12
German Existence-Philosophy
When Jean-Paul Sartre sought to determine the relationship between existentialism and humanism shortly after the Second World War, he classified Karl Jaspers as a Christian existentialist and Martin Heidegger as an atheistic existentialist (Sartre 1947: 15). Jaspers and Heidegger maintained that the position taken by each of them is not to be equated with French existence-philosophy. However one might think today of Heidegger’s and Jasper’s dissociation from Sartre, it is certain that it is not merely a matter of establishing fine theoretical distinctions. Rather, both Jaspers and Heidegger thought that the existentialism advocated by Sartre could not suitably rely on the positions advocated by them. And if Heidegger is counted as an existence-philosopher at all, then surely this would be only the Heidegger of Being and Time.
Nevertheless, the French variety of existentialism in the version advocated by Jean-Paul Sartre is not the only one that falls under the term “existentialism.” It may be that existentialism owes its international breakthrough “to the consequences of the Second World War, consequences that mesh still more deeply with the whole structure of our thought, and moreover to the total historical breakdown of our entire intellectual world” (Bollnow 1947: 126 f.). But existentialism is older than that, even though the term “existence-philosophy” is comparatively new – in Neue Wege der Philosophie (“New Paths of Philosophy”), Fritz Heinemann claims to have coined this term himself (Heinemann 1954: 11).
Søren Kierkegaard, who opposed Hegelian panlogicism with his “philosophy of existence,” is existentialism’s ancestor.1 In this sense, existentialism follows in the line of anti-idealistic systems that want to put a rationally adulated reason on trial and want to situate it in its own domain of operation. Therefore, existence-philosophy continues the subject matter of the philosophy of life “in a deeper and more radicalized way,” and outstrips it in the process. Life, called upon since Nietzsche as an opposition to rationality, reason, and truth, now, understood as the principle which is set against the principles of idealism, is further concretized by existence-philosophy through the concept of “existence.” Thus, the concept of existence occupies the place which reason once had for Hegel: for Jaspers existence-philosophy is concerned directly with a fundamental new interpretation of “life,” and Heidegger thinks that humans can only recognize themselves from their existence, “from the possibility: to become what they are, or not.”
Both Jaspers and Heidegger in this context share with the philosophy of life not only a conviction of the limitations of reason and rationality, a criticism of subject– object dualism, and a criticism of the cognitivist reduction of the modern concept of the subject, but also a methodic irrationalism, insofar as “existential elucidation” is not supposed to be managed by the discursive understanding. According to Jaspers the existential elucidation takes place through an “existentiell” experience; according to Heidegger through the figure of a “radical questioning” within the framework of a “hermeneutic of Dasein.”
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Picking up from Kierkegaard, Jaspers argues that existence cannot be grasped rationally: “existence is . . . inaccessible to one who asks about it in terms of the purely objective intellect.” It is to be grasped, then, “beyond the bounds of objective knowability in a leap that exceeds the capacity of rational insight. Philosophizing begins and ends at a point to which that leap takes me” (Jaspers 1970: 6). Jaspers wrote his habilitation thesis in 1913 with Wilhelm Windelband on General Psycho-pathology (Jaspers 1913), and in 1919 published the Psychology of Worldviews (Jaspers 1919). In the latter work he developed the basic positions of existence-philosophy, in which existence is already determined through the fact that it is that which is “never objectified.” It is the “source of my thoughts and actions” (Jaspers 1969: 56) – which is why one can see this work as the birth certificate of systematic existence-philosophy. Jaspers, who, with this work, was appointed full professor of philosophy in Heidelberg in 1921 against the express opposition of Heinrich Rickert, fell back on the concept of “existence” as the basis for determining anew the essence of human being, namely as an essence that comports itself toward itself and thereby toward transcendence (Jaspers 1969: 56).
In the first place, the view that Jaspers maintains here – the view that existence cannot be rationally grasped – has nothing to do, as is frequently maintained, with a defensiveness against the sciences. To the contrary; Jaspers expressly stresses that there cannot be an “objective cognition as world-orientation” without science (Jaspers 1969: 69). Indeed, that without the sciences, which move in the medium of “conceptual thinking,” “which is indirect and systematic,” “philosophizing becomes immaterial and empty” (Jaspers 1969: 69). Jaspers merely believes that the knowledge that is supplied by the respective sciences must be joined together into a unified world picture by philosophy, proceeding from human existence. Precisely at existence, according to Jaspers, lie the boundaries of the sciences, boundaries which are not to be exceeded by means of a work of the understanding that is free of value judgments. Human existence has, for Jaspers, approximately the function which belongs to the “I think” within transcendental philosophy, inasmuch as Kant thought the whole of logic, indeed, transcendental philosophy itself, hangs from it. Human existence can itself not become an object of research for the sciences, because it is essentially non-objective, that is to say, it is freedom.
According to Jaspers, the methodic irrationalism of existential elucidation is thus not supposed to lead to the rejection of understanding and science. Existence-philosophy is, according to Jaspers, “the way of thought by means of which man seeks to become himself; it makes use of expert knowledge while at the same time going beyond it” (Jaspers 1957: 175). The path of philosophical existential elucidation is not supposed to lead to annihilation, but rather to the transcending of reason and rationality in their breakdown when confronted with the experience of “limit situations” – situations in which human beings see themselves set before the “nothing.” When human beings become aware of their existence in “limit situations,” and of their conditionedness in the grasp of their surroundings and through “transcendence,” thinking raises itself above the empirically factical and begins to “float.”
The floating of thinking sets the authentically unconditioned free. The goal of elucidation is not a projection of being as such, not a possession of knowledge, not a result, but rather the methodic becoming aware of being. But this awareness is, as it were, a floating. In it occurs the dissolution of the ground in order to win a truer ground, until at last one achieves a free-floating groundlessness in the world with respect to the foundation of the one absolute ground of transcendence . . . In this way there is in the end no ground, no principle, but rather a floating of thought in groundless space. Contrary to a firm establishment and safeguarding that one finds in a system of thought, in which I hold myself and to which I submit myself, I remain master of my thoughts in order to be open for transcendence and to experience from transcendence the authentic unconditionedness of the world. (Jaspers 1947: 185)
Existence-philosophy, conceived of as the critique of the culture of understanding, here comes to itself as the philosophy of reason with, as it were, a “perceptual” reason. “Reason means the perception into the all-connecting being encountered of every essence and every possibility, of being and of nothing.” This is a form of the “rational” critique of the understanding, which Jaspers shares with Heidegger, although he always rejected the latter’s ontological mode of proceeding. For Jaspers, existence is not to be grasped in the form of an existential apriori that can be clarified through an analytic of Dasein within the framework of a “fundamental ontology.” Existence always remains a “projection” and a call and an appeal to the “authentic.” Heidegger surely noted this difference sooner than Jaspers, although he recorded already in 1928 some points of difference with Heidegger. Nevertheless it seemed initially to Jaspers that “for a short time” he and Heidegger “were on the same road,” something which he thought “was, in retrospect, perhaps a mistake” (Jaspers 1981: 75/2).2
As we have already noted, existence lies beyond the boundaries of the knowledge that is scientifically knowable. It is not to be grasped rationally. “It gets beyond the bounds of objective knowability in a leap that exceeds the capacity of a rational insight” (Jaspers 1970: 6). At this point Jaspers calls attention to the fact that he has taken over this concept of existence from Kierkegaard: “To Kierkegaard I owe the concept of Existenz, which, since 1916, has become standard for me in order to understand that for which I had, until then, exerted myself uneasily” (Jaspers 1981: 86). “Through him . . . I came to see . . . what philosophy might be today” (Jaspers 1969: 9). But Jaspers also mentions a difference with Kierkegaard: “But of equal power [for me] was the concept and claim of reason, which, through Kant, now became constantly clearer” (Jaspers 1981: 86). World orientation and existential elucidation form for Jaspers a complementary relationship, whereby existence-philosophy becomes the alternative program to the scientific-technological rationality of our culture of understanding, without of course penetrating it and being able to place it thoroughly in question. This brought on the reproach of Jaspers’ existence philosophy that its job is to provide edifying fancy speeches in the field of philosophy.
But be that as it may; for Jaspers existence philosophy represents a new “mode of thought” that indeed continues the discoveries of the particular sciences, in that it takes up their open questions. It is itself, however, not a science, since it has nothing to do with objects, but rather with human existence, which is essentially freedom. According to Jaspers, scientific thought is limited according to its content and its method because it always only focuses on beings, whereas for philosophy it is a matter of the totality of being. This is why he also thinks that there are two stems of knowledge that are not reducible to one another, between which there is no continuous passage, so that finally and ultimately only the Kierkegaardian leap, which is not rationally graspable, remains. The path to being is found through existence, which is defined in the first place as a non-epistemic self-relation, and also through its reference to the transcendent, which Jaspers also calls “the Encompassing of all encompassing” (Jaspers 1967: 70). “Existence is what relates to itself, and thus to its transcendence” (Jaspers 1969: 56).
Kierkegaard already saw things in a similar way, when he defined the “self “as a relation “which relates itself to itself, and in relating to itself relates to something else” (Kierkegaard 1989: 43). In fact, Jaspers rejects this thesis: “the more conception of God, the more self “(Kierkegaard 1989: 112), since with it the concept of existence receives a quasi-religious signature, which did not seem acceptable to Jaspers, at least not in this form. Thus, with Jaspers, even Kierkegaard’s “terrible solitude” of human beings before God becomes the solitude of human being before the “nothing.” Still, the formulation of existence as a non-epistemic self-relation, that always also has a reference to the transcendent, is something which he takes over from Kierkegaard.
It is significant in this context that Jaspers explains this antinomic character of existence more precisely through the concept of the “limit situation,” inasmuch as the irreplaceableness of the individual who is conscious of his or her own finitude only shows itself in limit situations. Jaspers calls in existence against nihilism. But he does not want to understand existence solipsistically – this distinguishes Jaspers from Heidegger and later from Sartre, according to whom “hell is others.” It is otherwise for Jaspers. For him, communication and, along with it, the reference to the other belong essentially to the authentic choice of the authentic self, with which an intersubjective space for a shared common lifeworld is opened up within existence philosophy, although Jaspers hardly thought seriously about the hermeneutic dimension of a intersubjective understanding of meaning within a common shared lifeworld. Existence is for Jaspers thus determined in three ways: first through its non-epistemic self-reference; second through its reference to the transcendent; and third through its communicative reference to the other.
Thus for Jaspers, then, the authentic self is indeed the last point of refuge in a world that is meaningless from the ground up. As he will say immediately after the the catastrophic experiences of the Second World War, however, the individual is only then him- or herself “when the other is also himself. Freedom is only in the degree to which all are free . . . But the individual is powerless. This spirit is the responsibility of us all . . . One of the possible ways into it is history” (Jaspers 1965: 29) – by which the shell of the existentiell innerliness is broken open more and more in the direction of an existence-philosophical “world philosophy.”
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“Existence” has replaced “life” in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology also. Being and Time brings the philosophical end of the philosophy of life to our attention in that Heidegger replaces Wilhelm Dilthey’s “Hermeneutic of Life” with an “existential analytic of Dasein,” which is carried out within the framework of a “hermeneutic of Dasein.” Existential ontology presents itself as the result of a fundamental questioning into the direction of inquiry of the philosophy of life itself, but in such a way that now “‘life’ itself,” which in the philosophy of life never became “a problem in its mode of being,” is problematized – namely, as a question concerning the “being of Dasein” (Heidegger 1962: 73, translation modified). The “analytic of Dasein,” which is supposed to achieve this, stands under the guiding principle: “the ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence” (Heidegger 1962: 67). With this Heidegger himself also cites Kierkegaard, attesting that he “explicitly seized upon the problem of existence as an existentiell problem, and thought it through in a penetrating fashion,” even though the “existential problematic” remained “alien to him, in that as regards his ontology, he remained completely dominated by Hegel and by ancient philosophy as Hegel saw it” (Heidegger 1962: 494, n.vi).
That kind of Being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow, we call “existence”. And because we cannot define Dasein’s essence by citing a “what” of the kind that pertains to a subject-matter, and because its essence lies rather in the fact that in each case it has its Being to be, and has it as its own, we have chosen to designate this entity as “Dasein”, a term which is purely an expression of its being. (Heidegger 1962: 32–33)
Thus Heidegger also, analogously with Jaspers, does not want to grasp existence objectively. A further common characteristic consists in the fact that Heidegger also wants to conceive of essence from out of existence. “Its being-what-it-is (essentia) must, so far as we can speak of it at all, be conceived in terms of its being (existentia)” (Heidegger 1962: 67) – a thesis which is characteristic of Kierkegaard and the entire existence-philosophy. “Accordingly those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not ‘properties’ present-at-hand of some entity which ‘looks’ so and so and is itself present-at-hand; they are in each case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that” (Heidegger 1962: 67).
The “analytic of Dasein” and the question concerning the meaning of being that is clarified through this analytic, runs, according to Heidegger, “ahead of the positive sciences,” because the “question of being,” which Heidegger also calls “the funda-mental question” of philosophy, must be answered before the question “what is there?” Being, according to Heidegger “‘is’ only in the understanding of those entities to whose Being something like an understanding of Being belongs” (Heidegger 1962: 228).
Fundamental ontology would thus be an ontology which, with the “question of Being,” wants to inquire into a domain that does not at all become especially thematic in traditional ontology. Or, put another way, fundamental ontology wants to enquire about the domain which lies behind the question: “what is there?” (“was ‘es gibt’?”). It does not simply ask about “what is there,” but rather about the conditions of the possibility of ontology, and it would be in this respect a transcendental analysis in the Kantian sense. This is not to devalue traditional ontology. Heidegger claims that this ontology needs to be supported, which assumes of course that this ontology lacks support and is capable of being supported. If one should assume this with Heidegger, then the strategy that is connected with the question of being no longer seems absurd. The question of being aims, then, “at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type, and, in so doing, already operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundations” (Heidegger 1962: 31). For if “the sciences are ways of being of Dasein,” and if the “there is” (es gibt) is dependent on this Dasein, then the regions of being of the respective sciences first disclose themselves in the return to the understanding of being of those who com-port themselves in their everyday existence toward entities in the world and who then methodically build up these naive dealings and cultivate the individual sciences to a precise form.
It is thus necessary to inquire back into the transcendental attitude behind the categorial constitution of entities, which is laid bare by transcendental philosophy, taking its lead from the sciences. The analysis of these prior understandings of being first becomes thematic with those structures of being-in-the-world which Heidegger calls “existentials”; this is why the existential analytic of being-in-the-world also deserves the name of a fundamental ontology.
Dasein also has for Heidegger a priority over the other entities that is based first in that fact that “this entity is determined in its being by existence” (Heidegger 1962: 34, translation modified) – this would be its ontic priority. It is based secondly in the fact that “Dasein is in itself ‘ontological’, because existence is . . . determinative for it” (Heidegger 1962: 34) – this would be the ontological priority. Finally, it is based in the fact that to Dasein an “understanding of existence” also always belongs, “an understanding of the being of all entities of a character other than its own” (Heidegger 1962: 34) – this would be its ontic-ontological priority.
To Dasein, which “is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very being, that being is an issue for it” (Heidegger 1962: 32), a privileged position is befitting because Dasein has an exceptional relation to the question of being and the question concerning the possibility of the understanding of being that is connected to it. “Of course only as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible), ‘is there’ Being’ “(Heidegger 1962: 255). For “it is peculiar to this entity that with and through its being, this being is disclosed to it” (Heidegger 1962: 32), peculiar that Dasein “always already” has an understanding of being. “And this means further that there is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly” (Heidegger 1962: 32).
This “understanding of being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s being” (Heidegger 1962: 32; see Tietz 2003: 57 ff.). Heidegger wants to return with this concept to the totality of a non-objective context of meaning, which lies before each predication and makes it possible. And if it is true that “Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence – in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself “(Heidegger 1962: 33),3 then the following thesis is not implausible: “fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein” (Heidegger 1962: 34).
Dasein means being open in and for being. It is that place which Heidegger calls the site of the opening up of being (Heidegger 2000a: 220). The doctrine of the categories is also thereby tied into the ontology of Dasein – a doctrine which traditionally falls together with ontology and thus with the question concerning the being of entities. If Heidegger, in his book on Scotus (see Heidegger 1978), a book dedicated to Heinrich Rickert, wanted to renew the philosophy of language on the basis of the doctrine of meanings, the last ontological foundations of the understanding should now be specified. The doctrine of meaning, which traditionally ties the conditions of the possibility of a philosophical enterprise to language, falls under the conditions of existential ontology.
In accordance with the task which is contemplated by Heidegger, this ontology must, if it really wants to be a fundamental ontology and not a positive science, take on the form of an existential analytic, because the explanation of the meaning of being only proceeds from Dasein. For if Dasein interprets itself, then the transcendental reflection becomes an existential explication, which is unfolded by Heidegger within the framework of an existential analytic. With that the interpretation of a pre-ontological understanding of being and the explication of a context of meaning, in which everyday existence always already finds itself, steps into the place of self-consciousness Heidegger contrasts the self-relationship of the knowing subject to a Dasein who is existentially concerned about his being – a Dasein who, admitted into concrete world relations, comports himself to himself and others in his actions.
“It is not the case that man ‘is’ and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-of-Being towards the ‘world’ – a world with which he provides himself occasionally. Dasein is never ‘proximally’ an entity which is, so to speak, free from Being-in, but which sometimes has the inclination to take up a ‘relationship’ towards the world. Taking up relationships towards the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is as it is” (Heidegger 1962: 84). Against the assumption of an idealistically stylized knowing subject, which relates itself to the world as if to a totality of knowable objects in order therein to objectify itself, by starting from being-in-the-world the characteristic of in-being as such is emphasized. This in turn stresses the attuned self-finding of Dasein in the midst of entities and therewith the impossibility of “think[ing] of the entirety of what is as an object” (see Gadamer 1994: 29). “World as a wholeness ‘is not a being, but that from out of which Dasein gives itself the signification of whatever beings it is able to comport itself toward in whatever way’ “(Heidegger 1998a: 121).
Heidegger thus, on the one hand, dissolves the transcendental subject, in whose veins no real blood flows, but rather merely the “diluted juice of reason as a mere activity of thought” (Dilthey 1989: 50, translation modified), and replaces it with a Dasein, which he, with the deeply flowing conceptuality of an existential ontology that proceeds transcendentally, intends to describe in such a way that all the domains of experience, which systematically overstretch the constitutive achievements of the transcendental “I,” can become thematic in the conceptuality of the existential ontology. Heidegger adheres in a certain way to the transcendental attitude of an explanation that reflects on the conditions of the possibility of Dasein as being-inthe-world, in such a way however that he confers upon the transcendental problem an ontological sense.
Two things are interesting in this context; first the thesis that Dasein always understands itself from out of its existence, and second the thesis that this existence is represented as its possibility “to be itself or not to be itself,” something that is supposed to depend on a choice that grounds authenticity and inauthenticity. Thus, before Heidegger clarified the meaning-theoretical and practical dimension of the hermeneutic understanding and of the understanding of action, he maintained that Dasein understands itself from out of its existence. This is a thesis which is made concrete in the course of the investigation in such a way that the practical self-understanding is supposed to provide the foundations of the understanding of meaning and action (see Tietz 2005: 59 ff.).
“Understanding is the existential being of Dasein’s own potentiality-for-being; and it is so in such a way that this being discloses in itself what its being is capable of “(Heidegger 1962: 184). And this “understanding is either authentic, arising out of one’s own self as such, or inauthentic” (Heidegger 1962: 186). The concept of understanding that Heidegger introduces in this way thus refers initially to the “understanding of existence.” The concept of understanding is introduced without recourse to a linguistically parsed meaning, but rather with recourse to the practical self-understanding, from which we understand ourselves as such and such. First the concept of the ethical self-understanding is introduced and then the concept of the understanding is expanded onto the practical understanding in the sense of “know-how” and the hermeneutical understanding. “Meaning is that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself “(Heidegger 1962: 193). And only Dasein has this meaning: “only Dasein can be meaningful or meaningless” (Heidegger 1962: 193). This understanding of existence, the existence that is in each case one’s own, has a circular structure, which “is rooted in the existential constitution of Dasein – that is, in the understanding which interprets” (Heidegger 1962: 195). This circular structure is not something to be avoided, but rather one is to enter into it in the “right way,” since within it “is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing” (Heidegger 1962: 195).
Now Heidegger pointed out already during the clarification of everyday being-inthe-world “that a bare subject without a world never ‘is’ proximally, nor is it ever given. And so in the end an isolated ‘I’ without others is just as far from being proximally given” (Heidegger 1962: 116). The others, which according to Heidegger “proximally” and “for the most part” encounter each other from out of the ready-to-hand, environmental context are precisely already “there with” us. Our encounter with them is different from the inner-worldly encounter of equipment or things, thus different from ready-to-hand and present-at-hand things. For the others are “like the very Dasein which frees them, in that they are there too, and there with it” (Heidegger 1962: 154). The “with” is of a kind with Dasein, that with-like everyday being-inthe-world is a shared world with others. For the “world of Dasein is a with-world[Mitwelt]. Being-in is being-with Others. Their being-in-themselves within-the-world is Dasein-with [Mitdasein]” (Heidegger 1962: 155). Because Dasein is essentially in itself being-with, there always already lies in the being with others “a relationship of being from Dasein to Dasein” (Heidegger 1962: 162).
With this determination of Dasein as being-with and of the world as a with-world, Heidegger hits upon the important distinction between an objective world, in which natural objects and states of affairs are encountered as inner-worldly entities in manipulative dealings, and a social world of intersubjectively socialized subjects, who meet on the level of a common constitution of a world that is for them identical and for that reason objective. This has an obvious advantage over the monadological approach of the philosophy of consciousness, which explains our relations as symbolically mediated interaction – an approach that remained constitutive even for Husserl. It is true that Husserl, with his explanation of this phenomenon, returns to the foundational layer of the lived-world. Indeed he also understands all human achievements as objectivations of an everyday practice that is organized in accordance with the lived-world (see Husserl 1950: §49). However, through the fact that he thinks the “constitution of the lived-world” according to the basic principles of a constitution of knowledge, the attempt at a phenomenological grounding of inter-subjectivity is clearly paradoxical. For how am I supposed as a monad, as a transcendentally achieving I, to constitute another I and at the same time experience the one that is constituted in me as another? But through a “change of perspective” of the ego and alter ego, one merely gains the grounding of a solipsistic-transcendental “community of monads,” in which again every transcendental ego in turn merely has “his world,” but does not arrive at an intersubjectively shared “we-world” (see Schütz 1957: 100). Husserl’s change of perspective indeed guarantees a certain symmetry between ego and alter ego. The change of perspective is not capable, however, of breaking the immanence of the monad.
Heidegger is himself conscious of this paradox. For that reason he formulates the task to be “to make visible phenomenally the species to which this Dasein-with in closest everydayness belongs, and to interpret it in a way which is ontologically appropriate” (Heidegger 1962: 152). With this posing of the task, the social-ontological point of view of fundamental ontology comes into view, which is extremely significant for the analysis of being-with. Without mentioning Husserl’s name, the analysis developed in the fourth chapter of Being and Time presents a single polemic directed at Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity, and seeks to clarify that problem on which Husserl toiled in vain. Heidegger succeeds with this through reconstructing being-with as an intersubjective relationship of Dasein to Dasein. Heidegger explicitly stresses that “an isolated ‘I’ without Others is [never] proximally given” (Heidegger 1962: 152), thus that when all is said and done, “being-with and the facticity of being with one another” is grounded in a simple “occurrence together of several ‘subjects’ “(Heidegger 1962: 157). And insofar as the mode of being of Dasein has the “kind of being of being-with-one-another,” there is no requirement whatsoever “to provide the first ontological bridge from one’s own subject, which is given proximally as alone, to the other subject, which is proximally quite closed off “(Heidegger 1962: 162).
In contrast to Dilthey, who must make being-with plausible by means of a psychologistically understood concept of empathy, and also different than Husserl, who in the Logical Investigations constructs the communication that is mediated by signs and mutual understanding from the one-sided “perception of the announcement” (see Husserl 1984: 39 f.) – even later, for instance in the Cartesian Meditations or in the Crisis, Husserl could not free himself from a model of understanding which conceptualizes the process of understanding from out of an “indeclinable primal-I”4– Heigger does not merely want to keep the concept of the understanding clear of all psychological additions, but rather he also wants to show being-with to be “a relationship of being from Dasein to Dasein” (Heidegger 1962: 162).
The analysis of the world is therefore reconstructed first of all from the point of view of an intersubjective relationship of Dasein to Dasein in being-with, with which being-with is shown to be a constitutive feature of being-in-the-world. Through this, Heidegger brings those processes of the understanding into view which hold present the intersubjectively shared, lived-worldly background – the background which supports hermeneutic understanding. Heidegger enters with a stroke the level of intersubjectivity, without having to construct it from the transcendental performances of individual subjects, using a theory of constitution. He thereby deepens the phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity in which he explains the analysis of the world from the point of view of an intersubjective relationship which I enter into with others. For the lifeworld, which is somehow suspended in the structures of linguistically mediated intersubjectivity, reproduces and maintains itself through the same medium in which subjects who are capable of speech and action come to an agreement with one another about something in the world. And yet Heidegger remains a prisoner of the Husserlian strategy.
Indeed, the special standing, maintained by Husserl, of a supposed preintersubjective self-consciousness is exposed as a fiction; the epistemically reduced subject of epistemology is dismissed by appeal to the contexts of involvements and references of the lifeworld that cannot be gotten behind, and it is submitted to the conditions of an innerworldly existence and historical facticity. The entire modern epistemology since Descartes has to accept the blame for proceeding from a subject in the figure of the “I think,” a subject which has neither a world nor yet a with-world. This is something that affects even Husserl too, for while he indeed situates the transcendental ego in the world, he simultaneously, in order to not miss the possibility of a “universal critique,” wants to make the lifeworld and therewith the intersubjective relationship between the ego and alter-ego understandable from out of a “primal-I” by using a theory of constitution. Heidegger is no more able to free himself from the stipulations of the phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity. “That the analysis of being-with nevertheless only reproduces and does not overcome the theory of intersubjectivity has its basis in its transcendental-philosophical conception, in the point of departure from projection as the transcendental constitution of the world” (Theunissen 1984: 171–2, translation modified).
Heidegger’s problem is connected with his way of framing the other, which, more closely defined, appears as the “one.” The “publicness” is a publicness that has been made average. It is supposed to be characterized not through belonging together, but rather through “distantiality,” and in “averageness” it only meets the averaged expectations of everyone. In this way the “one,” characterized as “neuter,” levels out all positive possibilities of the being of Dasein. This interpretation of the “one” characterized as “neuter” has disastrous social-ontological consequences for Heidegger. For the “one-self,” the “self of everyday Dasein,” is the self who is completely fascinated by the world and the Dasein-with of others in the “one.” It is consequently inauthentic. Authentic Dasein in a negative moment annuls the validity of the “objective we-world,” and in a positive moment is supposed to lay open the transcendental horizon of the world and therewith also the “meaning of being.” This authentic Dasein should be a Dasein that is freed from the domination of others. And this, as Heidegger tells us, exists only in “individualization.”
With this formulation of being-with, Heidegger’s advantage over the phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity immediately disappears again. Heidegger describes the structures of the lifeworldly background, which reaches out around the Dasein that is “in each instance mine,” as structures of an everyday practice that has been made average, and which serve merely as a model of what authentic existence should not be. Because of this characterization, the analysis of being-with cannot be made fruitful for the question of how an intersubjectively shared world constitutes itself and maintains itself. Heidegger thus indeed succeeds in a first step at reconstructing the analysis of the world from the perspective of an intersubjective relationship between Dasein and Dasein in being-with, which is connected in the first instance with a change in perspective from isolated purposiveness to social interaction. In a second step, however, he lets the solipsistically positioned Dasein “as the entity which in each case I myself am” take the lead as opposed to Dasein-with. In fact this Dasein-with, including the structures of the lifeworldly background, are devalued as average and thoroughly deficient everyday practices. Because of this second step, Heidegger is thrown back onto the Husserlian starting point.
Because of that, Heidegger must make it plausible how now, once again, a being-with-one-another is made possible on the basis of individualization, but now a being-with-one-another that in comparison to the everyday kind turns out to be authentic. Heidegger seems to have supposed that, after the rise to power of the National Socialists, the people, built up to authenticity, will take over this task. Heidegger himself cannot enable this, for only death breaks through the environmental encounter of the other, an essential characteristic of inauthentic being-with-one-another. Authenticity as an abstract core of the self finds in death its measure and its ideal. In death alone are all relations to other Dasein undone. The solitude that arises from the non-relationality of the authentic self – Heidegger speaks in this context of an “existential solipsism” – thus becomes within social ontology the primordial fact of the authentic being one’s self (see Theunissen 1984: 189 ff.).
This non-relationality of death, which gives Dasein to understand that ultimately it is alone, casts its shadow on all intersubjective relationships. For in what is most proper to it, the authentic Dasein is no less isolated than the transcendental ego is for Husserl. Insofar as, for Heidegger, authenticity “becomes a relationship to itself under which heading nothing further can be conceived” (Adorno 1973: 75), it is precisely not what an intersubjective relationship always already presupposes: a social relationship to others. No authentic self constitutes itself in being-with-one-another. Dasein gains its authenticity without a positive possibility of being-with. That means that an authentic understanding cannot find a place any longer in being-with others.
So in his discussion of being-with, Heidegger indeed included the others under the title the “one.” But through this discussion the hermeneutical problem of the understanding also gets a paradoxical formulation, insofar as in the definition of the authentic relationship of the self to the self, the others are either completely missing or merely serve as a model of what it should not be. It is paradoxical because Heidegger couples two theses to each other. First the thesis that “being toward death” is a condition of the possibility of authenticity, and secondly the thesis that in the mode of authenticity a distinctive mode of the understanding lies before us.
The first thesis, with which Heidegger intends to place a “gap” between authenticity and inauthenticity, says that the confrontation with the possibility of death, a possibility that is “not to be outstripped,” liberates Dasein “from one’s lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one” (Heidegger 1962: 308). Insofar as here the “the issue is nothing less than Dasein’s Being-inthe-world” (Heidegger 1962: 294), “being toward death” is the condition of the possibility of a “choosing” which Heidegger calls authenticity. These theses, taken by themselves, do not seem problematic. The practical question can be posed in a radical and really fundamental manner, for instance as the question “How am I supposed to live?,” where this is understood in such a way that it does not refer to this or that particular action, but rather to our way of acting and therewith places our life as a whole in question. Insofar as it is posed in this way, then it is a question which always addresses itself to a first person singular, which, Heidegger thinks, means that “what expresses itself in the ‘I’ is that Self which, proximally and for the most part, I am not authentically” (Heidegger 1962: 368).
This reference to a first person singular clearly has a normative sense. For the identity of an “I” is grounded in its self-understanding, however diffuse it might remain. In the “I,” self-consciousness expresses itself, not as the self-relationship of a knowing subject, but rather as the ethical self-assurance of a person capable of being responsible. And this person who is capable of being responsible indeed always stands in an intersubjectively shared lifeworld, but “the individual projects himself as someone who vouches for the more or less clearly established continuity of a more or less consciously appropriated life history; in light of the individuality he has attained, he would like to be identified, even in the future, as the one into whom he has made himself” (Habermas 1992: 168).
From this first determination four further ones follow. The question concerning the “meaning of being” refers to a more or less immediate future; it refers to a self which is concerned with itself, it refers to a leeway of possibilities which should be questioned as a leeway, and it refers to those boundaries that limit these possibilities – for if these limitations were not available in the form of boundaries, they could not be considered here in any case (see Tugendhat 1979: 194 f.). It is indeed not necessary to pose this question. Instead of this, we could also go sailing or fishing. Heidegger designates with the expressions “authenticity” or “inauthenticity” this posing or this evasiveness before the question concerning the “meaning of being.” Insofar now as the “one” always already relieves Dasein of the question concerning the “meaning of being,” it also relieves him of the “projection” which gives an identity. Dasein lives as one lives, but not in such a way that it determines for itself what it wants to be. The “one” always already relieves Dasein of the freedom and authenticity of the choosing, which belongs to an autonomous self-determination and which authenticity first guarantees to a person who is capable of being responsible.
With Dasein’s lostness in the “one”, that factical potentiality-for-being which is closest to it (the tasks, rules, and standards, the urgency and extent, of concernful and solicitous Being-in-the-world) has already been decided upon. The “one” has always relieved Dasein from taking hold of these possibilities of being. The “one” even hides the manner in which it has tacitly relieved Dasein of the burden of explicitly choosing these possibilities. It remains indefinite who has “really” done the choosing. So Dasein make no choices, gets carried along by the nobody, and thus ensnares itself in inauthenticity. This process can be reversed only if Dasein specifically brings itself back to itself from its lostness in the “one”. (Heidegger 1962: 312, translation modified)
This is something that happens in the “limit situations” analyzed by Jaspers.5 In these situations, Dasein is brought “back to its ownmost potentiality-for-being-its-Self “(Heidegger 1962: 354).
Heidegger here associates the analytic of Dasein which proceeds transcendentally and hermeneutically with the existence-philosophical theme that human Dasein understands itself from its own possibilities of being itself or not being itself, in such a way that it always stands before the alternatives of authenticity and inauthenticity. Heidegger in this way translates the theme of the responsibility for one’s own salvation, a theme that came to a head with Kierkegaard, into the formula of care for one’s own existence: “Dasein is an entity . . . [for whom] in its very being, that being is an issue for it” (Heidegger 1962: 32). And insofar as man is from the outset an ontological being, upon whom the question of being is existentially forced, Heidegger speaks here also of an ontical rootedness of the existential analytic. “The question of being is nothing other than the radicalization of an essential tendency-of-being which belongs to Dasein itself – the pre-ontological understanding of being” (Heidegger 1962: 35).
Heidegger’s thesis, that the theoretical relation to the world is dependent upon our practical relation with the world, is thereby yet once again made more precise to the effect that theoretical and practical relations to the world are dependent on our practical self-understanding. This is true, Heidegger maintains, insofar as the “understanding of existence” is always also an “understanding of the world” (Heidegger 1962: 186). The practical self-understanding of one’s own personal I-identity would then found, not only theoretical, but also practical world relations.
Now the first part of the thesis about dependence, according to which our theoretical world relation is grounded in our practical dealings, is well established. The second part appears problematic, insofar as the “understanding of existence” cannot provide a foundation to the hermeneutic understanding, since it is already tied to an intersubjectively shared language and therewith to the hermeneutic understanding. All the same, here Heidegger addresses an important aspect in connection with the problematic of self-consciousness. With recourse to practical comportment, Heidegger expands the concept of self-relations to me as a thinking and acting subject, beyond the concept of the theoretical self-consciousness, to which, from Descartes onward, the concept was restricted!
The care about one’s own being which has been intensified into anxiety, which Heidegger joins to the introduction of temporal constitution, makes it understandable to the self that it cannot be understood in terms of the “one,” but rather it must apprehend itself from its possibilities and must itself take its existence into hand. And who seeks to evade this decision – who believes the question concerning the life that is good or successful can be answered from the third-person perspective, so that one merely does oneself what “one” does – that person has already decided for a life in the mode of inauthenticity.
Even if one now does not want to go along in substantivizing the self and the others who are introduced as the “one,” one must concede to Heidegger that the question concerning the “meaning of being,” if it in fact is radically posed, must include in itself the possibility of being-no-longer! Just this ability-to-be-no-more is the possibility of death. And this is, as the negation of life, the last boundary, before which the question concerning a good or successful life is really meaningfully posed. The thesis, for its part – one can call it the thesis of finitude – thus appears well grounded, because the unsurpassable possibility of death is constitutive for every individual giving of meaning.
This is different from the case of Hegel, for whom self-consciousness first attains independence through the negation of all things external to it that condition it – these become null and void through the dialectically progressing process of the liberation of one’s own finitude, through which the self-consciousness dissolves itself in its singularity and recognizes itself as the universal and therewith even as the individualized self-consciousness. Heidegger correctly insists on the irreducible finitude of “a Dasein which is in each case its own,” which is to be debated neither through a dialectical procedure of sublation, nor through a theological promise of salvation from the world. For Hegel, self-consciousness itself does not need to be afraid of its own death, since it carries out in death only the mediated transition into the concrete eternity of the species of reason, in such a way that this appears as his home with which he “is reconciled,” (Hegel 1979: 139). Heidegger, by contrast, recognizes that such a procedure of sublation makes unimportant the enabling conditions which place the finite Dasein – the Dasein who finds itself in determinate situations – before a choice in which it chooses itself.
We learn from Heidegger that an immortal being would not merely be an unbeing, but rather at the same time a being which could not get meaning from its perpetual Dasein. For a human being who would lose his mortality would also lose all interest in the lifeworldly concerns of mortal humans. In this respect, the question “Is death a condition of the possibility of the significance of life or: of the meaning of life?” must be answered positively (Apel 1978: 408). It is controversial whether this existentiell discovery also has a point for the theory of meaning, so that an immortal being, with the loss of its mortality, would not only lose every meaning-giving interest of and in the lifeworld, but rather together with this he or she would lose also the ability to genuinely communicate with others, that is, mortal humans. If it were like this, then “being toward death” at any rate would have to be understood not only as a “condition of the possibility of the meaningfulness of life,” but also as a “subjective-existential condition” of the possibility of the “understandability of meaning” and therewith as a “necessary prerequisite for the constitution of all meaning content which is understandable for us” (Apel 1978: 413).
However one might stand with respect to this thesis now, if the existential result in fact has this consequence for the theory of meaning, then it must be spelled out in such a way that its meaning is a publicly accessible meaning, since a meaning that is not publicly accessible is an un-meaning. This is particularly true since, with the acceptance of the thesis of finitude, the question concerning the conditions of the possibility of an intersubjectively valid understanding of the meaning of something as something, and the question concerning the intersubjectivity of linguistically shared meanings, have not yet been answered. And it is precisely the answering of such questions that Heidegger attempts. He believes that the consequence of the thesis of finitude lies not only in the proof that the question concerning the good or successful life must be answered with an appeal to the “Dasein which is in each case our own.” But he also believes that, with an appeal to this Dasein, the intersubjectivity of a common shared lifeworld and the intersubjectivity of a linguistically shared meaning can be made understandable. Nevertheless, precisely this proves to be impossible, since the priority of the intersubjectivity of the lifeworld over the mineness of Dasein, which is suspended in the structure of the linguistic intersubjectivity of meaning, goes beyond the way of conceiving things that remains trapped in the solipsism of Husserlian phenomenology.
In our context, the relevant problem results from the fact that Heidegger radicalizes the thesis of finitude into the thesis of authenticity and applies it to the problem of discourse and understanding. Heidegger thinks that the “understanding of existence” is “either authentic, arising out of one’s own self as such, or inauthentic” (Heidegger 1962: 186). In this way Heidegger, in a first step, with an appeal to practical comportment, expands the concept of self-relations beyond the concept of the theoretical self-consciousness to the me as a thinking and acting subject. Then, in a second step, he switches the practical self-relation for the hermeneutic understanding, in such a way that the former is grounded in the latter. And since the human Dasein must apprehend itself in the horizon of its possibilities, if it does not want to lead a life in the mode of the inauthentic, “authenticity” grounds “authentic understanding.”
But Dasein holds itself “proximally and for the most part” in the inauthentic kind of being. For “Dasein, as everyday Being-with-one-another, stands in subjection to Others” (Heidegger 1962: 164). This Dasein that stands in subjection to strangers, and hence is a non-autonomous Dasein, is characterized through the “distantiality, averageness, and levelling down” of its positive possibilities for being. The place at which this Dasein – the Dasein that is made non-autonomous by the “one” – keeps itself is the public. Heidegger attributes to the public not only a leveling, but also an authoritarian character. This authoritarian character becomes essentially fortified through “gossiping and passing the word along.” And indeed, so far as it goes, in the public which is referred to by Heidegger as “authoritarian,” “things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted by just such gossiping and passing the word along – a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on becomes aggravated to complete groundlessness” (Heidegger 1962: 212).
Later, in the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger will say with respect to §§ 27 and 35 of Being and Time that this public, including the dictatorship of the public, is “the metaphysically conditioned establishment and authorization of the openness of beings in the unconditional objectification of everything” because “it stems from the dominance of subjectivity” (Heidegger 1998b: 242). This objectification is also the reason why “language thereby falls into the service of expediting communication along routes where objectification – the uniform accessibility of everything to everyone – branches out and disregards all limits. In this way language comes under the dictatorship of the public realm, which decides in advance what is intelligible and what must be rejected as unintelligible” (Heidegger 1998b: 242). In the “Letter on Humanism” the “decay of language” and the “devastation of language” are indeed diagnosed from the perspective of a philosophy of being. Nevertheless here, as in the account in Being and Time of the “one,” an instance is identified which brings language under the subjection of the public, so that it becomes idle talk. Since the Dasein that has decayed to the “one” is able to express itself only in the leveled-down form of averageness – unlike Kant, Heidegger is not able to get anything more out of the public than its down-down, averaged, and authoritarian side – the “public” produced in this way must inevitably be understood as a pseudo-public, as a public which, instead of illuminating everything, obscures everything and in such a way that “what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone” (Heidegger 1962: 165). This is achieved by idle talk.
Now one would misunderstand Heidegger’s explanations of the fallenness of Dasein if one were to interpret this “as a ‘fall’ from a purer and higher ‘primal status’” (Heidegger 1962: 220). Heidegger does not want to practice cultural criticism in the tradition of Nietzsche, Simmel, Klages, or Spengler. He also knows, it is true, that “unease with the culture” that marks the openly admitted or else hidden source of all the worries that are inspired by the philosophy of life and oriented to cultural criticism. And even the promise of the philosophy of life of a total renewal of the body-soul can be shown, using Heidegger’s work, in a fundamental-ontological reformulation – and indeed in a solidly practical-political sense. Heidegger’s assurance, however, that his account of the “one” does not represent a variety of cultural concern is to be taken seriously. “The ‘they’ is an existentiale; and as a primordial phenomenon, it belongs to Dasein’s positive constitution” (Heidegger 1962: 167). The same can also be said of idle talk. The general fact that the mass culture is an average culture, which is essentially strengthened by “curiosity” and “ambiguity,” becomes comprehensible precisely with the account of idle talk. Idle talk thus does not arise for example as a sediment and waste product of that average culture. Instead it belongs to that mode of being of being-with-one-another itself, and consequently one cannot join in it “from outside.”
Heidegger explains this thought as follows:
In the language which is spoken when one expresses oneself, there lies an average intelligibility; and in accordance with this intelligibility the discourse which is communicated can be understood to a considerable extent, even if the hearer does not bring himself into such a kind of Being towards what the discourse is about as to have a primordial understanding of it. We do not so much understand the entities which are talked about; we already are listening only to what is said-in-the-talk as such. What is said-in-the-talk gets understood; but what the talk is about is understood only approximately and superfici-ally. We have the same thing in view, because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said. (Heidegger 1962: 212)
In the average culture, where everyone orients him- or herself to idle talk, communication is thus, strictly speaking, not shared at all anymore, at least not in an “authentic” sense. In the average common sense there is nothing which is left to be shared in discourse. This is because the average common sense is a common sense which is already shared, so that here nothing is left to be shared. Thus, insofar as being-with-one-another stands in “subjection to the others,” it also “takes place in talking with one another and in concern with what is said-in-the-talk.” And precisely because of that, “the genuineness of the discourse and of the understanding which belongs to it” can be guaranteed no longer (Heidegger 1962: 212).
The reason for this is not to be sought in the fact that a discourse, which holds itself in the discoursing-with-one-another of what is said in the discourse, has “lost” the “primary relationship-of-being” (212). For such a discourse has “never achieved” this “primary relationship-of-being,” and as a consequence cannot lose it either. And just as little is the reason found in the fact that here there is present an “aim to deceive.” For whoever wants to deceive would already need to have established this “primary relationship-of-being,” if he wants to deceive. No, the idle talk, the “groundless saying and passing further along” (213, translation modified) is the reason that this genuine relationship-of-being is not established. Idle talk is itself the authority, which is thought to be responsible for the fact that the “act of disclosing” is perverted “into an act of closing off “(213). Thus it is not a function of the speaker being a more or less competent speaker of a language! In idle talk Heidegger sees a built-in mechanism which ensures an effect of perversion, which cuts Dasein off “from its primary and primordially genuine relationships-of-being towards the world, towards Dasein-with, and towards its very being-in” (214).
Now the thesis of the fallenness of idle talk can be understood in either a weak sense or a strong sense. If we understand this thesis in its weak variation, then it seems acceptable, but it cannot, however, be used by Heidegger to support his conclusions. At the same time the thesis in its strong variation appears for Heidegger indeed usable but becomes meaningless. In its weak variation we would use the concept of the understanding to designate the grasping of a linguistic meaning, whereby this thesis of the fallenness of idle talk is then conceived as expressing a truth-semantic theory of meaning. If we use the concept of understanding in this way, then it is clear that we have not authentically understood a statement if we do not know what a conversation is about. The problem is only that this way of taking the thesis doesn’t allow us to distinguish between an authentic and an inauthentic understanding.
This cannot satisfy Heidegger. He must in addition show that idle talk per se can establish no “primary relationship-of-Being towards the entity talked about” and so to the “things themselves” – the reason for which is to be sought in the public as public. In addition, only if Heidegger can make this plausible can he cash out ontologically the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity in relation to the problem of language and understanding. Heidegger must advocate the strong variation of the thesis of fallenness if he wants to direct it critically against idle talk. For this purpose two theses are coupled together: first is the thesis of “being toward death” as a condition of the possibility of choosing, which in a negative respect annuls “the objective we-world,” and in a positive respect lays open the transcendental horizon of meaning that guarantees authenticity. Secondly is the thesis that in the mode of authenticity there is a corresponding discourse – an authentic discourse, to be exact. But precisely in this way the thesis of fallenness becomes meaningless. For the authentic discourse envisaged by Heidegger is not just simply the contrast picture to inauthentic idle talk, for example a discourse which establishes again the “relationship-of-Being towards the entity talked about” that has been cut off. It is rather a discourse which cuts off both all relations to being-with and all relations to the matters talked about. At this point, Heidegger’s assurance that there really is this “primary relationship-of-being” is anything but plausible.
What Heidegger observes with regard to inauthentic idle talk can be stated in a much more precise form concerning authentic discourse: this discourse would not only be “groundless,” “null,” “not genuine,” and “contrary to the facts,” but rather a discourse that merely preserves silence. In the mode of authenticity, neither an authentic discourse nor an authentic understanding is possible, since in authenticity there can only be a reverent being quiet. It is thus also anything but a coincidence when Heidegger claims already in Being and Time that discourse has “another essential possibility”: “keeping silent” (Heidegger 1962: 208).
Thus it is correct that the finitude of Dasein is a condition of the possibility for something appearing in the world as important for us. But it does not follow from this that the conditions of the possibility of the understandability of linguistically shared meanings are simply dependent on the conditions of the finitude of “that Dasein which is in each case one’s own,” a Dasein which authentically projects itself on its possibilities in the mode of authenticity. This is contradicted not only by the fact that the orientation to “that Dasein which is in each case one’s own” cannot be constitutive for linguistic intelligibility in an intersubjectively shared language, but also by the fact that even this language transcends “that Dasein which is in each case one’s own.” An intersubjectively shared language is the condition of the possibility of and understanding of “death,” for this is actually what first makes possible both an intersubjectively valid understanding and an existentially viewed understanding of what “death” really means (see Apel 1978: 416). In this respect, things are related in precisely the opposite way that Heidegger claims: the “understanding of existence” does not provide a foundation for the hermeneutic understanding, but rather the other way around.
Although Heidegger thus identified being-with as a constitutive feature of everyday being-in-the-world, he thinks that he can be guided by “that Dasein which is in each case one’s own” in order to make plausible what he calls an authentic discourse. The orientation toward “that Dasein which is in each case one’s own” is not only supposed to be constitutive for authentic choosing, but also for a discourse which Heidegger designates as “authentic.” This has awkward consequences. In the first place, Heidegger is unable to show how this authentic understanding and discourse are to be understood. On top of that, Heidegger runs into the danger of rehabilitating a problem in the hermeneutical perspective that, in the epistemological perspective fell to his critique of meaning, which he directed at the presuppositions of the philosophy of consciousness: the problem of how the “knowing subject comes out of its inner ‘sphere’ into one which is ‘other and external’” (Heidegger 1962: 87).
While Heidegger could, with regard to the subject–object relation of modern epistemology, expose this problem, and along with it the problem of the solipsism of epistemology, as an apparent problem, it returns however in a modified form, and in fact in the subject–subject relation of linguistically mediated interaction. Heidegger consistently refuses to conceive of knowing as “returning with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it” (89), precisely because the “clarification of being-in-the-world” showed “that a bare subject without a world never ‘is’ proximally, nor is it ever given. And so in the end an isolated ‘I’ without Others is just as far from being proximally given,” since they are always already “there with us in being-in-the-world” (152). On the hermeneutic level, however, Dasein is precisely locked in this “cabinet” if it authentically discourses. Precisely with that the problem of solipsism again arises for Heidegger in the framework of a private language. If being-with is originally supposed to keep Dasein from the path into the solipsism of epistemology, then authentic discourse also now opens the path into “existential ‘solipsism’.”
Indeed, Heidegger protests that “existential ‘solipsism’” does not put Dasein as “an isolated subject-thing into the innocuous emptiness of a worldless occurring,” but rather first “brings it” in the authentic sense “before its world” and “before itself as Being-in-the-world” (233, translation modified). “Everyday familiarity” is simply supposed to collapse. But it is very obvious that the language game in which and from which we understand ourselves also belongs to this everyday familiarity. If it in fact collapses, then the problem of solipsism arises in the form of a private language. In his critique of the theory of intersubjectivity of the philosophy of consciousness, Heidegger is, as it seems, still trapped in those premises which he opposes. For his theory of intersubjectivity also proceeds methodically from out of “that Dasein which is in each case one’s own” – at least as concerning the mode of authenticity. And this Dasein bears all the consequences of a phenomenologically reduced being. Husserl demanded a phenomenologically altered comportment in opposition to “projecting oneself in thought and action.” The phenomenological comportment is not merely supposed to permit the epoché-practicing phenomenologist to suspend the “general thesis of the natural attitude,” but rather which allows the phenomenologist at the same time, by virtue of phenomenological self-reflection, to distinguish an absolutely indubitable basis from which the regress of grounding can be stopped and further questions concerning justification can be dismissed as meaningless. In the same way, Heidegger also demands, as against the thinking, acting, and speaking of everyday being-in-the-world, an existentially altered comportment in order to save Dasein in the mode of authenticity from the relativity and situatedness of everyday being-in-the-world. Heidegger indeed released the phenomenological reduction from the compulsion of the methodical. Individualization is conceived by him as an existentiell performance, while the phenomenological reduction presents a method that is handled by the disinterested spectator. Insofar as Heidegger demands, however, that authentic discourse and understanding have oriented themselves to the mode of authenticity, he reproduces the problem of intersubjectivity on an existential-ontological level.
With that, the explanatory advantage which Heidegger, with his analysis of being-with, had won on the level of the critique of the presuppositions of modern philosophy of consciousness is lost again on the level of the grounding of an authentic discourse. Having arrived at the gate of authenticity, no path leads back from here to an intersubjectively shared lifeworld. Indeed, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology can “answer the question overlooked by platonist logicism concerning the subjective-existential constitution of understandable ‘significance’ . . . but it cannot answer the question concerning the grounds of the possibility of intersubjectively valid significations” (Apel 1978: 413). Heidegger recognizes a linguistically disclosed and inter-subjectively shared lifeworld as a fact. But he cannot make it understandable through fundamental ontology: Heidegger can merely universalize the unique existentiell solitude to a solipsistic-transcendental community of solitude, but he cannot raise it into an intersubjectively shared we-world. For the we is the “one.” And the “‘public’ we-world” (Heidegger 1962: 93) is the public “one-world,” from which it is precisely necessary to get away. This is also why Heidegger in the end no longer has any place for an symmetrical I–Thou encounter of Dasein with Dasein in being-with.
Heidegger expressly opposes considering the I–Thou relationship as “the fundamental social structure” (Brandom 1994: 39), starting out from which one can explain not only the problem of intersubjectivity, but also the problem of the achievement of the disclosure of Dasein. Heidegger opposes the dialogic of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Heidegger’s first habilitation student Karl Löwith, who emphasized in his habilitation thesis the dialogical I–Thou relationship as constitutive for discourse and understanding (Löwith 1981). Heidegger defends his position against such views with the argument that it would be an error “to assume that the I–thou relation as such primarily constitutes the possible discovery of the world” (Heidegger 1997: 214). What is constitutive for it is rather the “Dasein which is in each case our own” and its transcendence, through which it can first actually “be with another self as a thou in the world” (Heidegger 1997: 214). And precisely this is the reason why Heidegger cannot solve the problem of the dialogical constitution of meanings. Indeed, Heidegger, with the concept of the referential context of the lifeworld, which lies constitutively behind the participants in interaction, is able to make thematic the unquestionable context of processes of understanding. With the appeal to an authentic discourse, however, he changes straightaway his magnificent knowledge into an absurdity. For an authentic discourse would be a discourse which no one could understand any more – in the end not even he who believes that he can speak it.
Following Wittgenstein, we can designate such a discourse a “private language.” As Wittgenstein showed, the speaker of such a private language would not be in a position to define the signification of linguistic expressions in such a way that one could meaningfully say he had used the linguistic expressions in correspondence with their respective significations. This is because to say this would require making reference to the public practice of everyday being-in-the-world, more precisely, to the ability to follow a rule. And one cannot, according to Wittgenstein’s point, follow a rule privately. But now if the public practice of everyday being-in-the-world is a necessary condition for holding the “assignment of signs and significations” in a way that they can be controlled, and if the meaningful application of rules itself can be understood only in the context of the “custom” of a concrete “form of life,” then the speaker of a private language places himself outside of this practice, insofar as he dismisses himself from this public practice of everyday being-in-the-world. But this is not all; he dismisses himself at the same time from an intersubjectively understandable language.
Now such a private-language argument could possibly be thought in the context of Being and Time. Analogously to Wittgenstein, Heidegger also shows that the skeptic presupposes something that he skeptically places into question: the reality of the external world. Therefore, there are, according to Heidegger no “‘actual’ sceptics” (Heidegger 1962: 271), because such a skeptic, if he were actually consistent, would not at all need to be refuted. Indeed not, because, differently “than one would innocently like to have true when one tries to bowl over ‘scepticism’ by formal dialectics” (272), the skeptic “has obliterated Dasein in the desperation of suicide, and in doing so, he has also obliterated truth” (271). Heidegger thus also begins from the premise that the skeptic, if he wants to present his skepticism meaningfully, must “always already” presuppose something that itself can no longer be doubted. From this perspective it is also meaningless and scandalous to demand a proof of the external world on the grounds that everything could possibly be merely my dream. And if Heidegger had now generalized this refutation of epistemological skepticism – a refutation based in the critique of meaning – he would have come to a comparably similar result with respect to the possibility of a private language, as we know it from Wittgenstein. For from the point of view of the theory of language and meaning, a private language is merely the counterpart to epistemological skepticism. One seeks in Heidegger in vain, however, for such a generalization to the philosophy of language of the meaning-critical refutation of epistemological skepticism (see Tietz 2004: 33 ff.).
This is because, in order to generalize the argument in this way, Heidegger would have had to be guided by the public use of an intersubjectively shared language. Such an orientation would not only offer the possibility of explaining the signification of a linguistic expression through its use within specific “language games.” At the same time this orientation would open up the possibility of subjecting the use and misuse of linguistic expressions in the empty games of philosophy, in the sciences, and even also in everyday language to a critique that starts from immanence. Instead of this, Heidegger believes that the language of the everyday life-world can be surpassed in fundamental ontology through the laying open of an authentic discourse. It is the unsayable demand for authenticity which in the perspective of the philosophy of language rehabilitates that problem which Heidegger dismissed with respect to modern epistemology. For the immanence of the monad cannot be broken simply with this orientation to the “Dasein which is in each case our own.” For Husserl, each Cartesian Meditation“leads back to the transcendental ego naturally,” and is confronted “with its concrete monadic contents as this de facto ego, as the one and only absolute ego,” by means of “the method of phenomenological reduction.” In the same way, a solipsism is restored for Heidegger, albeit without the phenomenological reduction in the sense of a methodical procedure, which brings the problem of a private language in tow.
So the solitude, arising from the non-relationality of one’s own self, overshadows every communicative understanding and in its ultimate consequence makes communication as communication impossible. The Dasein of the other mutates into a plurality of closed-off monads, which in their interiors contain mineness inaccessibly (see Sternberg 1981: 133). As we noted already, insofar as for Heidegger, like for Kierkegaard, “authenticity becomes a relationship to itself under which heading nothing further can be conceived, “it is precisely not that which linguistic understanding always already presupposes: a social relation to others. No authentic self constitutes itself in being-with, since being-with after all merely appears as a codetermining factor in relation to authenticity, and yet as a negative factor for it. Dasein gains its authenticity without a positive possibility of being-with; this thus means that something like an authentic discourse and understanding cannot occur here. The “gap” which the Heideggerian social ontology tears open between authenticity and inauthenticity is for Heidegger no longer bridgeable hermeneutically. In this respect, the analysis of being-with does not merely repeat the Husserlian theory of inter-subjectivity on the level of existential ontology, but rather radicalizes and intensifies it at the same time.
The dialogical structure of linguistic understanding disappears in favor of the monadological construction of the authentic self, which actually does not allow any further answer to its offer of language. This self is tied to an imagination which functions as a primary self-understanding and in contrast to which all offers of language of everyday being-in-the-world appear as ideological foreign infiltrations. The conceptualizing of death as a condition of authenticity thus does not merely have the consequence that Heidegger’s project dismisses the principle of self-preservation in its traditional form, but rather also puts into question, on the basis of the monologue, the functioning of conventional language and its social content of signification. With this, the course is already set in Being and Time for explaining the “essence of language” from the “essence of poetry” (see Heidegger 2000b: 60 ff.).
But it is now clear that the monologue cannot be constitutive for linguistic understanding by means of indentical significations. For the participation in linguistic interaction does not merely require the use of linguistic symbols, a use which is bound up with the competence to follow a rule, but rather also the attitude in which the ego and alter ego address each other. But precisely this addressing attitude is systematically misguided by the orientation to the “Dasein which is in each case our own.” The consequence of this is that the monologue eats up the dialogue. This loss of dialogue is in its consequence the reverse side of the negativism of the theory of intersubjectivity, which the premises of the analysis of being-with force. The monadological involvement with “the Dasein which is in each case our own” compels Heidegger to reconstruct the intersubjective relationship between Dasein and Dasein in being-with from the perspective of an individual consciousness, through which the process of understanding falls into two disparate parts: in the declaration of a speaker on the one side, and in the taking notice of a hearer on the other side. Indeed, Heidegger assures us that speaking just as much as hearing is constitutive for discourse and understanding. Since however the “second person” appears “only in the levelled out form of the ‘other’ person, but not as my partner or as the thou belonging to an I” (Löwith 1942: 61, translation modified), a linguistically generated intersubjectivity of the understanding cannot be made plausible.
But with that the entire concept of language, as Heidegger takes it in Being and Time, is caught in a crisis. For that which is predicated cannot be “authentically” communicated in any case, because in the mode of authenticity there is no inter-subjectively understandable language whatever. And because every predication would compromise the priority of being, then language can ultimately communicate nothing more than something totally empty. Heidegger wanted originally to speak of that of which Wittgenstein preferred to remain silent. In this way this emptiness, the absolutely inexpressible, that which is exempted from all predication under the name “being,” finally becomes for him that ens realissimum that is capable of telling silence.
So then Heidegger indeed, following Dilthey and Husserl, adopted understanding and language as the basic characteristic of human Dasein and called attention to the constitutive role of the pre-understanding, which arises from the having-to-do with the same thing. But insofar as Heidegger with the orientation to “the Dasein which is in each case our own” gives the model for interpreting the understanding as a one-sided, say, monological, expression, it becomes impossible for him to solve the problem of the linguistic understanding of meaning. In contrast to the observations which everyone makes for themselves alone, the understanding of meaning is not feasible solipsistically. Linguistic signification can be derived from the performative attitude of participants in communication, which assumes a common orientation to an intersubjective practice – something Heidegger cannot guarantee through his orientation to “the Dasein which is in each case our own.”
This is also the reason why the problem of intersubjectivity cannot be solved on the basis of Heidegger’s premise of a Dasein which can project itself authentically on its possibilities only in solitude, something that then holds also analogously for an intersubjectivity of linguistically shared significations. For the signification of linguistic expressions cannot be made plausible, as Heidegger attempts to do, with a “Humpty-Dumpty-view” of language,6 but rather only in relation to the rule-structure of language. Heidegger recognizes this in the consequences. He recognizes that Dasein is forced ultimately to watch helplessly the withdrawal of being from the deficient practice of the everyday understanding. And he recognizes, without of course freeing himself from the “Humpty-Dumpty-view,” that the problem of intersubjectivity cannot be solved on the premises of fundamental ontology. That is why he attempts to spring back onto an ontologically even deeper foundation. But this foundation within Dasein, as it was conceived in Being and Time, cannot be exhibited.
The creative subject was indeed brought out from the realm of the intelligible and placed into the dimension of the lifeworld. And the philosophy of the subject, in which the transcendental formulation recovered an ontological sense, was indeed overcome through the more deeply conceived conceptuality of an existential ontology that proceeds transcendentally, which wants to make the conditions of the possibility of predication thematic with the concept of “disclosedness.” “Precisely the concrete analysis of disclosedness in Being and Time, however, in which this is presented in its ‘finitude,’ had to lead to the realization that Dasein cannot bear any longer the grounding function which here was still transcendentally-philosophically expected. The later ‘turning’ is contained in advance in the content of the new problematic” (Tugendhat 1967: 273).
In his later philosophy Heidegger therefore searches for an alternative in order to get rid of the “founding communicationlessness” of Dasein (see Ebeling 1982: 30). Heidegger no longer wants to philosophize from Dasein, but rather from being. It is no longer Dasein, but rather being, to which Heidegger awards the power to disclose worlds. Therewith the problem of intersubjectivity now indeed becomes invalid. Now instead, being is at work in the grammatical change of the linguistic world picture, which in such a way takes over the place of a subjectless creator of meaning – with which then the chapter on existential ontology is ended and the chapter on the philosophy of being begins.
Notes
1 The early Georg Lukács dedicated an essay to him in 1909, in which he anticipated the basic theses of the later existence-philosophy. Lukács 1911: 61 ff. For more on this, see Tietz 1989: 561–80.
2 In the “Notizen zu Heidegger” Jaspers says: “among the German philosophy professors of our time only one interested me: Heidegger. All the others seemed to me intellectual bustle. Only here was another serious philosopher. In the years from 1920 to 1930 it united us” (Jaspers 1978: 75).
3 “In determining itself as an entity, Dasein always does so in the light of a possibility which it is itself and which, in its very Being, it somehow understands. This is the formal meaning of Dasein’s existential constitution. But this tells us that if we are to Interpret this entity ontologically, the problematic of its Being must be developed from the existentiality of its existence” (Heidegger 1962: 69).
4 See Husserl 1976: 188. The exchange of roles between the ego and alter ego which Husserl contemplates can indeed guarantee a certain symmetry. Ultimately, however, every appresentation refers to its own primal presence. With that, Husserl’s attempt to construct intersubjectivity from a pre-intersubjective “primal I,” which lies before all exchange-understanding, remains stuck to a one-sided perspective. See Waldenfels 1980: 166 ff.
5 Heidegger refers in this context to Jaspers and his Psychology of Worldviews, insofar as “here the question of ‘what man is’ is raised and answered in terms of what he essentially can be,” from which, according to Heidegger, “the basic existential-ontological signification of ‘limit-situations’” is supposed to result (Heidegger 1962: 496 n. xv).
6 According to Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less” (Carroll 1872). Husserl also advocated such a Humpty-Dumpty view insofar as “a word or expression is invested with meaning by a mental act on the speaker’s part conferring meaning upon it” (Dummett 1994: 104; see also Dummett 1994: 44 ff.).
References and Further Reading
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Bollnow, O. F. (1947) Existenzphilosophie. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Brandom, R. B. (1994) Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Carroll, L. (1872) Through the Looking-Glass. London: Macmillan.
Dilthey, W. (1989) Introduction to the Human Sciences (ed. R. A. Makkreel and F. Rodi). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dummett, M. (1994) Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ebeling, H. (1982) Freiheit, Gleichheit, Sterblichkeit. Philosophie nach Heidegger. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1994) Martin Heidegger’s one path. In T. Kisiel and J. Van Buren (eds.), Reading Heidegger from the Start (pp. 19–34). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Habermas, J. (1992) Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (trans. W. M. Hohengarten). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1979) Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time (trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson). New York: Harper & Row.
—— (1978) Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. In Frühe Schriften. Gesamtausgabe vol. 1. Frankfurt: Klostermann.
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