Being, Meaning, Mattering

I. Introduction

Robert B. Pippin's new book, The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy (hereafter The Culmination), which discusses Heidegger's ‘confrontation’ with Kant, Hegel and the other German idealists, is, like all his books, an exemplarily researched, thoughtful and thought-provoking text. Pippin has the rare ability to painstakingly lead his readers to the core of a philosophical dispute without ever losing their interest. The Culmination will undoubtedly shape any future research on Heidegger's take on Kant and the German idealists.

Given the work's richness and complexity, it would simply be impossible and certainly unwise to attempt to account for all the issues and arguments expounded in it. Thus, I have chosen to focus on what Pippin himself calls ‘the heart of the matter’ in Heidegger's dispute with Hegel (C: 11).¹ This pertains to the question of the meaning of being (hereafter QMB) and has two sides, an interpretative and an evaluative side. On the interpretative side, Pippin shows with admirable clarity that Heidegger's critique of Hegel centres on the idea that there is something wrong with Hegel's demanding that any enquiry into the meaning of being should be conducted from the vantage point of the thinkability and knowability of being or ‘logic’ (C: 11–12). I find this interpretation of Heidegger's reading of Hegel convincing. On the evaluative side, Pippin unhesitatingly declares that ‘Heidegger is right’ in his critique of Hegel (C: xi–xii). This is the book's aspect I am not convinced of and would like to challenge.

I will, first, describe Pippin's account of Heidegger's critique of Hegel. Then, I will provide two critical remarks on Heidegger's argumentation with the aim of challenging Pippin's verdict that ‘Heidegger is right’.

II. Heidegger's critique of Hegel

Heidegger showed great interest in Hegel throughout his career. This interest stemmed from his belief that, as Pippin puts it, ‘Hegel represents the culmination of all philosophy and must be overcome for philosophy to have a future’ (C: 140). Yet Hegel's philosophy does not stand alone on this peak: it is the end-result of a philosophical movement called idealism.

Idealism, for Heidegger, Pippin notes, is the thesis that being is knowable because ‘pure, or empirically unaided, thinking’ (C: 8) is necessarily involved in the thinking of any being. Through this involvement, being becomes thinkable and knowable. This is, Pippin insightfully observes, the meaning of the infamous Hegelian thesis of the identity of thinking and being. The domain of pure thinking is called ‘logic’, so, for the idealists, logic has a priority concerning the enquiry into the meaning of being (C: 8). Logic provides the pure conditions of the possibility of thinking anything at all.

For Heidegger, then, idealism answers QMB in terms of thinkability, knowability and logic. Being means nothing unless it is thinkable and hence knowable. Yet, Pippin observes, for Heidegger,

the problem of ‘the meaning of Being’ is the problem of the meaningfulness of beings—that is, beings in the way they matter. Their way of mattering is their original way of being available; […] it is how beings originally show up for us in our experience. (C: 31, my emphasis)

This is crucial if we are to understand Heidegger's Hegel critique. He ‘translates’ the question of the meaning of being into the question of the meaningfulness of beings, namely into the question of how beings matter to Dasein.² Heidegger's claim, according to Pippin, is that beings matter to Dasein before they are thought or known and that it is their mattering that allows it to think and know them. Mattering always already occurs in ‘the world’ into which Dasein has been thrown (C: 32) and ‘at first and for the most part’ involves Dasein's practical concerns and handling of equipment. In Pippin's words, for Heidegger ‘[b]eings show up because their intelligibility has come to matter to us, and this in terms of their manipulability’ (C: 32).

For Heidegger, therefore, thinkability and knowability are not the originary conditions of the meaning of being. Mattering is more originary than they are. This entails that idealism, implicitly or unconsciously, answers the question of mattering before it answers QMB. That is, the idealists presuppose that what matters is thought and knowledge. As Pippin puts it, idealism ‘has assumed that what matters most […] is […] knowability. Given that, the world as it matters to us is available because of our conceptual and explanatory capacities’ (C: 141).

The idealist view of what matters to us, namely thinkability, knowability and logic, is continuous in Western metaphysics from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, Kant and Hegel. This tradition ‘culminates’ in Hegel because in Hegel, in contradistinction to the pre-Hegelian state-of-affairs nothing is allowed to remain beyond knowability and conceptualization (the ‘target’ of the Hegelian ‘system’ is, after all, ‘the absolute’).

Heidegger objects precisely to this idea, asking for its justification. As he puts it,

[W]e must pose the question of whether the connection between logic and metaphysics, which has utterly ossified into self-evidence for us, is justified: whether there is, or must be, a more original problematic; and whether or not precisely the usual way of asking metaphysical questions orients itself toward logic in the broadest sense precisely because insight into the peculiar character of the problem of the world has hitherto been obstructed. (FCM: 289, emphasis added; cited in C: 142)

It is significant to notice that Heidegger's objection is raised in terms of justification, for Hegel's reason for answering QMB in terms of logic is that only in this way can dogmatism be circumvented. Heidegger's objection is that answering QMB in terms of logic does not actually subdue dogmatism (C: xi–xii, 83, 145, 154, 178, 181, 192).

Thinkability is only one ‘modality’ of the availability of beings and is founded on their mattering. Mattering happens each time within ‘the world’, so the world has priority over thinkability regarding QMB. Pippin writes that, for Heidegger,

[w]orld is a necessarily presupposed (i.e. primordial) condition for the possible availability or accessibility of beings within such a world in the first place, a horizon of possible sense or meaningfulness always within which and in terms of which beings are encountered. (C: 36)

Mattering occurs within ‘a world’ and has many ‘modalities’ or ‘modes’, only one of which is thinkability and knowability. ‘Logic’ is only one way in which beings matter to Dasein. The originary ground of the meaning of being is, therefore, not logic, but mattering and the world.

Pippin stresses that, for Heidegger, there is not just one world. Worlds are ‘epochal’, so mattering alters in the ‘history’ of worlds, in the transition from one world to another (C: 61, n 42, 188–89). Pippin writes that, for Heidegger, ‘[the] source of possible meaningfulness and so the meaning of Being as such is time, the ‘event’ of epochal disclosure, and so available only in its historicity’ (C: 32, n 3). This gives mattering as such a temporal, historical character.

What Pippin insightfully illuminates, then, is that, for Heidegger, the right way to raise QMB is to raise it as the question of mattering as such. It is this way of raising QMB that philosophy has ‘forgotten’.

For Pippin, Heidegger's critical point against idealism is not the same as Marx's, Kierkegaard's or Nietzsche's. They argue that pure thinking is not really pure, as it is grounded in some interest or drive or unconscious motivation. Heidegger, by contrast, points up that while idealism takes its orientation for answering QMB from logic, this pertains only to a particular ‘modality’ of mattering within ‘the world’. This temporal and historical mattering is the originary meaning of being. Thinkability, knowability and logic are only possibilities of being, they are not being as such, and derive from mattering as such. QMB is not answered by dogmatically focusing on a region of being (‘the region of the knowables’), by a regional ontology (C: 215). The question asks of what is prior to the regions of being, of what makes these available, and this is temporal and historical mattering in the world.

III. Mattering and the positing of being

The ‘heart of the matter’ in Heidegger's critique of Hegel is the claim that Hegel simply assumes logic's priority regarding QMB. Logic is only a ‘modality’ of mattering, of how things matter in ‘the world’. Thus, mattering as such is prior to logic. Mattering as such is temporal and ‘epochal’ or ‘historical’, it exhibits a different (dominant) modality from ‘epoch’ to ‘epoch’. Yet, at its very core, it is in ‘the world’ and so appertains fundamentally to Dasein's practical concerns and handling of equipment. Logic, therefore, simply ‘derives’ (through situations exhibiting various ‘breakings’ or ‘distortions’) from more originary structures relating to such concerns and equipment-using behaviour (these are the structures Heidegger describes under the label of Zuhandenheit).

For this critique to succeed and the judgement that ‘Heidegger is right’ to be validated, it must be accepted that logic is a modality of mattering and, ultimately, that the enquiry into the meaning of being ‘translates’ into the enquiry into the meaningfulness of beings. As soon as we accept these claims, it would be difficult to deny that logic is not the only thing that matters to Dasein, that in various epochs other things matter more than pure thought (for example, God, war, honour, money, technology, family, love, life, and so on). If this holds, if it sounds strange to say that pure thinking (‘the airy heights of metaphysics’, as Pippin calls it (C: 217)) is the only thing that matters or what matters most, then its priority concerning QMB must be justified rather than simply assumed. Heidegger claims that this priority is ‘simply assumed’ (C: 197, 218), hence that logic cannot give us access to the meaning of being.

In my view, the vital claims that logic is a modality of mattering and that the question of the meaning of being ‘translates’ into the question of the meaningfulness of beings can be contested and consequently that Heidegger's Hegel critique can be challenged. First, for Hegel, the enquiry into the meaning of being amounts merely to the enquiry into the determinations of being, which is the enquiry's subject-matter (die Sache). Searching for being's determinations is not, initially at least, identified with searching for what matters to Dasein. Putting, first, Dasein and, second, what matters to it into the mix at the beginning of his logic seems to be a move Hegel would not accept. There seems, then, to be a disagreement on how one should approach QMB, as a question of being's determinacy or as a question of the meaningfulness of beings, and it is unclear that Heidegger has provided convincing arguments for the second option. Second, the claim that logic is a modality of mattering would be justified only if Hegel made a determinate choice how to begin the enquiry into the meaning of being. This would mean that his choice mattered to him more than other choices. Is, though, the beginning of the enquiry with the positing of the subject-matter, namely being, really a determinate choice? It does not seem so. Would we say that an enquiry into the meaning of health beginning with the positing of the concept of health makes a determinate choice? Apparently not. Making a determinate choice requires the availability of at least a pair of characterizations or modalities of the subject-matter. Beginning with simply the subject-matter eradicates the possibility of a determinate choice.

Hegel, then, does not begin the enquiry into the meaning of being by making a choice as to what matters but by simply positing that which is to be investigated, namely being. Mattering is irrelevant at the beginning of Hegelian logic. There is no ‘assumption’ here that being is primarily ‘logos’ or ‘pure thinking’ or ‘the absolute’ or ‘the subject’. All being is taken to be is simply being. For Heidegger's critique to get off the ground, this Hegelian view must be rejected and one should claim instead that despite Hegel's own declarations that he begins simply with the positing of being, the beginning with being is ‘really’ a beginning with logos or pure thinking etc., that is, with what matters to Hegel (i.e., with a modality of mattering). It is difficult to see how a discussion could develop in this way, though, if Hegel's literal expressions are taken to represent theses that undermine these expressions themselves.

It may be objected that the enquiry into the meaning of being refers to ‘meaning’, which belongs to Dasein's being and thus that the positing of ‘being’ at the beginning of an inquiry into the meaning of being is immediately attached to the being of Dasein. Pippin writes that ‘[m]attering is clearly a mode of what Heidegger calls the meaning of the being of Dasein—Care’ (C: xii, n. 7). Yet, as I suggested above, Hegel does not assume that QMB entails a connection with Dasein; all Hegel understands with such a question is an enquiry into being's determinacy. Similarly, when one enquires into the meaning of a black hole, one searches simply for the determinations of a black hole and does not assume or give special significance to any connection these might have with Dasein (this, of course, does not exclude the possibility that such a connection will emerge in the enquiry; the same holds for the enquiry into the meaning of being).

The rejoinder may be offered that if Hegel begins with the simple positing of the subject-matter (being), his beginning is highly suspicious as he ‘abstracts’ from what is undeniably there when the positing occurs, namely Dasein and ‘the world’. I cannot here extend a full-fledged response to this rejoinder. Suffice it to say that, in Hegel's view, the undeniable fact that we are always already there (da) in the world does not entail that we must begin the enquiry into the meaning of being with the world. In fact, as The Phenomenology of Spirit shows, beginning philosophy with the world engenders the collapse of the ‘phenomenal’ attitude demanding such a beginning and the establishment of the horizon of ‘logic’ as the only possible entrance into the enquiry into the meaning of being. This, of course, does not mean that in Hegelian philosophy the world is ostracized from the enquiry into the meaning of being: it only means that it cannot provide the entrance into it, its beginning.

Heidegger's view is the complete opposite of this. He thinks we can access the meaning of being only through a phenomenological reflection on Dasein's being-in-the-world, which includes its ‘being-among intraworldly beings and being-with-other Dasein’ (BBP: 289). As he blatantly puts it, ‘[n]o understanding of being is possible that would not root in a comportment toward beings’ (BBP: 327). Precisely because Dasein always already relates to beings within a world, its understanding of being, which belong to its very existence, is based on ‘transcendence’ and the originary structure that grounds it (BPP: 299–300). ‘Transcendence’, for Heidegger, means stepping-over to beings within a world and the originary structure grounding it is temporality. Our access into the meaning of being can take place only through ‘transcendence’, to wit, only through Dasein's relating to other beings within a world (BPP: 300).

Hegel plainly disagrees that the fact that we are in ‘the world' entails that the enquiry into the meaning of being must begin with a reflection on our being-in-the-world. This seems to him to be the height of dogmatism, as it arbitrarily decides to investigate being through the lenses of being-in-the-world. If being-in-the-world is an indispensable part of being as such, this must be shown immanently from the sheer positing of being as such. Heidegger is himself suspicious of this turn to ‘immanence’ (which he takes to be the opposite of his notion of ‘transcendence’) because he thinks it annuls the difference between being and beings (‘the ontological difference’) (BPP: 327). Yet, this is precarious, for in Hegel the self-explication of being as such, the sphere of ‘logos’, generates its genuine difference from the ‘real’ spheres of nature and finite spirit, which are the domains of the exposition of beings in their relation to being as such. In Hegel, that is, ‘the world’ comes to be exhibited in all its glory. Yet, the world and the temporality grounding it are not allowed, in Hegel, to dominate being. This has the all-important consequence that timelessness is, contra Heidegger, legitimately affirmed as a fundamental dimension of being.

IV. The philosophical expression of mattering

Pippin's verdict that ‘Heidegger is right’ can be challenged in another way as well. It regards the philosophical-theoretical expression of mattering. Heidegger incorporates mattering into his philosophical-theoretical discussion of QMB, so its account employs a predicative and discursive language. (I surmise it is undeniable that Heidegger strives to furnish a philosophical theory and that the language he utilizes for this purpose is (therefore) predicative and discursive. I call a language ‘predicative’ if it assigns features (through the use of predicates) to elements (nouns) and ‘discursive’ if it joins concepts or judgements so as to convince an audience about its producer's or someone else's convictions. Heidegger does not tender poems or statues or simply exegeses or ‘interpretations’ of philosophical and literary works; he endeavours to make a point and convince us about it. The argument of The Culmination corroborates this.) ‘Mattering’ is a concept located in a network of concepts and judgements constituting a philosophical theory and is bestowed a particular function and content. However elusive this function and content are made to be, they are still made available through predicative and discursive language. It is exactly such a language that, in Heidegger's own view, pertains to or is grounded in ‘logic’, to wit, conceptualization, thinkability and knowability. If this holds, saying anything whatsoever philosophically-theoretically about mattering presupposes logic. Thus, in Heidegger's own enquiry into the meaning of being logic is prior to mattering.

The issue of how the answer to QMB could, in Heidegger's view, be expressed is addressed in The Culmination, but it is not scrutinized from the angle I propose here. If anything is to be said about mattering philosophically-theoretically, it must be said through concepts and judgements having a cognitive character and a predicative and discursive form. Heidegger indicates a ‘new thinking’ that will replace the old, philosophical-theoretical thinking, yet this indication occurs via the old, philosophical-theoretical thinking. This is my objection to (a) Heidegger's claim that logic is only a modality of mattering and (b) Pippin's verdict that ‘Heidegger is right’. As Heidegger's own philosophical practice reveals, mattering becomes available through philosophical-theoretical thinking and hence through logic.

The rejoinder may be submitted that what Heidegger intends to disclose is not mattering's philosophical-theoretical availability, but rather a non-theoretical thinking about it. This would misfire, for I acknowledge Heidegger's intention. What I point out is solely that this intention is realized through philosophical-theoretical thinking and that this proves logic's priority over mattering. As part of a philosophical theory, mattering can never have priority over logic.

The later Heidegger, as Pippin mentions in his brilliant discussion of the issue in the work's final chapter (C: 205–220), understands the ‘new thinking’ as ‘poetic thinking’, a thinking occurring as or through certain poems, buildings and artworks. But could mattering be disclosed in the rich and sharp fashion in which it is presented in The Culmination (a philosophical-theoretical treatise, for sure) if it were disclosed only as a poem or a Greek temple? Would we even engage with mattering and its huge significance for QMB if we never read Heidegger's works and experienced instead a Van Gogh? If there existed such a possibility, one would certainly feel that Heidegger's relentless exertion to produce a voluminous philosophical-theoretical work instead of writing poems or building temples is somewhat hypocritical. The difference between philosophical theory and ‘poetic thinking’ is consequential and the first cannot simply be replaced by the second.

This is not to say that poetic thinking unveils nothing regarding the meaning of being or mattering.³ Quite the contrary. Poetic thinking is a powerful way of experiencing being as phusis, as simultaneous concealment and unconcealment. It can even yield a more powerful access to such an experience than a philosophical theory can. Yet, this experience (the experience of being as described by Heidegger's theory) presupposes one's familiarity with Heidegger's theory. ‘New’ non-theoretical thinking cannot be philosophical without ‘rooting’ in the ‘old’ theoretical thinking. Mattering can be shown by art in the specific way Heidegger describes only if Heidegger's theory of mattering and hence logic (thinkability, knowability, conceptuality, determinacy, discursivity) precede it. As, in Kant's view, science can be universal and necessary only if it rests on transcendental metaphysics, so ‘poetic thinking’ can be philosophical only if it rests on a philosophical theory.

Pippin writes that

to Heidegger's view […] true metaphysical thinking is not to be understood as a strictly cognitive exercise of pure reason and this is linked with the hermeneutic rather than analytic character of thinking. (C: 14, emphasis added)

Pippin also writes that ‘such [hermeneutic] thinking is constantly burdened by a dependence on a ground we constantly experience as beyond our ability to grasp conceptually’ (C: 15). There is also this passage by Heidegger:

The concept is thus something like a determinative representation. The fundamental concepts of metaphysics and the concepts of philosophy, however, will evidently not be like this at all, if we recall that they themselves are anchored in our being gripped, in which we do not represent before us that which we conceptually comprehend, but maintain ourselves in a quite different comportment, one which is originarily and fundamentally different from any scientific kind. (FCM: 9, cited in C: 15, emphasis added)

These passages display exactly that attempt at philosophical thinking Hegel found the most confusing of all. It is unclear what a not strictly cognitive thinking would be. If it remains cognitive, even if ‘not strictly’ cognitive, it would still be subject to the structures of thinkability and knowability. Moreover, even if it leads us to experience the ‘ground’ (mattering as such) as ‘beyond our ability to grasp [it] conceptually’ (namely, as an elusive element), this ‘leading’ is still performed by means of concepts and predicative judgements. We still talk about the ungraspable ground theoretically. Otherwise, what we do is not philosophy.⁴ In the last passage, Heidegger intimates that there are concepts, what he calls ‘fundamental concepts’, which are not ‘determinative representations’ and in which we ‘maintain ourselves’ in a ‘comportment’ that is different from the scientific one. Yet, as the passage's form evinces, this is said in a conceptual, determinative, predicative manner. (It is stated that the fundamental concepts are not determinative representations, that they are anchored in our being gripped; a variety of features of our being gripped are given.) There is a sense, therefore, in which ‘logic’ is a condition of the possibility of the ‘ground’ we cannot grasp conceptually. Without logic, this ground is condemned to silence. (This is, mutatis mutandis, the point Hegel makes against Kant's Ding an sich.)

Let me make this point even more forcefully. Referring to ‘poetic thinking’, Heidegger writes that it is ‘where being is manifest’ and that this ‘manifestness […] belongs in the destiny of being’ (WP: 203, cited in C: 205). These expressions are predicative but they are meant to inform us about a non-predicative thinking. Heidegger also writes that ‘[i]n truth beings are torn from concealment’ (FCM: 29, cited in C: 206) and gives this as what we understand through ‘poetic thinking’. Yet, the statement itself is predicative and, as part of a philosophical theory, discursive. Heidegger asserts:

Truth is innermost confrontation of the essence of man with the whole of beings themselves. This has nothing to do with the business of proving propositions at the writing desk. (FCM: 29, cited in C: 206)

New thinking is supposed to take us beyond the writing desk and beyond predication and yet this is said by means of predicative propositions produced from Heidegger's writing desk. Finally, consider the following excerpt:

Unconcealment happens only in so far as it is brought about by the work: the work of the world as poetry, the work of stone in temple and statue, the work of the word as thinking, the work of the polis as the site of history that grounds and preserves all this. (IM: 204, cited in C: 206)

We are informed predicatively and discursively about the relation between unconcealment and work. Yet, the point is that this relation occurs non-predicatively and non-discursively. The point itself, though, comes to be only because it has been mediated by predicative and discursive expression—in short, by a philosophical theory. ‘[T]he work of stone in temple’ may be a ‘new thinking’, but it has philosophical significance only if it is mediated by the ‘old’ discursive, philosophical-theoretical thinking. This seems to be what Heidegger fails to see and what Hegelian philosophy is all about, to wit, that the non-conceptual, the non-discursive, the non-logical becomes available philosophically only through conceptuality, discursivity and logic. We could write a poem or build a temple so as to provide a locus for being's concealment and unconcealment, yet this has philosophical-theoretical significance only if we talk about it predicatively and discursively.

Does this mean that mattering does not occur without a philosophical theory? Absolutely not. Yet, this is just a fact, a sheer event without philosophical significance. As soon as it is placed in a philosophical theory and called an ‘event’ philosophically, it is conditioned upon thinkability, knowability and logic, upon determinacy, predication and discursivity. The attempt to refer to a non-predicative and non-discursive mattering, to the non-conceptual and the unsaid, through a predicative and discursive language, through philosophical theory, is destined to failure. As Hegel would say, ‘what is called the unutterable is nothing else than the untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant’ (PG: 66/92).

V. Conclusion

According to Pippin's The Culmination, the ‘heart of the matter’ in Heidegger's ‘confrontation’ with Hegel is Heidegger's claim (a) that Hegel answers QMB from the perspective of thinkability and knowability and (b) that this is unjustified or dogmatic because this perspective is only a ‘modality’ of ‘mattering’. Mattering as such is the meaning of being and has a temporal and historical character. Pippin unhesitatingly declares that ‘Heidegger is right’ in his Hegel critique.

I have argued that Pippin's exemplarily researched interpretation of Heidegger's dispute with Hegel is quite convincing, but that his evaluative claim that ‘Heidegger is right’ is not. Two reasons support this. First, the beginning of the Hegelian system, which is also logic's beginning, is simply the positing of the subject-matter, namely being, and hence it is independent of mattering. The positing of being is not a modality of mattering. What matters to us is irrelevant at the moment of such a positing, in the same way that in an enquiry into health beginning with simply the positing of health the issue of ‘what matters to us’ is irrelevant. This deflates Heidegger's point against Hegel. Second, there is at least one dimension of the relation between thinkability and knowability, on the one hand, and mattering, on the other hand, in which the former have priority over the latter. This dimension is mattering's philosophical-theoretical expression. Indeed, one cannot build a theory of mattering (as Heidegger does) without employing concepts or a predicative language or ‘discursive determinacy’. So, ‘logic’ is a condition of the possibility of mattering's becoming available as a philosophical-theoretical subject-matter. It follows that if Heidegger expresses anything philosophical-theoretical about mattering, he must admit that logic has a certain priority over it. If no such admittance materializes, the legitimate thing to do is to remain silent or write poetry or make art.

Pippin could easily avoid this critique. All he had to do was to remove the (tiny in length, but enormous in significance) judgement that ‘Heidegger is right’ from his book and be content with his masterful exposition and discussion of Heidegger's texts. Following this purely exegetical route, though, would have made The Culmination less than what it now is, namely a philosophical treatise in its own right.