Žižek's question: Is Heidegger a radical transcendentalist? Or maybe something more?

A basic presentation of the peculiar question Žižek asked Sloterdijk during the Indigo Festival back in 2023.

In 2023, the Indigo Festival took place in Slovenia. As part of the festival, there was a conversation between the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (the link refers to the question in the video). The discussion took place in a friendly atmosphere, as expected between old acquaintances who are used to conducting their popular-philosophical discussions in front of an audience. However, at one moment, it seemed as if the popular tone of the discussion was broken in favor of what Žižek likely saw as a matter of “in for a penny, in for a pound” – even if the audience wouldn’t understand, perhaps he himself could benefit something for his more serious philosophical work. This post will attempt to explain exactly what Žižek asked and will try to offer a starting point for an answer. This is precisely one of the moments where the discussion became slightly more interesting when he posed the following question to Sloterdijk:

Can I make, if it's not too philosophical, risk, and then we can go to more popular stuff, I for a long time I wanted to ask you because I am sincerely am I an idiot here did I get it right - for me Heidegger is, I will explain how, I know his critique of the notion of transcendental approach, the ultimate transcendental thinker, in what sense? For Heidegger the ultimate ereignis-event is a disclosure of being in a new way. Things appear not in a superficial sense, like, Dasein means sein appears to us in a new epochal, new way. But then, from time to time, I found this in the late twenties in his seminary on [Die] Grundbegriffe [der Metaphysik] up to some late book, short, dialogue, with Eugen Fink [Probably the Heraclitus Seminar from 1966], he asks, Heidegger, totally totally naive question. But what happens with entities, things, independently of our perception of them. And then very strangely Heidegger engages in some almost theosophic speculations which remind me even of Walter Benjamin, at some point he speculates that there an infinite pain in nature and that human language is a way for the pain which is already in nature independently of us, coming to work. So, the problem with which I in my books which nobody reads is obsessed is precisely this: Can we move beyond this Heideggerian horizon which is different epochs of being, now our only hope is another disclosure of being, without of course returning to old naive materialists realism. Yes, we are part of nature and so on. I'm struggling with this, do you have something or –

To understand Žižek's question, some background is needed. In his philosophy, Heidegger proposed a radical critique of Western metaphysics, including transcendental philosophy from Kant’s tradition, and, to a lesser extent, from Husserl. Transcendental philosophy—pardon the oversimplification—largely sought to justify our knowledge of the world: instead of arguing that our knowledge is justified by reference to some external objects, intrinsically anchored to them, transcendental philosophy proposed that objectivity itself is a creation of our subjectivity when properly exercised. In Kant’s case, through the regulative idea of perfect synthetic knowledge of nature, and in Husserl’s case, through a meticulous distinction of the cognitive structures that allow the appearance of objective knowledge.

In any case, transcendental philosophy placed great emphasis on the correct subjective approach to phenomena. For Heidegger, this approach was too limited because it did not consider the conditions under which subjective access emerges, and thus it overly focused on the relationship between subject and objects. For example, for Kant, the question concerns the subjective conditions required for a phenomenon to be constituted by reason as an objective phenomenon—say, the ability to causally link different impressions. This leads Kant to attribute ‘reality’ (Realität) only to a very limited set of phenomena that can be known through the subjective constitution of their objectivity. For Heidegger, this bias toward the subject-object phrasing relates to a deep misunderstanding of philosophy’s purpose, which is meant to help us understand Being or the thing-in-itself. On this front, Heidegger actually appreciates Husserl’s work in showing how one can approach things themselves without necessarily digesting the Kantian “thing-in-itself,” which indeed lies beyond any subjective cognition.

Žižek's question gracefully avoids the double Marxist temptation that usually characterized approaches to Heidegger. On one hand, Soviet Marxists liked to lump every philosopher they disliked into the convenient—yet severely constraining—category Marx built for Stirner and his ilk. The idea was simply to categorize every "rival" philosopher as an "idealist" and forget about them. On the other hand, there was the seemingly more sophisticated approach of Adorno, which sought to demonstrate how, in fact, Marxist philosophy was an application of Kantian critique to the social field, and how Heidegger, in regularly breaking from Kantian critique, was in fact a new type of fascist. Žižek's approach to Heidegger is more complex, and in my opinion, reflects the dynamic philosophers adopt toward other philosophers if they are good enough: I’ve understood a lot, I haven’t understood enough, but I roughly know where things stand—I’ll continue exploring this in my free time; in the meantime, there’s still more to learn and think about. Žižek, as far as I can tell, went through a Heidegger phase, and that’s not an easy thing to recover from. As I see it, Žižek recovered in the best possible way: he didn’t lose interest, but he wasn’t imprisoned by Heidegger’s thought either.

Nevertheless, Žižek wants to argue that Heidegger is a radical transcendentalist—precisely in the sense that Dasein, the human being in its being, is where things receive their meaning. In other words, it appears that without Dasein, things are meaningless, and only in the context of Dasein do they acquire meaning. Not necessarily through a subjective approach, but necessarily through Dasein's understanding of Being. On the one hand, Heidegger is certainly not an idealist, in the sense that he never claims that things are the creation of Dasein; on the other hand, he is not a skeptic. Like Kant and Husserl before him, he believes that it is possible to attain knowledge, or at least an adequate understanding of things.

But then Žižek presents his confusion: from time to time, - and there are, to be sure, far more cases than the ones Žižek mentioned -, it seems that Heidegger deviates slightly from this simple scheme and offers a true departure from transcendentalism. For example, in his seminar from 1929, the same year he published his revision of Kant’s philosophy titled Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, which Žižek referenced. What interests Žižek, as he formulates it, is whether we can legitimately move beyond the transcendental dimension in Heidegger’s thought without falling into naïve materialism, or what he suspects Heidegger is doing—a kind of theosophical speculation in the style of Walter Benjamin. Naïve materialism essentially "places" humans within nature without fully accounting for human reflexive qualities (a formulation Heidegger would likely not accept), while theosophical speculations represent dogmatic thinking from another direction, in the "everything is permitted" style (again, Heidegger would disagree with the phrasing).

Specifically, Žižek is interested in the relationship between nature and humans. (Earlier in the discussion, Sloterdijk gave a brief introduction to philosophical anthropologists like Plessner, Gehlen, and others, which likely sparked the question).

The two texts that Žižek cites contain this conscious attempt by Heidegger to transcend the framework of Dasein, of Disclosure, at least seemingly. In the fundamental concepts of metaphysics, Heidegger offers a particularly long and interesting discussion about what it means for animals to be "poor in the world" (a concept that we now know also pertains to Jews in the so-called "Black Notebooks"). Even more interesting, and probably what prompted Žižek to bring up this text, is that he speculates on whether the fact that animals are poor in the world is something that humans must understand in relation to animals per human understanding, or whether it is an authentic characteristic of the animals themselves, independent of humans. Heidegger's intriguing response is that, fundamentally, animals are poor in the world because they are limited to a specific domain, to a particular "environment." The animal, so to speak, belongs to a certain type of environment that restricts what it can experience. This domain functions as a limitation in the sense that were the animal not confined to this domain, one could speak of the animal's world. However, from Heidegger's perspective, this limitation of each animal to a specific defined domain is an essential matter, in contrast to the fundamental openness, or world-formation, that characterizes humans.

So far, so good. However, Heidegger explicitly states that the question arises whether this is the way we must understand the animal, given that as humans, we are essentially world-makers, and therefore we understand animals through a human understanding, or whether the poverty in the world belongs to the animals fundamentally. Interestingly, Heidegger constructs an argument to resolve this question by asserting that we must first resolve the question of what a world is, or what it precisely means to be world-makers. To do this, we first need to understand that while each animal indeed has its own domain, its own "circle," the animals themselves are interconnected within each other's circles in such a way that even the development from one species to another is related to a process of adaptation that involves, each time in a different way, natural entities. Animals do not perceive the same nature or the same entities; rather, they see them only in different ways that correspond to the domain of each animal. However, each animal gains a certain access to natural entities that are fundamentally alien to both humans and other animals, and develop the so-called higher species. The human belongs in this entalgenment of circles as well. Humans are not the "products" of this process, simply because the difference between them and animals is, as stated, a qualitative matter whose nature we have not yet fully grasped, and perhaps we cannot grasp the nature of humanity finitely enough (pun intended). Yet this process itself reveals some aspects of nature that transcend the ordinary way humans perceive it as a mere arbitrary thing (Vorhandenheit). In this sense, nature is supposedly in a process of transcending itself, of which humans, who are also in a decisive sense—at least, as Heidegger states elsewhere, in the body—are held captive.

Here we must note that the unity of humans with animals is no longer a unity of cognitive structures. According to Heidegger, these are not even the same entities that become accessible, only in varying degrees, to both the animal and the human. Humans gain access to things as they are in themselves, whereas animals gain access to a natural appearance that is much more basic regarding other things. The very concept of appearance or manifestness is shared not by essence (because the essence of animality and humanity differ), but in a neighbourhood relationship that arises from a common belonging to to the unity of being that also grounds our worldliness in a sense. The unity of the world thus becomes not a unity of the basic cognitive structure that makes entities accessible in various ways, but rather a unity in the sense that an entity becomes accessible in various ways. This unity, in itself, from the perspective of nature, is a dynamic matter. It is undoubtedly a speculation that places Heidegger's concept of the world beyond any transcendental philosophy as it is generally understood. It follows that the possibility of Disclosure authentically belongs to nature itself, even without humans. Even without humans, we must assert that the concept of animality is characterized by the fact that the animal belongs to a domain that restricts it from having a world—this is the manner in which Heidegger understands "poor in the world." The very possibility of humanity, as well as animality, lies within nature itself and conditions its mode of appearance retroactively, even if it was not necessary from the outset for humanity to come into being. It follows that the verse cited by Sloterdijk from Paul, “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed”—the very verse that Heidegger himself quotes in a lecture—gains an ontological meaning that stands in contrast to the most basic Kantian dialectic.

A similar story repeats itself in the joint seminar of Heraclitus with Eugen Fink. There, Fink pushes Heidegger, following the aforementioned lectures on the foundations of metaphysics, into a corner where a type of ontic corporeal understanding may be possible, which in a certain way serves as a parallel to the ontological understanding offered by beings—through the phenomena of the body, sleep, and the natural conditions that allow for the establishment of Dasein. However, that is truly a story for another time.

If curiosity still gnaws at you regarding the question of Heidegger and transcendentality, a friend of mine revealed to me that a very interesting text from Heidegger's archive has recently been published, which engages many of these moves in what seems like an excessive focus on this very question—though, in my opinion, it is less fruitful than the seminar with Fink. In any case, you are invited to look into it as well.