what Heideggerians always say

Here are two points that Heideggerians always tend to make against me whenever debate is launched. (Having been a “Heideggerian” for the whole of my youth, I mean no harm to my former tribe.)

1. “Dasein’s relation to the world is of a completely different kind from the relation of inanimate objects to the world. In fact, these have no relation to world at all.”

But this misses the point. Even most panpsychists wouldn’t deny that human dealings with the world are of a vastly different kind from all others. That’s not in dispute. The dispute is over whether the human relation is so vastly different in kind from that of other entities that it deserves to be built into a basic ontological rift around which all else revolves.

And in fact, this is Heidegger’s weakest point as a philosopher, the point where he sees least clearly with his own eyes and merely adopts what the tradition of modern philosophy handed down to him. For he is never able to clarify adequately how Dasein’s relation to the world is different. It always has something to do with the “as-structure.” Humans see world “as” world.

But the nature of the as-structure remains cloudy throughout his writings. At times it seems to mean that all human comportment takes things “as” what they are, as in his claims that even blindly using a hammer takes it “as” a hammer. But at times it seems to mean a heightened sort of articulate awareness, as when philosophy is claimed to be the what really sees world “as” world or being “as” being.

In short, he uses it both as a term for all human comportment, and as a measuring-stick for judging certain kinds of comportment as more “as” than others– e.g., philosophy.

This is why animals pose such a special difficulty for Heidegger. He never dares the Cartesian position of claiming that animals are machines that see nothing and feel no pain. Yet he also obviously isn’t comfortable granting the heightened theoretical sort of “as” to animals. So they remain stranded in something called “world-poverty” that is raised but never explained, in the famous and popular 1929/30 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World-Finitude-Solitude.

My own procedure, different from Heidegger’s, was simple. I read the as-structure in the most basic possible way, with full justification in Heidegger’s own texts (though I admit he would never accept my conclusions). Being is what withdraws from all access, while the “as” is what has emerged into access. (See the distinction between Ereignis and Vorgang in 1919, or more famously that between Zu– and Vorhandenheit in Being and Time itself.)

Once you read it this way, there are no grounds for distinguishing in a basic ontological way between the human relation to a cotton ball and a flame’s relation to that same cotton ball. Both relations fail to exhaust the depths of cotton-being, though presumably the human access to the cotton is far richer.

In other words… Is the difference between human comportment and inanimate relations a basic rift in the cosmos (as almost all modern philosophy thinks)? Or is the basic rift not rather between objects and relations? If the latter is true, as I hold, then human Dasein is merely an extremely complicated and interesting sort of object, differing only in degree from the reality of a flame or ball of cotton.

My way involves fewer presuppositions. None of Heidegger’s talk of the as-structure or “openness” or the like has any virtue other than being more consonant with the basic dogma of modern philosophy that human being is some sort of special rip in the fabric of the cosmos, different from all others. This same dogma is defended today most lucidly and openly by Zizek. And though I love both Heidegger and Zizek, this assumption on their part always sounds to me like mere table-pounding.

That is the source of my very partial alliance with the denials, by scientifically inclined philosophers (“positivists,” some wrongly call them all), that there is something automatically special about humans for the purposes of ontology.

2. Heideggerians also like to say things like this: “There is no problem for Heidegger with object-object relations. Heidegger is perfectly supportive of science.”

But this misses the point again, even in terms of Heidegger scholarship, let alone philosophy proper. For Heidegger, science deals with objects by modelling them in terms of present-at-hand properties. And once things appear in terms of present-at-hand properties, they are no longer the things themselves. (Terminological note: Heidegger always uses “object” as a pejorative term for the present-at-hand incarnation of a thing; I use “object” for what he means by “thing” in the writings from 1949 onward.)

Here I do not depart from Heidegger’s own self-understanding. The reason he is so (needlessly) critical of the sciences, going so far as to claim that they “do not think,” is precisely because they posit their objects in terms of present-at-hand accessibility, which is what Heidegger’s entire philosophy was built to undermine. (Husserl, in his eyes, also does nothing more than reduce the world to presence-at-hand in consciousness.)

The problem is that Heidegger never develops an “authentic” sense of inanimate relations. Something like the relation between cotton and fire has meaning for him only in terms of present-at-hand proposition and measurements in the physical sciences. The sole relation that has philosophical weight for Heidegger is that between Dasein and Sein. And in that respect he’s just another modern philosopher, not as original as he is on so many other fronts.