Properties of Being in Heidegger’s Being and Time

Abstract

While it is well known that the early Heidegger distinguishes between different ‘kinds of being’ and identifies various ‘structures’ that compose them, there has been little discussion about what these kinds and structures of being are. This paper defends the ‘Property Thesis’, the position that kinds of being (and their structures) are properties of the entities that have them. I give two arguments for this thesis. The first is grounded in the fact that Heidegger refers to kinds and structures of being as ‘characteristics’ and ‘determinations’, which are just two different words for ‘properties’, in the broadest senses of these terms. The second argument is based on the fact that kinds and structures of being play three roles that properties are supposed to play: they account for similarities between things, they are what predicates express, and they are what abstract nouns refer to.     

Heroism and history in Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology

Whereas Phenomenology of Perception concludes with a puzzling turn to “heroism,” this article examines the short essay “Man, the Hero” as a source of insight into Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the early postwar period. In this essay, Merleau-Ponty presented a conception of heroism through which he expressed the attitude toward post-Hegelian philosophy of history that underwrote his efforts to reform Marxism along existential lines. Analyzing this conception of heroism by unpacking the implicit contrasts with Kojève, Aron, Caillois, and Bataille, I show that its philosophical rationale was to supply experiential evidence attesting to the latent presence of human universality. It is a mythic device intended to animate the faith necessary for Marxist politics by showing that universal sociality is possible, and that the historically transformative praxis needed to realize it does not imply sacrifice. This sheds considerable light on Merleau-Ponty’s early postwar political thought. But inasmuch as the latter cannot be severed from his broader philosophical concerns, the prospect is raised that his entire phenomenological project in the early postwar period rested on a myth. Not necessarily a bad myth, but a myth nonetheless.     

Being articulate: Rede in Heidegger’s Being and Time

Being and Time’s emphasis on practical activities has attracted much attention as an approach to meaning not modelled exclusively on language. However, understanding this emphasis is made more difficult by Heidegger’s notion of Rede (‘Articulacy’ or ‘Discourse’), which he routinely characterizes as both language-like and basic to all disclosure. This paper assesses whether this notion can be both interpreted coherently and reconciled with Heidegger’s emphasis on intelligent nonlinguistic behaviours. It begins by identifying two functions of Articulacy – the demonstrative and articulatory – and a potential source of incoherence in Heidegger’s analysis. Having reviewed some standard approaches to Heideggerian Articulacy, I show how Heidegger’s discussion of predicative judgements (‘Statements’) implies that language can be linked with different kinds of content. This allows Heidegger’s analysis to be read coherently, provided Articulacy is understood as having distinct purposive and predicative modes. The final section shows how this reading preserves a close connection between Articulacy and language while accommodating intelligent nonlinguistic behaviours.     

What is Original in Merleau-Ponty’s View of the Phenomenological Reduction?

Despite the recent increase of interest in the work of Merleau-Ponty there is still a persistent tendency to overlook the uniqueness of the philosophical position he advances in Phenomenology of Perception. In this article I present a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the phenomenological reduction that explains how it is original. I do this by contrasting his presentation of the reduction with that of the early Husserl, highlighting how his emphasis on the phenomenology of the ‘perceived world’ leads him to reject Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as a ‘philosophical science,’ and the Kantian language in which the this account is framed. I go on to critically discuss the interpretations of the reduction advanced by Stephen Priest and Joel Smith as examples of readings that fail to fully grasp Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ‘natural attitude’ as resting on the inherent objectivizing structure that is built into perception itself. The way that these authors misinterpret Merleau-Ponty helps to make maximally clear the profound philosophical significance that he places on the phenomenology of the ‘perceived world’.     

Sartre’s Dessin,Literature and the Ambiguities of the Representing Word

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Seemingly a minor part of L’Imaginaire, Sartre’s literary examples therein are of great significance especially in the way they highlight the...     

The temporality of Merleau-Ponty’s intertwining

In his last work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty explored the fact that we believe that perception occurs in our heads (“in the recesses of a body”) and, hence, assert that the perceptual world is “in” us, while also believing that we are “in” the world we perceive.  In this article, I examine how this intertwining of self and world justifies the faith we have in perception. I shall do so by considering a number of examples.  In each case, the object “in itself” will turn out to be neither within us nor outside of us, but rather at the intersection set by the intertwining. I will then turn to what this disclosure of this object reveals about human temporality and, indeed, about human being as a place (or “clearing”) that permits disclosure.     

That Which “Has No Name in Philosophy”: Merleau-Ponty and the Language of Literature

In this paper I address some related aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished texts, The Visible and the Invisible and The Prose of the World. The point of departure for my reading of these works is the sense of philosophical disillusionment which underlies and motivates them, and which, I argue, leads Merleau-Ponty towards an engagement with art in general and with literature in particular. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s emerging conception of ethics—premised on the paradox of a “universal singularity” and concerned with the concrete experience of the individual subject, rather than with abstractions and formal categories—can best be articulated through the formalist concept of “defamiliarization,” the fundamental performativity of all literature, and the dialogic relations which, though inherent in all discourse, become most powerfully evident in the dynamics of reading.

Being and Becoming and the Immanence-Transcendence Relation in Evelyn Underhill’s Mystical Philosophy

If mysticism, as Coventry Patmore defines it, is 'the science of ultimates,' in what way would mysticism explain the possibility of a profound relationship between ultimate reality as infinite and proximate reality as finite (Patmore 1895, p. 39)? This paper attempts to address that question through the lens of Evelyn Underhill’s philosophy of mysticism. The paper fundamentally works at framing two of Hegel’s triadic patterns of dialectic against the being-becoming binary as engaged by Underhill. This application helps unveil the relation of transcendence with immanence, a relation that is crucial for a structuring of the infinite-finite mystical intimacy.     

Merleau-Ponty’s Immanent Critique of Gestalt Theory

Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Gestalt theory in The Structure of Behavior is central to his entire corpus. Yet commentators exhibit little agreement about what lesson is to be learned from his critique, and provide little exegesis of how his argument proceeds. I fill this exegetical gap. I show that the Gestaltist’s fundamental error is to reify forms as transcendent realities, rather than treating them as phenomena of perceptual consciousness. From this, reductivist errors follow. The essay serves not only as a helpful guide through parts of The Structure of Behavior for newcomers, but also offers a corrective to recent trends in philosophy of mind. Such influential commentators as Hubert Dreyfus, Taylor Carmen, and Evan Thompson have, I argue, risked serious misunderstanding of Merleau-Ponty’s view, by mistakenly treating “circular causality” as central to Merleau-Ponty’s own acausal (dialectical) view of forms.     

Fales’s Defense of the Given and Requirements for Being a Reason

Fales defends the doctrine of the given against the Sellarsian dilemma. On his view, sensory experiences, to which one has direct access, can justify basic beliefs. He upholds this view by way of defending an expansive conception of inference, according to which a broadly inferential relation can hold between sensory experiences and perceptual beliefs. The purpose of this paper is to show that Fales’s defense of the given fails. For this purpose, I argue that there are two requirements for being a good reason, and that his conception of direct apprehension faces a serious dilemma with regard to these requirements. In addition, I argue that his expansive conception of inference is unfounded.     

On the motivations for Merleau-Ponty’s ontological research

This paper attempts to clarify Merleau-Ponty’s later work by tracing a hitherto overlooked set of concerns that were of key consequence for the formulation of his ontological research. I argue that his ontology can be understood as a response to a set of problems originating in reflections on the intersubjective use of language in dialogue, undertaken in the early 1950s. His study of dialogue disclosed a structure of meaning-formation and pointed towards a theory of truth (both recurring ontological topics) that post-Phenomenology premises could not account for. A study of dialogue shows that speakers’ positions are interchangeable, that speaking subjects are active and passive in varying degrees, and that the intentional roles of subjects and objects are liable to shift or ‘transgress’ themselves. These observations anticipate the concepts of ‘reversibility’ and ‘narcissism’, his later view of activity and passivity, and his later view of intentionality, and sharpened the need to adopt an intersubjective focus in ontological research.     

Heidegger’s perfectionist philosophy of educationin Being and Time

Continental Philosophy Review - In Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education, I argue that Heidegger’s ontological thinking about education forms one of the deep...     

Ontology and Politics: Interdependence and Radical Contingency in Merleau-Ponty’s Political Interworld

Human Studies - This paper takes as its point of departure Merleau-Ponty’s assertion: “everything will have to begin again, in politics as well as in philosophy”. In pursuing his...     

The primacy question in Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology

This paper takes up the question as to what has primacy within Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology as a way to provide insight into the relation between empirical science and transcendental philosophy within his account of embodiment. Contending that this primacy necessarily pertains to methodology, I show how Kurt Goldstein’s conception of biology provided Merleau-Ponty with a scientific model for approaching human existence holistically in which primacy pertains to the transcendental practice of productive imagination that generates the eidetic organismic Gestalt in terms of which sense is made of empirical facts. Considering the analogous role played by imagination in Merleau-Ponty’s account of perceptual synthesis in the form of what he called projection, I argue that his account of embodiment is, parallel to Goldstein, grounded methodologically on the projection of an organismic Gestalt, and that as a form of operative-intentional praxis projection is the site of primacy in his phenomenology overall. In terms of the relation between natural science and transcendental philosophy in Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment, while the theoretical dimension of the latter—the eidetic apriority of the organismic Gestalt—is coupled dialectically with empirical facts on an epistemically coeval basis, these are jointly subordinated to the normative commitments implied by the imaginative projection of that Gestalt. The primacy of the latter is transcendental but in a distinctly practical sense, such that any substantive discrepancy between natural science and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology reflects metaphilosophical, not theoretical, disagreement.     

Animate being: an inquiry into Being in Heidegger’s Being and Time

Continental Philosophy Review - This paper questions the ontological integrity of Dasein as Heidegger specifies Being in Being and Time. It does so with reference to the real-life, real-time...