La persona, sistema en marcha

I have thus far maintained in two parallel arguments that Heidegger’s philos-ophy has deep affinities both with Deweyan pragmatism and with Kantian transcendentalism. Heidegger embraces both the primacy of practice and the apriority of ontology. One is likely to suspect, however, that pragmatism and transcendentalism, as philosophical attitudes, if not movements, are incom-patible. The transcendental and the a priori are two of the prime targets of much pragmatist anti-epistemology. Despite the confident feeling that prag-matism and transcendentalism are incompatible, the upshot of Heidegger’s Kantdeutung appears to be that Kant’s transcendentalism actually presupposes the primacy of practice. We have seen that for Heidegger, whereas interpre-tation can be captured in propositions and thus brings in the entire appara-tus of aspectuality, conceptuality, and cognition, understanding is precogni-tive, engaged coping. Ontology expresses the a priori form of temporality, the temporal structure of experience more fundamental than any conceptual articulation of it. Ontology is a priori precisely because it gives expression to what underlies and makes possible all concept formation. Ontology is im-mune to empirical refutation, because no conceptually articulate, empirical activity can violate, and hence call into question, the results of ontological Ontology, the A Priori, and the Primacy of Practice 21

inquiry. Ontology is a priori, then, because it expresses our preconceptual pre-ontological understanding of being. Put in the exegetical context of Heideg-ger’s Kantdeutung, we may say that HeidegHeideg-ger’s reconstruction of Kant’s first Critique shows how in order to defend the a priori status of ontology, Kant must ultimately turn to Heidegger’s antirepresentationalist quasi-pragmatism.

The primacy of practice and transcendental ontology are, therefore, not inconsistent, at least not simply as such. If we take into consideration, how-ever, a further aspect of Heidegger’s conception of philosophical method, we do confront an inconsistency, one that I believe is irresolvable. Accord-ing to the Heidegger of the mid-1920s, ontology must be articulated con-ceptually and expressed propositionally. Ontology is, after all, a science. It is theoretical in nature. It is expressed in Being and Time in a web of proposi-tions. Heidegger could not put it more clearly than he does in Basic Prob-lems, when he writes,“Philosophy is the theoretic-conceptual interpretation of being, its structure, and its possibilities.”⁴⁰It is for this reason, if no other, that Heidegger is not by his own lights an existentialist, that he is no Kierke-gaard or Jaspers. In the hands of KierkeKierke-gaard and Jaspers philosophy is merely edifying; in Heidegger’s hands it is scientific.

Heidegger’s writings from the mid- to late 1920s are filled with this rhetoric of scientificity: the opening sections of Basic Problems lay great stress on the scientificity of philosophy, which is to say ontology, and contrast sci-entific ontology with mere “worldview philosophy.” In the process of devel-oping this theme of scientificity, moreover, Heidegger emphasizes the mere

“positivity” of worldview philosophy.

Every world- and life-view is positing [setzend], that is, is related existingly [seiend]

to entities. It posits entities, it is positive. . . . To worldview belongs this multifac-eted positivity, such that it is in each case rooted in a thus and so existing Dasein, is related to the existing world, and interprets the factically existing Dasein. Because this positivity, that is, the relatedness to entities, the existing world, and existing Da-sein, belongs to the essence of worldview and thereby to the construction of world-views in general, the construction of worldworld-views precisely cannot be the task of philosophy.⁴¹

Philosophy does not concern itself with the positive, with what is merely given, the way human life happens to be constituted here and now. Philoso-phy focuses, instead, on what is necessary, what underlies all positivity. As Kant argued in the first Critique, necessity is the hallmark of the a priori.

What is necessary must be known a priori. Scientific philosophy, in contrast with pseudo-philosophical worldview thinking, must be an a priori science.

Heidegger’s point here, moreover, is not just a negative rhetorical jab at worldview philosophy. It informs his detailed conception of phenomeno-logical method.

22 William Blattner

Being should be apprehended and made into a theme. Being is in every case the be-ing of an entity, and for this reason it is accessible primarily only in reference to an entity [im Ausgang von einem Seienden]. Therefore, phenomenology’s apprehending vi-sion must be directed to an entity, but in such a way that the being of the entity thereby becomes salient and available for thematizing [zur Abhebung und zur möglichen Thematasierung kommt].⁴²

Phenomenology thematizes being. According to Being and Time,“thematizing objectifies.”⁴³From Kant forward there is an intimate connection between ob-jectivity and conceptuality. In section 19 of the B-Deduction, Kant links objective validity with judgment, which is propositional or conceptual. For this reason, according Kant, the understanding—Kant’s understanding, not Heidegger’s—is the faculty of both concepts and objects. There can be no objectivity without conceptuality. Thematizing in Being and Time is therefore a matter of interpretation, putting understanding into conceptual form. This explains why interpretation, but not understanding, is thematic.

If phenomenological ontology is conceptually articulated and proposi-tionally expressed, what does this tell us about the understanding of being to which it gives voice? It entails that the understanding of being can be captured in propositions. (At least, unless ontology is a hopeless distortion of the understanding of being.) However, if the understanding of being can be captured in propositions, then it is, by the analysis above, not understanding at all, but rather interpretation. Put the other way around, whatever it is that ontology puts into words, it cannot be an understanding of anything, includ-ing beinclud-ing. And if it is not an understandinclud-ing of beinclud-ing, that is, does not line up with the pure productive imagination of Heidegger’s Kant, then it can-not enjoy a priori status. It does can-not capture something more fundamental than the conceptual, something that would thereby prove to be immune to empirical refutation.

Therefore, there is nothing inconsistent in Heidegger’s transcendentalist quasi-pragmatism until we add into the brew the notion that ontology is

“theoretic-conceptual.” Heidegger does face an aporia in his early concep-tion of philosophy, but it is not a simple inconsistency between transcen-dentalism and the primacy of practice. The aporia is a triadic inconsistency between the primacy of practice, the transcendental conception of ontology as a priori, and the further expectation that ontology is scientific, that is, theoretic-conceptual.

One might object: “But surely Heidegger saw these difficulties and of-fered a method for overcoming them, namely, hermeneutics!” In the words of Being and Time,

From the investigation itself it will emerge that the methodological sense of phenom-enological description is interpretation. The logos of the phenomenology of Dasein has Ontology, the A Priori, and the Primacy of Practice 23

the character of hermeneuein, through which the authentic sense of being and the basic structures of its own being are made known to the ontological understanding that be-longs to Dasein itself. The phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutics in the original meaning of the word, according to which it designates the business of interpretation.⁴⁴ Hermeneutics is the practice of putting understanding into words, of giving voice to what lies below the level of articulate expression. Putting the under-standing of being into words, then, is a hermeneutic act. Scientific ontology, if it is to be possible at all, must be hermeneutic. This argument, unfortu-nately, does not so much resolve our worries as give them a name. Certainly, if the understanding of being could be expressed in propositional form, then the business of doing so would deserve the name of hermeneutics. Giving the method of ontology a name does not clarify its inner possibility, and it is precisely this possibility that we have called into question. It is noteworthy, then, that Being and Time does so little to clarify the nature of hermeneutics, so little to explain to the puzzled reader how ontology could be a matter of hermeneutic interpretation.⁴⁵

If hermeneutics is not the answer to our worries,⁴⁶then we will have to abandon one of the three jointly inconsistent elements of Heidegger’s method. Which should it be? To those who are attracted to the transcen-dental-phenomenological Heidegger, the answer is obvious: we should abandon the primacy of practice. We saw above, however, that Heidegger’s justification of the transcendental status of ontology relies upon the primacy of practice. Thus, we cannot resolve the aporia by abandoning the primacy of practice. We are forced to choose between transcendentalism and scien-tific ontology. This is to say, Heidegger cannot have it both ways, he cannot simultaneously insist that ontology is immune to empirical refutation and that it is a scientific theoretic-conceptual enterprise.

We find historical confirmation of the stubbornness of this aporia in the vicissitudes of Heidegger’s methodological reflections prior to Being and Time. Theodore Kisiel has described in great detail Heidegger’s inconsistent attitude toward the theoretic-conceptual nature of philosophy.⁴⁷In his early Freiburg lecture course The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of World-Views (Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem),⁴⁸ Heidegger toys with the idea of abandoning the theoretic-conceptual nature of philosophy.

He suggests that Husserl’s “principle of principles” “does not have a theo-retical character.”⁴⁹Phenomenology is meant to be “the primordial bearing of life-experience and life as such,” and this bearing “becomes absolute when we live in it—and that is not achieved by any constructed system of concepts, regardless of how extensive it may be, but only through phenom-enological life in its ever-growing self-intensification.”⁵⁰ He follows these remarks up in the next subsection of the lecture (section 20a) with the sug-24 William Blattner

gestion—and this is all it is here—that phenomenological language might not be theoretical, conceptual, and generalizing.

The problem of method presented itself in the form of the question of the possible description of experiences. The crudest but already sufficiently threatening objection pertained to language. All description is a “grasping-in-words”—“verbal expression” is generalizing. This objection rests on the opinion that all language is itself already objectifying, that is, that living in meaning implies a theoretical grasping of what is meant, that the fulfillment of meaning is only object-giving.⁵¹

In the next paragraph he labels the assumption that “grasping-in-words”

is always theoretical an “undemonstrated prejudice.” If this were so, he con-cludes, then it would be false that “all verbal meaning consists in nothing but” theoretical universality.⁵²So, in these passages Heidegger aims to under-cut the assumption that all hermeneutic expression is theoretic-conceptual. In defending hermeneutic interpretation as the method of phenomenology, Hei-degger does not try to explain how the precognitive understanding of being can be put into “theoretic-conceptual” propositional form. Rather, he suggests that the verbal expression of phenomenology is nonconceptual: nontheoreti-cal, nonpropositional, nonscientific. Ontology is not scientific, but rather aims for “self-intensification.”⁵³ In another of his early Freiburg lecture courses, published as Ontology:The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität), he describes the aim of philosophy to be “wakefulness.”

Steven Crowell has (in a gentle and friendly fashion) criticized Kisiel’s narrative of the genesis of Being and Time by arguing that Kisiel arbitrarily deemphasizes Heidegger’s affinity with Husserl’s phenomenology.⁵⁴Husserl’s phenomenology provides Heidegger with a model of a formal science of being. Phenomenology gives us access to the formal structure of objectiv-ity, rather than merely to the general content of objects. Phenomenology thus allows philosophy to escape from the prospect of merely integrating the results of empirical research, the prospect of remaining a logic that merely “limps along afterward.” Phenomenology delineates the special topic of philosophy, namely, being, the formal structure of what is, and gives us nonempirical access to it, that is, access independent of empirical science, so that philosophy can become a “productive logic” of being. Crowell makes a convincing case that this model of phenomenological science had a grip on Heidegger. That the aspiration to an a priori formal ontology plays a signifi-cant role in Heidegger’s development does not show us, however, how that aspiration can be realized. When Heidegger does actually turn to the foun-dations of a priori ontology in his Kant lectures, we see that the way in which he defends the apriority of ontology is incompatible with its scien-tificity. Because the Kant lectures postdate Being and Time, Kisiel does not Ontology, the A Priori, and the Primacy of Practice 25

explore them and the light they shed on Heidegger’s proposed methodol-ogy. Had he done so, he could have supplemented the narrative of Heideg-ger’s early Freiburg years with an argument drawn from the Marburg years, an argument that shows how Heidegger is forced to choose between apri-ority and scientificity.

Not long after Being and Time and the Kant lectures Heidegger seems once again to give up on scientific ontology.⁵⁵After returning to Freiburg, Heidegger begins to move back toward a nonscientific conception of phi-losophy. Indeed, Heidegger seems to be struggling to define how we can talk about being nonscientifically. In his 1929 inaugural lecture at Freiburg,

“What Is Metaphysics?” he is driven to the conclusion that ontology is about the Nothing.⁵⁶It may well be that metaphysics is about nothing, not only because we are invited into it by anxiety, but also because we cannot say anything disciplined, wissenschaftlich, theoretic-conceptual about being from within anxiety. Looked at in this way, the position of “What Is Meta-physics?” is a desperate halfway house between the scientific ontology of Being and Time and the later, poetic vision of the discourse of being that emerges in the 1930s. “What Is Metaphysics?” may then represent an all-or-nothing response to the collapse of transcendental phenomenology: science or nothing, the Nothing.

In the 1930s Heidegger turns away from the failed models of philosophy of the 1920s and gropes around for something new. Through all the details of Heidegger’s path from Being and Time to “Time and Being,” the one con-stant remains that Heidegger seeks to develop and perhaps stabilize a dis-course of being. He holds on to the idea that this disdis-course of being is more fundamental than empirical scientific research and immune to revision by the impress of such research. His name for the discourse of being changes through the years: phenomenological ontology, metaphysics, thinking. What-ever it is called, it maintains its apriority, its priority to empirical science. That the discourse of being retains its apriority, even when it escapes scientificity, is an indirect confirmation of my account above: the apriority of the discourse of being is not a consequence of its scientificity, but rather of the primacy of practice. The attempt to put this discourse into theoretic-conceptual form as a science of being fails, and when it does, Heidegger gives up on the science, not on being.

In an especially clear statement of this in “Time and Being,” Heidegger states that even trying to relate thinking in the form of a lecture is dubious, because lectures speak “merely in propositional statements.”⁵⁷ Propositional-ity—that is, conceptuality, interpretation, cognition—is an obstacle to our access to being. This explains Heidegger’s attraction to poetry as a form of thinking, for poetry eschews propositional-conceptual representation in favor 26 William Blattner

of a more direct and evocative encounter with being. Heidegger’s turn away from philosophical science is, therefore, not merely a spasmodic display of some crypto-religious mysticism of the sort identified by Herman Philipse in his book on Heidegger’s philosophy of being.⁵⁸It is, quite surprisingly, a disciplined response to a philosophical aporia that besets his early conception of ontology.⁵⁹

Ontology, the A Priori, and the Primacy of Practice 27

the centerpiece of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is called the “transcen-dental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding.” Kant explains that he has chosen the term deduction by analogy to juridical procedure. Ju-rists distinguish between questions of fact (quid facti) and questions of law or right (quid juris), he says,¹and the answer to the latter sort of question is called a deduction. Kant has drawn up a list or table of the pure concepts of the understanding, or categories, and the “deduction” is meant to answer the question: by what right are these categories applied a priori to objects? It is a question, he says, of “how subjective conditions of thought can have objective validity.”²

In his reading of this part of Kant’s Critique, Heidegger takes Kant to task for his choice and explanation of the term deduction. “The transcendental deduction, conceived as quaestio iuris, is the most fatal part of Kant’s philoso-phy to which one can appeal. The transcendental deduction is untenable al-most throughout [fast durchgängig unhaltbar].”³“The questio juris should not be taken as the guiding thread for the interpretation of this central chapter of Kant’s.”⁴The problem of the section called “transcendental deduction,”

he says, is “ganz und gar keine juristische Geltungsfrage”—not at all a juridical question of validity.⁵In fact, “eine juristische Fragestellung [hat] keinen Sinn,” a juridical inquiry makes no sense here,⁶and by introducing the quid juris Kant is guilty of nothing less than a “misunderstanding of the problem of transcendence [Verkennung des Transzendenzproblems].”⁷Heidegger is critical of Kant on many points in his interpretation of the Critique, but these are certainly the harshest and most emphatic expressions he uses; Heidegger seems irritated, if not angry, an indication that something important is at stake. This is remarkable, since on the whole, of course, Heidegger views

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