Abstract
In Being and Time, Heidegger mentions the possibility of a “metaphysical” inquiry that could be worked out on the ground of Being and Time’s phenomenological ontology. In writings from 1928–1934 Heidegger tries to sketch out an approach to such a metaphysics. Here, his main concern is to show that if we replace the traditional metaphysical definition of the human being as “rational animal” with the phenomenological account of Dasein as care (Sorge), we must also develop new metaphysical understandings of life, nature, culture, and history – a project then currently understood as the formation of a comprehensive Weltanschauung (world-view). The present paper examines some important stages in Heidegger’s pursuit of a phenomenologically based metaphysics, focusing on the concept of life as play (Spiel) – central to Heidegger’s 1929 Davos dispute with Ernst Cassirer – and the distinction between world-view and world-having (Welt-haben) – central to his dispute with Max Scheler. These considerations will yield three conceptual difficulties that suggest why Heidegger ultimately abandoned the project of a phenomenological metaphysics, and they provide a cautionary lesson for similar efforts to move from transcendental phenomenology to metaphysics today.
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Notes
- 1.
Edmund Husserl, Idea of Phenomenology, tr. William F. Alston and George Nahknikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 1.
- 2.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 60. Henceforth cited in the text as BT.
- 3.
Steven Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), Part I.
- 4.
For a comprehensive account of this period in German philosophy, see Joachim Fischer, Philosophische Anthropologie: Eine Denkrichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg: Alber, 2009). Some discussion of Heidegger’s relation to Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology can be found in Steven Crowell, “The Middle Heidegger’s Phenomenological Metaphysics,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University press, 2018), pp. 229–250.
- 5.
See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, tr. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 232. Henceforth cited in the text as FCM. Einführung in die Metaphysik (1935) is something of an end point, since it is not devoted to establishing a phenomenological metaphysics but to Heidegger’s subsequent project of “overcoming” metaphysics. We need not settle the fine-points of periodization here, since our concern is simply to understand what Heidegger’s positive conception of metaphysics is. For an alternative periodization, see Stefan W. Schmidt, Grund und Freiheit. Eine phänomenologische Untersuchung des Freiheitsbegriffs Heideggers (Springer, 2016), pp. 1, 76.
- 6.
On regional ontologies, see (BT, pp. 29–31). On the connection between metaphysics and the positive sciences Heidegger remarks that “we cannot separate metaphysics and positive research” since “the inner unity of science and metaphysics is a matter of fate” (FCM, p. 189). I will return to this in the Section “World-formation as play” below.
- 7.
From this perspective, the so-called “theological turn” would itself be a version of the broader metaphysical turn. Indeed, Heidegger himself embraces this broad sense of “theology” in his gloss of the division in Aristotle’s first philosophy between ontology (the question of being qua being, on he on) and theologike (the question of the highest entity, kuriotatos on). Heidegger interprets to theion as “simply beings – the heavens, the encompassing and overpowering, that […] upon which we are thrown.” See Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, tr. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 10–11. Henceforth cited in the text as MFL.
- 8.
I have in mind here, especially, the metaphysical debates over mereological composition, which is framed by two extreme views: mereological “universalism, in which everything composes with everything (nothing but the whole is “fundamental”), and mereological “nihilism,” according to which nothing is composite and there are only “simples.” For a compendium of contemporary analytic views about what metaphysics is and how it can or should be pursued, see Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, ed. David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009).
- 9.
Carl Gillet and Barry Loewer, Physicalism and its Discontents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. ix. My thanks to Andrea Staiti, who made reference to this remark in an as-yet unpublished paper.
- 10.
This project is familiar at least since Quine’s scientistic version of “naturalism.” See W. V. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 69–90.
- 11.
Here is not the place to try to be more specific about what exactly “physicalism” is, its relation to materialism, to methodological naturalism, or to the science of physics. For a good overview, see Daniel Stoljar’s article, “Physicalism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/physicalism/>. But the general point I am making about “spooky” entities is familiar enough from efforts like Quine’s rejection of modal logic as “in conflict with the nonessentialist view of the universe” (W. V. O. Quine, “Reference and Modality,” in From a Logical Point of View. New York: Harper Row, 1963, p. 158), Daniel Dennett’s attempt of “explain” consciousness (away) (Consciousness Explained, New York: Little, Brown, 1991), Hartry Fields’ Science Without Numbers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), Joseph Levine’s identification of an “explanatory gap” (Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), or Jaegwon Kim’s argument that mental properties are physically reducible via functional analysis (Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
- 12.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 6. Henceforth cited in the text as BPP.
- 13.
Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. Otto Saame and Ina Saame-Speidel. Gesamtausgabe Bd. 27 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996), p. 344. Henceforth cited in the text as GA 27.
- 14.
This discussion explicitly takes aim at Ernst Cassirer’s approach to myth. Heidegger had just finished writing a critical review of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2: Mythical Thinking, which was published in 1928. A translation appears as an appendix in Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphyiscs tr. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 180–190. Henceforth cited in the text as KPM.
- 15.
In Crowell, “The Middle Heidegger,” I translate this term as “self-control” for the purposes of emphasizing the self-directed character of what Heidegger has in mind here, in contrast to the other-directed world-view of “sheltering.” Haltung could also be rendered as “stand” or “stance,” as in “taking a stand.”
- 16.
This pedagogical strategy is also evident in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, where Heidegger understands phenomenology not as a science but as “preparatory” (vorläufig) thinking (FCM, pp. 173, 351) whose task is “not to describe the consciousness of man but to evoke the Dasein in man” (FCM, p. 174), to “tranform” our “understanding” into “the Da-sein in us” (FCM, p. 296).
- 17.
These terms are drawn from the so-called “Black Notebooks.” See Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen II-IV (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), ed. Peter Trawny (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2014), pp. 62, 89. Henceforth cited in the text as GA 94.
- 18.
Heidegger’s invocation of Führerschaft in this context might be seen as a warning to his students to avoid the degenerate self-assertive posturing to which the world-view of Haltung might lead. But as with all such references in Heidegger’s metaphysical decade, there is an ambiguity: what Heidegger rejects at the ontic level of current university politics he appropriates at the ontological level of his own reinterpretation of the relation between philosophy and world-view. I discuss the way Heidegger’s understanding of metaphysics informs his involvement with National Socialism in “Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks,” in Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941, ed. Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016), pp. 29–44.
- 19.
With this I do not mean to overlook Heidegger’s remark to Karl Löwith that his concept of historicality led to the engagement with politics; I mean only to contextualize it by noting the connection between the concept of historicality – “destiny” as the “historizing of the community, of a Volk” (BT, p. 436) – and the metaphysics Heidegger began developing around 1928.
- 20.
See Steven Crowell, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially Part III.
- 21.
Heidegger is not interested here in “regional ontology,” the corresponding “ontological” concept which “signifies the being of those entities,” for instance, that show up in the “world of the mathematician” (BT, p. 93). Metaphysics is not concerned with the being (meaning) of entities, but with the entities.
- 22.
Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 120. Henceforth cited in the text as EG.
- 23.
Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 83. Henceforth cited in the text as WM. The term Einbruch plays a crucial role in Heidegger’s metaphysical decade. In “What is Metaphysics” (pp. 82–83) it is used to characterize the project of science which, as he notes, has become our “passion” – that is, our worldview: “our existence – as a community of researchers, teachers, and students – is determined by science,” which has a “proper though limited leadership in the whole of human existence.” Science is “supported and guided by a freely chosen stance [Haltung] of human existence,” one that is “exceptional” because, in its commitment to “impartiality of inquiring, determining, and grounding,” it is a “peculiarly delineated submission to beings themselves.” Science is thus a peculiarly delineated “irruption” of the human being “into the whole of beings,” one that allows beings to “show what they are and how they are.” Despite this positive evaluation of science, however, Heidegger argues that “the rootedness of the sciences in their essential ground has atrophied.” The worldview of science is thus a degenerate form of Haltung. The point of Heideggerian “metaphysics” is to restore this rootedness by recalling what sustains the irruption of science – and all other irruptions in which beings are encountered as beings – in the Grund-haltung of philosophy, the “primal form of worldview,” which he calls “transcendence” or “freedom for ground.” See Section “From metaphysics to metapolitics: world-view” below.
- 24.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 100 (A63/B88).
- 25.
In his comments on a version of the present paper, delivered at the annual meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association (2015), William Blattner points out that Heidegger’s understanding of finitude here is not so different from Kant’s notion of the “receptivity” of all human cognition, a point which Heidegger himself emphasizes (KPM, pp. 18–19). The difference lies in the fact that Kant equates spontaneity (freedom) with reason, while for Heidegger the “free” counterpart to thrownness is “projection,” which is taken to be the ground of reason. As we shall see, this complicates Heidegger’s attempt to specify what might be called the “noetic correlate” of metaphysics.
- 26.
The being-problem (ontology) is exclusive to a finite being in Heidegger’s sense of “finitude.” As he remarks in several places, it is a joke to imagine God doing ontology. At the same time, Heidegger now seems to think that the finitude which “compels” us to ontology also opens a positive approach to the cosmological world-problem.
- 27.
Günter Figal, Objectivity. The Hermeneutical and Philosophy, tr. Theodore D. George (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), p. 147.
- 28.
Life and nature show up meaningfully in everyday projects as well, not only in science. But this wrinkle, though interesting in its own right, does not affect the point at issue here – namely, that to show themselves as something determinate, and so thinkable, beings must be “discovered” within a project that involves a normative framework for their re-identification as something.
- 29.
On the importance of Vorbild in Heidegger’s account of concepts, see Sacha Golob, Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom, and Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 30.
How this works is analyzed in detail in FCM, pp. 339–49.
- 31.
For a discussion of these points see Steven Crowell, “Competence Over Being as Existing: The Indispensability of Haugeland’s Heidegger,” in Giving a Damn: Essays in Dialogue with John Haugeland, ed. Zed Adams and Jacob Browning (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017), pp. 73–102.
- 32.
A comprehensive account is found in Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). While historically illuminating, Gordon’s account is philosophically hampered by interpreting Heidegger essentially as a pragmatist. Phenomenology is given little consideration.
- 33.
Gordon, Continental Divide, p. 117ff.
- 34.
Gordon, Continental Divide, pp. 121–22.
- 35.
See the dismissal of Cassirer’s distinction already in Being and Time: “Functional concepts are never possible except as formalized substantial concepts” (BT, p. 122).
- 36.
This view of ontological concepts (“formal indications,” FCM, pp. 291–94) as “at issue” in existing itself underlies Heidegger’s Davos remarks about freedom. For both Heidegger and Cassirer, following Kant, “freedom is not an object of theoretical apprehending but is instead an object of philosophizing,” where the latter – for Heidegger, though not for Cassirer – means that “the sole adequate relation to freedom in man is the self-freeing of freedom in man.” This is the performative dimension of philosophy, “the sole and central [thing] which philosophy as philosophizing can perform”: the “setting free of the Dasein in man” (KPM, p. 200). The whole point of a metaphysical picture of kosmos, of das Seiende im Ganzen, thus seems to be to set the stage for this performance, provide something like a reason for it.
- 37.
In a Nachruf for Scheler that he inserted into his 1928 lecture course, Heidegger praises Scheler in terms that mirror his own metaphysical project (MFL, p. 51): Scheler had an “irrepressible drive always to think out and interpret things as a whole.” Indeed his “philosophical anthropology [is] an attempt to work out the special position of man” within “the whole of philosophy in the sense of Aristotle’s theology” – that is, in light of what Heidegger himself is pursuing as the world-problem. On “theology” see note 7 above; on Scheler see also FCM, p. 192.
- 38.
For a concise discussion of some important passages see Daniel O. Dahlstrom, “Transcendental Truth and the Truth that Prevails,” in Transcendental Heidegger, ed. Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 63–73.
- 39.
See Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Das logische Vorurteil (Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1994); translated by the author into English as Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
- 40.
Of course, there is a normative sense of “human being” (as in perfectionist ethics, for instance) that I can try to live up to, but, as we shall see, this is not what Heidegger means by Dasein’s dispersal into homo sapiens (FCM, p. 172).
- 41.
Figal, Objectivity, p. 136.
- 42.
In the background here is Heidegger’s proposal to “radicalize” Leibniz’s monadology (GA 27, p. 145), a topic that deserves more attention than I can give it here. As characterized in the 1928 lecture course, Leibniz’s monad is a “universal” concept of being and so “must also explain the possibility of beings as a whole.” What implication does the monad-concept have for “the way beings exist together in the whole universe” (MFL, p. 83)? Heidegger’s method in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics starts with an analysis of how things show up in the Grundstimmung of “boredom,” a kind of “everydayness” characterized by a “remarkable undifferentiatedness” of beings as a whole: “here the beings that surround us are uniformly manifest as simply something present at hand in the broadest sense” (FCM, p. 275). Such a mood allows Leibniz’s question of “the way beings exist together” to arise when, “seized by terror [Schrecken],” the “Da-sein in man launches the attack [Angriff] upon man” (FCM, pp. 366, 21). What this might mean will concern us below.
- 43.
This, as Heidegger notes, raises the specter of “irrationalism”: if such play is not intrinsically guided by reason, how are we to account for philosophy’s conceptual authority, the possibility of its grounded validity? Heidegger does not address the question head-on here, either. Again he comments that traditional metaphysics is misled in thinking of the understanding of being in terms of idea, logic, logos and insists that metaphysics requires “a fundamental revision and radical repetition” of its “initial dawning” in Plato (GA 27, pp. 321–22). Until reason is reconceived on the basis of care – in Kantian terms, “transcendental imagination” – it will be impossible to decide whether the charge of irrationalism has any currency (GA 27, pp. 319–20). Nor can the concept of transcendence as “play” be derived from Lebensphilosphie (GA 27, p. 320) or philosophical anthropology (GA 27, pp. 313–14).
- 44.
For the argument, see Steven Crowell, “Responsibility, Autonomy, Affectivity: A Heideggerian Approach,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and the Self, ed. Denis McManus (London: Routledge, 2014). See also Steven Crowell, “Facticity and Transcendental Philosophy,” in From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental, ed. Jeff Malpas (London: Routledge, 2002), 100–121.
- 45.
In contrast, metaphysics in the Medieval period was “fatefully” tied not to science but to religion.
- 46.
For a detailed account see Steven Crowell, “We Have Never Been Animals: Heidegger’s Posthumanism,” Études phénoménologiques / Phenomenological Studies Vol 1 (2017), 217–240.
- 47.
In this, Heidegger (who dedicated Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics to Eugen Fink) probably served as the model for Fink’s revisions of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, the so-called “Sixth Cartesian Meditation,” which also advocated something like this gnostic model for phenomenology – a proposal that Husserl vigorously resisted. See Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning, ch. 13: “Gnostic Phenomenology.” Chad Engelland, “Heidegger and the Human Difference,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1/1 (2015), pp. 175–193, recognizes that Heidegger courts metaphysical dualism here, but he argues that Heidegger ultimately avoids it. For my response, see Crowell, “We Have Never Been Animals,” p. 228, n. 11.
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Crowell, S. (2022). Life and World: Heidegger’s Phenomenological Metaphyiscs and Its Discontents. In: Rogove, J., D’Oriano, P. (eds) Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_9
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