Inauthentic Authenticity: The Problem of Inheriting the Concept

We stumble upon a situation of remarkable irony when we realize that there is perhaps no concept in the Heideggerian corpus more improperly inherited than that of eigentlichkeit, or, as it has been most commonly inherited in English thought, authenticity. Ironic --and, when understood as an indication of an historical condition unique to the present age, ominous. This irony is prima facie not entirely lost on Stuart Shneiderman, who remarks on its historical significance, observing: 

In the age of authenticity more people aspire to authenticity than know what it is. But, we have it on the authority of no less a philosopher than Martin Heidegger, the godfather of authenticity, that small talk or idle chatter (gerede) is bad.
Heidegger extended the category of idle chatter to any use of language that is formulaic, that repeats commonly accepted wisdom and that expresses what everyone thinks, rather than what I think. Authentic speech, in Heidegger’s philosophy, wells up from the depths of your soul. It is original and personal and unique to you. It might involve your latest research into Western metaphysics; it might express your sentiments about the state of German politics in 1933.

There may be good reasons for calling ours "the age of authenticity," or, better, the age where an historical decision gets forced upon human beings regarding whether and how they can any longer be authentic, but as Shneiderman goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that his own rough account of the question of authenticity is itself an instance of a rather common, public acceptance of the term --an instance, that is, which is at variance with Heidegger's own nuanced use of it. Shneiderman has merely taken over this common notion of authenticity without first putting the very term itself up for question. His use of "authenticity" is as unexamined as it is inauthentic. To see why one need merely to return to Heidegger's own use of the term, since, by Shneiderman's own admission, Heidegger is none other than the "godfather of authenticity" (a rather hilarious title). And what is it that marks Heidegger's understanding of "authenticity" as a unique understanding? What is it that makes the meaning  Heidegger imparts to the words so distinctively...Heideggerian? Is it so obviously true that, for Martin Heidegger, "small talk or idle chatter (gerede) is bad." Not at all. Though this misunderstanding is persistent and widespread, the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit is emphatically clear on this, in a move that makes his understanding of authenticity uniquely his own: authenticity is a mere "existentiell modfication" of inauthenticity; the latter is presupposed by the former. That is to say, not only does "gerede" as a devolution or falling away from the more original "rede," but also "eigentlich rede," such as the eventual discourses of philosophy, poetry, the State, etc. has its origins in "Alltäglichkeit" ---and that means in a domain where the everyday "connection-making small talk" called gerede has its home. Thus when you write that Heidegger claims authentic speech "wells up from the depths of your soul" you misconstrue his unique insight. In fact, Heidegger goes so far as to say that there is no "your" in "your soul" unless it is first wrested from "Their" or "One's" soul or understanding (Das Man). To miss this is to miss the entire raison d'etre for the second division of SZ's prospectus, namely, the "Destruktion" of the history of ontology, in which the so-called "primordial understanding of Being" is to be retrieved precisely from those now formulaic traditional ontological assertions. The inauthentic harbors the authentic and is its condition of possibility. Recognizing the necessity and even worth of inauthenticity is not as un-philosophic a gesture as Shneiderman's amusing piece would have its readers believe, Indeed, it is, for Heidegger, the only way something that was once called philosophy can be done in the present age; the thought of Being is essentially historical, if by historical we mean inherited and not, therefore, initially owned up to. It presupposes a condition of historical irresponsibility. Shneiderman ends his piece offering the following advice:"The next time a Pied Piper comes along to suggest that you give up schmoozing in the name of authenticity, think twice before going along." But "thinking twice" is precisely what distinguishes the authentic from the inauthentic. By the same token, one wouldn't have the opportunity to "think twice" without encountering the received (inauthentic) wisdom (e.g. "inauthenticity is bad") of some pied piper. The matter is thus a complicated one and it indicates a unique historical danger in the present age. And it was Heidegger who first of all, in a dangerous move which threatened to eclipse itself simply by being communicated, so powerfully drew attention to this.
     

Heidegger's "Teleology in Reverse" Part I: Intentionality and Scholastic Idea-logy

Gadamer once made the pedagogical gesture of characterizing the historical dimension of Heidegger's thought as a "teleology in reverse". Like all such gestures, this one carries with it the self-conscious necessity of distorting the matter to which it is supposed to lead. With Gadamer's characterization we are invited to glimpse how deliberately different Heidegger is from Hegel, but it takes only  the brief moment of focusing in on what we have glimpsed to lose what is really being gestured toward; if we pin Gadamer's words down to a formulation and lose the subtlety of its intentional evanescence, then it quickly becomes clear that the reversal of which it speaks is futile, or as Heidegger so famously wrote of Sartre in his letter to Jean Beaufret, "the inversion of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement". But how can we receive and preserve the intended benefit of Gadamer's gesture? We must follow where it points, i.e. to what is intended in "a teleology". And since it points to "a teleology in reverse", we must ask not about any end of teleology, as if the historical dimension of thinking could be characterized as a history of thought that culminated in the thought of its own teleologically achieved end. No, this teleology has a twist. It's order and movement is attracted by the force of something different--precisely, it is teleology reversed, a teleology belonging to the beginning. The question therefore presses upon us as to just how this teleology may affect the way we must think of it. In other words, there arises the question of how the Greek τέλος is to be understood at all. Consider the following typical remark made by Heidegger in one of his retrievals of Aristotle’s four causes:

“But there remains yet a third that is above all responsible for the sacrificial vessel. It is that which in advance confines the chalice within the realm of consecration and bestowal. Through this the chalice is circumscribed as sacrificial vessel. Circum-scribing gives bounds to the thing. With the bounds the thing does not stop; rather from out of them it begins to be what, after production, it will be. That which gives bounds, that which completes, in this sense is called in Greek telos, which is all too often translated as “aim” or “purpose’ and so misinterpreted.The telos is responsible for what as matter and for what as aspect are together co-responsible for the sacrificial vessel. ”

The Greek τέλος, Heidegger forewarns, must not be misinterpreted as “aim or purpose.” When we so misinterpret it, τέλος is an idea, that is to say a being of intentionality, a being referring to but lacking substance. Such an idea, as an intentional being, can also be thought of in a more substantive sense, namely, as a thing’s “nature,” e.g. the nature of things as the target aimed for in their development, the perfect species to which each individual thing strives –or in other words, the scholastic “Ideas in the Divine Mind.” Even so considered, these Ideas are in an interesting way properly intentional, not only because real individuals strive toward them (as in the way the form or outward look of a Greek statue gives us the enbodied form of man, of the "ideal" man ---of what Rainscape has, in talking about Achilles' heroic drive, insightfully called  the "drive to be beautifully, to fill out the limits of his form"), but also because, as Aquinas would have it, essentia is potentia to esse as the actus essendi. The primacy of esse over the Ideas unto and through which it is conferred allows those Ideas to still hold the trace of τέλος as “aim or purpose” which Heidegger wishes to avoid.This can be brought to greater schematic clarity in terms of a threefold concept of intentionality. When τέλος is thought as aim it is understood as a “possible” which may be perfected, that is, which may be actualized. This is true of the explicitly intentional aims of men (ideas of intention), the implicitly intentional aims of all natural beings (“drives” and natural movements or tendencies), and even those divine Ideas which serve to give the former (ideas of intention, drives) their teleological ground, in so far as even these divine Ideas are, if not possible, then yet potentia to the act of existence (they are, as it were, intended-to-be in a preeminent sense. The marks of this interpretation of τέλος may be summed up thusly: A.)τέλος as aim presupposes the priority of actuality over potentiality, and B.)τέλος as aim requires the grounding of mind, i.e. the aspiring intentionality of the human subject or the creative intentionality of the divine subject (the implicit intentionality of nature being grounded by both subjects, since aspiring intentionality is in some measure endowed with freedom). 

        It is with respect to the peculiar problem of  divine intentionality that the author of Just Thomism recalls a debate between the Averroists and Aquinas:

The Averroists, following a very probable reading of Aristotle, argued that God could not know anything other than himself – and certainly could not know individual things. Both arguments appeal to the idea that because God is the most excellent object of thought, he would only think of himself, and so would not have the diversity of rationes of created things in his mind.  St. Thomas, on the other hand, not only argued for a multiplicity of ideas of created intelligible natures in the divine mind, he claimed that these divine ideas reached even to the very concretion of the particular things.

 What is here carefully called "a very probable reading of Aristotle" may also be taken to stress the powerful discrepancy of Aquinas's reinterpretation --a reinterpretation which is among other things concerned with saving the worth, so to speak, of what is individuated, regardless of the sphere or gradation of existence that it enjoys. The Thomist reinterpretation, while countering a "very probable reading or Aristotle," raises many scholastic questions regarding its own reading. How, for instance, does the 'presence' of these Ideas in the divine mind not infringe upon the necessity of god being perfect esse, that is, pure act? One way to obviate the difficulty is to understand the divine Ideas as much different than the alleged divine intentionality I have somewhat crudely characterized above --a route that Just Thomism's author seems to advise: 

Thus the ideas or intelligible natures of things, which are similitudes of things in the mind of God, are most perfectly the similitudes of things not only because the knowledge of God is unable to err or be ignorant, but also because the divine mode of knowing, in a way that infinitely transcends the human intellectual power, can attain to a positive, intellectual apprehension of the concrete particular. The idea of a self within the divine mind is not an abstraction, a generalization, or an inadequate, subordinate representation of the concrete reality. It would not be going to far to say that, in a way that is comparable to how God can be said to be more present to the creature than the creature is to itself, so too the self – the I that is me in the concrete existential situation of my life – more exists in the divine mind than it does in itself. 

The solution seems to have many interesting aspects --not the least of which is a metaphysico-theological account of the peculiar phenomenon that Heideggger himself made central to his preparatory Dasein Analytik, namely, that we precede our very own selves from the beginning -- a phenomenon not unrelated to what is being indicated in "a teleology in reverse." But this enticing aspect must also be confronted with other aspects of Thomistic thought that seem to temper it or even contradict it. For instance, if it is correct to affirm that the doctrine of the primacy of esse is distinctively Thomistic or, at least, that it lies at the center of Thomistic metaphysics, then it would seem difficult to simultaneously affirm that the divine Ideas actually exist more perfectly than those actual things of which they are Ideas. The difficulty lies in the relation between esse and essentia; if the former is always the act of the latter, god would have to actually create a second (or first) even more perfect totality of beings. The Divine Ideas would be a quasi-alternate universe. Not only would all-that-is be created through them by the conferring of esse; they would also, problematically, be more than a principle of creation: they would be another, separate creation. Even the separate substances would not just be essentia and esse, since there would have to actually exist a more perfect divine Idea which created them. And again, if this more perfect Idea existed, it would, as an ens, have to be other than god. One might even say that with this othering, yet another Idea mediating the creation of a divine Idea would be necessary ---ad infinitum. Of course, Aquinas, simply being a thinker of such a stature as he is, would not likely have maintained any position that held such implications. But I honestly don't know how he maintained a  multiplicity of actually existent divine Ideas in the mind of a god himself characterized by perfect act (comments emphatically welcome). My own initial inclination (and I admittedly have not done my homework on this debate with the Averroists) is to think of the scholastic concept of divine knowledge along lines not too different from the manner in which Kant inherited the problem in his concept of intuitis originalis, as it is distinguished from intuitis derivativus (and of course I am entirely bracketing the very different way Kant made use of this distinction). In other words, god's knowledge of a thing effects its existence, or, put another way, the existent thing (ens) is per se the object of god's knowledge. In this case, however, if we further posit Ideas in the mind of god, then they cannot exist ---rather god's Idea is the existing thing. And this returns me back to my rough notion of the divine intention as an instance of τέλος as aim.
         If through scholasticism the primary sense of τέλος first becomes definitively grounded in Mind, then this tendency becomes radicalized in modernity, especially in its most extreme and self-mirroring version in Hegel. It is this version that Heidegger is predominantly invested in freeing thought from.  Hegel is the most extreme representative of this interpretation of τέλος, since he proposes that all three different intentionalities (the implicit intention of nature, the explicit intention of finite mind, and the creative intention of divine Mind) are themselves teleologically directed to the insight that they are in actuality only one intentionality, one subjectivity or Mind comprehended in its own Concept. Importantly, for Hegel, this actual unity of the different intentionalities is not simply the case, but must be teleologically achieved, i.e. brought from the potentiality of an abstract Idea to the actuality of a concrete Concept --a Concept which grasps precisely the teleological necessity of this achievement.  

            

Epistemology and Logic (Part Three): On the Derivation of Propadeutic Logic

    

Logic is at once self-reflexive art and it is propadeutic to science. It is self-reflexive art because the direction which this art gives is meta-direction --that is, logic is the art of the direction of that which directs all arts (including logic). If meta-direction accounts for the manner in which logic relates to all possible art, then its relation to all possible science is accounted for by its being a propadeutic. It is a propadeutic because it is reason's knowledge of itself, but only at the level of an art and not yet a science, since, for Aristotle, the causes of reason lie outside of reasoning, in the matter (τὸ ὄν)  being reasoned about.
        This double orientation of logic gives it, as an art, a twofold uniqueness. Because logic is meta-directively oriented toward art, the formulation of its rules happens in the same medium as does the appropriation of that unarticulated domain (from out of which  those rules are derived), namely rational speech, λόγος. No other art can be acquired from out of the same domain as its rules can be expressed. On other hand, because of its orientation to science, namely, as a propadeutic, logic is the only art that is supposed to expressly offer its rules as a part of its art; it passes on a set of criteria by which the sciences can secure the correctness of their inquiry. But this security that logic as a propadeutic is supposed to offer, raises questions about the security required by logic itself. The rules for the metadirection of logic must themselves be derived correctly. But how is this to be accomplished? It would seem prima facie that one would need an infinite set of rule books for the derivation of rules. And of course this, as a reductio ad infinitum, reduces to the logically absurd. And yet for all these meddlesome considerations, logic gets underway and establishes itself through the truth of its practice. We could ask, in good Kantian fashion: granted that logic actually establishes itself, how is this achievement possible? Not only can we ask this question; we must ask it, if, that is, logic is properly characterized as a propadeutic to scientific endeavor. What causes the apparent problem of logical derivation? In coming to a reductio ad infinitum we might consider that our own rule-oriented approach has been misguided from the outset, as it were. It may even be that this misguidance is not to be understood only as an error, but also as a clue --a pitfall that may yet harbor the possbility of truth on the matter its seems to deviate from. But however the case, everything depends on this (and here we echo Hegel's words from part one of these posts): that we recognize the impossibility and even undesirability of establishing yet another meta-direction to avoid initial misdirection.

Epistemology, Logic, and their self-limitations (Part Two)

       
       Logic is not for Aristotle, as it is for the Stoics, a science, an ἐπιστήμη λογική. In fact, the very word for the discipline of logic, λογική, does not appear once in the entirety of Aristotle's corpus. What Alexander of Aphrodisias would later, while commenting on the Prior Analytics, refer to as λογική, is for Aristotle the Ὄργανον --the organ or instrument. As such its employment is not an ἐπιστήμη --rather, it is a τεχνή, an art. But it is not only an art. Logic enjoys, according to the tradition, the esteem of being called the art of arts, a title it shares with only one other art, namely, the art of the ordering of the πόλις, politics. For indeed, if all arts are learned, they are a kind of knowledge and are therefore ultimately acquired and perfected under the direction of reason, but the art of logic is most exceptional in this respect; it is an art not only directed by, but directing of, reason. If, then, we envision reason, or more precisely λόγος, as the director of all the arts, logic must be considered the director of the director. But once we characterize logic in this twofold sense of being most generally, an art and, more specifically, an art of arts, we are confronted with an inherent problem in the determination of this peculiar art.
        The initial glimpse of this problem may be had by simply comparing logic's status as an art to its epistemic role as a propadeutic. Logic can not be science because it does not know the cause of its subject matter. The question that seems to press forward is: how can Aristotle allow his entire edifice of epistemic pursuit to be built on a cornerstone that is not epistemic and ignorant of its causes? After all, Physics, for example, may be based on something entirely lower than science, namely ἐμπειρία, or the knowledge that something happens under certain conditions, but Physics also grounds this basis, since it is knowledge of why these same things happen. Logic, however, is art, and is therefore beneath ἐπιστήμη. How can the former be something upon which the latter is dependent? But this question already contains its own answer. Art is neither knowledge-that nor knowledge-why, but knowledge-how. As an art, logic shows us how to reason, but it does not show us why this is the case. Thus the logic is, like experience of nature, a basis which  is grounded by that for which it is a basis; the categories are metaphysical before they are logical, the principle of non-contradiction is a principle of Being before it is a principle of the truth of predication. Thus the initial glimpse of the problem turns out to be only a glimpse of a pseudo problem; even the discovery of logic is no real mystery: its principles come to light merely as the principles of how we think, just as the builder's knowledge of angles is merely the knowledge of how to build stable structures. And if the causes of the builder's art are known by the physicist and geometer, the causes of the logicians art are known by the metaphysician --but this does not in any way alter the truth of what the builder or logician know; the rules of building or thinking remain the same despite the state of our knowledge of their causes. Hegel's objection made against a critical or preliminary epistemology that is motivated by practical concerns for the securing of scientific success seems to have lost all its footing if it is made to stand against the division of Aristotelian logic.
          And yet despite the tidiness of this reasonable resolution, there remains something problematic: 'rules' are known in a very different way then they are appropriated. One may know the rules of an art through and through and yet fail as an artisan. When one is apprentice to a master, presumably he does not simply learn the rules of a craft, and indeed, he may not ever learn them as rules at all. But the good apprentice must reside in the locale of his master and keep an intimate proximity to him. He is not told what the master knows, but must rather discover for himself what the master has discovered for himself --and for this reason the apprentice must enter into the region and the 'workshop' of another and make it his own. This appropriation happens not as a focusing on the master, but as a focusing upon what he is focusing on. Such a thing may later be talked about with varying degrees of accuracy, but it is only encountered for the artisan in the not yet articulate world of his craft; in the smithy of the blacksmith, the kitchen of the chef, the studio of the painter, the stable and fields of the horseback rider. It is only from this inarticulate domain of appropriation that rules are later derived. In each case the art is appropriated, but it is known in terms of rules in a much different manner --and for reasons other than for simply performing the art.
         Here, however, we return to a new dimension of the problem. If logic is an art then its discovery is subject to the distinction between appropriation from out of a domain of mastery and rule-formulation. But logic is, as has been said, not just an art. It is the art of arts. Where is its smithy, kitchen, studio, or stable? Each domain belongs to a single art, but logic is art which directs that very thing (λόγος) which directs these arts. How then is logic appropriated? Can its appropriation take place apart from a discourse of its rules? 

What Epistemology? What about Logic? A (Self-) Reflection on the Limits of the Self-Reflexivity of Knowledge (Part One)

Recently, a brief argument was made (though perhaps only indirectly as fodder for dialectic) in support of the legitimacy of epistemology insofar as it is understood as being "motivated by a practical concern for actually having knowledge." Such an epistemology, the claim continues, "is prerequisite to the sure success of metaphysics itself." The practice of critique (and the primacy of the practical domain that it implies), the concern for actual possession of knowledge, and, of course, the demand that metaphysics be successful, are all, even if they may also be other things, unmistakably Kantian (see here for a few volleys regarding just these points in their connection to the central contention of Kant's first Kritik). Anticipating his sweeping critique and simultaneous justification of skepticism in his Phenomenology, Hegel's response to this sort of deference to critique/epistemological propadeutic, found in his famous Introduction to that opus, is among the most succinct formulations of a powerful counter-thrust to this epistemological tendency:

Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error introduces an element of distrust into science, which without any scruples of that sort goes to work and actually does know, it is not easy to understand why, conversely, a distrust should not be placed in this very distrust, and why we should not take care lest the fear of error is not just the initial error. As a matter of fact, this fear presupposes something, indeed a great deal, as truth, and supports its scruples and consequences on what should itself be examined beforehand to see whether it is truth. It starts with ideas of knowledge as an instrument, and as a medium; and presupposes a distinction of ourselves from this knowledge...

 The practically motivated epistemology that sets for itself the goal of establishing those things that would be a prerequisite to the "success" of the first science, namely metaphysics, is itself, in Hegel's estimation, indebted to a presupposed understanding of knowledge as "an instrument, and as a medium" --hence the need to learn how to direct it which this proposed epistemology would satisfy. But the instrumental function of knowledge is indebted to a much older thinking which, perhaps ironically, has no place for epistemology. This older thinking is the thinking of that ancient founder of Logic, Aristotle. That consideration capable of considering knowledge apart from its objects, and thereby capable of directing scientific pursuit as a propadeutic to the latter which could ensure its correctness, is to be found in those books which Aristotle called the Organon, the instrument. But what of this understanding of logic as a propadeutic, as an art, and as the directions for right reasoning? How does it fare against Hegel's critique? Does his critique not penetrate even beyond Kant and into his greatest intellectual fore-father(s)?     

Dialectic and Difference: Notes on the Non-Identity of Being and Nothing

Our last post tried to touch upon the seynsgechichtlich meaning of a statement that Heidegger first makes in his well-known 1929 address Was ist Metaphysik?. Roughly, the statement runs as follows: Being and Nothing are indeed not identical, yet they are the same. In the immediate context of this assertion as it is found in Was ist Metaphysik? there is passing reference made to that thinker with whom Heidegger seems, from his dissertation of 1915 to his last public lecture of 1962, to find the most vigorous point of contention, namely Hegel. And this is no accident. It hardly seems an exaggeration to say there are, at bottom, two ways of hearing this statement, and depending on this alone you are either Hegelian or Heideggerian.

Being and Nothing are indeed not identical, yet they are the same.

Everything is concentrated in what is meant by the negativity of this "not" --it is the fulcrum on which the meaning of the sentence swings. What possibility is harbored in this non-identity, such that it can allow Heidegger to speak in accord with Hegel against Hegel? In what follows I will permit myself some rough notes seeking to indicate an answer.

The non-identity of Being and Nothing could, for Hegel, be explained as the dialectical necessity that Being and Nothing, as prior moments of the Concept of Becoming, remain distinct moments. This distinction of identity must be maintained because otherwise Being and Nothing would, as it were, already be becoming; they would negate the very need for a development, they would negate the possibility of the Concept of Becoming --and along with this negation also the very possibility of their ever being the same in and as this Concept. Conversely, the sameness of Being and Nothing consists in that sublation which alone would preserve and ensure with unshakable necessity their non-identity. As it resounds in Hegel's ear, then, the statement "Being and Nothing are indeed not identical, yet they are the same" is a statement stressing the tension between the non-identity of what is dialectically undeveloped with the sublative, reconciliatory sameness in which dialectical development results. The savory paradox of this statement that can only be lost sight of at the expense of its entire meaning is that the union of the sameness of which it speaks not only reconciles but necessitates the (previous) non-identity of Being and Nothing. In short, "the same" names an "identity-in-difference" which justifies the difference between Being and Nothing just as it is presupposed (in kernel form, as it were) by this difference.

But if this statement about Being and Nothing can be made to speak the language of dialectic, how can it speak differently? How does it resound in the famous "ear of Heidegger"?

Being and Nothing are indeed not identical, yet they are the same.

For Heidegger the negativity of this non-identity must be understood in light of two extreme possibilities. The first of these, the first negativity, is that of Das Nichts. As I tried to emphasize in the last post, we are not 'done' thinking this Nothing when we think it as that which, though a constant companion of beings as a whole as such, rarely discloses itself in the welling up of anxiety. Not only through the various stimmungen of Dasein's Befindlichkeit  but far more primordially through the historical grantings of Being does the Nothing nichtet: the Nothing is the epocally destined granting of refusal which enables Being as Gestell. Thus we may say that Nothing, thought Beyng-historically, is the consummate withdrawal of Being (Sein). Because it is consummate, this withdrawal (which is in truth the source of history's epochality) itself withdraws into complete concealment; the ages come to an end. It is this negativity of the ending of the epochs of Being, which Heidegger elsewhere calls simply "oblivion", which marks the essence of the Nothing, In interpretting our statement then, the question of Heideggerian non-identity is a question of how this negativity differs from Being (Seyn) itself. But this question also contains another, namely, what negativity is at work in this difference.

If the Nothing is to be thought of in terms of a consummate withdrawal of Being, then a fortiori Being must be thought of in terms of a withdrawal, namely, its own (eigen). The first negativity has its secret wellspring in an other negativity. Being is that which is not, nor could ever be, a being, it is that which differentiates itself from all beings, it is that which withdraws from beings --indeed, withdraws from them so that they can  be beings for a while (jeweilen). This means that neither Being nor Nothing is to be thought save in this withdrawal. Nothing must be thought in the withdrawal of Being; Being must be thought in the withdrawal of It Itself, i.e. Ereignis. Only according to this withdrawal of Being itself (Seyn) is it possible and necessary that the non-identity of Being and Nothing be maintained --a terrible and overburdening task of maintenance to which our essence has been fatefully assigned, as is revealed in the present age of technology.

 Being and Nothing are indeed not identical, yet they are the same.

Interpreting the statement now, the non-identity of Being and Nothing belongs to the non-identity of Being itself. This non-identity proves to be too excessive to offer the stability of a stage upon which to prop the sublation of dialectic. If for Hegel, the sameness of Being and Nothing is in dialectical tension with their non-identity, things are even more paradoxical for Heidegger: the non-identity of Being itself, a negativity which we now understand as withdrawal, marks that separation between Being as such and Being itself whereby the negativity of the Nothing is made possible. The non-identity of Being is the source of its sameness with Nothing.

Das Selbe: A Seynsgeschichtlich Definition

Heidegger has always sought to properly avoid (vermeiden) the ensarements of Hegel's historical thinking, and for just this reason Heidegger's thought regarding history, from Destruktion to Seynsgeschichte,  has always respected Hegel's acknowledgment of the necessity that anyone asking the question of the meaning of history be beset from the outset with the immanent criticism of his own historical predjudices at work in the posing of this question. In short, Hegel's Universal History was the first to carry itself out in constant awareness of this limit, and Heidegger's Seynsgeschichte does not fall prey to some retrogressive naivete regarding the matter. Thinking regarding history must be historically situated; one cannot consider history save from within history ---nor is it, according to both thinkers and for drastically different reasons, desirable to even try to do so.

Keeping this necessity of immanent criticism in mind then, I would like to refine one of my own previous considerations of a crucial aspect of Seynsgeschichte that I articulated more than a year ago in a great discussion here. The aspect under consideration is Das Selbe. Previously I had tried to give a formal sketch of Das Selbe --an attempt destined for a certain kind of failure. But now I would like to offer a step toward a more concrete consideration of Das Selbe. Previously, I had offered the following gloss:

The Same is the name for Being as it has been granted throughout each epoch. But each epoch understands Being differently. The Same, therefore, does not designate an identity among epochal sendings of Being, nor does it designate another underlying thing (subjectum) in terms of which the unity of the epochs can be thought. Rather the Same designates that in terms of which each epoch may be called an epoch, or in other words, that in terms of which each epoch differs from the other yet remains epochal. What is this? It is the ἐποχή, that is, the withholding of the beginning which is proper to the beginning, and which destines in advance all possible epochs. The identical requires the present. The Same, unlike the identical, is that which cannot any longer be grasped now, in the present age, but rather lies in our future as the beginning. The Same is thus the still unthought jointure in terms of which the epochs are related. It is therefore a unity that can account for the plurality without reducing it to some one present thing. The attempt to say the Same explicitly must accordingly necessarily diversify itself.

I do not quote myself to be redundantly self-approving, but to point out an inherent shortcoming of this previous characterization. What the above sketch misses is the requirement that, if das Selbe is to be thought appropriately, it must be thought from out of the current age --and when we do this we avoid the tendency to think of it emptily in a mere formal logical fashion. Das Selbe is now --that is to say in the present age, the non-identical unity of Sein and Nichts. This very timely definition must be understood in terms of a state of affairs that has persisted, as it were, throughout Beyng's history, namely, that what das Selbe designates is that which has, up to the present time, always referred to both "Being as such" (i.e. that Sein which is understood in a seinsverstaendnis) and "Beyng itself" (that which is not yet understood in and as "Being as such"). In fact, it refers more precisely to this "and", their very conjunction. What sort of conjunction is this? When we speak in terms of beings, "the same" almost always designates a relation between two things. By contrast, when we speak in terms of Being, "the same" refers to a difference within Being itself, namely, the difference opened up by Being sending itself.

If it is true that to speak of Das Selbe in the current age is to speak of the dangerous coincidence of Sein and Nichts, then this is so only because the present understanding of Being has been given Nothing to understand. In keeping with the duality that results from the opening between Being as such and Beyng itself we must hear this last assertion in the full range of its ambiguity.

"The present understanding of Being has been given Nothing..." 

This means first the present age has been refused a grant of Being which would enable a succeeding epoch to subsequently take its place. Because the present age has been given nothing it is also the last age, the age which ends the ages. However, just as soon as we admit this meaning of our assertion we must immediately consider another meaning --namely, that the present age, having been given Nothing to understand, has been assigned a peculiar mandate, indeed, has been given (geben) nothing but an auf-gabe, in order even to properly take place as an age at all. The two meanings of this assertion, dangerously coinciding in the same words, could hardly be in greater strife with one another. One claims the age has been left without a future, the other claims that it is precisely nothing other than this future which the present age must claim in order to be itself. However this apparent opposition is only a semblance resulting from the unique confluence of Das Selbe. For, to be given Nothing to think, i.e. to be thoughtlessly commanded by what is no longer present, namely Gestell, is to be offered the perilous possibility that we must, in a manner unprecedented, think precisely what this Nothing itself is. If we have nothing to think about in the present age, then we may no longer take even this Nothing for granted. Nothing now becomes the present form of what must still be thought as Being itself (Seyn). For this reason, Being and Nothing can never be considered identical, but they may be called the Same, das Selbe.

To Philosophize with a Broken Hammer: A Brief Remark on a Familiar Discussion

The interference of φύσις, in the sense in which it is made accessible within Sein und Zeit's tentative schematic of possible innerweltliches Seiendes, might be understood according to two, seemingly mutually exclusive possibilities. The first of these is the obstinacy of nature, in which something natural is zuhanden in a deficient mode: the rock that you stumble on while hiking, the snow that prevents your flight to Boston from leaving on time, etc.  The deficiency here in view, namely that which yields obstinacy, is in principle the same, albeit in a manifestation less extreme, as that of the all too underscored "broken tool" of Sein und Zeit. What is characteristic of this interference of nature is that it is an interference at all by virtue of its modal deficiency; it remains totally comprehended by the phenomenal realm of zuhandenheit precisely as a negative phenomenon --one which receives its negative character only to the extent that it has been freed a priori as something zuhanden.  But this negative interference seems also to coincide, and even perhaps necessarily, with a positive interference; the zuhandenheit of nature seems also to require the possibility of, if I may venture this use of the word, a physiology of zuhandenheit. When, in the course of hammering the nail which will hold up the canvas and frame whereby the rustic summer house cottage room will be illuminated anew by Van Gogh's Peasant Shoes, the metal of the hammer snaps at the thinnest part of the neck, not only has the referential totality (within which the hammer already resided and by virtue of which alone it was capable of being used) lit up as such, but nature, hidden in the hammer, has conspicuously announced itself. The lighting up of the one and the announcing of the other coincided, but they are not at all identical. What nature here announces itself in this positive interference of nature? Such nature is, to be sure, not a Naturding; even less is it any "ding an sich" in the sense of a de-worlded vorhanden ding, an individuated res extensa. Thus, the classical understanding of the artificial substance as a thing possessed of a natural substratum reasserts itself here --yet in a way in which neither that artificial thing nor nature can any longer be confused with what is vorhanden, which confusion is precisely what definitively characterized the classical understanding. Thus the "broken tool" is not simply the occasion of a loss of world that lights up what is thus lost; it is also the very assertion of φύσις itself -- its interference is the intrusive reminder of a forgotten world, or of a forgotten 'part' of the very world which has been lit up as the worin of the referential totality.

        

This is of interest to me because, as I have already tried to emphasize, it is not that nature has ceased to be zuhanden in the broken tool or the airport delay. Whether we trip over a hidden tree stump, catch sun-glare on the windshield while driving to an appointment we are late for, snap a screw-driver in the midst of a last minute fix, or get attacked by a bear while trying to survey some wooded forest land, nature not only asserts itself and interferes, but it does so only within and through a world in terms of which, for example, we might disclose ourselves through panic, and our 'world' might go to pieces. 

     So the point is: the broken tool is not only a sign of the illuminating retraction of, but also the assertion of world. We would almost want to speak of two worlds passing by each other and intersecting on the way, were it not for the phenomenal evidence before us: the worlds are not so radically different as to not be understood as the singular world of In-der-Welt-Sein, and these retractions and assertions, it must at least be provisionally conceded, have as their common ontic site innerweltlich Seiendes. Thus the question is, how does one account for the paradoxical interference of φύσις in which world is at once asserted and rescinded? Again, one cannot say that this is reducible to the traditional distinction between nature and artifice for many reasons, but perhaps the obvious and most persistent one is the one we have already indicated: nature and artifice are not to be distinguished according to vor- and zu-handenheit. Nature is already zuhanden,  but zuhandenheit is already natural --and yet not at all because there are natural things -- a collection of individual substances or 'objects' in the 'great outdoors'. The plane that you can't take to Boston might very well have frustrated your future and thus lit up the 'fact' that the world you are in also lies ahead of you, but it has done so just as much through a startling assertion of the world which I would now, imputing a different sense to the word, want to call a physiological assertion. However, the physiological assertion enacts itself just as much as it is already contained in the world, the same world capable of illuminating retraction: the sudden snowstorm not only disrupts, it also surprises.

The Logic of Catastrophe: A Study in Arachnology, Part I

          Kant… This catastrophic spider…

        - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (hat-tip Edward Feser)

In a discussion spawned by the last post's attempt to defend Heidegger against a common historicistic misreading, I was given occasion to sketch a rough, formal definition of that logical specimen which may serve, within certain limits, as a criterion according to which the difference between historicism and Heidegger's seynsgeschichte may be judged irreducible. The Liar's Paradox, as the specimen is sometimes called, was there specified as follows: 

The "Liar's Paradox" names any proposition the form of which contradicts that same proposition's content due to the manner in which the latter referentially contains the former." The Liar's Paradox as I have just formulated it can assume either a universal or a particular form, in keeping with the twofold possibility of the form of all predication (or if you prefer, propositional formation).
An example of its universal form would be: "All propositions are false". An example of its particular form would be "This proposition is false."".

The Liar's Paradox has a history whose origins may be traced at least as far back as the ancient Greek Cretan Epimenides, whose famous warning that "All Cretan's are liars" raised suspicion in regard not only to its credibility but, remarkably, also to its incredibility. But for the purposes of the present post, it is not its alleged ancient Greek origin but its alleged exemplification in modern transcendental idealism that is in need of some consideration: the author of Just Thomism has recently drawn attention to the way in which the "basic thesis" of Kant's first Kritik offers us a shining example of just such a logical fallacy:

The basic thesis of the Critique is that the mind cannot move beyond the bounds of possible experience. But the more often he argues and repeats the point, the more ironic it becomes, for sooner or later it becomes clear that Kant is giving page after page of non-empirical arguments to show that only empirical arguments are possible. To use Kant’s own language in his preface, when does he ever put the nature of the mind on the witness stand and force it to only answer the questions that he is putting to it? 

Is Kant, logically speaking, a bold-faced Liar? The question, however seemingly simplistic, is obviously an important one: perjury is perhaps least acceptable before the tribunal of Rational criticism. And while the objection is not an uncommon  one among intelligent readers of Kant, it is all the more pressing since Kant himself does not leave the peculiar character of his "thesis" unaddressed: 

That the understanding, therefore, cannot make of its a priori principles, or even of its conceptions, other than an empirical use, is a proposition which leads to the most important results. A transcendental use is made of a conception in a fundamental proposition or principle, when it is applied to things in general and in themselves, an empirical use, when it is applied merely to appearances , that is, to objects of a possible experience. (KrV A 239, B 298) 

If we are to examine Kant's words in the light of the aforementioned objection, then the first order of business is to ensure that no equivocation is afoot --or, in other words, that the terms to which the objection has been raised can be translated without significant remainder into those of the Kritik's actual proposition. Thinking along these lines we may be inclined to take observation of a state of affairs at once superficial and significant: the word Kant employs above which has been rendered as "understanding" is verstand. An immediate difference in terminology becomes apparent with the force of something obvious: Kant's work is not entitled "Kritik der Reinen Verstand", but "Kritik der Reinen Vernunft". It would be hard to overstate the importance of differentiating between the two faculties and of never losing sight of their difference, not only in the first Kritik, nor only in the entire critical project of Kant, but in German Idealism as a whole --even when, as in Hegel, the goal is to arrive at the Identity within this difference.

But for our present purposes, such a superficial  observation, while necessary, is insufficient. For what is at stake in the task at hand is not only that the powers of the mind cannot be reduced to verstand, but that the nature of verstand, when positively expounded and clearly specified, be unconfused with the source of Kant's proposition regarding the limitations of the employment of that same verstand. What does Kant mean by speaking of the "use of the understanding", in either its transcendental or its empirical variety? What is the nature of such "use" or "application"?  In his most general accounts, Kant speaks of verstand as "a spontaneity of knowledge" in distinction from the receptivity of sensibility (KrV A 126). At such a level of description we might very well be inclined to think of the understanding as identifiable with "mind" or with "the mental faculty" broadly conceived. But Kant also supplies his reader with far more specific accounts of the understanding: Kant's revolutionary claim is that it is possible "to reduce all acts of the understanding to judgements" and thus to regard the understanding specifically as "faculty of judgments" (KrV A 68, B 93). The precise sense then, of "the use of the understanding" here in question regards those functions whose combinatory power enables the setzen, the positing, that occurs in and is proper to all scientific, that is, synthetic judgment. Analytic judgments such as those that are to be found in logic, may well constitute a propaedeutic to science, but they can never constitute a body of scientific knowledge proper; they are not to be regarded as a use or application of the understanding, either in its transcendental or empirical variety. The use of the understanding, then, precisely in so far as it is so regarded, results in the acquisition of objective knowledge, i.e. not simply tautologous, but ampliative knowledge, which extends the wealth of what is already known,  and whose systematic possession constitutes, for Kant, the aims of all science. The use of the understanding is most properly referred to the acquisition of scientific knowledge, and that scientific knowledge, because it  must be ampliative (and therefore objective), must depend upon the possibility of categorial judgement, i.e. the capacity to say something about something. 

But it is here that the question is only begged all the more: when we revisit Kant's quotation above, isn’t Kant therein saying something ("cannot make any use other than empirical") about something ("the understanding" as it relates to its "a priori principles" and "conceptions")? But if we bear firmly in mind the specific meaning of the understanding that Kant has clarified, then an answer becomes detectable.  For what is meant by "saying something about something", i.e. by categorial judgment, is that act by which one can establish relations with an object --and not just any manner of relations, but precisely those in terms of which the object itself can be known and knowledge can thereby be amplified.  In other words the combination achieved in such judgment must be achieved in just such a way that that combination be justified and necessitated by nothing but the object itself; the grounds of our judgment must be looked for nowhere else than in the object itself. Only thus is knowledge truly objective. I can, on the other hand, say something about an object without my statement being objective knowledge (but only an opining about perception), as in Kant's famous example: "the rock in the sun over there is warm". This judgment does indeed refer to an object as to its matter. But --and this is the crucial point --it does not find the ground of its combination therein. Rather we should say in such a case that this combination is only to be found in the representing subject, in which the representations of  "rock" and "warmth" have happened to coincide. Such a judgement is a judgement of perception.  But if a judgment is to produce objective knowledge, if it is to truly say something about something, if it is to be a categorial judgment, then it must be a judgement of experience, the sole possibility of which depends upon the application of the categories and not upon subjective coincidence. Thus, when I say: "the sun causes the rock over there to increase in temperature", I am now relying on much more than a coincidence of representations to intend the object of my judgement; I am relying not on the mere subjective simultaneity revealed within time as inner intuition but upon the objective succession of time as universal intuition, i.e. as the element in which alone the matter of my representations (and not my representations qua form) can be given. Such a distinction is the fundamental basis of the second of Kant's Analogies of Experience, and, more generally of all dynamical determinations, and it must therefore be regarded as elementary to the entire argument, the "basic thesis", of the Kritik itself. 

To recapitulate: the use of the understanding, when specified as judgment, can be roughly spoken of as the act whereby one predicates or "says something about something", but such saying is itself a πολλαχῶς λεγόμενον. When we sort out the equivocation at play here, we discover that the primary sense of such "saying something about something" is the judgement qua judgment of experience, whose combination is objective, and not the judgment of perception whose combination is subjective. The case of Kant's proposition regarding the use of the understanding that we are discussing above can be classified in neither of the two ways just mentioned; the necessity of its connexion depends neither upon the use of the a priori principles of the understanding, nor upon the coincidence of representation, which is why the statement is properly logical in the transcendental sense; its matter, while belonging to a determinate domain (unlike General Logic, which bears no reference to material content whatsoever), is itself yet formal and only that. It is for this reason that Kant begins his second book of the Transcendental Analytic, namely, The Analytic of Principles, by noting the following regarding the material content of all knowledge proper to Transcendental Logic: 

As Transcendental Logic is limited to a certain determinate content, namely to the content of those modes of knowledge which are pure and a priori, it cannot follow general logic in its division...Understanding and judgment find, therefore, in transcendental logic their canon of objectively valid and correct employment.  (KrV A 131, B 170)  

Kant's point here bears repeating: a canon of the objective and correct employment of the understanding, and not that objective knowledge gained by such employment, is to provide the proper subject matter of the transcendental logic. For the Liar's Paradox to be operative in Kant's transcendento-logical statement that "the understanding, therefore, cannot make of its a priori principles, or even of its conceptions other than an empirical use", that statement must be a product of the use of the a priori principles or conceptions of the understanding, i.e. it must be establishing a categorial saying something about something. But this is not what it is doing, since categorial application, because it by definition is grounded in the object itself, always depends on the givenness of time in terms of which the appearance of that object is informed. If all objects of knowledge are in the first place given in and under the conditions of intuition as Kant has transcendentally exposited them, and if one accepts that the very application of the categories depends on those conditions and owes all of its (formal) meaning to them,  then his thesis regarding the empirical limits of the use of the understanding is logically unassailable. But however his exposition and analysis of the conditions of knowing be understood, it cannot be understood as vulnerable to the Liar's Paradox.

Footnote to a Common, All Too Common "Explanation" of Seynsgeschichte

I find myself regularly marveling at the attempts, made by many an otherwise adept reader, to explicate Heidegger's understanding of the History of Being in a manner that inevitably ends up reducing the whole affair to a cultural historicism (sometimes even empirically ascertained!). What's worse, Heidegger's "idea about Western history" is depicted as one that is not even aware of its own vulnerability to the liar's paradox! Thus, either the question of how Heidegger himself would be able to 'access' the meaning of previous ages or the question of how he would be able to access the fact that he could not access such meaning often goes entirely neglected in such historicistic readings. I don't mean to suggest that there aren't insightful inquiries and honest work being done on Heidegger's seynsgeschichtliche denken, even in the abbreviated form afforded by the "blogosphere" (see, for example, the excellent William Koch's Philosophy Blog among others). Nor am I suggesting that the thought take only one form of articulation --indeed by definition, as it were, it cannot. But there is a persistent and often even crude misunderstanding of Heidegger's Seynsgeschichte that seems to me to have plagued its English-speaking reception, and it should be purged.

It is fortuitous, then, that even a reader who finds himself inept in the art of interpreting Heidegger carefully has been provided many passages in which Heidegger is nearly vitriolic in his appraisal of both "culture" and historicism. In Besinnung (1938-9), Heidegger writes:

   "Finally, the thinking in terms of values is the most superficial superficialization of Being as objectness...Domination of cultural consciousness and consequently domination of cutural politics pursues a growing consolidation of modernity in the direction of that which modernity as such pursues, namely, the forgottenness of Sein. The uprootedness of man does not consist in a certain shaping and particular degeneration of culture and cultural consciousness. Rather, culture as such is this uprootedness and indicates the severance of man's as yet ungrounded ownmost from history...Historicism is the total domination of history in the sense of reckoning with what is past in view of what is present, all in order to claim thereby once and for all man's ownmost as 'historical' --not geschichtliche. The domination of history will be overcome only through geschichte, through a novel decision and through an ever-first inquiry into the truth of Seyn."  (GA 66, pg. 147 in the English translation (poorly) entitled "Mindfulness").

Here it is quite obvious that historicism is not only being deliberately contrasted with Seynsgeschichte but that the latter is proposed as a manner of overcoming the former. What are people thinking when they try to 'describe' the history of Being as a succession of cultural understandings that are simply not governed by any overarching rationality? With such a description, one may have succeeded in offering an understanding of history that has lost --or rather simply negated --any resemblance to Hegelian Universal History, but they are equally (if not further) removed from Heidegger's Seynsgeschichte. As if Heidegger were speaking of a sociological version of Kuhnian paradigm shift. What could be more facile? (And, in fact, that is not being fair to Kuhn). It is perhaps well past time to take seriously Heidegger's insistence that in order to think the History of Being we must first of all understand that and how it is something yet to come, something which properly lies in the future (zukunft). The History of Being is no account of past cultures, practices, or even concepts. It is no account of the past at all.  Rather, as Heidegger reminds us in his widely read letter to Jean Beaufret, the History of Being lies imminently before us. It is the History of what has not yet been thought --and this now means: the way the unthought intiates and rules the very movement of History. What is still unthought: this criterion should be applied to all 'synoptic accounts' or 'explanations' of seynsgeschichte --not as a measure that can be replaced by or confused with the explanatory grounds of irrationality (say, the id or unconscious), but as a measure which always separates itself off from such explanatory conceptions by differing from them in a manner that relies on the future.