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Abstract
In ‘Time and Being’ Heidegger claims that the task is to ‘cease all overcoming and to leave metaphysics to itself’. This paper asks what it actually means to leave metaphysics to itself, and how we are meant to understand the difference between “leaving metaphysics to itself” and “overcoming metaphysics”. To understand this distinction, the paper compares Heidegger’s later position with those of Husserl and Wittgenstein and with his own earlier position expressed in Being and Time. While we find different interpretations of what it means to leave metaphysics to itself, this paper shows that none of them, apart from Wittgenstein’s, draw a clear distinction between leaving metaphysics to itself and overcoming metaphysics. Indeed, rather than leaving metaphysics to itself, Heidegger in ‘Time and Being’ comes to articulate a negative metaphysics. To avoid such a move, this paper draws on Wittgenstein to show how we can truly leave metaphysics to itself and cease all overcoming.
Notes
1 I should also like to thank the editor Tanja Staehler for her advice and support throughout.
2 ‘Philosophy is metaphysics’ (‘End of Philosophy’, TB 61G/55).
3 ‘No longer doing philosophy and endorsing a historical or cultural relativism in its stead’ or ‘naturalizing philosophy by turning philosophy into the maiden of the natural sciences’ could be a simple answer. Yet, this is not what Heidegger envisages: not only because he is critical of the natural sciences and deplores the historical and cultural relativism of his time, but more importantly because he believes that from the time of its inception, philosophy has potentially undermined its autonomy by encouraging the development of the human and natural sciences and ‘their separation from philosophy and the establishment of their independence’ (TB 63G/57). ‘It suffices to refer to the independence of psychology, sociology, anthropology as cultural anthropology, to the role of logic as symbolic logic and semantics’ (TB 63G/57). What unites all these sciences is that they advance philosophy insofar as they radicalize the ‘principle of reason’. They attempt to explain effects through causes, to ground and justify by appealing to principles of laws. ‘The development looks like the mere dissolution of philosophy, and is in truth its completion’ (TB 63G/57). Leaving metaphysics to itself thus cannot mean naturalizing philosophy, for we would still be doing philosophy insofar as we would remain at its end. In view of this, the aspiration “to leave metaphysics to itself” is not in a strict sense anti‐philosophical – he never regards philosophy as a useless enterprise we can easily do without – rather when he claims that we need to leave metaphysics to itself he believes that we need to realize its end in order to allow for a thinking which is neither ‘science nor metaphysics’ (TB 67). Yet this does not answer our question about how we are meant to understand the difference between “overcoming metaphysics” and “leaving metaphysics to itself”. We have merely shown what it cannot mean.
4 SuZ, §7, C, 34 ‘Das was sich zeigt, so wie es sich von ihm selbst her zeigt, von ihm selbst her sehen lassen. Das ist der formale Sinn der Forschung, die sich den Namen Phänomenologie gibt. So kommt aber nichts anderes zum Ausdruck als die […] Maxime: “Zu den Sachen selbst!”’.
5 In ‘The end of Philosophy’ Heidegger indeed refers the reader back to the passage I have just cited from Being and Time, SuZ 34 (see TB 82).
6 ‘Die Kehre ist in erster Linie nicht ein Vorgang im fragenden Denken; sie gehört in den durch die Titel “Sein und Zeit”, “Zeit und Sein” genannten Sachverhalt selbst. … Die Kehre spielt im Sachverhalt selbst. Sie ist weder von mir erfunden, noch betrifft sie nur mein Denken’ (‘Letter to William J. Richardson’, in William Richardson, Heidegger Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), p. xix).
7 Only what is presented to intuition has a right to existence. ‘Every originary giving intuition is a legitimising source [Rechtsquelle] for cognition’ (Id. I, §24, translation slightly altered).
8 Husserl’s argument is similar to that of Bernard Williams’ critique of metaphysical realism; Williams says that we can recognize our world as a point of view only if another view is available to us. Bernard Williams, ‘Wittgenstein and Idealism’, in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 144–63, see 160–1 in particular.
9 This leads Held to compare Husserl’s epochē with Pyrrhonic scepticism (43ff.). See Held, ‘The Controvery Concerning Truth: Towards a Prehistory of Phenomenology’, Husserl Studies, 17(2000), pp. 35–48.
10 As Husserl says: only ‘what is offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being’ (Id., §24, 43).
11 ‘Wir führen die Wörter von ihrer metaphysischen, wieder auf ihre alltägliche Verwendung zurück.’
12 ‘Wenn die Philosophen ein Wort gebrauchen – “Wissen”, “Sein”, “Gegenstand”, “Ich”, “Satz”, “Name” – und das Wesen des Dings zu erfassen trachten, muss man sich immer fragen: Wird denn dieses Wort in der Sprache, in der es seine Heimat hat, je tatsächlich so gebraucht?’
13 As Heidegger says in Being and Time: ‘Our aim in the following treatise is towork out the question of the meaning of Being and to do so concretely’ (SuZ i).
14 A more detailed comparison of both thinkers can be found in L. Alweiss, The World Unclaimed (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2003).
15 ‘If consciousness were something completely separate and separable from being, this relation would be impossible. … Thus consciousness and being must be connected’ (Husserliana 36: Transzendentaler Idealismus. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1921), ed. Robin D. Rollinger in cooperation with Rochus Sowa (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), p.73).
16 As long as it is kept in mind that the idealism in question differs from a subjective idealism insofar as the question of constitution has been prised from subjectivity and the idea of an ultimate and firm foundation. As Heidegger explains in Being and Time, ‘If what the term “idealism” says, amounts to the understanding that Being can never be explained by entities but is already that which is “transcendental” for every entity, then idealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic. … But if “idealism” signifies tracing back every entity to a subject or consciousness whose sole distinguishing features are that it remains indefinite in its Being and is best characterised negatively as “Un‐Thing‐like”, then this idealism is no less naïve in its method than the most grossly militant realism’ (SuZ, §43, a) 208).
17 As Heidegger writes to Husserl in October 1927: ‘It has to be shown that Dasein’s mode of Being […] precisely contains in itself the possibility of transcendental constitution. […] Therefore the problem of Being is universally related to that which constitutes and to that which is constituted’ (Brief, 601–2 / 119–20). Cf. Alweiss, The World Unclaimed, Chs 3 and 4.
18 ‘Die Philosophie im Zeitalter der vollendeten Metaphysik ist die Anthropologie’ (Überwindung der Metaphysik 82G; cf. Holzwege 91f.).
19 This is why it should not come as a surprise that Being and Time is quite often read as advocating a form of pragmatism.
20 See Heidegger, ‘Feldweg‐Gespräche’, GA 77, 112, cited by Held, ‘Zurück zu den Sachen selbst’, in P.‐L. Coriando (ed.) Vom Rätsel des Begriffs. Festschrift für Friedrich‐Wilhelm von Herrmann zum 65. Geburtstag (Berlin, 1999), pp. 36–7.
21 ‘The relation to man is also named in the “It is” far more emphatically than in the customary “It gives”’ (TB 43G/40).
22 ‘And does not even sheltering and concealing and preserving [Bergen und Verwahren] hold sway in this self‐concealing of the clearing of presence, from which unconcealment can first be granted, so that what is present can appear in its presence?’ (TB 78G/71, translation altered).
23 TB 43G/40.
24 ‘Phänomenologie des Unscheinbaren’.
25 See Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske, 1954), pp. 70f.
26 It is precisely in this ‘as‐structure’, already a theme in Being and Time, that Heidegger argues that withdrawal is germane to the appearing of entities. In our practical engagement in the world entities disclose themselves in‐explicitly and in‐conspicuously. When we handle tools our attention never rests on the object, but on the project with which we are engaged. Entities to this extent appear as in‐visible insofar as they do not draw our attention to them. The relevance (Bewandtnis) of utensils is thus grasped in their inexplicitness and withdrawal by pointing beyond themselves and remaining in the background: ‘The peculiarity of what is proximally ready‐to‐hand is that, in its readiness‐to‐hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready‐to‐hand quite authentically’ (SuZ, §15, 69, my italics). What characterizes the ready‐to‐hand is that it, ‘as it were, withdraws’. In its withdrawal it refers, however, to the totality of assignments. This is what Heidegger calls the ‘hermeneutical as’ which refers to the pre‐predicative interpretative understanding of factical Dasein as being‐in‐the‐world. Entities can only be disclosed as useful if we have an understanding of a world which allows for the spacing within which entities can appear. In the final anaysis the as‐structure thus refers us back to the world. This leads Klaus Held to observe: ‘This was Heidegger’s first groundbreaking discovery in Being and Time, namely that the form of appearing of entities entails the strongest experience of the in itself’ (Klaus Held, ‘Zurück zu den Sachen selbst’, pp. 36–7).
27 ‘Das Denken, dem hier nachgefragt wird, nenne ich das tautologische Denken.’
28 So we have gone full circle and are returning to Husserl’s articulation of the epochē, which precisely questions our right to make certain judgements. Yet, one question remains that has not been raised so far: why should we wish to leave metaphysics to itself and cease all overcoming? What is actually wrong with seeking explanations and reasons? We know that Heidegger’s problem is that the principle of reason paves the way for our scientific‐technological age, which assumes that everything is at our disposal (see TB 65). Is this not maybe a distorted understanding of transcendental philosophy? According to Heidegger, transcendental philosophy assumes that everything is or could be in principle at our disposal. Yet if we return to Kant’s articulation of the transcendental turn, we learn that the assumption is not that everything is necessarily at our disposal. Kant is troubled by the question of how the categories of understanding, which are purely intellectual in their origin, can ever conform to their object. This is a problem for an understanding such as ours which lacks the resources to bring objects into being. For this reason it is not at all obvious how pure concepts can conform to content. Heidegger reads Kant as solving the problem by referring to a common root – the imagination – understood as the analytic of Dasein, which guarantees the identity of understanding and intuitions. He assumes that there is a given unity (Dasein’s understanding of being) which ensures that entities are accessible to us. Yet it is not that obvious to me that this necessarily reflects Kant’s position. The assumption is not that entities are necessarily at our disposal; rather the task of transcendental philosophy is to ask how such a unity can be achieved. Kant (unlike Heidegger in Being and Time) acknowledges the possibility of failure (as does Husserl, for that matter). Indeed, in the Critique of Judgement he realizes that we need to make room for non‐cognitive judgement, precisely because we may lack the concept to determine what is given. Kant does not presuppose the principle of reason as given. He acknowledges that we may well lack the resources to render intelligible what is given. If this is so, it is no longer that obvious why we should wish to leave transcendental philosophy to itself, although it may well be clear why we should leave Being and Time to itself. However, that is a topic for another paper.