Heidegger

Cologne 27-May-2008

Bob Guevara schrieb Mon, 26 May 2008 11:57:09 -0700:

> The Crisis of Reason:
> A Reading of Heidegger’s Zur Seinsfrage’
> JOSEPH P. FELL
>
> “But isn’t this all unfounded
> mysticism or even bad mythology, in
> any case a ruinous irrationalism, the
> denial of ratio?”
>
> Heidegger
> Zur Sache des Denkens
>
> P44 …
>
> II. Displaced Reason
>
> In the technological epoch, in which nihilism comes to the fore, what
> has happened to reason? The epoch of the Ge-Stell has its own
> characteristic conception of the nature and role of reason. This conception
> of reason is also a conception of meaning, because to reason is to
> mean something in certain sorts of ways. Typically, reason (Vernunft,
> ratio) judges by analyzing and synthesizing, adjusts means to ends
> through reflective deliberation, logically induces and deduces, and even
> seeks to ground or validate itself on some solid ground. To mean
> something in certain sorts of ways is, in turn, to think what it is. So
> reason in the epoch of the Ge-Stell means or intends beings in certain
> sorts of ways. Four passages in Zur Seinsfrage show just what these ways
> of meaning are:
> 1. “…a conferring of ‘meaning’ on the meaning-less” (395). 0 The context
> of this passage makes clear that what is meant is that the human subject
> exercises its “metaphysical power” by “stamping” a changeable,
> mobile world of things with the subject’s own Gestalt or idea of a fixed
> being. Heidegger refers to Plato’s use of the term typos, that which
> makes an imprint. For example, Nietzsche might be said to type or form
> the form-less by giving it the stamp “will to power,” much as a
> typewriter imposes a fixed type on a wholly blank or type-less sheet of
> paper.
> 2. “…the conceptual language of the sciences….is frequently
> represented [vorstellt] as nominalism….” (405). This means that in recent
> times reasoning in the sciences commonly gets taken as imposing on
> the objects of science words that are mere empty name-tags. The word
> tells us nothing about the real nature of the things it names; it is only a
> way of giving a single tag to a number of otherwise-diverse phenomena
> that science finds it useful to try to group into a single set or class.
> There
> are only differing individuals—no real kinds or classes or types of beings.
> Again, this amounts to the willful imposition of a single, fixed form
> on a “mobile” world. Heidegger says that this nominalism is “ensnared
> in the logical-grammatical conception of the essence of language” (405).
> In other words, it sees the function of language as that of imposing on
> things a logic and a grammar that have nothing to do with the individual
> things themselves; they belong to the subject, not to the object.
> 3. “In which sense does ‘being’ appear when the point is to gain
> assurance about beings? In the sense of the everywhere and anytime
> confirmable,
> and that means representable” (397). The subject’s thinking
> takes the form of “re-presenting” (Vor-stellen). Again, as in the term
> Ge-Stell, we find a term rooted in the German verb stellen. One sense of
> Vorstellen is to represent in the sense of present again—to present or
> make present in thought or idea something that is also and separately
> present in reality. This is a second or secondary presentation: the thing
> itself is somehow present in and by itself, but it becomes present a second
> time, in secondary form, when it takes the form of an idea or concept or
> a sense-datum. The secondary presentation, the idea, is ‘true’ if and
> when it corresponds to the way in which the thing presents itself, the
> primary presentation. But Vor-stellen not only has the sense of representing
> or making present over again in thought; in the epoch of Ge-
> Stell its dominant sense is pro-posing or pre-presenting. 12 In this sense,
> the reasoning subject “propositions” the world by actively and aggressively
> proposing to the environment a priori, in advance of experience,
> the concepts, norms, rules by which the environment is going to
> be interpreted. This is a basic sense of ‘reasoning’ in the modern, post-
> Copernican epoch. Here the concept or idea is primary and the thing
> secondary. Thus for Kant the concept “legislates” in advance to the
> thing—categorizes things by laying a charge against them. I propose to
> the entire region of the sensible in advance, as a condition for the
> appearance
> of intelligible objects of real science, that the sensible must conform
> to the concept of substance, the concept of cause and effect, etc.
> Now in either case, whether the Vor-stellung is a presenting over again in
> thought or a proposing by thought in advance, there is a separation of
> the concept and the thing—the concept is over against the thing. Heidegger
> is going to question how basic this “over against” really is—even
> though it seems obvious that ideas and things are different in kind: ideas
> belong to the minds of subjects, while things exist in a separate, distinct
> realm (”the environment,” “nature”).
> 4. “….ratio… is by no means a fair judge. It resolutely shoves
> everything
> not comformable to ratio Into the alleged morass of the irrational, which
> it has itself staked out. Reason and its presentings [ihr Vorstellen] are
> only
> one way of thinking and are determined not by themselves but by what
> has called thinking to think in the manner of the ratio” (388). Modern
> reasoning is only one mode of thinking, and not the fundamental one.
> The dialectical opposition reason / the irrational does not exhaust the
> field of thinking. The /r-rational connotes a departure from the norm of
> reason, and so presupposes that reason autonomously sets or pro-poses
> the norms for thinking. But what if reason were really dependent on a
> “deeper” or more basic way of thinking whose basic role has been
> forgotten? What if reason were, in terms of Sein and Zeit, a “founded
> mode” or “modification”13 of thinking? What if a more basic thinking
> that has already happened makes reason possible in the first place? To
> remember this forgotten thinking would then be not to destroy reason or
> to reduce it to “the irrational” but rather to recall its proper place, and
> so to secure it in its proper domain. Despite some dramatic assertions by
> Heidegger seeming to indicate the contrary,” Heidegger’s purpose is not
> to destroy reason but to ground it in its true source or origin. Reason
> leads to its own destruction when it claims to be fully self-determining or
> self-grounding or self-legislating or ‘absolute.’ This hubris of reason in
> Descartes is fated to encounter its nemesis in Nietzsche. Ironically
> Descartes, not Heidegger, is the real enemy of reason, and the critique of
> the powers of reason from Hume through Nietzsche performs the essential
> service of exposing the groundlessness of reason’s claim to be the absolute
> arbiter of what-is, of reality and truth. This critique prepares the
> way for remembering reason’s basis in a thinking which already has been
> and which remains, playing an essential but hidden role. Most peculiar
> of all, this basic thinking has itself blocked access to itself, has deeply
> dissimulated itself” in the course of our history by falling into thinking
> of being as presentness. I shall come back to this.
>
> To summarize the four sorts of ways in which reason means the being
> of beings: (1) Reason takes itself as source of meaning and confers its
> meaning on the meaningless. (2) Reason commonly gets interpreted
> nominalistically or logico-grammatically–i.e., as imposing on things a
> subjective structure of words, grammar, or logic that is foreign to the
> things on which it is imposed. (3) Reason is seen as a re-presenting or a
> pro-posing in which the thing is understood not in terms of itself but
> through the medium of an idea or concept that stands over against and
> stands for the thing, as ‘representing’ the thing or as ‘legislating to’ the
> thing. (4) Relegating all other thinking to the “irrational,” reason has
> lost track of its origin in a prior and more basic thinking.
>
> Gathering together the four ways in which reason means the being of
> beings, we can conclude that reason—its words, its grammar, its
> logic—appears to owe nothing to the world it reasons about. Independent
> of things, reason attempts to make things bear a meaning that is foreign to
> the things themselves. The being—the meaning and “ground”"—of beings
> appears not to belong to these beings themselves but to have a
> metaphysical origin: to be determined over and above and apart from beings
> by reason alone.
>
> The consequence of this conception of reason in the modern period is
> the loss of the meaning of things themselves. Meaning or significance
> occurs,
> if at all, in the domain of the reasoning subject, or in the domain of
> the irrationally willing subject, and not in the domain of things. Thus, for
> Ringer, the worker, who is the contemporary subject, determines and
> manipulates what is and will be by what Heidegger calls “an assault on the
> actual” (402).” Things are not themselves intelligible, meaningful,
> significant,
> or valuable. The historical quest for the real nature of things terminates
> in a “skeptical relativism” and in the arbitrary manipulation of
> things for human ends. There is ‘nihilism’: i.e., where the being of beings
> themselves should be recalled, there is instead an “invalidating
> nothingness” —a nothingness that misses the original coming into
> disclosure of beings.
>
> Nihilism seems to be the final story only on metaphysical premises.
> What are these premises? (1) That being is to be understood as presentness;
> and (2) that being is a goal to be reached by a departure from the
> domain of things, by a transcending ascent to a separate domain beyond
> the process of things themselves (meta-physis). But what if the being of
> beings is what already has been and still secretly holds sway? Then the
> metaphysical and rational quest to reach the meaning of beings as a
> future goal, as a novel conclusion, would be altogether vain. The meaning
> of beings would be already there, rather than being locatable in an
> ideal future or rather than being altogether unobtainable. The task, then,
> would not be to arrive at it for the first time, but to remember it.
>
> III. Phenomenological Chronology 18
>
> The question about being, then, is a question about time. The problem
> of nothingness in nihilism—the apparent absence of being—is then a
> problem of time. And the “crisis of reason”—reason’s inability to
> disclose things as they really are—is a crisis in our understanding of time.
> How does time figure in Heidegger’s letter to Ringer? We have seen that
> Ringer wants to cross “the line” or “zero point” of nihilism. And we
> have seen that Heidegger restrains Ringer: rather than simply thinking or
> planning ahead to a post-nihilistic future, Heidegger talks about
> remembering something that has been. So he writes to Junger:
> ***
> …instead of willing to overcome nihilism we must first attempt
> to turn into its essence. The turn into its essence is the
> first step, through which we leave nihilism behind us. The
> path of this turn into has the direction and manner of a turning
> back (422).
> ***
> This “turning back” is not a restoration.”‘ Heidegger is speaking of a
> surpassing of the oblivion of being, and of a surpassing of metaphysics,
> for the first time. Before we can go forward, beyond nihilism, we have to
> go back, into the hidden roots of nihilism. What we find when we go
> back will provide the means for going forward. Yet Heidegger is saying
> much more than that. True going-forward is itself a going back. Here we
> come into contact with Heidegger’s radical rethinking of the nature of
> time, which is needed for full understanding of his letter to Ringer, but
> which can hardly be gleaned from the letter itself.
>
> For Heidegger “the play of true time” is a synchronicity or contemporaneity
> of what has been, what is coming, and what is present. 2° Essentially,
> the three “moments” of time—past, present, future—”time
> together,” rather than one after the other. 21 Heidegger sometimes expresses
> this by saying that what has been comes on out of the future. 22
> Another way of expressing this is found in On the Way to Language:
> “Time itself, in the wholeness of its nature, does not move; it rests in
> stillness.” 23 These are difficult sayings, and it is hardly surprising that
> they should be difficult if what they seek to evoke has been in oblivion,
> deeply disguised. They are at the very heart of Heidegger’s thinking.
> They provide an essential clue for surpassing the problem of nihilism and
> the crisis of reason. But it is far from easy to show how this rethinking or
> recalling of the true nature of time could resolve the problem of nihilism
> and the crisis of reason. What must be shown is that the “play” of time
> as a synchronicity of the moments of time is itself “the event of
> appropriation”
> (Ereignis). This happening of being, or coming to disclosure of
> beings as meaningful, hangs on a certain interrelation of word, idea, and
> thing. I want to turn next to this interrelation. There can be no adequate
> assessment of the nature and basis of reason without careful consideration
> of the interrelation of word, idea, and thing.
>
> In the Heidegger literature there is sometimes a recognition that
> Heidegger is not out to destroy reason or logic but is instead intent on
> reaching back to their source. But I miss a coming to grips with just how
> this source really underlies reason and makes it possible. Until this is
> worked out, the claim that reason is grounded in being says very little. It
> is important, then, to ask: in what way are reason’s ideas or concepts or
> representations grounded in (made possible and justifiable) by “the
> event of appropriation”? What specific sort of connection can be made
> between concepts and being? Such an inquiry must of course respect the
> li mit Heidegger places on what is sayable; but this cannot be an excuse
> for failing to try to say just as much as it is possible to say about this
> vital
> issue.
>
> The approach I am about to take may seem peculiar and uncharacteristic
> of Heidegger. As I proceed, it should be borne in mind that
> I am concerned to show the relation between propositional or assertive
> thought or speech—such as occurs in reasoning—and the initial truth or
> disclosure that makes such reasoning possible. In this inquiry, it should
> be remembered that Heidegger does not deny or preclude the
> phenomenon of agreement between assertions and actual states of affairs.
> 24 He seeks rather to show that it is not the primary locus of truth,
> and hence to show how the primary locus of truth (original disclosure)
> makes the truth, and the falsity, of assertions possible in the first place.
> In an important sense, then, Heidegger makes possible a rehabilitation of
> the “correspondence theory of truth” (but with, we shall see, an important
> qualification). It must further be borne in mind that assertions are
> composed of words and of ideas (the words found in a dictionary are
> defined by ideas) that refer to things (entities, events, states of
> affairs).
> Therefore my task is to show how the ideas and the words of assertions
> can ‘correspond’ to things, if the relation of words, ideas, and things to
> the primary locus of truth is taken into account. As A.C. Ewing has
> noted, “…the correspondence theory…does not give us much information
> unless we can succeed in defining correspondence, and unfortunately
> nobody has been able yet to give a satisfactory definition.” 25 There has
> been no satisfactory definition because words and ideas appear to be
> entirely
> different in kind from things, hence not adequatable to or “match-
> able” with things. A consideration of phenomenological chronology
> may help us to locate a real and non-arbitrary relation between words,
> ideas, and things.
> …
>

ME: Fine food for thought. Thanks, Bob. “Ringer”, of course, should read
“Juenger”.

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Posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 6:04 am
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