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CHAPTER TWO

THE SCIENCE OF λόγος AND TRUTH—WHAT “THINGS” ARE

Martin Heidegger

Human behavior and human being first become conspicuous in and through speaking, and so in their early, pre-scientific characterization of human being, the Greeks defined human being as ζωον λόγον εχον [zoon logon echon]—the living being that can speak and that co-defines its being in and through speaking. [. . .] Λόγος [logos], then, is what reveals an ontological connection between the other two universal regions [. . .]: human being (ἦθος [ethos]) and world (φύσις [phusis]). [. . .] By clarifying the meaning of the word λόγος, we have already indicated the arena that is the topic of logic: speech in the broadest sense.

—Martin Heidegger¹

The ripple effects caused by the eccentric principle, which ushered in a new age more than four hundred years ago, seem to me to have become exceedingly broad and flat; knowledge has advanced to the point of nullifying itself, and man has become so far removed from himself that he no longer catches sight of himself. “Modern man,” that is, man since the renaissance, is fit for the grave.

—Yorck von Wartenburg²

In chapter 1, I addressed Edmund Husserl’s critique of the formalization of reasoning, and his insight that the mathematical rendering of nature leads us not only to forsake our responsibility for our epistemological claims but also to forget our responsibility for the world we live in. Husserl argues that knowledge cannot be reduced to technical know-how.³ As I have suggested, Husserl’s critique of the formalization of knowledge is a principal concern throughout his work. In his view, modern knowledge, instead of following the tradition of the ancient Greek, medieval, and Renaissance thinkers—who saw knowledge as “wisdom”—becomes technical expertise. Technicians, by manipulating formal systems, sidestep responsibility for their own achievements because they have forgotten the ground of knowledge. Husserl’s critique of psychologism, anthropologism, and un-reflected-upon epistemological formalization—which he sees as responsible for ushering in the skepticism and relativism of his age—leads him to consider the notion of the life-world. For Husserl the priority of the life-world is not only a background to our everyday understanding, but is also the original ground of scientific knowledge.

In this chapter, I will consider Martin Heidegger’s work. I will argue that Heidegger is also concerned with the way science frames the experience of the world we live in. Heidegger confronts the predominance of scientific understanding differently throughout the various stages of his thinking, but the idea that science limits, in advance, our experience of being in the world is a recurrent theme. Like Husserl, Heidegger maintains that nature is not “primarily the object of scientific-theoretical understanding” (CT, 16 [23]), but is, first and foremost, the world that we live in. The notion of the world is very different for the two thinkers—and yet, those notions are related.⁴ Heidegger, after all, was privy to Husserl’s investigations of the life-world and to Husserl’s writings that later appeared as Ideas II and III.⁵ However, there are also important differences.

For Heidegger, in the initial “thrownness” defined by facticity (BT, § 12, 53 [55–56]), our understanding is derived from the age we live in, from tradition. In other words, we are always born (thrown) into the world that was here before we were born and that will be here when we die. Our initial understanding is from others, from our involvement in dealing with things, from our living in the world. Only by questioning the history of thinking⁶ might we be able to go back to the things themselves (CT, 42 [51]) and consider anew the meaning that we inherited from tradition. Human existence is always circumscribed by particular situations, things we encounter, projects we undertake.⁷

It is important to stress that my aim is not to address the complexity of Heidegger’s work, trace its changes of direction, consider whether late Heidegger is a return to early Heidegger, or whether the famous Kehre occurred, why and when.⁸ In this chapter, I will deal with Heidegger’s themes that specifically relate to his notion of Dasein (the structure of human existence), his notion of truth, and his discussion of the scientific rendering of nature by technoscience, themes that Arendt and Patočka take up, extend, and change.

THE HISTORY OF THINKING: DESTRUCTION

Destruction means—to open our ears, to make ourselves free for what speaks to us in tradition as the being of being.⁹

Heidegger’s questioning of the history of thinking, or, as he calls it, destruction, means to begin to unravel the meaning that we have inherited.¹⁰ His method is phenomenological.¹¹ Hans-Georg Gadamer remarks that Heidegger “built on research in intentionality carried out by the phenomenology of Husserl.”¹² For Heidegger, phenomenology is important as a critique of “presuppositions, overlays from the tradition, and hasty questions laden with presumptions” (LQT, § 5, 28 [33]). Heidegger stresses that in Logical Investigations, Husserl makes three groundbreaking discoveries that will eventually show him the way toward phenomenology as we know it. They are: “1) intentionality, 2) categorial intuition, and 3) the original sense of the apriori.”¹³ To extend Heidegger’s attestation to the importance of Husserl’s phenomenological method for his thinking,¹⁴ I will consider the trajectory of Heidegger’s thinking concerning logic, which leads him to reformulate the question of truth, his understanding of meaning, and his realization that a questioner, who lives in the world, is central to a consideration of the constitution of meaning. All these concerns are framed by his misgivings related to the state of modern science¹⁵ and technology.¹⁶

The centrality of the Being of a questioner leads Heidegger to rethink the facticity of Dasein, framed in terms of a speaking being living in the world. Who is the being for whom the world is always meaningful? The shift from consciousness as the ground for the constitution of meaning, to the questioner for whom the world is already meaningful, guides Heidegger’s transformation of Husserl’s considerations regarding meaning and human understanding of the world. The epistemological problem of the gap between our thinking and things in the world ceases to be important if humans always already live in the world. The world is not a collection of objectively present things that we eventually encounter. Neither can the world be reduced to a bundle of impressions from which we supposedly construct meaningful things through understanding. The world is here and we live among things. Heidegger speaks of the facticity of human beings who find themselves in the world. Prior to all epistemological considerations, the world is the space of meaningful manifestation of things that we encounter in our everyday dealings. The world is the backdrop against which and from which things appear, and from which they eventually disappear by ceasing to be. Yet how is it that we live in an already meaningful world? How can we explain Heidegger’s insistence that living in the world is prior to the problems that modern epistemology regards as primary?

Heidegger argues that to speak about the world implies that the world is already a horizon where things appear and disappear in turn. It is already opened to humans living there; humans understand things based on their everyday dealings with them. The things given to us are not the things of natural science: objects defined by a theoretical attitude. Living in the world means that things are close or far from us depending on our projects, depending on what we do. We do not measure distances between things; or if we do, this is not our primary encounter with things. A keyboard is right here in front of me, but a jug of coffee is in the kitchen. I have to get up and go there. We use things according to our activities. We touch them, use them, and walk toward or around them.¹⁷ Only when we stop using things and change our attitude toward them do we develop a different point of view. We start looking at things as objectively present and not as a part of our living and dealing with them.

Similarly, only when we change our attitude and disengage from using things, looking at them apart from our everyday dealings with them, can geometry develop. “Science is the development of this way of merely looking at a thing.”¹⁸ In order for people to be able to produce things that we can all participate in, we need a scale of measurement that can be shared. We invent the specific method for measuring distances between things in the world to develop procedures; for example, for the building of pyramids. However, measuring procedures are practical; they are not yet idealized. Husserl explains that the ancient Greeks developed geometry only by extending measurement techniques and idealizing them.¹⁹

So, first, we live in the world where we use things. In order to extend our communication with others about the environment around us, we develop measuring procedures. We can use the edge of a table as a standard rule for measurements that others can adopt by replicating it, in order to build and produce things for use. However, only by idealizing—that is, by severing the link between the measuring that we have established as a rule and a table that we originally used for establishing the standard of measurement—can we imagine the idea of a line, for example. We imagine the line not as the edge of a table but as something that is not in the world anymore and that will guide us in the future when establishing new rules for measurement. This imagined line cannot be found in the world, and yet it is not nothing: it is the idea that will inform our future measurement. The idea of a line ceases to be a practical tool; it becomes a theoretical notion. According to the Western tradition, theoretical understanding is primary.

However, Husserl also points out that the ancient Greeks’ idealization of geometry was originally still an idealization taken from the world in which they lived, and intrinsically related to it. Only when Galileo turns this understanding upside down and assumes that the world is geometrical does the formalization of knowledge begin (as I have discussed in the previous chapter).

Without reflecting on the sedimented nature of knowledge that informs our experience, we forget that we understand nature as it was defined from Galileo onward. Galileo’s new methodology is not about the world we live in, as it was for Aristotle.²⁰ Galileo’s investigations are not concerned with particular things and their appearances; he is not interested in the way things are. He wants to discover laws that “all bodies” are ruled by.²¹ While for Plato unchanging ideas were reality itself, in which our changing everyday world participates, Galileo accepts the sedimented nature of geometry originally derived from the world of our living, and turns it around. From then on, nature is mathematical: “written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures.” How else could humans understand it? They would lose their way “pointlessly in a dark labyrinth.”²²

Heidegger suggests that Galileo begins with a hypothesis about certain observed phenomena—for example, the fall of a particular object—and postulates laws that will cover all cases of those phenomena. In order to do so, he must make use of mathematics and the laws of uniform motion of time and equivalence between all bodies.²³ To frame nature for scientific observation in a particular way, Galileo presupposes these notions in advance. We cannot observe two different objects falling at the same speed. Only through a priori positing the equivalence of mass and motion of any and every object can we measure and calculate the speed. This calculated speed is not a “speed of things” that we encounter in our everyday experience.

René Descartes, in his search for certainty of knowledge, extends and appropriates this scientific methodology for knowledge per se.²⁴ Modern epistemology becomes the first philosophy; it assumes the disinterested attitude of looking at objects that we have already transformed into equivalent objects for scientific investigation.

Heidegger extends his own consideration of the scientific attitude and claims that our initial understanding of things is defined by the public anonym. We always think in terms of “everyone and no one.” This way of understanding leads humans to become lost in the world and among things; and the care and concern that we all feel about the world, others, and ourselves becomes a concern for things only.²⁵ Heidegger insists that, at present, the public anonym is the voice of the modern mathematical project of the sciences, and the essence of technology. The problem is that we cannot simply recover the life-world from oblivion.²⁶ We have already constituted the life-world according to modern science. Heidegger’s different understanding of humans and their Being in the world transforms Husserl’s insight regarding the forgetfulness of the sciences and their disregard for their original starting point, the life-world.

Heidegger transforms the life-world and the transcendental ego by shifting the focus from consciousness as the ground of meaning constitution to the living being in the world.²⁷ Very schematically, we can say that Heidegger transforms Husserl’s notions of intentionality of consciousness by recasting it: intentionality is severed from the ego and the idea of the constitution of meaning is reframed. In Heidegger, meaning is not constituted by the transcendental ego; rather, the world is the meaning-constituting horizon. Husserl’s idea of internal time-consciousness becomes Dasein’s temporality and historicity. Moreover, Heidegger realizes that Husserl’s insight regarding categorial intuition is important; he goes further by questioning the traditional understanding of categories.²⁸ Heidegger declares that categories can define only things, never human beings.

Likewise, Heidegger takes up Husserl’s idea of the a priori and adapts it for his ontological project. We can discern two paths here. On the one hand, the a priori is tied to his understanding of the constitution of meaning whereby we let beings be as they show themselves to us, and we realize that we understand them through our dealings with them.²⁹ Dasein is the space that opens the meaningful world because we live there and we deal with things as they relate to our projects. In this instance, the a priori is historical: we disclose things according to our place in history. For us a thunderstorm is not a sign of Zeus’s anger but the result of electrostatic discharge in the atmosphere. On the other hand, the formal a priori is a part of the modern mathematical project. One of Heidegger’s insights is that the modern scientific project is derived from, and yet overthrows, the Greek meaning of τἀ μαθήματα (ta mathemata). For the ancient Greeks, ta mathemata meant learning and teaching in the sense that we can learn about only something that we already know. However, Heidegger argues that modern science changes the original meaning of this a priori of knowing—knowing something that is derived from our initial encounter with things and our dealings with them. Modern science—through the assumption that worldly structure is mathematically a priori—transforms this original meaning of knowing things into a formal framework that, in advance, takes for granted that nature is mathematical and can be mathematically ordered. Only by restricting nature to a mathematical manifold can we find the universal natural laws and “facts” that are subject to those laws.

To put it differently, Heidegger’s first sense of a priori relates to his notion of the original essence of truth, whereby we let beings be as they are; the second is related to the scientific and technological enframing of nature into a mathematical manifold and the new scientific way of understanding objectively present things, whereby truth is regarded “as a characteristic of knowledge.”³⁰ Heidegger comments on the correspondence theory of truth, which proposes that truth is the property of a sentence. According to this theory, we judge things by “matching up” words to things in the world. However, Heidegger insists that the correspondence theory of truth must be based on a more primordial notion of truth; in other words, on truth as a disclosure, as the revelation of things and their being as they are manifest to humans. Hence, the correspondence is derivative from this original disclosure of things; the correspondence theory of truth cannot be the only sense in which we can think about truth.

For Kant, the intermediary between an object and our thinking is intuition. Given that intuition is not cognitive, a thing and an assertion cannot be directly connected; intuition is the gap between our thinking and the thing in the world. Kant recognizes that without sensibility there is no intuition, but without cognition there is no possibility of understanding what is given to us in intuition. The direct connection is between an object and intuition and not between an object and an assertion. As Heidegger stresses, without pure concepts of understanding, such as quality, quantity, relation, modality,³¹ through a “power of judgment,” the object would remain “undetermined.”³² In order to see something as something, we synthesize “the manifold pure intuition” with the imagination, and these “pure categories” bring it into the unity of our thinking.³³ We do not stand in the midst of a superabundance of different sensations that assault our senses. Heidegger, discussing Kant, states that pure understanding brings “to a stand” intuition, which would be meaningless to us without a thought.³⁴ Through the categories of pure understanding, the correspondence between our judgment and the (previously) undefined object is constituted.³⁵ Kant states: “Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.”³⁶ Hence a thing in its thingness, its objectivity, is “determined as object” through the unity of intuition and thought (WT, B, II, § 7a, 184; italics in original). Thought provides the pure categories of understanding that delimit our experience in advance. To account for the possibility of our experience—in other words, knowledge—we need to realize that Kant’s project is not to change the ground of modern logic, but to set limits to it (WT, B, II, § 2, 122). As Heidegger notes, “The ‘mathematical’ feature of modern metaphysics is retained, namely, to determine in advance out of principles the Being of what is” (WT, B, II, § 2, 122). The meaning of things is circumscribed by categories that, in advance, determine the meaning of the “thingness” of a thing.