Heidegger's Beiträge and Realism

This post on (the late) Heidegger and his possible interest to speculative realists caught my attention [from the always worth-checking-out After Nature].

Like Leon I consider myself post-Heideggerian. I’m also a realist, and believe speculation has a function in philosophy (but I hold enough weird positions outside those two commitments that speculative realist dosen't quite fit). I actually called my general position ‘phenomenological realism’ for a time. I didn’t invent this, of course, and it was used by a range of less well-known phenomenologists that sought to counter-act the dominant strains of phenomenology. Even in that mainstream there are arguments for realism in Husserl, Heidegger, and even Derrida (Marder most recently, but similar arguments are found in Caputo and, to a lesser extent, Hägglund).

Depending on how one wants to see it phenomenological realism can be secured minimally as when Husserl and the early Heidegger accept transcendent actualities through the Kantian route of affectivity from outside the phenomenal realm – hyle as constraint. Or it can be secured maximally as in the approach exhibited in the later Heidegger and Derrida where some argue they are hyper-realists focused on the excess of the things themselves as indicating toward a donation that is 'in itself' more real than the mere real (here I thank Michael O’Rourke for showing me that such a reading of Derrida exists - a reading he discusses in an upcoming interview).

One has here a realism of the 20’s Heidegger and a realism of the 30’s Heidegger. In the twenties Heidegger is still very much in line with the Husserlian stance on the real, and this stance is, in turn, one faithful to the Kantian transcendental idealist stance on the real (especially as outlined in the anti-sceptical arguments of the‘Refutation of Idealism’ in the B Edition). In the thirties Heidegger has left the Kant of the B edition behind, and Kant becomes nothing more than a figurehead in the history of being, a conduit for the transmission of ontological presuppositions, and one enters the age of his maximal realism or hyper-realism.

I tend not to place too much emphasis on distinctions within the Heidegger literature, and am sometimes a little exasperated by the entire early/late, Kehre/post-Kehre discussions. I do think there is a split, but for me the one that matters is the transcendentalist/not-transcendentalist Heidegger, and he flits between them enough such that a chronological distinction is not quite appropriate. There are later texts of Heidegger that are similar to the overtly transcendentalist period (comprising SZ and the various Marburg lectures up until Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics). Then again there are some early texts that show signs of his non-transcendentalist interests.

This also helps us to think about a different kind of distinction; and one I would call the publication/post-publication Heidegger. Heidegger did not publish many monographs, and the mere two we have are both early texts (and both transcendentalist ones). They are SZ and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and the latter Heidegger admitted hinged on a misreading of Kant. It’s actually a fairly blatant misreading and argues nothing less than that we should emphasize the A edition, and try to ignore the B one. Only in the A edition, so the reading goes, is Kant authentic.

Then again, Heidegger published a lot of essay collections, and these are almost always non-transcendentalist texts. This is why Lee Braver’s introduction to the later Heidegger [my review] had to focus on a collection of translated texts. There is no magnum opus to compare to SZ in the later work. There have been attempts to create one, but none of them are convincing.

The Beiträge zur Philosophie or Contributions to Philosophy is one such text, and it was explicitly promoted as a second SZ, but due to its woeful original translation this never quite caught on. I don’t think it would have anyway. It’s not really a book, and it’s a really weird text. One of the weirder ones in a tradition where weird is actually acceptable.

It’s only a ‘book’ in so much as it belongs to the GA, but it is really a selection of Heidegger’s private notes, and a selection not intended for independent publication as a stand-alone text. One of the problems with the English translations of Heidegger is that they make it seem as if one is dealing with just that... It’s a little more complicated than this, but even more so with the Contributions. It’s more complicated because what we have is a workbook for ideas Heidegger was not quite able to articulate properly. It’s a place where he is airing out some of the more intuitive, fringe ideas he was having.

It’s also where he ceases to be a phenomenologist. I really don’t think something like ‘poetic phenomenology’ can exist and I think the ‘post-phenomenological inflection of High-Romantic poetics’ (J. Bate) can simply be called good old-fashioned High-Romantic poetics. I’m not exactly knocking it and I don’t think Heidegger himself presents his fringe thinking as pure phenomenological method after a certain period.

Leon tells us he has been ‘thinking about how much the speculative realist movement is indebted to working through the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, and to a lesser extent, Merleau-Ponty.’ This is something, perhaps unsurprisingly, that has been on my mind ever since I first came across speculative realism, and I figured it might be worth posting up my final thoughts on the matter (since I intend to move into different areas of research…)

Leon is right that speculative realism has not really confronted the later Heidegger. I’m not sure it needs to, and I’m also not sure how indebted the non-OOO strands are to Heidegger anyway, or whether they commit themselves to such a confrontation in the first place.

Object-oriented ontology is certainly indebted to both Husserl (sensual objects) and Heidegger (tool-analysis-withdrawal-real objects), but neither Meillassoux nor Grant can be said to lean on phenomenology too much, perhaps at all. Meillassoux, in the SR roundtable, openly calls phenomenology a form of description (contra demonstration) – fine for the phenomenal world, but not quite of interest to him. Nihil Unbound has its Heidegger moment, but the Heidegger of Nihil Unbound is the early Heidegger of Sein und Zeit and Brassier seems content to find the resources he needs there.

Heidegger actually gets a rough deal in a lot of speculative realism. He emerges in Harman as a highly regarded influence, but one that failed to follow the logic of their own position to its proper end, and Harman has suggested there will likely be less Heidegger (and Husserl) in future books (with the emphasis shifting to the classics). I’ve made the point before that if OOO’s vision of reality is correct it existed with or without Heidegger, and ought to be potentially articulable free from Heidegger’s orientation. If this is the case there is no real obstacle to the development of an OOO that does not rely so heavily on either H or H.

Even if OOO has a phenomenological origin it intentionally violates enough phenomenological principles that I’m not sure what the Heidegger of the Contributions has to offer it. I could be wrong here and there is enough later Heidegger in Harman’s work (the fourfold for instance) to suggest that OOO might explore the later Heidegger in more detail, but I kind of hope it doesn’t go down this path.

For me the most interesting (and liberating) aspect of Harman’s reading of Heidegger is that he resists all the ‘post-phenomenological poetics’ and ambiguities that can be found in Heidegger’s more self-regarding texts – and we have to remember that this means thinking Heidegger free from the world-historical-thinking that the Contributions demands of us (that slight leaning towards Dasein is ever-present…)

So I would support, and I know some people find this sacrilege, Harman’s scorched earth policy on Heidegger – identify the brilliant insights and move on. Otherwise you may find yourself ‘echoing’ the empty apocalypticism that, as Heidegger himself notes, really ought only to be practised by the ‘ones to come’ that may only come in centuries…and you have to gamble that you just so happen to be one of the ones (I'd wager the proper ones are not Gestelling it up online).

Heidegger crops up in Meillassoux as a pretty straightforward correlationist and in After Finitude he stands in as a particularly blatant case of the correlationist’s need for over-explanation in relation to scientific statements (relating to his claims on Newton from his transcendentalist period in SZ and Basic Problems). In Grant Heidegger’s work on Schelling pops up from time to time, but the lineage he is attempting to trace is one that sneaks past Heidegger straight into Deleuze.

Leon points out that the attempt to surpass anthropocentrism in the mid-to-late Heidegger is something close to the speculative realist projects of overcoming finitude, democratic ontologies, thinking outside the correlationist circle (the non-human), and so on.

I’m not sure I *entirely* agree that Heidegger is attempting to ‘”non-humanly” think from within the real.’ I used to think Heidegger was some kind of immanent thinker because a lot of what I read really wanted Heidegger to be one - especially the eco-criticism and eco-phenomenology literature. But one can go all the way back to the earliest sourcebooks on deep ecology including the work of its founder Arne Naess (one of the first real 'broad' advocates of Heidegger's work).

In characterizing the Contributions as concerned with the real or as an immanentist project (to ‘think from within the real’ I suspect must be to think according to immanence?) we read it retroactively; or so I think. Heidegger was never, not even in his most poetic moments, a thinker of either immanence or the real, and I am sure he would consider both as metaphysically inspired approaches (onto-theologies in panpsychist or animist form). I am doubly certain he would dismiss speculative realism as fulfilling his project in any sense, and that it represents just another contribution from the ‘other end’ – the forgetting of being.

This points us to something important that sets the Heidegger of the Contributions in direct conflict with Meillassoux. Heidegger is fideistic thinker i.e. there is a residual theological aspect operative in his work, but it is a specific form of theology that emphasises ambiguity, mystery, or wonder as immanent to our world *as* gift or as donation.

I have no problem with the radical theologies found in thinkers such as Laurelle, process philosophers, and many others, but Heidegger is a different beast. There is good reason why Heidegger’s Contributions is such a foundational text within the postmodern theological turn found in thinkers such as Caputo, Kearney, and Vattimo.

'Beyng' remains in the Contributions a gift, a donation, and the sustaining role of Dasein remains in place (Francois Raffoul is especially good at reminding us how central Dasein remains in the later Heidegger).

The program of ‘being-historical-thinking’ is ours precisely because there is no being before Dasein (there are things, sure, but they were outside the history of being). It is this notion of originary event-as-gift to Dasein that puts Heidegger so much at odds with speculative realism. Heidegger is immune to the ancestral argument because his philosophy begins with that event, and the memory he traces is first registered there – there is no need to go behind it.

Certainly one finds in Heidegger an almost ecological openness emerging here – one that, I admit, is appealing for many reasons, but also one that is ultimately geared not toward the things-themselves, but to the possibility that in sustaining the right relation to them (Gelassenheit) they might shed some indirect light on what we are truly seeking – the ‘it gives.’ Maybe even, for the more dedicated, something of the promised next beginning might be...thought? encountered? glimpsed (in the blink of an eye)? It's hard to know.

There is more to be said on this. Not least on the connection between the last God, the ones to come, and Meillassoux’s own virtual God. But I think I’ll leave those for another post. And to Leon I realize I have not addressed your post in full, but I promise to do so soon.