Self-Consciousness and the Critique of the Subject

Hegel, Heidegger, and the Poststructuralists

Simon Lumsden

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231538206
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Post-structuralisme en philosophie

Poststructuralists hold Hegel responsible for giving rise to many of modern philosophy's problematic concepts—the authority of reason, self-consciousness, the knowing subject. Yet, according to Simon Lumsden, this animosity is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of Hegel's thought, and resolving this tension can not only heal the rift between poststructuralism and German idealism but also point these traditions in exciting new directions.

Revisiting the philosopher's key texts, Lumsden calls attention to Hegel's reformulation of liberal and Cartesian conceptions of subjectivity, identifying a critical though unrecognized continuity between poststructuralism and German idealism. Poststructuralism forged its identity in opposition to idealist subjectivity; however, Lumsden argues this model is not found in Hegel's texts but in an uncritical acceptance of Heidegger's characterization of Hegel and Fichte as "metaphysicians of subjectivity." Recasting Hegel as both post-Kantian and postmetaphysical, Lumsden sheds new light on this complex philosopher while revealing the surprising affinities between two supposedly antithetical modes of thought.

1

THE METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE AND THE WORLDLESS SUBJECT

Heidegger’s Critique of Modern Philosophy

In this way the illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise to one final delusion: it seems as though man everywhere and always only encounters himself. … In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself i.e. his essence.¹

HEIDEGGER WROTE EXTENSIVELY on German idealism throughout his career and his relationship to it has a number of phases. At some stages, he takes Hegel’s and Fichte’s thought to be the end of metaphysics and the pinnacle of every problematic tendency in modern philosophy. At other times, his approach is far more nuanced. The concern of this chapter is not to flesh out the various changes of attitude that Heidegger adopts toward German idealism—this has been done admirably well else-where²—but rather to re-create the narrative by which German idealism comes to be understood as the metaphysics of subjectivity. Understanding why this view of German idealism takes hold over leading poststructuralist thinkers, such as Deleuze and Derrida, requires tracing the development of this idea in Heidegger’s thought.

Heidegger adopts a variety of attitudes toward German idealism. Why poststructuralism takes Hegel to be the archetype of all the problematic tendencies of the philosophical tradition has no straightforward answer.³

Nevertheless, for reasons that may well be as much biographical as philosophical, Hegel remains for poststructuralism the denouement of the philosophical tradition, even though Nietzsche, on Heidegger’s account, is the definitive end of the line for modern metaphysics. Above all others, Hegel’s system is the one that has to be overcome to put philosophy back on track, overcome either by fundamental ontology, differánce, or transcendental empiricism (as will be explored in the final three chapters of this book). My concern in this chapter is to reconstruct the narrative by which Hegel becomes the figure who completes the transfer of God into subject and, with this move, brings metaphysics to completion. Demonstrating this does not require going against the grain of Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel, since it is a pronounced line of argument that runs through a number of his works.

DESCARTES AND THE RISE OF THE KNOWING SUBJECT

In an early section of Being and Time, Heidegger outlines the necessity for the “Destruction of the History of Ontology,” a dramatic and seemingly drastic demand. Why does it require such a comprehensive overhaul? The philosophical tradition has, since Antiquity, appropriated a fairly narrow range of concepts that it has determined to be the master concepts of philosophical inquiry. Within modern metaphysics, there is a further narrowing of the concepts of legitimate concern: “the ego cogito of Descartes, the subject, the ‘I,’ reason, spirit, person” (BT 22). These concepts have become the animating concerns of modern philosophy. These concepts are not in themselves in need of jettisoning, but their predominance is indicative of a failure of philosophy to examine a far more elemental problem, upon which all these issues and problems are based, and which each of these problems assumes an understanding of, but which remains unexamined. This is the issue of being. As Heidegger puts it in Basic Problems of Phenomenology: “We must understand being so that we may be given over to a world that is” (BP 11). In order to put philosophy back on the correct course to the most basic problem of philosophy—the inquiry into the question of the meaning of being—philosophy needs to be purged of the flaws of traditional ontology.

In the first instance this requires reconstructing the trajectory of Western metaphysics, demonstrating how it has constrained philosophical inquiry from Antiquity to the modern era. Once this deleterious path has been exposed, an approach to being can be envisaged that is adequate to it. In Heidegger’s case, reorienting the core problems of the tradition (knowing, selfhood, reason, and so on) away from their corrupted elements to the more elemental issue, their relation to being, will also allow them to be examined in a manner that does justice to philosophical inquiry. What hope is there of understanding these concepts if the most important issue underlying them is neglected? Heidegger is motivated to put philosophy back on track not simply to reclaim the legitimate path of ontology from which thought has been diverted; rather, his concern is guided by the present need of philosophy.

The destruction of the history of ontology is important for the transformation of contemporary philosophy. Putting philosophy back on the right path requires examining the figures that were decisive for the present state of philosophical inquiry. Unsurprisingly, the figures that are decisive in determining the way contemporary philosophy understands the central problems of philosophy are Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. The approach of these figures to the central problems of philosophy has come to dominate modern philosophy. In Being and Time Heidegger describes the fundamental problem of their approach this way: when Dasein “understands either itself or Being, it does so in terms of the ‘world’” (BT 22).

This seems like a peculiar criticism for Heidegger to make; after all, the isolation of the Cartesian and Kantian subject from the world is one of his most trenchant criticisms of the philosophical tradition. Heidegger has, however, a number of technical definitions of “world.” By “world” here, he means “the totality of those beings which can be present-at-hand” (BT 64). This sense of “world” is one that is inflicted with a “baleful prejudice” (BT 25), a prejudice that has come to dominate modern philosophy and is inseparable from the neglect of the question of being. That prejudice is to understand ens (that which is) as a posit of the subject. In early modern philosophy Descartes presents the most powerful articulation of this prejudice. He amplifies the prejudice of medieval ontology in which “the meaning of the ens is established in the understanding of it as ens creatum,” that is, a created being (BT 24). Presumably, for the medieval thinker, created being meant created by God, not by man. Descartes divides existence into that which is self-constant (God) and things that are produced. Humans are the exception within this spectrum by virtue of their thinking, but they too are things: res cogitans.

What comes to define the reality of beings, on this view, is its “remaining constant [ständigen Verbleib]” (BT 92). What remains constant is the substantiality of a corporeal thing and is prior to “any other ways in which being is determined.” It has as such a metaphysical priority. Descartes’s error was to ignore the being of substance and of Dasein; indeed, he “renounces [it] in principle” (BT 94). He understands objects exclusively as beings and not at all with regard to their being. For Descartes, being is not accessible “as a being” and accordingly cannot be considered an object of investigation. Because being is not accessible, Heidegger argues, Descartes makes beings the privileged object of philosophical inquiry. Consequently, all being comes to be understood in terms of determinate attributes. By understanding being as “world,” Descartes makes the mistake, in Heidegger’s terminology, of treating the ontic as the ontological. Moreover, Descartes employs a methodology appropriate to such a task, and this further diminishes the prospects of a fundamental ontology.

Descartes’s method had two important features: that the world understood as substance adheres to mathematical regularity and that objects can only be grasped through knowing, intellectio: “In criticizing the Cartesian point of departure, we must ask which kind of Being that belongs to Dasein we should fix upon as giving us an appropriate way of access to those beings with whose being as extensio Descartes equates the being of the ‘world.’ The only genuine access to them lies in knowing, intellectio, in the sense of the kind of knowledge we get in mathematics and physics” (BT 95). This “remaining constant,” which this mathematical-styled knowledge appeals to as the standard of truth, renders beings into a readily accessible form: “Thus the being of the ‘world’ is, as it were, dictated to in terms of a definite idea of being which lies veiled in the concept of substantiality and in terms of the idea of a knowledge by which such beings are cognized” (BT 96). The being of the world is as such prescribed by the criteria of scientific method itself. Objects are cognized to the extent that they are accessible to mathematical knowledge. What is accessible is that which “remains constant.” The standard of constancy is conceived exclusively as mathematical regularity. The central presupposition by which the knowing subject is presumed to have access to objects—constant objective presence-at-hand (ständige Vorhandenheit)—is unexamined. Objects, in this view, present themselves to subjects only on the basis of the conformity of objects to an order worked out in advance, for example, the characterizations of objects that issue from perception.

The perceptual-based descriptions that Descartes employs to describe the external world (for example, as extended in space) cannot explain the cognition of being. The very idea of the truth of objects as constant presence-at-hand prohibits Descartes from seeing that the properties of objects that are taken to be true can only present themselves to a Dasein. That is, what this approach fails to confront is that Dasein has already and implicitly an understanding of the being of beings. It is only on the basis of this implicit understanding of being that any specific “property” of an object, for example, extension, can be meaningful to Dasein. That understanding is not knowledge.

Descartes’s reliance on the methodology of mathematics involves a pivotal shift from ontological considerations to epistemological ones: “to know an object in what is supposedly the most rigorous ontical manner is our only possible access to the primary Being of beings which such knowledge reveals” (BT 100). The irony of the Cartesian strategy is that scientific method is supposed to bring the world back to the very center of thought, by virtue of its ability to express the world as a universal and substantial truth. But what moves to the center is not world, and certainly not being, but rather the subject and its representational way of knowing the world. This subject is characterized by a division between a representing self and a world that it sets out to know. What is brought to center stage is a knowing worldless subject.

In the writings that follow Being and Time, Heidegger describes the emergence of representationalism in the history of philosophy and the way in which it becomes tied to a very specific type of subject. As was sketched briefly in the introduction, the decisive shift in modern philosophy was the redefining of subjectum from the being of all beings to subjectum as ego.⁴ Subjectum, Heidegger claims, is derived from hupokeimenon: “the core of the thing.”⁵ In ancient and medieval thought substance and subjectum both indicated the being of beings. Descartes’s innovation was to redefine subjectum as the “self-representing representation.”⁶ Heidegger explains the character of this subject in Basic Problems of Phenomenology: “this being which we ourselves are is given to the knower first and as the only certain thing, that the subject is accessible immediately and with absolute certainty, that it is better known than all objects” (BP 123). This vision of a subject completely misinterprets Dasein and its relation to being. Descartes’s subject is defined by virtue of its presence to itself. The idea that we could be present to ourselves with transparency or with epistemic certainty fails to capture the being of Dasein.

While Dasein is a being, our selfhood, language, understanding, existence, and indeed anything else of philosophical significance cannot be adequately explained as beings. Much of Being and Time shows how Dasein should be depicted. In Descartes’s case, treating the self as a thing (res) that it represents to itself with certainty is not the end of the story. This representationalism is how all relations to objects come to be conceived. This subject is a creature that has itself before itself and conceives the being of objects before it as representations. The rise of representationalism is a critical step in detailing the limitations of modern philosophy. Conceiving of objects as representations is not in itself a problem; the problem is conceiving the relation to objects exclusively on this model. When “being is defined as the objectness of representation, and truth as the certainty of representation,” Dasein, world, and objects are obscured (AWP 66).

Heidegger points out three problematic elements of representationalism. Firstly, it assumes a subject that is opposed to an object (Gegenstand). Descartes interprets the world solely in terms of a thinking subject (res cogitans) set over and against the res extensa. The subject is a purely inner entity, which by virtue of its representations knows and relates to the external world. These representations allow the subject to “return with [its] booty to the cabinet of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it” (BT 62).⁷ Descartes’s philosophy starts from the subject and returns to the subject (BP 152).

Secondly, as has already been discussed, the marker of the relation of subject to object is knowledge. By setting up beings as objects over and against the subject, they are made available to the subject in an orderable way: “They become objects of explanatory representation” (AWP 65). The purpose of the explanation is to secure everything into an explanatory order. The setting up of beings in this way makes them available as items to be known. Thirdly, the I takes a privileged position: “When, however, man becomes the primary and genuine subjectum, this means that he becomes that being upon which every being, in its way of being and its truth, is founded” (AWP 66–67). With Descartes subjectum has become the subject. The subject is defined by its knowing relation to itself. And the being of beings is defined and determined by the knowledge the subject has of them. All being has thereby become the subject. The being of hupokeimenon has been transformed into the being that is determined by the knowing subject. Reason is employed by this subject to contain the object as something over against the subject, and truth has come to mean only certainty.

In pre-Platonic philosophy “humanity is the receiver of beings” (AWP 68). This relationship to the object is nonrepresentational, since the object presents itself to man rather than the object being accessible to man by virtue of norms that issue from the subject. By contrast, in the modern era the unidirectionality of the subject-object relation has shifted—the subject determines the object. Man has become the determiner of being. Knowing, reason, and certainty place the object at the disposal of man and technology. The object is kept securely in its place over and against the subject “which masters and proceeds against” it (AWP 82). The anchor of all this securing and mastering o...