Fundamental Ontology Reexamined (part I)

A short arch of how I started to break away from Heidegger's philosophy.

Reading Heidegger is always a complex undertaking. His writing is difficult, and it's not always clear that it's worth the effort—sometimes it truly isn't. But occasionally, some unfortunate souls get trapped within it like unlucky flies in a skilled spider's web. Some of these souls become Heideggerian. They become unable to read other philosophy or even show interest in anything not connected, however abstractly, to Heidegger's philosophy. Nevertheless, other souls are much more anxious about this situation. Perhaps they've learned over time to take interest in other things, but always with a certain splitting of themselves, waiting for the final verdict of fundamental ontology. Sometimes, some of these souls learn to free themselves. In the history of philosophy, it's enough to give the examples of Levinas, Jaspers, and even Žižek to describe people who've gone through this process. The surprising thing is that rarely can a person who has truly been trapped use the path that another has blazed to free themselves. Without mystifying this—the reasons that seem good to others don't seem good to me, and vice versa. This is especially true for those who have truly read Heidegger in depth and been exposed to the multitude of facets his system has to offer.

This is the story of the small path I've forged. Not great names like Levinas, Žižek, or Jaspers, but the small niche I've found over many years to understand what exactly seems wrong in Heideggerian philosophy. The untying of the obvious discomfort, in my opinion, of one who is trapped in the web of such a repulsive personality.

Reading Heidegger is difficult, and extracting a coherent argument from him is even more difficult. Perhaps one day I'll write more didactically about Heidegger's philosophy, but for now, I'll settle for a very selective presentation of parts of his early approach and explain why I find them lacking. This post will deal more with Heidegger's fundamental ontology—and thus touch on what can be called metaphysical considerations. The next post will address the ethical expressions of the problem in Heidegger's philosophy.

In one of Heidegger's courses from the early 1920s (published in part as supplementary material), he notes that the discovery of the phenomenon of world should be attributed to Aristotle. This is a somewhat strange statement, but to understand it better, we need to understand what Heidegger refers to when he talks about the phenomenon of world. Heidegger understands the phenomenon of world as part of the existential (category) of the being of the entity that asks itself the question of being—namely, the human being as we know ourselves. At the foundation of the phenomenon of world lies a non-thematic involvement in a complex of tools, signs, and specific tasks. Heidegger's presentation of the phenomenon of world in Being and Time is done through a regressive presentation: since the phenomenon of world—our immersion in activity such that we pay attention neither to the entities we use nor to the complex of relations underlying our activity—entails the non-thematic nature of the phenomenon of world, which makes it difficult to address thematically, Heidegger presents the phenomenon precisely through a gradual breaking of our shared involvement in the world as a strategy to deal with this difficulty.

For example, when a particular tool breaks, we discover to some extent its essential character as "in-order-to." If our chair breaks, we notice that the chair's role is supposed to be to hold us at our work desk. If a task we were working on fails for some reason, we become aware of why we undertook this task in the first place, instead of simply being immersed in the specific task. The phenomenon of world presents a certain directionality; we are always on our way somewhere—both in the immediate sense and in the more general, abstract sense. Thus, Heidegger frames the phenomenon of world as always converging toward a certain "for-the-sake-of-which." The world is not composed of things or tasks. However, precisely through "interruptions" in certain things or in our tasks, interruptions in our involvement in the world, we become aware of how things or tasks participate in a whole of a certain world which, without it, even if through negation, no specific thing or task has essential meaning. In other words, every activity assumes that to some extent the for-the-sake-of-which is already implicitly present in it, as something that has already been decided.

The for-the-sake-of-which, in turn, brings us back to the phenomenon of the self. The self is conceived as something that most of the time is not revealed to us as a whole, mainly because, unlike things, its presence is revealed to us primarily in the context of time and less in the context of our immediate environment. But the self becomes a relevant phenomenon because bringing it to completion—that is, to something defined and explicit that we can refer to—is done through reference to the fact that we begin our actions with reference to a for-the-sake-of-which for which we do them. In this sense, the for-the-sake-of-which actually expresses an extension of the structure of the phenomenon of world. Our own world can become explicit for us only through understanding in what way we are ultimately supposed to be revealed within it. Our selfhood, in this extended sense, should be understood as in some way already present in all our activity—as part of the world within which it works. What this means is that the opposite is also true: our selfhood can become explicit for us only through understanding in what way the world is ultimately supposed to be revealed. In some way, it should be true that the world as it may reveal itself to us is already at the foundation of our activity.

To return to more nominal understandings, we would need to say something like this: I put on my shoes so that I can go out. I go out to the street and walk "on it" so that I can get to the market. I go to the market to shop. I shop so that ultimately, the for-the-sake-of-which, I can prepare dinner for my friends. In this sense, preparing dinner for my friends is actually the activity that organizes the meaning of all my other activities. In this example, if I find someone in the market who owes me money, the purpose of the activity is reorganized. If I myself am indebted to someone else, for instance, I might even cancel the dinner so that I can deal with settling with my creditors.

This nominal example can be extended to the general phenomenon of world, and in another sense, to the human being itself. Let's start with the world. If the world suddenly changed so drastically that the for-the-sake-of-which I am working for already lacks any meaning, then we need to start talking about how the phenomenon of world is not necessarily organized around my for-the-sake-of-which, but around that event that changed the world, which at an intuitive level we might understand as a more fundamental substrate for the meaning of the characteristic of being-world than the human being. To avoid staying too much at the abstract level, let's say that a certain person all his life aspired to become an artist, and discovered that his art no longer has a place in the world. It's not that he failed to be an artist. It's that in a certain sense a certain occurrence—let's say, a great war—negated the meaning in which his art might succeed or fail.

Of course, the world is always the human being's world in the sense that the human being is the entity through which the world appears. But from this it does not follow in any way that what fundamentally explains the world is precisely the human entity. What anchors the qualities of the human entity as the fundamental explanation is its role as the questioner of the question of being, and in the ontological case, as one who offers an interpretation through which this question is asked for every entity of this kind. The implications of this point for fundamental ontology are far from self-evident, and there is every reason to suspect that this is one of the reasons why this project was eventually abandoned by Heidegger—in favor of what is not our concern here.

A more concrete example that Bernard Williams brings in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy might help here. Let's think about a teenage girl who tries to commit suicide, and at the last moment another person prevents it by chance. For argument's sake, let's assume that this girl truly "discovers" her selfhood in this act—and it is prevented from her. She understands the world as leading there. Now, not only has she failed, but her authentic confrontation with death has been prevented from her. She slowly begins to understand her life anew. Eventually, she understands that her selfhood might be better revealed in another way, that her understanding of her personal death needs to receive a different expression. She discovers, after years, that she was wrong about herself when she tried to commit suicide, not that she failed. We can discuss this case back and forth, but the point is that an external and random event can change the most committed understanding of the world, an understanding committed enough to die for. It would be very strange to claim that since the girl did not commit suicide, she would no longer be capable of an authentic understanding of herself that would necessarily negate the authenticity of the decision and the practical attempt to end her life. But it would also be strange to claim that her decision to end her life that was prevented only by chance is not almost a paradigmatic example of a committed decision. There is a problem here of first-person (which assumes temporality of past-present-future) and third-person (which transfers the past-present-future structure to a framework of present) to which we will hopefully return in the next post.

Heidegger's missing of this characteristic of the world stems, to my best understanding, from a flawed interpretation of Aristotle that he gives in at least two different places. One of them is in the lectures on Plato's Sophist, and the second is in the Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. In both of these places, Heidegger emphasizes that for the human being who has decided through deliberation to act in certain ways for an activity that can be characterized in terms of the for-the-sake-of-which for which we do our other activities is indifferent to the calls of luck in a way that very much recalls the Stoic doctrine of happiness (eudaimonia). Heidegger's error is not trivial, and in order to understand it more deeply, we will first need to understand what he is saying, on what grounds it sits, and then return to Aristotle's writings, find the error—and revise the reading of Heidegger in Aristotelian ethics, and by implication, the way in which the example we understood about the person in the market is reflected in the ontological extension of the concept of world.

Let's start with the earlier stage, where Heidegger still hesitates to deviate too much from Aristotle, in the Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. There Heidegger says:

[...] For this reason, the authentic ἀγαθόν [=good] of human being-there is, ultimately, εὐπραξία [=good practice] or εὐζωία [=good life]. The εὐ [=good] is not something simply available somewhere in the world, but a certain "how" of life. From the determination that the ἀγαθόν is itself a "how" of taking responsibility itself, we have a series of aspects that characterize ἀγαθόν, and thus they provide us with a kind of unique introduction in its necessity to determining the meaning of ἀγαθόν. It belongs to this meaning of ἀγαθόν that one who finds oneself in εὐζωία [=good life] has εὐτυχία [=good luck]. The concrete being-there [=human being] can fulfill itself in such a way that in any case it will suffer bad luck. εὐτυχία, as an additional aspect of the εὐδαιμονία [=happiness] of the ἄριστον [=best person], marks the point where εὐζωία is being-in-the-world with its determining conditions and possibilities; that εὐτυχία is included shows that this ethics is not a fantasy, but one that seeks the ἀνθρώπινον ἀγαθόν [=human good] in its possibility.

Here Heidegger is somewhat on the fence on the issue of luck. His basic determination here is that the life that fulfills itself, life in its meaning as the good life, will contain bad luck. A possible interpretation of this is that Heidegger believes, like Aristotle, that a person who lives the good life will know how to bear the bad luck that comes his way with grace. However, another interpretation of Heidegger here is possible, and as we shall see, it is probably the one that Heidegger is actually aiming at. The good person, as happy, can still have bad things happen to them. That something bad happens to me while I am happy is almost a contradiction. What matters to us here is the way in which Heidegger actually defends his interpretation: the entity that researches and shapes its life accordingly is the human entity, which seeks the possible human good. The possible human good is certainly what Aristotle seeks—and such a good cannot, to some extent, be achieved except through the actions and insights of the human being himself. But Aristotle does not hang the characterization of the good thus achieved, happiness, beyond the fact that the person will do his best, on the person alone—on the "how" of his life. Let's move to a brief examination of what Heidegger says later in the course on Plato's Sophist:

The possibility of failure is constitutive for the development of τέχνη [=art]. But in the case of φρόνησις [=practical wisdom], on the contrary, where it is a matter of dealings whose subject is the being of being-there, every error is a personal failure. Personal failure in relation to ourselves is not a higher possibility, not the τελείωσις [=completion] of φρόνησις, but precisely its corruption. Apart from failure, the only possibility open to φρόνησις is trial and error; in practical activity I cannot experiment with myself. The dealings of φρόνησις are governed by either-or. Φρόνησις is in its precise meaning στοχαστική [=aimed skill]; it has a fixed orientation, it pursues the goal, and specifically the μεσότη [=middle]. With φρόνησις, unlike with techne, there is no more or less, no "both and," but only the seriousness of the defined action, victory or failure, either-or. As long as φρόνησις is στοχαστική, it is impossible for it to be more complete. Thus it has no arete but is itself arete.

Here we already see the foundation of what Heidegger was aiming at in the earlier lectures, and which undoubtedly formed the background for the thoughts of the second division of Being and Time. According to Heidegger, practical wisdom in Aristotle reaches flawless completion. It is not possible for a person who has reached the practical human completion to err. Let's not be mistaken. This is not an issue of a Platonic conception of the righteous person, about whom the discussion that might take place is whether and how he functions in reality. As we said, the Aristotelian background obliges Heidegger to the possible human good. In this sense, the person with practical completion can only fail, and any failure of his comes out, and this is the important part, only from a flaw in the practical completion of himself. Of course, a person may also do things incorrectly if he considers his considerations incorrectly—but here we are explicitly talking about the person who makes all his considerations correctly. Such a person cannot be mistaken.

The reason that such a person cannot be mistaken is that in practical completion, the person is exposed to himself in the most complete way. He is able to see his for-the-sake-of-which, which conditions the way in which things in the world in general may appear for him. In this sense, it is certainly possible for a person to be mistaken about himself, but then he is not the person with practical completion. What is strange in these things, as in other places in Heidegger, is that the possibility that luck will refute the correct practical considerations we have made does not arise. Luck functions, insofar as it is discussed at all in Heidegger at these stages, as a misleading factor, but not one that might sometimes be decisively misleading.

First we need to understand why Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle doesn't work. To do this, we will use Richard Bodéüs's excellent work Aristotle and the Theology of the Living Immortals. Bodéüs examines the way in which education is perceived as a gift in Aristotle. In this case, there are two hypotheses in Aristotle. One is that happiness may come to us through a divine gift, the inspiration of some spirit that rests upon us. The second hypothesis is that happiness will come to us through good luck. The second hypothesis is seemingly rejected insofar as happiness is conditioned on practical and theoretical completion, and the luck in question is only such that brings us external goods. However, as Bodéüs points out, in several places Aristotle states that perfect happiness does not come to us unless it is accompanied by external goods, even in the case of the most detached human happiness possible—this is a necessary condition.[1] And indeed, insofar as the good that Aristotle seeks in the context of his ethics explicitly concerns human actions that we can actualize, such a good is indeed to be found—but not necessarily a good that stems solely as a result of human actions, which would border, if to use the language of Heidegger with a note of irony, on fantasy. In this specific sense, Aristotle gives as an example the good of the gods, who really do not need any external assistance to be complete—unlike the human being, who, it seems, needs a certain measure of luck—and not just a certain "how" of his being subject to his decision.[2]

Either way, as we have seen in the Eudemian Ethics, it seems that Aristotle reaches a conclusion that certainly contradicts the Heideggerian analysis. In his lectures on Plato's Sophist, Heidegger, rightly, places great emphasis on the importance of βουλή, which can usually be translated as practical deliberation, but he understands it especially as a form of decision (Entschlossenheit). Aristotle's discussion in the Eudemian Ethics emphasizes that even in the holy of holies of human deliberation, the element of luck, and perhaps even of divine intervention, is present—and that without it we will simply have difficulty understanding the meaning of all kinds of significant ethical phenomena. It should be noted that the lack of emphasis in Heidegger's discussion on the Eudemian Ethics in these formative lectures says a lot. Heidegger, for example, does a lot to sterilize what he considers to be Jaeger's interpretative errors in distinguishing between the different books of the Metaphysics. He also presents a classical medieval approach as an interpreter of Aristotle, and places great emphasis on the harmonization of different texts. Since he read Jaeger, it is presumed that he was familiar with and read the Eudemian Ethics himself (at one point Heidegger writes to a friend that before studying Aristotle for ten years, there is no point in talking philosophy at all). What, then, is the meaning of this disregard?

In any case, if luck can indeed intervene even at the stage of the rational deliberation that accompanies the decision, it seems that the for-the-sake-of-which for which human beings work can also undergo spontaneous exchange. If this is true, then according to Aristotle the a-temporality of luck can sometimes characterize even what is perceived in fundamental ontology as the foundation through which we understand the meaning of entities that are not us. In this sense, even Heidegger's concept of temporality stands before a challenge that it seems may perhaps be rounded with his system, but not without paying the price of the phenomenon of luck.

Before we continue with Heidegger, we need to understand more deeply how Aristotle understands the phenomenon of luck. The discussion relevant to our concern about luck is conducted by Aristotle to some extent in his book Metaphysics. There Aristotle links the problem of contingency to the concepts of generation and destruction. In this case, I think it's worth remembering that the paradigmatic examples Aristotle thinks of in the context of natural things are precisely living things. According to Aristotle, there are things that do not come to generation or destruction through a process. That is, a human being comes to generation through the process of fertilization that matures and then gradually accumulates the properties we attribute to a baby until birth, or maturity, for example. He also comes, in most cases, to destruction through the process of aging. But there are, it turns out, things that deviate from this natural causality, from the continuity of processuality.[3] But the way Aristotle proves this is interesting. He assumes that it cannot be that all things are necessary. After he has assumed this, how would the world look if things came to being or to nothing only on the basis of processes? According to Aristotle, we could ask about everything in the world whether it occurred or not. We could say that this thing occurred if something else occurred. And so on and so forth, until we would reach the first thing, which if it occurred, necessarily the last thing also occurred. Since then we would be required to say that all occurrence is necessary, we have a certain refutation of the claim that all things come to the world through a process. Note that Aristotle does not prove here that occurrences in the world are not necessary. He proves here that if it is true that occurrences in the world are not necessary, then it cannot be that the world consists only of processes of continuous generation and destruction.

Beyond the intriguing assumption that Aristotle makes here regarding the universality of processual necessity in the world, Aristotle expands on the implications of this argument, and in doing so presents an interesting form of proof ad absurdum that if everything is necessary, then conclusions that cannot be accepted are apparently accepted. It turns out not only that there are things that occur not through a process, but according to Aristotle, if things did indeed occur only through a process, there are certain implications here regarding the nature of time: if we take a certain period of time and another certain period of time, and another and so on from any finite time, we can always converge back to the present. I think Aristotle's reservation in this context concerns the nature of natural causes. Natural causes, by his definition, are such that cause things to occur mostly or always in the same way (in Heideggerian language: approximately and for the most part). If every natural cause caused things to occur necessarily, we would be forced to accept absurd conclusions such as that someone would die a violent death if he went outside, or would die because he ate spicy food. Clearly there are such occurrences, but they are accidental, that is to say, it is not true that generally if someone eats spicy food or goes outside then he dies—and for this reason even if things did happen that way we tend not to see one as the cause of the other.

Let's dwell a bit. The fact that we went to the market and found someone who owes us money is something that could have occurred and could not have occurred. The point is that it couldn't have been inferred from the reason we went to the market, the desire to prepare dinner. The process of preparing dinner is long and reaches its purpose only with serving the meal to friends. In a known sense it is continuous, because it cannot be broken down into the sum of its components: at no stage before serving the meal to friends can we say that the process has been completed. If the stall in the market was closed, we'll go to the supermarket, etc. No specific component in the process is necessary in itself, but only through its reference to the convergence of the purpose. But then what really happens when we suddenly encounter a person who gives us a considerable sum of money? On the face of it, it seems that we are forced to explain the reason we went to the market in the first place, the preparation of dinner, as an accidental cause for the fact that we received a nice sum of money. Unlike our dinner that gradually came into being, in analogy to what can be called "natural causality," we have not yet completed the dinner and it has already become the reason why we received a nice sum of money. Even if at this point we abandon the process of preparing dinner and it will never reach its purpose, this will still remain the best explanation for this occurrence. What happens in such a case is that the final cause changes spontaneously.

That is to say, it is precisely the processual nature of the dinner preparation process that seemingly allows its disruption. The disruption to the process changes the meaning of the process itself. Another way: precisely because it is necessary that the dinner preparation process not be hermetic, so that not only is no specific component in it necessary, but even the process itself is subject, to some extent, to a change in its meaning—it follows from this that Aristotle has a very strange concept of what a process is. We can ask, for example, what is more important, that we managed to prepare dinner for our friends or that a significant sum of money came our way? Sometimes we will have to say that it is precisely the fact that a significant sum of money came our way that is more important to us. In such cases, the whole story of preparing dinner will be reframed around the purpose of this sum of money, let's say, settling debts. The question arises whether and at what point the self, or any other authority, is the relevant authority for framing.

If we return to the characterization of luck as what breaks the domain of proper generation and destruction, for Heidegger the fact that things in the world are subject to generation and destruction is all well and good, but it is not relevant to the characterization of time itself. In the usual course of affairs, Aristotle points out that generation and destruction themselves already assume time. Therefore, he feels comfortable classifying all processes of wear (both in Being and Time and in his other courses) to the ontic level, that is, to things in the world that depend on time and are not themselves time. But if Aristotle's analysis is correct (and I believe that at least on the phenomenological level it is correct), it turns out that there is something in ontic occurrences whose meaning cannot be attributed back to the ontological level, that is, to the definition of time that anchors meaning. These occurrences have meaning, and sometimes it can even be said that this meaning is primary, like finding by chance a cancerous growth during an examination meant to find another, smaller disease. Another way, even if Heidegger is right that all generation and destruction assume an ontological characterization of time (the fundamental characteristic of being-there in Heideggerian jargon) it is still not true that an ontological characterization of time covers the entire domain of meaning (Significance). One can still evade and say that all cases receive their meaning from some fundamental characterization of continuous time indirectly, but here Aristotle will claim, and rightly so, his due: if we are pushed to say something like that, it will turn out that we will not be able to separate different orders of causality, or another way, it will turn out that we will miss, phenomenologically, the fundamental being of chance.

[1] 145-6.

[2] 157.

[3] I assume for the purpose of the discussion that for Aristotle all processes are continuous.