The idea behind the clearing is that we cannot speak of beings, and thus of being (in the sense of the prevailing meaning of beings, what Heidegger calls "the being of beings") without some pregiven sense of what we are talking about. But we cannot give an account of the genesis of this sense without at the same time relying on it to justify our account, in other words there is something ungrounded at the root of our account, or, in philosophy parlance, an event, i.e something that just happens without being able to be grounded in any existing norms without fear of circularity, or, if you like, something which provides its own conditions.
It should be noted that our sense of what beings are is not, for Heidegger, just a theory we cook up, as if from nowhere, because, even in spite of ourselves, any explicit thesis we can formulate about being expresses a position we already occupy, in other words it is formulated against a background of assumptions emanating from the way we live, the way in which we interact with beings before we come to theorize about them. In this sense, any theory is in fact a symptom, something that expresses an underlying condition. As we are, we speak, which is why Heidegger does not think that we have a special relation to being because we have language, but rather that we have language because of our involvement in being. We live our relation to being before we formulate it.
The later Heidegger gives the name "thinking" to that discourse concerned with this sense-enabling timespace called the "clearing" of being, and with the event which gives the clearing (which Heidegger calls "Ereignis"). If we keep this in mind, we see that he is not being dismissive but is precisely correct to say that "science as such does not think"; science is concerned with the real genesis of things, which can only be accounted for within the parameters of (the/a) clearing; science must operate within certain norms of truth. Thinking is not concerned with real genesis at all, but with how we can come to understand beings such that we can account for their real genesis.
Since Heidegger is not a dialectical thinker, he has no way to talk about real genesis and the genesis of sense as in any way intertwined. However, it is possible that with his later turn to the interplay of world and thing, rather than the ontological difference, as the matter for thinking, he points the way to a new kind of thinking which he himself would reject, one which keeps both sides in play, playing each off against the other. This would of course need to be developed in much greater detail than I can provide here, I just want to mark it.
What's more immediately important for the conversation about realism is to understand the sort of claims Heidegger is making when he divides discourse into thinking and technical discourses. Any discourses that pursue results along a pregiven path without addressing the event of the genesis of sense are deemed "technical." That Heidegger sometimes sounds dismissive about these needn't distract us from the real thrust of what he is saying, which is that the clearing is the space within which truths can be formulated. Heidegger is not saying that the truths of science are only true "for humans," or that the Earth couldn't have really accreted 14 billions years ago (or however long it is), or any of that stuff. What Heidegger critiques about science is not that it doesn't think the clearing, but that it actively forgets the clearing, so that technical discourses come to colonize all of human existence and all non-scientific questions are deemed meaningless or, at best, "fun." (I wish I knew how to do that slick thing where the word "fun" is a link): http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/why-i-am-a-naturalist/
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