Heidegger on presence: A reply

Taylor Carman has argued that the passages I submitted to him as proof that Heidegger identifies being with presence are really just his characterizations of a metaphysical conception of being that he repudiates. I show that he has misread these passages and has misunderstood the nature of the continuity that Heidegger himself recognizes between the views of Kant which are under discussion in the texts from which these passages are drawn and his own (Heidegger's) position which finds expression in them. I then cite other passages from another work by Heidegger that make the same point about being and presence just as emphatically and quite independently of any account of any other philosopher's views. Finally, I explain the difference between the ways Heidegger uses the word Anwesenheit ‐ his word for presence. One of these is as a translation of the Greek ousia which he interprets as a concept of being as presence sans temporality; the other is the radicalized concept of being as presence toward which Heidegger was working in Being and Time.     

Heidegger’s Nietzsche

ABSTRACT

Heidegger maintained that Nietzsche was a metaphysical thinker. What did he mean by that? Not that Nietzsche advanced purely theoretical doctrines that might be perfected or refuted by rational argument. Instead, he meant that Nietzsche’s thinking is a ‘representational thinking’ (vorstellendes Denken) that preserves a commitment to a conception of truth as correctness (Richtigkeit). Nietzsche’s apparent denials of the intelligibility of truth, Heidegger argues, are in fact expressions of our growing insensitivity to truth understood as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit). Nietzsche’s thinking is thus deeply attuned to metaphysics as Heidegger came to understand it in the late 1930s, namely as a forgetting of being (Seinsvergessnheit), beginning with Plato. His interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought, particularly the idea of eternal recurrence, changed less because he changed his mind about Nietzsche than because he reconceived the philosophical tradition since Plato as metaphysical, and so reframed his own project as an attempt to think beyond metaphysics.     

The coming of history: Heidegger and Nietzsche against the present

Heidegger’s 1938–1939 seminar on Nietzsche’s On the Utility and Liability of History for Life continues Heidegger’s grand interpretation of Nietzsche as a metaphysical thinker of presence. Nietzsche’s conceptions forgetting, memory, and even life itself, according to Heidegger, are all complicit in the privileging of presence. Simultaneous with his seminar, Heidegger is also compiling the notebook, Die Geschichte des Seyns (The History of Beyng), 1938–1940, wherein he sketches his own conception of history. Examining Heidegger’s criticisms of Nietzsche in the light of his contemporaneous notebook allows us to articulate Heidegger’s concern for history and for “what has-been” (das Gewesene) as a thinking of the “coming” of being. For Heidegger, to exist historically is to exist as something sent, something arriving, as something that “comes” to us. This coming of history is an ontological determination of all that is, no longer construed as present-at-hand objects, but as always arriving, relational beings. After presenting Heidegger’s view of the coming of history, I return to Nietzsche’s Utility and Liability of History to draw attention to an aspect of his text that is neglected by Heidegger, that of the political. The concluding sections of Nietzsche’s text confront the politics of the present, in both senses of the genitive, in order to rally against the closure of society. In the conclusion to the paper, I turn to the political dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking of history with an eye to how it might elude Heidegger’s interpretation.     

“Heidegger’s Biological Nietzsche”

Heidegger’s lecture courses on Nietzsche give prominent attention to the question of what he calls “Nietzsche’s Alleged Biologism”. This biologism is what has been labelled the official Nazi reading of Nietzsche. Yet, there is no single Nazi reading of Nietzsche. There were biologistic and non-biologistic Nazi readings of Nietzsche, as well as anti-Nietzschean Nazis such as Ernst Krieck who denied that his philosophy was either socialist, nationalist, or racial. I will show that Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche is a critique of the so-called official Nazi reading of Nietzsche as biologistic. However, Heidegger is not merely replacing the Nazi biologistic reading with a metaphysical reading, for his metaphysical reading of Nietzsche is biological, in a distinct sense. Although I reject this metaphysical reading, Heidegger aids my project of constructing a non-naturalist, yet physical reading of Nietzsche in at least four ways: 1) he rejects the Nazi biologistic reading of Nietzsche; 2) he sets forth distinct notions of the biological and the physical akin to Nietzsche; 3) he argues against scientific naturalism in favour of an alternative mode of knowing; and 4) he recognises that rather than reducing everything to nature, Nietzsche anticipates him in intertwining more originary, dynamic notions of physis and techne.     

A ground completely overgrown: Heidegger,Kant and the problem of metaphysics

ABSTRACT

While we endorse Heidegger’s effort to reclaim Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a work concerned with the possibility of metaphysics, we hold, first, that his reading is less original than is often assumed and, second, that it unduly marginalizes the critical impetus of Kant’s philosophy. This article seeks to shed new light on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and related texts by relating Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant to, on the one hand, the epistemological approach represented by Cohen’s Kant’s Theory of Experience and, on the other, the metaphysical readings put forward by Heimsoeth, Wundt and others in the 1920s. On this basis, we argue that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant remains indebted to the methodological distinction between ground and grounded that informed Cohen’s reading and was transferred to the problem of metaphysics by Wundt. Even if Heidegger resists a ‘foundationalist’ mode of this distinction, we argue that his focus on the notions of ground and grounding does not allow him to account for Kant’s critique of the metaphysical tradition.     

From the Question Concerning Technology to the Quest for a Democratic Technology: Heidegger,Marcuse, Feenberg

Frederick Olafson criticizes Hubert Dreyfus's interpretation of Being and Time on a number of points, including the meaning of being, the nature of intentionality, and especially the role of das Man in Heidegger's account of social existence. But on the whole Olafson's critique is unconvincing because it rests on an implausible account of presence and perceptual intuition in Heidegger's early philosophy, and because Olafson maintains an over‐individuated notion of Dasein and consequently a one‐sided conception of the role of das Man. Unfortunately, since Dreyfus confines his commentary exclusively to Division I, he in effect forgoes any attempt to explain how das Man might be understood as playing the simultaneously constitutive and destructive role Heidegger seems to have envisioned for it. I conclude by arguing that the conformity and the conformism represented by das Man are bound together by Heidegger's notion of standoffishness (Abständigkeit).     

Heidegger the Metaphysician: Modes‐of‐Being and Grundbegriffe

Modes‐of‐being (Seinsarten) figure centrally in Heidegger's masterwork Being and Time. Testimony to this is Heidegger's characterisation of two of his most celebrated enquiries—the Existential analytic and the Zeug analysis—as investigations into the respective modes‐of‐being of the entities concerned. Yet despite the importance of this concept, commentators disagree widely about what a mode‐of‐being is. In this paper, I systematically outline and defend a novel and exegetically grounded interpretation of this concept. Strongly opposed to Kantian readings, such as those advocated by Taylor Carman and Cristina Lafont, I interpret a mode‐of‐being as a universal that defines a district (Bezirk)—that is, a natural class of entities that ought to be conceptualised in a special way. As such, every mode‐of‐being plays an important metaphysical and epistemic role: serving both to unify a natural class of a high degree of generality and as the interpretandum of an act yielding the basic‐concepts (Grundbegriffe) pertaining to the entities therein. In explicating and arguing for this interpretation, I attribute a characteristically Aristotelian philosophical position to the early Heidegger, encompassing both metaphysical and epistemological realism and a conceptualist theory of universals.     

“Superabundant Being”: Disambiguating Rilke and Heidegger

Rilke's impact on the generation of writers reshaping philosophy and theology during the interwar years is arguably without parallel. Within this constellation, the case of Heidegger as a reader of Rilke presents unique challenges. For Rilke's poetry neither quite allows for a wholly appropriative reading such as, for better or worse, Heidegger accords Hölderlin's oeuvre; nor can Heidegger quite bring himself to subject Rilke’s poetry to critical appraisal. Instead, Heidegger's analysis of Dasein as worked out in Part I of Being and Time (1927) and in his lectures on The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics (1929) seems haunted by an intellectual and expressive debt to Rilke that he can neither acknowledge nor fully resolve. For to do so would be to confront a possibility of human finitude, so luminously traced in Rilke's Duino Elegies (1922), still defined by moments of transcendence – moments that can be captured in the fleeting plenitude of poetic intuition (Anschauung) and lyric image (Bild). Whereas von Balthasar, in volume 3 of his Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (1939), reads Rilke as fundamentally embracing Heidegger’s notion of strictly immanent and finite Dasein, I argue that the oeuvre of the later Rilke, without being reclaimed for a metaphysical, let alone religious position, nevertheless is shaped, both intellectually and expressively, by insistent, if enigmatic, moments of transcendence.     

The Dynamic Association of Being and Non-Being: Heidegger’s Thoughts on Plato’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Sophist</Emphasis> Beyond Platonism

This article examines Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato’s Sophist, focusing on his attempts to grasp Plato’s original thinking of being and non-being. Some contemporary thinkers and commentators argue that Heidegger’s view of Plato is simply based on his criticism against the traditional metaphysics of Platonism and its language. But a close reading of his lecture on the Sophist reveals that his view of Plato is grounded in Plato’s questioning struggle with the ambiguous nature of human speech or language (logos). For Heidegger, Plato’s way of philosophizing is deeper than the metaphysical understanding of Platonism which sees only fixed ideas of being. In the Sophist, dialectical thinking of Plato constantly confronts the questionable force of the logos which betrays the natural possibility of non-being based on the tension between movement and rest. Thus, from Plato’s original insight Heidegger uncovers the dynamic association (koinōnia) of being and non-being as a natural ground of everyday living with others. However, although Heidegger’s understanding of the Sophist powerfully demonstrates the lively possibility (dunamis) of being beyond the customary perspective of Platonic metaphysics, his interpretation fails to further disclose Plato’s political question of being emerging in the Sophist, which seeks the true associative ground of human beings.     

Whose Metaphysics of Presence? Heidegger's Interpretation of Energeia and Dunamis in Aristotle

In the recently published 1924 course, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, Martin Heidegger offers a detailed interpretation of Aristotle's definition of kinesis in the Physics. This interpretation identifies entelecheia with what is finished and present‐at‐an‐end and energeia with being‐at‐work toward this end. In arguing against this interpretation, the present paper attempts to show that Aristotle interpreted being from the perspective of praxis rather than poiesis and therefore did not identify it with static presence. The paper also challenges later variations of Heidegger's interpretation, in particular his account of dunamis in the 1931 course on Metaphysics Theta, which insists that its mode of being is presence‐at‐hand. By arguing that this reading too is untenable, the paper concludes that Aristotle's metaphysics is not a metaphysics of presence and that his texts instead point toward a possibility of metaphysics ignored by the attempts of Heidegger and others to overcome it.     

Overcoming Philosophy: Heidegger, Metaphysics, and the Transformation to Thinking

Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is central to his attempt to re-instantiate the question of being. This paper examines Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics by looking at the relationship between metaphysics and thought. This entails an identification of the intimate relationship Heidegger maintains exists between philosophy and metaphysics, an analysis of Heidegger’s critique of this association, and a discussion of his proposal that philosophy has been so damaged by its association with metaphysics that it must be replaced with meditative thinking. It is not quite clear, however, how the overcoming of metaphysical thinking is to occur especially given Heidegger’s insistence that relying on human will to effect an alteration in thinking simply re-instantiates the metaphysical perspective to be overcome. While several critics have argued Heidegger has no solution to this issue, instead holding that thought must simply be open to being’s ‘self’-transformation if and when it occurs, I turn to Heidegger’s notion of trace and a number of scattered comments on the relationship between meditative thinking and willing as non-willing to show Heidegger: (a) was aware of this issue; and (b) tried to resolve it by recognising a reconceptualised notion of willing not based on or emanating from the aggressive willing of metaphysics.     

Power and Freedom in Heidegger’s First Notebook

ABSTRACT

In the first notebook published in Überlegungen II-VI, which covers the years 1931 and 1932, Martin Heidegger uses a conception of power that is different to that found in his later work. Rather than power being the expression of the will to will and source of ruin for humanity, he says that humanity can only be saved from ruin if it can pave the way for an “empowerment of being” (Ermächtigung des Seins). This article will show that this early understanding of power is related to Heidegger’s conception of freedom as the essence of truth, developing his thinking on this topic from the period of 1927–1930. It will show that the terms “empowerment of being” and “letting be” (Seinlassen) are akin, and that Heidegger uses the former to distance his thinking from potential misinterpretations of the essay “On the Essence of Truth”.     

On questioning being: Foucault’s Heideggerian turn

Attempts to resolve the question of Foucault’s relationship to Heidegger usually look for points of substantive correlation between them: the coincidence of being and power, the meaning of truth, technology, ethics, and so on. Taking seriously Foucault’s claim in his final interview that he uses Heidegger as an ‘instrument of thought’, this paper looks for a correlation in practice. The argument focuses on a structural isomorphism between Heidegger’s concept of the fourfold event (Ereignis) of being and later Foucault’s critique of ‘problematization’ (problématique). This isomorphism, I argue, indicates a covert philosophical confrontation between Foucault and Heidegger, which was determinative for Foucault in the period of the turn to ethics (1976–84). This is a confrontation over the meaning of the ‘event of thought’. Such an interpretation not only permits a literal reading of Foucault’s comments regarding Heidegger in his final interview, but also casts the developments in Foucault’s later work in a fascinating new light. Foucault’s critique of problematization, on this view, is founded in an historicized version of Heideggerian ‘other’ thinking, and pivots on a ontologically tempered enactment of the Heideggerian turn (Kehre).     

The Privilege of the Present: Time and the Trace from Heidegger to Derrida

ABSTRACT

One of the starting points of Derrida’s deconstruction is the idea that metaphysics is dominated by an ontological primacy of the present. It is well known that Derrida took up this thesis of the ‘privilege of the present’ in metaphysics from Heidegger. However, this thesis is mentioned without being developed by Heidegger. What is the meaning of this ontological position? How did it originate? Should we try to go beyond it? And if so, how? In this paper, I would like to start out from Heidegger’s view that the understanding of Being, in the metaphysical tradition, is dominated by the ontological primacy of the present: according to this approach, which goes back to Aristotle’s theory of substance (ousia), Being means constant presence; only that which is constantly present really exists. I will then show that Heidegger himself, in his conception of the past, has renewed the privilege of the present, favoring the ‘having been’ (Gewesenheit) over the past as ‘by-gone-ness’ (Vergangenheit). Finally, I will show how Derrida’s concept of trace may help us to go beyond the privilege of the present.     

Auto-affection and the Curvature of Spacetime: Derrida Reading Heidegger Reading Kant

ABSTRACT

This paper has a twofold objective. First, it engages with the interrelation of time, space, and matter in Kant, Heidegger, and Derrida and questions whether and how this interrelation effects the possibility of self-relation. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Heidegger suggests that the very structure of subjectivity is constituted by what he calls the ‘pure self-affection’ of time and thus the possibility of self-relation is intimately bound up with the temporalizing of time. In his 1964–65 seminar, Heidegger: the Question of Being and History, Derrida translates this pure affection of time into the more generic term ‘auto-affection,’ which will remain a pivotal reference point for his deconstruction of the metaphysical privileging of time as presence. Derrida shows how the (im)possibility of auto-affection is bound up not only with time but also with space, or rather with the ‘spacing of time’ that he also refers to as ‘the trace.’ Second, the paper moves across the frontiers of philosophy and physics posing anew the question concerning the interrelations of temporality, spatiality, and materiality. With reference to what in general relativity is called ‘the curvature of spacetime,’ the efficacy of materiality in the movement of auto-affection is called into question.     

Heidegger and the contradiction of Being: a dialetheic interpretation of the late Heidegger

ABSTRACT

It is well known that, from the beginning to the end of his philosophical trajectory, Martin Heidegger tries to develop a fundamental ontology which aims at answering the so-called question of Being: what does Being mean? Unfortunately, in trying to answer this question, Heidegger faces a predicament: given his own premises, speaking about Being leads to a contradiction. Moreover, according to the majority, if not all, of the interpreters who admit the existence of such a predicament, Heidegger tries to avoid the contradiction in question. But is this the only way Heidegger tries to solve the predicament? In this paper, I argue that, in some of his late works and, in particular, in the Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger also takes into serious consideration the possibility of accepting the contradiction he faces in speaking about Being as true. If this is correct, Heidegger endorses what nowadays analytic philosophers call dialetheism, namely the metaphysical position according to which some (but not all) contradictions are true.     

From Gegenstand to Gegenstehenlassen: On the Meanings of Objectivity in Heidegger and Hegel

ABSTRACT

One of Heidegger’s enduring concerns was to develop an original meditation on the meaning of (the presence of) the present. Integral to this attempt is his critique of the understanding of the being of beings in terms of the objectivity of the object. In this paper, I trace Heidegger’s analyses of objectivity, through which Heidegger consistently establishes objectivity as non-primordial and derivative. In order to do this, however, Heidegger had to identify a specific, narrow (spatio-temporalized) conception of objectivity (in terms of Gegenstehenlassen and Vorstellen) as the hallmark of modern philosophy. I show that it is unclear whether that conception is a justified result or rather an unjustified presupposition of his approach. I then suggest what meanings of objectivity might be lost after Heidegger, by pointing to several aspects of Hegel’s notion of objectivity that are incompatible with Heidegger’s account, to wit: the lack of ‘subject-object’-terminology in his definitions of objectivity; the special language of ‘forms of’ objectivity; Hegel’s critique of representation; his notion of Gegenstand as a content with a categorical form, and, finally, that Aristotle’s notion of hypokeimenon might provide a clue as to how Hegel’s notion of object can be understood.     

Heidegger on Aristotle's “Metaphysical” God

In courses in the twenties and early thirties, Heidegger argues that in Aristotle the question of the being of beings (ontology) and that of the unity of beings (theology) are distinct. Although he treated the two questions as part of one science, prôtē philosophía, Aristotle did not, in Heidegger's view, discuss the way in which these questions belong together. Being is determined theoretically as presence; and God, the first mover, is an aítion, an explanatory ground of motion in sensible ousía. God is required as a ground for the presence of beings as a whole. Heidegger no longer seeks explanatory grounds, nor does he prioritize theory. Rather, he inquires into the essence of ground, and the poietical involvement of Dasein in understanding being. The unity of Aristotle's questions is found in a groundless ground: Dasein as transcendence. The metaphysical god is thus no longer required in Heidegger's phenomenology.     

Phenomenology,idealism, and the legacy of Kant

Martin Heidegger closes his Winter Semester 1927–28 lectures by claiming that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, read through the lens of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, confirmed the accuracy of his philosophical path culminating in Being and Time. A notable interpretation of Heidegger’s debt to Kant, advanced by William Blattner, presents Heidegger as a temporal idealist. I argue that attention to Husserl’s adaptation of Kant’s critical philosophy shows that both Husserl and Heidegger are realists. I make my case by tracing a unified philosophical problematic through three puzzling passages: the Schematism chapter of the first Critique, Husserl’s thought experiment of the destruction of the world in Ideas, and the passage in Being and Time that motivates Blattner’s idealist reading. Husserl and Heidegger give accounts, derived from Kant, of how the consciousness of time makes it possible for objects to be perceived as enduring unities, as well as ‘genealogies of logic’ that show how a priori knowledge, including ontology, is possible. These accounts are idealistic only in the sense that they concern the ideal or essential features of intentionality in virtue of which it puts us in touch with things as they are independently of the contributions of any mind of any type.