(or reading Russell’s Problems of Philosophy while reading Heidegger)
Juliana de Albuquerque Katz
The style of the text we have been given1 leads the reader to a rationalist approach of the question concerning appearance and reality. As a matter of fact its first paragraphs seems to be a parody of the style of the cartesian meditations. In order to make such reference clear, there are three moments of the text I would like call attention to: its very beginning with the question is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?; its following explanation to which philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions; and the affirmation that knowledge is to be derived from our present experiences but any statement as to what is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong.
Moments that, if we attentively observe them in their full development, will culminate in the following situation: if the world qua object of our investigation exists, it should not be the same one as experienced by our immediately experience. Actually, it should be an inference from what is immediately known to us. Thus leading us to very tricky questions concerning the existence of the external world and its characterization as an object.
The distinction between appearance and reality: “between what things seem to be and what they are” often puzzled the modern philosophers and had one of its most emblematic moments in the philosophy of Descartes. Thus, it will not be a coincidence, that in the 19th century Hegel – who was against the modern distinction between subject and object – will criticize the French philosopher and try to build his own version of the problem by affirming that appearance will be related to an essence that will appear or show itself. Says Michael Inwood: “in this case Sein (‘being’ i.e., what we are immediately acquainted with) is Schein, both in the sense that it is dependent on something else, an essence, and in the sense that it does not fully manifest that essence.”
Hegel’s claim on these matters seems to have been influenced by the expressionist turn carried on by German Philosophy under Herder and the Romantics. These philosophers were against the shift of modern times to a self-defining and atomistic subject that was bound to a sense of control of the world, i.e., the objectification of the world. A world that would have lost its sense of embodied meaning to a mechanistic notion that could easily be grasped by a mathematical reasoning: the locus of neutral, contigent correlations freed from final causes and related to efficient causation only.
In fact says Charles Taylor:“Herder reacts against the anthropology of the Enlightenment, against what he called the ‘objectification’ of the human nature, (…) against a calculative notion of reason, divorced from feeling and will. And he is one of the principal of those responsible for developing an alternative anthropology, one centered on the categories of expression.”
It seems to me that Heidegger is not too far from Herder and Hegel in his critique of rationalism and and the consequences of the full import of the cartesian model to our way of thinking the world and our relation to it; since they all appear to maintain that the objectivity of the moderns portraits a reality in which the world as that which shows itself in itself – as manifest, is actually forgotten.
This forgetfulness of the phenomenon of the world by the moderns is the cause of its skepticism about the external world. A position which is avoided by Heidegger – and, as a matter of fact, also by Hegel, although his thoughts on this matter won’t be explained in this text – by reacting towards the the modern representationalist framework of the investigation about reality. In fact, Heidegger will claim that the contextless world of representationalism is an illusion. He will say that the world is the humam world: “it is the affirmation of the reality of what shows up for us”.
This idea that the world is the human world finds its foundations on husserlian intentionality because it admits that every consciousness is consciousness of something. Every consciousness is in relation to its object. There are no consciousness apart from its objects as there are no objects objects apart from consciousness. Dasein is being-in-the-world and its structure favors it to already have a previous knowledge of this reality because it happens to be thoroughly in contact with it.
This amounts that Dasein’s previous knowledge of the world is on the basis of its familiarity with the world. This familiarity is what enables Dasein to find its way around. One must toss away the cartesian notion that our mind bares inside of itself a representation of the world. There is no such a thing. In reality we are always outside of ourselves in the world and towards the world as transcendence.2
Accompanying the moments which I mentioned in the very beginning of this text, Russell gives the reader a very interesting example about a table that may be set to illustrate exactly what Heidegger seems to criticize about Descartes, in the section 21 of Being and Time about the Hermeneutical Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the World. Says Heidegger: “we must then demonstrate explicitly not only that Descartes’ conception of the world is ontologically defective, but that his Interpretation and the foundations on which it is base have let him to pass over both the phenomenon of the world and the being of those entities within-the-world which are proximally ready-to-hand”.
According to Heidegger, Descartes’ conception of the world is ontologically deficient because it is based on a tradition that insists in being as present-at-hand (the metaphysics of presence) and finds in mathematical science a suited ally. Thus, the table in Russell’s text is not a in order to for Dasein (i.e., an equipment or a tool). It appears as being examined while dissociated of its usefulness or the concern it might have for Dasein. It is a collection of characteristics: “to the eye it is oblong, it is brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives out a wooden sound.” Its whole apprehension is its theorization. This shows that Descartes and the cartesian tradition skip the problem of how to get an appropriate access to entities within-the-world. Thus the cartesian reliance on intuition (noesis) against sensation although, Heidegger says, “sensation as opposed to intellectio, still remains possible as a way of access to entities by a beholding which is perceptual in character.”
In relation to the experience of the table, if I were to reconstruct Russell’s text in a heideggerian fashion it would read this way:
Dasein’s most basic way of being is even more basic than seeing something as something which it is. In its averageness Dasein is in a pre-reflexive way and it acquires the understanding of things within-the-world while skillfully coping with these things. There is a direct connection between Dasein and the things and everything it does already presupposes this a priori involvement. Heidegger does not want to separate Dasein from the world on the assumption that it would render both of them closely to the subject-object relation.
The way of being of the table is readiness-to-hand. Since it is not self-sufficient, a table is not presence-at-hand. The readiness-to-hand of the table can be understood in its usefulness for Dasein. A Dasein uses a table in order to work or to read Being and Time. In using the table as an equipment it becomes present to Dasein and it is freed from holistic background of relations and equipment in the study room. If Dasein copes with the table in a satisfactory fashion it can be said that it [Dasein] is by using the world to take a stand on itself. Thus, the table in the study room will be described in a completely different fashion from the explanation given by Russell. Instead of primarily comporting a series of characterizations, it will be described through Dasein’s familiarity with it: the table used in order to study.
The aim of Heidegger’s deconstruction of Descartes (and of the present deconstruction of Russell text) is exactly to provide an explanation that will cease the confusion between scientific description of things and our experience of the world. Although Descartes is gives the foundation of the scientific conception of the world as nature. One must understand that to a heideggerian point of view the world is not a thing. It is not a material thing due to nature’s characteristic as res extensa. World is part of the fundamental structure of Dasein itself as being-in-the-world: it is Dasein’s way of being. It is grounded on the way Dasein exists.
Like in the past when Descartes distinction between nature and spirit – res extensa and res cogitans – raised the suspicion of Herder and Hegel; this time it comes to Heidegger’s attention that far from revealing Descartes rebellious character against tradition, it proves that the structure of nature as res extensa actually places Descartes amongst the tradition itself because it takes being “that simple awareness of something present-to-hand in its sheer present to hand” says the German philosopher.
Another issue to the cartesian interpretation of world is that it obscures the meaning of the being of Dasein. This occurs because it also is interpreted along with tradition under the category of substance. If one tries to do the effort to think with Heidegger, one will see while reading the Meditations that the relation between Dasein and the world becomes totally obscure and this is becomes clear if we also analyse Russell’s explanation.
Finally, although much more could be said about the issues being dealt in this text, I would like to say that the punch line of Heidegger’s critic of Descartes is obviously the confusion the French philosopher does in using particular ontology to work general ontology. A critic that Hegel also directed to his contemporaries who insisted in doing ontology through the means of particular sciences. I quote Large: “any ontical science (however interesting and true it might be on its own terms) cannot be an answer to an ontological question”.
Reference:
Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary. Blackwell Publishers, Massachusetts, 1999.
Large, William. Heidegger’s Being and time. Indiana University Press, Indiana, 2008.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Harper Perennial, New York, 2008.
Heidegger, Martin. Introdução à Filosofia [Eintelung in die Philosophie]. Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 2008.
Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975.
1The following observations were an exercise based on the first two pages of the chapter about appearances and reality of Russell’s book The Problems of Philosophy.
2Hubert Dreyfuss maintains that: as a fundamental determination of Dasein’s ontological structure, transcendence will found intentionality. The intentionality inaugurated by Heidegger is a primordial mode of intentionality which differs from its husserlian counterpart. Actually this primordial intentionality refers to Dasein’s non-representational and non-mental absorbed coping was Dasein is in its averageness.
Escrito por Juliana de Albuquerque K. 
