Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T10:23:01.611Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Error, Hallucination and the Concept of ‘Ontology’ in the Early Work of Heidegger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Denis McManus
Denis McManus
Affiliation:
University of Southampton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Recently the attempt has been made to demonstrate Heidegger's relevance to the concerns of analytic philosophers. A focus for this effort has been the criticism in his early work of Cartesian ontology. While a number of important works have mapped out this area of Heidegger's thought, a crucial task has not been carried out, namely that of assessing how Heidegger can accommodate those phenomena which motivate the Cartesian to adopt his highly counter-intuitive ontology. As long as we fail to examine how Heidegger's early ontology copes with the possibilities of error and of hallucination, the suspicion will remain that Heidegger is simply insensitive to those phenomena on which the Cartesian focuses. Neither Heidegger nor the Cartesian have been done any favours by commentators showing little inclination to bring the opponents into closer combat. This paper attempts to correct that omission.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 71 , Issue 278 , October 1996 , pp. 553 - 575
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Cf., e.g., Guignon, C. B.Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Hackett, 1983)Google Scholar,Richardson, J., Existential Epistemology (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar, Olafson, F. A., Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind (Yale, 1987)Google Scholar and Dreyfus, H.L.Being-in-the-World (M.I.T., 1991).Google Scholar

2 The views to be discussed are those Heidegger expresses in Sein und Zeit and in the lectures he presented in the two years prior to the original publication of that book. All page references are to the following English translations: Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Blackwell, 1962) (referred to in the text as BT, followed by a page number), The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans, by A. Hofstadter (Indiana, 1982) (BPP), The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M.Heim (Indiana, 1984) (MFL), History of the Concept of Time, trans. T.Kisiel (Indiana, 1985) (HCT).

3 That everydayness is not to be taken as an unambiguous clue to Dasein's true nature emerges in Heidegger's discussion of his concept of authenticity. But the phenomena which Heidegger seems to be trying to capture with his authentic-inauthentic dimension are not obviously concerned with anything like perceptual error or hallucination, the concerns of this paper. One might argue that since Heidegger's Existential Analytic is an analysis of Dasein in its everydayness, it can only be expected to yield an analysis of Dasein in its normality and thus cannot be expected to accommodate hallucination. But, to anticipate a point to be made in Section 3, if Heidegger's ontology is not expected to accommodate the phenomena that Descarteš ontology was designed specifically to accommodate, we will have lost our conception of a single task which these two ‘rival ontologies’ are to perform.

4 Natural scientific knowledge is also subject to this kind of analysis. ‘[T]heoretical research is not without a praxis of its own’ (BT 409) and thus the Vorhanden objects of natural science are fundamentally Zuhanden.

5 Wittgenstein, L., The Blue and Brown Books, ed. Rhees, R. (Blackwell, 1969), p. 39.Google Scholar

6 McDowell, J. ‘Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space’ in Pettit, P. and McDowell, J. (eds) Subject, Thought and Context (Oxford, 1986), pp. sp151-152.Google Scholar

7 Cf. also Putnam's, Hilary struggles with ‘the problem of how pure mental states of intending, believing, etc., can … constitute or cause reference’ (Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge, 1981), p. 43).Google Scholar

8 McDowell , op. cit. p. 167.Google Scholar

9 There is an interesting parallel between the problem I raise here for Heidegger and that which faces Descartes in the fourth and sixth Meditations, namely, that Descartesš answer to the sceptic appears to be too potent. If knowledge is secured by the existence of a non-deceiving god, it becomes difficult to understand how such a god could ever allow us to make errors or have hallucinations in the first place. Descarteš attempt to explain error, by citing the impetuosity of the human will, also has parallels with that which I will offer below on Heidegger's behalf.

10 Heidegger's own comments on the possibility of error and delusion are scant and rather unhelpful, primarily because in such contexts his main concern is to show that this possibility does not call into question the essential intentionality of Dasein's perceiving (cf., e.g., BPP 60 and HCT 164). Such remarks address some erroneous (Cartesian) conclusions that one might draw from the fact that error is possible. But they do not help us to understand how it is possible that errors come about.

11 It should be noted that not only am I presenting an examination of only a very small number of the themes of Heidegger's early work but also that space precludes the kind of analysis of Heidegger's concepts of ‘understanding’, ‘interpretation’ and ‘state-of-mind’ (a poor translation of ‘Befindlichkeit’) which a full account of his concept of knowledge would require.

12 C. E.Scott ‘Heidegger, Madness and Well-being’ in R. W.Shahan and J. N.Mohanty (eds) Thinking about Being (Oklahoma, 1984), p. 148.Google Scholar

13 Quoted by Scott (Ibid. . p. 149) from an unpublished translation by Brian Kenny of M. Boss Grundriss der Medizin (Hans Huber, 1971) Part III, Ch. 2, Section d.

14 Heidegger's understanding of ‘existence’ is complex and highly idiosyncratic. In broadest outline, it is a term he uses to denote the way in which Dasein stands out from its reality so as to be able to reflect upon it. Thus, Dasein ‘ex-sists’.

15 Interestingly enough, there have been a number of theories within clinical psychology which suggest that hallucinations result from peripheral elements in our perceptual input, that we normally filter out, being misinterpreted as arising from real sensory stimuli. Cf., e.g., Frith, C. D., ‘Consciousness, Information Processing and Schizophrenia’, British Journal of Psychiatry 134 (1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 One natural option that I may appear to have ignored is the claim that a rejection of the PCH is an ontological proposal. But the difficulties I am about to discuss raise the question of whether we know what kind of claim an ontological claim is.

17 One might compare it with established philosophical distinctions such as essence/existence and a Kantian transcendental/empirical but Heidegger specifically rejects such comparisons for reasons I will not go into here.

18 Attempts to rationalize such a distinction have been subject to much criticism during this century. Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction and Davidson's on form/content spring to mind. Heidegger himself may have had some influence on comparable criticisms that have emerged elsewhere and this may have something to do with his own subsequent move away from the relatively traditional-sounding ontological claims of Being and Time. A useful discussion of this possibility can be found in Dreyfus, H. and Haugeland, J., ‘Husserl and Heidegger: Philosophy’s Last Stand', in M. Murray, Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (Yale, 1978).Google Scholar

19 In this paper, I will not worry about the different forms that naturalism can take.

20 Cf. n. 4 above.

21 Heidegger's own account, which emphasizes the role of our projects, does not explain subjectivity, as the possession of such projects is an aspect of our being Dasein. This account must be understood as a descriptive fleshing-out of what subjectivity amounts to.

22 In a fascinating set of lectures given in 1929/30 (published as Part 2, Chs. 3-5 of Heidegger, M., The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. McNeill, W. and Walker, N. (Indiana, 1995)), Heidegger examines how we should understand animal behaviour. Since this is an area lying between, so to speak, the intentional and the straight-forwardly physiological, one might suppose that one would find here an account of how one could reconceptualize the findings of naturalistically-inspired approaches to the intentional within a Heideggerian framework. However, Heidegger's main concern here is, once again, to challenge the adequacy of ‘the prevailing mechanistic and physicalist approach to nature’ (p. 260). Although Heidegger discusses the work of several biologists whose work he sees as pointing towards a more adequate perspective, it is unclear to me at the moment how one might develop the ideas that these lectures present so as to reinterpret results arrived at through naturalistic approaches.Google Scholar

23 My presentation here of ‘this approach’ is unavoidably over-simplified and cannot hope to do justice to the heterogeneous views which I am lumping together.

24 This stance leads to the bracketing of the assumptions of the naturalistic,scientific world-picture as merely localized, cultural products.

25 Something like this thought can also be found in Bosš work. Cf.,e.g., Psychoanalysis and Daseinanalysis (Basic Books, 1963), pp. 226 – 229.Google Scholar

26 I would like to thank Tom Baldwin, Renford Bambrough, Michael Tanner and Anthony 'Hear for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.