The Incomprehensible “Unworlded World”: Nature and Abyss in Heideggerian Thought

ABSTRACT

The complexities of Heidegger’s early accounts of nature provide a privileged perspective from which to understand the evolution of his thought into the 1930s and beyond. This movement seems largely driven by his response to what Karsten Harries has called “the antinomy of being”. In Heidegger’s early writings, Natur is associated with the “theoretical” and the “intraworldly.” However, less attested is an “unworlded” and thus intrinsically “incomprehensible” sense of nature, as the abyssal ground of worlding. This thread is traced through key Marburg period texts, into Being and Time, and beyond it into the 1928 “metontology” appendix and its surprising transformation in the 1929 inaugural lecture. Finally, some cursory observations are made about how this trajectory unfolds in later Heideggerian thought, taking the 1936 Artwork essay as an example, showing how both sides of the antinomy of being come to be incorporated within a more comprehensive framing of the Seinsfrage.

KEYWORDS:

• Heidegger
• nature
• world
• being
• antinomy
• metontology

Notes

1 In terms of English language scholarship alone, it was noted long ago by Hubert Dreyfus in his influential commentary (Dreyfus, 109–115), shortly thereafter in a more detailed way by Bruce Foltz in his study on Heidegger and environmental ethics (Foltz, 31–33 ff), and it has been taken up more recently by Michael Lewis (chapter 1), David Storey (66–79ff), and in papers by other scholars (e.g., Padui; and Cooper).

2 The theme of ontological surplus or excess is one that has been broached from a variety of angles in recent Heidegger scholarship, in ways that differ and overlap with the approach taken here. For example, in his fine overview of the theme in Kant and post-Kantian thought, Richard Kearney sees it as culminating in Heidegger’s conception of Dasein and the power of imagination. As will be seen, a very different notion of surplus is developed in this essay. Other approaches are closer to the one developed here, such as those of Polt, Storey, and more broadly, Capobianco (Heidegger’s Way of Being).

3 Harries, The Antinomy of Being. See footnote 18, below.

4 SZ:158/ BT:200.

5 SZ:85/ BT:118; SZ:63/ BT:91; SZ:25/ BT:47.

6 SZ:362/ BT:413–414; GA24:457/ BPP:321; GA26: 16/ MFL:13.

7 For example, the distinction, made in 1923, between “two basic characteristics” of disclosedness: “fore-appearing [vor-schein]” and “fore-presence [Vorhandenheit], in which the latter is framed not as an inadequate theoretical mode of projection of nature, but rather as the already-present background against which equipment appears (GA63:93/ OHF:71; transl from Kisiel, 331.)

8 GA20:269/ HCT:198.

9 GA20:269/ HCT:198.

10 Cf: “[W]e do not reveal nature in its might and power by reflecting on it, but by struggling against it and by protecting ourselves from it and by dominating it” (GA:25: PIK:21/15). See Scheler’s engagement with Sein und Zeit around this issue of resistance and reality, in Scheler. In terms of more contemporary phenomenological approaches that bear comparison, see Günther Figal’s notion of das Gegenständliche as that which “stands over against [entgegensteht]” and “confronts” us (Objectivity, 3); and Lee Braver’s notion of “transgressive realism” which seems to develop a quite similar position (Braver).

11 GA20:269/ HCT:198.

12 SZ:70/ BT:100.

13 Aristotle, Physics Book 2, 192b.

14 SZ:388–89/ BT:440.

15 GA20:270–71/ HCT:199.

16 GA20:270–71/ HCT:198–99. Heidegger’s italics.

17 SZ:71–72/ BT:101–02. Interestingly, there is a certain fluidity in Heidegger’s thinking about these matters in the period between the Marburg lectures and the publication of Being and Time. Whereas in 1925, Heidegger consistently speaks of intraworldly nature as a species of being-present-at-hand (e.g., “already-present” nature is the “Vorhandene in contrast to the zuhanden” [GA20: 270/ HCT:199]), in Being and Time precisely the same phenomena seem to have been incorporated into the ready-to-hand. As Theodore Kisiel puts it, this loss of a “more subtle and richer present-at-hand” in Being and Time, means that the category shrinks back to signify the abstract theoretical attitude alone; to a mere “presence that has been denuded of a world” (Kisiel, 332).

18 What Harries identifies through his use of this term is not only the elemental rivalry between hermeneutic and ontic priority, but also their unavoidable mutuality. On the one hand, hermeneutics goes all the way down: there is no access to the real that is not already mediated through worldly dwelling and experience (reality). Indeed, in this sense, the very idea of reality “in itself” is an incoherent notion. But on the other hand, meaning, understanding and experience are only possible because the things of the world are in the first place, independently of their being-experienced. The real is that which is finitely experienced and understood, and so in this sense, talk of reality-as-experienced without the real is absurd. These two positions each have their own robust and undeniable claims to priority. We are therefore left with an aporia, or an antinomy (in a structurally Kantian sense of the term). Further – not coincidently mirroring the strife and the intimate complementarity of world and earth in Heidegger’s Kunstwerk essay – it is not feasible to favour one side of the antinomy over the other. Harries thus makes a systematic case for phenomenological (or hermeneutical) realism that places equal weight on both hermeneutics and realism as complementary poles of the antinomy of being as a whole. (For a further exploration of Harries’ account, see Colledge).

19 GA20:298/ HCT:217.

20 GA20:356/ HCT:258.

21 This perhaps explains Kisiel’s otherwise inexplicable decision to enclose “unworlded” in scare quotes (omitted above) in his translation, where Heidegger’s entweltlichte is not so marked. Other translators, including Dreyfus in his commentary (Being-in-the-World, 205), do indeed render Heidegger’s text as “deworlded.”

22 GA20:299/ HCT:218.

23 Dostal, 142. Emphasis added.

24 In this sense, Niels Bohr’s purported remark that “it is wrong to think that it is the task of physics to find out how nature is … Physics concerns what we can say about nature” (Petersen, 8), is somewhat misleading. Physics (like all the sciences) does concern nature, but its work is to find optimal (if inevitably inadequate) ways of revealing what is disclosed in the encounter. (My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this remark.)

25 GA15:331/ FS:38.

26 Michael Lewis, 2, uses the language of “nature in itself,” a term that (as seen above) has warrant in Heidegger’s own usage concerning the “Seienden als Seiendem an sich.”

27 SZ:153/ BT:194.

28 Of course, this fecund passage leaves to one side all manner of further questions – that consequently lie beyond the scope of this paper – relating to Heidegger’s understanding of the character and possibility of scientific inquiry and discourse. One might ask, for example, whether Heidegger sees the sciences as dealing with nature as intraworldly or as unworlded. Such a question, I suggest, is premised on the dubious assumption that the two are separable in this way. It would seem that for Heidegger in this passage (and here I put to one side the many ways that he addresses the question of science across the Gesamtausgabe, from the 1912 essay on “The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy” to the Le Thor Seminars from the late 1960s), intraworldliness is nothing other than the factical experience of (unworlded) nature. There are not two worlds, but one. Scientific inquiry, as empirical, is entirely dependent on projective understanding of the world as encountered: an encounter with the (unworlded) world. Science is in error, however, when it takes its own (justifiable but profoundly limited) “theoretical” projections of the world as giving it direct and potentially complete access to nature that is thereby stripped of its obscurity and laid bare in its vorhanden openness. In asserting the “incomprehensibility” of (unworlded) nature, and the “inadequacy” of discourses about nature, Heidegger is insisting that all discourses about the world are so partialized that the best we can hope for is a rough glimpse (albeit a potentially productive one) into the overwhelming presencing of nature. Nature as such – the real – is incomprehensible in anything like its full scope. That does not mean that the scientist (or indeed the person in ordinary engagement with the world) are cut off from the real world, cast adrift in a “second” illusory world, for we are all first of all in-the-world. Rather, as Glazebrook puts it, Heidegger’s “commitment to the transcendent actuality of nature goes hand in hand with the thesis that human understanding is projective” (“Heidegger and Scientific Realism”, 362). Finally, none of this says anything specific about the worth (dare I say “truth value”) of any one world projection vis-à-vis others. This important problem of philosophical hermeneutics is one that lies beyond Heidegger’s immediate concern, at least in this passage.

29 See: SZ:212/ BT:255.

30 The passages at issue in Being and Time are well known: (1) “Beings are quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed, the acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their nature is ascertained. But Being ‘is’ only in the understanding of those beings to whose Being something like an understanding of Being belongs.” (SZ:183/ BT:228); (2) “Being (not beings [Seienden]) is dependent upon the understanding of Being; that is to say, reality [Realität] (not the Real [des Realen]) is dependent upon care.” (SZ:212/ BT:255); (3) “Being (not beings) is something which ‘there is [gibt es]’ only in so far as truth is.” (SZ:230/ BT:272.) To these can be added even more unequivocal passages from around the same time: e.g., “Beings are in themselves the kinds of beings they are, and in the way they are, even if, for example, Dasein does not exist.” (GA26:194/ MFL:153)

31 Albeit with many qualifications, there is certainly a strong family resemblance here with Kant’s advocacy of transcendental idealism alongside empirical realism, a point that at least underlines the deeply transcendental structure of Being and Time.

32 GA24:241/ BPP:170; see also, GA24:422/ BPP:297.

33 Harries, “The Antinomy of Being”, 192. See also Harries, The Antinomy of Being, 13–17.

34 GA24:235/ BPP:165; emphasis added.

35 GA24:240/ BPP:169.

36 GA24:240/ BPP:169. See also highly kindred passages across other works of this period: GA24:313/ BPP:219; GA25:19–20/ PIK:14; and GA26:250–51/ MFL:194–95; GA29/30: 405/ FCM: 279–80.

37 Heidegger’s vacillations on this issue were highlighted by Karl Löwith at Heidegger’s 80th birthday colloquium in Heidelberg in 1969. Löwith complains:

[W]hat I missed by the existential mode of inquiry was nature – which is all about us and our selves. When nature is lacking … it cannot be brought in supplementarily afterwards. For what is nature supposed to be if it is not the nature of all beings, whose power of generation permits everything which in any way is – and thus even man – to proceed from it and to pass away again? (Löwith, 311)

38 SZ:152/ BT:193–94; translation altered.

39 SZ: 35–36/BT: 60; emphasis added.

40 SZ:436/ BT:487.

41 GA24:33/ BPP:24.

42 GA26:199/ MFL:156–57.

43 GA9:111/ PM:88.

44 GA9:114/ PM:90; translation amended.

45 Concerning this “whole of beings,” it should also not go unnoticed that early in Being and Time, Dasein is said to have an “ontico-ontological priority” in relation to the question of being, according to which it possesses “an understanding of the Being of all beings of a character other than its own” (SZ:13/ BT:34).

46 Polt, 34, 27; emphasis added. Given terminological confusion around the language of “existence,” Polt prefers to name this thatness, “excess.”

47 This shift does not involve any new exclusion of ontic grounds. To the contrary, in 1935, Heidegger can still say frankly and unremarkably that “the building stands there [understood ontically] even if we do not observe it. We can come across it only because it already is.” (GA40:25/ IM:36) It is more that Heidegger’s primary focus was on the opening by which world entry happens on the basis of the given ontic (ungrounded, unworlded) ground.

48 GA15:135/ FS:79.

49 GA15:101–03/ FS:59–60. It is worth noting that this insight is something already foreshadowed in Heidegger’s discussion of phenomenology in Being and Time: “What is it that phenomenology is to ‘let us see’? … Manifestly, it is something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself at all: it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most part does show itself; but at the same time it is something that belongs to what thus shows itself, and it belongs to it so essentially as to constitute its meaning and its ground … [T]hat which remains hidden … [is] the Being of [beings] (SZ:35/ BT:59).

50 GA4:26,59/ EHP:45,82.

51 Richard Capobianco (Heidegger’s Way of Being, chapters 5–6 and Heidegger’s Being, chapter 1) has written with great insight on Heidegger’s engagements with the Heraclitus fragments, particularly his insistence on the ineluctable lethic reserve (or hiddenness) of being.

52 GA79:5/ BFL:5.

53 GA5:28,33/ OBT:21,25.

54 GA5:28/ OBT:21.

55 GA5:58/ OBT:43.

56 GA5:51 / OBT:38.