Heidegger Contra Transhumanism Part 1: Dasein, not Mensch

"Make no mistake, what we are speaking of here is a transformation in the essence of man."
There is a great irony in beginning the bald declaration of such a radical proposal as Heidegger does, in his now infamous Einführung die Metaphysik, with the assurance "make no mistake" ---a phrase seemingly guranteeing univocity to a proposal that is anything but univocal. As this post will hope to indicate, not without reason is this proposal vulnerable to the grossest and most dangerous of misunderstandings. Not without reason does it seem to join the chorus of a legion of modern thinkers proclaiming man's transformative enlightenment, as in Kant's second Kritik, where the transition from man to a rational being in general becomes the essential index of the truth of practical concepts, or as in Marx where the dialectic inherent in the economico-historical essence of man eventually yields his consummate transformation towards the achievement of a species-being --to say nothing of the Nieztschean "either-or" of a Letzte- or an Ueber-mensch, heralding the advent of a bio-technologically empowered master race. Not without reason, we say --for, the very reason, the very grund, that necessitates the semblance of an affinity between Heidegger and these modern thinkers of the metaphysically trans-human, has according to Heidegger himself,  not been negated but has become utterly concealed, obnubilating the fragile divide that must be maintained in order to hold apart things and their mighty opposites. Not without reason, then, unless the lack of reason, the abgrund, be equatable to the retraction of a reason, nay, of its very essence, into perfect concealment. Indeed, Heidegger's quote comes precisely at a time of what he would call, a year later in his Beiträge, abysmal distress, or as the Einführung has become quotable for formulating: the flight of the gods and the darkening of the world unto its night. Heidegger's seemingly dismal assessment of this catastrophic concatenation of events is well-known. The spirit of historical humanity whose very effluence is thinking itself,  has reached the final stage of its ex-piration; it has become disempowered, and this lost power has cascaded down into the volatile  deadlock of power-constellations that the techno-political realm, as a result, has exclusively become. Following fast upon this disempowerment, thinking undergoes an emergency and a struggle for its own life; it gasps to give new breath and meaning to the old words in terms of which alone it is allowed to receive a public, political hearing. Those words, now at such a desperate stage in the life of Western thought, are the philsophical dialect of Heidegger's Rektoratsrede, and they refer to self-assertion, the will-to-know, the spiritual mission of a people, over-powering power, and, yes, a transformation of man --and we must pay attention to the precise wording here: not only a transformation of man, but even more emphatically, of the essence of man. What could have been meant by such a transformation, if it is not meant to join the chorus of exhortations of the transformation of man that Heidegger understands as a mark of the last metaphysicians, from whose company he strives at every turn to sharply distinguish himself? In the series of posts that follow I wish to point out a path that leads toward  an answer to this question.


 The first thing necessary to catch the sense of direction that will lead us to this path is to cast a backward glance toward the inception of phenomenology; for there is a strong continuity that runs from the essential motivations of this beginning all the way to Heidegger's 1935 call for transformation. It is of seminal importance to understand how phenomenology, at first rather imperceptibly in the nascent form of Brentano's Deskriptive Psychologie, and then with increasing clarity in Husserl's lifelong critical engagement with psychologism,  becomes aware of its own necessity and vocation precisely by delimiting the field of an emerging, still amorphous, science of man, namely psychology. Heidegger's Habilitationshcrift faithfully pays homage to this critique and sustains this critical engagement when Sein und Zeit first brings what Heidegger considers to be the true phenomenological characterization of the essence of man as Dasein precisely in relief from the ontic sciences of man, chief among which is psychology. For the purposes of gaining an intial orientation to the question of man's transformation, it will be enough if we can appreciate the logic here operative in Heidegger's delimitation of the field of psychology, and, in general, of the ontic sciences, sharply from that field in which Dasein comes into view. This appreciation will also serve, secondarily, as a reference point by means of which the reader of Sein und Zeit may dismiss claims that the work is itself a psychological or philosophico-anthropological study masquerading as an ontological study --a claim which seems to perennially appear in myriad subtle forms and misguide  scholarship from time to time.

According to that logic of Sein und Zeit, the problem of the field of psychology and the attempt to achieve an adequate concept of man really becomes transparent in its requirements and achieves proper self-understanding when it is referred back to those mechanisms whereby a science achieves its foundation: namely foreconception and fundamental conception. The tendency to surrender such phenomena as "inner experiences" or "emotional states" to the field of psychology is here anticipated and countered. Everything, indeed, depends upon our fore-conception of the phenomenon in question; we can certainly greet stimmungen as instances of "psychological moods" or "inner experiences" but the question is: what fore-conception enables this greeting? Certainly not one that just fell from the sky but one that was established with the very foundations of the science of psychology. So the real question about "mental processes", because it is dependent upon that forum in which the identification of something *AS* mental process is made possible, is reducible to the question of how sciences get founded. More specifically, a science is only capable of being founded if a certain domain is granted to it in advance as that which it must subsequently discover. For example, in the broadest sense, biology, before it even begins, must be granted the possibility of treating anything whatsoever precisely with an eye toward whether it is living or non-living. At a certain point, it may even try to procure a certain"working" definition of life, but it has only come up with this definition by first recognizing and examining living and non-living things. It is clear, then, that biology is made possible by a fore-conception of life that is presupposed in its most basic concepts and that therefore unifies the foundation of that science.

If, in the fore-conception in terms of which a science establishes its basic concepts, the inherent unity of its task and the extent and limit of its objective domain is established, then accompanying this establishment a discernible rank and priority necessarily presents itself in the fore-conceptual interrelations that already obtain between the fundamental concepts of entirely distinct sciences: one science must inherently presuppose another if in the objective domain of that other science can be included the fore-conception which makes possible the fundamental concepts of the first. This rank and priority among the sciences, based solely on the manner of each field's fore-conceptual founding, necessarily leads to a truly unique possibility: the possibility of a science the fundamental concepts of which alone constitute that same science's pre-given objective domain of investigation. Heidegger in Sein und Zeit calls this necessity "Der Ontlogische Vorrang des Seinsfrage". Vor-rang is here given according to the inherent capacity of an inquiry to pursue its own Vor-griff, fore-conception. Such a science whose most proper object is also its origin, and whose proper conceptuality must not only be rooted in but must also thematize its fore-conceptual basis Heidegger calls Fundamental ontology. This science necessarily deals with the fundament of all science as an explicit theme in the course of accessing its proper object. At the same time, this science relates to its objective domain for one reason and one reason alone: to make explicit the fore-conception in terms of which that objective domain gets founded. Now, in fundamental ontology this aforementioned objective domain is constituted by that being (seiende) which serves as the condition for the possibility of the explicit establishment of any fundamental concepts whatsoever. Ontically speaking, such a being is called man (mensch). Both psychology and fundamental ontology look to man as to the being which occupies their respective objective domains, but they take this object in entirely different ways. In what, epistemically speaking, does this difference consist?

The object of psychology, man, is found within an objective domain constituted by an already established fundamental concepts of the psychic, experience, consciousness (and perhaps the unconscious, etc), but these are dependent upon a fore-conception of human existence which is determined based on an understanding of "an underlying", i.e.the subjectum of subjectivity in terms of which, e.g., the ego, id, and super-ego would be found (but this exmple should not be taken to restrict our sense of psychology to psychoanalysis). Such a fore-conception predetermines man as a "bearer of mental processes" which processes can in turn be investigated in their own right. And here we see the main difference: for while man as psychic is taken as an object according to fundamental concepts that have already been established in keeping with certain fore-conceptions, man as Dasein is taken as an object precisely to the extent that it is capable of being taken as a pre-conceptual condition for the possibility of all fundamental concepts, i.e. insofar as the man is that being in terms of which the fore-conception of Being itself may be made conceptual. Angst, eigentlichkeit, sein-zum-tode, langeweile, grundstimmungen, etc. are all inquired into strictly in terms of the way they illuminate the foreconception of that very inquiry ---a foreconception which is ultimately Sein itself.  It is for this reason that man is called, in Fundamental Ontology, Da-sein.

Get Back In your Cave!: Bloom and Heidegger on the Question of Historical Freedom

The Whirlpool's Rim regularly posts such thoughtful things that I want to respond to but almost never actually do, so I don't want to pass the opportunity up yet again when Tony writes: 

I don't wish to derail the discussion of inauthenticity at Seynsgeschichte, but I wonder how Bloom's view of the value of "the experience of living in Plato's Cave" -- that is, of having lived within a defined cultural tradition -- differs from Heidegger's view of the presupposition of gerede and of the inauthentic as harbor of and "condition of possibility" for the authentic. Is it necessary, in the end, to leave the "vagaries of history" behind?

Eliot's Four Quartets instructs us or assures us or dissuades us with the following: "Only through time/Time is conquered"...and, again,: "History may be servitude/History may be freedom"

I think we may profit by wresting these lines in the direction of Heidegger's thought of history...that is, history as of Beyng. Let us employ the distinction often employed in discussions like those of the meaning of categories liberal and conservative, or those which invoke Burke to describe a proper relation to tradition. That distinction would be the one also used by Berlin in his essays on the topic...namely the distinction between negative and positive freedom. The claim from Deneen to which Tony refers above is that, on the level of "the vagaries of history," that is, the level of things inherited or inheritable as opposed to, say, 'ahistorical transcendentals' (e.g. the Straussian concept of Natural right or, at least, the foundations of this concept), Bloom's admiration of positive freedom was superficial and utilitarian. If historical positive freedom, in the sense of having a (respectable, genuine) cave, is to be lauded, it is only because it offers the opportunity of a higher form of negative historical freedom, that is, of a philosophic escape from one's cave --an escape also from history itself. This may or may not be a fair characterization of Bloom's position, but it does seem to resonate with my reading of his Closing. In fact, Closing  can be seen as a whole to be a long argument for the need for Western tradition to be upheld --and to be upheld for the sake of an eventual philosophic liberation from the bondage of tradition. As an aside I must say Deneen is flat out wrong, however, if he indeed (as it seems prima facie he does) conflates Bloom's contempt for a fraudulent notion of "muliculturalism" with a very different contempt for culture in general, which I, for one, do not see Bloom possessing. So-called multiculturalism and the self-defeating celebration of diversity which annihilates appreciation for real difference, Bloom rightly dealt with in a Nietzschean spirit as a thin rainbow sheet loosely covering a stinking carcass of nihilism and consummate cultural oblivion.
But however much credence we can lend to Deneen's characterization of Bloom's liberalism, there can be no doubt that it is at variance with Heidegger, who is often politically pegged as a conservative or by some of his not so secret unadmirers, a fascist. But the difference here is thoughtlessly missed if we stick to these unhelpful and nearly (I do not say "completely") meaningless categories. I would prefer to construe it with the help of another pair of problematic, though less problematic in my mind, categories, namely "negative and positive freedom". Like Eliot's lines above suggest, Heidegger does not see tradition as either a cave of bondage or a springboard for philosophic assent. For Heidegger and Eliot, tradition blindly masters us for better or worse at first, but --and here is the crucial point--it is that same tradition which is to be made the "object" of our positive freedom. Tradition not only must be labored for to be properly inherited --it is itself worth the labor. The ground and source of tradition is the only place where true freedom is to be achieved. History, properly understood, is transcendental and its bond can never be broken, only modified. In this modification, to which I recently referred  in an enjoyable discussion of Sein und Zeit with Jeremiah, as an "existentiell modification of the the existential of inauthenticty", real recovery of the forgetful condition of human existence is made possible ---and it is made possible precisely and only by a posture of anticipating, i.e. by an historical posture. Speaking modally, then, it is really (i.e. in an ontic site) made possible, but is not yet actual. Because of the non-actuality of this reality (a reality which the early Heidegger, still speaking in the tongue of Lebensphilosophie, would call the true and genuine scientific life, a life sprung from a science capable of recovering and returning to life instead of forgetting and objectifying it, a mature living possession of science), Heidegger's freedom cannot be called positive, but it is certainly even further away from the Enlightenment's exhalted "virtue" of negative freedom.  History and forgetfulness are necessary not only to the obfuscation of truth but for the achievement of truth. Nor are they an instrument for its achievement. They are inherent to its finite possession. Indeed, history is the truth in the sense the truth, in being true, historizes; truth is eventual. Inheriting is built into the very structure of truth. In this way, finitude is not simply man's. It belongs more primordially to truth ---to the way truth ITSELF withdraws, that is, withdraws itself.
       Bloom, like Strauss, seems only to have seen Heidegger in opposition to his own idea of a strictly negative historical freedom. Heidegger is, for him, a relativist of the most brilliant sort, or more precisely, Heidegger is an historicist, albeit one of top philosophic caliber. this is because Bloom sees Heidegger promoting and amplifying the Nietzschean mantra of "commitment" and decisionism --i.e. of willing the historical situation to which one has been fated and of considering all truth to be found in this will, and thus to be entirely historically enclosed or "horizonal." But, as I have had pause to remark before, Heidegger does not say this. If, in Sein und Zeit, he thinks of time as "the transcendental horizon for any possible understanding of Being", this is not because Heidegger thinks truth is a function of historical trend. Rather Heidegger is thinking of time and history differently --not as either a flux or a succession of moments (or ages). but rather as concealments of Being itself. Time gives an understanding of Being (Sein) but Being itself, i.e. Seyn as Ereignis, gives time by giving it itself. There is time only by virtue of the granting of Beyng itself. History is of Beyng. Authentic "positive freedom" lies not in willing one's current historical understanding but in binding oneself to what has already in advance given or made possible the understanding of an age...and that is something which such an understanding initially hides or conceals. To simply will one's historical situation is to misunderstand it. Nietzsche's perspectivism prioritizes history over truth. Heidegger, by contrast sees history as a path to truth, but unlike Bloom he also thinks this path to be part of the truth. To discard it as an instrument would be to discard the truth which we are seeking to reach by its means. The only other thinker who can claim this of history is Hegel, but, as I have discussed elsewhere, he does so in a manner violently opposed to Heidegger.

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.