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Abstract
Heidegger’s ‘serious idealism’ aims at capturing the realist impulses of our natural consciousness whilst avoiding a collapse into metaphysical realism. This idealism is best conceived as a form of transcendental empiricism. But we need to distinguish two varieties of transcendental empiricism, corresponding to Heidegger’s early and later work. The latter, transcendental empiricism2, is superior. Here, Heidegger’s ontology of gift gives full, conceptual shape to the two-way dependency between man and world characteristic of transcendental empiricism as a whole. In exemplary forms of inspired experience, marked by the 'animation' of our conceptually-structured natural powers, things call on us in a speech that is their very own. This moves us decisively beyond not only early Heidegger’s transcendental empiricism1 but also the picture of experience presented in McDowell’s Mind and World.
Notes
1. For recent interpretations of Heidegger as a transcendental idealist, see Richardson Citation2012, 240: ‘Heidegger’s early position mirrors Kant’s of an empirical (or internal) realism contained within a transcendental idealism’; Lafont Citation2002, 230: Heidegger attempts ‘to defend a transcendental idealism based on purely hermeneutic reasons’; ‘[i]n this sense Heidegger, like Kant, is an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist’; Blattner Citation1999, 247: ‘Heidegger and Kant are both transcendental idealists’. For interpretations of Heidegger as an ‘ontic’ realist, see Carmen Citation2003 (159) or as a transcendental realist, see Crowell and Malpas Citation2007 (192–196).
2. Heidegger also calls naïve idealism ‘psychological idealism’ (Citation1995, 251) or ‘subjective idealism’ (Citation1988, 166–167).
3. Heidegger contrasts an ‘ontological’ concept of sensibility from one that is empirical or ‘sensualistic’ (Citation1997a, 19). The former is connected to Kant’s notion of pure intuition (19, fn.35). Heidegger’s thesis is that human intuition is not ‘sensible’ because affection takes place through the sense-organs but rather the reverse: the organs that serve affection are sense organs because they belong to finite intuition. Thus, ‘[p]ure sensibility must be the sort of intuition that takes what is intuitable in stride in advance [i.e. Being] – prior to all empirical receiving’ (64).
4. All forms of realism, he writes, ultimately seek to understand Being through entities, making realism ‘in terms of scientific method … always at a lower level than every idealism…’ (1992, 223). Idealism, conversely, has an ‘advantage in principle’ and ‘affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic’ (Citation1995, 251). The modest inclination towards idealism also re-appears in Heidegger Citation1988, 167.
5. See also Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Heidegger Citation1997a, 141): ‘the grounding question for a laying of the ground for metaphysics, is the problem of Being and Time’. In Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (Citation1997b, 289) Heidegger remarks: ‘If we radicalize the Kantian problem of ontological knowledge … then we shall arrive at the philosophically fundamental problematic of Being and Time.’
6. Heidegger (Citation1998, 129) writes that Dasein’s transcendence ‘make intentionality possible transcendentally’, and so ‘makes possible the manifestation of beings in themselves’. This particular essay, Heidegger (Citation1997a, xix) remarks, ‘provides further clarification of the guiding manner of questioning’ contained in Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.
7. In Heidegger’s early work, the terms ‘transcendental’ and ‘ontological’ are often interchangeable, as are, of course, receptivity and sensibility. See Heidegger’s identification of transcendental and ontological inquiry: Citation1997a, 10–11.
8. This a priori check Heidegger calls the ‘resistance of Being (Widerständigkeit des Seins)’, contrasting it with the ‘resisting character in [a] being’ or of the ‘pressing in of sensations’ (Citation1997a, 52). Heidegger insists that ontic resistance can only be understood in terms of the ‘meaningfulness’ of world that is already-there (Citation1992, 221). But, of course, this meaningfulness still offers a form of normative ‘resistance’ in that it acts as an objective measure on the activity of the experiencing subject.
9. Heidegger (Citation1997a, 52), deploying Kantian terminology, describes the ‘resistance’ of Being as that which is ‘objective in objects’ and as, indeed, the ‘primal concept’, one that issues from the ‘primal activity of the understanding’. This normative resistance or ‘constraint’ prevents our knowledge, Heidegger remarks, citing Kant, becoming ‘haphazard or arbitrary’.
10. Kant’s footnote in §26 distinguishes the spatio-temporal ‘forms of intuition’ from a ‘formal intuition’ of space and time, with the unity of the latter grounded in cognitive synthesis. For discussion of this distinction, see Gardner (Citation2005, 84–5).
11. Heidegger Citation1997a, 107: ‘For the power of imagination is also and precisely a faculty of intuition, i.e. of receptivity. And it is receptive, moreover, not just apart from its spontaneity. Rather, it is the original unity of receptivity and spontaneity.’
12. In Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (Citation1997b, 53), Heidegger remarks that one might well absorb the aesthetic into the logic as long as ‘logic’ is not conceived as ‘thinking’ but rather as ‘thinking intuition’, i.e. as a form of understanding that is constituted both by receptivity and spontaneity.
13. See, especially, Heidegger Citation1997a, §25. Heidegger also calls this analytic of transcendence a ‘pure phenomenology of the subjectivity of the subject’ (62), one that completes Kant’s missing ‘Subjective Deduction’ (117).
14. Kant’s original transcendental framework, leaving out the ‘subjectivity of the subject’, belongs with the forms of idealism that fail to clarify how an understanding of Being belongs to ‘Dasein’s state of Being’ (Heidegger Citation1995, 251).
15. ‘All projection – and consequently even all of man’s “creative” activity – is thrown, i.e. it is determined by the dependency of Dasein on the being already in the totality, a dependency over which Dasein itself does not have control’ (Citation1997a, 165). The transcendental imagination is Dasein’s capacity to project or ‘create … from out of itself the pure look (image)’ of ‘Being’ (85–87).
16. Heidegger Citation1997a, 19: ‘Because our Dasein is finite – existing in the midst of beings that already are, beings to which it has been delivered over – therefore it must necessarily take this already-existing being in stride, that is to say, it must offer it the possibility of announcing itself.’
17. By ‘functions’, I mean dialectically, as it were. Heidegger does not put the point exactly this way.
18. I owe this interpretation of Heidegger to the general line of argument in McDowell (Citation1998, 25–45). There are differences, however. McDowell argues that the concept of ‘transcendental receptivity’ is the ‘problematic’ idea of the impact of a super-sensible reality on our minds (42). But I believe the lesson of Heidegger’s work is that this concept also has a positive function, one that needs to be retained.
19. The concept of a ‘view of the world’, meaning the understanding of Being into which we are thrown, is not to be confused with an en-framing ‘world-picture’ grounded on ‘representing-producing man’: Heidegger Citation1977, 130.
20. Heidegger (Citation1995, 201) calls this the ‘existential-hermeneutical “as”’.
21. There are a series of gradations between the ‘apophantic-as’ of thematic assertion and the hermeneutical-as of mere seeing (Heidegger Citation1995, 201).
22. Heidegger (Citation1995, 415): ‘If the thematising of the present-at-hand – the scientific projection of nature – is to become possible, Dasein must transcend the entities thematised … [Dasein’s] transcendence … provides the support for concernful Being alongside entities within-the-world, whether this Being is theoretical or practical.’
23. In ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ (Citation1971b, 65), ‘that such a work is at all, rather than is not’ is explicitly linked to the sheer, inexplicable, sensuous materiality of the work, a materiality that Heidegger names ‘Earth’ (45).
24. Philipse (Crowell and Malpas Citation2007, 197) argues that authentic experience gives us access to the things ‘apart from all transcendental schemes’, making Heidegger a ‘transcendental realist’.
25. In other words, Carmen (Citation2003, 194–195) is not correct in suggesting that authentic experience supports an ontic realist interpretation of the underlying metaphysics.
26. In ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ (Citation1971b, 49), this point is expressed in the fact that the sheer facticity of Earth arises only as a counter-thrust in its strife with World.
27. See footnotes 8 and 9.
28. The deep connection between Heidegger’s conception of the transcendental imagination and Kant’s notion of pure, practical reason comes through very clearly in §30: 109–112.
29. There is some irony, then, in Heidegger’s criticism of the Marburg Kantians as illegitimately dissolving the aesthetic into the transcendental logic. The focus on pure intuition that figures in Heidegger’s appropriation of the transcendental aesthetic is a diminishing moment in his own, early work too.
30. To my mind, Sheehan overstates the distinction between a realization of the reversal within a transcendental framework and Heidegger’s seinsgeschichtlich approach.
31. For McDowell’s conception of transcendental empiricism, see ‘Experiencing the World’ (McDowell Citation2009b, 243–256), McDowell (Citation2000) and Smith (Citation2002, 287–288).
32. In articulating Sellars’s ‘non-traditional empiricism’, McDowell draws on an interpretation of Kant as a philosopher of intentionality and proceeds to defend this interpretation by explicitly referring to Heidegger’s project in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: see McDowell Citation2009a, 8–9. Drawing this connection is not to elide the differences between McDowell and Heidegger. But, for the purpose of this essay, I focus on the similarities.
33. Heidegger tends to focus on the latter rather than the former.
34. McDowell’s (Citation1998, 9) point is that the original Kantian thought that experience arises out of a ‘co-operation’ between sensibility and understanding should be grasped in the radical sense that ‘receptivity does not make an even notionally separable contribution in its co-operation with spontaneity’.
35. We can put to one side what concepts, exactly, might be actualized in the experience rather than non-inferentially provoked by the experience. E.g. the concepts bird and perching might be actualized but woodpecker non-inferentially provoked (if I have this concept).
36. Already in Being and Time (¶ 33.), we find Heidegger criticizing the traditional privileging of the logos of thematic assertion. The later work deepens this critique.
37. Heidegger Citation(1982b, 135): ‘Language is the house of Being because language, as Saying, is the mode of Appropriation.’
38. This paradigmatically poetic form of experience he explicitly contrasts with ‘the notion that science is superior to all other experience in reaching the real in its reality’: see Heidegger Citation1971c, 170.
39. Heidegger (Citation1982a, 182): ‘the stone is speaking.’
40. Emphasis added.
41. See also Wittgenstein Citation1998, 87: ‘Let us imagine a rule intimating to me which way I am to obey it; that is, as my eye travels along the line, a voice within me says “This way!” … In the case of inspiration, I await direction.’ Note the imperative form of the intentional content, here (Do x!).
42. I have deliberately refrained from comparing Heidegger’s transcendental empiricism2 with the transcendental empiricism that Deleuze (Citation2004, 180–181) raises as a possibility. Just as there are striking affinities between transcendental empiricism1 and McDowell’s conception of experience, so too there are noticeable parallels between transcendental empiricism2 and Deleuze’s conception of experience. Like Heidegger, Deleuze’s approach involves revealing a Transcendental Aesthetic ‘more profound’ than Kant’s, one that uncovers a more radically ‘passive self’ (121). Indeed, echoing Heidegger’s ontology of gift, Deleuze suggests that transcendental empiricism is ‘superior’ to ordinary empiricism precisely in that it ‘raises the faculties to the level of a transcendental exercise…’ thereby enabling an encounter with that ‘imperceptible’ something that gives them, whether this is the being of the sensible or of the intelligible (204–205). Interestingly, McDowell criticizes Sellars for appearing to believe that there needs to be a transcendental role for sensory items that are not shaped by the understanding, and thus for a form of ‘sheer receptivity’ that is detached from our conscious awareness (McDowell Citation2009a, 25). Arguably, Deleuze too wants a form of sheer receptivity that exerts constraint on the subject below the level of that subject’s conscious awareness. In this respect we might say that both Deleuze and Sellars, to their credit, rightly notice the shortcomings of transcendental empiricism1 but go awry in the way they try to compensate by detaching receptivity from the conceptual capacities of the ‘I’, locating it at the sub-personal level. McDowell, by contrast, has a blind spot in that – missing the possibility of the animation of our capacities – he appears to believe that radicalizing a theory of sensibility beyond the actualizations of our conceptual capacities will lead inexorably to the detachment of this power from sensory consciousness. We can grasp Heidegger’s transcendental empiricism2 as mediating this dialectical impasse.
43. Or, to put it slightly differently, there is a transition in Heidegger from a conception of freedom as self-determination to freedom as determination by one’s nature.
44. One can imagine a person, from the standpoint of the scientifically sophisticated modern world, regarding an ‘animist’ worldview as naïve, constricted and not at all open to reality ‘as it is’. But it is curious that one can grasp a worldview structured by a theoretical-explanatory framework, one that has lost sight of the essential mystery and sacredness of things, as also narrow and constricted, albeit in a different sense (i.e. a sense linked to Heidegger’s ‘abandonment of subjectivity’).