Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies:
"The Continental Origins of Postmodernism"

Week 2: September 20-26

DISCUSSION OF "DASEIN" IN "WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?"

Sent: Thursday, September 23, 1999 9:43 AM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Dasein of the Time(s)

[From: David L. Potts ]

Bryan suggested that we might find his reading of "What Is Metaphysics?" too Sartrean; I confess I did find it so. I was particularly distressed to read that according to Heidegger "one [i.e., the human subject] is nothing. The terms 'the nothing' and 'the subject' are co-referential." But Heidegger does not talk about "the subject." That would smack of Cartesian subject-object ontology, which is accepted by all modern philosophy and which Heidegger is keen to "de-struct" ("Introduction" to _Being and Time_, in _Basic Writings_, 69-70; NB - my edition of BW evidently is different from Bryan's: my page numbers are normally two greater than his for the same material). And in fact Heidegger relentlessly avoids any sort of mentalistic language, anything that would imply that he accepts the mind or the knowing subject as valid ontological categories. If Heidegger ever refers to Dasein as "the subject" I would be curious to know where.

The point matters because, as I read Heidegger, it is essential to his project to escape the difficulties Descartes opened up for modern philosophy by questioning the subject-object ontology that Heidegger believes to be the root cause of said difficulties. These are the same difficulties, about causation, space, time, freedom, etc., that Kant wrestled with and tried but failed to resolve with his transcendental method. Kant failed because he accepted Descartes' categories rather than ask "the question of Being" ("Intro" to B&T, 68-69), which is the question what is the meaning of being in general. That is, prior to deciding upon any set of ontological categories, we ought to ask the more fundamental question what it means to be per se. Thus Heidegger proposes a sort of meta-ontology prior to ontology itself, which in turn is prior to science ("Intro" to B&T, 53). He hopes thereby to succeed in establishing the foundation of science where Kant and Hegel and Husserl and all the rest failed. This being so, he is certainly not going to begin by presupposing subject-object dualism.

Again, consider the following from the "Letter on Humanism": "Nihilation unfolds essentially in Being itself, and not at all in the existence of man - so far as this is thought as the subjectivity of the _ego cogito_" (BW 238). So long as one thinks of Dasein as subjectivity, one can understand nihilation only as _denial_. But nihilation is something more: our "standing out" (ek-sisting) into the nothing. We are "held out into the nothing" and thereby encounter entities in their "original openness" ("What Is Metaphysics?" 105), i.e., without embeddedness in the wider context of other entities. This concurs with what Bryan says about the nothing earlier in his piece: the nothing is total dis-integration [not annihilation] when all context has been rendered useless. It is beyond intellect and reason as normally understood.

In short, Heidegger's project is one more tortuous, Teutonic attempt to escape the apparently intractable difficulties of modern philosophy by "thinking outside the box." It would appear in fact to be the last such attempt. It is generally thought to have unraveled in midstream, and Heidegger never completed it. After Heidegger, philosophers influenced by the tradition of which he is a part gave up on the modernist project of establishing an objective basis for science.

-David

(who apologizes for the title but couldn't resist)

Sent: Friday, September 24, 1999 2:23 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Re: Dasein of the Time(s)

[From: Bryan Register ]

There are a number of criticisms of my introductory comments which I'd like
to discuss over the next few days, but first I'd like to accept one of them.
David L. Potts is right to call to our attention Heidegger's anti-mentalism:

>I was particularly distressed to read that according to Heidegger "one
>[i.e., the human subject] is nothing. The terms 'the nothing' and 'the
>subject' are co-referential." But Heidegger does not talk about "the
>subject." That would smack of Cartesian subject-object ontology, which is
>accepted by all modern philosophy and which Heidegger is keen to
"de-struct"

It's true and I owe you an explanation.

Heidegger does want to deny the subject-object distinction, and many take
this to mean that he wants to deny the subject. In some way, he does. But
the way is important. Many modern materialists, who seem to assume that 'the
mind,' if it existed, would *have* to be a Cartesian subject, will want to
move from Heidegger's denial of the subject to his denial od the mind or the
mental as such. However, Heidegger alludes to mental or subjective phenomena
all the time. Moods, thoughts, logic, and so forth form a constant part of
his vocabulary. In virtue of this, it seems to me that those modern
materialists are taking their own impoverished view of what a mind might be
and imposing it on Heidegger. I continually find that Heidegger makes most
sense as a kind of mental externalist; so, I take it that, for Heidegger,
the mind is 'located' out among its objects. For instance, someone's
experiencing something as ready-to-hand (a needful tool in its appropriate
context) happens in the hand, in the tool, in the workshop, in the thing to
be tooled. (Much like the perceptual form of a perceived object is
experienced as a feature of the object, not of our experience of the object;
so the form which is there only in virtue of the workings of the mind is
experienced as out in the world.) It's not that there's no mind, it's just
that it's not a unitary Cartesian mental point. Heidegger, too, may have
viewed this as such a radical break with the tradition that he had denied
the mind, but, as he hadn't, I can't think of any reason to follow his usage
in detail.

Thus, I played fast-and-loose with the language in the way David P. is
taking me to task for. Essentially, I, for clarity's sake, translated
Heideggerian into Objectivese or at least into normal English whenever
possible. I don't think that I introduced any distortion into the
presentation in that way, but if someone thinks otherwise, that's possible
and important and I'd like to hear how and why.

Bryan

Subject: Cyberseminar: Re: Dasein of the Time(s)

[From: David L. Potts ]

Bryan writes, in defense of his claim that the nothing is "co-referential"
with "the subject":

>Many modern materialists, who seem to assume that 'the
>mind,' if it existed, would *have* to be a Cartesian subject, will want to
>move from Heidegger's denial of the subject to his denial od the mind or
the
>mental as such.

Who do you have in mind?

Anyway, it makes no difference. Whether we speak of "the subject", "the
mind", "the self", or any such category, my point was that none of these is
what Heidegger means by "the nothing". Heidegger himself speaks not of "the
subject" but of "Dasein" (i.e., man). But man isn't the nothing
either. We are _held out into the nothing_. When we confront the
nothing we can approach and penetrate beings (Basic Writings 105).

In his review essay Bryan says that the identity of the subject and the
nothing explains why Heidegger says "Without the original revelation of the
nothing, no selfhood and no freedom." Concerning selfhood, Bryan explains:

>There's no selfhood without
>something that isn't the self, so to have a self we have to realize what
>the self is not. That's everything (all objects which can be given to one);
>the self is nothing.

But just because everything other than the self must be "not the self"
doesn't mean there's nothing _left_ for the self to be. That is simply a non
sequitur. A simpler interpretation is provided by Heidegger himself in the
sentence immediately preceding the one Bryan is trying to explain (105-106):
if Dasein were not "holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never
be related to beings nor even to itself." I believe the reason for the
latter clause is that, as Heidegger says repeatedly, man himself is a
being. "No selfhood" then means that man, if he were never held out into
the nothing, would never encounter himself (or anything else).

Concerning freedom:

>were the subject something, then it would be
>governed by causal laws and would thus not be free.

Heidegger does not, so far as I know, think that man is free in the sense
of being able radically to choose identity for himself. Rather, we find
ourselves "thrown" into a world of determinate and limited possibilities
from which to choose. This is our "facticity." We must "project" ourselves
and our goals on the world to build a coherent life. Such projection confers
meaning (intelligibility) on the entities that comprise facticity, it is
true, but that does not mean that facticity is infinitely malleable or that
it does not constrain our possibilities. Man should be pictured not as a
being confronted with freedom to "pick any properties you like" (as Bryan
says) but as a culturally rooted, historical being whose choice consists in
what sense to make of the traditions one inherits.

Much more to the point, the analysis that shows what freedom man has to
choose is a "fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can
originate" ("Intro" to Being & Time (in BW) 56), as I discussed in my
previous post. That is, Heidegger is proposing to do a "phenomenology" of
man (as Dasein) prior to any ontological categories, including causation. It
therefore misses the point to try to understand human freedom in relation
to causation, as an "exception" or otherwise, since human freedom
must be understood from a vantage point prior to any such categories.

-David

[David Potts]


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Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
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scholarly discussion.

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