Whatisrecollectedisthestancedetermining
the thing as object.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
'.
His answer to these question, however, proceeds through asking 'what does "existence" mean?
', questioning the verb o f 'to be' into its ontological and functional force.
We inhabit this force through a redemptive semantics which transforms the concepts o f identity and predication determining existence, 'being' and 'is', from a world both containing and against us, into the categorical semantic
Notes for this chapter begin on page 326
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
249
ambiguity of the word 'weilen' (dwelling, staying, abiding, lingering) under the pressure of this re-education. "
I want to use this re-education as a way of sketching how time can be translated into a grammar. Strictly speaking, this is not meant as a critique ofHeidegger, as much as an attempt to write an exegesis of "Das Ding" towards the limits of our language exposed under the pressure o f the concepts o f things and o f time that he reads in his description o f a jug. It is at these limits that the relation between animation and semantics offers descriptions o f how we make and inhabit the world in which we find ourselves.
I want to begin with some confusion about one o f the ways the mind emerges in Being and Time as a way of opening up a set of questions that will lead me through "Das Ding". To recognize something as countable is to know how to count. Knowing how constructsthedomainofthecountable. Thisisthewayinwhichpracticesgain ontological significance. Heidegger in Being and Time, therefore, is correct, I think, to the degree that he says our being-in-the-world necessarily requires and functions within pre-established domains of interaction, something like what Wittgenstein means by forms of life. Heidegger asks, in chapter IV, what allows for the mutual interaction among Dasein, things, and other humans? : "The Others who are thus 'encountered' in a ready- to-hand, environmental context o f equipment, are not somehow added on in thought to some Thing which is proximally just present-at-hand; such 'Things' are encountered from out ofthe world in which they are ready-to-hand for Others~a world which is always mind too in advance' (BT154;118). Heidegger thinks, however, that counting disguises this requirement:
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
250
Even to come across a number o f 'subject' becomes possible only if the Others who are concerned proximally in their Dasein-with are treated merely as 'numerals'. Such a number o f 'subjects' gets discovered only by a definite Being- with-andtowards-one-another. This'inconsiderate'Being-with'reckonswiththe Others without seriously 'counting on them', or without even wanting to 'have anything to do' with them. (BT163)
I f we clarify Heidegger's mood in saying this, we might translate this as "we count so we don't have to count what we count". Is the fact that "count' can also mean 'to matter', 'to have significance or value' an indication of the hidden structure of what Heidegger calls care[Sorge]inknowing? ofanecessaiy(orsupervening)relationbetweenvaluingand knowing?
Answering this question, I think, would involve answering why Heidegger attempts to dissolve empathy into what he calls Being-with, my finding myself already within a world with others:
Dasein is with equal originality being-with others and being-amidst intraworldly beings. The world, within which these latter beings are encountered, is . . . always already world which one shares with the others. (Basic Problems, 297)
We can at least ask: Is Heidegger justified in making empathy dependent on Being-with as a way of grounding Dasein outside of doubt? Does taking a stance toward others as if they had souls undo my doubt that their souls are like mine?
In Being and Time, Heidegger wants to undo the structuring of our being in the world as a form of knowing, determined as a relation between subject and predicate,
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
251
quantified in such a way as to insure that to exist is to be constituted as a metaphyscial form o f identity. The relation between subject and object quantified in this way constructs our subjectivity, our being, within the realm of objects. If such an objecthood is to be resisted as the ground ofour being, then one must reinhabit the meaning ofBeing, recognize as authentic (although the complexity o f this recognition prevents any brief description) Dasein's being in the world prior to its becoming my world. The structure of this involvement is exposed authentically as care (sorge), which is our responsiveness, our being in relation to time, where "being is itselfan issue. " Dasein is "[ejssentially ahead of itself' (BT458;406), "ahead-of-itself-being-aIready-in-(the-world) as being-amidst (entities encountered within-the-world)"(BT237; 192). Temporality is understood as a dynamic involvement within the world against which the identity o f things is constructed, as a resistance. We must re-enter this temporality through care in order to re-enter the ground or the meaning of our being as non-things.
Heidegger's conceptualizing ofDasein as Being in the world, Dasein's proximate and for the most part relation to the world, unwinds the object status o f the world into a relational disposition that places the world and our relation to it before our construction of theworldintothings. Doubtasaspeciesoffailuretransformswhatisready-to-hand(our ordinary usage o f things) into present-at-hand (the presence o f objects as against us) and therefore into things (or what in "Das Ding" he will call objects). As things the objects of our dispositions and intentions, o f our world, lose the guarantee o f their relation to us (in third man arguments, for example); and thus doubt can work its way into skepticism.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
252
Heidegger constructs "the They" in chapter IV as a replacement for matter as the given form o f our substantiality, and thus as the guarantee o f the world and our relation to it. How can one be an entity and not an identity? How can one be relational and still work within our embodied form? The riddle is 'what is both subject and yet not an identity reducible to a thing? ': We--they, us, "das Man. " Underlying the question o f who is Dasein, in chapter IV, is the question cDo we function as things, as individuals organized as identities? ' For Heidegger, it is the relation between identity and thing that must be avoided, displaced into our Being-with, our existing as a function of our relations withothersandwiththeworld. The"wayofBeing"configuresDasein(anditsBeing)as a disposition and a becoming (a function of time): how do we temporally exist within the everyday? How is this Being within everyday time a disposition toward others? Why do
we count others as versions of ourselves?
Associating 'mattering' and 'numbering' (a form of knowing) in 'to count' might
be justified by 'numbering recognizes, and recognition values'. Is this order correct: knowingthenvaluing? Whatdowegainifwereversetheorderandsayvaluing recognizes? Counting is a way of constructing a set. We can mark value within a set or betweensetsbynumberingwithordinals. Isthisanexplanationforthemeaningof'to count'? When it means 'mattering', counting is a way of making value explicit. How can caring become abstracted into counting? What exactly does counting make explicit about caring? Heidegger assumes we can care (solicitude) without counting. But can we care outside o f our need and ability to count (which Heidegger would agree is a function o f our doubting, i. e. needing to know)? (Wittgenstein's resistance to scientific knowing as
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
immoral and destructive suggests that a scientific attitude is not a legitimate form o f life, although it can operate with legitimate language games in some domains. ) This might be a way of asking how skepticism makes empathy possible (something Heidegger implies,
BT163). What is the difference between the symbolizing procedures (the structure of identities and relations) which define empathy and solicitude? If solicitude can for Dasein "take away 'care' from the other and put himselfin his position in concern" (BT158), it requiresakindofself-symbolization(toallowforthisreplacement). Tosaythatempathy depends on a greater estrangement between Daseins than solicitude does not at all challenge the similar conceptual relations that construct an Others as something that can be replaced by oneself. The ability to "leap in" for someone else, while it structurally agrees with the condition of the "They", where "everyone is the other, and no one is himself' (BT165), is a Being-with-another by "not 'mattering' to one another" (BT158). Solicitude,therefore,cantaketheformofdenyinganother,orfailingtounderstand. If such a denying is possible, lying is possible. In fact one could understand solicitude-as- domination as a form o f lying based on the symbolization o f the other as someone to be replaced (to be used). Wouldn't this kind of leaping in create conflict? Does this kind of
solicitude meet with opposition? And can it fail?
Similarly, whatever allows us to feel empathy also allows us to lie. How could we
lie without simultaneously ascribing mental states to others, which we then manipulate, assuming our mental state(s) can be hidden? Lying requires both caring ("the other is primarilydisclosedinconcemfiilsolicitude",BT161)anddoubting. Chimpanzeescan bothlieandcount. HowcanwedissolvelyinginBeing-with? Thepossibilityoflyingand
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
254
our need to lie arises out o f our solicitude. Lying can function as the failure to recognize another in the face of one's own desire, such that one can replace one's desire for another. Since this replacement takes place in the context o f Being-with, it represents a turning away that for the Other could be understood as a hiding, This would not be lying only if we could cease Being-with, could erase our mutual identity within the 'They'. Otherwise we are stuck in a split structure, within a doubling, where we remain with the other but in thewayofhisnotmattering. Ontologysplitsfromvaluing. Butwithoutthisvaluingthe ontological relation expressed in Being-with has not content, and could not describe our everyday existence. Heidegger is stuck with the 'They' as the domain in which Being-with functions. Being-with becomes an orientation o f the 'They', within the 'They', as who a particular entity is (what is ontic if not a "non-committal formal indicator"? BT152). The content ofDasein is simultaneously its context (and thus Heidegger seems to avoid the separation between universal and particular). "Our" Being-with, therefore, is not so easily separated from empathy (as concomitant with lying). The ontological unity o f Being-with,
at the level o f complexity o f Dasein, already involves a kind symbolization that allows for counting and doubting. Being-with because it embodies an orientation, and is not simply unconsciousness in the way a lower animal might be unconscious, must conceive of others within a realm in which our orientation might fail, creating the possibility for doubt.
Heidegger resists and ignores this possibility in Being and Time. In "Das Ding" "Being-with" describes our nearness (or relation and involvement both ontologically and semantically) to and with things. Heidegger's philosophical therapy is directed at exposing our "Being-with" within the totality ofthe world as an animate whole. This
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
255
means that "Das Ding" is a manual for animating the world as a means o f re-animating being human outside ofthe temptations ofself-reflection that have reduced being human to consciousness (Descartes) and then to a mode o f knowing (Hegel).
Heidegger's philosophical therapy resists (or Heidegger fails to understand) the meaning and depth of the scientific stance within and towards the world (partly because he collapsesscienceandtechnology). Thisscientificstancewasarticulatedclearlyby Lucretius inDe Rerum Natura: "The dread and darkness ofthe mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the shining shafts o f day, but only by an understanding o f the outward form and inner workings o f nature" (31). Lucretius attempts to separate psychology, or rather divinity, from physics, while Heidegger wants to collapse both into a more fundamentalstancetowardearth,sky,mortalsanddivinities. Thehistoryofscientific therapy has yet to be written, as has a study investigating the depth of the question 'how is it? ' and its relation to the question 'why is it? ' (This is not to suggest that science reaches
"the real in its reality" [DD170]). Heidegger, in "Das Ding", is partly attempting to usurp these questions, suggesting that in the case of the jug whose nature he is exploring science gives "no thought to how the containing itselfgoes on" (171). While I do not think this is true, it opens up the intersection between science (or knowing) and the question of the meaning ofthings (or, in this case, ofjugs and containing). This intersection is what allows Lucretius to offer "the inner workings of nature" as an antidote to "dread and darkness. " Thus,Heideggerbringsusclosetosomeofthequestionsofscience(although he misrepresents their nature as scientific questions at least). And he is right to suggest that the meaning of our ontological commitments cannot be given by science (although I
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
256
do not think they can be 'given' by his semantic ontology either). Heidegger, at least, attempts to undo who we are as what and how we know, and in this avoid skepticism by animatingtheworld. Herevealsourrelationtotheworldasnotdeterminedorlimitedto representation (knowing) and asserts that science pictures and structures a world around the equation person = object + life = automaton; this picture o f science is more akin to vitalism than modem biology.
In "Das Ding", Heidegger's philosophical therapy contests the semantics and the ontological claim o f ways o f making and being made. One aspect o f this contestation enfilades along a line between 'making' and 'educating'. The relation between making
and education, however, is not symmetrical, bound as they both are to different pictures of whatisgiven. HeideggerenjoinsPlato'ssubsumptionof'becoming'ineducationand 'recalling' in knowing. Becoming human, recalling our humanness, through the reconceptualization o f our being in the world in relation to things, proceeds through
recalling our nearness to things as things, before they emerge as objects o f our knowing, as some predicate attached to a subject. But what can this 'before' mean here? Heidegger collapses (as a function of his holism, although there is some confusion here, I think, as well) four possible interpretations of this 'before':
1. historical before
2. psychological before 3. false consciousness 4. loss/ recovery
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
257
Historical loss describes the diminution and rejection of the Pre-Socratic expression of the relation between humans and the world (the conception ofBeing), a rejection that, he claims, precipitated the philosophical confusion ofWestern civilization. This loss, however, has a psychological analogue in the way subjectivity is formed within the context ofourparticularculturesandsocieties. Ineitherthehistoricalorpsychologicaldimension, however, Heidegger is faced with the possibility that our relation to Being remains an unrecognized existential-ontological reality (described in Being and Time) or that this relation has been lost and must be recovered (a possibility which was partly responsible for his turn towards historical interpretation).
8. 1 Matter
Heidegger wants to make the relation between mathematical description and semantic expression into the riddle: What's the difference between an atomic bomb and a
jug? Theybothlooklikeajug. Theirdifferenceistheirsimilarity. Isn'tabomb something like a jug? They both bring, or 'gather', atoms together. Atomic bombs do not always go off. I can use a jug to hit you over the head: it might not destroy a city (or even a world), but it might kill you. Not anyone could build an atomic bomb. Uranium, or any fissionable material, is hard to come by. But even if I did not understand the physics, that is, if I could not make it the first time, I could follow someone's instructions. I wouldn't know how it worked or why I built it in the way I did, but I could make it without any conscious commitment to the laws of science underlying it, except for my faith that such a combination of stuff could produce an explosion. It might seem like
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
258
magic to me. Could I make a jug, even if I just followed instructions, and not know how it works as a jug, or even how my making worked? I am nearer to the inside o f a jug than I am to the inside of an atomic bomb.
Let's ask the question again: what's the difference between an atomic bomb and a jug? I can mistake myselffor ajug, but not for an atomic bomb--even ifI know that I am
madeofatoms. Imightcallyouajug-head,andmeanyourmindisavoidorthatyour ears look like jug-handles or that you look like a cartoon character. If I say you're an atomic bomb, I might mean you hurt a lot o f people. That you might metaphorically explode and transgress the limits o f human behavior in some kind o f orgy o f violence.
God made us like we make a jug, formed out of clay. Is that more reasonable than that we were made and determined by the same laws of physics made articulate and used to construct the atomic bomb?
Feynman asks at the beginning of his Lectures on Physics:
I f , in some cataclysm, all o f scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made o f atoms-- little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. (1-2)
How much rests on the atomic constitution ofmatter? What is the role ofjustification and value in this sentence? Language is reduced to its informational content. This information
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
259
is communicated within a kind o f scientific fragment: a basic descriptions o f the relations which determine the physical world as the physical world. The world consists of an exceedingly large number of particles or parts. These parts have specific and law-like
relations describing their interactions as a function o f their distance from each other, at a little distance they attract each other, but at a smaller distance they repel each other.
'Atoms' answers the question 'what are we made of? ' Modem materialism does not necessarily dissolve the mind into material interactions, rather these interactions describeaparticularlimittowhatcancountasanexplanation. Itrulesoutspiritormagic for example. What counts as an atom, how atomic relations constitute matter and how mathematical descriptions capture fundamental relations and constituent aspects are all
questions beyond saying the world is made of atoms. Scientific knowledge describes the world in such a way that we can act through that knowledge to predict events, to alter events and forms, to discover how the givenness of our world works and determines itself as a world limited by the same limitations binding us.
Heidegger asks what is the nature of determining what the world is as a world, through knowing. This question does not ask about the nature of reality nor about what constitutes the real or the world. In fact it forecloses that question in order to demonstrate that at the most fundamental stage of the recognition of a thing (or non-
conceptual seeing) our stance toward the world is determined as meaningful. And thus Heidegger attempts to describe epistemology as a form of semantics, or rather to dissolve epistemology into an ontological semantics, where what counts as 'ontological and
'semantic'iswhatistobediscovered(ordescribedorunconcealed). Whatthisineffect
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
260
entails is the transformation o f what Heidegger understands as Science's question (a lot is already hidden in personifying science here, in not asking about different sciences at different times as defined in the practices of different scientists) from 'what is the real thing (object)? ' into 'what does a thing mean? ' That Heidegger phrases his question as 'What is a thing? ' indicates that this transformation must take place in our understanding of'is', and in this the question ofour figuration and picture ofthe real is bound with what
it means to be (the question ofthe meaning ofBeing). One ofthe goals of"Das Ding" is to replace sein, ist with Gegenstand, stehen, vorstellung, Weilen (west; verWeilen), versammelt, ring and gering within a coherent idiom.
Heidegger describes a vessel as "something self-sustained, something that stands onitsown"(DD166). ThisiswhatHeidegger'slanguagepantomimes,whathecallsour saying, and by this he means the ordinary logic through which a thing is a thing, as "the thinglycharacterofthething"(DasDinghafledesDinges). Athingbecomesanobject (Gegenstand) when or if "we place it before us" (against us; ob-, gegeri). An independent, self-supporting thing may become an object if we place (stelleri) it before us, whether in immediate perception or by bringing it to mind in a recollective re-presentation. We make a thing into an object by this placement or standing (stelleri). Placement is a presentation of the thing as against us, as a form distinct from other forms. Heidegger obscures what
thisplacingconsistsof,howwedoit,whywedoit,andsoon. Anaccountofthegenesis of our fall into an object world would force Heidegger into metaphysics.
Our stance toward the world can be defined by this placement in which objects appear in our "immediate perception" (and in this it is not a placement o f the object but
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
261
our placement o f ourselves before the fact). Recollection replicates this stance by presenting the world, representing things as presentable, and thus as presenting the thing asknowable: representingmeansknowing.
Whatisrecollectedisthestancedetermining the thing as object. This stance because it defines an object as an object, in the way that social relations are inscribed in and as the commodity in Marx, embodies in the object, and
thus the object mirrors our being human knowers. If we discover a world of objects, it is because we have become objects ourselves. We might call this one way ofbecoming objective. This is at least true for science which "always encounters only what its kind o f representation has admitted beforehand as an object possible for science" (DD170).
This link between our stance and the world justifies Heidegger's assumption that the reformation o f being human can proceed through saving things from objecthood. Heideggerdoesnotofferajustificationforhiswaytowardreformation. Partofthis reformation consists of embedding value in the world (the quadrature or fourfold) outside ofthe demand and criteria forjustification (ofknowledge, belief, ofsense or nonsense). 1 The form o f the jug is lost to the jug acting and our use resides not in our acting but in the time-series constituting jugging (the jug).
Heidegger, for example, counters skepticism with the assertion that "[t]he jug remains a vessel whether we represent it in our minds or not" (DD167). But this is not an argument or an invocation of what tempts us toward doubt or even a counter to the Cartesian dualism that sets up the problem of mind and world that is one ofHeidegger's specific targets. The temptation he is diagnosing here is our tendency to see the self- standing independence ofthejug (ofthings) as a function ofits being made or ofthe
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
262
description of how it is made. The onlyjustification for ignoring the force of skepticism, if we ignore his final goal to undo the unity between knowing and being, he offers here, although it is less an offer than a strategy, appeals to a scientific principle, that something is first what it is when it is made.
Clearly the jug stands as a vessel only because it has been brought to a stand. This happened during, and happens by means o f a process o f setting, o f setting forth, namely, by producing a jug. (DD167)
Self-sustaining and supporting (Selbstandigen) determines the jug as a thing, but not as an object. Does this "standing on its own" (<das in sich steht) ("Das Ding" 158) happen during the process of producing the jug? "Clearly the jug stands as a vessel only because it has been brought to a stand" (DD167). 2 Standing on ones own is not the same as being brought to a stand (Stehen). In confusion we understand self-support "in terms of the making process. Self-support is what making aims at" (DD167). Our confusion, it seems, is to understand the meaning of "self-support" as determined by the "making process. " For Heidegger this is a kind of category mistake. The 'meaning' of thejug can only be its use. One would expect that Hiedegger, even at this early stage o f the essay, would suggest the way in which the meaning of 'self-support' is bound by its inclusion in our intentions, practices, language, and so on. Instead, he personifies making, itself, giving it
an intention that is satisfied (if successful) in "self-support": "Self-support is what making aimsat. " Heideggerdistinguishesherebetween'meaning',orthedeterminingofidentity (and therefore this is already a site o f confusion between meaning and ontology), and 'causation', the "making process. " Heidegger, however, is careful how he invokes cause,
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
263
and in fact reinstitutes the confusion between meaning and cause, attaching it not to the jug,buttothe"makingprocess"throughhisascriptionofintention. Heidegger(orrather
my interpretation) makes explicit that all descriptions o f cause (even in science) inscribe an intentionality (described by laws) that provides an agency for any particular cause. The way this agency (or intentionality) attaches to other 'things' (how and towards what 'effect' something is animated) can be confused (and can describe the difference between science and phenomenology, for example). Heidegger's goal, therefore, is to reconfigure the lines o f animation (intention) in such a way that they make an animate world (the concept or the sense o f an 'animate world' is exactly what is at stake in such a picture).
The jug is brought into the same world as the earth, being made o f earth, and thus itcanstandontheearthbyvirtueofthisidentityinmaterial. LockeintheEssayon
Human Understanding refills Descartes definition of matter as extension with solidity: This of all other, seems the Idea most intimately connected with, and essential to Body, so as no where else to be found or imagin'd, but only in matter: and though our Senses take no notice of it, but in masses of matter, of a bulk sufficient to cause a Sensation in us; Yet the mind, having once got this Idea from such grosser sensible Bodies, traces it farther; and considers it as well as Figure, in the
minutest Particle o f Matter, that can exist; and finds it inseperably inherent in Body,where-ever,orhowevermodified. ThisistheIdeabelongstoBody, whereby we coneive it to fill space. The Idea o f which filling o f space, is, That where we imagine any space taken up by a solid Substances; and, will for ever hinder any two other Bodies, that move towards one another in a strait Line, from
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
264
coming to touch one another, unless it removes from between them in a Line, not
parallel to that which they move in. (Q. iv. 1-2)
Two bodies cannot occupy the same space. Bodies fill space, and this filling while it can
exist at many points in space (within the pre-existing dimensionality o f space) marks the limit between other bodies. Locke is ignoring permeability, but if such permeability is described at a macro-quantum level there is no problem. Permeability requires holes. It is possible, however, although improbable, that a truck might drive through a 'solid' hill becauseofquantumtunneling. ButifweimaginethatLocke'sanalyticdescription captures the logic o f our senses and perception then it captures the rules we apply to our perceptionsinordertoproduceorrecognizebodiesinspace. Heideggerassertsthat common substances resist each other, but interact through this resistance. It is the nature ofearthtoresistthingsmadeofearthandsoon. Lockedefinesbodiesthroughtheir
formal integrity described as their possession ofa particular area of space. Heidegger's use of, what I consider, a Lockean version of matter, however, is less about the nature of matter than it is about the semantics of being 'in space'. Locke's matter, therefore, means to be self-standing and self-supporting. To be 'in' matter is to be constituted in this way.
Such a vision of matter and being-in describes not only things but people, or rather "Man in the State [ofLiberty]". In this State men "have an uncontrollable Liberty, to dispose of his Person or Possessions" (Second Treatise, ? 6). In order to provide the
justification ("justifie to the world") for representative government, Locke must establish a limit to arbitrary power ("Just and Natural Rights") in who someone is, in their ontological-socialstatusasself-standingandself-supporting. Thenaturalstateofbeing
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
265
human is a "State o f perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and dispose o f their Possessions, and Persons, as they think fit, within the bounds o f the Law o f Nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man" (Second Treatise, ? 4). Andthus"everyManhasaPropertyinhisownPerson. ThisnoBodyhasanyRight to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properlyhis"{SecondTreatise,? 27). Self-ownershipdeterminesthestatusofMan against the power o f others. The scope o f power is limited by rights (as justification) and expressed through ownership o f Property. Given his use o f this ontological picture underlying both the status o f matter and men (not women o f course) in Locke, Heidegger's transformation of matter (as self-supporting objects) into mutually related things within and in relation to the earth, sky, mortals and divinities can (and should) be read as a political allegory. There is a lot in stake in such an allegory (I do not have the space to pursue such an allegory here).
Our making seems to place the jug as self-standing outside o f our perception, and thus to constitute it as a thing and not an object. This is not true, however:
It is, to be sure, no longer considered only an object of a mere act of representation, but in return it is an object which a process of making has set up before and against us. Self-support is what the making aims at. But even in truth we are thinking o f this self-support in terms o f objectness, even though the overagainstness {Gegenstandlichkeit) ofwhat has been put forth is no longer groundedinmererepresentation,inthemereputtingitbeforeourminds. But
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
266
from the objectness ofthe object, and from the product's self-support, there is no
way that leads to the thingness o f the thing. (DD169)
The jug is not a jug, however, because it is made. It becomes a jug once it can be used as a
jug. If that uses pre-exists the making then it is made to fit that use. If such a use does not yet exist, then it only emerges as a jug, out o f the background, once that use is recognized and it, as a particular kind o f thing, is recognized as that use.
This picture of what something is within the semantics of its use opposes Heidegger's picture of scientific reduction: "the wine became a liquid, and liquidity in turn becameoneofthestatesofaggregationofmatter,possibleanywhere. " Thismeans wine=liquid =a state ofmatter. This equation describes the substrate ofall reality as matter, as substance. When Heidegger says that the "states o f aggregation o f matter" are "possible anywhere" he means that matter has been reduced to a quantity within a single frame. WhatHeideggerisresistinghere,ofcourse,isthereductionofthequestion'what is real? ' to the question 'what does it consist of? ', asking instead the questions 'how do we use it? ' or 'what does it do? '.
Themodemworldisaworldorganizedaroundquantity. Timeandspacefall under sets of points in a meta-space which maps our travel or experience in the world as a function o f speed, so that faster means less distance. The Flugmaschine (airplane) and the Rundfunk (radio) shrink space; Film shrinks time by translating the seasonal time scale through which plants live into a representation taking a minute, or the sites of "altesler Kulturen" (ancient cultures), as if their identity and inhabitation and animation exists in their stones or the aura of their landscape, are transplanted by film into our present. Our
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
267
space machines and time machines can present themselves to us while they present or shrink the world so that we know it is the world they show us ("Der Film bezeugt uberdies sein Gezeigtes noch dadurch. . We reach the world through our machines, which
justify their veracity through the transparency ofthe mechanisms, which can film themselves,asinPersona,filmingthemselves. Thesemachinesfunctionastest apparatuses, by and through which we determine what is real. For Heidegger, science asks and answers the question, 'what is real? ' This reality is guaranteed by translating things into the logic described by machines, onto film or into radiowaves or into a machine producing an asymmetry o f forces (an airplane), in which the world is regularized into distance or rather into quantity.
In such a world, where the real is measured as quantities, "everything is equally far and equally near". Science, according to Heidegger, places the world under the rule of identity, where everything in its reduction to quantity, is equal ('gleich') under this rule: this is how Heidegger understands objectivity. 3 This is logically equivalent to Marx's description o f exchange value, where use-value, the qualitative value o f a product determined by its function and utility, is reduced to a quantitative system o f equivalency. What Marx calls a Fetish generated by capitalism, Heidegger calls an object generated by science and technology. Even if this picture is true, how does objectivity or quantification erase the difference between 'near' and 'far' so as to dissolve distance? Heidegger works against objectivity here by foregrounding the meaning of far and near as describing relative distancefromaparticularperspective. Thus,heispositingtwolanguageswhichexpress
andembodyopposedandseeminglyincommensurablecriteriaforwhatisreal: the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
268
mathematical and the semantic. The mathematical produces the object, opposed to us in an objective and meaningless space. The product o f the semantic is the thing, constituted by what it does within an implicate order in which the real emerges as that which is used (and thus within the quadrature o f earth, sky, mortals and divinity each thinks, implies ontologically and reflects the other, through how each determines the entelechy (its actualityandcompletion)formingthefunctionofoneforanother). Heideggerassertsthat one cannot move from the mathematical to the semantic, from the object to the thing. If we have moved from the thing to the object, from the semantic to the mathematical, what prevents the opposite movement? Even if these are incommensurable descriptions o f the real, if the mathematical has replaced or overwritten (a palimpsest) to varying degrees, the semantic, the possibility for this overwriting must exist within the semantic.
If something like this model is correct, then Hiedegger's prohibition of moving from object to thing marks off our phenomenal semantic relation to and within the world from any process o f being made, except our being made by [a] divinity whose making determines us as usable for them. This is a way of conceptualizing a necessary domain of intentionality as the world in which we actually function.
8. 2 Whatisathing? :Functionalism
Have we lost our nearness to things through a process o f history? Again and
again, like our innocence, as we each mature? Is our nearness our everyday condition which we fail to see? fail to see in varying degrees so that we actually live within a world
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
269
whichisnolongernear? Allofthesequestionsaskifwecanwerecoverourselvesifthe world remains as it is?
If there is a single standard for what is real then there is no distance, distance is redefined. Is this a re-definition o f space?
Nearness describes a conceptual relation between different categories or kinds, and thus is not reducible to a single standard o f reality. The problem o f nearness is the problem o f incommensurablity. Emerson wrote in one o f his journals: "There is every degree of remoteness from the line of things in the line of words" (Journals 4:303). 4 Human beings and things are constructed at the nexus o f such category distinctions. This is why Heidegger thinks that the question "What is nearness? " (DD171) is so important in determining the human relation to things: "Near to us are what we usually call things.
But what is a thing (Doch was ist ein Ding)" (DD166). How is 'is' used here? How we read 'is' is what is at stake in the difference between a 'thing', that which is near, and an object which is over against us. Do we say a thing is a list of properties we predicate of a thing or of all things or of thingness? If a thing is not these properties then this 'ist' is not being used as a copula. Heidegger's immediate answer is "Ein Ding ist der Krug" ("A thing is a jug"). But does this suggest that all things are jugs? Why not say "A jug is a thing"? This would agree with our desire to take this jug as an example o f a thing. Heidegger makes the jug, instead, exemplary o f thingness: he can get to the world, the quadrature,throughjugness. Asanexampleajugisamemberofthesetorcategory 'things'. Heidegger wants to undo this kind o f objectification o f things into a category. The exemplary status of'jug', therefore, at least recognizes the force ofthe question
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
270
'what is a thing? ' as asking for the identity ofthingness (x=y or x=x: the difference between these is partly what's at stake in the essay). But answering 'what is a thing? " with "a jug" is a kind of mistake, at least an acknowledgment that we do not know how to answer Heidegger's question.
What would count as an answer to a question o f identity? In mathematics it seems clear: 5+5=10. We can substitute either side of the equation for the other, and thus algebraispossible. Identity,therefore,seemstodescribesynonymyandthroughthis describes how words mean: morning star = evening star. Thing as thing, and not as a particular thing, cannot be picked out ofthe world like an object and put in such an equation. A thing is the same as what? Another thing. Such self-reflection cannot yet answerthesecondincarnationofHeidegger'squestion: "Whatinthethingisthingly? What is the thing in itself? " Heidegger's version of a thing = thing will be "the thing things", but this does not make any sense within our language, as a function of the logic of 'is' that we understand. Heidegger must dissolve 'is' into nearness, a language function describing a resolution o f the categorical difference between quantity and quality. The quality of being a jug determines the jug as a jug, and therefore as a thing: an identity.
Heidegger asks "what is the jug? " This is not the same kind of question as "what is a thing? ". We can answer this question with little ambiguity: "A vessel, something of the kind that holds something else within it. " "A vessel" answers "what is a jug? " with its function. A jug has a use first. It becomes a thing (what it is) by having this use. Thus 'what is a thing? ' asks 'what does a thing do? ' But I imagine I still would not answer 'a thing things" or 'a jug jugs'. To what question might we answer this? I might say this in a
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
271
language that included x=x but not x=y, that is, a language without metaphors. O f course, in our language we understand "a thing things" as a metaphor. A thing is what it does and thus the noun 'thing' becomes a verb, becomes its function. Ajug's nature is not brought about by making, because the use of anything is not determined by making. Making something fulfills a use that pre-exists. Even if we find a new use, or a use, for a found or already made object, it becomes what it is to us through that use. The thing has to emerge as something within the scope ofour concerns, as a part ofthe relations that constitute our world.
Heidegger opposes function to form as involving two different ontologies. Function determines the real through nearness, something like an implicate order or series. 5 Form determines the real as substance and order: "That is why Plato, who conceives of the presence of what is present in terms of the outward appearance,. . . everything present as an object of making (des Gegenstand des Herstellens- arfahren)"(DD168). What about representation, or the identity ofthings as form or as substance, as Aristotle conceives of it in Book VII of the Metaphysics, is determined by understanding, as Heidegger believed Plato did, "everything present as an object o f making"(DD168). Similarly,whataboutunderstandingtheoriginofanobject(orthing) in its making leads to an object overagainst us, or to identity as a function of form, or to thehypostasisofknowingasbeing? Heideggerslipsoutofthisknotofquestionsand assumptions by redefining "making" as "what stands forth" and not as that which stands "against us" (iGegenstand). Heidegger recognizes that making is not the same as representing, but if this making determines identity both making and representing are
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
272
determinedbyasimilarkindofknowing. Standingforthimpliestwothings: "Stemming from somewhere", having a beginning and an origin, a thing became, and thus did not always exist as such, and it had a cause; and once made it exists within "what is already present" (168). But neither standing forth nor standing against reaches across the noumenal boundary to "the thing qua thing". 6
Heidegger investigates things-in-themselves by investigating the onto-semantics o f the '-in-' sandwiched between 'thing' and the self-possessive 'themselves'.
Notes for this chapter begin on page 326
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
249
ambiguity of the word 'weilen' (dwelling, staying, abiding, lingering) under the pressure of this re-education. "
I want to use this re-education as a way of sketching how time can be translated into a grammar. Strictly speaking, this is not meant as a critique ofHeidegger, as much as an attempt to write an exegesis of "Das Ding" towards the limits of our language exposed under the pressure o f the concepts o f things and o f time that he reads in his description o f a jug. It is at these limits that the relation between animation and semantics offers descriptions o f how we make and inhabit the world in which we find ourselves.
I want to begin with some confusion about one o f the ways the mind emerges in Being and Time as a way of opening up a set of questions that will lead me through "Das Ding". To recognize something as countable is to know how to count. Knowing how constructsthedomainofthecountable. Thisisthewayinwhichpracticesgain ontological significance. Heidegger in Being and Time, therefore, is correct, I think, to the degree that he says our being-in-the-world necessarily requires and functions within pre-established domains of interaction, something like what Wittgenstein means by forms of life. Heidegger asks, in chapter IV, what allows for the mutual interaction among Dasein, things, and other humans? : "The Others who are thus 'encountered' in a ready- to-hand, environmental context o f equipment, are not somehow added on in thought to some Thing which is proximally just present-at-hand; such 'Things' are encountered from out ofthe world in which they are ready-to-hand for Others~a world which is always mind too in advance' (BT154;118). Heidegger thinks, however, that counting disguises this requirement:
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
250
Even to come across a number o f 'subject' becomes possible only if the Others who are concerned proximally in their Dasein-with are treated merely as 'numerals'. Such a number o f 'subjects' gets discovered only by a definite Being- with-andtowards-one-another. This'inconsiderate'Being-with'reckonswiththe Others without seriously 'counting on them', or without even wanting to 'have anything to do' with them. (BT163)
I f we clarify Heidegger's mood in saying this, we might translate this as "we count so we don't have to count what we count". Is the fact that "count' can also mean 'to matter', 'to have significance or value' an indication of the hidden structure of what Heidegger calls care[Sorge]inknowing? ofanecessaiy(orsupervening)relationbetweenvaluingand knowing?
Answering this question, I think, would involve answering why Heidegger attempts to dissolve empathy into what he calls Being-with, my finding myself already within a world with others:
Dasein is with equal originality being-with others and being-amidst intraworldly beings. The world, within which these latter beings are encountered, is . . . always already world which one shares with the others. (Basic Problems, 297)
We can at least ask: Is Heidegger justified in making empathy dependent on Being-with as a way of grounding Dasein outside of doubt? Does taking a stance toward others as if they had souls undo my doubt that their souls are like mine?
In Being and Time, Heidegger wants to undo the structuring of our being in the world as a form of knowing, determined as a relation between subject and predicate,
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
251
quantified in such a way as to insure that to exist is to be constituted as a metaphyscial form o f identity. The relation between subject and object quantified in this way constructs our subjectivity, our being, within the realm of objects. If such an objecthood is to be resisted as the ground ofour being, then one must reinhabit the meaning ofBeing, recognize as authentic (although the complexity o f this recognition prevents any brief description) Dasein's being in the world prior to its becoming my world. The structure of this involvement is exposed authentically as care (sorge), which is our responsiveness, our being in relation to time, where "being is itselfan issue. " Dasein is "[ejssentially ahead of itself' (BT458;406), "ahead-of-itself-being-aIready-in-(the-world) as being-amidst (entities encountered within-the-world)"(BT237; 192). Temporality is understood as a dynamic involvement within the world against which the identity o f things is constructed, as a resistance. We must re-enter this temporality through care in order to re-enter the ground or the meaning of our being as non-things.
Heidegger's conceptualizing ofDasein as Being in the world, Dasein's proximate and for the most part relation to the world, unwinds the object status o f the world into a relational disposition that places the world and our relation to it before our construction of theworldintothings. Doubtasaspeciesoffailuretransformswhatisready-to-hand(our ordinary usage o f things) into present-at-hand (the presence o f objects as against us) and therefore into things (or what in "Das Ding" he will call objects). As things the objects of our dispositions and intentions, o f our world, lose the guarantee o f their relation to us (in third man arguments, for example); and thus doubt can work its way into skepticism.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
252
Heidegger constructs "the They" in chapter IV as a replacement for matter as the given form o f our substantiality, and thus as the guarantee o f the world and our relation to it. How can one be an entity and not an identity? How can one be relational and still work within our embodied form? The riddle is 'what is both subject and yet not an identity reducible to a thing? ': We--they, us, "das Man. " Underlying the question o f who is Dasein, in chapter IV, is the question cDo we function as things, as individuals organized as identities? ' For Heidegger, it is the relation between identity and thing that must be avoided, displaced into our Being-with, our existing as a function of our relations withothersandwiththeworld. The"wayofBeing"configuresDasein(anditsBeing)as a disposition and a becoming (a function of time): how do we temporally exist within the everyday? How is this Being within everyday time a disposition toward others? Why do
we count others as versions of ourselves?
Associating 'mattering' and 'numbering' (a form of knowing) in 'to count' might
be justified by 'numbering recognizes, and recognition values'. Is this order correct: knowingthenvaluing? Whatdowegainifwereversetheorderandsayvaluing recognizes? Counting is a way of constructing a set. We can mark value within a set or betweensetsbynumberingwithordinals. Isthisanexplanationforthemeaningof'to count'? When it means 'mattering', counting is a way of making value explicit. How can caring become abstracted into counting? What exactly does counting make explicit about caring? Heidegger assumes we can care (solicitude) without counting. But can we care outside o f our need and ability to count (which Heidegger would agree is a function o f our doubting, i. e. needing to know)? (Wittgenstein's resistance to scientific knowing as
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
immoral and destructive suggests that a scientific attitude is not a legitimate form o f life, although it can operate with legitimate language games in some domains. ) This might be a way of asking how skepticism makes empathy possible (something Heidegger implies,
BT163). What is the difference between the symbolizing procedures (the structure of identities and relations) which define empathy and solicitude? If solicitude can for Dasein "take away 'care' from the other and put himselfin his position in concern" (BT158), it requiresakindofself-symbolization(toallowforthisreplacement). Tosaythatempathy depends on a greater estrangement between Daseins than solicitude does not at all challenge the similar conceptual relations that construct an Others as something that can be replaced by oneself. The ability to "leap in" for someone else, while it structurally agrees with the condition of the "They", where "everyone is the other, and no one is himself' (BT165), is a Being-with-another by "not 'mattering' to one another" (BT158). Solicitude,therefore,cantaketheformofdenyinganother,orfailingtounderstand. If such a denying is possible, lying is possible. In fact one could understand solicitude-as- domination as a form o f lying based on the symbolization o f the other as someone to be replaced (to be used). Wouldn't this kind of leaping in create conflict? Does this kind of
solicitude meet with opposition? And can it fail?
Similarly, whatever allows us to feel empathy also allows us to lie. How could we
lie without simultaneously ascribing mental states to others, which we then manipulate, assuming our mental state(s) can be hidden? Lying requires both caring ("the other is primarilydisclosedinconcemfiilsolicitude",BT161)anddoubting. Chimpanzeescan bothlieandcount. HowcanwedissolvelyinginBeing-with? Thepossibilityoflyingand
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
254
our need to lie arises out o f our solicitude. Lying can function as the failure to recognize another in the face of one's own desire, such that one can replace one's desire for another. Since this replacement takes place in the context o f Being-with, it represents a turning away that for the Other could be understood as a hiding, This would not be lying only if we could cease Being-with, could erase our mutual identity within the 'They'. Otherwise we are stuck in a split structure, within a doubling, where we remain with the other but in thewayofhisnotmattering. Ontologysplitsfromvaluing. Butwithoutthisvaluingthe ontological relation expressed in Being-with has not content, and could not describe our everyday existence. Heidegger is stuck with the 'They' as the domain in which Being-with functions. Being-with becomes an orientation o f the 'They', within the 'They', as who a particular entity is (what is ontic if not a "non-committal formal indicator"? BT152). The content ofDasein is simultaneously its context (and thus Heidegger seems to avoid the separation between universal and particular). "Our" Being-with, therefore, is not so easily separated from empathy (as concomitant with lying). The ontological unity o f Being-with,
at the level o f complexity o f Dasein, already involves a kind symbolization that allows for counting and doubting. Being-with because it embodies an orientation, and is not simply unconsciousness in the way a lower animal might be unconscious, must conceive of others within a realm in which our orientation might fail, creating the possibility for doubt.
Heidegger resists and ignores this possibility in Being and Time. In "Das Ding" "Being-with" describes our nearness (or relation and involvement both ontologically and semantically) to and with things. Heidegger's philosophical therapy is directed at exposing our "Being-with" within the totality ofthe world as an animate whole. This
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
255
means that "Das Ding" is a manual for animating the world as a means o f re-animating being human outside ofthe temptations ofself-reflection that have reduced being human to consciousness (Descartes) and then to a mode o f knowing (Hegel).
Heidegger's philosophical therapy resists (or Heidegger fails to understand) the meaning and depth of the scientific stance within and towards the world (partly because he collapsesscienceandtechnology). Thisscientificstancewasarticulatedclearlyby Lucretius inDe Rerum Natura: "The dread and darkness ofthe mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the shining shafts o f day, but only by an understanding o f the outward form and inner workings o f nature" (31). Lucretius attempts to separate psychology, or rather divinity, from physics, while Heidegger wants to collapse both into a more fundamentalstancetowardearth,sky,mortalsanddivinities. Thehistoryofscientific therapy has yet to be written, as has a study investigating the depth of the question 'how is it? ' and its relation to the question 'why is it? ' (This is not to suggest that science reaches
"the real in its reality" [DD170]). Heidegger, in "Das Ding", is partly attempting to usurp these questions, suggesting that in the case of the jug whose nature he is exploring science gives "no thought to how the containing itselfgoes on" (171). While I do not think this is true, it opens up the intersection between science (or knowing) and the question of the meaning ofthings (or, in this case, ofjugs and containing). This intersection is what allows Lucretius to offer "the inner workings of nature" as an antidote to "dread and darkness. " Thus,Heideggerbringsusclosetosomeofthequestionsofscience(although he misrepresents their nature as scientific questions at least). And he is right to suggest that the meaning of our ontological commitments cannot be given by science (although I
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
256
do not think they can be 'given' by his semantic ontology either). Heidegger, at least, attempts to undo who we are as what and how we know, and in this avoid skepticism by animatingtheworld. Herevealsourrelationtotheworldasnotdeterminedorlimitedto representation (knowing) and asserts that science pictures and structures a world around the equation person = object + life = automaton; this picture o f science is more akin to vitalism than modem biology.
In "Das Ding", Heidegger's philosophical therapy contests the semantics and the ontological claim o f ways o f making and being made. One aspect o f this contestation enfilades along a line between 'making' and 'educating'. The relation between making
and education, however, is not symmetrical, bound as they both are to different pictures of whatisgiven. HeideggerenjoinsPlato'ssubsumptionof'becoming'ineducationand 'recalling' in knowing. Becoming human, recalling our humanness, through the reconceptualization o f our being in the world in relation to things, proceeds through
recalling our nearness to things as things, before they emerge as objects o f our knowing, as some predicate attached to a subject. But what can this 'before' mean here? Heidegger collapses (as a function of his holism, although there is some confusion here, I think, as well) four possible interpretations of this 'before':
1. historical before
2. psychological before 3. false consciousness 4. loss/ recovery
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
257
Historical loss describes the diminution and rejection of the Pre-Socratic expression of the relation between humans and the world (the conception ofBeing), a rejection that, he claims, precipitated the philosophical confusion ofWestern civilization. This loss, however, has a psychological analogue in the way subjectivity is formed within the context ofourparticularculturesandsocieties. Ineitherthehistoricalorpsychologicaldimension, however, Heidegger is faced with the possibility that our relation to Being remains an unrecognized existential-ontological reality (described in Being and Time) or that this relation has been lost and must be recovered (a possibility which was partly responsible for his turn towards historical interpretation).
8. 1 Matter
Heidegger wants to make the relation between mathematical description and semantic expression into the riddle: What's the difference between an atomic bomb and a
jug? Theybothlooklikeajug. Theirdifferenceistheirsimilarity. Isn'tabomb something like a jug? They both bring, or 'gather', atoms together. Atomic bombs do not always go off. I can use a jug to hit you over the head: it might not destroy a city (or even a world), but it might kill you. Not anyone could build an atomic bomb. Uranium, or any fissionable material, is hard to come by. But even if I did not understand the physics, that is, if I could not make it the first time, I could follow someone's instructions. I wouldn't know how it worked or why I built it in the way I did, but I could make it without any conscious commitment to the laws of science underlying it, except for my faith that such a combination of stuff could produce an explosion. It might seem like
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
258
magic to me. Could I make a jug, even if I just followed instructions, and not know how it works as a jug, or even how my making worked? I am nearer to the inside o f a jug than I am to the inside of an atomic bomb.
Let's ask the question again: what's the difference between an atomic bomb and a jug? I can mistake myselffor ajug, but not for an atomic bomb--even ifI know that I am
madeofatoms. Imightcallyouajug-head,andmeanyourmindisavoidorthatyour ears look like jug-handles or that you look like a cartoon character. If I say you're an atomic bomb, I might mean you hurt a lot o f people. That you might metaphorically explode and transgress the limits o f human behavior in some kind o f orgy o f violence.
God made us like we make a jug, formed out of clay. Is that more reasonable than that we were made and determined by the same laws of physics made articulate and used to construct the atomic bomb?
Feynman asks at the beginning of his Lectures on Physics:
I f , in some cataclysm, all o f scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made o f atoms-- little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. (1-2)
How much rests on the atomic constitution ofmatter? What is the role ofjustification and value in this sentence? Language is reduced to its informational content. This information
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
259
is communicated within a kind o f scientific fragment: a basic descriptions o f the relations which determine the physical world as the physical world. The world consists of an exceedingly large number of particles or parts. These parts have specific and law-like
relations describing their interactions as a function o f their distance from each other, at a little distance they attract each other, but at a smaller distance they repel each other.
'Atoms' answers the question 'what are we made of? ' Modem materialism does not necessarily dissolve the mind into material interactions, rather these interactions describeaparticularlimittowhatcancountasanexplanation. Itrulesoutspiritormagic for example. What counts as an atom, how atomic relations constitute matter and how mathematical descriptions capture fundamental relations and constituent aspects are all
questions beyond saying the world is made of atoms. Scientific knowledge describes the world in such a way that we can act through that knowledge to predict events, to alter events and forms, to discover how the givenness of our world works and determines itself as a world limited by the same limitations binding us.
Heidegger asks what is the nature of determining what the world is as a world, through knowing. This question does not ask about the nature of reality nor about what constitutes the real or the world. In fact it forecloses that question in order to demonstrate that at the most fundamental stage of the recognition of a thing (or non-
conceptual seeing) our stance toward the world is determined as meaningful. And thus Heidegger attempts to describe epistemology as a form of semantics, or rather to dissolve epistemology into an ontological semantics, where what counts as 'ontological and
'semantic'iswhatistobediscovered(ordescribedorunconcealed). Whatthisineffect
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
260
entails is the transformation o f what Heidegger understands as Science's question (a lot is already hidden in personifying science here, in not asking about different sciences at different times as defined in the practices of different scientists) from 'what is the real thing (object)? ' into 'what does a thing mean? ' That Heidegger phrases his question as 'What is a thing? ' indicates that this transformation must take place in our understanding of'is', and in this the question ofour figuration and picture ofthe real is bound with what
it means to be (the question ofthe meaning ofBeing). One ofthe goals of"Das Ding" is to replace sein, ist with Gegenstand, stehen, vorstellung, Weilen (west; verWeilen), versammelt, ring and gering within a coherent idiom.
Heidegger describes a vessel as "something self-sustained, something that stands onitsown"(DD166). ThisiswhatHeidegger'slanguagepantomimes,whathecallsour saying, and by this he means the ordinary logic through which a thing is a thing, as "the thinglycharacterofthething"(DasDinghafledesDinges). Athingbecomesanobject (Gegenstand) when or if "we place it before us" (against us; ob-, gegeri). An independent, self-supporting thing may become an object if we place (stelleri) it before us, whether in immediate perception or by bringing it to mind in a recollective re-presentation. We make a thing into an object by this placement or standing (stelleri). Placement is a presentation of the thing as against us, as a form distinct from other forms. Heidegger obscures what
thisplacingconsistsof,howwedoit,whywedoit,andsoon. Anaccountofthegenesis of our fall into an object world would force Heidegger into metaphysics.
Our stance toward the world can be defined by this placement in which objects appear in our "immediate perception" (and in this it is not a placement o f the object but
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
261
our placement o f ourselves before the fact). Recollection replicates this stance by presenting the world, representing things as presentable, and thus as presenting the thing asknowable: representingmeansknowing.
Whatisrecollectedisthestancedetermining the thing as object. This stance because it defines an object as an object, in the way that social relations are inscribed in and as the commodity in Marx, embodies in the object, and
thus the object mirrors our being human knowers. If we discover a world of objects, it is because we have become objects ourselves. We might call this one way ofbecoming objective. This is at least true for science which "always encounters only what its kind o f representation has admitted beforehand as an object possible for science" (DD170).
This link between our stance and the world justifies Heidegger's assumption that the reformation o f being human can proceed through saving things from objecthood. Heideggerdoesnotofferajustificationforhiswaytowardreformation. Partofthis reformation consists of embedding value in the world (the quadrature or fourfold) outside ofthe demand and criteria forjustification (ofknowledge, belief, ofsense or nonsense). 1 The form o f the jug is lost to the jug acting and our use resides not in our acting but in the time-series constituting jugging (the jug).
Heidegger, for example, counters skepticism with the assertion that "[t]he jug remains a vessel whether we represent it in our minds or not" (DD167). But this is not an argument or an invocation of what tempts us toward doubt or even a counter to the Cartesian dualism that sets up the problem of mind and world that is one ofHeidegger's specific targets. The temptation he is diagnosing here is our tendency to see the self- standing independence ofthejug (ofthings) as a function ofits being made or ofthe
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
262
description of how it is made. The onlyjustification for ignoring the force of skepticism, if we ignore his final goal to undo the unity between knowing and being, he offers here, although it is less an offer than a strategy, appeals to a scientific principle, that something is first what it is when it is made.
Clearly the jug stands as a vessel only because it has been brought to a stand. This happened during, and happens by means o f a process o f setting, o f setting forth, namely, by producing a jug. (DD167)
Self-sustaining and supporting (Selbstandigen) determines the jug as a thing, but not as an object. Does this "standing on its own" (<das in sich steht) ("Das Ding" 158) happen during the process of producing the jug? "Clearly the jug stands as a vessel only because it has been brought to a stand" (DD167). 2 Standing on ones own is not the same as being brought to a stand (Stehen). In confusion we understand self-support "in terms of the making process. Self-support is what making aims at" (DD167). Our confusion, it seems, is to understand the meaning of "self-support" as determined by the "making process. " For Heidegger this is a kind of category mistake. The 'meaning' of thejug can only be its use. One would expect that Hiedegger, even at this early stage o f the essay, would suggest the way in which the meaning of 'self-support' is bound by its inclusion in our intentions, practices, language, and so on. Instead, he personifies making, itself, giving it
an intention that is satisfied (if successful) in "self-support": "Self-support is what making aimsat. " Heideggerdistinguishesherebetween'meaning',orthedeterminingofidentity (and therefore this is already a site o f confusion between meaning and ontology), and 'causation', the "making process. " Heidegger, however, is careful how he invokes cause,
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
263
and in fact reinstitutes the confusion between meaning and cause, attaching it not to the jug,buttothe"makingprocess"throughhisascriptionofintention. Heidegger(orrather
my interpretation) makes explicit that all descriptions o f cause (even in science) inscribe an intentionality (described by laws) that provides an agency for any particular cause. The way this agency (or intentionality) attaches to other 'things' (how and towards what 'effect' something is animated) can be confused (and can describe the difference between science and phenomenology, for example). Heidegger's goal, therefore, is to reconfigure the lines o f animation (intention) in such a way that they make an animate world (the concept or the sense o f an 'animate world' is exactly what is at stake in such a picture).
The jug is brought into the same world as the earth, being made o f earth, and thus itcanstandontheearthbyvirtueofthisidentityinmaterial. LockeintheEssayon
Human Understanding refills Descartes definition of matter as extension with solidity: This of all other, seems the Idea most intimately connected with, and essential to Body, so as no where else to be found or imagin'd, but only in matter: and though our Senses take no notice of it, but in masses of matter, of a bulk sufficient to cause a Sensation in us; Yet the mind, having once got this Idea from such grosser sensible Bodies, traces it farther; and considers it as well as Figure, in the
minutest Particle o f Matter, that can exist; and finds it inseperably inherent in Body,where-ever,orhowevermodified. ThisistheIdeabelongstoBody, whereby we coneive it to fill space. The Idea o f which filling o f space, is, That where we imagine any space taken up by a solid Substances; and, will for ever hinder any two other Bodies, that move towards one another in a strait Line, from
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
264
coming to touch one another, unless it removes from between them in a Line, not
parallel to that which they move in. (Q. iv. 1-2)
Two bodies cannot occupy the same space. Bodies fill space, and this filling while it can
exist at many points in space (within the pre-existing dimensionality o f space) marks the limit between other bodies. Locke is ignoring permeability, but if such permeability is described at a macro-quantum level there is no problem. Permeability requires holes. It is possible, however, although improbable, that a truck might drive through a 'solid' hill becauseofquantumtunneling. ButifweimaginethatLocke'sanalyticdescription captures the logic o f our senses and perception then it captures the rules we apply to our perceptionsinordertoproduceorrecognizebodiesinspace. Heideggerassertsthat common substances resist each other, but interact through this resistance. It is the nature ofearthtoresistthingsmadeofearthandsoon. Lockedefinesbodiesthroughtheir
formal integrity described as their possession ofa particular area of space. Heidegger's use of, what I consider, a Lockean version of matter, however, is less about the nature of matter than it is about the semantics of being 'in space'. Locke's matter, therefore, means to be self-standing and self-supporting. To be 'in' matter is to be constituted in this way.
Such a vision of matter and being-in describes not only things but people, or rather "Man in the State [ofLiberty]". In this State men "have an uncontrollable Liberty, to dispose of his Person or Possessions" (Second Treatise, ? 6). In order to provide the
justification ("justifie to the world") for representative government, Locke must establish a limit to arbitrary power ("Just and Natural Rights") in who someone is, in their ontological-socialstatusasself-standingandself-supporting. Thenaturalstateofbeing
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
265
human is a "State o f perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and dispose o f their Possessions, and Persons, as they think fit, within the bounds o f the Law o f Nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man" (Second Treatise, ? 4). Andthus"everyManhasaPropertyinhisownPerson. ThisnoBodyhasanyRight to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properlyhis"{SecondTreatise,? 27). Self-ownershipdeterminesthestatusofMan against the power o f others. The scope o f power is limited by rights (as justification) and expressed through ownership o f Property. Given his use o f this ontological picture underlying both the status o f matter and men (not women o f course) in Locke, Heidegger's transformation of matter (as self-supporting objects) into mutually related things within and in relation to the earth, sky, mortals and divinities can (and should) be read as a political allegory. There is a lot in stake in such an allegory (I do not have the space to pursue such an allegory here).
Our making seems to place the jug as self-standing outside o f our perception, and thus to constitute it as a thing and not an object. This is not true, however:
It is, to be sure, no longer considered only an object of a mere act of representation, but in return it is an object which a process of making has set up before and against us. Self-support is what the making aims at. But even in truth we are thinking o f this self-support in terms o f objectness, even though the overagainstness {Gegenstandlichkeit) ofwhat has been put forth is no longer groundedinmererepresentation,inthemereputtingitbeforeourminds. But
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
266
from the objectness ofthe object, and from the product's self-support, there is no
way that leads to the thingness o f the thing. (DD169)
The jug is not a jug, however, because it is made. It becomes a jug once it can be used as a
jug. If that uses pre-exists the making then it is made to fit that use. If such a use does not yet exist, then it only emerges as a jug, out o f the background, once that use is recognized and it, as a particular kind o f thing, is recognized as that use.
This picture of what something is within the semantics of its use opposes Heidegger's picture of scientific reduction: "the wine became a liquid, and liquidity in turn becameoneofthestatesofaggregationofmatter,possibleanywhere. " Thismeans wine=liquid =a state ofmatter. This equation describes the substrate ofall reality as matter, as substance. When Heidegger says that the "states o f aggregation o f matter" are "possible anywhere" he means that matter has been reduced to a quantity within a single frame. WhatHeideggerisresistinghere,ofcourse,isthereductionofthequestion'what is real? ' to the question 'what does it consist of? ', asking instead the questions 'how do we use it? ' or 'what does it do? '.
Themodemworldisaworldorganizedaroundquantity. Timeandspacefall under sets of points in a meta-space which maps our travel or experience in the world as a function o f speed, so that faster means less distance. The Flugmaschine (airplane) and the Rundfunk (radio) shrink space; Film shrinks time by translating the seasonal time scale through which plants live into a representation taking a minute, or the sites of "altesler Kulturen" (ancient cultures), as if their identity and inhabitation and animation exists in their stones or the aura of their landscape, are transplanted by film into our present. Our
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
267
space machines and time machines can present themselves to us while they present or shrink the world so that we know it is the world they show us ("Der Film bezeugt uberdies sein Gezeigtes noch dadurch. . We reach the world through our machines, which
justify their veracity through the transparency ofthe mechanisms, which can film themselves,asinPersona,filmingthemselves. Thesemachinesfunctionastest apparatuses, by and through which we determine what is real. For Heidegger, science asks and answers the question, 'what is real? ' This reality is guaranteed by translating things into the logic described by machines, onto film or into radiowaves or into a machine producing an asymmetry o f forces (an airplane), in which the world is regularized into distance or rather into quantity.
In such a world, where the real is measured as quantities, "everything is equally far and equally near". Science, according to Heidegger, places the world under the rule of identity, where everything in its reduction to quantity, is equal ('gleich') under this rule: this is how Heidegger understands objectivity. 3 This is logically equivalent to Marx's description o f exchange value, where use-value, the qualitative value o f a product determined by its function and utility, is reduced to a quantitative system o f equivalency. What Marx calls a Fetish generated by capitalism, Heidegger calls an object generated by science and technology. Even if this picture is true, how does objectivity or quantification erase the difference between 'near' and 'far' so as to dissolve distance? Heidegger works against objectivity here by foregrounding the meaning of far and near as describing relative distancefromaparticularperspective. Thus,heispositingtwolanguageswhichexpress
andembodyopposedandseeminglyincommensurablecriteriaforwhatisreal: the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
268
mathematical and the semantic. The mathematical produces the object, opposed to us in an objective and meaningless space. The product o f the semantic is the thing, constituted by what it does within an implicate order in which the real emerges as that which is used (and thus within the quadrature o f earth, sky, mortals and divinity each thinks, implies ontologically and reflects the other, through how each determines the entelechy (its actualityandcompletion)formingthefunctionofoneforanother). Heideggerassertsthat one cannot move from the mathematical to the semantic, from the object to the thing. If we have moved from the thing to the object, from the semantic to the mathematical, what prevents the opposite movement? Even if these are incommensurable descriptions o f the real, if the mathematical has replaced or overwritten (a palimpsest) to varying degrees, the semantic, the possibility for this overwriting must exist within the semantic.
If something like this model is correct, then Hiedegger's prohibition of moving from object to thing marks off our phenomenal semantic relation to and within the world from any process o f being made, except our being made by [a] divinity whose making determines us as usable for them. This is a way of conceptualizing a necessary domain of intentionality as the world in which we actually function.
8. 2 Whatisathing? :Functionalism
Have we lost our nearness to things through a process o f history? Again and
again, like our innocence, as we each mature? Is our nearness our everyday condition which we fail to see? fail to see in varying degrees so that we actually live within a world
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
269
whichisnolongernear? Allofthesequestionsaskifwecanwerecoverourselvesifthe world remains as it is?
If there is a single standard for what is real then there is no distance, distance is redefined. Is this a re-definition o f space?
Nearness describes a conceptual relation between different categories or kinds, and thus is not reducible to a single standard o f reality. The problem o f nearness is the problem o f incommensurablity. Emerson wrote in one o f his journals: "There is every degree of remoteness from the line of things in the line of words" (Journals 4:303). 4 Human beings and things are constructed at the nexus o f such category distinctions. This is why Heidegger thinks that the question "What is nearness? " (DD171) is so important in determining the human relation to things: "Near to us are what we usually call things.
But what is a thing (Doch was ist ein Ding)" (DD166). How is 'is' used here? How we read 'is' is what is at stake in the difference between a 'thing', that which is near, and an object which is over against us. Do we say a thing is a list of properties we predicate of a thing or of all things or of thingness? If a thing is not these properties then this 'ist' is not being used as a copula. Heidegger's immediate answer is "Ein Ding ist der Krug" ("A thing is a jug"). But does this suggest that all things are jugs? Why not say "A jug is a thing"? This would agree with our desire to take this jug as an example o f a thing. Heidegger makes the jug, instead, exemplary o f thingness: he can get to the world, the quadrature,throughjugness. Asanexampleajugisamemberofthesetorcategory 'things'. Heidegger wants to undo this kind o f objectification o f things into a category. The exemplary status of'jug', therefore, at least recognizes the force ofthe question
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
270
'what is a thing? ' as asking for the identity ofthingness (x=y or x=x: the difference between these is partly what's at stake in the essay). But answering 'what is a thing? " with "a jug" is a kind of mistake, at least an acknowledgment that we do not know how to answer Heidegger's question.
What would count as an answer to a question o f identity? In mathematics it seems clear: 5+5=10. We can substitute either side of the equation for the other, and thus algebraispossible. Identity,therefore,seemstodescribesynonymyandthroughthis describes how words mean: morning star = evening star. Thing as thing, and not as a particular thing, cannot be picked out ofthe world like an object and put in such an equation. A thing is the same as what? Another thing. Such self-reflection cannot yet answerthesecondincarnationofHeidegger'squestion: "Whatinthethingisthingly? What is the thing in itself? " Heidegger's version of a thing = thing will be "the thing things", but this does not make any sense within our language, as a function of the logic of 'is' that we understand. Heidegger must dissolve 'is' into nearness, a language function describing a resolution o f the categorical difference between quantity and quality. The quality of being a jug determines the jug as a jug, and therefore as a thing: an identity.
Heidegger asks "what is the jug? " This is not the same kind of question as "what is a thing? ". We can answer this question with little ambiguity: "A vessel, something of the kind that holds something else within it. " "A vessel" answers "what is a jug? " with its function. A jug has a use first. It becomes a thing (what it is) by having this use. Thus 'what is a thing? ' asks 'what does a thing do? ' But I imagine I still would not answer 'a thing things" or 'a jug jugs'. To what question might we answer this? I might say this in a
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
271
language that included x=x but not x=y, that is, a language without metaphors. O f course, in our language we understand "a thing things" as a metaphor. A thing is what it does and thus the noun 'thing' becomes a verb, becomes its function. Ajug's nature is not brought about by making, because the use of anything is not determined by making. Making something fulfills a use that pre-exists. Even if we find a new use, or a use, for a found or already made object, it becomes what it is to us through that use. The thing has to emerge as something within the scope ofour concerns, as a part ofthe relations that constitute our world.
Heidegger opposes function to form as involving two different ontologies. Function determines the real through nearness, something like an implicate order or series. 5 Form determines the real as substance and order: "That is why Plato, who conceives of the presence of what is present in terms of the outward appearance,. . . everything present as an object of making (des Gegenstand des Herstellens- arfahren)"(DD168). What about representation, or the identity ofthings as form or as substance, as Aristotle conceives of it in Book VII of the Metaphysics, is determined by understanding, as Heidegger believed Plato did, "everything present as an object o f making"(DD168). Similarly,whataboutunderstandingtheoriginofanobject(orthing) in its making leads to an object overagainst us, or to identity as a function of form, or to thehypostasisofknowingasbeing? Heideggerslipsoutofthisknotofquestionsand assumptions by redefining "making" as "what stands forth" and not as that which stands "against us" (iGegenstand). Heidegger recognizes that making is not the same as representing, but if this making determines identity both making and representing are
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
272
determinedbyasimilarkindofknowing. Standingforthimpliestwothings: "Stemming from somewhere", having a beginning and an origin, a thing became, and thus did not always exist as such, and it had a cause; and once made it exists within "what is already present" (168). But neither standing forth nor standing against reaches across the noumenal boundary to "the thing qua thing". 6
Heidegger investigates things-in-themselves by investigating the onto-semantics o f the '-in-' sandwiched between 'thing' and the self-possessive 'themselves'.
