The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (114 page)

But what are the implications for what has gone before in this chapter? How much of what we have seen Heidegger say, or of what has been said about what he says, resists being construed propositionally?
⁸⁰
Some central material survives, surely. Consider for example Heidegger’s distinction between ‘whos’ and ‘whats’, or his distinction between ‘whats’ that are ready-to-hand and ‘whats’ that are present-at-hand. These still look as though they can be taken at face value.
⁸¹
On the other hand what about
Heidegger’s very use of the word ‘Being’? Or ours in reporting and discussing him? Must these already indicate something awry with any purported propositions in which they occur – rather like a Fregean use of the word ‘property’ (
Ch. 8
, §7(b))?

The matter is not at all straightforward. This is partly because there are many ways of not taking a proposition at face value without impugning its propositionality. Thus consider a proposition’s grammar. This sometimes cannot be taken at face value. ‘She did it for the sake of Arthur’ does not state that she did it for something belonging to Arthur (cf.
Ch. 14
, §2). But we can still regard it as a bona fide proposition. Similarly, perhaps, in the case of ‘We have forgotten the Being of beings.’ Perhaps this is a bona fide proposition which nevertheless does not state that we have forgotten something belonging to beings. Or consider the way in which a word or phrase is sometimes used so that it is itself part of the subject matter of the proposition in which it occurs, even though syntax suggests otherwise. Examples are the use of ‘George Eliot’ in ‘By 1857 she had become George Eliot’ and (arguably) the use of ‘fifty-two’ in ‘He has misremembered his six-times table and thinks that six nines are fifty-two.’
⁸²
Whatever the correct story may be about Heidegger’s own use of the word ‘Being’,
⁸³
this second possibility is enough to safeguard the propositionality of much of what I have written about him, using that word. Thus ‘Heidegger wants to make sense of Being’ can at the very least be interpreted as a bona fide proposition concerning sense-making which Heidegger wants to achieve and which is such that imparting it, whether propositionally or not, involves the word ‘Being’.

There is clearly far more to be said about these matters and their bearing on Heidegger’s work. But I want now to focus on something of particular relevance to this enquiry: their bearing, more specifically, on his apparent idealism.

7. Idealism in Heidegger?

We found a kind of idealism in Husserl, which I suggested was to Husserl’s discredit (
Ch. 17
, §6). I also gave a diagnosis (
Ch. 17
, §7). We seem to find a kind of idealism in Heidegger. And we seem able to give the same diagnosis.

Where is there an appearance of idealism in Heidegger? We have already seen one place, if only in passing. I commented parenthetically in §3 that Heidegger individuates beings very finely. He distinguishes between ‘the “source” which the geographer establishes for a river’ and ‘the “springhead in the dale”’ – as he does between ‘the botanist’s plants’ and ‘the flowers in the hedgerow’ (p. 100/p. 70). It looks as though he is prepared, in idealistic vein, to carve up that of which sense is made in accord with the sense that is made of it. Such, more generally, appears to be the lesson of his distinction between things that are ready-to-hand and things that are present-at-hand. For this is a distinction that he draws by appeal to the different ways in which
Dasein
engages with things, where these in turn are, on a suitably broad construal of sense-making, different ways in which
Dasein
makes sense of things. Here is a striking passage in which Heidegger makes this very point and, in the course of doing so, seems to give it blatantly idealistic expression:

World exists – that is, it is – only if
Dasein
exists, only if there is
Dasein
. Only if …
Dasein
exists as being-in-the-world, is there understanding of Being, and only if this understanding exists are intra-worldly beings unveiled as present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. (
Basic Problems
, p. 297)

As far as the diagnosis is concerned, I suggested that Husserl’s error was to think that he could address questions, not only about
how
things are, but about
what
things are. Precisely the same diagnosis seems to be available in this case. For surely Heidegger would never have individuated beings as finely as this if he had not wanted to go beyond an account of how things are to an account of what they are; if he had not been concerned, indeed, with Being. This suspicion seems to be confirmed when he writes:

Beings are. Their Being contains the truth that they are. The fact
that
beings are gives to beings the privilege of the unquestioned. From here the question arises as to
what
beings are. (‘The End of Philosophy’, p. 81, emphasis in original; cf.
What Is Philosophy?
, pp. 35ff.)

But we need to tread very cautiously. I keep saying what there ‘seems’ to be in Heidegger – and with good reason. The appearances are misleading. Or at least they are partly misleading. Heidegger’s fine individuation of beings
seems
to betoken a simple idealism. But actually, the very fact that he individuates beings as finely as he does can just as well be taken to show, nay should be taken to show, that he understands beings to be, not just what sense is made of, but what sense is made of
as
thus made sense of. They are objects of intentionality.
⁸⁴
(Let us not forget that the individuation of beings is subject to the phenomenological reduction.) This is why he
says that ‘we must understand actuality, reality, vitality, existentiality, constancy in order to comport ourselves positively towards specifically actual, real, living, existing, constant beings’ (
Basic Problems
, pp. 10–11). On this conception of beings, the claim that beings depend for their individuation on the sense that is made of them, so far from having to be heard as a commitment to some kind of idealism, can be heard as a tautology. The same is true of the claim that ‘world’ depends for its existence on the existence of
Dasein
. For by ‘world’ Heidegger means ‘a determination of Being-in-the-world’ (
Basic Problems
, p. 166), a determination, in other words, of
Dasein
’s peculiar kind of Being.
⁸⁵
As for Heidegger’s insisting that there is a question about what beings are, that too can be heard in a quite innocuous way. What I proffered above in connection with Husserl was just a slogan. Husserl’s error was to attempt, by inappropriate phenomenological means, to say what the intrinsic nature of things was. Heidegger can be heard as asking, quite differently, and quite reasonably, how the notion of a being, as it occurs in his own work, is to be construed, in particular how beings are to be individuated: the very question that we have just been addressing.

This discussion is as pertinent to how the notion of Being is to be construed as it is to how the notion of a being is to be construed. For after all, Being is ‘that which determines beings as beings, that on the basis of which beings are already understood’ (pp. 25–26/p. 6). Being amounts to intelligibility or giveability. Or, as Heidegger himself puts it:

Being ‘is’ only in the understanding of those beings to whose Being something like an understanding of Being belongs…. [There] is a necessary connection between Being and understanding. (p. 228/p. 183)
⁸⁶

This in turn gives the lie to further appearances of idealism in Heidegger, among which the most pertinent are in §44(c) of
Being and Time
. He there writes:

Being … is something which ‘there is’ only in so far as truth is.
⁸⁷
And truth
is
only in so far as and only as long as
Dasein
is. (p. 272/p. 230, emphasis in original)

This too, on a correct understanding, can be heard as more or less tautologous.

Note that Heidegger very clearly distances his claim that Being depends on
Dasein
from the more idealistic-sounding claim, to which he emphatically does not subscribe, that beings depend on
Dasein
. Indeed in the ellipsis
in the quotation just given he writes in parentheses ‘not beings’. And earlier in the section he explains that:

beings are uncovered only when
Dasein is
; and only as long as
Dasein is
, are they disclosed….

[But]
once
beings have been uncovered, they show themselves precisely as beings which beforehand already were. (p. 269/pp. 226–227, emphasis adapted)

That beings are individuated in accord with the sense that is made of them, and that their Being (i.e. their intelligibility, their susceptibility to sense-making) is dependent on the sort of being that makes sense of them: neither of these facts gainsays the fact that they themselves enjoy, and indeed are made sense of as enjoying, an objectivity whereby they are quite independent of that sort of being. Only when I turn my head slightly or reach forward can I see or feel the pen on my desk, whose visibility and tangibility consist in the possibility of just such encounters. Moreover, I can distinguish between the pen
qua
seen and the pen
qua
felt. The fact remains that what I see or feel is something that was there anyway, already available to be seen or felt, which is indeed precisely how it strikes me when I see or feel it.
⁸⁸

At one stage Heidegger, making clear that he holds individual truths such as Newton’s laws and the principle of contradiction to be aspects of Being rather than beings, expresses the independence of beings with respect to
Dasein
as follows:

Newton’s laws, the principle of contradiction, any truth whatever – these are true only as long as
Dasein is
. Before there was any
Dasein
, there was no truth; nor will there be any after
Dasein
is no more…. Before Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not ‘true’….

[But to] say that before Newton his laws were [not true] … cannot signify that before him there were no such beings as have been uncovered and pointed out by those laws. Through Newton the laws became true; and with them, beings became accessible in themselves to
Dasein
. (p. 269/pp. 226–227, emphasis in original)

Relatedly:

All truth is relative to
Dasein
’s Being
. Does this relativity signify that all truth is ‘subjective’? If one interprets ‘subjective’ as ‘left to the subject’s discretion’, then it certainly does not. For uncovering … takes asserting out of the province of ‘subjective’ discretion … and brings the uncovering
Dasein
face to face with the beings themselves. (p. 270/p. 227, emphasis in original)
⁸⁹

On closer scrutiny, then, the initial appearance of idealism in Heidegger begins to fade. But it does not disappear altogether. Still less are we in a position to conclude that there is no idealism in Heidegger. I believe that there is in fact an idealism in Heidegger: a variation of the idealism that we found in Husserl, whereby the things of which we make natural sense depend for their essential features on their susceptibility to just such sense-making. Heidegger’s idealism is subtler than Husserl’s, partly because of the subtleties in this notion of a being, in its contrast with that of Being, and partly because of the more restrained phenomenological reduction that underpins it. But it may still ultimately be subject to similar objections.

Note first that the subtleties in the notion of a being may be subtleties too far. There are various familiar niceties (aporiae?) associated with the use of the word ‘
qua
’. Is the pen
qua
seen ‘the same thing’ as the pen
qua
felt? Is the pen
qua
used, and thus ready-to-hand, ‘the same thing’ as the pen
qua
contemplated, and thus present-at-hand? In a sense, in each case, yes; in a sense, in each case, no.
⁹⁰
But how satisfactorily can we both separate and maintain these different senses? More to the point, how satisfactorily can Heidegger do so, consonantly with what else he wants to say? The sense in which the pen was already available to be seen is surely the sense in which it
is
the same thing
qua
seen as
qua
felt, and the same thing
qua
used as
qua
contemplated. But that is not the sense that is pertinent to Heidegger’s finely individuated notion of a being. One wonders whether he would have done better to invoke something like Frege’s distinction between sense and
Bedeutung
, and to accept
only
the sense in which the pen
qua
used is the same thing as the pen
qua
contemplated, as indeed the source of the river identified by the geographer is the same thing as the springhead in the dale, albeit each of these things can be given, and can be made sense of, in more than one way. If somebody were to suggest that this is in effect what Heidegger is doing, and that his finely individuated beings are really nothing more than Fregean
Bedeutungen
indexed by Fregean senses, then that would raise a further concern. Heidegger’s insistence that such beings do not depend on
Dasein
would seem to commit him to a Fregean objectivity about
sense; and that would sit ill with his radically non-Fregean insistence that truths such as Newton’s laws do not antedate their discovery.