Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 00:15:47 +0100
Subject: Habermas on Heidegger


Cologne 31 January 1999

Thank you Antti for your thoughts on Habermas. You are forcing me to be more 
careful and reconsider what Habermas is saying in order to try an ex negativo 
entry to the thinking of being. To keep matters manageable I will concentrate on 
a few key issues and try to be brief and not overlook anything important.

> AK:
> Now, it is true that what cannot be put into words cannot be publicly
> debated. But bear in mind that Habermas is not aiming at an account of
> human being in its fullness: what he is talking about is rather how to
> settle disputes of (propositional) truth, politics, morality, or law
> non-arbitrarily and without recourse to metaphysics.

If Habermas has a restricted aim, as you describe, then he has to presuppose a 
certain understanding of human being (since he can't do without (an 
understanding of) human beings altogether). So his understanding of human being 
on a fundamental level would have to be implicit. Where does this understanding 
come from? Is there such an understanding without recourse to the core of our 
tradition? After all, Habermas is defending (a kind of) rationality, isn’t he? 
And he is trying to fend off an alternative understanding of human being coming 
from the direction of the thinking of being, so there must be some surface area 
on which they can make contact. Above all, Habermas has Heidegger’s thinking in 
his sights and regards his own thinking as a match for Heidegger’s. What kind of 
critique would that be whose compass does not even encompass what it is trying 
to criticize? 

This is an aspect of the question whether there is such a thing as social 
philosophy or political philosophy. Factically there is such philosophy, no end 
of it. Embedded within a certain tradition of understanding what human being is, 
such delimited philosophy has its place. When it comes to the thinking of being, 
however, which is not social or political philosophy, the question of who we are 
is posed anew, and that in such a radical way that one could claim it is the 
first time this question is being re-posed since the beginnings of metaphysics 
with the Greeks. 

So I question whether it is possible to settle anything “without recourse to 
metaphysics”, as you claim for Habermas’ theory. What is Habermas’ implicit 
understanding of human being underlying his Theory of Communicative Action? 

> "Nor does the step back from propositional truth into the clearing
> mean that one has moved simply to a zone of experience that cannot be
> brought to language." Why? Because "[p]henomenology means, after all,
> putting the phenomena into words, and 
> that implies that phenomenological truth is necessarily shared." One can
> argue for a different understanding of the body and so thematize it in
> rational discourse,...

Is it _rational_ discourse? I regard our dialogue as trying to get something 
into view for the participants (you, me, the others taking part) to see. The 
language is trying to invoke and point out something. This is a common 
enterprise. Rational discourse, on the other hand, is often or mostly concerned 
with providing better arguments, with dispute, with defeating an opposed view by 
providing more powerful reasons (_ratione_). Recall the distinction between 
“repudiation” and “loving dispute/conflict/strife” in the passage from 
_Wegmarken_. 

What phenomenology can put into words may be in part that which does not show 
itself to understanding. In words we may be able to say this withdrawal from 
understanding, but not _what_ (if it is a what) is withdrawing from 
understanding. Words can then only point to what lies beyond them. To put it 
another way, there is e.g. concealment which is itself concealed (and then we 
know nothing at all about it), and there is concealment which reveals itself 
_as_ concealment. When we try to say anything about music, for instance, we are 
pointing to something which _as such_, i.e. as music, defies words, but 
nevertheless reaches us. Phenomenology would then be demarcating its own limits 
and pointing beyond itself. 

Isn’t an essential aspect of our bodiliness (like the earth) its concealing of 
itself from us? E.g. I can certainly see, but I can never see my eye seeing. 
Does my eye see at all? Or do I see through my eyes? On the other hand, I can 
grasp something with my hand, and I can see what I grasp and my hand grasping. 
But my hand cannot grasp my eye seeing. So here there is a dimension of 
concealment involved which we can point to phenomenologically. This pointing 
does not take place simply “within propositions”.

> AK:
> Hence, on Habermas's account politics, for example, cannot be based on
> ineffable insights on part of seers, whether they happen to be party
> leaders or university rectors.

I agree. But I regard it as a warning that philosophical thinking, especially 
the incipient type of thinking initiated by Heidegger, cannot find any 
im-mediate (unmediated) place in political discourse. On the other hand, 
however, what politics or the dimension of the political is, is a question which 
falls outside of political discourse and is not accessible to political 
thinking. 

> Earlier in the same collection, he concludes his criticism of Husserl as
> follows:
>
> "Wenn es aber einen Rekurs auf ein letztes tragendes Fundament nicht gibt,
> wenn wir, wie schon Peirce eindrucksvoll gezeigt hat, den Evidenzbegriff
> der Wahrheit preisgegeben müssen; dann sind die in den intentionalen
> Erlebnissen implizierten Geltungsansprüche nicht anschaulich, sondern nur
> diskursiv einzulösen. Nicht Anschauungen, sondern allein Argumente können
> uns veranlassen, die Rechtmässigkeit problematisierter Geltungsansprüche
> anzuerkennen oder zu verwerfen." (Jürgen Habermas, 'Vorlesungen zu einer
> sprachtheoretischen Grundlegung der Soziologie', _Vorstudien und
> Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns_, 48)
>
> (Truth, for Habermas, is one of the validity claims (Geltungsansprüche)
> raised in speech acts.) In other words, Habermas is arguing in the spirit
> of Sellars and Rorty that the authority or justification of judgments like
> "this piece of chalk is white" is not to be explained with the piece of
> chalk being present to us in intuition (as in Husserl) or by our being by
> (bei) it, but can only take place in the "logical space of reasons"
> (Sellars). This is what Heidegger says on the matter: "Wir, die Subjekte,
> beziehen uns direkt auf dieses Seinde (Kreide) selbst; wir sind bei ihr.
> [...] Wir kommen nicht erst auf dem Wege über die Aussage und den
> Beziehungszusammenhang, in dem sie angeblich hängt, zur Kreide, sondern
> umgekehrt, nur insofern wir schon bei der Kreide sind, uns bei ihr
> aufhalten, kann sie mögliches Objekt der Aussage werden." (GA 27, 66) For
> him, predicative truth is based (I'm not sure if "based" is the best
> characterization here) on a more fundamental relationship, which he calls
> veritative: "Die Wahrheit liegt also nicht in der Beziehung des Prädikats
> zum Subjekt, sondern in der Beziehung der ganzen prädikativen Beziehung zu
> dem, worüber ausgesagt wird, zum Aussagegegenstand." (ibid., 53)
>
> As I said, I could not say at this point whether or not the pragmatist
> criticism of evidential conceptions of truth applies to Heidegger, or what
> the implications would be in that case. It would have to be carefully
> considered what the nature of the relationship between truth as alêtheia
> and propositional truth is in Heidegger, and of course one could also
> criticize the pragmatist conception.

Don’t statements/propositions refer to something? Heidegger’s simple example of 
the chalk shows that the chalk itself must show itself of itself _as_ chalk, and 
that we must be with the chalk in its self-showing to say anything at all about 
it. Claims of validity are also statements and refer to something (states of 
affairs) which reveals itself. If arguments and not Anschauungen (immediate 
looking-at) are the sole medium in which validity claims can be established, 
wouldn’t these arguments be _gegenstandslos_, so to speak, i.e. don’t arguments 
have to refer to something to which we have access also _apart_ from talking and 
arguing about it? (It would seem that academic discourse in the bad sense is 
predicated upon the belief that the texts/arguments refer only to each other and 
not to anything we live and experience.) 

>... In Heidegger's case, and here I'm again echoing
> Habermas-as-I-remember-him, it is difficult to see how feedback from
> argumentation would modify the clearing, ie. how newly established
> propositional truths alter the space within which truth can take place
> (Habermas speaks of "learning processes").  

If propositions always refer to something that can be looked at (angeschaut) in 
the broad sense of being open to experience, and if propositions always presence 
beings in the open, then argumentation never leaves the dimension of alêtheia, 
but is only en-abled within this dimension. When you say “alter the space”, do 
you mean what comes to show itself within the openness of alêtheia, or do you 
mean alter the space of alêtheia itself? If the latter, then this is the heart 
of philosophy: trying to become clear about alêtheia, its play and counterplay 
with lêthê, etc. So there is no need for “feedback” if argumentation can never 
leave the clearing. 

> I welcome references to
> Heideggerian texts where such alterations are not simply unaccountable
> sendings of being. 

What do you mean by “unaccountable”? Do you want to see a reason? Are you 
claiming that nothing happens without a reason? Are you an adherent of Leibniz’s 
_nihil est sine ratione_? But Leibniz’ principle that there is nothing without a 
reason is itself ungrounded and therefore “unaccountable”! Nevertheless, we can 
follow in the writings of great thinkers how they bring the “unaccountable 
sendings of being” to thoughtful language in drafting and casting an 
historically new conception of being. The refusal to allow that the being of 
beings opens itself to us humans historically in different ways leads to the 
hybris of us trying to provide explanations for everything, i.e. to us trying to 
_rationalize_ in the true sense of this word _everything that is_. But this 
principle of rationality (of which Habermas is a fierce proponent) is itself a 
dogma and ungrounded. The fundamental philosophical stance is not that of 
arguing and providing reasons, but of questioning into a dimension which we do 
not control. The absoluteness of reason, i.e. that it is absolved from anything 
outside itself (the dimension of alêtheia on which it depends), is an arrogation 
of human subjectivity. It is a dogma that human rationality underlies 
(subiectum) everything that is. And perhaps this dogma is part of the problem of 
(metaphysical) politics, i.e. that it appeals to rational argument and excises 
what does not fit. So that what does not fit returns through the back door in 
the form of ‘irrationalism’, as the negation of reason. 

> [T]he human being is so interwoven with the context-shaping, space-giving,
> temporalizing processes of world-disclosure that Heidegger characterizes
> its existence as Da-sein (there-being), which "lets be" every entity by
> comporting itself toward it. The Da (there) of Dasein is the locale where
> the lighting-up process of Being [Lichtung des Seins] opens up." (_The
> Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_, 147). Habermas never criticizes this
> aspect of Heidegger's thinking, and I don't think it is reasonable to call
> his reading of it "appalling", even if he does not use the same rhetoric as
> Heideggerians do. His remark on this not being an advance to American
> pragmatism is intentionally provocative and, I have to say, stupid.

I agree that Habermas’ paraphrase here is completely adequate, and therefore by 
no means appalling. But isn’t it appalling to have understood (in some way or 
other) this central insight of the thinking of being and not to make anything of 
it? To simply drop it and put it on the same level as American pragmatism? 

> ME:
> 3) Habermas represents SuZ as the result of several “begriffsstrategischen 
> Entscheidungen” (decisions relating to conceptual strategy; S.174). This is 
> antithetical to Heidegger’s phenomenological approach in which it is a
> matter of 
> pointing to (in language, with the _logos_) the phenomena as they show 
> themselves of themselves. 
>
> AK:
> This is not a valid criticism of Habermas's critique. Heidegger may well
> represent himself as simply adhering to how things show themselves from
> themselves, but it does not follow that this is the case. In itself, the
> fact that what Heidegger says about what he's doing does not prove that
> Habermas's different interpretation is wrong. Surely being and beings do
> not articulate themselves into concepts of themselves, even if they do show
> themselves; you know better than I do the care with which Heidegger chooses
> his concepts, even using creative etymology to link them together.

I don’t think right or wrong is the appropriate distinction here. Any 
interpretation of a philosopher has to mesh (critically engage, 
aus-einander-setzen) with the deepest core of that thinking (that is, if it not 
just using it as a convenient quarry of ‘ideas’). Heidegger does indeed choose 
his concepts carefully, and his concepts and language change continually, but is 
it a matter of “conceptual strategy”? Strategy to what end? Toward defeating 
which opponents? Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, of bringing people round to 
your point of view. For Plato, this art of rhetoric is a kind of flattery to be 
distinguished from philosophy, the love of insight into how being shows itself. 
I submit that the “loving strife” of philosophy cannot be a matter of 
“strategy”, that the “strife” of contro-versy, i.e. speaking against each other, 
has to be encompassed by a common dimension of devotion to the issue which is to 
come to light. I do not see that this aspect finds any place in Habermas’ way of 
thinking; his fundamental stance seems to exclude it. 

ME:
> point in another direction. Rather, das Man has to be understood, if at
> all, as 
> a happening of _alaetheia_ too, namely, as a covering-over.
>
> AK:
> "If at all"? Surely the problematic of das Man has to be understood, and
> the modernity-critical tone is all too noticeable, no matter how it is
> denied. (I'm sure Heidegger also denies the influence of his cultural
> background to the analyses of the fourfold, and with no more credibility.
> Had he been born 500 miles to the east or to the west, the thing thinging
> might have brought something quite different to play. I sometimes wonder
> which elements of his philosophy would have been different had he been a
> woman born in New York.) Have you read Bourdieu's _The Political Ontology
> of Martin Heidegger_? (I don't recall the French title.) It's a little too
> much to expect people to believe that the coincidence in tone and rhetoric
> between Heidegger and the mandarins of the time would be just a
> coincidence, particularly when it seems to take some twisting to fit the
> critique of das Man with Dasein being Mitsein from the start.

I don’t think the point is that thinkers inevitably bring their own experience 
of life (cultural background, etc.) into their thinking. Of course they do, and 
they must do it. Every philosopher brings their deepest intimacy to bear in 
their thinking, and also their cultural environment, their times and Zeitgeist. 
No doubt. But does this justify that their thinking then be explained and 
interpreted _in those terms_? Of course this can be done, and it is easy to do. 
That’s why philosophical libraries are full of books and articles of this type. 
Psychobiographical and sociological explanations abound, esp. with regard to 
Heidegger, but aren’t such explanation themselves problematic? Do they reveal? 
Does their revealing at the same time conceal? Don’t a thinker thoughts have a 
status (Seinsweise) completely inaccessible to such modes of explanation? 

If one is to take SuZ at all seriously as a _philosophical_ treatise, then one 
has to take its stated core question seriously -- and not  just brush it 
(violently) aside. One cannot then pick and choose the juicy bits, such as the 
sections about _das Man_ and “idle chatter” or “existing authentically”, and 
separate them off from the rest of _SuZ_ as an existentialist social critique, 
but one is obliged to try to make sense of what these sections have to do with 
the single question that moves the thinker. (Any philosophy has some sort of 
unity, it hangs together, even if contradictorily and with inconsistencies, 
etc.) _All_ phenomena have to be approached with the question of being in mind 
if we are to learn anything at all philosophically. In SuZ we read:

“What remains _hidden_ in an exceptional sense, however, or falls back into 
_hiding_ or shows itself only in a _distorted_ way is not this or that being, 
but rather ... the _being_ of beings.” SuZ Sect. 7C, S.35

So, at the very least, in the context of SuZ (and perhaps not in later writings) 
we have to ask ourselves what the sections on _das Man_ have to do with trying 
to uncover the being of beings. Otherwise, the psychobiographical and 
sociological explanations only do violence to philosophical thinking and help in 
covering up what thinking is striving to reveal. The violence of these ways of 
thinking should not be overestimated, for they have the advantage of relying on 
the self-evidence of everything that is taken for granted in our thoroughly 
metaphysical ways of thinking. It is a tremendous struggle to try to free 
oneself from these habits of thinking. 

> AK:
> This may be your most revealing misunderstanding. Habermas's point is that
> the world does not play by itself (you speak of Dasein as "playmate"
> yourself), nor does Being cast its light on beings by itself. True, for
> Habermas the play of the world is not primary; it is _co-originary_ with
> the agency of actors, who are formed in and through the different networks
> of lifeworld interaction. The subject is not given or foundational or in
> control of everything in herself or around her, so I do not think you can
> make the charge of metaphysics of subjectivity stick. If, on the other
> hand, you eliminate human agency altogether, what do you have but nameless
> occurring, for which nobody is responsible in the least?

I agree that we are the playmates of being, that there is no “nameless 
occurring”, as you put it. Being eventuates only insofar as it appropriates 
human being as the place where it can open up. The issue is how Habermas thinks 
the play of the world. I’ll have to take another look at Habermas to say more 
about this. Do you know of any succinct passages where Habermas presents his 
deepest understanding of the world?

ME:
> So the late Heidegger is for Habermas 
> a preacher of blind submission to destiny. Habermas gets nervous at the idea 
> that there could be something happening which is not in the hands of
> subjects. 
>
> AK:
> There is a difference between subjectless happening and happening that is
> not quite in the hands of subjects. It is only the first one that Habermas
> cannot accept. What he gets nervous about is throwing your hands up
> altogether and surrendering in the face of metaphysics of subjectivity or
> the merciless march of instrumental rationality.

I cannot accept the first either if it is interpreted as a blind submission to 
destiny. And this is what Habermas strongly criticizes in the later Heidegger. I 
think this criticism is nonsense, since Dasein’s questioning belongs to the 
propriation of being. Philosophical questioning is part of the way in which 
being reveals itself in different historical castings of the being of beings. We 
are not blind victims of being’s missives and missiles, but are embedded in its 
happening. One cannot accuse Heidegger of “throwing up his hands altogether and 
surrendering”. Questioning is his response, and that means anything but 
submission. This is the philosopher’s role, and it is not the role for 
everybody. 

Michael
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