Reason, reality, and the fate of philosophy
For most of its history, Western philosophy tried to use pure reason to know reality. But, argues Robert Pippin, Heidegger showed that this entire philosophical tradition was doomed, due to its mistaken assumption that what it is to be a feature of reality is to be available to rational thought. This assumption, which culminated in Hegel, led philosophy to forget the meaningfulness of reality for humans, and so left us lost. Only by recognising that we encounter reality not primarily through reason, but through the ways in which it matters for us, can philosophy recover the world as something meaningful for humans.
- What is forgotten in the Western philosophical tradition
Heidegger claimed that German Idealism and especially Hegel’s philosophy was the “culmination” (Vollendung) of the entire Western philosophical tradition. This meant that one could most clearly see in the work of Kant and Hegel the decisive, underlying assumption guiding that tradition from its inception in Plato and Aristotle to its final fate. Because of that assumption, philosophy had exhausted its possibilities; all that was left for it was to recount its own past moments either in some triumphalist mode (Hegel) or in some deflationary irony (Derrida). This failure, Heidegger hoped, might tell us something crucial for the possibility of a renewal of a philosophy that had something to do with human life as it is actually lived.
This most basic question in philosophy was taken to be the question of “the meaning of being qua being,” but in reality, Heidegger claimed, this question had never been properly addressed; indeed, it had been “forgotten.”
The heart of that prior tradition was metaphysics, the attempt by empirically unaided pure reason to know the “really real,” traditionally understood as “substance.” This most basic question in philosophy was taken to be the question of “the meaning of being qua being,” but in reality, Heidegger claimed, this question had never been properly addressed; indeed, it had been “forgotten.” Instead, the major philosophers in the Western tradition simply assumed that the primary availability of any being is as material for cognition, that “to be” was “to be a detectable substance enduring through time and intelligible as just what it is and not anything else.” Moreover, Heidegger claimed that this assumption about the primary availability of being to discursive thinking, in all the developing variations in later philosophy and especially in modernity, had set in place by its implications various notions of primacy, significance, orders of importance, social relations and relations with the natural world that had led to a disastrous self-estrangement in the modern West, a forgetfulness and lostness that ensured a permanent and ultimately desperate homelessness. This assumption was that being – anything at all – was primarily manifest as a detectable substance enduring over time, something merely present before us. He called this the “metaphysics of presence.” So, if the tradition takes itself to be answering the question of the meaning of being – from Platonic Ideas, to Aristotelian forms, to atomism, to materialism, to Leibnizian monads, to Cartesian mental representations, to whatever the most advanced physical sciences say – what in the question of the meaning of being has been forgotten?
What does it mean to be, in what way does anything at all come to mean anything for us?
- Heidegger’s corrective: we first encounter beings through their mattering for us
The heart of Heidegger’s answer concerns how we understand the question itself: what does it mean to be, in what way does anything at all come to mean anything for us? The problem of “the meaning of Being” is the problem of the meaningfulness of beings; that is, beings in the way they matter. Their way of mattering is their original way of being available; they become salient in a familiarity permeated by degrees of significance; it is how beings originally show up for us in our experience. The source of that meaningfulness is the possibility of meaningfulness as such, the meaningfulness of Being as such, that beings can matter at all. We immediately assume that this is all a matter of “subjective projection,” that individuals somehow determinate what matters to them and project that onto the world and others. This is what Heidegger most of all wants to contest. He wants to relocate the possible sources of meaningfulness in a shared historical world, a horizon of possible meaningfulness into which we are “thrown,” in his famous term.
So, in his most well-known account in his 1927 Being and Time, Heidegger wanted to convince his readers of two initial claims, along the way to a much longer project that he had planned for the book. One was that entities are available for experience in their significance (Bedeutsamekeit), salient in experience because of the way they matter, given various comportments, practical undertakings in our engagements with beings and with others. In making this claim, he was concerned with the issue he called primordiality or fundamentality. While various sensible and material properties of objects could be attended to, his phenomenological claim was that this sort of attentiveness was secondary, “founded,” an abstraction from what was our original, practical engagement.
The second followed from that claim of primordiality. It was that this primary availability could not be understood as a matter of discursive discrimination, as if the objects’ significance were a function of or result of our judging or even being able to judge the objects to be significant. His now famous examples involved the use of tools or “equipment.” While we obviously have reasons to grab a hammer by the wooden handle and not the metal top, our understanding of how to use the hammer was not a matter of those reasons guiding or directing our use: the know-how involved in hammer competency need have no basis in prior beliefs or implicit beliefs about proper hammering. The hammer came to matter as some task or other arose, and it could so matter because of a nondiscursive familiarity with hammers and the equipmental context assumed as a background for that significance, a context itself not appealed to or invoked in any discursive way.
That context was itself a component of a general horizon of possible meaningfulness, a source of comportments that would make sense to engage in, a world. Our general orientation in any such equipmentman context, our knowing our way around in a given historical world, is much more a matter of what he called “attunement,” a way of being onto, appreciating, registers of significance in experience, rather than rule-following or conscious directedness. This meant that there was a primordial normative dimension in the availability of entities, significances, meaningfulness, mattering, that was not properly understood as the product of or even as subject to rational assessment. We are oriented from such possible meaningfulness non-discursively by this “attunement”, in the way friends or orchestra members might be said to be attuned to one another.
This also speaks to the “critical” potential of Heidegger’s approach. What he wants to claim about the ultimate groundlessness and dogmatism of the traditional metaphysical orientation has a normative consequence that Heidegger clearly thinks is catastrophic, a dimension brought out best by “Heideggerians” such as Herbert Marcuse on “One-Dimensionality” and Hannah Arendt on “thoughtlessness.” It is also manifest in his explicit linking of consumerist capitalism with the implications of the metaphysics of presence. This has an important bearing on what might be possible if we manage to recover, to remember, what we have forgotten, the question we need to ask. The absence of any acknowledged, genuine source of meaningfulness has a political dimension, even, perhaps especially, when it is not acknowledged. Such a dimension is manifest in such ever more common pathologies such as boredom, anxiety, depression, “deaths of despair,” resentment, and alienation, and these express themselves in the rage we see coursing through contemporary politics.