Kisiel and Crowell on Heidegger’s B&T

I have now finally finished my reading of both Kisiel (The Genesis of Heidegger’s B&T) and Crowell (Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning). The Kisiel book took a long time as it is fairly intense especially when it starts going through the various drafts of B&T. I must admit that I got bogged down in that for there are a lot of fine distinctions between the drafts, and that part of the book is not merely as interesting as the first part about the early courses of Heidegger. But Crowell’s book is a great supplement to the work of Kisiel who tends to overlook the grounding of Heidegger in Husserl’s Phenomenology. And so it is really essential that one read both of these complementary commentaries. But, of course, Crowell’s work is in fact lightweight in relation to that of Kisiel whose work is extremely significant for anyone who wants to have a clue as to where B&T came from and what its fundamental motive might be which is not at all obvious from the finished product which mostly was written in about a month by Heidegger, which in itself is an amazing accomplishment. However, Crowell admits that the work of Kisiel is monumental, but as he says needs some balance added to it because it represses the phenomenological themes. And I agree with this assessment. I believe that Heidegger was attempting to stay true to the Phenomenological insights of Husserl and to show that he understood them by pushing beyond them as much as is possible. The key point is that Husserl’s whole project takes place in the Present-at-hand modality, and once we ask the question that is posed by intersubjectivity about solipsism it is clear that something radical must be done to solve these problems that plague the philosophy of Husserl. If Husserl has not taken the Kantian paradigm to such an extreme of clarification the problems would never had been seen and a radical departure could not have been formulated. Heidegger uses the breakthroughs of Lask and his knowledge of Dun Scotus to pose an alternative way which is also focused on taking phenomenology into the realm of life philosophy as proposed by Dilthey. Ultimately, the radical breakthrough was made based on the insights of Yorck in his correspondence with Dilthey. Yorck was the one who said that the ontic and the historicity of the human must be radically separated, and this eventually led to the separation between Existenz and Ontology using the work of Jaspers and the Limit situations as the ultimate clue as to how to frame the exploration of the structure of Dasein and beyond that Care. This is a deeply fascinating story of a struggle to express something extremely fundamental that had long been passed over and ignored by philosophy.

As I have said before I don’t think that B&T has yet really had the impact it will eventually have despite all that has been said and written about it, because most of the commentators up till now did not base their understanding of the book on the courses of Heidegger during the period of silence between his Dissertations and the publication, under a publish or perish imperative, that called B&T into Being. The first division was not enough to secure his professorship, and so we got two divisions, if that had not been enough we would have gotten the third division, which would have really helped. But who could day that B&T in the two divisions we have is not enough? As it has changed the landscape of philosophy forever and the entire future of Philosophy will be operating under its shadow. Why is that?

I learned why that was by reading these two commentaries. It is because Heidegger affects a deep reversal in the Philosophical tradition. There are philosophers like Zizek and Nietzsche who try to reverse everything that their predecessor have said for shock value, but it turns out that these reversals are all very superficial ultimately because they leave the deepest presuppositions intact. Heidegger has gone after an extremely deep presupposition within the philosophical universe of discourse that no one suspected was there, and he reversed it, and by that he changed our view of the entire tradition. This reversal is bound up with his going back to Aristotle and taking up the various kinds of Knowledge that Aristotle identifies, which as I have said elsewhere are isomorphic with the Divided Line of Plato. As Brogan says Heidegger aligns Present-at-hand with Episteme, Ready-to-hand with Techne, and places Dasein in relation to Phronesis. We might also say that the They or One (Das Mann) might be associated with Metis. (Aristotle does not name Metis but that is attested in the rest of the Greek tradition as an independent kind of knowledge). Heidegger does not treat Sophia or Nous in this framework set out by Aristotle and Plato that is the core of the Western Tradition. But in Kisiel’s book we learn why he does not treat Sophia. That is because he is reversing the tradition of philosophy. Sophia is that which cannot be different and does not change, i.e. a prioris. Heidegger is interested in life philosophy as is Husserl (cf. Lifeworld) and what does not change and cannot be different is something dead, i.e. anti-thetical to life. Heidegger wants to ground life philosophy and thus he leaves the arena of Transcendental Subjectivity and instead explores its opposite which he calls Dasein, i.e. he leaves Sophia and explores instead the possibilities of Phronesis, which has been mostly ignored, or sidelined by philosophy traditionally. Philosophy has always preferred what cannot change and cannot be different over what can change and can be different, Heidegger reverses this in his philosophy as we receive it in B&T. This is a very deep reversal of the overwhelming tendency in the philosophical tradition as a whole. And its effects will be felt for a long time to come. He does not just as many philosophers have done say that they want to base their philosophies on Change rather than Stasis as say Heraclitus, or Whitehead, or Deleuze wants to do. But rather he goes very deeply into what it means to base a philosophy on phronesis and that eventually leads him to putting it in terms of Existenz rather than Ontos (Being) under the influence of Jaspers. This set of the craze of Existentialism in France that turned out to be a massive misunderstanding of Heidegger according to what we learn in Generation Existential by Ethan Kleinberg. Heidegger pointed out this misunderstanding in his Letter on Humanism where he disavowed the interpretation of his work by Sartre in Being and Nothingness. In fact, probably only now are we getting in English enough background texts, in the form of Heidegger’s courses translated that we can appreciate what Heidegger was trying to do in B&T which turns out to be much deeper than what anyone thought he was trying to do up till now. Germany prior to the two world wars was a very sophisticated philosophical climate which we do not seem to have been able to reproduce since then even with the effulgence of French Philosophy after the war, and the limping along of English and American interest in Continental (Real) Philosophy up to the present. Appreciating the sophistication of that era of philosophy is extremely difficult for us. One good book that sets the stage in a different way by concentrating on Dilthey is Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism by Charles R. Bambach. Also Crowell gives us a great picture of the work of Emil Lask and the Neo-Kantian context and response to Husserl which was the point of departure for Heidegger’s early work. Lask’s major book has been translated but seems to be out of print with only a few copies showing up on Worldcat.org. Crowell helps us understand the relation of Heidegger to Lask and of both of them to Husserl which is the most important contribution of his commentary. A good book about Phronesis is The Heart of Judgment by Leslie Paul Thiele. Phronesis is one of those concepts that has not garnered much attention but has led a kind of underground life in the tradition that is just now receiving more attention now that we know that Dasein for Heidegger was probably an expression of Phronesis. But Heidegger’s interpretation is a very sophisticated reinscription of the meaning of that term. And what I was most surprised about was that the idea that I have been working on for a long time which I call the System/Meta-system duality Heidegger already had at the very beginning of the Kisiel account, i.e. Dasein is a meta-system in relation to the system of the Subject. Dasein is pure context, situation, and not an entity as such, i.e. it is prior to the reified distinction between subject and object. This is just one of the many innovations that appear in Being and Time, the decentering of experience of the unified totality of the subject into the detotalized, disunity of the human situation formally indicated by the term Dasein. It is still not clear where Heidegger got this idea of the Meta-systemic nature of Dasein, but it is probably from Duns Scotus. However, one finds again that something that has taken one years to understand was there all along in Heidegger’s early work and taken for granted as a foundation of his thinking. And that is why his thinking is so radical, because even now only a few theorists have any idea about the difference between Systems and Meta-systems. One of them is A. Plotnitsky building on the work of Bataille. But these theorists who understand meta-systems are very few indeed. But we find Heidegger taking this distinction for granted and building it into the architectonic of his philosophy early on without elaboration one might expect with such a radical shift that this idea brings with it in our understanding of almost everything. Another example is that Heidegger is very explicit that the Ready-to-hand is mass-like while Present-at-hand is set-like. This distinction is also one that has taken me years to clarify on my own, and now I find it was there all along in B&T as the difference between the modalities of being-in-the-world. That should mean that Dasein is neither mass-like nor set-like extremes of identity and difference but something else which I name ipsities in an aggregate. And in fact we see that it is assumed that existentials with their existentiells are like ipsities in an aggregate in their expression. It is normal to struggle to understand things, and that once one understands them find out that this is what the other philosophers have been talking about all along, one just did not understand it. This is a confirmation that one has been thinking the right direction in ones on philosophical journey that one finally catches up with those who have blazed the trail previously. Normally one only finds the trail belatedly, and this is because for the most part commentators do not understand the precursors as well as they think they do, and by following commentators one can easily be led astray. And that is because most commentators are not thinking for themselves along their own paths of thought, but trying to follow someone else. But many of the deepest ideas can only be found if you think along your own path for yourself. When you do that and discover this is what the great philosophers in the tradition have already been saying then you know you are on the right path. But Heidegger has so many innovations like this in his thought that exhausting what he has to teach us is going to take quite some time. But it will be time well spent.

For me going back to early Heidegger and attempting to spend the time to do justice to his thought, by re-reading B&T, and then these new commentaries has been like a revelation to me. I thought I understood it mostly before, but all this time I was really relying on what I was taught about Heidegger and Husserl by my philosophy teacher Alfonso Verdu. This time through I felt like I was reading a completely different book, and probably that we because of all the homework I had done over the years reading much of the Continental tradition in translation, and pursing my own research which I thought was groundbreaking. In fact, almost everything I have done was merely preparation for actually understanding what Heidegger was trying to say in the first place. But hearing that without the proper preparation was impossible. There has been almost a century of work done by others trying to understand and extend what Heidegger himself was indicating. Much of it has been misdirected, but some of it, especially the work of Merleau-Ponty has been extremely significant because he unearthed a modality of Being that Heidegger did not himself seem to recognize. Heidegger himself discovered Being crossed out which Derrida calls difference. But Merleau-Ponty reasoned in The Visible and the Invisible that if there was a third kind of Being that there must be a Fourth, i.e. Wild Being and this is precisely the realm which Deleuze explores so deeply, beyond the realm of Hyper Being that Derrida has explored beyond Pure and Process Being that appear in Being and Time as Present-at-hand and Ready-at-hand. Understanding that there are these other meta-levels of Being beyond those that Heidegger identified allows us to get an interesting perspective on his work, because we can see the way he telegraphs their existence in Being and Time through the peculiarities of its structure. In other words Heidegger gets so deep into the Worldview that he even senses things intuitively about it that he does not actually explicitly comprehend philosophically in an explicit way. Thus we can see that B&T was a genuine Emergent Event because it did have implicitly within it all the Kinds of Being even though only two were called out as actual modalities of being-in-the-world. This was one of the main things I wanted to try to discover in this reading of B&T, whether it actually had the structure of an Emergent Event, i.e. had within it all the kinds of Being as a face of the world. The fact that it does seem to have those other kinds of Being encoded within it, means that it is delving very deeply into the core of the worldview, which it does explicitly by aligning with the kinds of Knowledge of Aristotle. But as shown in The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void the structure of the Western worldview as set long before Heidegger came on the scene, and the fact that he is responsive to that structure means that his insights are guided by some profound intuitions about the nature of the worldview.

The fact that by reading B&T one can come to know better the nature of our worldview, makes it an important resource for us today when understanding the nature of the worldview has become a matter of survival for the species. Basically if we cannot understand ourselves enough in time we will probably kill not just ourselves but everyone else and all the other species on the planet as well the way things are going, i.e. toward a Venusian future. Thus if it was up to me I would make B&T required reading for anyone within the Western Worldview who needs to understand it, because it is the closest thing we have to a users manual for the Worldview. Of course, it is not the whole story, but it is at least the basics about the structure of the worldview and how we as human beings relate to the “Big Other” as Lacan calls the They (Das Mann) which is driving our world off the cliff of non-sustainability. And the best commentary on the Users Manual so far are those of Kisiel and Crowell taken together and combined with that of Brogan. Of course, there are many others that are good. But this new wave of interpretation is grounded in Heidegger’s own courses that he taught prior to the publication of B&T and thus they give us a really good idea of where he was coming from and what he was thinking that eventually led to this radical departure we see in B&T.