Heidegger the Obscure and Heraclitus the Obscure

Heidegger’s works are useful in teaching undergraduates in a variety of ways besides simply introducing Heidegger as an important figure in the history of philosophy. This paper outlines the role of Heidegger in the structure of my Ancient Philosophy course, an intermediate level requirement in the history of philosophy for the philosophy major at Goucher College. The thematic role of Heidegger in the course is illustrated with the intersection of Heidegger’s and Heraclitus’ philosophies and their related pedagogy of following language in a polysemic movement that can break the spell of sclerotic ordinary language about beings. Both Heraclitus and Heidegger move from the ordinary opining of the natures of things to the enigma at the heart of language. The paper also references the effect of this pedagogy on students with writer’s block, or graphophobia, when faced with their first attempts at serious philosophical writing. I conclude with describing the outcome of overcoming the fear of writing.

Two Refutations of the Vorhanden Reading of Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science in Being and Time

The dominant interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy of science in Being and Time is that he defines science, or natural science, in terms of presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). I argue that this interpretation is false. I call this dominant view about Heidegger’s definition of science the vorhanden claim; interpreters who argue in favor of this claim I call vorhanden readers. In the essay, I reconstruct and then refute two major arguments for the vorhanden claim: respectively, I call them equipmental breakdown (Section 1) and theoretical assertion (Section 2). The equipmental breakdown argument, stemming mainly from Hubert Dreyfus, advances a vorhanden reading on the basis of three other interpretive claims: I call them, respectively, the primacy of practice claim, the decontextualization claim, and the breakdown claim. While I remain agnostic on the first claim, the argument fails because of decisive textual counterevidence to the latter two claims. Meanwhile, the theoretical assertion argument, which I reconstruct mainly from Robert Brandom, premises its vorhanden claim on the basis of some remarks in Being and Time indicating that theoretical assertions, as such, refer to present-at-hand things. Since science is taken to be a paradigmatic case of an activity that makes theoretical assertions, the vorhanden claim is supposed to follow. I refute this argument on the grounds that it equivocates on Heidegger’s concept of “theoretical assertion” and cannot account for his insistence that science does not principally consist in the production of such assertions. I conclude that, with the failure of these two arguments, the case for the vorhanden claim is severely weakened.

Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach

Heidegger’s three Country Path Conversations have generated much scholarly interest for their elaboration on Heidegger’s thinking of Gelassenheit, scientific and technological thinking, the work of art, evil, and the political aftermath of World War II. In this paper, I argue that these texts also, upon closer analysis, contain a Heideggerian pedagogical philosophy. In each text, I will show, a dynamic of teaching and learning is at play, most especially when it seems to be absent. Further, I will show how only when these three texts are read together does a fuller account of Heidegger’s pedagogy emerge. In the “Triadic Conversation,” I draw out the affective dimensions according to which the Guide’s teaches the Scientist to contest his own worldview. In the “Tower Conversation,” I show how the Teacher must practice what he himself teaches, choosing to tarry with that which causes him discomfort and anxiety. Finally, I read the “Evening Conversation” as an example of students assuming the teaching role themselves when the teacher is nowhere to be found, fulfilling the hopes any teacher would have for her students.

The Ontophobic Turn

My paper sketches a critical historcization of the post-heideggerian philosophy of technology, i.e. of the so called Empirical Turn. In particular, I emphasize its Ontophobic Outcome and its consequent Genetivization. In 1997 Hans Achterhuis publishes a volume (American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn), which presents an overview of the post-continental (i.e. American) philosophy of technology. Achterhuis argues that from the eighties of the last century the philosophy of technology must be traced back to its Empirical Turn, i.e. its rejection of the essentialist approach inspired by Heidegger. The Empirical Turn, or the second generation of philosophers of technology, is characterized by a pragmatist, optimistic and constructivist approach. My thesis is that during these 35 years the Empirical Turn has proven to be an Ontophobic Turn. By this expression, I mean an over-reaction against Heidegger’s legacy. This over-reaction consists of a two-stage process. On one side we have the rejection of the potential ‘mystical drift’ involved in Heidegger’s approach. I consider it a legitimate rejection, i.e. a physiological parricide by the second generation of scholars, in order to free itself from a bulky legacy. However, this physiological parricide gradually turned into an illegitimate rejection, that is an over-reaction (total refuse) against Heidegger’s legacy. Such an overreaction equates to an exclusive interest in the ontic dimension of technology, i.e. an a priori disinterest in its ontological implications. These implications finally become a taboo, i.e. a real Onto-phobia. The benchmark of this change of attitude in the philosophy of technology is the lexical replacement of its object (the transition from “technology” to “technologies”) and its main outcome the “Mr Wolf Syndrome”, namely the transformation of the philosophy of technology into a problem solving activity. In turn, this syndrome produces the eclipse of the epistemic difference between “problem” and “question”, i.e. the metamorphosis of the philosophy of technology into a “positive Wissenschaft”. With reference to this state of things my objection is the following. If the philosophy of technology turns into a search for solutions of the concrete problems emerging from the single technologies, it must be admitted that this kind of activity is performed much better by ‘experts’ than by philosophers. As a result, the Ontophobic Turn culminates in the disappearance of the reason itself for a philosophical approach to the question of technology. The paradoxical fulfilment of the Empirical Turn should be therefore the self-overcoming of the philosophy of technology. To avoid the current Genetivization of the philosophy of technology is necessary a countermovement towards its Ontophobic Turn. The first step of an Ontophilic Turn (i.e. the foundation of a “Philosophy of Technology in the Nominative Case”) consists of the right metabolization of Heidegger’s legacy, i.e. of a Heidegger-renaissance within this discipline. The final goal of this renaissance is the safeguard of the Fragwürdigkeit of technology as philosophical Grundfrage.

Big Nothing

Kant defends the logical consistency of metaphysical groundlessness from the objection that a groundless being would be grounded on nothing, and therefore, on something—a “Big Nothing.” Instead, what is groundless has non-being for its ground; logic yields a formal concept of non-being as the negation of all that exists. Heidegger goes further in giving a positive characterization of the nothing: the nothing “makes possible the manifestness of beings” and “belongs to their essential unfolding.” Our openness to beings reveals beings as distinct from the nothing. The internal structure of this openness (‘something and not nothing’) is revealed in fundamental attunements like anxiety. I consider objections to Heidegger’s account from Carnap and Wittgenstein and offer a Heideggerian response. I show that Wittgenstein’s final assessment of metaphysical statements is more ambivalent than Carnap’s. Where Carnap mocks Heidegger for expressing his feelings in the form of a theory, Wittgenstein recognizes the direction of Heidegger’s thought, and concludes that what Heidegger wants to express is—Schade!—inexpressible. There is a there there; it’s just that language isn’t capable of saying so. Heidegger’s response is that metaphysics neglects to ask about the condition (being/the nothing) that makes beings possible — it identifies being with presence. Ironically, the attempt to eliminate metaphysics through the logical regimentation of language terminates in metaphysics—a metaphysics of presence. This metaphysics flattens every attempt to think about the world into a consideration of beings without any room for consideration of being, as that which makes their manifestation possible. For Heidegger, by contrast, nothing is the ground of grounds, the reason for reasons. We find things intelligible because of the nothing that allows us to find ourselves in a world of beings.

The Role of Receptivity in Heidegger’s Kant Interpretation

Commentators on Heidegger’s late-1920s interpretation of Kant often argue that Heidegger reveals himself in this work to be a philosopher of receptivity: Heidegger gives pride of place to the passive aspects of human cognition, our “openness to the world,” over against activity, spontaneity, and understanding (Gordon, 2010, p.7). On this view, Heidegger’s contribution to the transcendental tradition is offering an “affective transcendentalism” (Engelland, 2017, p.223): in response to the central question of transcendental philosophy – What are the prior conditions that enable and structure our experience? – Heidegger emphasizes the prior affectivity that preconditions our experience. While Heidegger’s position, so construed, may appear an exciting strain of transcendental philosophy, it likewise seems to be a considerable departure from Kant. After all, Kant insisted that both spontaneity and receptivity are required for human cognition; this is often referred to as Kant’s “discursivity thesis”. In Kant’s well-known formulation connecting our passively receiving intuitions and actively organizing concepts, “thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B75). Therefore, the idea that Heidegger defends a philosophy of receptivity in his interpretive works on Kant contributes to the common view that Heidegger is a bad interpreter of Kant. I challenge the claim that Heidegger defends a philosophy of receptivity in his interpretive works on Kant. This claim derives its plausibility from Heidegger’s opening discussion of intuition, where Heidegger does insist that “thinking is in the service of intuition.” While this discussion grants a kind of primacy to sensibility – in particular, our faculty of sensibility explains why human cognition is finite – I suggest that it does not compromise Kant’s discursivity thesis. Heidegger affirms, with Kant, that understanding and sensibility, two distinct capacities or faculties, are required for cognition. Further, I argue that Heidegger’s claim that sensibility plays a “leading role” in cognition is merely the beginning of Heidegger’s argument; it is not his main intervention. For Heidegger is concerned not with cognition, but with the source of cognition: the very constitution of the human being. And this source, Heidegger insists, is both receptive and spontaneous. Heidegger’s central thesis – that we must consider the imagination to be the fundamental cognitive faculty in Kant – rests crucially on the claim that the imagination is both receptive and spontaneous. Under the consensus reading of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, Heidegger is supposed to be a perfect foil to the Neo-Kantian interpretation of Kant: where the Neo-Kantians privilege spontaneity, Heidegger privileges receptivity. While Heidegger is certainly critical of the Neo-Kantian prioritization of spontaneity, I argue that we must rethink Heidegger’s relationship to the Neo-Kantian view. Heidegger’s main thesis in the Kant interpretation – that the imagination, a faculty that is both spontaneous or receptive, is the “common root” of sensibility and understanding – answers a question that Heidegger takes up from the Marburg Neo-Kantians: what is the origin that unifies the faculties of sensibility and understanding? While the Neo-Kantians insist on an origin in the spontaneous faculty of understanding, Heidegger suggests instead that the origin is the receptive and spontaneous faculty of imagination. Where the Neo-Kantians overemphasize spontaneity, Heidegger restores balance. Ultimately, Heidegger does not prioritize receptivity in his reading of Kant; rather, Heidegger offers a transcendental philosophy that inquires more deeply into the unified receptivity and spontaneity that characterizes the human being.