Heidegger 1: Metaphysics So What?

[koganbot]

Am currently reading Martin Heidegger's "The Word Of Nietzsche" (it's in The Question Concerning Technology And Other Essays, no preview available through Google Books, unfortunately), at the recommendation of Philosophy David 1.* I'm only a few pages into the essay, but I have a question that I think is quite discussable whether one has read the

Comments

[byebyepride]

Hi Frank,
I can't say anything confident until I've read over the HD piece. But based on my broader - and possibly garbled - reading of HD, I think you're maybe misconstruing him here. It looks to me as if the list from 'the suprasensory world' to 'civilization' are 'answers' offered by philosophers in the past. In as much as what HD is calling 'metaphysics' is supposed to exceed any of those answers, it seems to me at least possible that it doesn't really matter to him whether or not those answers are what you call beliefs. So the constructive force he ascribes to them is the power those 'answers' have in building philosophical constructions. In this context it seems quite important to distinguish 'metaphysics' which is something like HD's attempt to retool philosophy (instead of doing philosophy, do metaphysics) from the results of other philosophies (e.g. God, reason, happiness of as many people etc.). The question of belief doesn't seem to come into it (here).

There is a reading of Heidegger which would read him in the terms you suggest - i.e. as offering a historical account of a series of epochs in which people's activities are grounded in sets of beliefs, and as presenting himself at the 'end' of that series i.e. at the point at which those sets of beliefs reveal themselves to be equivalent to each other (in the sense that each structures an age) and therefore lacking any 'ultimate' authority. I share what I take to be your reservations about that position (not least that ideas may not have social force etc.) but I think Heidegger's is more complicated. In one sense his 'metaphysics' is an investigation into that loss of authority, but it may not be an attempt at a new 'ultimate' but to rethink philosophy's task.

(By the way, I don't think the confusion is entirely wrong - Heidegger might be trying to have it both ways, so that his presentation of his arguments at this stage in his work may deliberately raise the spectre of that 'historical account of a series of epochs'. As ever we need to reconstruct the logic of what he says AND what he intends by it AND then why he presents it in the way he does.)

[koganbot]

Alex, I think it's terrific you're commenting, and you're helping to remove some confusion.

it doesn't really matter to him whether or not those answers are what you call beliefs. So the constructive force he ascribes to them is the power those 'answers' have in building philosophical constructions.

I don't know if I understand you here. Is the distinction you're drawing between believing those "answers" and using those "answers"? This seems like six of one, half a dozen of the other (people are a thousand times more likely to use them if they believe them, no?). Or are you drawing some other distinction?

It would be odd to claim that Augustine didn't believe in God and that Kant didn't believe in the a priori; but yes, what's at issue isn't their belief per se but how they used their belief in "God" or the "a priori." My fundamental question is "How important are these beliefs (or 'answers,' or values or what have you)?" And the way to answer the question is by asking "What did the people who believed (or asserted, or whatever) them do with them? And what would have been different if these people hadn't believed and therefore used them?" And where someone makes a point of disbelieving in God, the a priori, or whatever, the question would be "What use do they put their disbelief to?" I honestly don't see where I lose anything by using the words "belief" and "disbelief," or what confusion they cause. I don't see that they weaken my question, which still exists in its full power.

I - probably mistakenly - associated the term "constructive force" with the idea that the suprasensory whatever-they-ares are the ground and goal of reality (or, to use a transcendental vocabulary - the text shifts from one to the other - they determine life from above and without). That is, in being grounds-goals-determiners they are constructive forces. And of course this is the idea that Nietzsche and Heidegger are challenging. So on this interpretation, the word "constructive" doesn't refer to what Nietzsche thinks is constructive, or Heidegger thinks is constructive, but what the proponents of these ideas think is constructive.* However, you're probably right that this is a misreading, since your interpretation - that Heidegger in this passage is using the word "constructive" as he would use it - does make more sense, gets rid of the contradiction between disbelieving in the construction but believing that the construction can go void, makes "constructive force" and "social force" the same thing. And your interpretation makes "metaphysics" a more positive word, disassociates it from the suprasensory wetchamacallits (though why use the word "metaphysics" if you don't mean something metaphysical by it?).**

[byebyepride]

Is the distinction you're drawing between believing those "answers" and using those "answers"?

I was drawing another distinction, but it may have been based on a misconstruction (oops!) of your question. I thought you were asking about the identification of philosophies with epochs (implying a hierarchical identity of sorts between philosophical thinking and 'ordinary' thinkers-doers) i.e. did 'common' beliefs rest on notions such as aim for the greatest happiness of the greatest no. [Actually, I think the choice of utilitarianism as an example for HD is interesting because it would be hard in the mid C20th to argue that it was ever more than a partial reflection of the thought-world of a particular time and place.] So are you asking instead about whether HD thinks the philosophers he is criticising believe in the terms they use?

By the way there is a massive distinction to be drawn between Augustine's belief in God and Kant's use of the 'a priori', since the a priori is not an entity in whose existence one can believe, but a speculative thought experiment. In that case the distinction between belief and use is only the start of it, since one points towards theology and the other towards a critical rationalism which doesn't seem to me classically system-building (but then I've found few philosophers who do build systems, but that's because I look for the use rather than the architectonic by and large). Belief may be symmetrical with disbelief, but belief and use can't be paired like that.

[koganbot]

So are you asking instead about whether HD thinks the philosophers he is criticising believe in the terms they use?

No. I assume that they generally do (though Nietzsche played around with the slipperiness of language, is said to have invented the scare quote). I'm basically asking about the IMPORTANCE of the ideas. And one can relate that to epochs if one wants (though I didn't have epochs in mind): the importance of the ideas to the people who held them, who disputed them, to the other people these people had an impact on, to the people that these people didn't have an impact on, etc.

There's nothing nuanced or subtle about the question, though answering it means that we have to come up with some idea of when or how something is important. And the question of "What would it be like if people didn't hold belief X?" (I'm utterly baffled as to why you have a problem with my use of the word "belief," but you can just as easily substitute "use" or "idea" or "what it is that they're advocating") is my way of asking the question about importance. No, I'm not asking did people believe what they said they did. I'm asking, what if, instead of believing that God is the ongoing source and cause of life, one doesn't believe that God is the ongoing source and cause of life? Etc. How would your life be different? Or how would the world be different if, say, Augustine had remained a Manichean rather than converting to Christianity? Or what if there had been no Augustine?

In general, a good way to ask about the importance of something is to ask, "If it didn't exist, or hadn't happened (if it's an event), how would life be different?" So, in regard to ideas, what if the idea X didn't exist? What if no one held it? ("Believed it" being just another way of saying "held it.") Or, given that idea X has existed, what difference does it make whether or not I hold it? For instance, what if I used to believe in an X that provides a ground or a goal for life but now no longer believe that X is the ground or goal for life, but my behavior seems not to have changed one whit from the time when I believed that X was the ground or goal for life? We can then hypothesize that the belief (or the idea, or whatever) wasn't very important (by which I mean not that I didn't feel it was important, but that this feeling didn't have much consequence).

[byebyepride]

Oh right, ok that's really clarified it for me! I was assuming your worry about HD was close to my problem with HD but it's not at all, in fact it's not really about HD at all - which is probably why you said it didn't matter if people hadn't read the essay.

But I don't feel I have much to contribute by way of answer to your question, in that case. Not that it's not interesting, but that it doesn't seem to me answerable at that level of generality. I guess I was trying to answer 'how important is X to Y' where 'X' was 'a particular account of the role of these grounding ideas in philosophy' and Y was Heidegger; but you were asking 'how important are ideas to people'.

I'd be more interested in making exactly the kinds of distinctions you seem to think are by the by. i.e. that 'importance' in a world-historical sense is quite significantly different to 'importance' in the sense of what degree of affective hold have X ideas had over Y people (and of course the answer must be 'it varies') which is also quite significantly different to a question like 'how much of people's behaviour is determined or influenced by ideas they hold, rather than feeling, habit etc. So the distinction I wanted to draw between 'belief' and 'use' seems to me to point in this direction, which you are disinclined to go down.

I just don't know that we can compare how Augustine feels about God with how Kant feels about the a priori - although we might be able to compare it to how Kant feels about God, which could lead us to understand something about the difference between their conceptions of philosophy.

[koganbot]

*Where the text seems to be going, though it hasn't gotten there yet, is Nietzsche's asserting that actually it's nihilism that creates the felt need for such a suprasensory ground or goal or determiner from above and without. Or perhaps nihilism is the felt need for such a suprasensory ground etc. (I'm not sure that the term "suprasensory" is all that relevant, but it's the one Heidegger uses.)

**I'm still not sure my reading is altogether wrong, since up 'til this point in the text Heidegger is using words like "ground" etc. and obviously not speaking for himself or for Nietzsche in his use of them, but I'll go with your reading for its getting rid of the contradiction and also because you've had experience with how Heidegger uses the word "metaphysics."

[koganbot]

I chose the Heidegger quote not for the phrase "constructive force" but for his string of phrases, "the suprasensory world, the Ideas, God, the moral law, the authority of reason, progress, the happiness of the greatest number, culture, civilization," all of these representing grounds or goals.

[koganbot]

But my fundamental question doesn't change one iota. How important is the idea that a suprasensory whatever-it-is grounds life or is the goal of life or determines life from above and without, and by extension; and if one disbelieves the idea, how important is one's disbelief? To what use do people put the belief and disbelief, and with what impact upon others? My hypothesis remains that Nietzsche and Heidegger assume the importance of such beliefs-answers-etc. and therefore in the importance of those beliefs-answers-etc. going void, even while Nietzsche and Heidegger themselves disbelieve those beliefs-answers-etc. themselves and disbelieve in the transcendental functions their proponents claimed for their "answers." (Again, I don't see where there's a problem in my using the word "disbelieve.") Actually, I'm pretty sure that my hypothesis is right for Nietzsche - that he's something of a mugwump, addicted to the ideas he's trying to overthrow - though I don't think this is debilitating for his project, which has more to do with creating values than with his grounding or justifying the creativity. I really don't know if my hypothesis is right in regard to Heidegger - that he assumes the importance of the subject matter. We'll see. "The constructive force he ascribes to them is the power those 'answers' have in building philosophical constructions." One could rewrite this as "The paltry 'constructive force' he ascribes to those 'answers' is that they merely play a role in building philosophical constructions" (of course, that's to pretend to answer the question I haven't yet really explored: how important are these types of ideas?).

[byebyepride]

I'm aware that I haven't tried to answer this question, but I'm still not sure where it comes from - HD is a philosopher, he's trying to define the task of philosophy (i.e. what distinguishes it from all other modes of enquiry) and to define it in such a way as to separate his conception from that of others (I guess the alternative would be to say that X, Kant or somebody, has gone in the right direction and we just need to develop or correct this or that). So I guess it seems to me obvious that for *this* argument these other conceptions of the object of philosophy are important, and that for him as a professor of philosophy, the definition of philosophy is of some importance.

The other way to look at this might be that the 'importance' is built-in to those 'answers' HD is questioning, because they all make some kind of claim to a highest good, i.e. they represent the ethical pay-off of philosophy (what is good living?: to aspire to the greatest happiness, to contemplate Ideas, to become a cultured [bildung I assume i.e. implying aesthetic education in the Schiller, von Humboldt line].)

As for the constructive force, I'll need to go to the essay, since it sounds to me like one of the tricky terms in Heidegger.

[koganbot]

may not be an attempt at a new 'ultimate' but to rethink philosophy's task

This is probably what it is, but I wonder why he believes "rethinking philosophy's task" is necessary, given that we now know that philosophy's task, upon the conviction of Phil Spector, is to create new girl groups. I'd say that Puffy, Danity et al. produced better philosophy than The-Dream, Tricky Stewart, Electrik Red have so far. (Seriously, why would one think that there's a specifically philosophical task left to do? This is a question I don't think Rorty, for instance, ever even gave a rudimentary answer to.)

[byebyepride]

well 'philosophy' has a certain authority in the C19th/C20th German academic world. HD exploits this in his political role as a University rector under the Nazis; when he (in my view) backs away, one of his concerns is to reclaim 'philosophy' from its exploitation in a nationalistic direction (since philosophy is seen as THE German attribute from at least Kant's time). This is almost certainly also a reason for giving the lecture courses on Nietzsche at this time. I think there is more to it than this for HD, but I think his position (or certainly the way he describes it) changes - it is different in Being and Time, in this period, and almost certainly different in his later work, where he distinguishes thinking from philosophy, and sees it as something that happens rarely, and poetically (the creation of new possibilities in language).