Heidegger and the Problem of Consciousness

Nancy J. Holland

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780253035943
• eBook ISBN:
  9780253035981
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Nancy J. Holland turns to the thought of Martin Heidegger to help understand an age-old philosophical question: Is there a split between the body and the mind? Arguing against philosophical positions that define human consciousness as an overarching phenomenon or reduce it to the brain or physicality, Holland contends that consciousness is relational and it is this relationship that allows us to inhabit and negotiate in the world. Holland forwards a complex and nuanced reading of Heidegger as she focuses on consciousness, being, and what might constitute the animal or, more broadly, other-than-human world. Holland engages with the depth and breadth of Heidegger's work as she opens space for a discussion about the uniqueness of human consciousness.

1Introduction

One can, in fact, discuss exclusively the fundamental issues, but what is discussed does not have to include everything.

—Martin Heidegger (Logic: The Question of Truth, 2010)

I: Heidegger, Nature, and Consciousness

A recent article in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association asks, “Is Consciousness a Spandrel?” In other words, did phenomenal consciousness (i.e., our lived experience of the world) evolve along with the complexity of the human brain, but without contributing to (or inhibiting) the evolutionary success of the species, so that everything would be exactly as it is if we had no phenomenal consciousness at all? The authors argue that, yes, phenomenal consciousness is a “by-product” of evolution, much like blood type or eye color.¹

The reasons for adopting such a position are clear. Phenomenal consciousness is inherently and necessarily subjective and, hence, beyond the reach of objective, scientific investigation. Furthermore, if the material world is a closed causal system, phenomenal consciousness must be either physical to act causally in that system, or, as the article argues, evolutionarily useless. This should be considered closely for a moment. To say that consciousness is a spandrel means that beings much like ourselves, but lacking phenomenal consciousness, could build a world in which they could not see the color of a leaf, yet still discovered chlorophyll; could not hear music as music, yet produced Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; could not be aware of the stars, yet sent a spacecraft past Pluto; could not understand puzzles, yet produced Sherlock Holmes; and could have no experience of pain or grief, yet developed modern medicine and philosophy.

I will not try to refute the authors’ argument. Given their assumptions, it might well be irrefutable. It is those assumptions that interest me. They illuminate the fact that, after four hundred years, philosophy may have immensely refined the mind/body dichotomy that plays a central role in the thought of René Descartes, but it has not managed to resolve the paradoxes it generates. Rather than argue in those terms, this book will follow the lead of Descartes’s contemporary Baruch Spinoza. He responded to Descartes’s dualism not by redefining the mental in a way that would make it compatible with our understanding of the physical—as most contemporary philosophers attempt to do—but by redefining the physical in a way that would make it compatible with our lived experience as conscious beings.

I was spurred to embark on this task by a claim Martin Heidegger makes as part of his implicit critique of science (or scientism) in the 1932 lectures collected in The Essence of Truth. There, he states that the connections between things with which science concerns itself in the physical world “are there only in so far as they are reckoned with—how so? By perceiving and experiencing and dealing (and so forth) with beings” (Heidegger 2002a, 161). I argue that this is not a reformulation of George Berkeley’s “esse percipi,” but rather a reminder that science exists only as a human activity undertaken for human purposes. That is, the objects of science exist as things of a particular kind only in the context of specific scientific enterprises and research programs. In our current state of knowledge, to take a well-known example, light can be conceptualized as a particle or a wave without actually being either, but the physics of light progresses all the same. The things about which and with which science reckons exist in our scientific world in the first place because, and insofar as, they are reckoned with.

It is important to note that what I have to say about Heidegger here would leave the sciences free to be what they are, though they would be repositioned as partial, secondary, and primarily instrumental forms of understanding rather than the measure of all knowledge they have become since Descartes. In Heidegger’s view, as we will see, there are multiple layers of truth in any social context. Some of these layers are obvious and easily accessed (e.g., “ordinary science”), and some are more obscure and possibly less rationally based, as Thomas Kuhn has argued. There are also deeper layers that resist any easy analysis. These include the complex interwoven belief systems represented in the thirteenth-to-fifteenth century mosaic ceiling of the Baptistery in Florence, as well as the convention that applies the word “clan” to premodern and early modern Scotland, but not the word “tribe.” Still deeper we hit a kind of bedrock—not an eternal truth, but one very slow to change. As Ludwig Wittgenstein says, our “spade is turned” (Wittgenstein 2009, 91).

Heidegger’s concern, however, is only secondarily with the way modern science and technology distort our relationship with beings (i.e., the natural world seen as nothing more than a collection of calculable masses in motion). His primary concern is with how science and technology distort our understanding of ourselves (i.e., as “minds” in relation to, and potentially explainable in terms of, a subset of the calculable masses we call “human bodies”). My claim is that if we begin from the merely physical, we can never explain how or why consciousness exists. We are left with the spandrel argument or something similar. Only by rethinking the physical from the starting point of our lived experience can we ever hope to solve the problem established by Descartes’s dualistic conjecture. The rethinking of our relationship to the natural world that I see in Heidegger’s work is based on Dasein’s constant “reckoning with,” or directedness toward, beings, as well as the insight that things can exist for us only as experienced. This idea is, of course, Kantian in origin, but Kant’s account of the “phenomenal” remains far too abstract. Put somewhat differently, our knowledge of the world is built not from the outside in through perception, but from the inside out—from the tacit knowing inherent in our day-to-day involvement with things toward what has become contemporary technology/science.²

That said, it is easier to explain what this present study is not rather than what it is. It is not an exhaustive study of Heidegger’s work, nor does it offer a comprehensive interpretation of his thought. It is not an attempt to determine his proper place in the pantheon of twentieth-century German or European philosophy. It is not a defense of, or apology for, his involvement with the Nazi party, nor for the undeniable sexism, racism, heterosexism, anti-Semitism, and other biases that can be found in his words. I am not particularly interested in whether there is a clear demarcation between Heidegger’s thought and, for example, Husserl’s (though I am among the many who believe there is), Rather, I am primarily interested in whether Heidegger’s understanding of human consciousness opens up new avenues for philosophical problem-solving more effectively than does Husserl.³

I view this work as part of a new wave of twenty-first-century Heidegger scholarship that moves beyond these preoccupations to seek in Heidegger’s texts the tools with which philosophy might better address not only the mind/body problem, but also the mounting ecological crisis and other issues that must be addressed in ways that do not relegate human consciousness to spandrel status. Jacques Derrida calls this a “neo-Heideggerian” way of thinking (Derrida 2005, 216). In his foreword to the English translation of Michel Haar’s Heidegger and the Essence of Man, Hubert Dreyfus suggests that we need to find a middle path between a “long line of Germanic treatises that have reverently repeated Heidegger’s jargon and numerous French-style essays that have irreverently attempted to deconstruct Heidegger and go beyond him” (Haar 1993, xv).⁴ The present book, like much other recent work on Heidegger, is such an attempt to find such a middle path.⁵

My examination moves from Towards the Definition of Philosophy (1919) to Four Seminars (1966–73) in an exploration of the groundwork Heidegger laid for a radical rethinking of how we understand our relationship to the physical and social worlds. I argue that his concern with the relationship between consciousness and the physical began very early in his thinking, and that this element of his thought has been systematically misunderstood or distorted. The misunderstanding arises because of the very phenomenon he identifies—the tendency to see ourselves as subjects in relation to objects on the Cartesian/Husserlian model of intentionality.⁶ By tracing his line of thought from the “early Heidegger” to the later work on Greek philosophy and technology and by de-emphasizing Being and Time, the present book will also suggest a new approach to the so-called Kehre and present a unified interpretation of Heidegger’s work across the span of his philosophical career.⁷

The remainder of this introductory chapter will clarify the difference between “nature” and φύσις for Heidegger and explain how that difference links his understanding of “nature” with the fundamental relationship of “Western historical man” to himself. It also offers a parallel consideration of the relationship between ψυχή and modern concepts of consciousness and the mental. In the second chapter, I will describe current interpretations of the problem of consciousness as they appear in the neurobiological work of Gerald Edelman, in some areas of philosophical psychology and cognitive science, and in psychologist Max Velmans’s Understanding Consciousness.

In the subsequent five chapters, I will trace Heidegger’s understanding of and approach to this problem throughout his career. The third chapter focuses on the very early lectures, where this line of thought first appears. The fourth chapter traces the same themes through the period leading up to and including Being and Time. The fifth chapter looks at some key text of the Kehre, which many scholars regard as a major turning point in Heidegger’s thought, with special emphasis on “On the Essence of Truth.” The sixth chapter carries the argument forward through The Essence of Truth and “The Origin of the Work of Art.” The seventh chapter follows these themes along the two paths Heidegger takes in his work after 1940—ancient Greek philosophy and the critique of modern technology—with a coda from his lectures of the 1960s and 1970s. The final chapter addresses how my interpretation of Heidegger articulates with, challenges, and is challenged by the work of prominent “third-generation” readings of Heidegger, including those of Hubert Dreyfus, Richard Capobianco, Thomas Sheehan, and Jacques Derrida. Unlike Sheehan, I will not pretend to “make sense” of Heidegger. My primary purpose is to shed a clearer light on the groundwork Heidegger lays for a radical, and necessary, rethinking of both nature and our lived experience. This rethinking will allow us to see that relationship beyond the limits of the mind/body dichotomy.

II: Nature as (Not) Φύσις

Although I use the terms “nature” and “the physical” more or less interchangeably, this equivalence was not strictly allowed for by Heidegger himself.^8,9 The key for understanding Heidegger’s rejection of the Latin translation of φύσις as “nature” can be found in his lectures on Aristotle’s Physics, but important stages of the argument can also be found in other lecture courses from the mid-1930s. In Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), for example, he notes, “We use the Latin translation natura, which really means ‘to be born’, ‘birth.’ But with this Latin translation, the original content of the Greek word phusis is already thrust aside, the authentic philosophical naming force of the Greek word is destroyed.” According to Heidegger, for the Greeks, “Phusis is Being itself” (Heidegger 2000, 14–15).¹⁰

Heidegger’s interpretation of the meaning of φύσις in Aristotle’s text might be clearer if we remember that the ancient Greek world recognized little that would fall into the category of completely “dead” matter as we understand it today. Stones, mud, and dirt might qualify (cf. Plato’s “Parmenides”), but even they are not totally inert. Not every kind of clay (a sort of mud) can be used for all purposes. Similarly, marble has an internal structure that prevents it from being sculpted into certain shapes. The metals available in ancient times also placed many constraints on how they could be used for human purposes compared with the steel and aluminum we use today. Iron rusts and shatters; gold and copper are relatively soft. There is, thus, a continuum between these inorganic materials and such organic materials as wood, ivory, and leather. This continuum blurs the sharp modern distinction between the mineral and the vegetable or animal. The ancients lived in a world that was alive through and through—not because they were ignorant or superstitious, but because they seldom encountered anything that did not have an intrinsic structure that limited their use of it.

We can begin to unpack Heidegger’s claim that “Phusis is Being itself” by looking at his lectures in the Physics. There, he cites Aristotle’s claim that it is “ridiculous to attempt to prove that φύσις is,” and he translates the explanation that follows by noting that “wherever a being from φύσις stands in the open, φύσις has already shown itself and stands in view” (Heidegger 1999, 240). A “being from φύσις” refers not to the difference between the organic and the inorganic, as it would in the modern world, but to the distinction between things that appear “naturally” as opposed to things that are human-made. Human artifacts imply the existence of humans; “natural” objects imply the existence of nature. For Aristotle, according to Heidegger, “we find what is φύσις-like only where there is μορφή”—usually translated as “form.” Form serves a dual role here; it takes the place of human intent in giving ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Charlemagne’s Monogram
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Problem of Consciousness
• 3 The Earliest Vision
• 4 Truth, Being, and Mind
• 5 The Kehre
• 6 The Essence of Truth
• 7 The Later Heidegger
• 8 Reading Heidegger After Heidegger
• Conclusion: “Ψυχή Being Not a Soul but the Unmediated Discovery of Being”
• References
• Index
• Back Cover