a point that continues to be overlooked

Some of the recent objections to SR/OOO say something along the following lines:

“Heidegger never said inanimate objects don’t exist outside Dasein. He’s not Berkeley. That’s ridiculous.”

Let’s not even debate this point for now, because it’s not the main point. Let’s go ahead and assume that Heidegger thinks there are trillions of inanimate objects outside Daseon’s access, bumping into one another, causing fires, and so forth.

But that’s not the point. The central claim is not “Heidegger thinks objects don’t exist outside of us.” The central claim is “Heidegger, like Kant, thinks that the relation between human and world is different in kind from the relation between object and object.”

And this is the respect in which Heidegger does not overcome Kant in the least, but remains subordinate to Kant’s insights.

Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine that I go to the Heidegger Circle and give a paper arguing that just as a hammer withdraws from Dasein into concealment, so too does the true reality of wood withdraw from the raindrops that strike it. Do you really think everyone in the room would say: “Oh, no problem. We agree. And Heidegger already said that.” ???

Not a chance. You know what would happen. They would say that being can only withdraw from Dasein, because only Dasein is the site of the Open in which entities can either be manifest or not manifest, and blah blah blah.

So, the claims that SR/OOO is portraying Heidegger as an absolute idealist are both false and beside the point simultaneously. There’s that grain of realism in Heidegger, I believe, but it’s a real that only comes into as a scary ghost haunting Dasein with its cryptic hiddenness.