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.