over “things”, and later with the explanatory power of Foucaultian “discursive regularities”. I do think a compositional, bottom-up approach has great value in formal contexts, and that formal analysis is not irrelevant to ordinary language, but I think ordinary language meaning is best approached mainly in terms of material inference, which has a holistic character.

Primary Process

Lacan saw both language and the primary process of the unconscious as mainly governed by Jakobsonian metaphor and metonymy. While especially well adapted to accounting for poetry, word salads, and dreams, the Jakobsonian approach seems insufficiently constrained to be able to account for proprieties of inference; but then, it was not developed for that purpose. (See also Imaginary, Symbolic, Real.)

Brandom sees any descriptive, formal view of language such as the Jakobsonian one as ultimately parasitic on a nonformal, normative, and material-inferential view. For rational, discursive purposes where we want deontic modal constraints, Brandom’s approach works very well. Brandom’s account focuses on the normative and inferential meaning of ordinary empirical concepts, and has nothing to say about free metaphor and metonymy, which also have a big place in the wider world; but then, it was not developed for the latter purpose.

I don’t mean to suggest any facile symmetry here, just the bare possibility of some reconciliation in view of the fact that the main concerns of the two approaches are mutually exclusive. Saying that a view is parasitic on another view is very different from saying it is wrong. The question is whether it is fair to expect that Brandom’s claim of parasitism at a general level of formal on “material” and of descriptive on normative approaches imposes on Brandom an obligation to be able to explain any possible formal account in his terms, including one mainly designed for a case well outside his focus. I think it does impose on him an obligation to be able to explain any formal account addressing the scope of determination of empirical concepts, but does not impose an obligation to be able to explain something like metaphor and metonymy. So, at least in this measure I do think the perspectives can coexist.

In my youth when I was a linguistically experimental poet among other things, I put more stress on metaphor and metonymy myself. At that point, I still believed in rational intuition, did not really think of reasoning in terms of language, and was even a bit disdainful of breaking things down into steps. Now I think all intuition is secondary to some prior development. As soon as I encountered Brandom’s argument about the priority of inference over representation, it seemed very right, and I began to engage with other aspects of his work from there. We could squint and say metaphor and metonymy are forms of representation, but if so it is certainly not empirical conceptual representation, so I’m inclined to think in that case we’re dealing with an Aristotelian homonym.