29
Realism, Science, and the Deworlding of the World
Strangest is their reality.
their three-dimensional workmanship:
veined pebbles that have an underside,
maps one could have studied for minutes longer,
books we seem to read page after page.
If these are symbols cheaply coined
to buy the mind a momentary pardon,
whence this extravagance?
From “Dream Objects,” by John Updike (Updike 1988: 55)
Introduction
The classical thinkers of the phenomenological tradition – Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty – were deeply divided as to what should count as “world” and “reality.” Generally speaking, the phenomenological view is that the world is the horizon of disclosure: it is the field that permits phenomena to show themselves. And reality is the transcendent realm of entities as they exist independent of the world. But this raises a wealth of intriguing problems: What, more precisely, is the relation between world and reality? Is reality external to the world? If so, doesn’t this transform the category of world into a subjective condition, such that phenomenology becomes a species of subjective idealism? If not, if reality shows up only as it is disclosed in the world, doesn’t this mean that there is no hope of describing what reality itself is “actually” like? A decisive question in this debate is whether one holds that metaphysical reality is equivalent to what scientists call “nature.” The variety of responses to this question reveals a great deal not only about phenomenological methods, but also about the often negative image of natural science that has informed phenomenology over the twentieth century.
This chapter has four parts. First, I offer a brief excursus on the concepts of world and reality in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. My aim is twofold, to stress a continuity between Husserl and Heidegger, insofar as both of them conceived of the world as the transcendental horizon for phenomena, but also, to emphasize a discontinuity, insofar as Husserl’s way of conceptualizing the world left him vulnerable to the charge of subjective idealism, a charge Heidegger believed he could evade. Second, I provide a more detailed discussion of Heidegger’s existential notion of “worldhood.” Here, I will pay special attention to the spatial character of worldhood, in order to cast some light on Heidegger’s strong distinction between existential spatiality and natural-scientific space. Third, I will address Heidegger’s more controversial claim that, whereas worldhood is dependent upon practices and interpretative schemes, the scientific-realist conceives of entities as “deworlded.” This claim, as I will show, raises a variety of problems for Heidegger in the debate over realism and idealism. Heidegger’s position in this debate, as I shall explain, might be considered a version of “quietism.” Fourth and finally, I offer some broader, more critical reflections on the place of scientific realism in phenomenology. Here I will suggest that Heidegger’s image of the scientist as confronting a realm of deworlded entities is philosophically unhelpful and inconsistent. Indeed, such an image of deworlded scientific reality is a remnant of anti-scientism, and is best dispensed with, for reasons Heidegger’s own philosophy would seem to support.
To anticipate, this chapter supports the view that reality, even scientific reality, is always disclosed within an interpretative world. This is a view the early Heidegger did not unambiguously endorse and only came to accept in his later writings. For the early Heidegger, reality as it is disclosed by natural science is a deworlded realm of entities lacking in significance. But, if Heidegger himself was right that Dasein “always” projects a world, then this view cannot be sustained. For as post-Kuhnnian philosophers and historians of science have tried to show, scientific reality is itself disclosed only within communities of practice and horizons of “care.” And, more importantly, the way those entities are disclosed bears on the understanding of Being that we ascribe to those entities: they are not the deworlded or “non-interpretive” entities the early Heidegger took them to be. The thrust of my argument, then, will be that we need to adopt a more consistently Heideggerian view: (1) We can affirm Heidegger’s doctrine that Dasein always projects a world, and we can also affirm his commitment to metaphysical realism, i.e., the doctrine that there is a “reality” independent of the worlds that disclose that reality. And (2) we can also affirm Heidegger’s scientific realism, i.e., the doctrine that scientific practice investigates entities that are in some way independent of those practices. But (3) we should dispense with Heidegger’s own misunderstanding of science as a practice that discloses entities just as they are independent of those practices. For if science is one kind of practice alongside others, then the scientific image of deworlded entities is itself an interpretation of the Being of those entities. Science does not enjoy a special access to deworlded reality.
This argument has broad consequences for how phenomenologists conceive of the relation between science and the world. For once the scientific conception of reality is seen as merely one world among others, the longstanding conflict between the Kulturwissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften can no longer be construed as a quarrel between interpretive and non-interpretive modes of knowing. And so, the romantic fear that science brings “disenchantment” – a deworlding of the interpretive world – must yield before the more inclusive view that science has an interpretive world of its own.
Husserl, World, and the Problem of Metaphysical Realism
What did Husserl mean by “world” and “reality”? For Husserl, the attempt to describe the “stream of experience” must begin with what he called the “real events” of the natural world. Phenomenology, as he conceives it in Ideas I, could only develop by means of a decisive mental shift from the attitude of involved, everyday understanding to that of disengaged, mental awareness. To be sure, it must take as its point of departure the so-called “natural standpoint” and the understanding of reality that belonged to everyday consciousness of the “man on the street.” Now Husserl claims that such an everyday understanding of reality depends upon the “natural thesis” (or, alternately, the “general thesis”), according to which “the real world about me is at all times known not merely in a general way as something apprehended but as a fact-world that has its being out there” (Husserl 1931: 108).
But Husserl is not content to remain with this understanding of reality. If phenomenology is to be a “rigorous science,” it must perform a mental bracketing of the existential commitment as it is expressed in the natural thesis. For only then can we discover that region of pure consciousness which is alone the concern of phenomenological inquiry. Husserl emphasizes that nothing about this mental shift actually called into question the “reality” of the natural standpoint:
We do not abandon the thesis we have adopted, we make no change in our conviction... And yet the thesis undergoes a modification – whilst remaining in itself what it is, we set it as it were “out of action,” we “disconnect it,” “bracket it.” It still remains there like the bracketed in the bracket, like the disconnected outside the connexional system. We can also say: The thesis is experience as lived (Erlebnis), but we make “no use of it.” (Husserl 1931: 108)
Crucial to Husserl’s method of disconnection is that our everyday belief in reality remains undoubted – here Husserl dissents from Descartes – but it simply plays no further role in phenomenological inquiry. And Husserl is also emphatic that, because all of the empirical sciences involve this commitment to reality, the bracketing of existential conviction puts all such sciences equally out of play, for the sake of an altogether distinctive kind of a priori science of consciousness:
The whole world as placed within the nature-setting and presented in experience as real, taken completely “free from all theory,” just as it is in reality experienced, and made clearly manifest in and through the linkings of our experiences, has now no validity for us, it must be set in brackets, untested indeed but also uncontested. Similarly all theories and sciences, positivistic or otherwise, which relate to this world, however good they may be, succumb to the same fate. (Husserl 1931: 111)
Husserl’s bracketing technique implies a two-tiered theory of knowledge, and it poses a stark choice between the natural attitude and attitude of transcendental phenomenology: We may concern ourselves with either (a) any one of a number of richly textured investigations of empirical reality, the plenum of both everyday experience and the natural sciences, and all of these empirical sciences necessarily rely upon the “natural thesis” and its existential commitment to a mind-transcendent reality; or, (b) we can concern ourselves with the “a priori” investigation of mental “sense” as it falls within “transcendental subjectivity,” and, in doing so, attempt a unique science of our own mind-immanent sphere. This sphere itself contains the grounds for all possible experience and which is therefore the condition for the first kind of empirical inquiry.
The first attitude directs our attention to “reality,” and the latter to the “world,” in its technical, phenomenological sense of that term. The well-known consequence of this dualistic contrast is that the second option, once established, seems in conflict with the very commitment to metaphysical realism that the natural attitude had presupposed. Instead, the very presence of the world to consciousness is revealed – in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase – as something “paradoxical”:
Reflection does not withdraw from the world toward the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: xiii)
But if the phenomenological reduction thus makes “intentional threads” available to analysis, it also means that the “world” takes on a wholly immanent meaning. Indeed, the reduction seems to forbid any intelligible talk of a mind-transcendent reality. This result is especially evident in Husserl’s most idealist work, the Cartesian Meditations (first written in 1929):
Every imaginable sense, every imaginable being, whether the latter is called immanent or transcendent, falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectivity that constitutes sense and being. The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. They belong together essentially; and, as belonging together essentially, they are also concretely one, one in the only absolute concretion: transcendental subjectivity. If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely – nonsense. (Husserl 1973: 84)
This claim is remarkably idealistic. And Husserl only strengthens its idealistic tone with his further, clarificatory remark that the “world” is itself immanent to consciousness:
That the being of the world “transcends” consciousness... and that it necessarily remains transcendent, in no wise alters the fact that it is conscious life alone, wherein everything that is transcendent becomes constituted, as something inseparable from consciousness, and which specifically, as world-consciousness, bears within itself inseparably the sense: world – and indeed, “this actually existing” world. (Husserl 1973: 62)
For Husserl, then, “world” is something constituted within transcendental subjectivity. And it is our conception within consciousness of any mind-transcendent reality that is a condition for our actual experience. Whether Husserl found a way to avoid the undesirable idealist implications of this world-concept has been explored elsewhere (Kelly 2003). Here it is relevant only to note that Husserl expressly defines his world-theory as a species of idealism. Phenomenology, he claims, “is eo ipso ‘transcendental idealism,’ though in a fundamentally and essentially new sense.” For, “this is not a produce of sportive argumentations, a prize to be won in the dialectical context with ‘realisms.’ “Instead, it is an investigation of “the constituting intentionality itself,” and “an explication of my ego as subject of every possible cognition, and indeed with respect to every sense of what exists, wherewith the latter might be able to have a sense for me, the ego” (Husserl 1960: 86). In sum, Husserl recasts the “world” as an intentional horizon immanent to consciousness, and then welcomes the suggestion that this represents a kind of idealism. And, finally, he suggests that without this consciousness-immanent “world,” there can be no sensical talk of a mind-transcendent “true being.” Whether Heidegger managed to evade this idealistic theory of the world remains to be seen.
Heidegger and the “Worldhood of the World”
Let us now turn to Heidegger, and to his analysis in Being and Time of the existential category he terms “worldhood of the world” (Heidegger 1962: §§14–24). To properly grasp the importance of this analysis, we should recall that Heidegger’s larger task in the first half of Being and Time is to lay the grounds for the ultimate inquiry, the so-called Seinsfrage, or question of Being. This question is directed at the “sense of Being,” or Sinn des Seins, a terminological choice that signals Heidegger’s continued allegiance to phenomenological technique. Briefly, if reference is the meaning one intends, then sense is one’s way of intending that meaning. To recall Frege’s own example, “the Morning Star” has an identical reference as “the Evening Star,” while their sense is nonetheless distinct (Frege 1970). The investigation of sense rather than reference marks a crucial way-station toward the phenomenologist’s theory of intentionality, since sense is the specific modality by which consciousness intends, or is directed toward, its object (Lafont 2000). The “sense” of Being, then, is that transcendental condition in virtue of which the object of one’s intention is said “to be” at all.
Heidegger’s question of Being is thus an inquiry into the sense of Being that belongs to the intentional horizon. Like Husserl, Heidegger believed the constitutive features of this horizon might be described without recourse to the possibly prejudicial concepts and methods of the philosophical tradition. Phenomenological description is supposed to begin with an analysis of phenomena simply as they “show themselves” to be and as they present themselves in experience. But here Heidegger departs from his teacher Husserl: Whereas Husserl developed a method of phenomenological bracketing, or epoché, so as to isolate the purely transcendental features of intention, Heidegger wished to develop a phenomenology of the “natural attitude.” That is, he wished to explore the intentionality – the route of intention opening upon the world – insofar as this is manifest in the “everydayness” of human existence. In sum, against the quasi-Cartesian project of Husserl’s “transcendental” analysis which sought to investigate the a priori structures of transcendental consciousness, Heidegger proposed an “existential” analysis of human being-in-the-world.
The difference between Husserl and Heidegger as to their point of departure should not be exaggerated, and recent scholarship has shown that in his later lectures Husserl anticipated or came to share many of Heidegger’s own views (Zahavi 2003). Still, it seems clear that Heidegger at least rejects Husserl’s bracketing-technique. Indeed, for Heidegger, the metaphysical-realist commitments of the natural thesis cannot be held in suspension. For, by defining human existence as “being-in-the-world,” Heidegger wishes to grant in advance that the human being’s existence is bound up with the existence of the world. And this has an important consequence that any anti-realist challenge to the independence of the external world would already be a challenge to the reality of the human subject, as I shall explain later on.
Heidegger’s analytic begins with the claim that the human way of being can claim as its core identity nothing else besides its existence. There is no mysterious or transcendental “essence” which lies behind the various expressions of human activity as their unmoved mover or point of origin. We “are” nothing more than our unfolding existence itself. Heidegger terms this unfolding identity “Dasein,” and he then offers a provisional definition of Dasein as “being-in-the-world.” The entirety of division one in Being and Time amounts to a kind of anatomical portrait that serves to deepen our appreciation of the various facets of this essentially holistic structure. It aims to disclose that pre-philosophical yet constitutively necessary “sense of being” that belongs to and serves as the ultimate horizon for our being-in-the-world. The guiding assumption of this interpretation is that Dasein “is” only insofar as it is “ontological.” Human life, in other words, exhibits, in its very way of being, a rudimentary understanding of what it means to be. It is this, Dasein’s ontological understanding, that Heidegger contrives to examine in the existential analytic, and he proposes to do so by breaking it down into each one of its elements. These include: the social quality of “being-with,” the interpretative structures of “understanding” and “being-in” as such, and the so-called “worldhood of the ‘world.’ “
The analysis of worldhood as it is set forth chiefly in the third chapter of Being and Time introduces the distinctively “existential” theme of spatial relation that bears directly on Heidegger’s broader conceptions of world and reality. In what follows, I will first reconstruct some of his basic claims about spatial relation, and then move on to his more general conceptions of worldhood and reality.
Heidegger begins by warding off a possible misunderstanding, that the “world” to be analyzed is that of objective “nature” enjoying ontological independence from Dasein. The world should not be construed as what-is-not-Dasein, since the aim is precisely to examine that “worldhood” which is a constitutive part of Dasein’s own intentional structure. Thus “worldhood” (Weltlichkeit) is itself, in Heidegger’s terminology, an “existentiale,” or existential category (Heidegger 1962: §14).
What does it mean to say that worldhood is an existential? Here the comparison to Kant is helpful, since an “existential” is analogous in some respects to a Kantian category. It is an a priori, constitutive condition for possible experience, although, unlike Kant, it is not a mentalistic condition for possible representations. On the contrary, Heidegger does not wish to prejudice his analysis in favor of cognitivism or representationalism. But he believes this prejudice has become so deeply ingrained in the way we habitually relate to the world that it passes already for the common-sense metaphysics of everyday life. Accordingly, it would be unwise to begin by describing the “entities” (Seiende) within-the-world, since any such description would necessarily presuppose the existential horizon we need to examine. We always risk falling back without notice upon a particular ontological interpretation of these entities as “things,” as objective and extended substances (res extensa) that are somehow “out there” and “beyond” the subjective mind (res cogitans) that wishes to know them. This is an interpretation, Heidegger tells us, that we have inherited from the metaphysical tradition, chiefly from Descartes. Heidegger takes great pains to ward off this interpretation, since he believes it misses the ontological character of “worldliness” that informs Dasein’s own self-understanding as a being whose manner of being is being-in-the-world.
Similarly, Heidegger wants to avoid the misinterpretation that Dasein’s way of “being-in” the world is just like that of extended things. The “being-in” of two substances, say, a ball in a box, is something altogether different from the “being-in” which accompanies Dasein’s ontological understanding. Properly speaking, merely extended things are merely co-present, and “they can never ‘touch’ each other, nor can either of them, ‘be’ alongside the other,” in the special way that touching, or being-alongside, is possible for beings who exist in and through their interpretative relation to the world. Unlike the ball in the box, then, “Being-in... is a state of Dasein’s Being; it is an existentiale. So one cannot think of it as the Being-present-at-hand of some corporeal Thing... ‘in’ an entity which is present-at-hand” (Heidegger 1962: 54). Heidegger’s attempt to reject the philosophical picture of Dasein as a metaphysically independent entity “in” or “alongside” the world has important consequences for his views on the debate between idealists and realists, as I shall explain later.
Heidegger’s own analysis of worldhood takes as its point of departure that sense of one’s practical surroundings that belongs to human ontological understanding: This, he writes, is “that world of... Dasein which is closest to it,” namely, the “environment,” or Umwelt (Heidegger 1962: 66). While Heidegger warns us that the prefix “Um,” or “aroundness” should not be construed in a literally spatial sense, he nonetheless devotes much effort later in the chapter to distinguishing between the spatiality most customarily associated with the Cartesian, physical-scientific understanding of the world as nature and his own understanding of the world as environment.
The analysis of “environmentality” begins, however, not with environmental spatiality but with our practical relation to that environment, which Heidegger – using the same prefix, “Um” – calls our involvements or “dealings” (Umgang). He explains: “The kind of dealing which is closest to us is... not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of ‘knowledge.’” The basic and pre-philosophical interpretation of environmental entities therefore construes them not as “things” independent of us but rather as things-in-use, as “equipment” (Zeug), an interpretation captured in the term “pragmata.” Heidegger’s claim is that the human relation to worldly entities is primarily a relation of skillful “coping” (Dreyfus 1991a). We understand them not as objects of theoretical analysis, but rather only as they first appear within the context of practice, in and through our involvement. To reinforce this idea, Heidegger here introduced his famous distinction between the ready-to-hand (zuhanden) status of entities when understood as equipment, as against the present-at-hand (vorhanden) understanding of entities as they show themselves in perceptual cognition. The ready-to-hand is how entities show themselves in our “everyday” and pre-philosophical experience. It is, moreover, the “primordial” way entities are for us. Entities only show up as present-at-hand conditional upon a the oretical dissociation from our equipmental involvement.
Given the pragmatic relationship to the world as described above, Heidegger suggests that entities are interpreted in advance according to a teleological network, where each facet of the environment enjoys its most basic significance only because it is assigned a purpose in relation to the whole. An environmental entity is thus a “something ‘in-order-to’” (etwas um-zu), and this significance immediately implies its purposive interconnection with the other entities of the world. Indeed, Heidegger points out that this interconnection belongs to the very essence of equipment, since each entity is assigned its place only in reference to something else. Consequently, there is no such thing as “an equipment,” since discrete entities are understood in advance according to a referential totality of assignments. The totality thereby assumes a transcendental function, in that it is a condition for the possibility of understanding any one of its parts. The world as thus encountered is already a “totality of equipment” (Heidegger 1962: 68).
The environment, then, is a holistic structure of concern, in which entities are always practically understood in advance of any discrete or explicit knowledge. To underscore this point, Heidegger coins an additional term of art that captures the mode of understanding which accompanies our environmental relation: As against theoretical “vision,” or Sicht we understand in a mode of implicit sight, or Umsicht. Accordingly, we should not think of “dealings” as explicit “tasks” that we understand theoretically in advance and then go on to complete in practice. As Heidegger explains, most of our dealings “have already dispersed themselves into manifold ways of concern” (Heidegger 1962: 95). A future-oriented intention is built in to human understanding, and this implies that our practical relation to things is best understood, not as an instrumentalist one that aims to fulfill some specified goal, but instead as a kind of implicit investment in how things turn out and how our life-involvements as a whole are going to unfold.
As this exposition may suggest, Heidegger believed that Dasein’s own sense of spatial relatedness in-the-world – “existential spatiality” – is itself conditional upon Dasein’s equipmental context. Existential spatiality, or “Räumlichkeit,” is thus unlike the Cartesian notion of extension or a Newtonian idea of space as a container. The latter make sense only in reference to present-to-hand objects. They do not apply to a being whose primary relation to the world is one of involvement. Heidegger’s point, in other words, is that picking out discrete “concepts” of things and relating them to one another is only possible once things have first been conceived as “present-at-hand,” that is, as matter or “substance” in Cartesian space. But to conceive of entities in this way is to “break” from the equipmental context which constitutes the true ground of human understanding. It follows, however, that we must develop a notion of existential spatiality that is consistent with our involvement, and we must take care to dis-tinguish between Dasein’s spatiality and the “Cartesian” space of present-to-hand things. Spatiality is different from space (Malpas 2000; Dreyfus 1991a: 43).
The spatiality of Dasein is the sense of orientation which emerges out of the equipmental totality of Dasein’s world. The ready-to-hand has its own spatiality insofar as equipment requires placement within the totality of assignments. This sort of placement implies an understanding of something ready-to-hand as being “close” (in der Nähe), but it is not closeness in the sense of measurable distance. It is more a matter of an item’s “belonging-somewhere” (Hingehörigkeit) within the context of involvement itself. And this sense of proper fit is what first lends the context its specific orientation: Everything within the context is thus assigned a certain position, a “there” or “yonder” (“‘Dort’ und ‘Da’ “), and the entire context accordingly appears as a spatial “region” (Gegend). Unlike the three-dimensional, coordinate system of Cartesian space, which possesses neither left nor right, neither up nor down, the spatiality of Dasein’s involvement first lends our world a definite orientation (Heidegger 1962: 103).
The spatiality attending the equipmental context of the ready-to-hand is thus irreducible to Cartesian space. The strength of this contrast is most noticeable when one reflects upon the fact that Cartesian space always places things at a measurable distance, whereas Dasein’s spatiality determines distance in terms of its own context of significance. This is true already, Heidegger suggests, insofar as bodily orientation and directionality attend our involvement in the world. Stated more broadly, our sense of what is near is a function of significance rather than measure: The soles of one’s feet, for example, tend as a rule to vanish into the inconspicuousness of the ready-to-hand, while the person encountered while walking is brought to the fore, even while she may remain at a great measurable distance. To clarify this peculiar feature of Dasein’s existential constitution, Heidegger introduces the term “Entfernung,” or deseverance, to indicate the “undoing-the-far” which accompanies our orientation within the equipmental context (Heidegger 1962: 138–9). It is important to note that such deseverance is not the result of an interpretative action: it is not as if things lying at some measurable distance were brought close as a result of subjective imposition. As Heidegger explains, “de-severance” is an existential, and this means that Dasein’s world is first constituted with this existential-spatial structure: “In Dasein,” he concludes, “there lies an essential tendency towards closeness” (Heidegger 1962: 105).
This observation is important because one might otherwise believe that Dasein’s spatiality were a kind of interpretation overlaid upon a pre-existent given Cartesian space. On the contrary, Heidegger wants to argue that existential spatiality is the precondition for Dasein having a world at all, and the scientific conception of space presupposes existential spatiality. But this raises the question of how Dasein could ever effect what Heidegger terms a “deworlding” of the world.
Deworlding the World
As the above exposition of existential spatiality makes plain, it is characteristic of Heidegger’s overall manner of thinking to posit a sharp break between existential worldhood and natural-scientific observation. Whereas Cartesian space is that of measurable distance, existential spatiality is a horizon that “brings close.” And whereas Cartesian space is a world of pure dimensionality that nonetheless lacks any determinate sense of orientation, existential spatiality “with regard to right and left” is itself based upon the “a priori of Being-in-the-world,” and yet “lacks the pure multiplicity of the three dimensions” (Heidegger 1962: 110). Moreover, existential spatiality is the precondition for our understanding of Cartesian space, since the former is an existential condition for understanding at all. It follows that whatever formalized structures of measurement we may create in our attempt to better negotiate our surroundings, such structures are themselves merely a way of “thematizing” the spatiality of Dasein’s everyday environment. From this, Heidegger derives the noteworthy conclusion that there is no such thing as a “breakthrough” from existential spatiality to space:
As Being-in-the-world, Dasein maintains itself essentially in de-severing. This de-severance – the farness of the ready-to-hand from Dasein itself – is something that Dasein can never cross over. Of course the remoteness of something ready-to-hand from Dasein can show up as a distance from it,... [and] Dasein can subsequently traverse the “between” of this distance, but only in such a way that the distance itself becomes one which has been desevered. So little has Dasein crossed over its de-severance that it has rather taken it along with it and keeps doing so constantly; for Dasein is essentially de-severance. (Heidegger 1962: 142–3)
Heidegger does not deny that it is possible to develop a purely mental representation of formalized, Cartesian space. But he denies that this representation puts one in touch with something more “real” or objective than Dasein’s spatial world. While he does not develop the point at length, the following passage clearly accords with Heidegger’s more general view that existential contexts are constitutively prior to the conceptual schemes of science:
Space... can be studied purely by looking at it, if one gives up what was formerly the only possibility of access to it – circumspective calculation. When space is “intuited formally,” the pure possibilities of spatial relations are discovered. Here one may go through a series of stages in laying bare pure homogenous space, passing from the pure morphology of spatial shapes to analysis situs and finally to the purely metrical science of space. (Heidegger 1962: 147–8)
Here Heidegger reinforces the thought that existential spatiality is prior to, and a condition for, scientific space. But what then can it mean to “give up” an existential condition in one’s passage toward abstractly “metrical” categories? An existential condition, by definition, is constitutive and cannot be abandoned. As Heidegger himself notes earlier on, it is not possible to somehow “cross over” the interpretative horizon by which Dasein brings close the equipment of its world. The order of connection is ostensibly a “series of stages,” a term that seems to indicate a process of advance (Carman 2003: 195–9). But if this remark appears momentarily to assign scientific conceptualization a status of greater sophistication in human understanding, the suggestion is just as quickly withdrawn in dramatic language that implies not progress but loss:
When space is discovered non-circumspectively by just looking at it, the environmental regions get neutralized to pure dimensions. Places – and indeed the whole circumspectively oriented totality of places belonging to equipment ready-to-hand – get reduced to a multiplicity of positions for random Things. The spatiality of what is ready-to-hand within-the-world loses its involvement-character, and so does the ready-to-hand. The world loses its specific aroundness; the environment becomes the world of Nature. The “world,” as a totality of equipment ready-to-hand, becomes spatialized to a context of extended Things which are just present-at-hand and no more. The homogenous space of Nature shows itself only when the entities we encounter are discovered in such a way that it has the character of a specifically Deworlding [Entweltlichung] of the worldliness of the ready-to-hand. (Heidegger 1962: 147)
The importance of this passage should not be underestimated. One of the core issues in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is whether the world-conditions he describes are analogous to Kantian conditions, in the precise sense that one might distinguish between reality “in itself “and the existential world that is projected by human understanding. If this distinction is tenable, Heidegger has left himself open to the charge that the existential world is merely ideal, since, however deep its constitutive role, one might nonetheless appeal, if only counterfactually, to a realm of things present-at-hand, i.e., entities metaphysically independent of Dasein’s world.
The danger of this idealistic reading, however, is considerable, for it conflicts with the fundamental premises of Heidegger’s metaphysical anti-naturalism: According to Heidegger, philosophy since Plato has remained captive to a metaphysics of “presence,” i.e., the notion that the “Being” by virtue of which “there is” intelligible reality can only be understood as occupying some kind of metaphysical precinct beyond that reality, since only then could it serve as its self-sufficient ground. This notion of Being, however, takes its cue from the idea that time is a series of “nows,” such that Being itself would naturally appear as an eternal present. It is this conception which then seems to warrant the rationalist’s view that one can describe what ultimate reality itself is like in some incorrigible and non-interpretive way. Moreover, it is a notion that tends to posit a sharp break between the knower and the known: By disengaging from the world, one can ostensibly achieve a position of complete neutrality and lay bare what Bernard Williams called “the absolute conception of reality” (Williams 1978).
But it is just this aspect of metaphysical realism that Heidegger wants to combat. A basic insight of Heidegger’s thinking is that the urge to identify one and only one “ultimate reality,” even the reality as scientific realists would describe it, is symptomatic of the error he ascribes to the metaphysical tradition. And this error must be vigorously combated on behalf of the “post-metaphysical” insight that Being is itself grounded in time. It follows, however, that philosophers are mistaken if they lay claim to an unmoved and ultimate reality such as “God,” “Reason,” or “Nature.” But such a claim is possible only if there is a “view from nowhere.” And that is precisely the kind of vantage point that Heidegger believes human beings cannot achieve if they are the interpretive beings he claims they are.
Modern natural science thus confronts Heidegger with a serious challenge. If science knows what is “real,” then existential categories would appear to be merely subjective. It is important to realize that Heidegger himself was uncertain as to how best to cope with this difficulty, as his remarks on the “neutralization” of world conditions clearly illustrate: Once the structures of involvement are consigned to the status of human-dependent “interpretation,” the way is open for science to declare as its own domain the world as it is disclosed without interpretation, and so to proclaim that only through scientific “objectivity” can one gain access to what is metaphysically real. Kant himself, of course, believed he had inoculated his own doctrine against this subjectivist reading, with the assertion that not only is transcendental idealism compatible with empirical realism, it in fact underwrites whatever passes for “reality.” Scientific objectivity is, for Kant, correlative with the structures of understanding. For Heidegger, however, this solution is not available: By insisting that scientific reality was itself disclosed to Dasein as the present-at-hand, Heidegger’s transcendental– existential conditions – unlike Kant’s conditions – appear to be merely subjective and, indeed, contingent. By Heidegger’s own logic it seems possible to break free of those conditions so as to encounter the scientist’s field of merely “given” reality.
How does Heidegger address this problem? As I shall explain, Heidegger wants to sustain his commitment to metaphysical realism especially as concerns the entities that are revealed through scientific practice. But he is ambivalent about just how far that realism should carry him. His image of science as a practice for deworlding the world goes too far, I will claim, by conceding that the entities of science are revealed precisely as they are independent of our revealing them.
To clarify this point, let us look further at how Heidegger tries to resolve the debate between realism and idealism. There is much controversy over Heidegger’s position in this debate (as summarized by Hubert Dreyfus in Dreyfus 2001). A strong case has been made for the view that Heidegger was a transcendental idealist (Blattner 1994, 1999). But there are also grounds for calling Heidegger a realist, though one must take care to note which kind of realism is meant (Cerbone 1995; Dreyfus 1991a). I want to argue here that Heidegger tries to propose a conciliatory or “quietist” answer, by dismantling the metaphysical picture that first makes the debate between realism and idealism possible. But, as I will explain, Heidegger’s idea of deworlding the world comes very close to resurrecting that metaphysical picture and returning us to Husserl’s contrast between world and reality.
First, note that most of his remarks on the debate suggest that, like Husserl, Heidegger cleaved to a position one might plausibly call “idealist.” In Being and Time, for example, he writes:
As compared with realism, idealism... has an advantage in principle, [since] [i]f idealism emphasizes that Being and Reality are only “in the consciousness,” this expressed an understanding of the fact that Being cannot be explained through entities... If what the term “idealism” says, amounts to is the understanding that Being can never be explained by entities but is already that which is “transcendental” for every entity, then idealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic. (Heidegger 1962: 251)
In Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger concludes: “The world is not the sum total of extant entities [die Summe des Vorhandenen]. It is, quite generally, not extant at all. It is a determination of being-in-the-world, a moment in the structure of Dasein’s mode of being. The world is, so to speak, Dasein-ish [Daseinmäbiges]” (Heidegger 1982: 166; emphasis added). At first glance it may seem tempting to call this a variety of subjective idealism. Indeed, one might want to charge Heidegger’s conception of the world with the same idealistic tendencies that afflict Husserl’s conception (as it was presented above). But Heidegger is quick to note that the classical opposition between idealism and realism rests upon a falsely metaphysical picture of Dasein as a subject set over and against reality as a set of Cartesian, present-at-hand entities. That distinction should be overcome, Heidegger suggests, because Dasein itself is already “projected outward” though its practical engagement with reality. There is a Wittgensteinian flavor to Heidegger’s idea that we revise the underlying metaphysical description that got us into our philosophical dilemma. But, even we grant Heidegger’s therapeutic solution, the subjective idealist charge still seems to more or less correct, as he admits:
The world is something “subjective,” presupposing that we correspondingly define subjectivity with regard to this phenomenon of world. To say that the world is subjective is to say that it belongs to the Dasein so far as this being is in the mode of being-in-the-world. The world is something which the “subject” “projects outward,” as it were, from within itself. But are we permitted to speak here of an inner and an outer? What can this projection mean? Obviously not that the world is a piece of myself in the sense of some other thing present in me as in a thing and that I throw the world out of this subject-thing in order to catch hold of the other things with it. Instead, the Dasein itself is as such already projected. So far as the Dasein exists a world is cast forth with the Dasein’s being. (Heidegger 1982: 168)
Heidegger claims that the conventional distinction between idealism and realism is misleading, since it posits a “subject-thing” on the one hand and a “world-thing” on the other, and then asks whether the latter depends on the former for its existence. Heidegger grants that the “world” depends on Dasein. But this is only because he has proposed what has recently been dubbed a “quietist” response: i.e., he has revised the metaphysical picture of the human subject in such a way that the debate between realism and idealism is not so much solved as it is simply dissolved (McDowell 1994; Rosen 1994; van Fraassen 1980).
But if the “world” is dependent on Dasein, then what happens to the metaphysical realist commitment that normally goes along with the scientific conception of “nature”? The answer is that Heidegger wants to be an idealist about the existential world, but he also wants to be a realist about the entities scientists find in nature. For example, in the 1925 lectures, History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger grants that “nature” is “encountered ‘in’ the time which we ourselves are.” And this means that our mode of access to “nature” is the existential-horizon of Dasein’s world. But this does not mean that the entities that are found in nature are themselves dependent upon Dasein. As Heidegger notes in Basic Problems : “being within the world does not belong to the being of nature.” In other words, “nature” as such remains what it is independent of its possible disclosure: “Nature can also be when no Dasein exists” (Heidegger 1982; 169–70). Heidegger makes a similarly realist point in his account of truth in Being and Time. He first proposes a distinction, between the “original truth” which is relative to Dasein’s existential world, and the traditional concept of truth as correspondence, which, he claims, is dependent upon original truth. But that means that “scientific truth” is dependent on Dasein, even while the entities that scientific truth describes are themselves metaphysically independent:
“There is” truth only in so far as Dasein is and so long as Dasein is. Entities are uncovered only when Dasein is; and only so long as Dasein is. Newton’s laws [for example]... are true only so long as Dasein is. Before there was any Dasein, there was no truth; nor will there be any after Dasein is no more... Before Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not “true”; it does not follow [however] that they were false, or even that they would become false. To say that before Newton his laws were neither true nor false, cannot signify that before him there were no such entities as have been uncovered and pointed out by those laws. Through Newton the laws became truth; and with them, entities became accessible in themselves to Dasein. Once entities have been uncovered, they show themselves precisely as entities which beforehand already were. (Heidegger 1962: 269)
Heidegger is trying to suggest that, although the Being of scientific objects is contingent upon Dasein’s existential horizon, the entities thus disclosed are themselves robustly realist and, therefore, “already” there prior to Dasein’s disclosure of them. As Hubert Dreyfus has suggested, this means that Heidegger thinks that our scientific practices reveal entities that are independent of those practices (Dreyfus 2001). In this way, Heidegger can insist that while there is no “world” without Dasein, the entities disclosed in science would retain their reality even if the world were lost.
Heidegger, then, is a realist about the entities of science. But there remains a crucial ambiguity in Heidegger’s conception of nature. For even while Heidegger grants the Dasein-independent status of nature, he is uncertain whether our scientific practices for deworlding the world permit our access to something like brute, non-interpretative reality. In History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger writes:
Nature is what is in principle explainable and to be explained because it is in principle unintelligible (unverständlich); it is the unintelligible pure and simple, and it is the unintelligible because it is the deworlded world, if we take nature in this extreme sense of entities as they are uncovered in physics. (Heidegger 1985: 298; Carman 2003: 197)
One may detect an idealistic strain in this passage. Indeed, it seems reminiscent of Husserl’s idea, cited above, that we must dismiss the very notion of an “outside” to the phenomenological world as “nonsense.” Heidegger’s own notion of deworlding the world implies that science confronts the metaphysically real entities of the universe as devoid of meaning: the scientist deworlds Dasein’s world and then seeks to explain the Dasein-independent entities that have been revealed as “unintelligible.” But there is a crucial ambivalence in this image of science. It implies that the scientist has special, non-interpretative practices, i.e., practices of deworlding, that reveal nature to Dasein in just the way it actually is independent of the practices that revealed it. This is more than a commitment to scientific realism. It is also a commitment to the popular image of science as providing “objective” and “clear-eyed” access to the real. But this further claim is obviously inconsistent with Heidegger’s own exposition of Dasein’s interpretive way of being. If Heidegger is right that science deworlds the world and gets to an “unintelligible” nature, this means that Dasein has achieved, via science, a uniquely noninterpretative vantage upon reality. But this obviously conflicts with Heidegger’s basic thesis that Dasein is essentially an interpretative being, i.e., that Dasein “is” only insofar as it casts forth a world. Heidegger’s apparent inconsistency on this point thus seems to require that he dispense with one of his two premises: either he must admit that Dasein does not always cast forth a world (and thereby concede that the world is merely contingent, an interpretative scheme only sometimes imposed upon reality), or, Heidegger must insist that Dasein does in accordance with its very essence cast forth a world, and he must accordingly dispense with his conception of science as a practice for deworlding the world so as to discover a brute, non-interpretative nature.
Phenomenology and the Nature/World Debate
How is Heidegger best rescued from this impasse? A basic dogma of Heidegger’s existential analytic is that Dasein’s interpretive and practical world can break down into meaningless bits of occurrent data which are then available to formalistic observation. And this distinction – between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit – seems to correspond to another sort of contrast, between, on the one hand, the various interpretative activities that we pursue on a daily basis, whether in work or culture, and, on the other hand, the ostensibly non-interpretive activities that fall under the rubric of objective science. For Heidegger, then, culture and nature are ontologically distinct. Whereas science observes world-independent (metaphysically real) entities, our cultural or historical life is concerned with objects whose very Being is world-dependent. Heidegger calls these world-dependent objects “historical”:
There are beings, however, to whose being intraworldliness belongs in a certain way. Such beings are all those we call historical entities – historical in the broader sense of world-historical, all those things that the human being, who is historical and exists historically in the strict and proper sense, creates, shapes, cultivates: all his culture and works. Beings of this kind are only or, more exactly, arise only and come into being only as intraworldly. Culture is not in the way that nature is. (Heidegger 1982: 169)
Furthermore, when Heidegger suggests that scientific truth “depends” on Dasein, he seems nonetheless to think that scientific knowledge has dispensed with the interpretative dimension of Dasein’s world. Recall, for example, Heidegger’s claim that space can be studied “purely by looking at it” (Heidegger 1962: 147). This requires a complete deworlding of the ready-to-hand: “The homogenous space of Nature shows itself only when the entities we encounter are discovered in such a way that it has the character of a specifically deworlding [Entweltlichung] of the worldliness of the ready-to-hand” (Heidegger 1962: 146).
The later Heidegger reinforced this view: In his essay, “Science and Reflection,” for example, he suggests, first, that science is “the theory of the real.” And, he further explains that with the scientific conception of reality, the “subject–object” relation “attains its most extreme dominance,” because “everything real is recast in advance into a diversity of objects for the entrapping securing [nachstellende Sicherstellen]” (Heidegger 1977: 173, 168). I take this to mean that the natural-scientific attitude is not compatible with existential involvement. Heidegger seems to believe instead that only complete breakdown or deworlding of Dasein’s interpretive world is sufficient to yield the scientific image of mathematized and fungible nature. Incidentally, the negative quality of the later Heidegger’s characterization of science is especially evident once we recall that the term “nachstellen” can be used figuratively to mean “to persecute.” The question we must now ask is whether this is in fact an accurate characterization of natural-scientific understanding.
I would like to suggest that Heidegger’s conception of science as deworlding is inaccurate. Specifically, it does not capture the distinctive, world-shaping practices that first enable the scientist to pursue an investigation of nature. Since Thomas Kuhn and post-Kuhnian scholarship in the philosophy and sociology of science, it has been persuasively argued that science too, no less than other human activities, is a mode of practice that requires richly interpretive “worlds” or “paradigms.” For Heidegger, if science confronts a “pure” space of “nature,” it is because it deworlds Dasein’s practical worldliness. For Kuhn and his followers, however, this image of science is a myth: “No more in the natural than in the human sciences,” he writes, “is there some neutral, culture-independent, set of categories within which the population – whether of objects or of actions – can be described” (Kuhn 2000: 220).
According to Kuhn, scientists who explain nature in incommensurable paradigms actually live in “different worlds” (Kuhn 1996: 150). Of course, one might take such remarks as hyperbole. But one can plausibly read his notion of world-constitution as endorsing the phenomenologists’ conception that the world is a subject-dependent context of disclosure. And, as noted above, that theory is compatible with scientific realism about the entities that are so disclosed.
But the early Heidegger did not share a Kuhnian view of science as a world-constitutive activity. Instead, he believed that to view real entities in the scientific manner required deworlding, i.e., it demands that one “give up” one’s world-shaping practices, that they be “neutralized,” “reduced” or, more dramatically, “lost” (Heidegger 1962: 147). But there is no good reason to see science as deworlding and to confine the phenomenological concept of world merely to the objects of history and culture. If the post-Kuhnian view is right, then science, too, is a kind of world-disclosure with its own richly interpretative manner of representing and intervening with its entities. Indeed, a proper description of scientific practice would seem to suggest that our engagement with nature is just as thickly interpretative as our engagement with culture.
We should find it surprising, I think, that Heidegger neglected to include science along with the other world-constitutive practices he analyzed. In fact, this inclusive view of science would be more consistent with Heidegger’s own philosophical finding that Dasein always “casts forth a world.” For if Dasein’s very existence necessarily involves worldhood, then scientific inquiry as one possible mode of Dasein’s existence must presuppose a world. Indeed, what I have called Heidegger’s “quietistic” response to the debate over idealism and realism would seem to suggest that Dasein is never not disengaged from the world: Heidegger evades the debate by claiming that it rests upon an illusory picture of the human subject as a metaphysically real thing standing apart from another, equally real object. Quarrels over dependence or independence only make sense if we hold on to that picture. But Heidegger himself lapsed into that picture when he suggested that natural science takes a “pure” and disengaged stance toward metaphysical reality, while he should have argued that no such stance is possible for an interpretive, thrown being like Dasein.
I am suggesting, then, not that Heidegger was mistaken or too daring in his conception of worldhood, but that he conceived of worldhood in a needlessly restrictive way, and he should have applied that conception more broadly. But, if the phenomenological theory of worldhood should be taken in the inclusive sense, then it would appear that there can be no such thing as a complete “breakdown” of world-hood. The very notion of piercing through our interpretative practices of “giving up” existential worldhood to get to brute reality conflicts with the inclusive thesis that Dasein always projects a world.
Why did Heidegger cleave to this strong distinction between nature and culture? A plausible answer is that his concept of deworlding may reflect anxieties about scientific “mechanism” that were fairly widespread in early twentieth-century German thought (Harrington 1996). Here it may be helpful to compare Heidegger’s idea of “die Entweltlichung der Welt” (deworlding the world) to Max Weber’s nearly contemporaneous notion of “die Entzauberung der Welt” (the disenchantment of the world). In his 1918 speech, “Science as a Vocation,” Weber suggested that the rise of modern rationalism entails a “disenchantment” of the natural environment and a corresponding loss of meaning:
Who – aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences – still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?... If [the] natural sciences lead to anything... they are apt to make the belief that there is such a thing as the “meaning” of the universe die out at its very roots. (Weber 1946: 155)
There is a notable similarity between Heideggerian “deworlding” and Weberian “disenchantment.” For Weber as for Heidegger, the natural sciences are bereft of all significance because the latter has to do with cultural constructs alone. It has nothing to do with the region that is revealed to us when we break out of those constructs and just “look” at the way natural objects “really” are. Weber’s condescending tone suggests that those who still long for meaning in nature are just refusing to abandon their premodern and infantile wishes and are not facing up to the hard truth of dis-enchanted reality. Heidegger’s judgment is more subtle, but perhaps more nostalgic: scientific deworlding for him is “reduction,” and even “loss.” But, as I have tried to suggest, this image of science is inaccurate. As recent contributions to “science studies” have shown, there are good reasons for thinking that, while science deals with nature, it is no less a practice than other practices, all of which, regardless of domain, entail a culture and richly normative criteria of interest and significance. Science studies is a growing and diverse discipline and is frequently divided on the realism question. It sometimes takes a “debunking” view, as if noting the interpretive conditions for scientific discovery were sufficient to refute metaphysical realism. Needless to say, the antirealist conclusion about the metaphysical existence of entities hardly follows from descriptions of their context of discovery. But the important lesson to take from such studies is that science cannot provide deworlded access to entities in themselves (Papineau 1988; Pettit 1988). If these studies are right, then science is far from requiring the kind of breakdown in contexts of significance that both Weber and Heidegger associated with scientific modernity.
Of course, this image of science as a “culture” may not capture the self-image that actually governs natural-scientific practice. Some scientists may think that the scientific “world” cuts nature at its joints, i.e., they conceive of scientific practice as non -interpretive, as providing a clear window upon metaphysical reality. But this has little bearing on the philosophical question of whether scientific practice in fact pre-supposes an interpretive world. Indeed, from a Heideggerian view, we might say that the image of deworlding is just part of the self-interpretation that accompanies scientific activity. What is puzzling is that the early Heidegger should have mistaken that self-interpretation for a correct description of scientific practice. The later Heidegger seems more on target: “Scientific representation is never able to encompass the coming to presence of nature; for the objectness of nature is, antecedently, only one way in which nature exhibits itself. Nature thus remains for the science of physics that which cannot be gotten around” (Heidegger 1977: 174). For the later Heidegger, all worlds are sustained by interpretations that cannot be dispensed with (or “gotten around”). And the scientific world is sustained by the interpretation that reality just is, and is nothing other than, nature.
As Hubert Dreyfus has argued, Heidegger might be called a “plural realist” insofar as he claimed that all entities are disclosed only on the basis of a world (Dreyfus 1991a). But we also need to explain why Heidegger seems often to prioritize different types of worlds. Especially in his later writings, he seemed to believe that the “world worlds” (Welt weltet) more fully in works of art than in science: “The work,” he tells us, “holds open the Open of the world” (Heidegger 1971: 44–6). In other words, a work of art permits us to experience the simultaneous concealing and revealing that makes the world the site of disclosure. In “setting up a world and setting forth the earth,” a work of art thereby reveals the very difference between a world and the reality it discloses. But then, what really distinguishes the world as revealed by science from the world as revealed by art? The difference is not that science alone deworlds the world and opens upon the field of meaningless entities, whereas art opens up a realm of significance. Both are practices that disclose worlds. Science and art are different only because the scientific world does not let its own worldhood come into clear view, and it can thus take itself to be a non-interpretative encounter with reality.
Some historians of philosophy have observed that the “analytic” tradition took shape at the beginning of the twentieth century with an inflationary and ultimately unhelpful devotion to natural-scientific models. But one might also note that the “continental” tradition has frequently betrayed the correlative, de flationary view of natural science. And this, too, has spawned its own share of invidious philosophical debate, concerning, e.g., the differences between the Naturwissenschaften and the Kulturwissenschaften, the relative merits of scientific reductionism as against cultural constructivism, and so forth. I have tried to suggest that that there are good reasons to overcome Heidegger’s restricted thesis that nature lies somehow “outside” the world, and I have argued, instead, that the phenomenological concept of world deserves the broadest possible application, in the natural sciences as well as in cultural life. The naïve discussion as to whether something is either “nature” or “culture,” for example, appears to be partially dissolved once we recognize that we cannot, in Heidegger’s words, “cross over” our own existential world. The investigation of nature is itself, therefore, a cultural activity, deeply imbricated with meaning and interest. But this claim should not be understood as a strike against the authority of science. It is, rather, a mark of its humanity.
Note
This chapter is dedicated to my father, Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry at the University of Washington (Seattle), on his 75th birthday, February, 2005.
References and Further Reading
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Carman, T. (2003) Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in Being and Time. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cerbone, D. R. (1995) World, world-entry, and realism in early Heidegger. Inquiry, 38, 401–21.
Dreyfus, H. (1991a) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
—— (1991b) Heidegger’s hermeneutic realism. In D. Hiley, J. F. Bohman, and R. Shusterman (eds.), The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (pp. 25–41). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Dreyfus, H. (2001) How Heidegger defends the possibility of a correspondence theory of truth with respect to the entities of natural science. In T. R. Schatzki, K. Knorr Cetina, and E. von Savigny (eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (pp. 151–62). London: Routledge.
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—— (1971) The origin of the work of art (trans. A. Hofstadter). In A. Hofstadter (ed.), Poetry, Language, Thought (pp. 15–86). New York: Harper & Row (original work published 1935–6).
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