Minds and Brains

Being and Time era Heidegger is often accused of holding to some kind of subjectivism because of his “being idealism” wherein the being of entities is interdependent with the event of perceptual disclosure. But since early Heidegger also clearly states in several places that entities are not dependent on Dasein for their material existence, we are left with a contradiction between being idealism and entity realism. Now, there are many ways to try and get out of this contradiction. People like William Blattner differentiate between an empirical and a transcendental level of analysis where on the empirical level it makes sense to talk about independent entities but it does not make sense to do so on the transcendental level. Others like Dreyfus and Carman take a different route and simply define being idealism in such a way as to be compatible with entity realism. This is the route I take.

The best way to make entity realism consistent with being idealism is through what I call “ecological realism”. This version of realism must be decisively distinguished from classic or “philosophical realism”. Understanding the difference between these two styles of realism will help bolster my case that Heidegger understood himself to be a realist but denied the validity of “classical” realism. The key difference between ecological and classical realism is that whereas both believe that the Earth exists independently of the mind, ecological realism takes this as the starting point and philosophical realism takes it as something to be proved.

Along with Dasein as being-in-the-world, entities within-the-world have in each case already been disclosed. This existential-ontological assertion seems to accord with the thesis of realism that the external world is really present-at-hand. In so far as this existential assertion does not deny that entities within-the-world are present-at-hand, it agrees – doxographically, as it were – with the thesis of realism in its result. But it differs in principle from every kind of realism; for realism holds that the Reality of the ‘world’ not only needs to be proved but also is capable of proof. (BT 251)

Philosophical realism starts with the assumption of a consciousness or subjectivity isolated from the external world by means of an internal subjective sphere. The question is then “How does the inside of the sphere correspond to the outside?” Here we can see how classic realism runs dangerously close to being a form of idealism because it seems possible that our subjective experience could be totally different from the actual physical world. Indeed, it seems impossible to put the subjective and subjective worlds back together once cleaved. This is nothing other than the classic subject-object model that has caused so many problems in philosophy. Heidegger rejects this position not because he disagrees that the Earth exists independently of us, but rather, because he rejects the starting point of a consciousness isolated from it.

Instead, it is assumed that the mind relates to reality by means of already “dwelling outside”. For Heidegger, there is never a problem of how the inside corresponds to the outside because the mind is always already “outside”. But this doesn’t mean that the mind is somehow floating outside the skull. It simply means that insofar as the mind is characterized by intentionality (directedness towards), the mind is always already directed towards the outside world. Accordingly, subjectivity is understood in terms of being a process of encountering or attending to what’s already there before you: the environment. Perception then becomes a matter of regulating our reaction to the environment rather than constructing a model of the environment. We move from models of representation as mirroring to models of representation as control. The mind becomes a way of regulating our internal behaviors and homeostasis. This regulation forms a “background” upon which higher-order thoughts and theoretical reflections can occur. And built into this background is a feeling of existential being-in-the-world. This is because we spend our whole lives inhabiting the environment. To start from the presupposition that our primordial consciousness is separated from the environment is merely Cartesian dogma. Our primary consciousness is always already “outside” of our heads, in-the-world. This primary consciousness is better seen as a kind of low-level perceptual reactivity than any kind of theoretical cognition operating on the basis of symbolization.

The statement that the comportments of the Dasein are intentional means that the mode of being of our own self, the Dasein, is essentially such that this being, so far as it is, is always already dwelling with the extant. The idea of a subject which has intentional experiences merely inside its own sphere and is not yet outside it but encapsulated within itself is an absurdity which misconstrues the basic ontological structure of the being that we ourselves are. (BP 64).

So that’s more or less entity realism in a nutshell. What about being idealism? We have already set out a realist ontology based on the assumption of a direct realist account of intentionality. But we must infuse ecological realism with an “affordance ontology” in order to avoid a naive realism. It would be naive to suppose that animals directly attend to reality itself as understood by the physical sciences. But any direct realism worth its salt will never claim that animals directly perceive the actual structure of reality. This would be putting the cart before the horse. Instead, direct realism claims that animals do not first learn to perceive the present-at-hand structure of the Earth, but rather, they learn to perceive affordances. Affordances are objective properties of the given environment that are related to what an animal can do (with passive observation being a derivative kind of activity). For example, a chair affords the possibility of sitting for those with the appropriate bodies and capacities. But the affordance property of the chair is completely objective and independent of the perceiver. Whether the chair is capable of supporting someone is based on the material dynamics of the chair itself independent of my mind. As Gibson says, “The affordance points both ways [subjective and objective]. What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental, as we are accustomed to believe”.

It is here we can develop an account of being idealism that does not contradict entity realism. Take the chair again. The chair as it materially exists is independent of my perception of it. But my perception of the chair as as something-for-sitting is dependent on me the subject. So we can say that whereas the chair independently exists on the ontic level, its ontological being is dependent on how I take it to be. And since I can take the chair in many different ways depending on the context of my interaction, its ontological mode of being is essentially “free” or “open” to an infinite number of involvements (chair can be used as a stool or as kindling, etc.). Accordingly, Big B Being becomes defined as the meaning or significance of entities in relation to prior interests. We can therefore have an idealism of meaning (being) without collapsing into a subjectivism because the affordance property of the entity is not something subjectively determined. The chair will support me whether or not I am around to actually sit on it.  In order to perceive the chair as a chair then, I need not construct a mental representation or subjectively “put a value” on a meaningless input. Rather, I need only to differentiate the affordance property from the given stimulus. In other words, I need only respond to the meaning of the stimulus, not its physical profile (wavelengths, etc.). Learning this capacity involves learning how to attend to the ecological level of reality, the level of the Umwelt.

Jon Cogburn is a great professor because he always inspires me to work on really cool problems. Yesterday was the first day of his graduate seminar on animal cognition and he already suggested an awesome topic for my term paper: Does Heidegger’s account of understanding require language? Since we are reading Brandom, and Brandom uses a similar contrastive approach whereby humans are understood as being discontinuous from animal minds in virtue of linguistic-inferential doings, I will defend Brandom by defending Heidegger’s argument (which Brandom himself is heavily indebted too). I think I am also going to use Charles Taylor’s account of constitutive self-interpretation and Tomasello and Clark’s account of linguistic constructionism to demonstrate the way in which language modifies understanding so as to create world-richness. And this account will be structured by a holistic, usage-based (rather than formal) model of language acquisition wherein the syntactical abilities of young children are primarily item-specific with only little ability for systematicity.  Here is an abstract I whipped up last night:

In contrast to [the] historical path toward an understanding of the concept of world, I attempted in Being and Time to provide a preliminary characterization of the phenomenon of world by interpreting the way in which we at first and for the most part move about in our everyday world. There I took my departure from what lies to hand in the everyday realm, from those things that we use and pursue, indeed in such a way that we do not really know of the peculiar character proper to such activity at all, and when we do try to describe it we immediately misinterpret it by applying concepts and questions that have their source elsewhere. That which is so close and intelligible to us in our everyday dealings is actually and fundamentally remote and unintelligible to us. In and through this initial characterization of the phenomenon of world the task is to press on and point out the phenomenon of world as a problem. It never occurred to me, however, to try and claim or prove with this interpretation that the essence of man consists in the fact that he knows how to handle knives and forks or use the tram. (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 177)

Some would say that this line is definitive textual evidence against a pragmatist reading of Heidegger. However, this would be a mistake insofar as pragmatism is also not committed to claiming that the essence of man consists in the usage of knives and forks. If anything, pragmatism has perhaps the best explanatory gloss on both pedestrian equipment use and the so-called “higher” faculties afforded by language and culture.

When people mention Heidegger’s name, the last thing on their mind is that he ever had anything to say about consciousness. Albeit controversial, I want to claim that Heidegger does try to describe the operation of consciousness through the method of formal indication. What term points to or indicates consciousness? Authentic resoluteness. I’ve had this thought for a long time now, but this is the first time I have tried to put it into words. I know it is an interpretive stretch, but bear with me as I work through this reading.

In order to see that an authentic moment of vision is synonymous with a moment of consciousness, we must first understand that I am using the term consciousness in a nontraditional fashion. Following Julian Jaynes, I reserve the term consciousness to exclusively refer to the operation of introspection wherein meanings and thoughts are manipulated in an temporarily constructed and easily dissoluble “mind-space” or “workspace”. I am not suggesting that we revert to Cartesian theater models of the mind, but rather, I am suggesting that the Cartesian theater which introspects is itself an analogical model virtually constructed on-the-fly which exists only in the functional sense. What is it that does the introspection? Julian Jaynes calls it the “analog I”. Heidegger calls it the authentic Self. Cognitive scientists have called it the “narrative Self” or “interpretive Self”.  These concepts are a counterpart to what can be called the “minimal Self”, “they-self”, or “cognitive unconscious” i.e. that Self which is always operative at the subpersonal level and which grounds higher-order cognitive states.

Moreover, this conception of consciousness differs from the tradition insofar as the analog I or authentic Self is a modification of the more primordial they-self. Instead of being constantly present-at-hand in experience so as to ground and constitute it in its subjectivity, the analog I is but a temporary construction which comes into being and than fades away as we are reabsorbed into the familiarity of the world. Indeed, “Authentic being-one’s-Self takes the definite form of an existentiell modification of the ‘they’” (SZ 267). When Heidegger uses the term “existentiell” he is referring to ontic properties. This is a formal indication for material processes e.g. bodily/neural systems in operation.

Furthermore, consciousness is not just some free-floating spectator, but serves a purpose insofar as it is an operation rather than a thing or passive repository. What is the function? A shortcut to behavior through resolute decision making experienced in terms of a “moment of vision”. Normally, our choices are not really choices, but rather, can be likened to a rock rolling down a hill. We simply get carried away by the environment insofar as we are “fallen”. Indeed,

The “they” has always kept Daein from taking hold of these possibilities of being. They “they” even hides the manner in which it has tacitly relieved Dasein of the burden of explicitly choosing these possibilities. It remains indefinite who has “really” done the choosing. So Dasein makes no choices, gets carried along by the nobody, and thus ensares itself in inauthenticity. This process can be reversed only if Dasein specifically brings itself back to itself from its lostness in the “they”….When Dasein thus brings itself back from the “they”, the they-self is modified in an existentiell manner so that it becomes authentic Being-one’s-Self. (SZ 268)

It is important to note however that falling, thrownness, and lostness must not be interpreted pejoratively.

We would…misunderstand the ontologico-existential structure of falling if we were to ascribe to it the sense of a bad and deplorable ontical property of which, perhaps, more advanced stages of human culture might be able to rid themselves. (SZ 176)

But because Dasein is lost in the they, it must find itself explicitly in order to be authentic. This finding oneself explicitly is the process of authentic resoluteness. It provides the opportunity for synthesizing factical experience into meaningful whole so as to provide a shortcut to behavior. For Heidegger, this takes the form of what he calls a “resolution”. It is actualized in terms of a “moment of vision” or “clarion call”. Indeed,

When resolute, Dasein has brought itself back from falling, and has done so precisely in order to be more authentically ‘there’ in the ‘moment of vision’ as regards the situation which has been disclosed. (SZ 328)

I read this action of authentic resolution structured in terms of a moment of vision as an essentially metacognitive act i.e. an act of the self which takes the self and its experiences as the object of attention. But this is no mere proprioception or internal self-perception, but rather, an act of introspection which grabs hold of the self from a particular perspective mediated by linguistic-cultural projections.

This distinctive and authentic disclosedness, which is attested in Dasein itself by its conscience – this reticent self-projection upon one’s ownmost being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety – we call “resoluteness“. (SZ 296)

Dasein’s being-guilty is a formal indication for how Dasein is for-the-most part thrown into the facticity of the they-self and the self-other interpretations of public everydayness. That we have no choice but to be fallen indicates that there is a “guilt” to which we are thrown into, a guilt which is amoral. When our consciousness is operative, a self-projection works so as to bring factical possibilities of behavior to our attention, the most extreme being our own death. Indeed, “The resolution is precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time” (SZ 298). Moreover, this resoluteness “does not detach Dasein from its world, nor does it isolate it so that it becomes a free-floating ‘I’” (SZ 298). The authentic Self or analog I is not free-floating precisely because the object of the analog is the real, factical self which has been thrown in a history of structural coupling with the real entities of the Earth. This is the ontically near “mineness” which provides the experiential landscape through which the analog I can construct a temporary introspective landscape wherein our whole being-in-the-world becomes an object of attention. And insofar as the facticity of Dasein becomes an object of attention, new possibilities of behavior are afforded which would not be available if we could not authentically introspect upon factical possibilities. Moreover, it is important to note that this level of analysis is purely formal. In reality, the forms of self-disclosure and self-projection change radically over time and space in accordance with cultural evolution. How you see and introspect upon yourself will depend on the particular structure of your culture and historicity.

Now, I freely admit that this whole story I have been telling is quite precarious on the interpretive level. There is no Rosetta Stone for translating descriptions of authentic resoluteness into descriptions of consciousness. But nevertheless I think I am on to something. For both Heidegger and Jaynes, authenticity/consciousness is something which is temporary and derivative. It is something which is a modification of subpersonal “thrownness” (which Jaynes’ called behavioral reactivity). It is essentially a form of self-disclosure or self-interpretation. It brings forth factical possibilities and acts as a shortcut for behavior. It operates by “temporalizing” or “spatializing” experienced time through a spatial metaphor (past-present-future i.e. autobiographical or “episodic” time). It is flexible and dependent on culture and language. It is an operation rather than a thing or repository. It helps constitutes who we are as a species and separates us from our animal cousins. It individualizes us as separate from everyone else in the unfolding of its operation. It operationalizes when our familiarity and habit-structures breakdown in the face of uncanniness. It can be described in terms of visual metaphors (“moment of vision”, “the mind’s eye”).

In this post, I want to expose the object-metaphors of analytic philosophy of mind. In this video interview of Chalmers, we can see that for him, consciousness is understood as if it were an entity. He says that “consciousness is a thing” (which we know), as if consciousness is an entity with properties in the way a door is an object with properties which we can come to know. He says that consciousness is “presented” to him, as if consciousness were an object in the visual field which we can come into contact with and manipulate. He says that consciousness “exists”, as if consciousness exists just like a rock exists. He “experiences it” as if consciousness were something we experience in everyday life, such as a couch. He says that physical behavior is always “accompanied” by consciousness, as if consciousness were some extant object which can either accompany us or not.

Moreover, for Chalmers, Zombies “lack” consciousness, as if consciousness were a thing, which we can either possess or not possess. In the same way, God could have created a pure physical universe which “lacks” consciousness. Consciousness is then understood as a thing which exists and has certain properties such as ineffability, privacy, phenomenal feel, etc. The world “contains” consciousness, as if consciousness were an object which can be placed inside of things (such as brains). He says that “there is more to consciousness than physical matter in the brain”. He says that consciousness is an “inner movie”, as if consciousness were analogous to a mind viewing the projections upon a theater. This is an object-metaphor on steroids. It is based on a fundamental spatial analogy which blends a conduit metaphor with a container metaphor. The conduit is the neural sensory system, across which raw sense-data is transferred. The conduit leads into a container (or theater). The dumping of sense-data into the container constitutes the possession of conscious experiences.

If this sounds Cartesian, it’s because it is. Chalmers says that there are basically two types of things: matter and consciousness. This is nothing other than substance dualism wrapped up in the guise of a “respectable” property dualism but I think Chalmers buys into the Cartesian strategy more than he lets on. This is evidenced when he retains the same set of assumptions which lead to Descartes’ strategy of methodical doubt. Like Husserl, I would imagine that Chalmers thinks a universe that only houses a disembodied consciousness is conceptually coherent.

I could multiple Heidegger quotes indefinitely in order to show how he critiqued the presuppositions of analytic philosophy of mind, but I assume readers of Heidegger are familiar with such literature. Needless to say, Heidegger realized that everyday metaphors for consciousness are steeped in the object-discourse we inherit from everyday experience. Analytic philosophers have long treated consciousness as if it were a present-at-hand entity. I hope my analysis of Chalmer’s language has demonstrated that this type of discourse is thoroughly cemented in mainstream analytic philosophy of mind. Very few people have taken seriously the implications of George Lakoff and Mark Johnsons magnum opus Philosophy in the Flesh. This book, more than any other (besides Being and Time), opened my mind to how philosophy always goes astray when it fails to consider the metaphorical nature of philosophical discourse. Chalmers is able to conceive of consciousness as this disembodied inner movie only because he uncritically uses object-metaphors and treats consciousness as a nonphysical thing modeled on our everyday interaction with physical things.

In my opinion, William James was making the same basic point in his famous article “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?“. James’ point was not that thoughts and introspections don’t exist, but rather, that consciousness does not exist in the same way a rock exists, hence, consciousness “does not exist” (as an entity). But thoughts and introspections certainly do. As James says,

To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it — for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist — that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function.

While this might sound absurd to traditional Heideggerian scholars, I contend that Heidegger would emphatically agree with James on this point. Consciousness is not a present-at-hand thing. But it still exists. How? As an operation. As something we do. This is Alva Noë’s basic point as well, although it always gets misinterpreted as some kind of radical claim. This enactive approach to consciousness does suffer from a flaw however: whereas it critiques the inner theater model for perceptual consciousness, it needlessly abandons it for understanding introspective consciousness, which is a whole other breed of experience. This is another classic mistake of analytic philosophy of mind. By failing to distinguish the consciousness of brute cognition and the consciousness of introspection, many philosophers fail to realize that introspective consciousness is a different explanandum than cognition, which philosophers often call “phenomenal consciousness”. Accordingly, there is a distinction to be made between consciousness proper (self-reflexive introspection structured in term of self-metaphors such as the “I”) and cognition proper (real-time “on-the-fly” sensorimotor reaction).

Chalmers doesn’t make this distinction because for him, animals without introspection still qualify as fully conscious. This is because Chalmers buys into the theater metaphor for perceptual cognition. My beef is not with theater metaphors, but only with their application to low-level perceptual cognition. Theater metaphors are only applicable when we literally analogize a situation in terms of narratively-driven introspection. When we stop to think, we introspect upon a space which is an analog of our understanding of physical space. Philosophers like Chalmers take the spatialization of introspection to suggest that all experience is spatialized by this inner/outer distinction but he unwittingly extends the metaphor too far when he applies it to low-level cognition. This leads to all sorts of strange implications such as Zombies. But if we follow James and Heidegger in denying that consciousness is an entity, we can come to better understand our experience without eliminating or reducing the concept of consciousness.

It is well known that Heidegger’s concept of truth differs radically from the traditional correspondence theory. Some people take this to mean that Heidegger was in some way undercutting the possibility of propositional or predicative truth wherein our assertions are lined up and compared with reality as it exists in itself. Accordingly, this radical notion of truth is usually understood in terms of some kind of idealism or subjectivism. This line of interpretation is driven by passages where Heidegger says that “Being (not entities) is something which “there is” only in so far as truth is. And truth is only in so far and as long as Dasein is” (SZ 230).

However, I want to decisively argue against an idealist or subjectivist interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of truth. On my reading (which I am still developing), Heidegger’s notion of truth is entirely compatible with there being a mind-independent world that we more or less have direct access to by means of encountering it. This requires that we read Heidegger’s notion of truth in phenomenological terms. What needs explaining is how “the proposition that ‘Dasein is in the truth’ states equiprimordially that ‘Dasein is in untruth’” (SZ 222). What does this mean? How can we live in both truth and untruth?

The answer to this question lies in the notion of structural coupling. Structural coupling occurs whenever there is a history of recurrent interaction between two systems. More specifically, in virtue of its autopoietic (i.e. self-organizing) unity, an organism is structurally coupled with the environment insofar as it maintains its unity it respect to the environment. Accordingly, cognition can be defined as “A history of structural coupling that brings forth a world.” This definition of cognition is in stark contrast to the traditional conception of cognition as the manipulation of explicit symbol tokens by a central processing unit.

What does this have to do with Heidegger’s notion of truth? I propose that for Heidegger, Dasein is “in the truth” insofar as it is structurally coupled to a real environment. Dasein isn’t coupled to itself, nor its ideas, representations, or thoughts; it is coupled to the Umwelt, which is composed of real entities that have a structural determination independent of whether we are there to disclose it. Indeed, look at this passage:

Because the kind of being that is essential to truth is of the character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Dasein’s being. Does this relatively signify that all truth is ‘subjective’? If one interprets ‘subjective’ as ‘left to the subject’s discretion’, then it certainly does not. For uncovering, in the sense which is most its own, takes asserting out of the province of the ‘subjective discretion, and brings the uncovering Dasein face to face with the entities themselves. (SZ 227)

I have elaborated on this notion of encountering before (more recently here). Basically, the idea is that our cognition is directed towards the things themselves rather than any putative re-presentation of the things inside a mental theater. As I put it earlier,

perception is a matter of encountering or attending to what is already presenting itself to us. As long as we are alive, we have no choice but to encounter the Earth. Understood this way, sensations are irrelevant for the achievement of perception. All that matters for the act of perception is the performance of the act. And it is only dogmatism which supposes that the act of perception involves re-presenting the phenomena in terms of sense-data. For this, there is no need. We only need to respond or react to that which is there in such a way as to maintain the unity of our bodily singularity.

This direct response to what is “really there” in the environment grounds Heidegger’s notion of truth. This notion is taken from his definition of phenomena as that the totality of what shows itself. I contend that this notion of showing and encountering can be explained in terms of J.J. Gibson’s theory of direct realism. I don’t know of any other Heideggerian theorist who has proposed a concrete theory of how phenomena can show themselves and how we are receptive to this showing. I propose that the notion of structural coupling in addition to Gibson’s notion of affordance perception provides the necessary theoretical background for making sense of how Dasein can encounter the phenomenon as it shows itself from itself.

So now we have explained what Heidegger means when he says that Dasein lives in the truth. But as we saw above, Dasein also lives in the untruth. What does this mean? It means that our encounter with the environment is always an interpretive encounter. But this doesn’t mean that Dasien is synthesizing brute intuitions through a transcendental manifold, nor is Dasein generating internal “percepts” through sense-data. Heidegger’s notion of thrown projection is postKantian in the sense that for Heidegger, nothing is added to the phenomenon. In the act of perception, we simply perform the act. Accordingly, the significance of the world is generated by means of structural coupling rather than any putative “subjective coloring” of a static reality. As Varella and Maturana put it,

Inasmuch as the changes of state of an organism (with or without a nervous system) depend on its history of structural coupling [with the environment], changes of state of the organism in its environment will necessarily be suitable and familiar to it, independently of the behavior or environment we are describing.

In other words, the significance of entities (their meaning in relation to Dasein) is dependent on both the context of the situation and the internal historicity of the perceiver, but not on the generation of subjective percepts. In this way, Dasein is always attending to a partial selection of reality and never the entire Earth at once. Indeed, to say that Dasein is in the truth “does not purport to say that ontically Dasein is introduced ‘to all the truth’ either always or just in every case, but rather, the disclosedness of its ownmost being belongs to its existential consitution” (SZ 220). Encounter is always interpretive and thus disclosure is always partial and selective.

[In disclosure] entities have not been completely hidden; they are precisely the sort of thing that has been uncovered, but at the same time they have been disguised. They show themselves, but in the mode of semblance. Likewise what has formerly been uncovered sinks back again, hidden and disguised. Because Dasein is essentially falling, its state of being is such that it is in ‘untruth’. (SZ 222)

Now we can see that Heidegger’s notion of truth is phenomenological insofar as it describes the history of structural coupling of Dasein with the environment. As we have seen, claiming that truth is dependent on Dasein does not mean that propositional truth somehow is no longer valid or that Heidegger ascribed to some kind of subjectivist relativism. Instead, we can understand the claim that Dasein is both in the truth and the untruth to mean that Dasein is always operating within a real environment by means of structural coupling but at the same time, we only attend to that level of reality which is salient in respect to our interests and internal history. Indeed,

The existential-ontological condition for the fact that being-in-the-world is characterized by ‘truth’ and ‘untruth’, lies in the state of Dasein’s being which we have designated as thrown projection. This is something that is constitutive for the structure of care. (SZ 223)

I finally picked up a copy of what everyone seems to be talking about these days: After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. I’ve read the first chapter and I am itching to get some initial thoughts out there.

First, I think Meillassoux frames the realism/anti-realism controversy very nicely. Part of the reason I am so fired up about this post is because Meillassoux’s work seems get to the root of many contemporary issues and thus works nicely as a springboard for the philosophical dialectic. I like his term “correlationism”. It does seem to capture a distinct flavor of philosophy, one that I often run into in continental circles. Many phenomenologists seem to accept the correlationist strategy of putting the reciprocal co-relation of human and Earth first, understanding the phenomena as that which appears within consciousness. And of course, Heidegger’s critics have pejoratively put this label of “relationist” or “correlationist” on him in order to raise problems for his system. But I don’t really think correlationism, as described by Meillassoux, captures Heidegger. Here’s why:

Meillassoux’s understanding of correlationism is derived from an analysis of primary and secondary qualities. He says

Whether it be affective or perceptual, the sensible only exists as a relation: a relation between the world and the living creature I am. (2)

He uses the Berkeleyan examples of pain not being in the fire itself or color not being in the painting itself. This is supposed to illustrate an important fact about human existence: perceptual experience is the experience of sensible qualities, which exist only as a relation between perceiver and perceived. Accordingly, Meillassoux sets up the problem of correlationism in terms of whether you are willing to say that relational qualities are all we can possibly have access to. In other words, Meillassoux’s problem with correlationism is not the subjectivist understanding of perception in terms of sensible qualities, but rather, the limiting of human access strictly to the co-relation with the Earth  rather than the Earth as it exists apart from the sensible relation (which for Meillassoux, we can access through mathematics).

My difficulty with Meillassoux is that he never even stops to consider if there are alternative ways to conceive of the organism-Earth perceptual relationship. He would be wise to read some of J.J. Gibson’s work on ecological optics. Indeed, for Gibson (and for Heidegger), sensations have nothing to do with perception. Accordingly, relation is simply the wrong term to describe the intentional perceptual experience. For Heidegger and for Gibson, perceptual experience is not a matter of generating sensations or “having” sensations. If we examine his language, we can see that Meillassoux buys into the very object-metaphor that Heidegger critiques so vehemently in describing the sensuous process. Meillassoux always talks about “the” sensible, “the” perception, or “the” sensation, as if these things actually were things. But the sensible is precisely not something which comes into existence or is generated when a subject is alongside the Earth. To think this is to misunderstand the intentionality of perception.

Strictly speaking, the most primordial perceptual experience of an organism perceiving the Earth is not characterized by the “having” of things called “sensations”. To believe so is to fall prey to the object metaphors that Modern philosophy has corrupted the philosophy of perception with. As Heidegger says, perception is not about returning one’s “booty” of sensation back to the “cabinet” of consciousness. Instead, perception is a matter of encountering the phenomenon. And crucially, the genuine phenomenon for Heidegger is not the appearance within a consciousness, but rather, that which is known in perception, namely, the things themselves. “Phenomena are the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to the light”. What lies in the light of the day? The Earth! Indeed, it is the planet Earth upon which the sun shines.

Accordingly, perception is a matter of encountering or attending to what is already presenting itself to us. As long as we are alive, we have no choice but to encounter the Earth. Understood this way, sensations are irrelevant for the achievement of perception. All that matters for the act of perception is the performance of the act. And it is only dogmatism which supposes that the act of perception involves re-presenting the phenomena in terms of sense-data. For this, there is no need. We only need to respond or react to that which is there in such a way as to maintain the unity of our bodily singularity. And of course, our entire history of responding to the Earth, from conception until death, is determinate for how we react to the phenomena. This is where circumspective interpretation and “temporalization” comes in. Every encounter with the Earth is an interpretation or “projection” based on what we bring to the phenomenon in accordance with the fundamental historicity of our factical life experience.

It is curious then that Meillassoux says that “it becomes possible to say that every philosophy which disavows naive realism has become a variant of correlationism” (5). On my reading then, Heidegger escapes correlationism because he was a naive realist (Graham Harman might be interested in this claim)! But naive isn’t the right word. “Direct realism” or “ecological realism” is better. Basically, direct realism is the thesis that perception is a comportment towards the things themselves, but that how we take those things depends on the perceiver. Moreover, with visual perception, we are not directed towards the actual object, but rather, the ambient light which nomothetically reflects off the actual objects. We sense light and in so doing we attend to the objects themselves. It has been experimentally demonstrated that receptivity towards textures of light upon the retina which result from movement through the ambient light specifies enough information about the environment so as to intelligibly navigate through it.

This is why Meillassoux is mistaken when he assumes that perception of color necessarily involves a sensation or percept of color. In virtue of well-known physical laws, ambient light reflectance is determined by the chemical nature of the perceived object. Different chemical compositions on the surface of the object reflect light differently and can thus be specified by information contained within the ambient light. To perceive color then, we need only discriminate ordered  patterns of stimulus, not “generate a percept”. I thus agree wholeheartedly with Nigel Thomas when he says that:

colors (and all other experienced qualities) really exist out there in the world, just as do shape, size, and motion (or whatever properties are sanctioned by the latest physical theories). Furthermore, rather than merely mentally representing these qualities (or information about them), we are able to know or be in touch with them, as they exist outside of us, in a quite concrete sense. Qualitative experience, I am suggesting, may consist in being in contact with qualities rather than in the ‘having’ of qualia.

Accordingly, direct realism avoids the problem of correlationism because it never holds to the Kantian thesis that perception necessarily adds something to the phenomena. For direct realism, nothing is added to the phenomenon, we simply perform the act of encountering it. In this way, “Dasein remains outside” with the things themselves. This is why Heidegger is always saying things like:

To say that I am in the first place oriented towards sensations is all just pure theory. In conformity with its sense of direction, perception is directed toward a being that is extant. It intends this precisely as extant and knows nothing at all about sensations that it is apprehending.

in opposition to the subjectivist misinterpretations that perception is directed in the first instance only to something subjective, that is, to sensations, it was necessary to show that perception is directed toward the extant itself.

Nevertheless, the walls [in a lecture hall] are already present even before we think them as objects. Much else also gives itself to us before any determining of it by thought. Much else – but how? Not as a jumbled heap of things but as an environs, a surroundings, which contains within itself a closed, intelligible contexture

intraworldliness does not belong to the being of the extant, or in particular to that of nature, but only devolves upon it. Nature can also be without there being a world, without a Dasein existing…The being of beings which are not a Dasein has a richer and more complex structure and therefore goes beyond the usual characterization of that extant as a contexture of things

So far I am pleased with how my thesis is shaping up and the scholarly direction I am taking. I wanted first and foremost for this thesis to focus on explaining Heidegger rather than simply explaining why everyone else is wrong. I struggled for awhile with trying to choose which scholars I wanted to attack when I was first drafting the outline. But then I was reading some secondary literature and I realized that I hate it when Heideggerian scholars bicker back and forth about some trivial issue rather than dealing with Heidegger himself.  I often get the feeling that these scholars are more interested in preserving their academic reputation than attending to the “things themselves”. But now I am following a different strategy. Instead of devoting whole sections to showing how other interpretations miss the mark, I am simply going to briefly mark in a footnote what the position of other scholars is, but not really explain why they are wrong explicitly. I will simply mark their position and move back to my own interpretation.

I realized recently that I want my thesis to be 90% original interpretation. Reading through the secondary literature, I have become conscious that my interpretation of Heidegger is unique and that I have a lot to offer to the Heideggerian community. While I agree doxographically about certain issues with many people, there is no one I know of who reads Heidegger exactly like I do. I feel like I have a unique grasp on what Heidegger was really saying, particularly in respect to circumspective concern, Dasein, Existenz, intentionality, being/beings, Befindlichkeit, the question of the meaning of being, language as the house of being, phenomenological-ontology, the fourfold, and  authenticity.

Thomas Sheehan, Taylor Carman, Hubert Dreyfus, and Michael Wheeler come closest to my interpretation, but I find that each author suffers from theoretical hangups when it comes to paraphrasing Heideggerian concepts into concrete examples. For me, concrete examples are the highest standard of clarity in Heideggerian scholarship. If you can’t give a concrete example or description of the phenomenon that Heidegger is discussing, then in my mind you do not understand Heidegger’s meaning. If you haven’t experienced an authentic moment of vision and don’t know how to describe that experience, then you do not understand the concept of authenticity in phenomenology. You might be able to string Heideggerian jargon together in a way consistent with Heidegger’s own use of the term, but if you are unclear on the phenomenon in question, then you will never really “get” Heidegger, nor phenomenology.

Because so many scholars fail to live up to the rigorous introspective demands of phenomenological methodology, they end up merely parroting what Heidegger said rather than explaining what he was talking about. This is why I want my thesis to be less about showing why everyone else is wrong, and more of why my interpretation can unify Heidegger’s corpus into an internally consistent philosophical system, make sense of confusing “puzzle passages”, and clarify Heidegger’s position in respect to important issues such as the realism/idealism controversy, the problem of the external world, mind/body dualism, postKantian critical philosophy, etc.

Here are some of the things I will be demonstrating in my thesis:

• Following Sheehan (and Carman to some extent), I will argue that the question of the meaning of being is really about the question of the meaning of the meaningfulness of entities in relation to teleological interests. In other words, the being of an entity is always its meaning or significance for-the-sake-of a perceiver who is both concerned and familiar with the Earthly entities. But “being” (meaning) only “is” when there are perceivers. But entities nevertheless live a rich life of their own independent of perceivers. Accordingly,  we can explain how entities could exist independently of perceivers, but nevertheless their being (i.e. their meaning) depends on Dasein. We can thus have a entity realism and a being idealism without falling into a subjectivism. Moreover, this is a nontrivial philosophical position.
• In order to avoid a subjectivism wherein the given is “subjectively colored” or “synthesized” by the mental apparatus of the perceiver, we must develop a theory of perception wherein nothing is contributed in the act of perception. Instead of “synthesizing” the given into a percept, Heideggerian perception is described in terms of an entity encountering what is already there. In psychological terms, this can be described as an attentional theory of perception. Instead of enriching the stimulus through mental gymnastics, the entity is simply attentive to the meaning already specified within the ordered structure of the given. Because the meaning is already there in the environment, we can understand perception in terms of a perceiver taking the Earth as meaningful. Accordingly, there is nothing contributed to the stimulus in the act of perception as with Kantian psychology; the act if simply performed.
• Taking-as must be described in prepredicative terms because the meaning of the Earth is determined by the internal historicity of the perceiving entity as a living body. Because the historicity of biological organisms is structured by immediate teleological principles of homeostatic regulation, the internal balance of the system coconstitutes the manner of how we take the Earth to be. Moreover, the taking act is a worlding act. If you have a teleological instinct for self-preservation through the continual maintenance of structural unity, then there is an immediate mood or “affectivity” (Befindlichkeit) which governs your manner of interaction with the Earth. If you have a mood, then you have a world in virtue of being “attuned” or familiar with entities. This is what separates animate from inanimate entities. And because the teleological demands of the system are determined by a structural coupling with the environment, we can say that the Earth is immediately significant for the organism in virtue of the history of structural coupling of the organism with the Earth. This is why the Care-structure is temporalized. The teleology of the organism is always such that we are future-directed (so as to maintain our internal balance), but the history of structural coupling guarantees that our realtime interactions are coconstituted by our entire historicity as an embodied organism. The organism thus provides the model of temporality for Heidegger.
• Accordingly, I will argue that it is not affectivity, care, understanding, or temporality which separates Dasein from other animals. We share all these features with other animals insofar as they too are structured by teleological principles of organization. But these animals are still “world poor”. Why? Because they lack a complex syntactical language. It is language which gives birth to the thing through the power of naming and high-order attentional modulation. Language also allows us to engage in joint-attention. I can point something out and refer to it by name in order to control the attention of both myself and other people. Language allows us to point out and attend to higher levels of organization. For example,  the linguistic concept of person greatly changes how we perceive and interpret the world. We see others not as automatons or animated beings but as persons. Moreover, we understand ourselves to be persons. My account of language will thus account for Heidegger’s discussion of the word and thing, as well as the famous statement that language is the house of being. I will also be bringing contemporary developments in cognitive linguistics to bear on the question of language in Heidegger’s thought, showing that his account of language is now being confirmed by theoretical developments in the mind sciences.

Heideggeroids are known for their word play and inability to generate concrete expressions. This is especially true of scholarship on division II of Being and Time and later Heidegger. I’m sometimes suspicious that the scholar I’m reading has no idea what he or she is talking about. Accordingly, Heideggeroids usually substitute bad neologisms and jargon for a clear understanding of the phenomenon.

A Heideggeroid might respond by saying they are only following the Master’s lead. But Heidegger can be excused for his cryptic writing style because he understood the phenomenon to be described. Because he had such an intuitive understanding of the subject matter, he also realized the difficulty of capturing the rich manifold of human experience in the web of language and concepts. And not just any web, but one deeply embedded with metaphysical presuppositions that had long since oozed into the vernacular understanding by means of leaky philosophical systems. All his life then, Heidegger struggled with the same problem that has faced Zen for centuries: how do you think about thoughtless experience?

Rigorous phenomenology reveals that reflective, thinking consciousness sits on the surface of our total cognitive system. The idea of a vast, subpersonal ocean of mental activity is well-accepted by theorists today. Moreover, meditaters have understood since its original development that the thinking mind is part of a greater whole.This idea was also “in the air” during Heidegger’s time (through psychology and psychoanalysis). Indeed, one could say that the “they-self” is Heidegger’s attempt at describing unconscious processes in nonpsychologistic terminology. However, if we admit that the nonconscious mind is a legitimate form of human mental experience, albeit not filtered through language and socially constructed concepts, how do we include it into our phenomenology?

Close study of the mind reveals that it is the unconscious libidinal energy that grounds the rational, self-reflexive ego. Without the emotional undercurrent of the unconscious, the thoughts that float on top would lose their connection to the ongoing stream of bodily experience. You can see then the dilemma that phenomenology faces when confronted with the fundamental reality of the they-self.

It is my opinion that Heidegger, inspired by contact with the Eastern world and his own experience with nature, was a deep meditater. Indeed, I think any phenomenologist will miss the boat entirely unless they are thoroughly trained in meditation. Meditation allows you to fall into the thoughtless they-self without forgetting about the experience. This is the difference between a trained phenomenologist and a layman. Both are equally prone to falling into the they-self, but the phenomenologist expects it and is ready for it. The layman does not “wake up” or “return” to consciousness and then ponder about the time lost. The layman will not exercise the metacognition necessary for noting his return from the they-self, he will simply think a thought and then return to his absorption in the world. The phenomenologist however will not just return from his fall, but realize that he has “found himself”. The layman is never aware of his lostness in the way the phenomenologist is.

I suspect Heideggeroids are in the same position of ignorance. They read Heidegger’s words and learn how to string his neologisms into semi-coherent sentences but they fail to grasp the original, wordless experience of absorption. Because they do not understand the full target of phenomenology, they wind up sounding strange and esoteric in their speech and writings. But it’s time to wake up from this lostness into jargon. Heidegger already did the heavy phenomenological lifting for us. If we are to continue the task of phenomenology then, I think Heideggerians would profit more from heavy meditation rather than reading the Master. After all, a return to the “things themselves” does not mean a return to dusty German texts; it means a return to the primordial phenomenological datum: lived experience in all its manifold richness.

Graham Harman, in response to some recent communication and thinking about Heidegger’s relationship to Berkeley, has this to say:

There is obviously something psychologically special about humans in comparison with rocks and perhaps even flowers. No argument from me there. All sorts of fascinating human complexity is not to be found anywhere else. But it does not follow that human psychological peculiarity needs to be built into ontology as a full half of the cosmos.

…

Here’s a very nice passage from Dominic, which gets to the heart of the dispute I’ve had with a number of Heideggerians in this space over the past year, including both Minds and Brains and Chris Ruth. Only a few days ago did I realize the nature of the mutual misunderstanding, but Dominic gets it right:

“In other words, the question is not so much ‘does the hammer exist when I’m not using it’ (Heidegger would readily affirm that it does) as ‘does the hammer have a relationship to the nail, apart from my intention to use the one to strike the other’?”

Yes, that’s it. In recent days I realized (but perhaps I realized it before, and then forgot) that a number of my Heideggerian critics interpreted me as saying that Heidegger is Berkeley. In other words, when I say that there is nothing in Heidegger about the interaction between two entities when Dasein is not watching, they think I’m claiming that Heidegger is a sort of solipsistic idealist.

Well, he may actually be a bit closer to that than Heideggerians think. But that’s not the heart of my claim, and Dominic does get the heart of my claim: it’s about whether the Dasein/world relation is privileged over the world/world relation. In reviewing Lee Braver’s book in Philosophy Today, it’s what I called the “A7″ thesis (added on to Braver’s other 6 excellently useful anti-realist theses). A7 = “The human-world relation is the center of philosophy, having privileged status over all other relations.” And that’s really the essence of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. It doesn’t matter how much a Kantian insists that things-in-themselves really exist (and not all Kantians are that adamant). What matters is whether philosophy is allowed to treat sun/Mars and raindrop/ocean in the same way as human/tree.

I think Harman and Dominic have nicely clarified a pressing question: does Heidegger’s philosophy allow him to admit that humans interact with the Earth in the same ontological manner as a hammer falling to the ground during an earthquake does? Clearly not, based on standard readings of Heidegger’s ontology. But on my reading, this is indeed allowed but rarely mentioned; why not? Because it’s just common sense, encapsulated by the “natural attitude”, our basic way of understanding the world we live in. Normal people don’t doubt that raindrops over the ocean are having real interactions with each other; they just never bother to question it because it is so firmly rooted in how we understand reality. Indeed, the independence of object-object relations is something we learn in infancy and never forget.

Moreover, Heidegger says in the History of the Concept of Time that Dasein is corporeal. This is common sense. Everyone knows that they have a body and this body is made of “material stuff”. Clearly, the natural attitude understands that corporeal stuff interacts with the ground in the same way that raindrops interact with the ground. On a crude level of analysis then, most people understand that human bodies and the world are on the same ontological plain when it comes to what Harman and friends call “translation”, otherwise known as “bumping into” or “interacting with”. Heidegger doesn’t deny any of this. Indeed, Husserl insisted that the phenomenological reduction doesn’t deny the natural attitude but only temporarily suspends it for investigative purposes. Heidegger rarely comes right out and confirms the natural attitude, but he always implies its truth and never denies it. Why the hangup though? Because Heidegger wasn’t interested in the natural attitude or object-oriented science. In the same way that linguists aren’t interested in anything but language, Heidegger was only interested in the unique properties of the animal-world relationship, more specifically, the human animal-world relationship.

Heidegger was fascinated by animal-world relationship because of several unique properties, including affectivity (finding-oneself) and intentionality (directedness towards). Indeed, he says in the History of the Concept of Time that

A stone never finds itself but is simply present-at-hand. A very primitive unicellular form of life, on the contrary, will already find itself, where this affectivity can be the greatest and darkest dullness, but for all that it is in its structure of being essentially distinct from merely being present-at-hand like a thing.

What Heidegger is talking about here is the self-organizational property of living bodies, that peculiar way of bootstrapping oneself across time into a highly effective dynamic core of homeostatic directedness. As Maturana and Varela put it in The Tree of Knowledge,

What is distinctive about [organisms]…is that their organization is such that their only product is themselves, with no separation between producer and product. The being and doing of an autopoieic unity are inseparable, and this is their specific mode of organization.

So while the cellular organism is made of out the same physical “stuff” as inanimate objects, and thus “translates” in the same way on a fundamental level, the structural/functional properties of self-organization guarantee a unique “biological” phenomenology that is worlds apart from “stone phenomenology”. Furthermore, the addition of language, culture, and technology gives humans a “cultural” or “hermeneutic” phenomenology above and beyond the biological phenomenology that we share with our animal cousins. This is why Heidegger insists that language is the house of being, which constructs our unique “understanding of being” and gives rise to our capacity for ontological inquiry. Indeed, he says

Genuinely and initially, it is the essence of language to first elevate beings into the open as beings. Where there is no language — as with stones, plants, and animals — there is also no openness of beings and thus also no openness of non-beings, un-beings, or emptiness. By first naming objects, language brings beings to word and to appearance.

So it seems like Heidegger comes away unscathed from pejorative accusations of “correlationism”. He was fully capable of talking about the nail interacting with the hammer in the same way as our bodies interact with the hammer, but that just didn’t interest him. He was a phenomenologist after all, and remained one throughout his entire career.