'Meaning, Derivation, and Distortion in Early Heidegger', 16th Jan 2015, Paris (University Chicago/Husserl Archives)

Sacha Golob (King’s College London) https://kcl.academia.edu/SachaGolob Meaning, Derivation, and Distortion in Early Heidegger Paris, January 2015 Two of Early Heidegger’s Central Claims The purpose of this talk is to introduce a new reading of the relationship between two of early Heidegger’s central claims – claims about various forms of meaning and their relationship to ontology.1 The first claim is that propositional intentionality in some sense forces our understanding of entities into certain set channels, channels which at worst actively distort, and at best fail to capture, the true nature of our experience. The second claim is that propositional intentionality is explanatorily derivative. More specifically: A: There is some connection between propositional intentionality and the view that entities are present-at-hand. B: Propositional intentionality is explanatorily derivative on some irreducibly nonpropositional mode of intentionality. Let me begin by clarifying some of the terms in play. Heidegger uses “present-at-hand” in multiple non-coextensive ways: here are three of the main ones. “Present-at-hand1 ” = An entity in so far as it is “cut off from” the holistic web of instrumental, social and other relations which define the Heideggerian concept of “world”.2 “Present-at-hand2 ” = A substance in either an Aristotelian, Cartesian, Leibnizian or Kantian sense.3 “Present-at-hand3” = An entity individuated by reference to its spatio-temporal and causal properties.4 It is important to distinguish these; for example, although this won’t especially matter here, none of them is either necessary or sufficient for the other two. The other term to be clarified is ‘proposition’. Heidegger often articulates both A and B in terms of assertion [Aussage] or judgment [Urteil]: but there is a consensus, which I think is correct, that his real target is By “early Heidegger” I mean, roughly, between roughly 1919 and 1935. I think that these results do have important implications for how we read the later texts (see the final footnote), but I will not address that here. 2 SZ:83–6, 157–8. 3 See SZ:318; Ga41:107–8; Ga41:62–4; Ga25:295; Ga26: 40–2, 53. 4 See Ga20: 49–51; SZ : 361–2. 1 1 Sacha Golob (King’s College London) https://kcl.academia.edu/SachaGolob propositionality, whether asserted or believed or doubted. There are, of course, many theories of propositions. Heidegger himself often seems to assume something like the following definition: a proposition is the content of a declarative subject-predicate sentence.5 This is a view which Kant, for example, would have recognised. But I am going to operate, at least to begin, with a slightly thinner definition – there are many theorists whom Heidegger would surely regard as exemplifying the mistakes mentioned in A and yet who reject subjectpredicate form (Frege, for instance).6 So I propose instead: ‘Proposition’ = The content of a declarative sentence. In short, propositional content is linguistic content. Finally, ‘intentionality’: I use this broadly with no intended implication for doctrines like disjunctivism. If you have concerns over it, simply replace it with ‘experience’ or ‘meaning’. The Problem with A What exactly is the connection posited by A? Consider this famous passage: If this [hammer] becomes the ‘object’ of an assertion [‘Gegenstand’ einer Aussage], then as soon as we begin with this assertion, there is already a changeover...The ready-to-hand entity with which we have to do or perform something, turns into something ‘about which’ [‘Worüber’] the assertion is made. Our fore-sight is aimed at something present-at-hand in what is ready-to-hand, the ready-to-hand becomes veiled … Only now are we given any access to properties or the like...it has been cut off [abgeschnitten] from that significance which, as such, constitutes environmentality...It sinks to the structure of just letting one see what is present-athand in a determinate way.7 Obviously one issue here is what exactly the ready-to-hand is. But for current purposes what matters is that this and similar passages are typically read as endorsing A*: A* = If an entity E is intended by a propositional mode of intentionality then E is intended as either present-at-hand1, or present-at-hand2, or present-at-hand3.8 5 SZ : 154; Ga9: 130/27 Frege 1967:§3. 7 SZ:157–8, original emphasis: I have used ellipse to remove Heideggerian terminology not essential to the current argument. See similarly Ga41:62–4 and Ga29/30: 419. 8 See, for example, Okrent 2007:166; Schear 2007:128. I am particularly indebted to Schear’s work on these topics – although I strongly disagree with his conclusion that the prima facie implausibility of A is grounds to abandon it. 6 2 Sacha Golob (King’s College London) https://kcl.academia.edu/SachaGolob As Tugendhat puts it the claim seems to be that “assertoric sentences … express being in the sense of presence-at-hand”.9 As it stands, this claim, however, is prima facie immensely implausible: does describing my nausea to a doctor commit me to seeing it as a substance, or telling you that your taxi is here somehow cut it off from social and instrumental relations, or stating that ‘the number eight is even’ force me to see numbers as physical? A* would also leave SZ facing a Tractarian self-reference paradox: every proposition would enforce an ontology Heidegger opposes. More broadly, it is striking that other historical figures who endorse A* at least with respect to the second disjunct do so only given additional premises which Heidegger cannot access. Consider, for example, Russell: The ground for assuming substances – and this is a very important point – is purely and solely logical. What science deals with are states of substances, and it is assumed to be states of substances, because they are held to be of the logical nature of predicates, and thus to demand subjects of which they may be predicated.10 For Russell A is entirely an artefact of pre-modern logic. Yet Heidegger explicitly states that A is unchanged by the post-Fregean revolution.11 In short, we have a problem with one of Heidegger’s main claims. A Possible Solution: Explain A in terms of B I now want to turn to the most sophisticated existing solution to this problem, that defended by Carman and Wrathall: as I see it, they effectively explain A* in terms of B. Specifically, they argue that Heidegger understands our everyday experience in the “world” in terms of nonconceptual content. But such nonconceptual relations cannot be captured by propositions: thus propositions necessarily “cut entities off from” or “level down” worldly relations, so validating the first disjunct of A*. So, for example, Wrathall: That makes propositional truth, in Heidegger’s view, a privative concept – it is defined relative to the richer, more primordial givenness of the world which is lost in 9 Tugendhat 1986:161. Russell 1937:49. 11 SZ:88. 10 3 Sacha Golob (King’s College London) https://kcl.academia.edu/SachaGolob propositional articulation … The prepredicative is a nonconceptual way of comporting ourselves toward the things in the world around us.12 Similarly Carman: Propositional content therefore derives from a kind of privation, or perhaps a refinement or distillation, of practical interpretative meanings. Indeed “levelling down” the interpreted intelligibility of entities of all kinds to mere determinations of [present-at-hand] objects is “the speciality of assertion” (SZ:158).13 A* is thus explained in terms of B: since the world is nonconceptual, propositions cut entities off from it. The Problem with the Nonconceptualist View of B One concern you might have about this tactic is that nothing is said regarding presence-athand2, for example: it just drops out.14 But I think there is a deeper difficulty: it requires us to cash B in terms of a nonconceptual experience, an experience which possesses a distinctive richness that cannot be fully captured by the propositional. And this, of course, is the standard view of early Heidegger – he is a nonconceptualist. Now, I want to do two things here. First, I want to flag that this view of B is closely bound up with the problem of A - one reason for reading B like this is precisely to try to make some sense of A. By extension, if we were to have an alternate reading of A, the path might be open to an alternate reading of B. Second, the case for the nonconceptualist reading of B is, it seems to me at least, deeply problematic. Given time constraints, let me just motivate this with a few examples. One common view is that the nonconceptual is to be identified with the practical. Consider this from Richardson: We discover some entity as a tool not because we have mastered any concepts, but because we are already pursuing some set of ends and have a generalised competence over the system of equipment needed to achieve them.15 The idea here is that the primary level of Heideggerian experience is ‘tool experience’ and that that is about competence and pursuing ends, rather than mastering concepts. But this 12 Wrathall 2011:20 (I have altered the sentence order). Carman 2003:219. Carman uses ‘occurrence’ for ‘Vorhandenheit ’ and its cognates: I have modified the text for the sake of terminological continuity. 14 This is in turn reflected in other authors: for example Blattner, who defines the present-at-hand as “what is not involved in human practices” (Blattner 1999:186). 15 Richardson 1986: 22. 13 4 Sacha Golob (King’s College London) https://kcl.academia.edu/SachaGolob begs an obvious response - why couldn’t equipmental competence and pursuit of ends be analysed in terms of, rather than in contrast to, my possession of the relevant concepts? It is only because I possess the relevant concept that I recognise this bit of paper as money and so put it to work in various projects.16 Another widely held view is that the nonpropositional intentionality referred to in B should be cashed by an appeal to the finegrained content of perception. For example, Wrathall: In natural perception, then, we ordinarily perceive a whole context that lacks the logical structure of linguistic categories.17 There are familiar philosophical concerns over this approach to the nonconceptual– e.g. if the richness or situation dependence of experience, ‘the thousands of shades of green’ etc., is the issue, could one not simply employ multiple indexical or object-involving propositions? But there are also serious textual concerns. On the one hand, this approach equates the explanatorily primary level of Heideggerian intentionality with perception specifically, something that is problematic given how broadly he defines notions like ‘being-in-theworld’.18 On the other, animals can surely perceive, and often perceive even more finegrained content than we can; yet they lack whatever distinctive mode of intentionality Heidegger is interested in.19 A final example: one might try to cash the irreducibly nonpropositional content in motor intentional terms. But this seems to me exegetically unsustainable given Heidegger’s scanty and disinterested remarks on embodiment. Consider this. Heidegger wrote nearly a thousand pages of close commentary on the first Critique, a text in which Kant defends a theory of time determination that many have thought works precisely by occluding 16 In a similar vein, consider this from Wrathall: In our prepredicative experience of the world, things are understood as the things they are in terms of our practical modes of coping with them. Such practically constituted things are implicated in a complex variety of involvements with other objects, practices, purposes, and goals...In assertion, by contrast, our experience undergoes an explicit restriction of our view, and we dim down the whole richly articulated situation in front of us to focus on some particular feature of the situation. (Wrathall 2011: 19–20) So here it is the broad and complex scope of practical experience that makes it irreducibly nonpropositional. But the “explicit restriction” and “dimming down” which Wrathall speaks of is simply an artefact of Heidegger’s choice of example in texts like SZ:157, where I only start making assertions in reaction to the failure of an individual item, the broken hammer. And this clearly need not be the case: I can assert universally quantified propositions, I can assert vague propositions, I can assert many propositions at once etc. There is no need for propositions to restrict our view to any particular feature of things. 17 Wrathall 2011: 20. 18 The issue is tied up with the interrelation among the various layers of Heidegger’s terminology: for example, SZ:56-7 lists a huge range of activities, including paradigmatically non-perceptual states such as “discussing” [Besprechen], and labels these instances of “concern”. A few lines later he suggests that all and only cases of concern are cases of being-in-the-world. If this is right, what is his name for the supposedly crucial perceptual base? 19 On animals, see Ga27:192; Ga9: 326/157; Ga29/30: 384, 397, 450. 5 Sacha Golob (King’s College London) https://kcl.academia.edu/SachaGolob embodiment and proprioception. Yet Heidegger makes no mention of motor intentionality anywhere in his many discussions of that text. There are, of course, many very sophisticated defences of the nonconceptualist approach in the literature – I’ve learnt a great deal from these, and I’d be delighted to talk more about them in the discussion. But for the moment, I want instead to return to A – and to sketch a very different approach. A New Approach to A? As I see it, when Heidegger endorses A, what he has in mind was not A*, but this: A# = If an entity E is intended by a propositional mode of intentionality I and I is subject to a certain method of philosophical analysis M then E is intended as either present-at-hand1 , or present-at-hand2 , or present-at-hand3 , some combination of these. The key shift is that A is no longer a claim about propositional intentionality per se, but rather about a specific meta-linguistic approach to such intentionality. This has some immediate benefits: unlike on A*, Heidegger himself can use propositions without a self-reference problem. One of the key tasks of Division 1 of SZ is to identify method M, but for current purposes we can simply gloss it negatively: it refers to any method which does not begin from the concrete uses we make of practices such as assertion in a richly described social context.20 It is in this sense that Heidegger insists that we “must dispense with the ‘philosophy of language’” (SZ:166): his objection is obviously not to philosophising about language, but rather to the idea that the philosophical treatment of language can be pursued independently of, or prior to, a broader understanding of human agency and society. Heidegger often refers to the problematic method as “‘logic’”: what you can see in passages such as the following is the use of scare quotes to mark the suspect theoretical terms of this approach. Prior to all analysis, logic has already understood ‘logically’ that which it takes as its theme, for example ‘the hammer is heavy’, under the heading of the ‘categorical Thus Ga20:361: “If language is a possibility of the being of Dasein, then it must be made evident in its basic structures in terms of the constitution of Dasein.” 20 6 Sacha Golob (King’s College London) https://kcl.academia.edu/SachaGolob statement’. The unexplained presupposition is that the ‘meaning’ of this sentence is to be taken as: “This thing – a hammer – has the property of heaviness”.21 If this is correct, the challenge becomes to explain why analysing propositions in terms of M should lead to the entities intended by those propositions being represented as present-athand. Let me give two examples. As I noted above, Heidegger intends his argument to apply to modern logic as much as its predecessors, and so I will use modern examples: since I introduced Russell above, I’ll stick with him.22 (1) A# and Present-at-Hand1 One of the central achievements of modern logic is its ability to handle relational contexts: so why should it ‘cut entities off from’ those relations that define the Heideggerian world? Well, suppose an assertion like “Tom is richer than Harry” is analysed within Russell’s 1914 framework. It would no longer be treated as a “categorical statement” as in Heidegger’s remarks about the hammer, but it is instead studied as an instance of what Russell dubs an “asymmetric relational statement”.23 Now, what Heidegger says when discussing such modern relational logics is this: whilst this type of development may allow an improved grasp of the inferential status of relations in general, the price is the neglect of a particular set of relations, namely the social and instrumental context within which acts of assertion actually take place. The focus on the “empty formal idea of relation” ironically thus leads to the “suppression of the dimension within which the relevant relation can be what it is” (Ga29/30:424). And this project in turn, Heidegger claims, fosters a concomitantly narrow philosophical approach to the entities discussed in such assertions: [The assertion] gets experienced as something present-at-hand and interpreted as such; simultaneously the entities it points out have the meaning of presence-at-hand.24 I think the claim here is best seen as a methodological wager: philosophical approaches that begin by prioritising logical analysis of the proposition, and by extension the entities represented through it, in a way that ignores the social context in which both propositions and entities stand, will be unable to overcome this bias at later stages. 21 SZ:157. Heidegger himself was perhaps most familiar with Cassirer’s functional logic; for current purposes the differences between that and Russell’s various positions are irrelevant. 23 Russell 2009:39–40. 24 SZ:160. 22 7 Sacha Golob (King’s College London) https://kcl.academia.edu/SachaGolob (2) A# and Present-at-Hand2 Now for a second example, one of the link between A# and present-at-hand2. Heidegger saw his task as here as easier, insofar as many of his opponents enthusiastically embraced a connection between propositionality and substantiality: Kant and Leibniz, for example. But what happens when one moves, again, away from the pre-modern subject-predicate logic? Heidegger identifies a key argument when, in section 33 of SZ, he raises the problem of how a list of words “are put together in one verbal whole”25. This difficulty, usually dubbed ‘the unity of the proposition’, plays an absolutely central role in the development of analytic philosophy. As Russell observed, the problem is that the words “John” and “Jim” when put side by side obviously do not constitute a sentence, but only a mere list.24 But once this is conceded, it is unclear why introducing further terms, say “loves”, will not simply deliver a longer list: why, as Russell put it, does “loves” function as “the cement and not just another brick”?25 The relevance to A# is that, in treating the atomisation of the proposition as a legitimate starting point, Russell’s approach will necessarily generate an atomistic ontology if one simply adds some premise allowing the transfer of semantic conclusions on to the ontological domain. And this is precisely what does happen in Russell from his early Moorean-style equation of the semantic and the ontological onwards.27 The ontology of “particulars” which emerges is present-at-hand2 because, as Russell himself observes, they meet the Cartesian criterion for substance: not depending for their existence on any other entity. 28 Heidegger’s own response, in line with the methodological points made above, is to reject the whole problematic in the first place: his idea, I think, is that a focus on social usage licenses one to begin with propositions, rather than their subcomponents, since they are, amongst other things, the minimal unit for which I can typically be held accountable. Recall Russell’s remark that it was as if the cement had become merely another brick. This is Heidegger’s view: Not only do we lack the ‘cement’, even the ‘schema’ in accordance with which this joining together is to be accomplished has … never yet been unveiled. What is decisive for ontology is to prevent the splitting of the phenomena.26 25 SZ:159; Ga21:142; for extended discussion see Ga24:255–91. The ultimate result is logical atomism, the view that “you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples” (Russell 1986 : 234). 26 8 Sacha Golob (King’s College London) https://kcl.academia.edu/SachaGolob Evaluation of the Arguments for A# My proposal, in short, is to read A as a methodological claim: it concerns a specific philosophical approach to propositionality, rather than propositions per se. I think this makes sense of the text better than any of the alternatives. But are the arguments listed any good philosophically? In both cases, I think the most we can say is they have potential – and assessing that potential opens up important new connections among different aspects of Heidegger’s work. For example, the first argument, the argument to present-at-hand1, rests on the distinctive stress he puts on a philosophy’s primary orientation: one cannot add, Heidegger suggests, a genuine account of Dasein onto the type of ‘logic first’ approach seen in Russell or Frege – no amount of modification will not suffice to ensure that the “inappropriate formulation of the question would not continue to stand”.27 This assumption is closely bound up with Heidegger’s valorisation, both methodologically and politically, of concepts such as “ground”. Sound philosophy is “autochthonic”.28 Poor philosophy, in contrast, is “free-floating”, a product of what he will call “Bodenlosigkeit”.29 In 1925 phenomenology thus requires “demonstrations rooted in native ground”.30 But this is also – always – a political issue for him too: in 1929, and the notorious letter to Schwörer, it is not simply “demonstrations” but “educators” that must be “rooted in the native and indigenous”. To assess the first disjunct of A# then we need to look more broadly at the notions of origin and ground, both thought and unthought, in Heidegger’s system. What about B? In conclusion let me link very briefly back to B. One consequence of my interpretation, in contrast to the approach defended by Carman and Wrathall, is that A and B are logically independent: indeed, the methodological explanation I have given of A is compatible with the view that all intentionality is propositional. But Heidegger does indeed endorse B – so what positive account of it might I possibly give? After all, I have argued against an appeal to nonconceptual content. The key, I would suggest, is this: propositional intentionality may be 27 SZ:207, original emphasis. Ga20: 104. 29 Ga29/30: 243. 30 Ga20: 104. 28 9 Sacha Golob (King’s College London) https://kcl.academia.edu/SachaGolob sufficient for conceptual intentionality but it need not be necessary. Heidegger’s view is that there is another way of thinking about the conceptual, a way that has an irreducibly different grammar from that found in propositions. Thus, as he puts it, to prove B he must “liberate grammar from logic”.31 His simultaneously obsessive and deeply conflicted view of doctrines such as Kant’s Schematism and Plato’s theory of forms stems from the fact that he sees those theories as groping towards that insight, whilst simultaneously falling short of it.32 References Blattner, W. (1999), Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, Cambridge University Press. Carman, T. (2003), Heidegger’s Analytic, Cambridge University Press. Frege, G. (1967), ‘Begriffsschrift’, in Van Heijenoort , J. (ed.) From Frege to Gödel, London:Harvard University Press . Golob, S. (2014), Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom and Normativity, Cambridge University Press. Okrent , M. (2007), ‘The “I Think” and the for-the-Sake-of-Which’, in Malpas , J. and Crowell , S. (eds.) Transcendental Heidegger, Stanford University Press. Richardson , J. (1986), Existential Epistemology , Oxford: Clarendon . Russell, B. (1937), A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, London: Allen and Unwin. Russell, B. (1986), The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays, London: Allen and Unwin . Russell, B. (2009), Our Knowledge of the External World , London :Routledge . Schear , J. (2007), ‘ Judgment and Ontology in Heidegger’s Phenomenology ’, New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy , 7:127 –58. Tugendhat , E. (1986), Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, London : MIT Press . Wrathall, M. (2011) , Heidegger and Unconcealment, Cambridge University Press. 31 SZ:165; Ga20:344. What is this theory? Heidegger himself puts it like this: ‘Dasein transcends’ means: in the essence of its being it is world forming, ‘forming’ [‘bildend ] in the multiple senses that it lets world occur, and through the world gives itself an original view (form or image [Bild]) that is not explicitly grasped and yet which functions precisely as a prototypical form [Vor-bild] for all manifest entities. (Ga9:158/55) To trace its development, however, is beyond this paper – the situation is radically complicated by (a) the link Heidegger posits between such prototypes and time and (b) his growing suspicion in the 1930s that certain aspects of the prototypes approach themselves imply a distortive or restrictive view of entities, a suspicion played out, allayed and reinflamed in his various readings of Plato. For a detailed discussion see Golob, S. (2014), ch3. 32 10