Heidegger's Refutation of German Idealism
My past couple posts have been political, and while writing them I did a couple pieces for The American Sun, finished a piece for an upcoming newsletter, and was a guest on a new podcast. After so much time spent on politics, and especially time that included serious disagreements with a large portion of the right, I need a rest and no rest is better than my first love: philosophy. As per request, we will be looking at Martin Heidegger and the German Idealists.
Before we do so, there are two questions before the question. First, why care about what Heidegger says about Idealists? Why care about the debate at all? This gets at a much broader question, namely the value of philosophy. To answer that question, is for another day. At stake in the debate Heidegger and the Idealists, which is part of a much larger debate on realism vs. idealism (we will touch on these in a second), is the question of “what is reality like?” To act in the world, you have to know what the world is like, and although it is possible to act in the world without the aid of philosophy, it will certainly help. This brings us to the second question, “what is German Idealism?”
At its core, German Idealism is the position that there is no reality independent of the mind. Take your computer or your phone for example, which you are presumably reading this on one of the two. Take a second and list everything you can say about your device. Now try and find one thing on that list that is not dependent on your conscious interaction with the device. The feel of the keyboard, the brightness of the screen, the warmth of the device, the desk the computer is sitting on or the weight of the phone in your hand, etc. all of these things are dependent on your conscious interaction with your device. Even more complex description, such the parts of the device arranged to process substack.com or the binary code necessary to run your browser, both of these, even, are dependent on your conscious interaction because only to mind does the arrangement of processors or ones and zeros have any meaning. But surely, if all humans vanished today…your computer would surely exist, right? For the idealist, for this question to make any sense is to assume that there would exist a mind even after all humans vanish to even make sense of the question. Your device would still exist, for us. A squirrel or a dolphin does not know what your device is, and your device would not exist for them (as it does not exist for them now). Why? Because everything you know about your device, even what it is, can only be described in terms of a human mind interacting with it, and thus the object known as your computer, or your phone, is only your computer, or your phone, because humans can interact with it.
German Idealism puts Man at the center of the universe. Even more, German Idealism says Man is the universe since it is only through Man that the universe is meaningful and there is no difference between meaningfulness and existence for the Idealist. Religious, social, and political consequences follow from this, but we are taking a break from those at the moment.
Now, what does Heidegger have to say about the matter? Some do claim him as an Idealist, and there are some passages in Being and Time that seem to suggest that, but we shall see that he steps over the question of Idealism entirely. I will be using the article Realism and Truth by David R. Cerbone in The Blackwell Companion to Heidegger. Cerbone sets up Heidegger’s argument by arguing that the fundamental difference between realism and idealism is the possibility of the gap. Say you want to know what X is. There are a number of ways you can try and figure out what X is, and one way is through sense perception. Through your five senses you can investigate X and attempt to figure out what it is. At this point a problem arises: “one cannot simply help oneself to such an explanans, since it appeals to things (perceptual systems, an appropriately structured environment) that fall within the domain, the knowledge of which is to be explained. That is, such an explanation uses precisely the kind of knowledge whose possibility is to be explained, and that is no explanation at all.”1 If you are trying to explain the existence of an object of sense perception by appealing to sense perception, you are assuming that you have knowledge of a domain (sense perception as such) and using this knowledge to investigate one element of that domain (X). There is now the possibility of a gap between the former and the later. “Realism, we might say, unflinchingly acknowledges the possibility of such a gap.”2 That is, there might exist a gap between our knowledge of sense perception as such and our knowledge of a particular object of sense perception. It might be the case that I cannot correctly perceive, or even perceive at all, an object. This is a possibility for the realist because, for her, objects are real and exist independently of the mind, and this means I can be mistaken about them.
Against the realist, the idealist does not admit this gap is possible. “Spatiotemporal objects are, on [the Idealist] response, dependent on experience, and so on the minds whose experience they are.” 3 If spatiotemporal objects are dependent on my experience, if they are constituted by my conscious interaction with them, it is impossible that there be a gap between my perception of X and X, because these are the same thing. Skepticism is eliminated by German Idealism, and this is why Hegel can claim absolute knowledge. Skepticism is a live possibility for the realist, because she can, and admits as much, not see an object for what it is.4
Heidegger refutes German Idealism in an interesting way. Rather than taking up the mantle of realism, Heidegger steps over the problem of realism and idealism together. Central to Heidegger’s project was a study of Being, the revival of ontology. From the 17th century to the early 20th, epistemology was the name of the game. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with how we know things. Idealism was the direct result of centuries of epistemological debates leading nowhere, and ultimately collapsing the problem (collapsing the gap). In part as a reaction to the epistemology debates, and as a reaction to the history of philosophy as such, Heidegger sought to revive the ancient project of ontology started by the pre-Socratics. “The question of realism versus idealism in terms of Heidegger’s rejection of a particular kind of explanatory project where the possession and legitimation of intentional states (beliefs, knowledge, etc.) about worldly entities is at issue. For Heidegger, no such project is necessary because Dasein, as being-in-the-world, is “always already” amidst entities and so an explanation whose explanandum includes an appeal to ‘worldless’ being is, at best, superfluous, and, at worst, incoherent and delusional.”5
Dasein literally means “being-there” and is Heidegger’s term for human nature. Humans are “always already” in an environment. We are born into a community, a language, and a tradition. Our very ability to think is conditioned by the community, language, and tradition we are born into. Because of this, framing the discussion either in terms of realism or idealism is missing the mark. Both realism and idealism situate the problem as a worldless person looking upon the world. Instead of envisioning a person who is looking upon sensible reality and then either 1) tries to bridge the gap between sense perception and sensible reality or 2) collapsing the two, Heidegger envisions a person who is always already part of that sensible reality.
German Idealism cannot be true because it posits that reality is dependent on the mind, but the mind is conditioned by its surroundings and surely these surroundings must be real if they are to condition the mind. The access to entities, which is what both the idealists and realists try to explain, is not a problem because we are, to use that phrase again, always already amongst entities. There is never a point in which Man has to worry about having access to sensible reality because is a part of sensible reality and enveloped in it. A fish in the ocean has not to worry about having access to water, but this is what both realists and idealists implicitly claim.
In this refutation of German Idealism, as well as realism, Heidegger presents a vision of the world in which the world (we can also use the term environment or ecology) is the center, not Man. Knowledge about Man, or any of his interactions, must reduce to knowledge of his environment. Without touching on religious or political implications to this, we can say that if we view Man as primarily a being situated in the world and shaped by the world, there will arise an immediate concern for how the world (be it community, language, or tradition) influences us, both for better and for worse.
Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall. A Companion to Heidegger. Blackwell Publishing. Oxford, England. 2006. 250
Dreyfus and Wrathall. A Companion to Heidegger. 250
A Companion to Heidegger.
This becomes incredibly important for questions of ethics. Do I see you for who you really are? Do I see you as a person (you as are) or do I see you as someone I can extract pleasure and profit from (seeing you as a tool, and not as the person you are)?
Ibid. 253