Descartes the Heideggerian
Descartes the Heideggerian — the grand irony, of course, is that Descartes was fundamentally Heideggerian. Wait, what? I maintain that all of Cartesianism rests on a Heideggerian foundation (I want to say upfront that this line of thought is deeply inspired by a section in Richard Polt’s The Emergency of Being. Some of this is merely a rehashing of Polt’s insights). But in what sense? The debate between Descartes and Heidegger has become one of the great antagonisms in the history of philosophy. Considering that Being and Time is largely an attempt to rethink what it means to be a human being, an attempt to phenomenologically destroy the Cartesian cogito as formulated in Meditations on First Philosophy and replace it with Dasein as Being-in-the-world, it seems particularly strange to say that Descartes’ philosophy rests on a Heideggerian foundation. If Cartesianism never arrived at the thinking of Being qua Being, if it never asked about the meaning of Being as such, and instead only thought the beingness of beings (the essence or whatness of certain types of beings), then what is the Heideggerian kernel at the heart of it?
To see the truth of this line of thought, we must bring our thinking to a slow crawl. A claim as counterintuitive as this necessitates calm Lento — any slower and we would miss the beat. The key to understanding this claim lies in a distinction Heidegger made in Contributions to Philosophy, namely, the distinction between Seyn (Beyng) and Sein (Being). But what is the difference between Beyng with a “y” and Being with an “i”? In this difference we will uncover Descartes’ fundamental relation to Heidegger’s thinking of Being.
Let us begin with Being. This is precisely the Being in the title Being and Time. What is meant by “Being”? How are beings given to us? How do we stand open to beings as a whole and as such? If beings are given to Dasein, then what are we to make of the giving of what is given? The early Heidegger thought of the giving of what is given, the Being of beings, in terms of familiarity (Hubert Dreyfus famously refers to this as “the background” and as “background practices”). Normally and usually, we are simply concerned with beings, e.g., chairs, dogs, shoes, computers, etc. For the most part, we are absorbed with the beings we use to fulfill our goals. This type of existential cruise-control or “skillful coping” is conditioned by being familiar with the world (Being-at-home-in-the-world). A particular being, say a cup, is given to us on the basis of our background familiarity with beings as such. We are usually too busy interacting with beings to question our very accessibility to the whole of them. This pre-philosophical, pre-theoretical, pre-reflective familiarity with the world as a whole is Being — it is that on the basis of which beings as such are given to us. It is on the basis of our primordial trust of things that they can show themselves to Dasein in a meaningful way. Now, while the whole of beings is always already given to Dasein, a specific being can be non-given. In other words, Dasein doesn’t have access to every single being in having access to beings as such. Life generally becomes the pursuit of beings we do not yet have access to, e.g., money. It is our “need” for beings we do not possess that leads to us forgetting our access to beings as a whole. Our ontic concerns give us ontological amnesia. We forget that we can only chase down particular beings on the basis of Being itself.
We dwell in our familiarity like a fish dwells in water. It is the invisible home that makes our lives possible. This familiarity, this background, this pre-conceptual intelligibility, insulates us from the terrifying indifference of what Deleuze and Guattari called “Chaos” and what Levinas called “il y a” (the ‘there is’). But insofar as we inconspicuously inhabit it, we never come to encounter it as such, we never notice it (science itself forgets Being in the same way). But if familiarity is our home or the inside, our most fundamental interior space (though not a private, subjective one), then we can only come to properly encounter it from a distance, that is, from the outside. But in what way do we get “outside” of Being-as-familiarity or Being-as-home? This can occur in a number of different ways. Inside the functionality of our everydayness, we cannot encounter beings as a whole, but on rare occasions there will be a rupture in this order, a tear in this homogeneous fabric. These ruptures necessitate what Deleuze called the Encounter in Difference and Repetition, that is, an experience so intense that it disrupts our mode of access to the world. This is similar to the Lacanian notion of the Real bursting through and shattering the Symbolic. However, the larval form of these concepts of disruption can be located in Heidegger’s description of unreadiness-to-hand in Being and Time. But it must be stressed that not all encounters with beings as such are necessarily traumatic — in fact, it can be downright joyful.
For example, the experience of beings as such can assail us in when we are overtaken by the beauty of a sunset; it can hit us at the moment that we have a serious illness that serves as a twist of fate; we can come face-to-face with it when pondering how the world will treat our children; in other words, moments of great awe, joy, terror, anxiety, hope, ennui, grace, irony, thankfulness, boredom, despair, perplexity, ignorance (we will return to the experience of profound ignorance shortly), etc. These experiences are momentary lines of flight or vectors of escape out of Being-as-familarity, i.e., breakdowns in our familiarity with the world. In a broad sense of the term, things themselves become strange, alien and unfamiliar in these types of moments. Why? Because our understanding of Being cannot immediately process and assimilate them — Being with an “i” is itself always finite (a Lacanian would say something like every Symbolic order has its blind spots). Now, these moments are only opportunities to start thinking about Being and not guarantees that we will do so. In stepping outside of our everyday familiarity we are in a position to recognize the difference between beings as such and nothing. This is an opportunity to ask the question: “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” And this question can, then, give way to the question concerning Being itself (Sein selbst). What’s important to know is that this experience of Being itself, even if not followed up with a proper thinking through of itself, can inspire a person to think along new and revolutionary paths. How so? Because it reveals to a person that there is a vast outside that always escapes the parameters of familiarity and all of its derivatives (doxa, knowledge, philosophy, the big Other, myth, objective spirit, worldhood, science, religion, politics, tradition, Wissenschaft, common sense).
Richard Polt points out that regardless of whether or not we end up doing justice to the experience of Being afterwards, there are four essential aspects unconcealed in this encounter: 1. the whole of beings, 2. the dwelling of Dasein, 3. beings as such, 4. the given. These four structures (for lack of a better word) are the Prior, i.e., the conditions of any particular act, behavior, thought, statement or comportment on the part of Dasein in the world. The experience of Being is the unforgetting of the Prior. It announces to Dasein that the Prior is just that — the basis upon which the given has always been given, the givenness of the given (there is here a hint of Platonic anamnesis, but Being is not to be confused with the Forms, since Being is not a universal). Polt words it like this, “To recollect the givenness of the given is not to relive an old experience of something, but to become aware of a sense of the whole that must be in place before anything can be experienced” (The Emergency of Being, p. 27). To be Dasein is to implicitly or explicitly have a sense of the whole. It means to have a sense of your own there within the whole there.
But if Being with an “i” is our background familiarity with beings as such and as a whole, then what, pray tell, is Beyng with a “y”? Being is the givenness (presencing-to-Dasein) of the given (beings). Beyng is the source of the Being of beings. Beyng is the givenness of the givenness of beings. In Contributions to Philosophy, Seyn (Beyng) is synonymous with Ereignis (the event of appropriation). Heidegger writes, “Beyng essentially occurs as the event” (Contributions to Philosophy, p. 25). He also says, “The It that gives in “It gives being”, “It gives time”, proves to be Appropriation” (On Time and Being, p. 19). This is why es gibt (It gives) becomes synonymous with Beyng itself. Beyng is the presencing of Being. For the Heidegger of Contributions to Philosophy, Beyng or Ereignis is the event of Dasein coming to belong to Being, the event of Dasein being appropriated by Being. Beyng is the event of Dasein’s belonging to Being.
It is only in a state of emergency that we step outside of Being and are able to catch a flash of Beyng itself. Such an encounter throws a question mark onto our familiarity or that on the basis of which we can have any theoretical concepts/propositions at all. Being (pre-theoretical familiarity) is the condition of theory, thus, when Being itself gets called into question, so, too, does all of our theoretical knowledge (at least, it potentially does). Now who in the history of philosophy had such a crisis? Who was so struck by his profound ignorance that it called his entire world into question? That’s right — it was Descartes. The whole of Cartesianism rests on an encounter with Being/Beyng. It was the breakdown of Descartes’ familiarity or understanding of Being that led him to question the status of beings as such. Being became “unready-to-hand” for him, and in doing so became conspicuous — even if only for a flash of a moment. Descartes, of course, went on the re-metaphysicalize (re-onticize) his experience of Being, but it nonetheless served as the foundation of his philosophy. In this sense, we can say that Descartes’ experience of Being was the foundation of modern philosophy. It’s quite noteworthy that a single encounter with Being can bring a philosopher to take philosophy in a new direction — whether or not that direction is actually new enough is an altogether different question.
If only Descartes would have gone in the following direction! If the world is a dream, then, therefore, I am, too. I cannot disassociate myself from the world. So if I know that I exist, I thereby know that the world exists, too. The world is the ground of my identity. All of this talk of “representations” is simply bullshit. The representationalist theory of the mind (which was held by Descartes, Locke, Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, etc.) is simply a falsification of Dasein’s ontological structure. Proximally and for the most part, there is no wall of representations between us and beings. Beings simply show themselves form themselves in the non-representational clearing. Again, no world = no me. This is precisely what Heidegger established in Being and Time. We can always make this transcendental argument: The skeptic doubts the objective existence of the world. One cannot doubt this without utilizing language. There’s no such thing as a private language nor can one be generated. Therefore, the skeptic must utilize something that belongs to the social world (something his or her mind couldn’t have generated in absolute, ontological isolation) in order to doubt its existence. This is obviously absurd. Premise 1 is true. Premise 2 is true, since the world as a whole is not a particular intuition or perception, which is to say that it’s an abstract concept (signified) attached to a conventional (social or worldly) signifier “the world”. For the truth of Premise 3, one would only need to consult Wittgenstein’s private language argument(s). The skeptic needs to realize that he can only doubt the existence of the objective world if there’s an objective (social) world. The I is not itself the creator of its language. Language belongs to das Man (trans-individual reality) and makes possible the I coming to doubt exterior reality. Descartes is fucked at this point. Language (the exterior/Other) is the condition of the Cogito.
Note: I wrote this years ago. And, yes, there’s something tongue-in-cheek about it. The titled is certainly exaggerated and provocative. However, I’m currently thinking about some of these ideas again, I’m interested in thinking the whole Descartes/Heidegger debate anew, so I decided to post it just for fun. I do think there are some valid connections here, however. Hopefully, I get a chance to expand on them in the future. Especially, in relation to Žižek’s attempt to resurrect the Cartesian subject with a Lacanian twist.
