This will be quite a long one. For a quick capsule of my own views in this area, see Simple Thoughts About Being.

In Heidegger we have another instance of philosophical historical storytelling, such as came up recently with Brandom’s discussion of Rorty’s links to Dewey’s pragmatism, but this one is the story of a disaster rather than an optimistic vision of progress. This post is part of a response to Robert Pippin’s new book on Heidegger’s “overcoming” of German idealism. I am no Heidegger scholar, but I do know something about the history of things that have been called metaphysics.

Heidegger has famously promulgated an extremely simplified story about the history of Western metaphysics, as from beginning to end the story of a wrong direction. All the philosophers — from Plato to Hegel and beyond — stand indicted, except for Heidegger himself. Any such sweeping condemnation ought to be automatically suspect, but this thesis gained wide currency in the 20th century. According to Heidegger, Hegel’s substitution of “logic” for traditional metaphysics makes the wrong direction that metaphysics has always taken completely explicit.

“Heidegger begins by noting that Hegel, ‘the culminator’, had correctly seen that the underlying commitment of the Western tradition is that metaphysics… is ‘logic’. He does not, of course, mean formal logic, …but what Heidegger calls begreifendes Denken, conceptualizing thinking. He means a commitment to the view that what he calls the actuality of the actual, or the real essence of anything, is what can be grasped conceptually…, a determination of what must be the case for anything to be a determinate thing at all” (Pippin, The Culmination, p. 8).

“This means that being is already understood as what Heidegger will call ‘standing presence’ (ständige or beständige Anwesenheit). By this he means a being that is determinate, discriminable from other beings, and so potentially available to a subject in the present and able to endure through a temporal phase. The comprehensive concept for such an understanding is ousia, substance” (p. 11).

The ousia that has these characteristics is substance in the merely syntactic sense that it is given in Aristotle’s Categories for use in formal logic. Across many posts, we have seen how one of Aristotle’s main goals in the collection of manuscripts the ancient editors called “after the Physics” (meta ta phusika) involves explicating ousia not as a syntactic category, but first as form, and then as act and potentiality.

“This then raises the question that is at the heart of the matter for Heidegger: Why have we not asked whether this (let us say as shorthand, determinately standing being as thinkability) should be assumed to be the orientation for any inquiry about the meaning of being qua being? What grounds can justify such an orientation? Is it possible that a finite, mortal being can understand itself as an in-principle, completely self-knowing being with respect to the fundamental issues of first philosophy? If the question is the meaning of Being as such, it must mean the meaning available for the one being open to that question, and that being is not rightly understood as exclusively self-conscious, a pure thinking being, but as a living, finite being — what Heidegger calls Dasein — and the task of first philosophy must be reformulated in the light of the analysis of that being, a Daseinsanalytik. So, instead of a Phenomenology of Spirit, culminating in the self-knowing of a Science of Logic, we need a ‘metaphysics’ of Dasein” (ibid).

Pippin rather carefully states Hegel’s claim: living, finite beings can have reflective self-knowledge “in principle” and “with respect to the fundamental issues of first philosophy”. This involves neither infallibility nor omniscience.

Heidegger is right that Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, among others, think of being as inseparable from intelligibility. He is right too that Aristotle and Hegel, in their pursuit of intelligibility, direct inquiry away from being qua being as a matter of principle. I would say this is because their investigations have convinced them that being qua being cannot explain intelligibility or meaning. But Heidegger has only asserted — and not shown — that the sincere pursuit of intelligibility must inevitably go wrong.

Pippin emphasizes Heidegger’s insistence that we are finite, mortal beings. Heidegger criticizes Kant for allegedly giving up his insistence on our finitude in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, in favor of emphasis on the transcendental.

Hegel takes the emphasis on finitude to be a defeatist stance. He provocatively claims that in spite of our finitude and mortality, language and reflection introduce humans to a kind of infinity. He argues that we should embrace that infinity.

“But when Heidegger argues against any absolute status for philosophical judgments, he is not merely arguing against Hegel or an old-fashioned self-understanding but against all traditional philosophy itself” (p. 12, emphasis in original).

This is all deeply related to the question of whether humans can have genuine knowledge at all. Hegel is an optimist about this; Heidegger is a pessimist.

The vexed term “absolute” seems to be used by Heidegger in a blunt, black-and-white sense. For better or worse, “absolute” was a much overused term in Hegel’s Germany, made fashionable by the Schellingians. Hegel has quite a few wry comments about these pundits of “absolute” truth.

I have suggested that for Hegel, knowledge is said to be “absolute” when it fully recognizes its own relativity, which is to say its own conditioned character. Hegel’s claim would then be that anything deserving the name of knowledge in the fullest sense can and must in principle be capable of recognizing its own relativity. Perhaps indeed this is a criterion for knowledge in the fullest sense, not unlike the Socratic criterion for wisdom as recognition of all we do not know.

“[I]increasingly after Being and Time, Heidegger came to characterize what he was about as an attempt to ‘overcome’ Hegel, whom he consistently characterized as the ‘culmination’ of the entire Western tradition as well as German Idealism” (p. 13). Pippin quotes Heidegger, “with
German Idealism, it seemed as if philosophy as such had reached an end and had entrusted the administration of knowledge exclusively to the sciences” (ibid).

“This is all tied to Heidegger’s view that true metaphysical thinking is not to be understood as a strictly cognitive exercise of pure reason, and this is linked with a hermeneutic rather than analytic character of thinking. For him this means that such interpretive or ‘meaning-seeking’ thinking is inseparable from how such thinking should matter to any thinker” (p. 14).

But Aristotle and Hegel each in their own way do practice a kind of thinking that is more hermeneutic than analytic. They just don’t use the word, at least in its contemporary sense. (Aristotle’s On Interpretation is literally hermeneutike, but it is among the least hermeneutic of Aristotle’s texts.) Aristotle and Hegel’s difference with Heidegger is that like Paul Ricoeur also does, they recognize that more “analytic” investigations do also have value for a primarily hermeneutic orientation.

“And this mattering is complicated by the fact that such thinking is burdened by a dependence on a ground we constantly experience as beyond our ability to grasp conceptually” (p. 15).

Here is where things get complicated. For Heidegger, the ground is in principle beyond our ability to grasp conceptually. I think this assumes what Hegel would call an unreflective and therefore untrue (representational) notion of what is conceptual.

Brandom has written a lot about the very unordinary because nonrepresentational notion of the conceptual in Kant and Hegel, and I see something similar in Aristotle. (I find it a bit odd that Brandom is so generous in his reading of Heidegger, and am quite sure that Heidegger would not return the favor.)

“Heidegger has rejected understanding beings as mere objects standing over against a subject as a derivative and misleading assumption, and his references to Being are not to a being. So ‘being lasts as the withdrawing-proferring’ must refer to an ultimate source of meaningfulness that emerges historically, contingently, in a way that orients Dasein but cannot be determinately discriminated” (p. 20).

I find this ironic. It could be said that Hegel’s life work was devoted to promoting a point of view other than that of a subject confronting an object. Hegel can be abstruse and frustrating, but I better trust his version of this.

“[T]here is no other being like Dasein, whose own being is what Heidegger calls ‘existence’, a being of pure possibility that flees its call to itself to interrogate the meaning of its being, until wrenched out of its daily thoughtlessness by anxiety” (p. 21).

The description of “pure possibility” recalls some discussions of potential intellect in the broadly Aristotelian tradition. Of course, Aristotelian intellect does not “flee its call to itself”, or need to be “wrenched out of its daily thoughtlessness,” or experience anxiety. On some accounts such things might be said of the soul, but Aristotelian psyche has organic roots and is in no way a pure possibility. On the other hand, as a result of a complex contingent development, a fused notion of “intellectual soul” gained wide currency in the Latin middle ages, and this laid the ground for the oddly amphibious character of the Cartesian cogito and the Lockean understanding, which obliterate any distinction at all between intellect and a psychological entity.

“Dasein is described as always already ‘thrown’ into its world, inheriting a structure of significance, mattering, salience, and importance that forms a horizon of meaningfulness for any Dasein’s self-interrogation” (p. 22).

This sort of thing is probably one of the major appeals of Heidegger. Some of the vocabulary is uniquely his. But what is being said here is actually not that far from a traditional view (substitute “the soul” for Dasein). Experiences of encountering meaningfulness in a “world” that is already constituted independent of our willful doing are not far to find.

“The continuity of [Heidegger’s] emphasis on meaningfulness as the crux of the issue of Being’s availability is the interpretation I want to defend…. We can call this a resolute reading of Heidegger” (p. 25).

“The major question is the question of the meaningful availability of being at all”…. In Division One of [Being and Time], the possibility of any such nondiscursive availability is established by demonstrating phenomenologically that Dasein is Being-in-the World, not a subject standing over against objects, and a being whose meaning is care” (p. 26).

I am tempted to suggest that Hegelian Geist could also be said to be “Being-in-the World, not a subject standing over against objects, and a being whose meaning is care”. The difference is that Heidegger insists this all occurs at a nondiscursive level. A common Hegelian model is that things that do not start out as immediate can effectively acquire an immediate character.

(This calls for a brief sidebar on the strange way “discursivity” is used in the literature on Kant. Discursivity ought to simply mean something depending on articulation in discourse, as opposed to intuition or immediacy. But what is commonly called Kant’s “discursivity thesis” is his rather extreme claim that the understanding is entirely active, and includes no passive or receptive component or aspect whatsoever.)

“This is not at all to deny that this emphasis after the war shifted from existential thrownness into a world to the problem of language. But the general theme of most relevance to the critique of German Idealism — dependence, and so the impossibility of Hegel’s (and all of philosophy’s pure, autonomous thinking — is still apparent. In ‘Poetically Man Dwells’, a 1951 lecture…, we read, ‘Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man’ ” (p. 27).

Brandom might remind us here of Hegel’s own very sharp critique of “independence” and mastery.

“But, and here lies the source of the difficulty, what we have come to understand as metaphysics actually has never really addressed the question it poses for itself, aside from traces of an appreciation of the genuine issue in the pre-Socratics. Metaphysics has asked instead about the possible meaning of the ‘beings’…. The ancient answer to such a question was, of course, form. But… that leaves unanswered, in all traditional metaphysics, the possible meaningfulness of Being qua Being itself” (p. 28).

Here we get Heidegger’s line — only the pre-Socratics and Heidegger got Being right, and everyone else in history is completely off base. What’s peculiar is that Heidegger, who emphasizes how the Latin tradition distorts the Greek, takes up the scholastic valorization of “being qua being” without seeming to recognize how un-Aristotelian it actually is. Not that the equivalent phrase never appears in Aristotle (it does, in a relatively peripheral role), but only a huge weight of commentary promoted it to the central role it has in Aquinas.

“The problem of the ‘meaning of being’ is the problem of the meaningfulness of beings — that is, beings in the way they matter…. The source of that meaningfulness is the possibility of meaningfulness as such, the possible meaningfulness of Being as such. That possibility of meaningfulness question is not a transcendental possibility for Heidegger because it cannot be raised in strict distinction from the meaningfulness of beings. That is, this relation, between the general possibility of meaningfulness of Being at all, and the meaningfulness of entities, is not a matter of conceptual necessity but of what Heidegger calls ‘primordiality’…. There is a profound difference between the two regimes of meaningfulness, what Heidegger calls the ontological difference” (pp. 31-32).

Heidegger’s insistence on a radical split between “ontic” and “ontological” things — beings versus Being — is unprecedented. I cannot help being reminded of the sharp division between created things and the Eternal in the Hegelian “Unhappy Consciousness”. Perhaps Heidegger represents a contemporary Unhappy Consciousness.

“In his 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger is unambiguous about what he considers the basic philosophical problem. ‘We assert now that being is the sole and proper theme of philosophy.’ Philosophy itself is said to be ‘the science of being’. That Heidegger believes is unambiguous. No philosopher has ever concentrated so intensely on one question for the entirety of his fifty-plus-year career. But the first question for any student of Heidegger is simply what this question concerns…. Is the question of the meaning of Being even a question — that is, a question with a possible answer?” (p. 33).

Before this book of Pippin’s, I was very aware of Heidegger’s reverence for Parmenidean Being, but the close linkage that Pippin brings out between the “question of Being” and general questioning about meaning is new to me. My own attitude is that Aristotelian first philosophy is best understood as itself a kind of higher-order or generalized hermeneutics, and that general questioning about meaning does not benefit from being related to a notion of being as such.

“This issue is made more difficult because Heidegger is eager to qualify and to some extent marginalize the usual and much more familiar semantic ways of addressing the problem: the various senses of the word ‘is'” (ibid).

Indeed. Aristotle’s classic discussion of the ways in which being is said is structured entirely around the transitive senses of “is”. Being as such is not a substance but a transitive verb, “to be x”. Aristotle mentions it mainly in the context of the extreme generality of an incompatibility of contradictory assertions that is more than just syntactic. Being as such is something separate from Aristotle’s own notion of first cause (see also here); this identification was introduced much later.

“[Heidegger] tells us that such formulations assume the answer to the question he is trying to pose and so do not point to a way of addressing it…. Heidegger’s lifelong claim is that forgetting the question of the meaning of being is a catastrophic event in the history of mankind, that it leads to nihilism and a predatory, self-destructive technical manipulation of the earth” (p. 34).

If “forgetting” the question is a catastrophic event in history, this implies that it was previously clearly understood, at least by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Parmenides. We are then supposed to return to an immaculate origin. But history doesn’t show any such immaculate origin, and Plato’s dialogues already demonstrated that the teachings of both Heraclitus and Parmenides are untenable as they stand. Plato is vastly more sophisticated than either of them, with respect to the kinds of arguments he exhibits in his dialogues. And Aristotle is even more sophisticated than Plato. Here we really do have an example of the kind of progressive development that Brandom, following Rorty and Dewey, thinks we should be looking for in history. But as Nietzsche said, philosophers tend to be untimely. No historic society or culture as a whole has ever lived up to the deeper insights of Plato and Aristotle. In terms of sophistication of arguments, the contemporary world at a broad social level still has a pre-Platonic level of understanding.

“His is not a question of ontological commitment, the question of what beings there are or what kinds of beings. (E.g., Is there a God? Are there minds? Are there possibilities? And he does not ask: what makes it possible for beings to be the determinate beings they are? How can they be what they are and be differentiated from other beings? (E.g. what is it to be a mind? What is it to be a possibility?… He does not even mean what must be true of anything at all” (p. 35).

Heidegger argues for the primacy of “fundamental ontology”, which he distinguishes from the ordinary ontology that presupposes a great deal of implicit understanding about things in the world. This latter kind of ontology was already decisively criticized by Kant as dogmatic. But at least as interpreted by the neo-Kantians who dominated German academia in the early 20th century, Kant’s critique represented a turn toward epistemology. Indeed the whole “modern” tradition from Descartes on is sometimes characterized as primarily epistemological and science-oriented. Heidegger is definitely arguing for something new here, a new kind of first philosophy linked more closely with art and poetry.

“[A]ll consciousness-based and representational models of intentionality, are all improperly formulated and misleading. The possibility of such intentionality should rather be understood as requiring ‘being in the world’. A subject-conscious-of-a-distinct-object model should be replaced by an inseparable subject-object nexus, a subject always already transcended in a practical and unthematic relation to its objects. The relation is not one of spectatorship or simple perceptual awareness but ‘comportment’ (Verhalten), an active engagement with the world, an involvement that is driven by how things have come to matter” (p. 36).

We are agreed on this. But Brandom has argued that Kant and Hegel already moved beyond a consciousness-based or representational model of intentionality to one grounded in normativity. Moreover, the normativity model seems a better fit for Plato and Aristotle as well. So what Heidegger is criticizing does not seem to apply to any of the four greatest philosophers in the tradition.

“For Heidegger, world is not the totality of what there is, as in Kant, or all that is the case, as in Wittgenstein. World is a necessarily presupposed (i.e., primordial) condition for the possible availability or accessibility of beings within such a world in the first place…. This notion of availability as deep familiarity implies a kind of immediacy in our original encounter with beings in the world, but not like the direct presence of intentional objects as in theories of a pure ‘given’…. This implies a kind of immersion in the field of significances” (ibid).

I’m not quite sure about this. Immersion in a field of significances sounds promising, but what is this deep familiarity and immediacy that would not be a direct presence?

“In a very shorthand way, we can say that the background world for any possible accessibility and for [the individuation of humans] is a historical world — what Heidegger will call, using another term for openness, a clearing (Lichtung), not a species form” (p. 39).

Heidegger’s metaphor of a “clearing” has a kind of appeal. This seems to be a kind of historically emergent indeterminacy. All human experience is historically conditioned. There is no logos without ethos.

“Dasein is what it takes itself to be, within a world into which it is thrown, over which it has no power or influence. This means that primordial access to beings and to beings as a whole, being as such, is not originally cognitive, not the object of judgments, but requires instead what Heidegger calls a prior attunement…. [I]t is that involvement within a world that allows meaningful access to the beings that show up in such a world” (ibid).

Here we see a number of familiar themes, expressed in a novel vocabulary that is more dramatic and more categorical. The “taking” part is a familiar Kantian notion, but here it seems to be absolutized for the single individual in a way that Hegel at least would call one-sided. The social/ethical reciprocity in the constitution of meaning that Hegel so emphasizes is completely absent here. The world into which we are thrown again seems to be a very blunt dramatization of the non-independence and non-mastery that is an essential feature of human being for Hegel. But Kant or Hegel would also never say that we have no power or influence over the world, only that it is finite.

I’m still not quite sure what is going on with this vocabulary of “access” and “availability” of beings. At first I thought Pippin meant to associate it with what Heidegger pejoratively calls presence-at-hand, which seems to involve a kind of prejudice, like what the philosophically oriented sociologist Karl Mannheim calls ideology in the general sense. (Mannheim does in fact rather superficially refer to Heidegger, among others.) But here this access or availability seems to be playing a more positive role in Heidegger’s account, and to the extent that it does, it suggests a rather Cartesian separation of subject and object, which seems very ironic. Heidegger denounces all of “Western metaphysics”, from beginning to end, for supposedly assuming something like this. I don’t think this “Cartesian” notion of subject and object really applies to key figures like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, among others. Meanwhile, the researches of Alain de Libera on the “archaeology of the subject” strongly suggest that what is called the Cartesian subject has deep roots not only in scholasticism, but also earlier among the Christian church fathers.

I think the sharp dualism Heidegger puts between the bad, empirical ontic of the everyday and the good, metaphysical ontological that addresses only Being with a capital B is undesirable, and too much like the uncrossable separation between worldly beings and God in what Hegel calls the Unhappy Consciousness. Heidegger throws away too much. The philosophical dignity of the ontic should be rehabilitated. Even Hegel — who is very concerned not to swallow all particulars up in the whole in the way that he says that Spinoza does — sometimes seems to me to go too far in his critique of reified “things”.

“If there were no Dasein, there would be all the entities there now are, but none of them would mean anything. The world is the condition of availability…. The question of what accounts for things existing at all is not Heidegger’s question” (p. 40).

If there were no interpretive activity, there would be no meaning. He is right that this has nothing to do with the uninteresting question of whether things exist or not.

“The task of metaphysics is said to be to ‘awaken’ a fundamental attunement to the world (or to awaken us to the realization that we are already attuned)… in the musical sense of being tuned, on the right wavelength, or appreciatively engaged in this field of what matters” (p. 41).

The musical metaphor, like the appeals to poetry, has a kind of intuitive resonance, but here we have to tread carefully. Heidegger seems to appeal to simple intuition in places where there would be ramified reflection in Hegel.

“The ontologically significant states that disclose such meaningfulness as such are attunements like anxiety or boredom, where all such mattering in a sense fails, and so, in such a brutal contrast, the fundamentality (and contingency) of meaningfulness and manifestness as such is salient. And Heidegger always insists that such a significance, such degrees of mattering, cannot be understood as a subject projecting onto otherwise meaningless entities. There are no two steps in such Bedeutsamkeit, or meaningfulness: an encounter with a mere object and then a subjective projection of value by an individual or community. There are not two steps because there is no such first step; Dasein is ‘always already’ within the world of meaningfulness” (pp. 41-42).

That there is an “always already” aspect to our engagement with meaning seems entirely right. But what is this “manifestness as such”? It sounds like mere appearance that contributes nothing to understanding.

“Heidegger is proposing to shift the main tasks of philosophy from the analysis of concepts involved on knowledge claims, empirical experience, and moral claims to an interpretive enterprise, at the center of which are these notions of familiarity (Vertrautheit), meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit), and care (Sorge). As he tells us, a ‘fundamental ontology’ is a ‘hermeneutics of facticity’, and for all the revisions in his language and approach, I don’t believe he ever changed his views about the ‘fundamentality’ of such a hermeneutics (p. 42).

I found an early (1923) lecture course of Heidegger entitled Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, in which he emphasizes that hermeneutics is “not just a doctrine about interpretation… Hermeneutics has the task of making the Dasein which is in each case our own accessible to this Dasein itself with regard to the character of its being, communicating Dasein to itself in this regard, hunting down the alienation from itself with which it is smitten” (p. 11 in link above).

Heidegger delights in putting forward new jargon, like specifying what is to be interpreted as “the being-there of Dasein in the awhileness of temporal particularity” (p. 5 in link above). In any case, Dasein is supposed to better characterize us than reason or intellect or Husserlian phenomenology.

I agree that interpretation does (or should) come before any account of knowledge or being. Meaning is never reducible to something merely given to us, but requires a kind of practical engagement. It is something that we create or construct as much as find.

“That is why the epistemological issue is not prominent in what follows. The manifestation of such significance… ‘happens’ as a matter of mattering and is not a problem of idealism and realism… [also] not a psychological or social-normative issue” (p. 43).

He wants significance to be something that “happens”. I agree it is not a psychological or sociological or other empirical fact. At a simple level, significance could be said to “happen” when interpretation happens. But as such, meaning is no more an event than it is a fact.

“Heidegger’s question is not about the content of the concept Being, but rather about the meaningfulness of our engagements and comportings” (p. 44).

“As Heidegger increasingly insists throughout the ’30s, manifestness in this sense is an event” (ibid).

Unlike meaning, it does seem as though manifestness could be considered at least closely related to a kind of event (an appearing). But I don’t think meaning or significance is reducible to such manifestness.

“Beings don’t have this familiar signification in isolation but within a horizon of possible meaningfulness — that is, within a world…. [T]he world can never become an object, a being, in the world…. And he claims: ‘We can never look upon the phenomenon of world directly’…. That is, the problem of the worldhood of the world in effect names the problem of the meaning of Being as such…. The combination of the world’s centrality and relative cognitive unavailability is what produces what Heidegger refers to as a kind of homesickness, an uncanniness at our being always subject to such a world into which we are thrown, but which we cannot redeem, make sense of theoretically, or directly articulate…. [S]uch worldhood is not a source we have any extra-worldly access to. Anyone for whom anything matters knows that such mattering cannot be understood as the result of any prior reflection on what ought to matter” (p. 45, emphasis in original).

There is no meaning of anything in isolation. Meaning exists only in relation to other meaning. It is an effect of the interconnection of things. “Worldhood” is a name Heidegger gives to this non-isolation of meanings, of which I note again that Hegel was the pioneer in modern times. But once more, I do not see what this would have to do with being as such. The relations that make up the world are concrete.

“Given that the emphasis here on our primary access to the meaning of Being as such is an attunement, not any theoretical claim, and given this focus through boredom, it is clearly the case that Heidegger is tracking how things ‘mean’ to us (‘how things stand concerning us’) as a matter of mattering, a kind of mattering that could contingently collapse and thereby reveal itself” (pp. 47-48).

Heidegger’s novel focus on motifs like boredom and anxiety in Being and Time became a major catalyst for 20th century existentialism. Pippin is generously tracing this back to the much more general question of how things come to “matter” to us. I think there is a more direct and more classical path into this question of mattering, which need have nothing to do with boredom or anxiety. At the level of “us”, we need to stop dichotomizing reason and feeling. As Aristotle said, ethical choice is “either intellect fused with desire, or desire fused with thinking, and such a source is a human being”.

Pippin expands on what he means by “mattering”. His account recalls both Hegel and American pragmatism.

“Our initiation into any historical world is primarily an initiation into this realm of mattering…. Language use is normative not only grammatically but in the matter of its proprieties. That is, we are implicitly attuned to proprieties, or meaningfulness and significances, in daily exchanges with others. (Being so attuned is not incompatible with disregarding or challenging such assumed norms. In fact, it is a necessary condition for doing so.) Likewise, when we learn a task, like cooking, we learn the normative proprieties of the art: what utensils are for, how to use them, what makes for good seasoning, good time management, best techniques, mis en place, etc. We learn to understand the relation between eating and dining, and the place of food and cooking in the rituals of family and social life. In this and many other domains, all the beings we encounter are encountered within a world in which public proprieties have come to prevail, and we are onto these not by having beliefs about them or as a result of explicit evaluations but through being in a world, coping with other beings and other Dasein, in our Verhalten, as Heidegger keeps saying: comportment, a practical mode of access everywhere normative” (p. 48).

Clearly, “mattering” has what the Kant scholars would nowadays call a normative character.

“Heidegger’s main point is that the present-at-hand seems to be such that an engagement with mere substances and their proprieties is treated as if it weren’t a worldly interpretation. We are engaged in a practical comportment that we take ourselves to be avoiding, to be aspiring to ‘the view from nowhere’. This would be like saying that what has come to matter most is a ‘not mattering’ world-relation” (p. 50, emphasis in original).

Pippin elsewhere compares the Heideggerian present-at-hand to the point of view of mere Consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology. They are both concerned with the reification of experience into subject and object. They both suppress their own interpretive character.

“I should also signal here that, especially with respect to Hegel, we will have to revisit the issue of a logical prejudice and examine whether Hegel is guilty of it. After all, Hegel relies in the Phenomenology on such nondiscursive moments as the struggle for recognition, which is certainly not an exchange of judgmental claims” (ibid).

Pippin elsewhere points out that Heidegger’s claim that Hegel’s approach to meaning necessarily involves a “logical prejudice” and ignores nondiscursive dimensions is itself tendentious.

Where he seems to have more sympathy to Heidegger is in relation to the Hegelian talk about the absolute. It now seems to me that like Brandom, Pippin ultimately rejects the Hegelian absolute, rather than just having a deflationary interpretation of it, such as I would propose. I think the “absolute” is inflated (originally Schellingian) rhetoric for the much more modest claim that there is after all some knowledge in the strong sense of episteme. Properly speaking, the Hegelian absolute is not God, though Hegel does figuratively connect the two, especially when he is trying to be understood by nonphilosophers. More properly, the absolute is any instance of pure thought. But the reality of pure thought is itself challenging to explain, especially as applicable to us humans, who experience and indeed are constituted by the fusion of intellect and desire. Aristotle, Averroes, Hegel, and Husserl all make important contributions to such an explanation.

“[T]he way in which the problem of being as such gets any kind of grip on Dasein is not as the result of judgmental claims. The manifestness of beings as a whole cannot be understood as the content of any ‘as such’ judgment. That is the ‘apophantical as’ and cannot be original because it depends on a prior ‘hermeneutical as’…. [T]he meaning should not be thought of in terms of discursivity — again, the cardinal sin of the metaphysical tradition, culminating in Kant and Hegel” (p. 52).

It seems to me that Heidegger’s notion of discursivity is too narrow. In Pippin’s account we see a kind of dichotomy operating, between the kind of judgment associated with assertion, and interpretation. Yes, the “apophantical as” does indeed depend on the “hermeneutic as”, but in my view this was already anticipated by Aristotle. Wisdom is excellence in interpretation, not allegedly “knowing” some pre-existing truth. Truth is not prefabricated in Plato or Aristotle; it is only arrived at through sustained inquiry, and it is the sustaining of the inquiry that gives it its solidity.

“[F]or Heidegger, in all of Western philosophy, we do not know what we mean when we simply note that something, whatever it is, is manifested as what it actually is, endures, or is still alive or occupies space — or, to broach a large topic for him, what ‘happens’ to be” (p. 55).

I say that this is obscurantist. Mere happening to be in and of itself has no meaning at all. It corresponds to inarticulate noise. We begin to have meaning when we talk about some detailed way of being. A mere accident has no meaning.

“So the question is not what some being is, or what it is as such, but what it ‘means’ for it to be at all. By ‘meaning’ here he does not mean linguistic meaning (he says that all linguistic meaning is founded on ontological meaning), and he does not mean meaning in the sense of purposiveness” (p. 56).

So the conclusion does not follow. The linguistic meaning that is rejected here seems to be that of a banal representationalism, and the purposiveness a banal form of utility. But ordinary linguistic meaning is not purely representational; it too has a “poetic” dimension. And internal teleology in Aristotle and Hegel is precisely not reducible to utility (see Teleology After Kant).

“Heidegger will often also note that being should be considered a ‘presencing’ (Anwesende) of being, not something present at hand. By making this distinction, he means that any being present to us (which Heidegger thinks we usually and thoughtlessly attend to as merely present-at-hand (Vorhanden) is only a result” (p. 58, emphasis in original).

That everything that seems to be simply given or present at hand is better understood as a result, is an insight that goes all the way back to Aristotle’s insistence on the priority of ends. It appears in a particularly vivid form in Kant and Hegel.

“This would mean a wholly contingent shifting from beings available as substantial in one period, …to, in another, beings available as created beings, to beings available only as represented for a subject, to being available only as material for technological manipulation…. The Greek notion of ousia (which Heidegger insists is already connected to property, material for use, disposability), the medieval focus on ens creatum, the post-Cartesian notion of represented-being, and the technological orientation all involve a kind of concealment (and therein lies a crude summary of Heidegger’s entire history of metaphysics) that must be different from the inevitable and, one might say, ontologically appropriate sort of ‘concealing’ (more a kind of elusiveness) in the ‘work of art’ — a Greek temple, say” (pp. 66-67).

This recognition of “elusiveness” goes all the way back to Socrates and Plato. It is what underlies Socratic questioning and the long detour.

“Plato and Aristotle set us in a direction we have found it impossible to free ourselves from — the metaphysics of presence, the primordial mattering of intelligibility, knowing, which shows up even in Nietzsche’s claim to have freed us from metaphysical illusions” (p. 67).

Plato and Aristotle were the original critics of the metaphysics of presence. In modern times, this critique was notably taken up by Hegel.

“Nothing is ever originally available to us as such present-at-hand beings, but remarkably we have come to experience the world through some sort of willful blindness thanks to which our everyday world, what should be closest to us, the familiarity of the world as pragmata, is furthest from us…. The question of the meaning of Being has been not only forgotten but suppressed, layered over with some putative ‘neutral’ posing of observing subjects against present at hand substances” (p. 69, emphasis in original).

Hegel’s Phenomenology is from beginning to end an elaboration of a more sophisticated version of this insight.

“Heidegger asks… ‘Why is logic the science of assertion?’…. But there is an obvious answer to Heidegger’s question. The assumption behind the priority of logos is that only an assertion can be a truth-bearer, can be true or false. And if true, then an assertion says how things are, corresponds with being ” (p. 70).

I say logic is a tool that is helpful in interpretation.

“[C]ontrary to what Heidegger says, truth must still reside in some assertion about what is disclosed. An event cannot itself be true or false” (p. 71).

Assertions are what is “true or false”. But I also recognize poetic truth, which is not “true or false”.

“The meaning of one’s being is one’s ‘ownmost’….Such knowledge can only be arrived at first-personally…. And so in cases like these (where the meaning of Dasein’s being is at issue), a propositional formulation would get us nowhere” (ibid).

Essence is not reducible to propositional content, to statements that are true or false. It involves propositional content and valuation and poetic truth. It is characteristic of Plato’s depictions of Socrates that he already makes makes a major theme of showing in many different ways that essence is elusive. That is what distinguishes it from appearance.

“The issue of the original meaningfulness of being in any historical world is simply not statable in propositional terms, and its availability in literature and life is a matter of interpretation, not cognition, attunement not assertion…. Instead any propositional formulation and assertion must be said to presuppose a ‘context of significance’…. Such a context is not one Dasein has a mediated relation ‘to’; hence all the formulations about Dasein being its disclosedness…, that it is the ‘clearing’ where such disclosure happens'” (p. 73).

In the mode of poetic truth, it could even be said that we interpreting animals come to be what we are by participating in the clearing where meaning “happens”. But if we are to speak of a happening of meaning, it should be said that such happening is not at all purely contingent. I am inclined to think that “purely contingent meaning” is an oxymoron. Where there is meaning at all, it must be possible to give some kind of account of it, even if it be not univocal.

Next in this series: Versions of Finitude