a reawakened thread

Jon Cogburn made THIS POST back on March 17. I agree with Cogburn’s defense of my reading of Heidegger against Gary Williams, who just posted a response on May 5.

I’ll quote the exchange and then make a comment or two at the end.

“Gary Williams said…
While yes, Harman does think that even dust particles interact with other particles ‘as’ dust particles (and not, say, ‘as’ fire), he ‘freely admit[s] that there is a sense in which the paper screen is unable to encounter dust *as* dust, since it lacks the consciousness of sentient beings.’ (tool-being, p. 32). That Harman can brush ‘sentient’ consciousness off as not making any “principled” ontological distinction tells me that Harman is not actually a Heideggerian, and never was. Why else would he say that ‘My goal is *not* to reconstruct Heidegger’s own understanding of the tool-analysis. Nor is it my claim that previous interpreters have mistaken his authorial intentions, as if I were in a position to reveal his esoteric doctrine, hidden from the vulgar until now.’ (ibid., p. 15). Harman can’t be a Heideggerian because Heidegger’s main insight was the the structure of circumspective concern ‘frees’ or ‘clears’ beings into ontological possibilities not derivative from their ontic, present-at-hand structures. You can’t tell just from investigating a rock’s objective properties that it would be useful for humans if they need a paper weight, or an object to artfully decorate, etc. This opens up a whole ‘worldly world’ of ontological being (big B being) as opposed to ontic being (little b beings). This ‘ontology of objects’ is based entirely on the special consciousness of ‘sentient beings’ that Harman blows off! That’s the whole point of Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology. That Harman doesn’t see the principled ontological difference circumspective concern opens up tells me that his metaphysical project is entirely orthogonal to Heidegger’s. Reply May 05, 2010 at 05:06 PM

Jon Cogburn said in reply to Gary Williams…
Harman’s Heidegger is a lot more philosophically interesting than yours.

I mean if your Heidegger didn’t exist it wouldn’t make any difference to the history of philosophy, because what you are presenting as his fundamental insight is just a fancy way of making Aristotle’s distinction between teleological and efficient causation, but with teleological causation in objects being dependent on people. But this latter point is the standard post-Enlightement view of purposiveness being relative to human projects. So I don’t see any “fundamental insight” at all here, just a non-standard way of saying something that almost everyone believes since Descartes.
Reply May 05, 2010 at 05:53 PM

I’m not entirely sure what to make of Williams’s central criticism of me, which is this:

“This ‘ontology of objects’ is based entirely on the special consciousness of ‘sentient beings’ that Harman blows off! That’s the whole point of Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology. That Harman doesn’t see the principled ontological difference circumspective concern opens up tells me that his metaphysical project is entirely orthogonal to Heidegger’s.”

1. I’m not sure what would be wrong with having a “metaphysical project entirely orthogonal to Heidegger’s.” (“Orthogonal” is an unfortunate choice of terms, by the way. Why not just say “at odds with Heidegger’s,” so that everyone can understand the point immediately without pausing to wonder if they know what it means. But anyway…)

2. If the point of Tool-Being were to say “here’s what Heidegger was trying to do all along,” then the case would be worse than shaky. But several times in Tool-Being I openly say things like “Heidegger would surely hate my book if he were here to read it, but that’s not the point.”

But the real point, and frankly it’s a very Heideggerian point, is that what a philosophy actually accomplishes cannot be identified with the philosopher’s own understanding of it. That is a commonplace in the arts, and there are many examples of it even in the sciences.

In other words, the point of my reading of Heidegger has never been to say “this is how Heidegger saw himself,” but rather to say “this is where the real fractures in the earth appear following the Great Heideggerian Earthquake.”

And my conclusion is that, even though Heidegger tries to give certain ontological privileges to Dasein, he fails to do so. If you rigorously follow the labor that is actually accomplished by terms such ready-to-hand and present-at-hand (as I have), you will find that Heidegger’s attempts to restrict these terms to the human realm cannot possibly be maintained– and that if ready-to-hand and present-at-hand represent rigorous and stunning philosophical breakthroughs, his assignment of these terms to the sphere of Dasein is not rigorous and stunning, but simply show the way in which Heidegger was still a product of his era. (And by the way, Heidegger makes similar claims about most of his predecessors, so I don’t think he’d be in any position to scream about my doing it to him.)

It is a commonplace of intellectual history that later interpretations can be more true to the original than the original itself. My favorite, humble example was when someone said: “You have to remember that the sixties actually happened in the seventies,” and I know exactly what he meant.

Kant’s successors are always doing this: the amputation of the Ding an sich is not strictly true to Kant’s own intentions (recall his dismissive public letter about Fichte), but it can easily make sense to say “the things in themselves play no genuine role in Kant’s philosophy, and merely show the way in which he remained wedded to a tradition that he could never fully overcome; hence, we should simply dispense with them.” (One can always debate whether this is true or not –see Rae Langton’s Kantian Humility for the one of the most powerful opposing readings– but it’s obviously not a ridiculous thing to say about Kant.)

There is certainly some sort of difference between how humans confront the world, how animals confront it, and how a stone confronts it. But it’s also possible to dig to a deeper layer than that and ask “What does all such confrontation have in common? What is the deeper root from which Einstein’s speculations, the antics of a kitten, and the causal interaction between two stones all emerge?” The notion that the human being is so special that it needs to be a radically different ontological principle, built into the very foundation of the modes of being we recognize, has in my opinion become a great cliché of Western thought, and like all clichés it is tough to liberate oneself from.

And yes, I think this is what haunts not only Heidegger’s self-understanding, but also the positions of Badiou and Zizek, probably the two most prominent living philosophers in the continental tradition. They’re not arguing it, in my view, but simply relying on the fact that it still seems so inherently plausible to the majority of Western intellectuals. But if ever it loses that automatic plausibility, their positions will be in serious trouble.

And one final point from Williams:

“Harman can’t be a Heideggerian because Heidegger’s main insight was the the structure of circumspective concern ‘frees’ or ‘clears’ beings into ontological possibilities not derivative from their ontic, present-at-hand structures.”

I don’t see the point of this complaint. So what if I’m not a Heideggerian? This would be testimony to my originality, which most people would count as a compliment, whereas Williams’s tone suggests it is meant negatively. And I don’t get that.

But elsewhere, Williams says that I “never was” a Heideggerian. And that’s just historically false. I was most definitely a Heideggerian between early 1988 and late 1997, i.e. from ages 19-29. No one spends the vast majority of their free time in their twenties reading 60+ volumes by a difficult philosopher in a foreign language (after spending a couple thousand scarce dollars to acquire them) with a purely disinterested, neutral attitude. No, I thought Heidegger was pretty much right about everything but politics (with a few other peripheral objections: “he’s too pessimistic about technology,” “his treatment of animals isn’t very impressive,” etc.)

As I once heard a wise teacher say: “The danger of great teachers is that they can take years to outgrow.” And it did take me many years, but finally I grew out of it. Heidegger’s a truly profound thinker, but one whose works are riddled with inconsistencies that I have tried to describe, and I tend to agree with Cogburn about what those problems are (though his terminology, coming as it does from the analytic camp, is sometimes over my head).