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| ISBN-13: | 9780810129023 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/31/2013 |
| Series: | Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.80(w) x 6.50(h) x 1.10(d) |
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TIME AND THE SHARED WORLD
Heidegger on Social Relations
By Irene McMullin
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2013 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2903-0
CHAPTER 1
The "Subject" of Inquiry
According to Heidegger, the traditional problem of other minds is in fact a false problematic because "the very being which serves as its theme repudiates such a line of questioning" (BT 206/ 191). In other words, Heidegger answers the problem of other minds by rejecting the modern conception of selfhood that gave rise to it and by insisting that any account of human existence in which it appears as a problem is misguided from the outset. Indeed, Heidegger's use of the term "Dasein" is itself a protest against such accounts and their tendency to characterize the self as an atomic substance that is "initially worldless, or not certain of its world, and which basically must first make certain of a world" (BT 206/ 191). With the notion of Dasein Heidegger instead names a self that only is insofar as it is social and worldly. He repudiates demands for proofs of external reality because Dasein is not a self-contained substance independent of the world but is instead "being-in-the-world." To be a self is to occupy a way of being characterized by relationality and responsiveness to the world and others. Though the notion of being-in-the-world may conjure images of distinct inside and outside realms, Heidegger uses this expression to characterize the way in which we do not live "outside" the world, only to find our way "into" it or "prove" that it's really there. Rather, we exist embedded in its social, practical, and axiological meanings and we understand ourselves in terms of them. Indeed, this context of meaning is just what Heidegger means by "world"—which is not merely the totality of objects but is instead the network of meaningful references in terms of which we understand ourselves. Heidegger presents his account as an alternative to the modern philosophical tradition, which has tended to use the observation of physical objects as the paradigm for understanding all things. In contrast, Heidegger asks us to recognize the inappropriateness of this ontology for understanding the self. The self is not an object comparable to hunks of matter located at some particular point in space-time. Naturalistic presuppositions about the fundamental thing-status of all beings therefore preclude an adequate thematization of selfhood. Selfhood is a way of being characterized by directedness toward and dependence on the worldly context of meaning—not by a self-enclosed worldless independence. To be-in-the-world, then, means that we orient our lives according to the meaning frameworks that it provides, not that we are just one more object positioned within a larger collection of things—the traditional notion of the "world."
On this picture, Dasein's relation to the world is not a contingent feature of its selfhood but is its very way of being: "In the customary, psychological representation of the 'I,' the relationship to the world is absent. Therefore, the representation of the ego cogito is abstract, whereas the 'I-am-in-the-world' lets the 'I' be conjoined with the world, that is, as something primordially concrete [ur-konkret]" (ZS 175). Being-in-the-world is relationality, dependence, and directedness—in Heidegger's terms, transcendence. By "transcendence" Heidegger does not intend the popular philosophical meaning according to which "to transcend" means for something to exist outside or beyond the immanent sphere of subjectivity. Such characterizations simply return us to the isolation of the Cartesian subject. The original meaning of transcendere, Heidegger claims, "signifies literally to step over, pass over, go through, and occasionally to surpass." Transcendence is the stepping over or beyond the "borders" of one's internal life to be with or at the thing toward which it is directed: "The transcendens, the transcendent, is that which oversteps as such and not that toward which I step over" (BPP 299). It is a fundamental openness to that which lies outside or beyond the immanent sphere of subjectivity—an openness that is not some kind of occasional activity of the self, but its very essence: "Dasein does not exist at first in some mysterious way so as then to accomplish the step beyond itself to others or to extant things. Existence, instead, always already means to step beyond or, better, having stepped beyond ... The transcendence, the over-and-out-beyond of the Dasein makes it possible for the Dasein to comport itself to beings, whether to extant things, to others, or to itself, as beings" (BPP 300). Thus one might say that the confines of one's inner life are porous; to be a self is to be fundamentally shaped by and directed toward the web of significance that is the world. "To relate itself is implicit in the concept of the subject. In its own self the subject is a being that relates-itself-to" (BPP 157). We are only selves insofar as we are engaged in the world's meaning framework and understand ourselves in terms of it. Indeed, our capacity to comport ourselves to things—to choose, to love, to organize, to regret—relies on precisely this openness to the world. To be a self is to always already be "at" the world—transfixed and engaged and dependent on its network of meanings and significances. Thus Heidegger claims that transcending "does not only and not primarily mean a self-relating of a subject to an object; rather, transcendence means to understand oneself from a world" (BPP 300).
But what does it mean to "understand oneself from a world"? According to Heidegger, Dasein is worldly not simply because it exists in relation to worldly things, but because through its activities and relationships it can understand itself as meeting the standards and filling the roles that give these practices their meaning. Though we will be discussing the nature of Dasein's selfhood further in chapter 2, it is enough to note here that unlike many traditional accounts, Heidegger argues that to be a self is to be committed to the deeply personal project of understanding who one is to be. Thus Dasein does not have its possibilities arrayed before it as indifferent objects of choice; rather, to be a self is to be caught up in the fact that certain possibilities matter. Indeed, "care" is the term that Heidegger uses to designate this specifically human way of existing as a being that understands itself from the context of activities and meanings through which it plays out the possibilities that matter to it. We care about certain possibilities because they define who we will be. Our encounters with things are not "a rigid staring at something merely objectively present. Being-in-the-world, as taking care of things, is taken in by the world which it takes care of" (BT 61/ 57). To be a self is to be defined by care-laden openness to the world.
The problem, however, is that the philosophical tradition has tended to reify selfhood as a result of its failure to decouple itself from substance-oriented thinking. In contrast, Heidegger argues that the self cannot be understood as a type of substance—whether it be an object banging up against other things located in the world or a closed private arena of beliefs and representations. Such characterizations fail by portraying the self as either too "close" or too "far" from the world. The consequence is that such theories are then required to compensate—either by accounting for how a worldly object can be conscious and care-driven or by solving skeptical problems regarding the existence of world and others "outside" the sphere of my mental representations. Both responses are rooted in another misguided aspect of the philosophical tradition: its tendency to take the detached observation of physical objects as the basic model for understanding the self-world relationship. This characterization both obscures the fact that such observation is founded on our practical engagements with the world and encourages the view that the self is self-contained. Though our capacity to achieve the detached stance of a disinterested observer is an important human ability, it is a refinement of our basic oriented, directed, care-based ways of being and cannot be taken as primary. For Heidegger, practical immersion in one's way of being in the world takes precedence in human existing; detached, contemplative, scientific modes of being are derivative attitudes that must be accomplished, despite philosophy's fondness for pretending that they are the norm.
According to Heidegger, it is their commitment to this "scientific" model of knowing that ultimately causes him to break with Husserl and with Kant. Heidegger takes his stance in opposition not only to the traditional Cartesian picture of the self-enclosed cogito, then, but also to Husserl and Kant, whom he took to be Descartes's intellectual children in this regard. This inheritance is evident, he thinks, insofar as they explain the indubitability of the I by attempting to "abstract from everything else that is 'given,' not only from an existing 'world' but also from the being of other 'I's" (BT 115/ 109). But such an approach, Heidegger claims, will only lead the existential analytic into a "trap" (BT 116/ 109) because it assumes that such an abstraction is possible and conducive to uncovering the meaning of the I. To do so is to interpret the self as a type of self-enclosed unit—much as things are. Avoiding such a trap-like project, then, means accounting for the self in terms of the world and the others who share it. Thus Heidegger will reject the Kantian I "because it exists only as 'I think' and not as 'I think something.' "
Of course, Heidegger's interpretation of Kant and Husserl's shortcomings can and should be questioned—especially insofar as the "I think something" is the essence of Husserl's characterization of intentionality. Thus even if we were to grant Heidegger the legitimacy of this criticism of Kant (which is also questionable), it is difficult to see how Heidegger can claim the distance that he does from Husserl's position. After all, it is a distortion of Husserl's work to suggest that his account of the transcendental subject simply reiterated the Cartesian view of subjectivity as monolithic, solitary, epistemic I. The theory of intentionality was Husserl's resistance to the isolation of the traditional subject; an impulse that he only continued to develop with his analyses of the lived body and the Lifeworld. Thus characterizing Husserlian intentionality as worldless is a misunderstanding at best, insofar as intentionality is Husserl's attempt to designate the way in which the self always exists immersed in its relation to the world.
Despite interpretive claims to the contrary, then—including, in some cases, Heidegger's own—Heidegger was deeply indebted to Husserl's insights. Heidegger's contributions to enriching phenomenology cannot be fully understood or appreciated without recognizing the manner in which they were a development of, and not a simple break with, Husserl's work. Heidegger himself admits as much insofar as he too addresses the problem of what it means to be an I in terms of intentionality. Thus in Being and Time he asserts that "essentially the person exists only in carrying out intentional acts, and is thus essentially not an object" (BT 48/ 44–45). As Heidegger's Marburg lectures of 1923 to 1928 reveal, Heidegger did not reject Husserl's notion of intentionality so much as call for a more thorough elaboration of it in light of ontological concerns regarding the being of the intentional subject and its object. This becomes clearer once we acknowledge that the kind of transcending toward the world dubbed being-in-the-world is already present in protoform in Husserl's notion of intentionality (since all "I thinks" are "I think something") as well as in his account of the horizonal nature of experience—the recognition that objects are always given in terms of their unfolding relationships both to other objects and to the experiencing self.
Heidegger did not so much reject Husserl's intentional I, then, as object to the tendency to characterize the intentional relationship as primarily cognitive. For Heidegger, the being of Husserl's intentional object is simply presupposed as equivalent to the being of the scientific object. Understood as such, the object is characterized without reference to the social, affective and practical context that gives it meaning, relying, instead, on an account of knowing that tends to abstract from these dimensions. Thus Heidegger believes that Husserl's approach inappropriately prioritizes the epistemic relation to the world; a misunderstanding most clearly evident in Husserl's tendency to locate the source of intentionality in consciousness rather than in the rich contours of affective, practical, social life. The result of this approach, Heidegger claims, is that Husserl's phenomenological descriptions of how meaning must be constituted in terms of the transcendental ego tend to sound too much like empiricist proofs for the existence of the world and other minds. Of course, the very essence of phenomenology is a rejection of the legitimacy of such metaphysical existence disputes in favor of analyses of how existence claims show up as meaningful within experience. Nevertheless, Husserl's focus on the "sphere of ownness" and the "solipsistic" perceptual horizon lead Heidegger to conclude that Husserl did not recognize the import of his own discovery. Namely, how intentionality means that the self is only in terms of its interrelation with the world and those who share it. Because Heidegger believes that Husserl's characterization of intentionality maintains this scientific stance, he rejects its viability for accounting for the worldly nature of selfhood. The notion of intentionality will have to be transformed if it is to accommodate the insight that Husserl was attempting to articulate—a transformation that will be examined in further detail in the following chapter.
Thus Husserl's emphasis on phenomenology as "science" is a position that many Heideggerians view as fundamentally incompatible with Heidegger's project. As one commentator puts it: "Whereas Heidegger aims at separating philosophical thinking from science, Husserl's intention is the reverse. He wants to confirm scientific theoria as the highest form of human praxis." However, though Heidegger rejects Husserl's epistemological orientation and its implicit commitment to the traditional conception of the self, there is another sense in which Heidegger adopts the same scientific stance that Husserl does. This becomes clear once we recognize that Husserl takes "science" to mean all endeavors founded on self-responsibility—meaning that "nothing held to be obvious, either predicatively or pre-predicatively, can pass, unquestioned, as a basis for knowledge." Such a stance does not mean that phenomenology confirms theory as primary or that it is a foundationalist project in the original Cartesian sense. Husserl is not trying to deduce an error-free view of the world on the basis of some indubitable truth, nor does he aim to replace praxis with theory (despite the problematic formulations that may promote this conclusion). Rather, Husserl's call for a rigorous science means that philosophy must take responsibility for its claims. This commitment manifests itself in phenomenology's methodological constraints, which prevent one from taking any claims for granted—most especially the natural attitude's tendency to simply take given objects as straightforwardly there. In other words, striving to make phenomenology scientific means distinguishing between naive, thing-focused modes of thought—characterized primarily by psychologism and naturalism for Husserl—and the philosophizing that attends to the primordial lived experiences from out of which such modes of thought arise. Such an approach is the same one adopted in Heidegger's "destruction" of the history of ontology, however, according to which the primordial lived experiences that gave rise to certain (distorting) philosophical concepts are uncovered once again. Thus Husserl's fundamental methodological insight—the "to the things themselves" that lies at the heart of phenomenology—is adopted by Heidegger himself (BT section 7, 27–39/ 23–34). Phenomenology—Heidegger's chosen method—is "to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself" (BT 34/ 30).
Indeed, Husserl's phenomenological demand that one ground one's transcendental claims regarding conditions for the possibility of experience in one's own concrete first-person experience was already a break with abstract Kantian-style transcendental philosophy insofar as it refused to deduce these conditions from some prior architectonic, but insisted that they could only arise in response to concrete existence itself. It is this impulse that Heidegger carries further by providing an existential grounding for Husserl's analyses of meaning. Heidegger was concerned with the first-person experience of meaning despite the fact that his project aimed at transforming the way in which the meaning and the method of this "first-person" is to be understood—a point to be examined further in chapter 2. Allowing the nature of human existence to show itself from itself therefore involves both a commitment to the Husserlian phenomenological approach and a refusal to accept the Cartesian baggage that prevented this approach from being as radical as it needed to be. Though Heidegger undeniably changed the focus of phenomenology, then, he is fundamentally a phenomenologist in the same scientific way that Husserl himself was.
This interpretation of Heidegger goes against the grain of much contemporary Heidegger scholarship, which takes Heidegger's relationship with Husserl to be a radical break rather than an enrichment and development (though one often characterized by bad feeling on both sides). According to the former account, Husserl was trapped in a traditional characterization of subjectivity that resulted in the solipsism and idealism characteristic of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. Heidegger's genius, so the story goes, lies in his radical rejection of the Husserlian subject in order to produce the notion of Dasein—in which no trace of the traditional subject is to be found. This transformation only continued throughout Heidegger's career, according to this interpretation, and ultimately culminated in an understanding of Dasein-analysis as a dead-end on the road to the real philosophical matter: the happening of Being.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from TIME AND THE SHARED WORLD by Irene McMullin. Copyright © 2013 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: Time and the Shared World 3
1 The "Subject" of Inquiry 15
2 Mineness and the Practical First-Person 39
3 Being and Otherness: Sartre's Critique 58
4 Heideggerian Aprioricity and the Categories of Being 77
5 The Temporality of Care 105
6 Fürsorge: Acknowledging the Other Dasein 141
7 Authenticity, Inauthenticity, and the Extremes of Fürsorge 184
Conclusion 231
Notes 235
Bibliography 269
Index 293