Minds and Brains

If you want to grasp the deep structure of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, there is no better place to start than his 1927 lecture course at the University of Marburg, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology . I am not aware of any other of Heidegger’s texts that is so clear and insistent on problems of realism and intentionality. In this post, I’d like to briefly examine some passages from Basic Problems in an attempt to establish a clear sense of Heidegger’s realism in relation to Kantian idealism. It is my contention that Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology is founded in overcoming the Kantian critique of phenomenology (the study of “appearances”) as a possible ontology. For reference, I am using the excellent Hofstadter translation.

Realism can mean many things. For how I understand Heidegger, it simply indicates that intentional perception must be conceived as a directing-towards-the-extant-world. Such a directing is conceived in terms of a behavioral comportment, with perception being a form of doing. Moreover, in order to think this concept of perception, we must reexamine the traditional dichotomy between the subjective and objective spheres. Heidegger makes a deeply insightful point that humans think of everything in terms of “being extant”, that is, in terms of a persistence, a “reality”, an occurring. Moreover, in thinking of intentionality, we cannot discover it in terms of a relation between extant objects and therefore, we think “if it is not objective then it is something subjective” (66). However, because of our “mode of understanding” applies to even the realm of subjectivity, “the subject, again, is taken with the same ontological indeterminateness to be something extant” (ibid.); indeterminateness meaning that we have no real understanding of what we are saying when we declare “the subject” to be extant and constantly present-at-hand throughout our waking life.

On the contrary, precisely with the aid of intentionality and its peculiarity of being neither objective nor subjective, we should stop short and ask: Must not the being to which this phenomenon, neither objective nor subjective, obviously belongs be conceived differently than it thus far has been? (ibid.)

Moreover,

Intentionality is neither objective nor subjective in the usual sense, although it is certainly both, but in a much more original sense, since intentionality, as belonging to the Dasein’s existence, makes it possible that this being, the Dasein, comports existingly towards the extant. (65)

“Comports existingly towards the extant”. Phrases to such an effect are littered through these sections on intentionality and perception.

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. (64)

Here we can see why Heideggerian ontology has often been adapted to underlay the theoretical structure of modern ecological – or situated – cognitive science, which is at odds with the innerpictorial sense-data theorists. Heidegger concurs with Gibson in his critique of cognitivist sense-data theories when he claims “To say that I am in the first place oriented toward 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” (63). “For the Dasein there is no outside, for which reason it is also absurd to talk about an inside” (66).

How people could read these sections and conclude that Heidegger wasn’t a direct realist or an externalist is beyond me. Can we not put to rest any such notions with the following passage?

Does the perceivedness of a being, of an existent, constitute its existence? Are existence, actuality, and perceivedness one and the same? The window, however, surely does not receive existence from my perceiving it, but just the reverse: I can perceive it only if it exists and because it exists. (49)

I therefore argue that Heidegger was not an antirealist who thought that our perceiving the world is what primordially constitutes the extant world. The world is extant without our perceiving it and we have a nonmediated access to it through intentional comportment. However, the intentional as-structure bestows significance upon the world, not because our perceptual systems are “constructing” it, but rather, because the as-structure filters our experience in terms of “obects” and “things” i.e. “entities”. In Being and Time, Heidegger defines “Being” as “that which determines entities as entities“. In Basic Problems, we see the same essential point:

This entity [nature] is intraworldly. But intraworldliness does not belong to nature’s being. Rather, in commerce with this entity, nature in the broadest sense, we understand that this entity is as something extant [occurrent], as an entity that we run up against, to which we are delivered over, which on its own part always already is. It is, even if we do not uncover it, i.e. without our encountering it in our world. Being within the world devolves upon this entity, nature, only when it is uncovered as an entity. (169)

I rest my case.

In this post, I want to take some time to outline the extent to which I disagree with Lee Braver’s analysis of Heidegger in chapter six of his A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. The reason I have chosen this purely negative analysis is because if I included all the points on which I agreed with Braver in addition to all the points I disagree on, this would be a a rather long and boring post (as it is likely to already be too long, and perhaps boring). By jumping straight into the areas of disagreement I have with Braver, I hope to show that according to my interpretation, early Heidegger and later Heidegger do not explicitly contradict each other but rather, only reaffirm the central philosophical insights towards which Heidegger was working at throughout his entire life. To get started, I am afraid that I must disagree with the first sentence of chapter six:

Hegel, Nietzsche, and the early Heidegger were all engaged in the project of working out the implications of Kant’s anti-realism while simultaneously trying to break free of certain ways of framing the issue.

For me, this sentence is highly loaded and misses the ways in which Heidegger sought to establish a crude form of ontic realism throughout his career, especially in Being and Time (BT) but also in his later works as well. As I see it, early Heidegger was not seeking to confirm Kant’s anti-realism through a “temporalizing [of reality] into the forms of engaged instrumentality or disengaged inertness.” As I have tried to argue elsewhere, when one reads Heidegger in terms of “determining reality” as either Dasein infused (ready-to-hand) or in terms of “disengaged inertness” (present-at-hand), one misses the way in which Heidegger was an ontic realist through his conception of presence. Basically, I see Braver as largely missing the realist orientation of BT when he claims that early Heidegger was arguing for A1 mind-dependence by denying a mind-independent reality through phenomenological-ontology. By missing the realism of Heidegger, the “givenness” of the clearing of being that is so important in later Heidegger becomes obfuscated in light of relativist sound bites like “truth as unconcealment” or “es er-eignet sich” (which, though, aren’t necessarily relativist blurbs). Allow me to elaborate on phenomenological-ontology:

For both Braver’s early and later Heidegger, there cannot be a distinction between appearance and reality because “reality” itself fluctuates according to whether Dasein is engaged or disengaged and hus particular historical attitude and cultural background. When engaged, reality consists of referential value-structures related to practical comportment (tool-mode); when disengaged, reality consists of value-less present-at-hand objectivities (staring-mode). It is no surprise then that Braver reads BT has one more book working out the implications of Kantian anti-realism through the denial of noumena and replacing it with a mind-dependent reality that constantly fluctuates depending on the attitude or mode of  Dasein the perceiver. However, on my reading – following Taylor Carman in his Heidegger’s Analytic – early Heidegger (and later Heidegger, in his own way) very much sought (contra Braver) to establish an ontic realism which includes a distinction between appearance and reality (with reality understood in a special, Heideggerian sense of course). This is done through multiple conceptual tools, namely: being as presence, the definition of phenomena and semblances, the as-structure, and truth as unconcealment. All of these conceptions seek to establish several points which throw a wrench in Braver’s distinctions between early and later Heidegger as anti-realist and realist, respectively.

To start, being as presence and the distinction between phenomena and semblance do much to get rid of the notion that Heidegger was in the business of denying a mind-independent reality. It is precisely the fact that the totality of entities in the world (presence) is independent of our consciousness of it that allows for the possibility of it being presented to us in the first place. This is the “it” of the “es gibt”; the “it” when one says “It’s raining!”. For Heidegger,  only on account of there being a world independent of us that we can make an interpretation of it, seeing the entities in the world as something. It is only through Kant that we got the idea that the world perceived by consciousness is dependent on that consciousness to appear as it is. In contrast, by defining phenomena as that which appears, without there being any noumena “behind” that appearance, Heidegger in BT seeks to get rid of this indirect representationalism and replace it with a direct realism.

In everyday behavior, say, in moving around this room, taking a look around my environment, I perceive the wall and the window. To what am I directed in this perception? To sensations? Or, when I avoid what is perceived, am I turning aside from representational images and taking care not to fail out of these representational images and sensations into the courtyard of the university building? (Basic Problems)

Following Husserl, early Heidegger wishes to get rid of the noumena/phenomena distinction, but as against Braver’s interpretation, does not do so by denying the capacity to see appearances. In the following passages, we can see Heidegger point out the logical problem in Kant’s analysis of phenomenology, and we can simultaneously see how the result of recognizing this distinction is a limiting, Kantian style critique of ontology that says only as phenomenology, is ontology possible :

Kant uses the term “appearance” in this twofold way. According to him “appearances” are, in the first place, the “objects of empirical intuition”: they are what shows itself in such intuition. But what thus shows itself (the “phenomenon” in the genuine primordial sense) is at the same time an “appearance” as an emanation of something which hides itself in that appearance – an emanation which announces. (BT 54)

…

[This is Heidegger's update on Kant's definitions]“Phenomenon”, the showing-itself-in-itself, signifies a distinctive way in which something can be encountered. “Appearance,” on the other hand, means a reference-relationship which is in an entity itself, and which is such that what does the referring (or the announcing) can fulfill its possible function only if it shows itself in itself and is thus a “phenomenon.” (BT 54)

…

Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible. In the phenomenological conception of “phenomenon” what one has in mind as that which shows itself is the being of entities, its meaning, its modifications and derivatives. And this showing-itself is not just any showing-itself, nor is it some such thing as appearing. Least of all can the being of entities ever be anything such that “behind it” stands something else “which does not appear.” (BT 60)

We see then that Heidegger did not think the appearance/reality distinction was entirely wrong, he only thought that it needed to be conceived in a way such that when we fail to perceive the world as it really is, we are merely seeing a semblance i.e.  an ontic malfunction. In all other cases, we are perceiving the world as it is, with “is” being understood in the ontological sense given by the referential systems of value-structure (ready-to-hand, etc).

I realize that this approach to Heidegger’s ontic realism is sloppy, so allow me to try and summarize what we have established so far. In both Kantian and Heideggerian systems, there are “phenomena” – that which shows itself. For Kant, that which shows itself is merely an extension of our own consciousness, and in this way, what “shows itself” is but a mere appearance because if it could really show itself, we would be perceiving the noumena and not the phenomena. For Heidegger, in contrast, that which shows itself can either be a true phenomena seen “as it really is”[the existential is] or it can be a semblance, where we see something as something it isn’t [existentially]. Both cases are dependent on the possibility of something “showing itself” to us. In the case of the semblance, what “shows itself” is the misrepresentation e.g. when seeing a stick in the grass as a snake, what “shows itself” is the appearance of the snake. When truly experiencing a phenomena, and not a semblance, what “shows itself” is the thing in the world itself e.g. seeing a stick in the grass “as” a stick. In both cases, there is never, strictly speaking, a phenomena which is also an appearance, as in Kant where both phenomena and semblances must be appearances, whereas in Heidegger, only the semblance is the appearance and the phenomena is the “showing itself in itself” (keep in mind though that a semblance is also a phenomenon in a way because it is showing itself “as itself”, which is a misrepresentation. This introduces Heidegger’s distinction between a Kantian “mere appearance” and a Heideggerian “semblance”).

We are now in a position to see the importance of the “as-structure” for dealing with Braver’s claim that early Heidegger was committed to a Kantian A1 anti-realism. With the being of Dasein conceived as presence, being is understood as “that which determines entities as entities”(BT 24/SZ 6). Accordingly, we can now see why Braver might be mistaken in assuming that truth as unconcealment “eliminates the distinction between correct and incorrect unconcealment”.  With the as-structure of interpretation, as outlined by the distinction between semblance and phenomena, we can see how it is possible to correctly see something “as it is” or incorrectly see it as “something which it is not”. This correctness or incorrectness of perception is only possibile with the capacity for language and the referential totality of tool-modes and language games. The man who sees the hammer as a hammer – as something to be used in construction – is seeing it “correctly”; whereas the man who sees the hammer as a piece of art to be displayed in his house is seeing it “incorrectly”. However, the seeing something “as it is” is not a correspondence with the “thing in itself” of Kant, but rather, only a “correspondence” in the minimal sense of playing along with an established language game that is “there”, irrespective of our individual consciousness by virtue of being communal and socialized.

Coming back to being as presence, I want to now discuss the connection between R6 realism of the subject and Braver’s interpretation of early and later Heidegger. For Braver, early Heidegger is committed to a discovering an a-historical “deep, true structure of the self” with later Heidegger being committed to destroying such a transcendental enterprise. However,with the being of Dasein conceived in terms of presence and the ways in which we can variously interpret that presence as one thing or another, we come to a conception of the self that isn’t quite as transcendental or a-historical as Braver and other scholars might imagine. If one conceives of the basic structure of the self in terms of interpreting the present, ontic world in various ways according to language games and the as-structure, and then couple this world-interpretation with a reflexive self-interpretation that is intimately related to this world-interpretation, then one does not get a picture of a static, transcendental subject, but rather, of a dynamic flux of world-interpretations and self-interpretations that change in accordance with the world-interpretations and vice-versa.

The only thing “transcendental” to Dasein is the fact that the most basic and underlying self-interpretation which feeds back into the world-interpretation is the interpretation of selfhood, or “I”-ness.  Dasein sees huself in terms of an “I”; indeed, Dasein lives hus entire world through this conception, both in authentic and inauthentic modes of being (being as presence). In the inauthentic mode, caught up in the daily affairs of life, we unconsciously let slip expressions like “I am so flustered!”. In the authentic mode, we can consciously reflect on our experience and think “I am the author of my actions” or “did I really see that snake or did I just see a stick?”. In both modes of authenticity, the “I” structures the basic hermeneutics of world and self intepretation. It is also the “I” which gives humans the capacity to “own” or “possess” anything, including an identity, a house, a feeling, or a perception. It is the basis for “mineness”.

While some who are more anthropologically inclined can challenge the universality of the “I” and establish that there are humans who might not even use the term nor think of themselves as individuals, according to Heideggerian thought, these people would not really count as “Dasein” given that they are incapable of stepping back and asking the question of the meaning of being (being as presence), which is “do I know what that thing is?” For Heidegger, the very basic phenomenological standpoint presupposes a basic form of I-hood or self-hood given that it is only a self that can recursively wonder if it has seen the world as it is or think about its experience in terms of a self-reflective agent. While such a definition of humanity or Dasein-ness is inherently circular, Heidegger never balks at this circularity, but rather, embraces it because from a developmental standpoint, we who think in such terms were never given a choice about the matter: being raised in the modern world necessarily imprints self-hood upon our children, barring ontic malfunction. The degrees of authenticity and world/self-interpretation vary dramatically of course according to culture, but the basic subject-object structure of mine-ness and interpreting the world as if it were “you” who “looks out” at the world and owns one’s perceptions is, for Heidegger, a “transcendental” requirement.

This peculiar, autobiographical form of transcendental self-hood looks largely different from Braver’s interpretation of early Heidegger, but strikingly similar to his later Heidegger, which is focused on different historical epochs of being. So while it may seem from my posts that I disagree with Braver on every issue in regards to the interpretation of Heidegger, I actually agree with him on most substantial issues, especially in relation to later Heidegger. In most respects, I think his later Heidegger is spot on but my real contention is that his early Heidegger needs to look more like his later Heidegger and both his early and later Heidegger need to look more like realists. When Braver says that later Heidegger “eliminates the distinction between reality and appearance”, I am worried that Braver is turning Heidegger into more of a relativist than he deserves credit for. Although Braver quotes Heidegger saying “both Galileo and his opponents saw the same ‘fact’,” I am not sure that Braver really does does justice to Heidegger’s ontic realism by fleshing out just what “presencing” entails.

Furthermore, it seems like Braver is conflating the absolutely crucial Heideggerian definition of “[B]eing” as “that which determines entiteis as entities” with the standard definition of “that which is“.  I see this ambiguity about what “being” refers to throughout Braver’s text. By never explicitly making the distinction between Heidegger’s definition of being as the disclosure-interpretation of presencing and the standard definition of being, Braver seems to equate later Heidegger’s insistence on the truth of Being as historical with a general relativism about the “truth” of various “worldviews” [I might be wrong on this interpretation of Braver, it is an awfully long and detailed chapter and I probably missed something]. I think this is largely due to the conflation I just mentioned between Heideggerian disclosure-being and the capital B being of “reality”.  We can see this on pg 270 when Braver says:

If we are not to begin with the presuppositions that tell us what reality must be like – especially unchanging, univocal, and so on – then we must take Being as it occurs in these various forms without dismissing them as merely transitory and thus unreal.

Braver consistently persists in confusing “reality” – the totality of entities being presenced – with “Being”, which for Heidegger, was defined in BT not as “reality” or anything like that, but rather “that which defines entities as entities”. This is the as-structure of interpretive-perception. Admittedly, this ambiguity is largely Heidegger’s fault given that he only seems to defines being that way in the introduction to BT and just assumes that the reader will pick up on what he is talking about in all his later work. Again, we can see Braver being led astray by this conflation when we says on pg 274:

The meaning of Being, the goal of [BT], was the temporality that human Dasein project which makes Being possibile, similar to Kant’s transcendental subject projects time and space.

When read through the lens of ontic realism and being as the disclosure-of-presencing then “Dasein making Being possible” is trivial given that it would translate to “Dasein makes it possible for there to be a disclosure of the presenced world to Dasein”. No where in such a reading would there be the anti-realist subjectivity that links early Heidegger to a  truly Kantian project. We see then that later Heidegger and his insistence on epochal being is only carrying out the logical conclusions of what being as presencing entails: the disclosure of the present, ontic world to a human perceiver is necessarily a historical event given the temporality of human lifespans. All later Heidegger was doing was fleshing out the conception of presence and making the historical aspect of being as presence more explicit, although all the hard philosophical work was already done in BT. Implicitly, such a epochal conception of being was there all along if one realizes that the presence of the world happens on a timescale of earlier and later.

I wish I could continue further in working with Braver’s text on all these issues because he does such a good job laying out all the essentials of Heideggerian thought whether you agree or disagree with him. It is a shame that I can only begin to touch on Braver’s scholarship here. Despite my issues with realism, Braver summarizes better than most what a historical phenomenology-ontology looks like, and his scholarship of the Gesamtausgabe is highly impressive and deserving of much praise. It is only in regards to the historical development of Heidegger’s thought that I disagree with Braver (there are also some terminological problems surrounding his use of “reality” that I take issue with, but hopefully my discussion above will help clear that up). In my opinion, the seeds of his later thought can be found implicitly and explicitly in BT and related lectures.

With all that said, I apologize that this post isn’t that informative about later Heidegger as it should have been. In my defense however, the important things I have to say about later Heidegger only make sense if you have a good conception of what early Heidegger was doing, and I wanted to connect the two projects of early and later Heidegger into a cohesive hermeneutic project framed in terms of ontic realism, as suggested by Taylor Carman.