This book has been concerned with the reception of Heidegger's philosophical position in France, particularly in the postwar period when he became the master thinker of French philosophy. In modern times, a number of important positions have influenced, even strongly influenced, the course of philosophical debate, sometimes even for decades, but rarely more than that. Examples include the theories of C. S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey in American philosophy, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein in analytic philosophy, Georg Lukács in Marxism, and Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in phenomenology. Yet in modern philosophy there are only four unusually influential philosophical theories that have continued to shape the debate not only over decades but throughout this entire period: those of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Hume.
Different thinkers exert their influence differently. For an exceedingly brief moment, Karl Leonhard Reinhold dominated the post-Kantian debate before rapidly receding, well within his lifetime, into obscurity. Peirce attracted the attention of James but few others during his lifetime although since his death his reputation has continued to grow. Nietzsche's philosophical reputation has been acquired almost entirely since his passing. Heidegger's theory that attained almost mythical dimensions during his lifetime has become even more important since his recent death. It is too early to determine if, like the views of others, say Fichte and Bergson, the influence of his theory will like a supernova shine intensely, even incandescently but relatively briefly only, to be nearly extinguished after a short moment, or whether, like the single star he claimed to follow in his lifelong concern with being, his thought will remain fixed in the philosophical firmament, to serve as a beacon for others as long as the philosophical discussion continues. It is too early, then, to know whether Koyré was correct in contending that Heidegger's theory is not only an important new step in the discussion but rather marks the inception of a new phase of the discussion.
An understanding of the way that any philosophical theory, including Heidegger', is taken up in the philosophical tradition presupposes an understanding of the concept “philosophical tradition.” It might seem that the writings in that tradition and the tradition itself are fixed, or stable entities, since they are in a sense always and necessarily already there as a necessary precondition for later discussion. In order to discuss the critical philosophy, there must already be a series of texts in which this theory is stated. And the Kantian tradition in philosophy presupposes the Kantian theory.
Both the writings that compose the philosophical tradition and the philosophical tradition itself are variables. Texts change, for instance when a particular text is accepted as genuine or rejected as spurious, or when better, philologically more adequate, even critical editions appear that in turn may influence the understanding of philosophical theories.
Our understanding of Heidegger's position may well change as the texts change. A complete edition of Heidegger's writings is now in progress that, since it is not being edited according to the current views of what is a critical edition, will need later to be redone. In this edition passages omitted from texts already published, including politically sensitive remarks, have been restored. An unexpected change has occurred with respect to Heidegger's second doctoral thesis, or Habilitationsschrift,concerning the text “De modis significandi” that was earlier attributed to Duns Scotus. Heidegger's text is called “Die Kategorien - and Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus.” Today we know that the author of the text on which Heidegger comments was not Duns Scotus but Thomas of Erfurt.1
Such changes indicate that the past to which the writings belong and the writings themselves are not congealed, frozen as it were. If the very content of the philosophical tradition is never fixed but always mutable, then it takes on a strangely amorphous quality, as an admittedly extreme example will show. Reference to “The Question Concerning Technology” needs to specify which form of this text is intended: the censored, published version where Heidegger simply states that “Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry : ” 2 or the still unpublished, uncensored version, in which these five words begin a longer, arguably scandalous passage, already quoted above. For a text analyzing modern technology from the perspective of being is not the same as one that, in the course of such an analysis, simply equates agriculture and extermination camps.
Our understanding of this text obviously changes when the censored passage is restored. A text offering an apparently innocuous, not particularly interesting observation about contemporary agriculture as motorized, or better mechanized, is neither insightful nor controversial. It might be taken as an indication that Heidegger has nothing much to say about agriculture from his perspective. A very different text that adds the comparison of mechanized agriculture to extermination camps is arguably also not insightful; but it is apparently so controversial that, although this incriminating passage has been in the public domain for nearly a decade, the original manuscript of the lecture has never been published and is still not available to scholars. The latter version of this passage raises issues about Heidegger's scandalous insensitivity to extraordinary human suffering and the Holocaust in general; and it raises further questions about his capacity, through his analysis of being, to comment intelligently on the tragic events of the century and, by extension, on modernity.
Even more obviously than the texts themselves, their understanding is a historical variable that is always subject to further modification. As our understanding of philosophical theories changes, our short list of the few significant philosophical texts composing the philosophical canon, so to speak, also changes. As we approach the end of this century, there has never been less agreement on the main thinkers or the most influential works of this period or about the wider philosophical tradition.
It has been said that the three most important philosophical works of this century are Heidegger's Being and Time , Wittgenstein's Tractatus , and Lukâcs's History and Class Consciousness.3 Yet Husserl scholars might prefer to include Husserl's Logical Investigations or Ideas 1 , or Cartesian Meditations,or even the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Wittgenstein scholars, who are often critical of his early writing, prefer his later thought. Lukâcs's thought, which was controversial even within Marxism, is now likely to attract less attention after the collapse of official Marxism. Since Ryle's early review of Being and Time,4 Heidegger has long been regarded within Anglo-American analytic philosophy as an unusually obscure German thinker, for Carnap the author of a classic illustration of the meaningless use of language.5 Yet philosophical modes change. Analytic thinkers (e.g. Hubert Dreyfus , John Hoageland , Mark Okrent , Robert Brandom, and others) are now turning to Heidegger in increasing numbers.
Not only the content but even the idea of the philosophical tradition is a historical variable. This idea, as now understood, is relatively recent, and seems to have been invented by Hegel. He was apparently the first writer to regard the history of philosophy as a sort of Platonic dialogue extending through time, in which later thinkers build, or attempt to improve, on earlier theories. Hegel-maintains that philosophy has always been concerned with the problem of knowledge. He seeks to avoid the appearance of favoring a particular perspective by favoring them all. He implies that his own view of the philosophical tradition is without perspective, or aperspectival. Although Hegel claimed to take an aperspectival attitude towards prior thought in order to take up into his own anything of value, in practice he could only appropriate ideas compatible with his own.6 He typically omits from consideration the views of the later Fichte7 and the later Schelling.8
Hegel's underlying assumption of a single philosophical tradition concerned with the problem of knowledge is insightful, interesting, but finally mistaken. Although we can read the prior philosophical tradition through the problem of knowledge, other perspectives are possible. There are numerous theories in the history of philosophy, such as Heidegger's analysis of being, that are not primarily, on occasion not even remotely, assimilable to a theory of knowledge. Further, different views of knowledge lead to vastly different readings of the history of philosophy, and point toward vastly different ideas of the philosophical tradition.
Hegel's assumption of a single philosophical tradition is apparently shared by Heidegger. His proposed destruction of the history of ontology is meant to free up the original insights concerning being to which he means to return. This proposed return to the beginning of the philosophical tradition seems to presuppose a spatial understanding of the history of philosophy. Now it is only possible to return to early Greek thought if it is possible to go back behind the philosophical tradition as one can later return down a path one has traveled in order to take another turning in the forest. Yet it is simply mistaken to suppose that one can, from a later vantage point, strip away the veil constituted by some two and half millenia of discussion to grasp the original insights in their pristine form; even the urge to do so follows from a perspective based on the experience of the later discussion. Moreover, the underlying, rationalist assumption about the nature of the philosophical tradition as akin to a single path is mistaken; for it is more like a series of paths that cross at irregular intervals and angles.
The reception of important philosophical theories — roughly the way that they enter into the philosophical discussion in order to become part of the philosophical tradition — is rarely if ever based on anything as simple as correct interpretation or even on strictly philosophical criteria. If Heidegger's theory is typical, the reception of an important position invites, perhaps even presupposes, and probably cannot avoid a certain misunderstanding.
There is a distinction to be drawn between the texts that compose the philosophical tradition, the process of the reception of theories as they are taken up in the philosophical discussion, and their reading and rereading over a'period of time in the complex debate that constitutes philosophy. Wittgenstein's lectures that led his students in effect to debate his unwritten doctrines represent a special case. Philosophical theories are mainly described in print prior to and as a condition of their being taken up into the wider philosophical debate. This process obviously requires interpretation and, if the texts are deemed sufficiently important, successive reinterpretations over a period of time.
If a correct reading is possible at all, then it is most likely to occur for those rather ordinary positions that merely add an idea or two but otherwise leave “everything in place.” Yet it more difficult to understand the idea of a correct reading for a more novel position that creates a fundamental change in the debate. It is still more difficult to comprehend what a so-called “ correct” interpretation would be for the unusual case of a theory that departs radically from the ongoing discussion by innovating in some deep manner and, for that reason, requires for its understanding a process of reception in which new ideas are assimilated and often even new vocabulary to express them is developed.
Moreover, even for the most banal philosophical writings, the very idea of a single, univocally-correct reading, like that of the philosophical tradition, dissolves under scrutiny. We can sometimes exclude proposed interpretations as insufficiently supported by, even as incompatible with, the texts as we know them. Yet there is usually a range of possible readings that, insofar as they find what can vaguely be called “adequate” support in the texts, are admissible, and, hence, can be said to be correctDifferent interpretations of the same theory or text obviously highlight different aspects and reflect different viewpoints, different evaluations, and so on.
In general important philosophical texts are notoriously difficult to interpret, arguably impossible to read in a single correct fashion. Typically, there is not and clearly could not be a single, univocally-correct reading either of Plato's theory or of Plato's Republic. The history of Plato scholarship consists in a series of readings of his thought from different angles of vision. There is probably no example of an important philosophical position or philosophical text for which a univocally correct reading can be specified. The very idea of the correct reading of an important philosophical theory or philosophical text is questionable. Rather than the “conservative” view of text reading like a problem in mathematics for which there is a “right” answer that excludes all others, there seems to be no alternative to espousing a more liberal view of interpretation according to which, like child rearing or politics, there is more than one, even many correct possibilities.
Even the most original thinker cannot simply begin again at the beginning. At most one can provide a departure from the prior discussion. It follows that even the most novel philosophical position must be read against the background of the philosophical tradition. Since one can only reinvent a new way of continuing the ongoing debate, new philosophical ideas necessarily arise in reaction to, and represent a departure from, prior debate. Descartes, Kant and Husserl, three of the most radical philosophical thinkers of modern times, share a basic dissatisfaction with the entire preceding philosophical tradition. Although each is a highly original thinker, each finally offers new ways to reinvent, but not to invent, philosophy.
Now it is not the unimportant but the important philosophical positions that structure the philosophical discussion and, for that reason, the philosophical tradition. Since important positions by definition innovate with respect to the debate, they are difficult to interpret and routinely misconstrued. If this is the case, it follows that at least initially the philosophical tradition is mainly based on substantive misunderstandings or misreadings.
This idea clearly runs against the grain of the traditional view of philosophy, widely propagated by philosophers themselves, hardly a disinterested party. Ever since Plato, philosophers have argued that philosophy is not only the unique source of absolute truth and knowledge, but a strictly rational enterprise, in fact the only example of reason itself. The view of philosophy as intrinsically rational, as the main form of rationality, runs throughout the entire modern philosophical tradition. It is formulated in the Cartesian view of ahistorical reason, and later dominates the Enlightenment period. It reaches its highpoint in the Kantian theory of pure reason, a wholly theoretical analysis carried out in utter abstraction from all practical concerns, in a form of reason unsullied by any admixture that Kant held to be intrinsically practical.
Perhaps the most persuasive argument for philosophy's rational self-image lies in its fascination with science going back into the Greek tradition. If science, particularly mathematics, is the embodiment of reason, and if philosophy is science in a sense deeper, say, than the particular sciences, then philosophy is the embodiment of reason. The conviction that philosophy is not only scientific or rigorous but actually is science is everywhere in modern thought. It extends from Kant's idea of philosophy as systematic science, and Hegel's conception of phenomenology as the science of the experience of consciousness, to Husserl's notion of philosophy as rigorous science and to Heidegger's early view of philosophy as the science of being.
Husserl and the early Heidegger are exceptions. For there is now widespread agreement that although philosophy must be rigorous, it cannot be science. Since the traditional view of philosophy as pure reason can no longer be defended through any version of the claim that philosophy is more than rigorous, the precarious distinction between philosophy and a Weltanschauung ,or worldview, takes on an added importance.
Kant understood philosophy as a worldview, or conceptus cosmicus (Weltbegriff), intrinsically relevant to the ends of human being.9 Yet Schelling is already close to the modern idea of worldview in his distinction between intelligence as either consciously or unconsciously productive, as in a worldview.10 More recently, the notion of a worldview is the theme of a dispute-between Jaspers, Dilthey, Husserl, and Heidegger. Jaspers identifies a world view as composed of subjective ideas about life experience, and so on, as well as objective ideas about the shape of the world.11 On one interpretation, Dilthey seems to identify philosophy with a worldview, for instance when he evokes “the task of coming to terms with the incessant need for ultimate reflection on being, ground, value, purpose, and their inter connection in a Weltanschauung.”12This idea is strongly opposed by Husserl and, following him, Heidegger. In response to Dilthey, Husserl maintains that as the source of truth philosophy is incompatible with either a worldview or naturalism.13 His view is echoed in Heidegger's insistance that philosophy is not the construction of a worldview, but at most the basis of one.14
Apparently following Jaspers, Heidegger understands a worldview as a matter of coherent conviction that arises for a particular individual, as distinguished from universal science independent of any historical person.15 He correctly points out that if the task of philosophy is to construct a worldview, then there is no distinction between them.16 Yet the French reception of Heidegger's theory indicates that philosophy is not independent of the sociohistorical context. Although the evolution and reception of Heidegger's position cannot be reduced to the context in which it emerged, neither can it be understood in isolation from this context.
Through his concept of Dasein as existence, Heidegger insists on the contextuality of all thought, including his own. Yet there is a pronounced tendency in the Heidegger literature to ignore the background against which his theory emerged and evolved, in part to maintain the fictitious, but useful distinction between Heidegger the great philosopher and Heidegger the ordinary Nazi.17 Like other philosophical theories, Heidegger's cannot be understood without reference to others that influence it or to which he desired to respond, or to the background in which it emerged. We cannot grasp his initial position without reference to the period of the Weimar Republic in which it was formulated; and it is even more difficult to grasp the later evolution of his thought without an awareness of his own existential situation at the end of the Second World War, his steady commitment to his own private form of Nazism, and so on.
Philosophers like to regard the philosophical discussion as responding merely to philosophical imperatives, to other philosophical ideas only. Yet like everyone else philosophers are children of their times, to which they respond in their own abstract ways. The distinction between philosophy and Weltanschauung is not absolute, for it is not possible to separate cleanly or finally between views held to be true and the existential conditions in which they are formulated. The formulation, evolution, and French reception of Heidegger's theory amply contradict his restatement of the traditional, theoretically-desirable, but practically-indefensible view of philosophy as utterly distinct from a worldview. Although philosophy likes to regard itself as the product of a wholly free, entirely rational activity, it is rooted at every remove in social existence.
It does not follow, because it is usually, perhaps always impossible to provide a single correct reading of important philosophical theories, that they cannot be read in correctly. In fact, this is a frequent occurrence. Early on, Heidegger's view of the subject was read in correctly in the French debate. The French reception of Heidegger's theory illustrates how difficult it is to comprehend a novel philosophical position in a more than fragmentary manner. The initial French appropriation of Heidegger's thought through a reading of fundamental ontology as philosophical anthropology ran counter to his own reading of his position and the position itself. It is clear that although an anthropological interpretation of fundamental ontology has textual support, it is simply inadequate. In terms of the Kantian distinction between the spirit and the letter of a theory, although arguably faithful to the letter of the theory, an anthropological reading of fundamental ontology is simply not faithful to its spirit.
The early misreading of Heidegger's theory as philosophical anthropology, hence as anthropological humanism, contradicts his consistently antianthropological stance. Yet it correctly identifies the anthropological component of the theory of subjectivity as existence that Heidegger presents under the heading of Dasein. It follows that the initial French misreading of Heidegger's position points to the basic incoherence of his conception of the subject.
Heidegger was never interested in human being for its own sake. If we take Heidegger at his word, his entire position is dominated through his single-minded, some would say obsessive, concern with being. Even when he seems to be most interested in human beings, as in his occasional suggestion that Nazism will bring about an authentic gathering of the German people, arguably the central theme of the rectorial address, his main interest is being. His lengthy analysis of Dasein in Being and Time is not meant to elucidate human being; it is rather meant to elucidate human being understood through being as the vital clue to an understanding of being.
Since Heidegger's initial view of human being reaches a crisis as early as §10 of Being and Time,this paragraph merits detailed discussion. Here the anthropological misreading current in the early French reception of his thought appears as one aspect of an obviously dualistic conception of human being. The French reaction to the translation of “Dasein” as “réalité humaine,” apparently a simple misrendering of a key term in his position, is hardly that. Derrida's pointed objection to this translation as “monstrous” is not just an excited Gallic reaction, although it is that as well. But above and beyond that, it signals the inadvertent identification of a fundamental inadequacy in Heidegger's position that is not overcome in its later evolution.
In Being and Time , in his analysis of Dasein, or Daseinsanalytik , Heidegger exploits his claim that all people have a nonspecific, unanalyzed conception of being as his clue to disclose being in general. “Dasein” designates human being as well as what it is about human being that is concerned with being. Heidegger's problem is to offer a theory of the subject adequate to his concern with being that avoids the problems he discerns in other views of subjectivity. In § 10, in a discussion of the distinction between his own analysis of Dasein and the sciences based on a conception of human being, Heidegger argues for a difference in kind between his view of the subject and rival theories based either on philosophical anthropology or the Cartesian view.
A key to understanding Heidegger's position at this point is to realize that he is closely following as well as criticizing Husserl's general approach as he understands it. In remarks here on contemporary thinkers concerned with human being, he notes the agreement between Scheler and Husserl, and further notes Husserl's critique of Dilthey. For Heidegger, Husserl's basic view of personality ( Personalität ) is apparent in his famous Logos article, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” and carried further in Ideas, I. Heidegger contends that Husserl correctly saw that a person is not an entity but a unity. He insists on the further elaboration of the Husserlian approach, or the “a priorism” that is “the method of all scientific philosophy” that must now be applied to the analysis of the everyday (Alltäglichkeit).18
Since Heidegger explicitly accepts the Husserlian a priori approach, he cannot simultaneously accept a merely empirical approach, for instance the empirical approach of philosophical anthropology starting from a proximally given subject. Husserl draws a distinction between empirical psychology and transcendental phenomenology. Similarly, Heidegger differentiates between concrete anthropology, the thematically complete ontology of Dasein,19 other views that he rejects, and what he calls an existentially a priori anthropology.20
Heidegger's claim that the sciences presuppose an unanalyzed conception of subjectivity applies the Husserlian idea that the sciences lack a reflexive dimension provided only in philosophy.21 His objection that the Cartesian theory fails to examine the “sum” is directed against the idea of a transcendental subject in abstraction from experience as well as its restatement in the views of Kant and Husserl. Against Descartes and those influenced by him, Heidegger maintains that since Dasein literally is existence, it is only on this basis that we can examine the theme of being. Yet he refuses any view of the subject as proximally given, as still presupposing the unexamined conception of the subjectum,or hypokeimenon . For Heidegger, Scheler and Dilthey understand that the subject is not an entity. And he notes that the problem of human being is covered up by philosophical anthropology, such as the ancient Greek or later Christian views of man.
If this is an accurate summary of Heidegger's view, then four points follow. To begin with, it is obvious that its early French readers construed it anthropologically, as philosophical anthropology, since this is the obvious reading. Philosophical anthropology has attracted many philosophers, including Max Scheler , the author of an important work from an anthropological perspective, Man's Place in Nature.22 “Philosophical anthropology” has been understood as “an attempt to construct a scientific discipline out of man's traditional effort to understand and liberate himself.”23
In §10 of Being and Time , an anthropological reading of Heidegger' position is suggested by such factors as the distinction between theoretical and practical approaches to the subject, the concept of Dasein as human being, the interpretation of Dasein as existence, and so on. This reading amounts to construing his conception of subjectivity as a form of anthropology, or philosophical anthropology, albeit of a new kind, one that raises the question of being.
Heidegger's analysis of Dasein with respect to its average everydayness sounds suspiciously like philosophical anthropology.24 Heidegger specifically invites precisely an anthropological reading, more precisely an anthropological misreading of his view, through his remarks on what he refers to as traditional anthropology rather than on anthropology. In § 10, in rapid succession he objects no less than three times to traditional anthropology but significantly never to anthropology as such. To begin with, he objects to the understanding of human being through traditional anthropology in the ancient world and in Christian theology.25 Then he objects to traditional anthropology that forgets the question of being.26 Finally, he objects, in an apparent conflation between traditional anthropology and the Cartesian view — he later develops this point in his claim that the Cartesian conception of the cogito leads to modern anthropology — to the failure to reflect on the ontological foundations of anthropology.27
If Heidegger meant to protect his theory against an anthropological reading, then he did not do nearly enough to rule out that possibility. The fact that in § 10 he objects to traditional anthropology but not to anthropology as such leaves the door open to an anthropological reading of his own view that could fairly be read as a nontraditional form of anthropology.
In later passages scattered throughout Being and Time , Heidegger only complicates the effort to insulate his view against an obvious reading as philosophical anthropology. His remark that a complete ontology of Dasein is needed for a philosophical anthropology suggests that in that respect his own effort is at best partia1 . 28 In a passage already identified he notes that although his aim is the study of being, what he has so far done could be extended as an existential a priori philosophical anthropology.29 In later stating his desire to go beyond an existential a priori anthropology, he implies that this is the result so far of his analysis of Dasein.30 A comment that the analysis of Dasein is not aimed at laying the ontological basis for anthropology does not rule out the compatibility between his analysis and that task.31 This impression is only strengthened in the remark that we need to pass over anthropological, psychological and theological theories of conscience based on the concept of Dasein.32
An anthropological misreading of his position is further fostered by other factors as well. It is directly suggested in the next chapter of his book, comprising §§13–14 , that is entirely devoted to “Being-in-the-world in general as the basic state of Dasein.” This anti-Cartesian, even antiHusserlian view implies a conception of human being as in the world, not as transcendent to it. Yet in virtue of his acceptance of the Husserlian phenomenological view as basically correct, Heidegger is committed to a conception of the phenomenological subject as transcendent with respect to the world.
An anthropological interpretation of Heidegger's theory is indirectly suggested within § 10 by the remark on Descartes developed later in the book in a detailed critique of the Cartesian theory. The objection that Descartes fails to consider the nature of the “sum” of the cogito is misconstrued as a refusal to conceive the subject as a strictly theoretical entity. For Heidegger does not refuse but in fact welcomes a strictly theoretical approach to subjectivity. He only refuses to accept a view of subjectivity, theoretical or otherwise, in which its being is unexamined.
An anthropological interpretation of Heidegger's theory is again suggested from a Cartesian angle of vision, familiar to Heidegger's French readers. For a Cartesian, there are only two possible approaches to subjectivity: as either theoretical or practical, passive or active, as a spectator or as an actor. Heidegger's refusal of the Cartesian conception of the subject as a strictly theoretical entity, in Cartesian terms the spectator view of subjectivity, appears to commit him a view of the subject as an actor, as basically practical.
Second, this obvious, anthropological reading of Heidegger's theory is just as obviously mistaken. For it conflates Heidegger's opposition to an unexamined conception of subjectivity that fails to examine the being of the subject with an opposition, erroneously ascribed to Heidegger, to a theoretical conception of subjectivity. Heidegger specifically suggests the need to develop an analysis of what he calls the being of the whole man.33 His own view suggests the need to combine practical and theoretical elements in a more general theory of human being. Understood as existence, human being is the topic of philosophical anthropology; understood in relation to the analysis of being, human being is the topic of a transcendental phenomenological analysis of being. But there is no way to combine these two perspectives within a single conception of subjectivity.
In retrospect , an anthropological reading of Heidegger's theory exaggerates the disagreement between Heidegger and Husserl. The key problem is the theme of psychologism running throughout the first volume of Husserl's Logical Investigations. We recall Husserl's concern to avoid psychologism , or roughly the confusion between the philosophical and the psychological dimensions of experience, and Heidegger's contention that Husserl fell back into psychologism.
To accept a view of the subject or subjectivity as merely human being in an anthropological sense is to be guilty of psychologism. Husserl thought that psychologism and phenomenology were incompatible. Heidegger agrees with Husserl on this point. It follows that to allow psychologism, to propose an anthropological view of subjectivity, is tantamount to suppressing the very possibility of phenomenology. For this would amount to suppressing the phenomenological analysis of the everyday world in the extended Husserlian sense that Heidegger still accepts, and that, he maintains, is required to understand being.
Third, it follows that Heidegger's view of subjectivity is radically inconsistent since he thinks Dasein as both immanent, hence as existent, and as transcendent. From the latter angle of vision, Dasein is able to do all the usual work of the transcendental subject, such as performing an analysis of Dasein, including an analysis of average everydayness, in short to disclose being that is transcendent through phenomenological knowledge.
Yet it is inconsistent to interpret Dasein as existence and as the subject of phenomenological truth, or veritas transcendentalis. Heidegger fails to unify human being as immanent and transcendent, a posteriori and a priori, practical and theoretical. For he fails to show that a being essentially defined as existence is capable of phenomenological truth. Husserl introduces the idea of phenomenological reduction in order to explain how it is possible to reach phenomenological truth, to go to the things themselves. Heidegger retains this Husserlian goal for which he substitutes the analysis of being. Yet Heidegger fails to address the central methodological point, roughly how it is possible to elicit phenomenological truth.
Fourth, it is just as obvious that Heidegger needs to deemphasize the immanent side of his concept of the subject in order to protect his phenomenological approach to the theory of being. For a claim to provide anything like a phenomenological disclosure of truth requires a view of the subject as transcendent. Husserl sees the minimum requirement for phenomenological truth as the ascent to the transcendental plane through the phenomenological reduction. In this way, Heidegger renews with a traditional view stretching from Plato over Descartes, Kant and many others to Husserl.
From Heidegger's distantly Husserlian perspective at this point, phenomenological truth rests on a double condition: an authentic reworking of the problem of being in the ancient Greek formulation that is scarcely accessible to the ordinary person; and a concept of the subject that discloses the a priori that, following Husserl, he regards as the meaning of the authentically philosophical “empirical” (Empirie). In other words, for Heidegger as for Husserl phenomenology, in Heidegger's case the phenomenological approach to being, requires a transcendental subject.
As his position evolves, Heidegger rethinks his conception of subjectivity in a way that brings it into line with the requirements of his own approach to being while eliminating any anthropological residue through the celebrated decentering of the subject. Yet this revision of his original theory in order to alleviate a basic problem merely creates another fundamental problem. In suggesting that the subject is passive in respect to being as active, Heidegger does not so much break with his early thought as refine or “purify” it by further refining one of its strands. In Being and Time,he already understands “phenomenology” as concerned with “that which shows itself.”34
Heidegger's later decentering of the subject protects his phenomenological analysis of being only at the enormous cost of an evident and total collapse of his view of subjectivity. If the subject is merely transcendent but not imminent, then there is a unified view of subjectivity as that to which being is or can be disclosed. Yet if the precondition of the analysis of being is a unified view of a person, or a unified view of the whole man, in his decentering of the subject Heidegger has tacitly acknowledged his failure to grasp human subjectivity. If nowhere else, in Heidegger's later thought, in the decentering of the subject, in the turn away from the existential dimension of human being, Heidegger in effect bases his later theory of being on the death of man.
It is clear that Heidegger is not a humanist, and his theory is not humanism in a traditional, anthropological sense. The early French reading of his theory as anthropological humanism — ingredient in Kojève's reading of Hegel's theory, influenced by the views of Heidegger and Marx, and taken up by Sartre — as philosophical anthropology, is a clear misreading. It remains to be seen whether Heidegger is, as he claims to be, a humanist in some other, say, postmetaphysical sense, whether his theory can fairly be called humanism, or whether, as some have said, it is antihumanism. I will argue that Heidegger's remarks on humanism are inconsistent and that his description of his theory as humanism is incompatible with the very idea of humanism.
In the French context, at least three factors suggest that Heidegger's theory is humanist: the initial French philosophical turning toward fundamental ontology, Heidegger's early thought, understood as a philosophical anthropology, or anthropological humanism; Heidegger's “Letter on Humanism, ” where he distinguished between traditional, metaphysical forms of humanism, such as Sartre', and his own humanism, in which human being is understood through being; and the recent effort by some of his followers, such as Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe, to defend his later thought by simply conceding that his early thought was a form of metaphysical humanism.
To understand Heidegger's view of humanism, we will need to sketch its development in his writings. Humanism is not discussed in Being and Time. To the best of my knowledge, this term does not occur in the book. The two main texts where Heidegger discusses this theme are his well known lecture, “The Age of the World Picture” and the “Letter on Humanism.” In “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger criticizes humanism that he links with anthropology as a mere worldview (Weltanschauung) . Heidegger here rejects both anthropology as well as the idea of a worldview to which he links humanism.
In “The Age of the World Picture, ”"Heidegger's objection to humanism is consistent with his objections to traditional anthropology in Being and Time. The result is to clarify the ambiguity in his discussion of Dasein in his initial book, where Heidegger left open the question of its anthropological status. Heidegger now insists on the nonanthropological status of a concept of the subject, taking Greek thought as his model. Forgetting the obvious humanist implications of Socratic questioning, he inconsistently maintains that humanism could never have gained ascendancy in Greek thought. Humanism has an essential connection with philosophical anthropology as revealed by the understanding of man and the world through man: “It [i.e. humanism] designates that philosophical interpretation of man which explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man.”35 Humanism, he claims, is anthropology, when “anthropology” is understood as resting on an unreflective, dogmatic assumption concerning the nature of man.36
In “The Age of the World Picture” Heidegger links so-called traditional humanism to a worldview, or a philosophy of the worldview, as distinguished from postmetaphysical thinking. He suggests without argument that the traditional, or metaphysical form of humanism arises within metaphysics, or philosophy, that is in fact nothing more than a worldview, but not philosophy. Postmetaphysical thinking, although beyond metaphysics, is no longer a worldview. If the alternative lies in the choice between a worldview and philosophy, then postmetaphysical thinking, which is allegedly beyond philosophy, is only beyond that kind of philosophy not worthy of the name that fails to surpass a mere worldview. For postmetaphysical humanism, defined in terms of being, is intrinsically linked to thinking, or philosophy that is not a mere worldview.
In the “Letter on Humanism, ” Heidegger retreats from the view that philosophy culminates in his theory as part of his retreat from philosophy to thought. Here, at a point when Heidegger has abandoned any claims to philosophy, he does not exploit the implicit claim that in declining anthropology his own theory avoids the status of a mere worldview to realize philosophy. Yet the view of humanism that he now proposes is clearly inconsistent with his earlier criticism of humanism.
The inconsistency lies in the earlier rejection of humanism that he later claims for his own theory. In “The Age of the World Picture, ”he criticizes humanism as anthropology that fails to grasp the essence of human being. This criticism, which is consistent with the view in Being and Time , suggests a clear incompatibility between the grasp of human being and anthropology. Human being cannot be understood anthropologically, but only from a deeper remove, from the perspective of fundamental ontology.
Heidegger's description of his theory as a new, postmetaphysical form of humanism is inconsistent with his view of anthropology. In refusing anthropology that supposedly yields only a superficial view of human being, Heidegger refuses humanism as well. In suggesting in “The Letter on Humanism” that his own theory is humanism, Heidegger takes a line inconsistent with his discussion in “The Age of the World Picture.” It remains to be seen whether this line is consistent or inconsistent with the original position sketched in Being and Time.
In the “Letter on Humanism, ” Heidegger maintains that humanism necessarily implies metaphysics, and metaphysics fails to think man through man's essential human element, his humanitas .37 If traditional humanism has so far failed to grasp man correctly, the solution is not to abandon humanism but to invoke a new humanism already available in fundamental ontology, namely a type of humanism that does not think metaphysically.38 Returning now to his view of Dasein in Being and Time, Heidegger suggests that man is not merely human if this means “rational”; he is more than human since he is defined by his relation to being.39 Heidegger sums up his new, nonmetaphysical view of humanism as a replacement for the old, allegedly metaphysical type:
But — as you no doubt have been wanting to rejoin for quite a while now – does not such thinking [ i.e. his own theory] think precisely the humanitas of homo humanus? Does it not think humanitas in a decisive sense, as no metaphysics has thought it or can think it? Is this not “humanism” in the extreme sense? Certainly. It is a humanism that thinks the humanity of man from the nearness to Being. But at the same time it is a humanism in which not man but man's historical essence is at stake in its provenance from the truth of Being. But then doesn't the ek-sistence of man also stand or fall in this game of stakes? So it does.40
Rather than a new position, or a new version of his position, in this passage Heidegger presents a reinterpretation of his original position as stated in Being and Time. Heidegger's claim now that his original position, earlier described as fundamental ontology, is humanism rests on a series of dichotomies, or exclusive alternatives, between: his early theory and his later theory, metaphysics and nonmetaphysics, humanism and nonhumanism, Nazism and non-Nazism, and so on.
It is obviously inconsistent for Heidegger to reject humanism as such and later to claim that his own theory is a form of humanism. If we grant that Heidegger's depiction of his theory as humanism in the “Letter on Humanism” is opportunistic and inconsistent with his depiction of humanism in “The Age of the World Picture, ”the more interesting question is whether, despite Heidegger's probable opportunism, he was correct in describing his theory as humanism.
There is a difference between Heidegger's later interpretation, in the “Letter on Humanism, ” of his original position in Being and Time and its redescription as humanism. What Heidegger calls a nonmetaphysical view of humanism in the “Letter on Humanism” is consistent with his original view of Dasein in Being and Time as human being understood through being. Yet it is misdescribed as humanism.
If Heidegger's reinterpretation of his original position is allowed to stand, then his thought was never metaphysical since it was always postmetaphysical. In other words, if his reinterpretation is correct then the break between his thought and metaphysics does not occur in the course of the evolution of his position, or in the later evolution of his thought. Rather, it occurs in the original formulation of his position that has always been beyond the metaphysical pale.
Heidegger's proposed reinterpretation of fundamental ontology creates more problems than it resolves. In Being and Time, Heidegger tries to return to the early Greek origins of the problem of ontology, or metaphysics, in order to carry it further than the point at which it was left in the Greek tradition. This concern is clearly inconsistent with the later effort to suggest that his theory has never been metaphysical. Either his concern with ontology commits him to metaphysics, as he still implied in his study of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, where he read his own theory as continuing the critical philosophy; or his theory is postmetaphysical and he was never concerned to renew the early Greek philosophical tradition. It cannot be both.
If we accept Heidegger's view of his position as outlined in the “Letter on Humanism, ” it follows that the effort by such French Heideggerians as Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe to defend Heidegger's later theory by conceding the metaphysical status of his earlier view derives from a basic misreading of Being and Time. Yet to concede that Heidegger's later view of his theory as humanism after the so-called decentering of the subject is consistent with his original position but does not resolve and only deepens the problem which the supposed break in his thought was intended to resolve.
The problem is the well known political turning to Nazism. It is no longer possible to hold that since Being and Time is an apolitical book, a point on which all observers agree, it is not the basis of his attraction to Nazism. It is only possible to maintain that his later thought is unrelated to his earlier Nazism if the earlier theory was metaphysical, if the later theory is nonmetaphysical, and if there is a break between them. Yet it can no longer be denied that Heidegger was attracted to National Socialism and that this attraction was based on his theory. The implicit claim underlying the efforts of Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe to show that Heidegger's development can be neatly separatéd into an early position, that of Heidegger I, and a later position, that of Heidegger II, was meant to show how Heidegger could become a Nazi in virtue of his theory, although his later theory was not thereby affected.
Heidegger's reinterpretation of his original position as beyond metaphysics and authentically humanist is internally consistent. Yet this way of reading Heidegger's theory fails to explain his attraction to Nazism. On his own account, metaphysics leads to “biologism, ” precisely the point that Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe suggest. However, this kind of postmetaphysical reading of the Heideggerian theory is unsatisfactory. For if Heidegger's conception of Dasein is postmetaphysical, then his view of Dasein in terms of being can consistently be described as humanist in his special sense; but his turning to Nazism cannot be explained through his thought and remains inexplicable.
Heidegger's later description of his theory as postmetaphysical humanism is not inconsistent, although it fails to explain his attraction to Nazism. I believe that the interpretation of his position that Heidegger puts forward in the “Letter on Humanism” is self-consistent, not inconsistent, but unacceptable since at this late date any interpretation of Heidegger's position needs to understand the relation of his thought to National Socialism.
The suggestions by Aubenque or Fédier that Heidegger's turning to Nazism is due merely to his political naïveté or even, as Gadamer would have it, the political incompetence of philosophers in general, are inadequate since they fail to recognize the special status of a philosopher, particularly a singularly important philosopher. Heidegger's self-interpretation clearly fails if it is necessary to account for his political turning on the basis of his thought. Although I regard the efforts by Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe as mistaken, they at least have the virtue of going beyond Heidegger, whose self-interpretation leaves his Nazi turning as inexplicable, to propose an explanation where Heidegger offers none.
Heidegger's later description of his theory as humanist is problematic. He is obviously free to define“humanism” as he desires since this term is solely normative. Yet this approach that might be open to someone else is not open to Heidegger since he claims consistently to grasp the essence, in this case the essence of human being, through his effort to think man's humanity with respect to being. It is appropriate to ask: does Heidegger grasp man's historical essence? Does he comprehend the essence of human being?
Although Heidegger's theory is superficially humanist, on a deeper level it is not humanist at all. The humanism of Heidegger's theory lies in stress on the importance of classical studies, particularly Greek literature and Greek philosophy, a theory of human being, and a version of the traditional claim for the social indispensability of philosophy. All of these features are stressed in the “Letter on Humanism.”
The German philosophical embrace of Greek antiquity under way as early as the mid-eighteenth century, for instance in Johann Joachim Winckelmann's famous studies of Greek art, reached an early peak at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Hegel's thought.41Heidegger offers an extreme form of the typical German philosophical graecophilia. His familiar claim that the problem of being, originally raised in Greek philosophy, was later covered up leads to a series of other claims, including his conviction of the importance of the Greek conceptions of science and technology, his insistence that a defective translation of Greek philosophical terms into Latin deprived the later philosophical discussion of fundamental Greek philosophical insights,and so on. In a typical passage, after objecting to the situation in which “metaphysics persists in the oblivion of Being, ” he adds that
the same thinking that has led us to this insight into the questionable essence of humanism has likewise compelled us to think the essence of man more primordially. With regard to this more essential humanitas of homo humanus there arises the possibility of restoring to the word “humanism” a historical sense that is older than its oldest meaning chronologically reckoned …. “Humanism” now means, in case we decide to retain the word, that the essence of man is essential for the truth of Being, specifically in such a way that the word does not pertain simply to man as such.42
Heidegger's theory is humanist according to its letter but not according to its spirit. We can distinguish between humanism, antihumanism, and non-humanism. If humanism is basically concerned with human being, then antihumanism opposes it, and nonhumanism is merely indifferent to, neither for nor against, human being. Consider, for a moment, the following passage on humanism taken from an article by Fernand Braudel, the great French historian. Braudel writes:
Humanism is a way of hoping, or wishing men to be brothers one with another, of wishing that civilizations, each on its own account and all together, should save themselves and save us. It means accepting and hoping that the doors of the present should be wide open to the future, beyond all the failures, declines, and catastrophes predicted by strange prophets (prophets all deriving from black literature). The present can not be the boundary, which all centuries, heavy with eternal tragedy, see before them as an obstacle, but which the hope of man, ever since man has been, has succeeded in overcoming.43
Braudel's view of humanism is typical, typical of the use of the term to refer to an approach to the world and ourselves from an anthropological perspective. There are many types of humanism, but humanism of all kinds is, as the term suggests, oriented toward human being. All ways to understand “humanism” basically center on human being. Any other way of understanding this term is non-standard, different from, eventually unrelated to the way it has traditionally been understood in all the major Western languages.
If “humanism” is understood as essentially focused on human being, then Heidegger is not a humanist, despite his appeal to this term. For he employs the word in a way that breaks with its essential meaning for which he arbitrarily substitutes his own meaning. Heidegger's theory is oriented early and late, as he repeatedly claims, toward the problem of being. At no time in his long career, stretching over some six decades, was he concerned with human being other than as the clue to being. As early as his course on the hermeneutics of facticity in 1923, he argued that philosophy as such had no warrant to concern itself with universal humanity and culture,44 and called for a reexamination of the misunderstood Greek view of being.45 In Being and Time,his main work, he provides a theory of Dasein that he understood as concerned with being. In his infamous rectorial address, when he joined the Nazi party and in other documents of the period, he insisted on the realization of the German as German, “on the will that our people fulfill its historical mission.”46 This chauvinistic claim, which echoes National Socialist rhetoric, would be misconstrued as an interest in human being in general, since Heidegger's main concern is still being. Later, in the famous lecture on “The Age of the World Picture” he decenters the subject when he comes to believe that being does not need to be revealed since it reveals itself. Still later, in the “Letter on Humanism,” he affirms that in his theory he thinks “the humanity of man from nearness to being,”47 and reaffirms the message of his lectures on the hermeneutics of facticity in insisting that his theory is completely unrelated to practice.48
According to Heidegger, there is a reciprocal relation between revealing and concealing. In Being and Time,he maintains that covered-up-ness, literally concealment, is the counterpart of the phenomenon. In “On The Essence of Truth,” he insists that concealment is undisclosedness, so that untruth is inherent in the notion of truth itself.
This view can be applied to Heidegger's theory and its French interpretation. The proposed link between Heidegger and humanism conceals more than it reveals. The fact that Heidegger is an unusually important thinker explains the widespread interest in his theory, including the interest among French philosophers. The perception that he is a humanist thinker goes further in specifically explaining his emergence as the master thinker in France in a way and to an extent unparalleled elsewhere.
The humanist reading of Heidegger's theory, so important in the French discussion, is obviously mistaken. If “humanism” is used in a way that retains a link with the Western humanist tradition, then it refers to “a way to understand human being centered on human being.” Although Heidegger can use the term “humanism” as he wishes, his use of it has nothing other than the name in common with the term as used in the Western intellectual tradition. And wild claims that traditional humanism is Nazism meant to exculpate Heidegger's continuing commitment to a form of National Socialism do not justify a reading of his theory early or late as humanism in any recognizable Sense of the term. For Heidegger's main commitment, as he indicates, is to being, hence not to human being, or to human being only as it concerns being. For this reason, Heidegger is not and should not be understood as a humanist thinker.
Sartre and other French readers of Heidegger have long been overly generous in detecting a convergence between Heidegger's theory and their own concerns around the theme of humanism when there is none. This supposed convergence is based on a misunderstanding of Heidegger's theory,initially as philosophical anthropology, or anthropological humanism, and later as postmetaphysical humanism. Yet in the final analysis Heidegger is neither an anthropological or metaphysical, nor a postmetaphysical humanist, in fact not a humanist at all; and the French reading, based as it was on the letter but not the spirit of the theory, misperceived a similarity between it and Heidegger's nonhumanistic thought.
In writings after Being and Time,Heidegger rejects the early French reading of Dasein as philosophical anthropology. The later French reading of Heidegger as a postmetaphysical humanist significantly overlooks, in fact blocks access to, a central insight: his conception of human being as Dasein, or existence. In Heidegger's writings, being, his official topic, finally remains remarkably vague since he never tells us much about it. In his early writings, however, he does tell us a great deal, much of it still useful, about human being.
Postmetaphysical humanism is incompatible with philosophical anthropology, with the approach to the subject as a human being rooted in the world as the legitimate basis for an understanding of the world and ourselves. This insight, broached within Heidegger's concern with being, is important whether or not we are concerned with the problem of being. Yet it is lost in the later French reading of Heidegger as a postmetaphysical humanist. Since Heidegger later equates humanism with metaphysics, a postmetaphysical humanism goes beyond his insight into human being as existence, beyond the anthropological dimension of his insight into human being and human understanding.
In his later theory, Heidegger decentered the subject in order to concentrate on being that simply reveals itself. But as Descartes and Kant already knew, knowledge of all kinds, including phenomenological knowledge, can only be revealed to a subject. If this is correct, then the later Heidegger moved away from a central insight that has been simply overlooked in the more recent, poststructuralist reading of Heidegger as a humanist.
My suggestion is that it is useful, if necessary by reading Heidegger against himself, to make a qualified return to Heidegger's early view of Dasein read, as the early French Heidegger readers read it, from an anthropological angle of vision. This view carries forward the idea of human subjectivity that is the valid kernel in the theory of the subject that pervades modern philosophy. Heidegger is not a humanist, since he is basically unconcerned with human being. And although early thought, his Nazi turning and later thought, are inseparably linked, this is not a reason to reject his theory as a whole. Yet neither should his theory be accepted as a whole in uncritical fashion. Rather, it should be interpreted, as his own contextual approach to human being suggests, against the background of his life and times. When this is done, it will be seen that there are aspects of Heidegger's theory that still speak to us in powerful ways. An example is his early, insightful conception of human subjectivity through the lens of its existence, which points to a useful way to develop the traditional, anthropological conception of humanism that has never been more necessary than at present, in the wake of Heidegger's own theory.