Ideology, Science, and Existence

It strikes me that, at the time of The German Ideology, Marx has become (under the influence of Stirner, whom he nevertheless appropriates in a very critical manner) basically an 'existentialist,' in the broadest and most generic sense of the term. His text centers on a critique of ideology. What ideology means for Marx is the following: Ideology is first of all (1) the mistaken notion that human beings suffer under “the rule of concepts.” Secondly, (2) Marx and Engels call these concepts themselves ideology, and thirdly (3) certain spheres of society or “estates” are said to be ideological.

In other words, concepts abstracted from actual existence are ideological. But actual existence can never be apprehended without abstraction because actual existence is singular. Therefore all concepts have an ideological drive, as it were, and any concept can be ideological if it is not in some way referred to existence.

There is not one but two term complements to "ideology"--on the one hand "science," and on the other revolutionary activity, or praxis. Marx does not consider that thinking can be anything other than representation: the method of science is abstraction, but warranted abstraction that is not ideological because it remains referred to existence, and in doing so recognizes its own inherent incompletion. 

Marx leaves the middle ground between existence and representation vacant, and this is why he has often been misinterpreted as some sort of economic or even technological determinist. This is a misinterpretation because it assumes that there is some sort of pure activity or process that is distinct from thinking, but that is wrong--in fact there is no pure process, it's just that there is always a remainder in any representation. Since representation is conceptual abstraction, at the very least it cannot account for its own singularity. Marx does not want to give a complete representation of a pure process, rather he recognizes the constitutive incompletion of representation as such and thus wants to limit thinking, which is his biggest differend in relation to Hegel, of course. Theory is always referred back to practice, not as something wholly other (unlike for Althusser, who thus gets into an epistemological quandary) but as otherwise incomplete. 

What Marx does not consider is the possibility that there may be a non-representational thinking that is precisely concerned with singularity. Marx's thought points to the necessity of (without fully cashing out) an 'existentialism' that does not simply invert the traditional order of priority between essence and existence but (to use an apt but lamentably loaded term) deconstructs the polarity between the two. This would not simply be a method of abstraction, but a hermeneutic approach to the world-forming potency of that which exists. 

Ultimately, however, in order to do this a constructive approach, which goes wholly beyond Marx, would also be needed--to think without representing. This is what Heidegger often describes and also, less often, attempts to enact.  His most notable attempts at enacting such a thinking are probably his essays that deal with the fourfold. 

This non-representational thinking would open up possibilities for thought and action that are non-ideological, in other words it would not be a conceptual precis of what lies in existence but a signpost and guide for a kind of thinking and action (the polarity of which would thus also become entirely questionable) that shelter singularity rather than seizing it conceptually. In other words, this sort of thinking would be neither science nor ideology, nor even distinct from action in any essential manner.

Hence: Marx and Heidegger, Heidegger and Marx.

Heidegger and Realism Part IV: a brief remark

I realize that the account I gave in the last post sounds a little like one version of 20th Century Analytic philosophy, with science permitted to talk about the world and philosophy concerned with the conditions of such talk. But there are important differences; for one thing, for Heidegger science is not privileged over other modes of ontic disclosure. For another, Heideggerian thinking isn't concerned with the mechanics of signification--logic-- so much as it is an attempt to preserve the world-disclosing potentialities in language, and to cultivate an openness to the event of disclosure. Much more could, of course, be said about this, but this is not the moment for that.

Heidegger and Realism Part III

In my past couple of posts on the topic, composed quickly (as this one will be), I moved too quickly over, and perhaps even muddled, the question of the difference between SZ-era and later Heidegger on the clearing. As I mentioned, in SZ Heidegger says "Dasein is the clearing of being" or some such. "Dasein" does not name the human being, but the way in which human beings exist. However, Heidegger did not always maintain complete clarity on this, often referring to Dasein as "a being" and even talking about individual "Daseins." As for the former, if we refer to Dasein as "a being," we must immediately remind ourselves that it is a being whose essence lies in its existence, i.e. it is a being whose enabling characteristics (i.e. "essence") are not qualities but potentialities that are enacted in the temporalizing motion of projection and retrieval. Dasein names this motion, i.e. the way of being for human beings. Thus when Heidegger talks about "Daseins" it must be seen as shorthand for "beings who exist in the manner of Dasein," i.e. "beings whose way of being in the world is clearing projection and retrieval."

After a troubling interlude in which he starts mouthing off about "German Dasein," Heidegger settles into a manner of speaking (this is not a particularly scholarly or well-researched claim, so feel free to contradict me) where human beings are referred to as "human beings" (menschen, let's leave "mortals" out of it for now) and Dasein is used more consistently to talk about the human manner of being. (A final wrinkle I won't explore here is that the bar is now higher for Dasein, so we aren't automatically existing in a Dasein-like manner).

In the interim, Heidegger discovers the "history of being," in other words the clearing is now explicitly historical-epochal. The giving of the clearing, or I would even like to say "a clearing", although I don't think Heidegger does, is not a result of human projection but, as we have seen in previous posts, is of the nature of an event--not in the sense of a thing among others that occurs within given conditions of manifestation, but in the sense of a happening that itself brings these conditions of manifestation into play .

At the same time, there is no clearing without Dasein, in a sense Dasein still "is" the clearing (H. may even maintain this formulation in some later stuff, I couldn't swear he doesn't, "Letter on Humanism" maybe?). Without a being who exists in the manner of temporalizing/disclosing, beings would be undisclosed. Human existence enacts the clearing. But the clearing no longer reflects human projects, humans are in a sense called to witness the disclosure of being.

Heidegger does not say that beings wouldn't exist without Dasein; in fact, there is a lacuna because Heidegger has no terminology to deal with things that do not be (forgive the formulation). Only Dasein is said to "exist," so that word is taken. Bare subsistence is associated with presence-at-hand, which is itself referred back to a particular disclosing comportment to beings, and hence it refers thinking back to the clearing. When things are, on the other hand, they are disclosed, since being is identified with disclosure (or "truth"). Heidegger awkwardly makes a pass at this from time to time, basically hinting that if he had words to say it, he'd admit there were still things hanging around before anything existed in the manner of Dasein, but this is not really a question for thinking--it is a question for science, which can happily disclose archaic beings (even "arche-fossils") without worrying about the conditions of their disclosure.

I'd suggest this is a perfectly acceptable situation for realists if and only if they are prepared to accept the implicit division of labor (Heidegger would hate that formulation) between thinking and science. We cannot think beings apart from their disclosure and our involvement in the latter, but we can know them, might be one way of putting it, although there's no reason to think Heidegger would put it that way. (This is a kind of reversal of Kant's stance toward the in-itself.)

Anyway these are provisional thoughts and I welcome criticism.

Heidegger and Realism Part II

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/

Heidegger and Realism Part I

I will not of course try to say all that (I think) there is to say on this topic, and I am having difficulty finding the time to put into formulating thoughtful blog posts about philosophy, so I will assume some background on the part of my readers here in the interest of brevity.  In any case, I just want to try to orient this question in the way I think is proper, and hopefully in doing so I will make a small contribution to the ongoing debates about realism we find in blog world nowadays.

The key Heideggerian notion that has to be addressed by anyone asking the realism question is "the clearing."

For the Being and Time era Heidegger, the manner in which human beings exist is called Dasein. This means that humans are involved with the world in such a way that they are inseparable from it, and their involvement is temporal (and spatial, but above all temporal for Heidegger at this point). To speak in a little more Heideggerian manner, Dasein is involved in a world in such a way that it projects itself forward and retrieves itself from the past, in other words unlike objects that perhaps just bang into one another and have repercussions, Dasein's interactions with beings are conditioned by a temporal projection forward and a temporal retrieval backward. This can be seen any time I preheat my oven; I involve myself with the oven in such a way that I project that it will shortly be hot enough to put something in it, and I retrieve the meaning of 'preheat' and 'oven' in a more or less preconscious way, furthermore I may be fat as a result of things I've put in the oven before (retrieval) and want to lose weight (projection) so I am putting a diet meal in the oven, etc. No other beings do this--except (maybe) animals (to a certain extent), who naturally give Heidegger fits as a consequence. That is a whole other topic.

This projection and retrieval, or "thrown projection," is due to the primordial structure of Dasein, or Dasein's 'temporality,' the way it always exists outside of itself, returning to itself and projecting ahead of itself. This leads to the odd situation, which Heidegger apparently didn't notice, that what, for Heidegger, grounds ordinary sequential time--the aforementioned temporality of Dasein--also seems to rely on ordinary sequential time in order to make sense. But this is also a digression.

Dasein's involvement with beings provides them with a horizon, in other words it bestows meaning on them. In other words, Dasein opens up a space within which beings can meaningfully be. This space is called "the clearing" (die Lichtung). This doesn't exactly mean that beings were meaningless before people existed; it just means that they can only appear as they were before Dasein in the space opened up by Dasein's involvement with them, particularly in the mode of science. Science asks questions of real genesis, and this always leads us back to before there were beings who existed in the manner of Dasein. Heidegger says Newton's laws didn't exist before Newton, but the phenomena they describe did; in other words, Newton's laws are themselves part of the space Dasein opens up, they are themselves in fact a cleared space within which beings can present themselves. It is a confusion to say the laws existed before the clearing, because the laws are clearing (although of course they are not exhaustive of it).

Heidegger in Being and Time says that Dasein is the clearing. In his later work, however, he is more likely to say that Dasein, or, increasingly, Mensch, stands in the clearing. The clearing does not constitute beings, it simply gives them a space in which they can meaningfully appear (I'm not claiming that any of this satisfies everyone's realism requirements, by the way). In the later Heidegger, the clearing is no longer seen as constituted by Dasein's projects, but is rather given to Dasein in an event-like way, as will be seen in the second part of this post.