87027218 Heidegger s Descartes

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2010.00408.x

Heidegger’s Descartes and Heidegger’sCartesianism

R. Matthew Shockey

Abstract: Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (SZ) is commonly viewed as oneof the 20th century’s great anti-Cartesian works, usually because ofits attack on the epistemology-driven dualism and mentalism ofmodern philosophy of mind or its apparent effort to ‘de-center thesubject’ in order to privilege being or sociality over the individual.Most who stress one or other of these anti-Cartesian aspects of SZ,however, pay little attention to Heidegger’s own direct engagementwith Descartes, apart from the compressed discussion in SZ §§19–21. I here show through a careful reading of Heidegger’s lectures onDescartes from the years immediately preceding SZ that, while hehas sharp criticisms of Descartes and certain ‘Cartesian’ aspects ofmodern philosophy along the lines commonly recognized, he alsoaims to disclose what he calls the ‘positive possibilities’ in Descartesand the philosophy he inspired. I detail a number of these and thenshow that they force us to see Heidegger’s own early project aslargely unconcerned with dualism and mentalism per se, and muchmore with questions of the philosophical methodology that givesrise to them. Moreover, I show that a careful reading of Heidegger’streatment of the cogito makes clear that he is no serious wayattempting to ‘de-center the subject’ and that the fundamentalquestion of the ‘analytic of Dasein’ is one that takes Descartes as animmediate jumping off point: how can I articulate what I under-stand myself to be as the general kind of entity I am, and on whatbesides me does my being depend?

1. Introduction

Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (SZ)1 is one of the great works of anti-Cartesianphilosophy of the 20th century. Or so claim a wide range of readers, from thosewho find in Heidegger an ally against dualist, mentalist, and rationalist theoriesin the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences,2 to the many ‘post-modern’philosophers and critical theorists who view him as, if not actually havingbrought about the ‘death of the subject’, at least having led it to the guillotine.3

While it would be foolish to deny that Heidegger is in many respects critical ofDescartes4 and much thought directly or indirectly influenced by him, the claim

European Journal of Philosophy ]]]:]] ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 1–27 r 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

that he is anti-Cartesian has nevertheless become a bit of what he would call‘Gerede’:5 it is an assertion passed around as truth without adequate groundingby those who make it. And when we do examine the grounds for this claim, Iargue here, we see that treating Heidegger as an anti-Cartesian distorts as muchof his thought as it reveals.

For one thing, while one may object to Heidegger’s approach to the history ofphilosophy on a number of grounds, it must be said in his favor that when heengaged with his predecessors (and most contemporaries for that matter), he didso without rancor and with the deepest respect for their efforts, even when hewas ultimately critical of them. The very idea of defining himself as anti-X wasantithetical to his way of doing philosophy. More importantly, it turns out thatHeidegger meant it when he said in the remarks early in SZ on its planned Part IIthat he intended there to demonstrate the ‘positive possibilities’ of thephilosophical tradition (SZ: 22/44), not only those to be found in Kant andAristotle, to whom he has long been recognized as owing much, but alsoDescartes.6 Though that portion of the book remained unwritten, its spiritalready infuses those portions that did see publication, as well as other writingsprior to SZ. Thus even without SZ Part II, we may discover the ‘positivepossibilities’ Heidegger saw in Descartes. To do so we must highlight certainpassages that refer to Descartes but that have received comparatively littleattention (most of which has been given to §§19–21, where Heidegger subjectsDescartes’ conception of space to a penetrating analysis and rejects it as anadequate account of the space of human existence); we must carefully look athow Heidegger presents his criticisms of Descartes to see what else he is alsodoing; and we must bring to the fore the extended discussions of Descartes in theonly relatively recently published Marburg course of 1923-24, in which approvaland appropriation is a clear part of the interpretation.7

Heidegger actually saw more ‘positive possibilities’ in Descartes than can beaddressed in a single paper, so my aim here is relatively narrow: to show thatHeidegger’s criticisms of Descartes focus not at all on the first-personal characterof his philosophy and very little on his rationalism, dualism, or mentalism, andthat instead they revolve around the methodological question of how to offer anontology of the entity who asks ontological questions, i.e. us.8 By looking at hiscritical engagement with Descartes on this issue, we can then see that Heideggerhimself adopts and further develops the role Descartes gives to the first-person inphilosophical activity. More than that, he also adopts and develops Descartes’picture of the individual as finite, concerned with herself and her relation to otherentities, and teleologically oriented towards truth; and he sees a role forphilosophy in the development or perfection of the individual that is ininteresting ways analogous to what we find in Descartes. This also implies thatthere are certain structural parallels between the paths of inquiry and discovery ofthe Meditations and of SZ: each must be seen as a text that represents an individualcoming to articulate what she understands of herself a priori, and on what besidesherself this understanding rests, on the basis of which she then becomes more ableto be what she is. So, properly read, Heidegger must be seen as offering his own

2 R. Matthew Shockey

r 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

form of Cartesianism, though one that is separable from most of what normallygoes under that name. While my arguments for this will be of interest to readers ofHeidegger, there is more at stake than exegetical accuracy. What I call Heidegger’sCartesianism rests on an insight about philosophical methodology that needs tobe recognized by anyone working on questions that implicitly or explicitly centeron the first-person. The ability to raise and address questions about intentionalityor rational agency, for instance, depends on our ability to take up a relation toourselves in which we become able to describe ourselves ontologically, as ageneral kind of entity, one defined in part by its self-relatedness, rather than just asthe particular individuals we each are. How we can engage in such descriptionand what sort of self-understanding we thereby come to must be addressed if thequestions that rest on such understanding are to be properly taken up.

2. Descartes in Sein und Zeit: The Question of the ‘Sum’

I begin with a brief look at two of the early references to Descartes in SZ, in whichwe can already see that the critique of Descartes aims as much at revision andappropriation as rejection. The guiding question of the book which provides thecontext for these early references is, of course, the ‘question of the meaning ofbeing [Sinn von Sein]’, or ‘Seinsfrage’: what do we understand when weunderstand an entity (Seiendes), any entity, as being (Sein)? Or, in other words, invirtue of what are all our various takings-to-be takings-to-be?9 What unity is thereto them? In the sketch of the work’s plan in SZ §5, Heidegger tells us that Part IIwould offer a ‘destruction [Destruktion] of the history of ontology’ guided by thisquestion (SZ: 22/44), by which he meant an examination of certain keyphilosophical projects in Western thought framed by the question of what sortof understanding of being they assumed or offered. He both planned to showwhat the tradition had concealed about being—how it had tended to equate allbeing with being a substance, thus missing the multiplicity inherent in being—aswell as to bring out the aforementioned ‘positive possibilities’ of that tradition.The immediate reason Heidegger gives for his intention to include Descartes inthis ‘destruction’ is his obvious historical importance, most especially the role heplayed in shaping the background of Kant’s thought.10 Heidegger’s interest inKant itself came from the fact that he saw an anticipation of his own conceptionof the temporality of Dasein in Kant’s account of time as the form of innerintuition. In Heidegger’s view, however, even though Kant had brought ‘thephenomenon of time back into the subject’ (SZ 24/45), he was limited by the factthat in his interpretation of what it was to be a subject he ‘took over Descartes’ontological position’, i.e. he interpreted the subject as a kind of substance, orpermanent ‘presence-at-hand [Vorhandenheit]’.11 In other words Kant, likeDescartes, ‘failed to provide an ontology of Dasein’, i.e. of that entity we each are(SZ: 24/46).12 The most serious consequence of this failure, from Heidegger’sperspective, is that it left ‘the decisive connection between time and the ‘‘I think’’[. . .] shrouded in utter darkness’ (SZ: 24/45–46).

Heidegger’s Descartes and Heidegger’s Cartesianism 3


Whatever we are to make of this view of Kant, what’s relevant here isHeidegger’s view that Descartes provided Kant with his ontology of the subject,and that it is primarily for this reason that he focuses on Descartes. If he is touncover and rework what is valuable in Kant, Heidegger is implying, he mustpurge it of its problematic Cartesian elements. As his readers have rightly seen,Heidegger is setting up Descartes’ account of the subject (of the ‘I think’ that Kantfailed to connect with time) for some form of serious criticism. And the criticismturns out to be this: ‘With the ‘‘cogito sum’’, Descartes had claimed that he wasputting philosophy on a new and firm footing. But what he left undeterminedwith this ‘‘radical’’ beginning, was the way of being [Seinsart] of the res cogitans,or—more precisely—the meaning of the being [Seinssinn] of the ‘‘sum’’’ (SZ: 24/46).In other words, Heidegger claims that Descartes shifts our attention tosubjectivity, to the entity we each are, but without then properly asking what itis to be such an entity, and, a fortiori, without asking what connection our beinghas with being in general.

Heidegger’s own goal is then first to offer an ‘Interpretation [Interpretation]13

[that] will not only prove that Descartes had to neglect the question of beingaltogether; it will also show why he came to suppose that the absolute ‘‘being-certain [Gewisssein]’’ of the cogito exempted him from raising the question of themeaning of the being which this entity possesses’ (ibid.). Having done so,Heidegger then aims himself to offer a ‘working out of the unexpressedontological foundations of the ‘‘cogito sum’’’ (ibid.). We will see exactly what thismeans in what follows, but note here what it is not saying: that Descartes waswrong to focus on the ego, to turn us towards our individual ‘subjectivity’ andmake it central in our philosophical investigation. Rather, the problem is that heeffected this turn and then to failed to ask the necessary questions that followfrom it: what is the ‘subject’, this entity that I am? How does my being show up tome as I ask about it? What do I mean when I say ‘I am’? And how does my sayingthis differ from my assertions that other entities are which are not me? Descartesassumed that any such questions are either questions about what kind ofproperties define me as a substance or about the causes of my existence andessence as a substance, and so he never considered that I do not show up tomyself in my being as a substance at all.

Heidegger’s goal is to show both that and why Descartes didn’t ask thesequestions, but also to ask and answer them himself, conscious of the danger ofsliding into a substantialist interpretation of our being. This is nowhere moreclearly indicated than in a second early passage in SZ on Descartes, this one in§10, in which Heidegger uses him as a reference point for distinguishing his ownontological project from the merely ‘ontical’ human and life sciences (biology,psychology, anthropology) that take up the question of what a human being isfrom an empirical perspective. Here Heidegger repeats essentially the same claimhe makes in §5: Descartes ‘leaves the ‘‘sum’’ completely undiscussed, eventhough it is regarded as no less primordial than the cogito’ (SZ: 46/71). ButHeidegger then once again asserts: ‘[o]ur analytic raises the ontological questionof the being of the ‘‘sum’’ [Sein des ‘‘sum’’]’ (SZ: 46/72). And it is clear that this is



not simply one question among others that the analytic of Dasein raises. It is thequestion. For, since Dasein is ‘in each case mine [je meines]’ (SZ: 41/67), and ‘italways expresses itself in personal pronouns, ‘‘I am,’’ ‘‘you [du] are’’’ (SZ: 42/68),to say what Dasein is is precisely to address what I am (and you too, in regards tothe basic form of your first-person singular existence). There is, to be sure, a shiftof emphasis in Heidegger’s taking up of the Cartesian ‘ego sum’; it is ‘a matter ofthe verb and not the personal pronoun ego’ as Jean-Francois Courtine puts it(2009: 109). But the verb remains distinctively first-person singular (as is clear inthe Latin, which technically doesn’t even require the pronoun), and so theanalysis remains squarely within the first-person singular perspective, i.e. withinthe perspective we each have on our own being.

Heidegger’s goal is thus to carry through something Descartes began, the ‘turnto the subject’, not to abandon it altogether. As he puts it in the Grundprobleme derPhanomenologie course of 1927:14 ‘returning to the subject, in the broadest sense, isthe only path that is possible and correct’ (GP: 103/73).15 He is careful to indicate,of course, that in this ‘return to the subject’ we must guard against taking our‘point of departure’ as an ‘initially given ‘‘I’’ or subject’, for if we do so ‘we shallcompletely miss the phenomenal content [Bestand] of Dasein’ (SZ: 46/72). Onemight be tempted to take this statement as supporting the view that he isdisplacing the first-person from the center of his ontology. But as he indicates in thetext that follows, it is only a particular ontological interpretation16 of the first-person,as a thing or substance given to itself as a kind of object, that he is guarding against.It is not the ‘I’ per se that is the problem (or the ‘I-ness’ of the verb ‘sum’). His ownmethod of ‘formally indicating [formale Anzeigen]’ Dasein as in each case mine isprecisely his way of picking out its essential first-person character so that what it isto be such an entity may be asked by that entity without prejudicing the inquirythrough the tacit importing of a pre-given ontology, particularly one that interpretsthe entity asked about as a kind of thing or object present to itself in a wayanalogous to that in which worldly objects are present to a disengaged observer.17

Even from these brief opening passages in SZ it is clear that the still notinfrequently heard view that Heidegger aims to ‘de-center the subject’, and thathe is for that reason an anti-Cartesian philosopher, is misguided, or, at the veryleast, in need of severe qualification. Even those who accept that Heidegger has afundamental concern with the ‘I’, however, do not always see the methodologicalconsequences he draws from this concern. If I am to say what it is to be an ‘I’,then I must either look to entities other than myself who express themselves as‘I’s (by saying ‘sum’), or I must directly take up myself as the entity in question.Heidegger’s objections to the treatment of the subject as a present-at-handsubstance are, in part, an objection to the former approach. He recognizes thatany attempt to say what it is to be the sort of entity I am qua ‘I’ that fails to dealwith the fact that such an attempt must always be carried out in the first personwill inevitably distort what it treats. For it will entail that the one offering theaccount unconsciously disengages from his own being and treats it as justsomething there present before him, a thing to be analyzed as one might anyother thing. (His own choice to write of ‘Dasein’ and use the impersonal pronoun



to refer to ‘it’ subtly encourages this mistake among his readers, I think.) And sohe recognizes that a philosophical investigation that addresses the being of the‘sum’ must not only be undertaken by an entity who can say ‘sum’, but preciselyby that entity taking up her own being, i.e. taking up the question of what it is ingeneral to be Dasein as that is manifest in her own particular being of it. Thephilosophical analysis of Dasein, in other words, is a way for me to speak aboutmyself, in a distinctively ontological way, a way that captures not, as Heideggersays in the course on the Metaphysiche Anfangsgrunde der Logik,18 ‘the individualessence of my self, but rather the essence of mineness and selfhood as such [dasindividuelle Wesen meiner selbst, sondern das Wesen von Meinheit undSelbstheit uberhaupt]’ (MFL: 242/188).19

And so, whatever Heidegger rejects in Descartes, he wholeheartedly acceptsthat philosophy requires a reflexive, first-person singular, self-engagement.20

Heidegger’s goal is thus to correct and carry through Descartes ‘turn to thesubject’, to make Dasein ontologically ‘transparent [durchsichtig]’ to itself, as herepeatedly says (e.g. SZ: 7/26–27), appropriating the visual metaphor whichdominates modern philosophy. And this means providing the means for me, thephilosophical inquirer, to discover my own path to self-transparency, for thequestion of the being of Dasein only has meaning from this first-person singularperspective. Stated in the technical terminology of SZ: ‘only when thephilosophical-investigative question itself is seized upon in an existentiell manneras a possibility of the being of each existing Dasein, does there occur the possibilityof a disclosure of the existentiality of existence and with that of the initiation of anadequately founded ontological problematic in general’ (SZ: 13–14/34).

3. Descartes in the Einfuhrung course of 1923–24

To expand upon and offer further support for the above, I turn now to thelengthy but largely still unexamined analysis of Descartes in Heidegger’s 1923–24course, Einfuhrung in der phanomenologische Forschung, the substance of whichmatches nearly exactly what Heidegger said would be covered in the discussionof Descartes in the ultimately never-published Part II of SZ. Heideggerforeshadows in EPF the abovementioned comments in SZ when he says thedestruction or ‘way of dismantling [Wege des Abbauens]’ (EPF: 117/85) he aimsto undertake in his return to historically important philosophical figures ‘looks,not for the weaknesses, but instead for the positive, the productive in what ittakes up’ (EPF: 118/85; cf. 197/150). That is not to say that there is no criticism ofDescartes, but that the basic goal of criticism is the search for those moments ofgenuine philosophical insight that may lie hidden.

3.1 Teleology and Finitude

Heidegger’s ‘dismantling’ of Descartes begins with a simple question, framedwith one of the technical terms Heidegger aims to explicate in the course: what



does Descartes care21 about? A preliminary answer that Heidegger discusses atsome length is that he cares about knowledge, scientia, i.e. systematic,articulated, theoretical knowledge of the sort offered by the various sciences,including mathematics and the various branches of ‘natural philosophy’.Heidegger calls this ‘already known knowledge [erkannte Erkenntnis]’ (EPF56ff./42ff.) because, from the perspective of the philosopher who cares about it,its status as knowledge is already established. Care for such knowledge takes theform of worrying about its vulnerability, principally the threat to it posed byskepticism. Descartes’ response to this threat takes the form of providing‘foundations’ for knowledge that are themselves immune to skeptical attack andwhose immunity may be passed on to the structure built upon them. (Heideggerdoes not note this, but Descartes thinks the threat of skepticism is real only solong as knowledge is thought to rest on empirical foundations, as his Aristotelianopponents did; his own foundation is thus instead reason.) If one stops askingafter Descartes’ philosophical motivations here, one has the standard, if nowsomewhat faded picture of him as a foundationalist epistemologist, concernedabove all with refuting skepticism. But Heidegger, to his credit, recognizes thatthis still leaves the motivational question largely unaddressed, for it doesn’t saywhy it is that radical skepticism should be seen as a real threat to ‘already known’knowledge in the first place. One might reasonably think that, even if suchskepticism is in some way possible, it is not something that needs to be whollyavoided or overcome. Perhaps it is enough to show that some beliefs are morefounded than others, even if none may be absolutely certain, as, for instance,Locke and other so-called ‘mitigated skeptics’ thought.

Heidegger is among the ranks of those who recognize that the refutation ofskepticism isn’t, in fact, Descartes primary philosophical goal. He notes that theDedicatory Letter to the Meditations offers the goal of rationally refuting atheismand thereby providing a ‘rational foundation for the Catholic system of belief’(EPF: 265/204; cf. AT VII: 1ff./CSM II: 3ff.). But while Heidegger doesn’t doubtDescartes’ sincerity in this pro-theistic goal, he doesn’t treat it as his true or mostfundamental philosophical motivation, for its aim is religious, doctrinal. Instead,Heidegger focuses on the fact that the Meditations aim to transform the individualwho works through them from being in a state of error to one of being in truth, orat least in a state in which one is in full possession of one’s faculties and socapable of properly seeking truth and avoiding error. The Meditations thus reflect afundamental concern on the part of Descartes with how it is that, at the mostbasic level, we human beings should be, and a recognition of the fact that, due tocertain features of our fallen, worldly existence, what we should be is notnecessarily—indeed, necessarily not—what we are. For this reason, Heideggerviews our individual existence, and the struggle we must engage with respect toit, as what is truly at issue for Descartes. And there is good reason to thinkHeidegger is right. That the Meditations are designed to help the reader transformhimself is obvious enough, and, as Heidegger could have noted but didn’t,Descartes himself responded to the charge made by Hobbes and Bourdin that hisskeptical arguments were unoriginal by noting that originality wasn’t the point,



that their primary goal was to lead the reader away from the senses and to theintellect, a redirection necessary for the orientation of the individual’s activitytowards God and truth. Refuting skepticism was, according to Descartes, one ofhis goals, but only a secondary one (AT VII: 171–72, 464/CSM II: 121, 312).22

The possibility of the kind of self-perfection that Descartes seeks assumes thatthe entity with that possibility is oriented towards an end, namely, the good thatconstitutes its perfection.23 This possibility also implies another, equallyfundamental aspect of our existence: its finitude. Heidegger recognizes andaddresses the former, but it is the latter that he views as the central ontologicalelement in Descartes’ account of what we are.24 We can begin to see whyHeidegger thinks this and why he focuses on the interconnection of finitude andperfectionism in Descartes if we consider the following, which Heidegger himselfdid not stress. First, Descartes is famous for having purged final causes fromnature, but this purge applies only to finite, non-human entities, i.e. extendedthings. These things, which include all material objects and (infamously) livingthings as well, have no natural ends or goods, at least so far as we can know; theyare subject only to the blind, mechanistic forces of efficient causation. Humanbeings, on the other hand, do have natural ends, and, in agreement with manybefore him, Descartes sees these ends as including—or perhaps being exhaustedby—truth, where this is understood as supreme being or perfection. Second,achievement of this end for a person is not guaranteed, for to be human is, inDescartes’ words, to be ‘between supreme being and non-being’ (AT VII: 54/CSMII: 38). From the First Meditation’s reflection on the ubiquity of error, to theSecond’s on the merely relative knowledge of self and body, to the Third andFifth’s on the understanding of oneself as created by an infinite being, to theFourth’s on the imperfection of human intellect (though not will), and to theSixth’s on the fragility of the body, nearly everything in Descartes is driven by theindividual’s experience of himself as not perfect, as less than fully being, asdefined by the possibility of in some way not being, either wholly or partially.Heidegger’s focus on finitude in Descartes is thus wholly justified.

3.2 Subjectivity and Substance

As Heidegger sees things, however, problems begin for Descartes when, insteadof pursuing a phenomenology of finitude, i.e. instead of asking how exactly Ishow up to myself as finite, as one who stands in relations to others and things ina world, and as in some way constituted by the possibility of not being, he insteadinterprets finitude generally in terms of a theory of substance he has taken overand adapted from his Scholastic predecessors. There are, of course, manydifferences among the Scholastics Heidegger refers to, and serious departuresfrom all of them on the part of Descartes. But certainly most share an ontologythat distinguishes finite beings from infinite, that defines substance on the basisof a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties, and that understandsthe relations between substances as causal. Descartes clearly adopts this general



ontological framework and puts it to his own use.25 The narrative of discovery ofthe Meditations is one of the individual coming to discover himself as a particularkind of thing with certain intrinsic properties (most generally, thinking), causallydependent on the infinite, and, on the basis of this, in a (quasi-)causal relation toother finite things.26 To this Heidegger does not wish immediately to offer theopposite view, that I as finite being am not caused by infinite (or some other)being, or that I don’t causally interact with other finite things. Rather, he wishes toemphasize that the ontology of substance and its theory of causation orproduction is invoked not on the basis of an examination of how it is that I (themeditator) actually experience my own finitude or how I experience andunderstand the infinite from my finite perspective. It is, instead, simply invokedwithout argument as the basis for interpreting myself and my relation to thatwhich I am not. Descartes, for all his acuity, simply takes over uncritically anunderstanding of what it is to be that is readily available to him, i.e. the ontologyof substance and the theory of causation built around it.

It is within this ontology of substance that Descartes develops his account ofthe teleological structure of the human being and an understanding of itspossibility of perfection. He argues that we are caused or produced by infinitebeing (God), with the causation here appearing to be both efficient and final,insofar as we are created in such a way as to have a telos. This telos is, in neo-Platonic fashion, the cause itself, to which we must try to return. Becauseessences of substances are grasped by the intellect, a passive or perceptivefaculty, understanding of God is primarily a cognitive matter, akin to anunderstanding of a mathematical object. And, as with such objects, God is onlytruly understood when grasped clearly and distinctly in a concept (so far as thatis possible for an idea of the infinite). Because infinite being is that to which onemust orient oneself in order to grasp truth, the way to pursue one’s good is tocultivate one’s ability to understand things clearly and distinctly, i.e. throughprecise concepts grasped solely by the intellect, and to then subordinate one’sfaculty of judgment to these concepts, only affirming as true what one can clearlyand distinctly understand in terms of them. Heidegger’s picture of Descartes isthus of one who takes the basic Augustinian picture of the finite but free humanbeing striving towards its good and transforms it on the basis of both a theory ofsubstance and a new and narrower, purely cognitive or intellectual conception oftruth.

3.3 Truth and Rule-Following

The idea of truth is obviously crucial here and bears further analysis. At theoutset of his discussion of Descartes, Heidegger offers a five-fold differentiationof this concept into (1) truth as ‘the true: the entity that is uncovered in adeterminate sort of knowledge’; (2) truth as ‘the process of experiencing a knownentity and originally having it present’ in such a way that it may be spoken of inpropositions; (3) truth as ‘how such a truth [i.e. a proposition] is itself here, free-



floating to a certain extent’, i.e. as something that is valid and thus may berepeated without direct experience of the entity it is about; (4) truth as thedemonstrability or ‘rightness’ of the proposition, which means its ‘bear[ing]within itself the demand to be affirmed’; and (5) ‘truth as a value’, a value thatcomes from its having ‘the character of an ought [Gesolltes]’ (EPF: 123–25/89–90).Heidegger claims that the further one gets away from the first of these, thefurther one is from ‘what actually constitutes the true: [. . .] the entity itself in themanner it is uncovered’ (EPF: 125/90). That is, the further down the list one goes,the more derivative a concept one has; in (5) in particular ‘there is nothing leftthere of the original sense of truth’ (ibid.).

Heidegger’s ‘destruction’ of Descartes argues that he begins with somethinglike the first sense of truth insofar as perception of a res, an entity is central forhim—where perception is understood not primarily as sensory perception butalso and more fundamentally as intellectual—but that he moves away from it toan idea of propositional truth as the highest form. The crucial step in this move isthe focus on judgment as the locus of truth, which results from Descartes’interpretation of the freedom one experiences oneself to have as a freedom toaffirm, deny, or doubt, forms of activity that have propositions rather than non-propositional entities as their objects. Heidegger refers here to Part I, §41 ofDescartes’ 1644 textbook the Principles of Philosophy, where he asserts that as athinking thing, ‘there is nothing we grasp more evidently and perfectly’ than ourfreedom, and describes this freedom in terms of the aforementioned, proposi-tionally oriented cognitive activities (EPF: 201/152–53; AT VIIIA: 20/CSM I206).27 The focus on freedom as freedom to judge brings with it the idea that touse this freedom properly, to pursue truth and one’s perfection so far as that ispossible, means to judge rightly. For Descartes, this means to judge according torules that determine the true and the false. Freedom thus (seeminglyparadoxically) involves a submission to rules, a will to be determined by them.The Meditations are in part then a search for the right ‘rules for the direction of themind’, as Descartes had put it in the title of his earlier, only posthumouslypublished work.

Heidegger doesn’t object to the idea of freedom as a kind of submission, anidea that is a recognizable ancestor to his own idea of ‘letting be [sein lassen;Gelassenheit]’. Rather, his central thought is that it is a very different thing tosubmit yourself to the entities disclosed to you than it is to submit yourself to apropositionally expressed rule that tells you how you ought to regard thoseentities. The first sort of submission involves letting the entities themselvesdetermine your mode of comportment to them, i.e. how you think about them oreven whether thinking about them is the way of letting them be what they are;28

the second means determining the entities on the basis of something you bring toand impose upon them without the possibility of the entities resisting thisimposition. To do the latter is to have already moved away from fundamentaltruth to one of its derivative, or what Heidegger will in SZ call ‘founded[fundierten]’ forms. Thus, Descartes’ subordination of one’s freedom to the rule‘judge as true only what you clearly and distinctly perceive’ means abandoning



the perceptive, open relation to the entities disclosed to one and seeing them onlyas the rule allows you to.

This submission to a rule of certainty manifests that care for ‘already knownknowledge’ mentioned above, and here Heidegger asserts that the problem withthis mode of care is that it ‘gives itself the regula [i.e. rule of clarity anddistinctness]’ but ‘does not restrict this rule to the specific domain in which itoriginated’—mathematics, about which more below—‘[i]nstead the rule presentsitself as regula generalis [a general rule]. Along with the rule itself, the caredevelops a fundamental claim, of the sort that the rule normatively determiningit says at the same time: the only sort of knowledge that is science at all is thatwhich satisfies the rule. The original basis [Boden] is given up in thedevelopment itself’ (EPF: 222/169). This ‘original basis’ is the very uncertaintyinvolved in being an entity for whom care for certainty is possible. In otherwords, in order to be able to care about what is certain, and to make its pursuitmy overriding goal, I have to be the sort of entity who lives in uncertainty, andthis uncertainty has to, in a sense, be my fundamental state or way of being.Descartes tries to ‘give up’ this basis by clinging to what is certain. And the directresult is that ‘the bonum [good] is no longer the verum [true]’—understood asopenness to what is—‘but instead the verum qua certum [true as certain]’—truthas what is indubitable—‘so that the care, from its own standpoint, interprets ahuman’s specific perfectio [perfection] in the sense that the voluntas qua judicium[will as judgment] is interpreted as propensio in certum [propensity for certainty]’(EPF: 225/171).

Now, as just indicated, the fundamental rule to judge as true only that whichyou clearly and distinctly perceive in your intellect does, Heidegger concedes,have a domain of entities for which it is appropriate: mathematical ones.29 Thismeans that what Descartes has effectively done is to take an experience of acertain type or ‘region’ of entities and apply the defining aspect of what’sinvolved in the free submission to those entities to other regions of entities whereit may or may not be appropriate. As mathematical knowing is taken byDescartes (and most others in the period) as the model for scientia, the result isthat a formal idea of science derived from one particular science comes todominate the methodology of all systematic inquiry, regardless of the object.Heidegger gives a Kantian gloss to this Cartesian move: Descartes’ ‘developmentlies in grasping that which is objective [das Gegenstandliche] in accord with therule’ (EPF: 219/167), which means that ‘the idea of the science prefigures thebasic constitution of its possible objects’ (EPF: 212/161). Heidegger doesn’t usethe phrase, but it is clear that he views Descartes as offering his own, pre-Kantian‘Copernican Revolution’: let the experience of objects be guided by and judgedonly according to rules laid down by the mind, rather than attempt to subject themind to its objects so that they do the determining. The fundamental problemwith Descartes’ version of this ‘Copernican’ move (perhaps Kant’s as well), is thatonce it is made, there is no longer a possibility of questioning the operative ideaof science or its assumed universal validity—or of grounding it—on the basis of anexperience of the objects studied, for what counts as an object is pre-determined



by the idea of the science. Anything that would challenge this idea of a sciencehas no chance of showing up as real or legitimate.30

Among the consequences of this is that the being of the one who sets out thisrule comes to be seen only in terms of what the rule allows: the onephilosophically pursuing truth and self-perfection conceives of himself as aparticular kind of thing with properties that can be understood to necessarilybelong to it, i.e. as res cogitans. The Meditations’ method of doubt, or, asHeidegger calls it, method of ‘remotio [removal]’ of that which is uncertain (EPF:231/175) is, he argues, just the method of implementing the general rule ofjudging as true only what is perceived clearly and distinctly—i.e. certainly—to theexperience of the being of the one who is following it. Even though the ruledoesn’t get explicitly established until the Third Meditation, the very fact that theMeditations start off with the suspension of belief about everything that is notcertain shows the rule is already in place. (What is not yet there in the First,Heidegger might have noted, is that certainty always requires clarity anddistinctness of the sort one first learns to recognize in the experience of thecogito.) This method of doubt or removal leads at the conclusion of the FirstMeditation into what Heidegger calls an ‘end-situation [Endsituation]’ (EPF:234/178), namely, the suspension of all judgment, which suspension is thenreinstituted at the beginning of the Second. In this situation, in Heidegger’swords, ‘all the search can encounter [. . .] is the being of the one searching itself [. . .]what is found is the being of the one searching, that contains its being in itself’ (EPF:240/184). And what I, the searcher, find is that ‘the esse of the very res that I comeupon is the sort of being that must be expressed by the ‘‘sum’’’ (ibid.).

Despite having managed to come across his being and to see how it must beexpressed, Descartes, Heidegger thinks, fails to give an adequate phenomen-ological analysis of what is truly disclosed in the experience of confronting hisbeing. Instead, Descartes’ general rule prescribes what may be disclosed: he ‘seeshis own existence [Dasein]’ in terms of ‘the categorial determinations of a giventhing with properties’ (EPF: 241/185). The properties here are those of being aperceiver and judger, or, more generally, a thinker, for these properties are, apartfrom his existence, all that can be clearly and distinctly known of himself by himas he is steered by the need for certainty. The conditions that enabled the processthat led to this confrontation with his being—embeddedness in a world withothers—are unrecognizable, because belief in the existence of anything outside ofthe thinker has been suspended. And they never reappear as true conditions ofpossibility. The meditator comes to understand his essential dependence oninfinite being, God, but not on anything finite.

Now, Descartes’ blindness to the being of the philosophical questioner and tothe conditions of possibility of philosophical questioning is problematic in itself,but the problems reach their deepest level when we see the connection with theforms of truth mentioned above. Heidegger sees Descartes as shifting from taking‘the cogitare in the sense of a matter [Sache]’—i.e. a genuine phenomenon—tofinding ‘a proposition that is certain,’ a ‘formal-logical proposition’ that holds of a‘thing-of-thought [Denkding]’ (EPF: 248/191). In order to explain this, Heidegger



first examines how exactly Descartes conceives of ‘the regional [regionale] characterof the cogitatio in general’ (EPF: 248–49/193), and what he sees as definitive is that‘the being of the cogitare is a having-oneself-with [Sich-mit-haben]’ (EPF: 249/193). Heidegger essentially accepts this—it amounts to the idea that conscious-ness entails self-consciousness—though he thinks the sort of inherent reflexivityof the self needs a deeper analysis than Descartes gives it. The real issue here isthat Descartes moves from the grasp of thought as involving always a thought ofitself, a ‘having-itself-with’, to the assertion of a ‘formal-ontological proposition’that tries to capture it, namely, ‘is qui cogitat, non potest non existere dum cogitat[he who thinks is not able not to exist while he thinks]’ (ibid.).31 This propositionis ‘formal’ in virtue of the fact that it makes no reference to any specific entity, butalso in virtue of the fact that it strips away even what today would be called thetoken-reflexivity of the original ‘cogito sum’, And it is ‘logical’ in virtue of beingan ‘eternal truth’ whose primary role is as the starting point for the process ofdeduction of other, equally formal, truths. By shifting to it, Heidegger claims,‘Descartes perverts the specific being [spezifische Sein] of what he had earlier seen:the phenomenon of having-oneself-with’ (EPF: 250/193). This phenomenon is,Heidegger is claiming, not one that can be captured in the sort of formalproposition that Descartes offers. The reason it can’t is because such a propositionloses precisely that token-reflexivity that the thought is meant to express. So whatis needed is a method that finds its way to the ‘cogito sum’ but that allows the‘sum’ to be grasped and explicated without losing the reflexivity inherent in it.

4. Heidegger’s Cartesianism

With this we are at a point where we may begin to see how Heidegger takes hiscritique of Descartes not as an end in itself, but as the basis for an appropriationand reworking of certain insights or ‘positive possibilities’ that it has brought tolight. I now explore these and show that we ought to see Heidegger’s generalproject of fundamental ontology as itself in certain key respects strikinglyCartesian (albeit in a sense of ‘Cartesian’ that departs from the predominant onesin circulation).

4.1 Method and the First Person

To begin with, note Heidegger’s remark that Descartes ‘proceeds from the ‘‘I inmy environment [Umwelt]’’’ (EPF: 258/199)—a rather surprising statement, onemight think, given that in the sections on space in SZ Heidegger faults Descartesprecisely for an inadequate concept of world. One can nevertheless see his pointhere, for presumably he is thinking of how both the Meditations and the overtlyautobiographical Discourse on the Method begin with the writer finding himselfamidst all the things and people of everyday life, with an understanding of theseavailable to him thanks to his education, culture, and language. Descartes mightnot adequately capture his ‘factical’ starting point in his official philosophical



theory, but it plays a crucial role in his actual philosophical practice. This impliesthat there might be much we could learn from Descartes by looking at what heactually does, even if we find we have to depart from him in his official theory ofwhat he is.

Still, by itself this reference to the ‘I in my environment’ is not especiallysignificant. It gains in importance, however, when seen in light of otherconnections Heidegger draws or implies between Descartes’ project and his own.To see these, recall Heidegger’s description of the moment of self-encounterbrought about by the method of doubt as an ‘end-situation [Endsituation]’ (EPF:234/178). Looking more closely at the passages where he discusses this, we seethat Heidegger describes this end-situation as one in which the meditator ‘placeshimself face to face with the void [das Nichts] and seeks to maintain himself inthis situation. That means, however, in relation to the end-situation itself, that heis not only placed before the void, but also inserted into the void, devoid of anypossibility of still encountering something’ (EPF: 239–40/183). It is then in thissituation, that, as quoted earlier, ‘the being of the one searching itself’ shows up,which being is understood as ‘the sort of being that must be expressed by the‘‘sum’’’ (EPF: 240/184).

The resonance between this and the discussion of anxiety, particularly that ofanxiety in the face of death in SZ Part I Division II, is striking. There a grasp ofthe totality of one’s being as care is precisely founded on the individual’sencounter with the void, in which she finds her being as inherently threatened bythe ‘possibility of the impossibility’ of being at all (SZ: 262/306–7). This results inan individualizing (Vereinzelnung) of herself in which she sees herself defined byher own unique and unsurpassable possibility of death, in the course of theunderstanding of which her own finitude—the fact that she can never wholly beher own basis of being, that her being is given to her to be—is fully disclosed toher. Descartes, as Heidegger reads him, fails to carry out an analysis of theconfrontation with the void into which his method of doubt has led him.Nevertheless, insofar as he has shown that the being of the sum shows up onlywhen the ‘I’ confronts the void, Descartes has implicitly taken a fundamental steptoward an adequate phenomenological account of the being of existence (Dasein),a step that is apparently historically unprecedented and that presumably is onlymade again by Heidegger himself.

To highlight the significance of the fact that Heidegger finds this step inDescartes, note that he views Husserl (whether fairly or not) as, for all hisprofessed Cartesianism, having failed to take it: Husserl’s ‘reduction does nothave the sense of leading to an end-situation as in Descartes’ case, in such a waythat the search sees itself confronted with nothing and inserted into the void ofpossibilities of finding. Instead the reduction develops the possibility that everymerely possible being [Sein] comes into view; hence, not nothing but instead theentirety of being [die Gesamtheit des Seins], with a specific modification, issupposed to become thematically present’ (EPF: 259–60/200). Here we may seeHeidegger as implying that, on this point at least, his own project is a kind ofsynthesis of Husserl and Descartes (as he understood them), for he too aims to



thematize ‘the entirety of being’, but to do this precisely by bringing the onedoing the thematizing into the void, i.e. by inducing a confrontation with herfundamental possibility of not being.

One interesting consequence of this is that it implies that Heidegger’s ownphilosophy needs a method formally analogous to Descartes’ method of doubt,i.e. a method that will allow the philosopher to bring herself into the void and sobefore her being, for only then will she be able to access her normally only tacitlyunderstood ontological structures. Apart from the fact that this method will notbe epistemologically driven, i.e. not governed by Descartes’ ‘care for alreadyknown knowledge’, it is less than obvious exactly what Heidegger thinks it mustlook like. It is clear from the discussion in SZ §§39–41 that the mode of ‘self-finding [Befindlichkeit]’ that he calls anxiety (Angst) has an important role toplay, for it is a ‘mood [Stimmung]’ defined by the fact that, unlike fear, it has noparticular object in the world, it is anxiety in the face of nothing in particular. It isprecisely that mood or state one is in when one confronts the void, becomes‘individualized’ to oneself, and has the possibility of conceptualizing the ‘totalityof the structural whole [Ganzheit des Strukturganzen]’ that is the being of Dasein(SZ: 191/236). We may reasonably assume then that the philosopher who seeks toprovide a thematic account of her ontological structure, and of being in general,must cultivate and maintain herself in this (or some other such) mood. Heideggerisn’t as clear as Descartes is about how to deliberately cultivate a mood of thiskind. He doesn’t offer anything as focused as the method of doubt, and much ofhis discussion is of our tendency to flee from anxiety and so from our ownontological disclosure. Nevertheless, the aim and structure of his whole projectentails that some such mood and method is needed, for only then can thephilosopher have access to and maintain her focus on general, constitutive,ontological structures rather than on determinate ontical matters.32

In light of this, now consider Heidegger’s discussion of Descartes’ attempt tosecure a ‘formal-ontological’ proposition that captures what he finds in the ‘end-situation’ in which the cogito gets asserted. Heidegger wants to preserve twothings that Descartes here comes across and then allows to slip from his grasp: (i)the moment in which the being of the one asking about being can show up toitself as it is in itself, and (ii) the expression of that being in a way that captures itsself-relatedness, its ‘having-itself-with’ itself. In that sense, Heidegger wants toadequately characterize the ‘res’ that Descartes brought to light but didn’t take onits own terms, i.e. the phenomenal matter itself, the being of the one who says‘sum’. And so as an alternative to Descartes’ interpretation of the proposition thatexpresses the being of the meditator as a formal proposition that is stripped of itsconnection to the one asserting it, Heidegger suggests that, ‘if, by contrast, onetakes [Descartes’] proposition in the sense of a formal indication [einer formalenAnzeige], in such a way that it is not taken directly (where it says nothing), but isrelated to the respective [jeweilige], concrete instance of what it preciselymeans’—i.e. the one uttering it—’then it has its legitimacy’ (EPF: 250/193). For,he goes on, ‘the character of the respectiveness [Jeweiligkeit] is inherent in thecogitatio’s being. Each being [Sein] in the sense of existence [Dasein] is



characterized by its respectiveness and further determined by its temporality, andeven further by the specific type of being of this ego sum in what it has’ (ibid.). SoHeidegger’s aim is to adequately address what it is to be the sort of entitycharacterized by ‘respectiveness’, or what he will come in SZ to call ‘in-each-case-mineness [Jemeinigkeit]’, and to make sure that the philosophical languagechosen to express the being of the philosophical inquirer does so, and does notdistort it by treating what the language is about as an impersonal object, standingover and against the inquirer. From this it is also clear that Heidegger wants tohold on to a sense of the formal—the formal of ‘formale Anzeige’—whiledistancing himself from the sense of the formal in Descartes’ ‘formal-ontological’,i.e. generic, non-indexical proposition.33 That is, he wants a proposition that isassertable of any Dasein, but that is so only in virtue of the fact that each Daseincan assert it of herself.

Even from just this short analysis, it is clear that Heidegger sees Descartes ashaving done much to bring the central phenomenal matter of philosophicalanalysis into view (i.e. me, the philosophical inquirer, encountering myself in myfinitude, as concerned about and oriented towards myself as well as towards thatwhich is beyond me and on which I depend), and that his own account ofDasein’s being as ‘care’ must understood in light of this, and seen as a revisedversion of Descartes’ understanding of the finite, teleological nature ofsubjectivity. (And, as the analysis of care opens to that of temporality, this willpresumably in turn lead us back to Kant and allow us to separate his insightsabout time from his Cartesian understanding of subjectivity.)

4.2 Ontology and Self-perfection

One might reasonably worry that this ‘Cartesian’ picture of Heidegger threatensto obscure the ontological aims of SZ, that is, its intended focus on being as such.I now briefly argue that it is, in fact, only if we appreciate the ‘Cartesian’ cast ofHeidegger’s thought that his way of pursuing his larger ontological aims makessense. From this it will also become clear exactly how, as I suggested early on,there is a strong parallel between the paths of (self-)discovery of the Meditationsand SZ.

As I noted at the outset of §2, the question of the meaning of being isessentially the question of what unity there is to our various ways of takingentities to be (at least at this early stage of Heidegger’s thought, there is no beingper se, only the being of entities34). This question has two main dimensions. Onthe one hand, there is a question of how it is that different kinds or ‘regions’ ofentities (in the terminology Heidegger appropriates from Husserl) are under-stood as both distinct and yet all regions of being; and, on the other, there is aquestion as to how any entity ‘has’ different aspects of its being: what it is(essentially or constitutively), that it is (or is not), and how it is (as this or thatparticular entity). So, for instance, with numbers or mathematical objects moregenerally, we may ask how we understand a unity among what, that, and how



they are; but we may also ask in what sense there is a unity between ourunderstanding of these being-aspects of numbers and our understanding of thewhat-, that-, and how-being of other sorts of entities, e.g. physical objects,animals, persons, or God.35

On the face of it, these fundamental ontological questions have nothingessential to do with subjectivity, however broadly understood, except in the sensethat subjects are one kind of entity among others and so are a ‘region’ that willhave to be subsumed within the overall account of being as regionalized. But, assurely as Descartes was, Heidegger is led to see a primacy of the first-personsingular entity, and for two reasons: first, this entity is peculiar in being definedby the fact that it is the entity who understands entities as being, i.e. we are theones who make the distinction between entities and being (SZ §4; GP: 21–22/16).Second, the question of the meaning of being is always a question that is raised byan individual, through her engagement with her own being and her under-standing of entities in general as being. Thus, for me the philosophical questioner,my being and being uberhaupt are originally and inseparably joined. When I comeacross entities as being, so to speak, I can’t but come across myself as the oneunderstanding them; and when I come across myself, I can’t but come across myunderstanding of entities as being. To understand and then answer the questionof the meaning of being in general thus entails that I must get clear on my ownbeing—to render it ‘transparent [durchsichtig]’—as well as on the fact that mybeing is always implicated in all my understanding of being. It is not the certaintyof my existence that is important here, as Descartes, guided by a particular ideaof scientific understanding and a desire to escape his finitude, thought. Rather itis what we might call its inevitability: any understanding of being involves me init as the understander. This is what Heidegger refers to in SZ as the ‘priority ofDasein’ in fundamental ontology, which priority has both ‘ontical’ and‘ontological’ dimensions (SZ §§3–4): ontological, in virtue of the fact that it isthe entity who understands entities as being, but ontical in virtue of the fact thatthe questions asked are always asked from within the existence of the particularphilosopher—i.e. I ask the question of what it is to be, and to be Dasein, and thismatters to me as the particular Dasein I happen to be, even as I ask thesequestions not just about me but about being and Dasein in general.

Whatever the details of this, the basic impulse Heidegger is following is theCartesian (and ultimately Augustinian) one: pin down what I am and see onwhat my being and my understanding of it depend. For Heidegger, just as forDescartes, I cannot find a ground in myself for the fact that I am, nor what I am (asthe kind of entity I am), or how I am the individual I happen to be. My being isgiven to me. The question is, then, by what or whom? Heidegger, freed from theconstricts of Greco-Christian metaphysics, seeks not an efficient cause of mybeing but a condition of its possibility that fits with my true character as a social,self-undertaking, worldly entity, and so he locates the givenness of my being notin infinite substance but instead in those other finite beings of the same kind asme with whom I find myself existing and whose practices, languages andinstitutions provide the ‘space’ for me to be. We can thus see Heidegger as



capturing explicitly something implicit in Descartes, namely, the ‘‘‘I’’ in myUmwelt’ that Heidegger had claimed Descartes began with, i.e. that facticalcontext of social, worldly existence in which the meditator found himself beforearriving at his Archimedean point of self-certainty.

Because he takes over and reworks the understanding of us as having truth asour telos, Heidegger also retains something analogous to the perfectionist orredemptive dimension of Descartes’ (and Augustine’s) philosophical project.Like them, he believes that coming to a fundamental understanding of what I amand what my being relates to and depends on will allow me to, in some sense,more fully go about my ‘ontical’ existence. For Descartes, asking what I am, afterI have established the certainty of my existence, is done with the aim of allowingme to go about being what I am in the way that I ought to, where this meansusing my faculties properly in the pursuit of truth, understood as scientia. Bylearning what faculties I have and how I relate to other entities (God, the world)at the most basic metaphysical level, I first become able to do this. Truth is mytelos and first philosophy the means for its attainment, so far as I can attain itgiven that I am necessarily imperfect. Heidegger’s project is a variant on this asfollows: truth is freed from its interpretation in terms of propositionallyexpressed judgments which are universally assertable and normatively bindingon any judger, and back to what he takes to be the more original idea of truth asopenness to what is in the way that it is, which provides the ultimate ground andcontent of any judgments which purport to express the truth. Dasein isunderstood as that entity who is defined by its participation in truth throughits understanding entities as entities. And with that remains the possibility oforienting oneself towards these entities genuinely, on the basis of an under-standing of them according to the forms of being appropriate to them, or failingto do so by forcing on them an inappropriate framework of interpretationderived from elsewhere.

The two fundamental ‘existential’ possibilities Heidegger calls authenticityand inauthenticity (Eigentlichkeit and Uneigentlichkeit) pick out these possibi-lities of being in truth and failing to be. Failure here means substituting theunderstanding of entities provided by others for one’s own, or, more accurately,not being open to the possibility that the provided understanding is in some waydeficient. That is, an understanding of entities is not false simply because itcomes from others; that would entail that authenticity always requires a rejectionof the social-conceptual status quo, i.e. mere rebellion. What authenticity insteadrequires is essentially what Kant demanded of the enlightened man, that he thinkfor himself rather than blindly follow those socially provided ‘precepts andformulas’ of action that in the unenlightened man become ‘mechanicalinstruments of rational use, or rather misuse, of [the individual’s] naturalendowments’.36 Taking rules to cover all norms of comportment, understanding,use, etc., this means for Heidegger that the authentic individual must strive foran openness to entities in which she can see whether the reigning norms areappropriate and, when not, to seek to go beyond them in whatever ways thesituation dictates.37



Heideggerian philosophy as represented by SZ then becomes a means tosecuring just the right sort of open relation to what is: by struggling through theontology that shows what I am, and how it is possible for being to be understoodby me, I come to be in the position of having an articulated understanding of howmy understanding works, thus of how I am always being pulled away from theentities themselves back to the received interpretation of them. I thereby come toan authentic understanding of my own being, and of being in general, which,without necessitating it, opens the possibility for me of being towards otherentities in an equally authentic way. In short, the activity of pursuingfundamental ontology aims to effect a transformation in my own self-under-standing, one that feeds back into how I actually go about my existence. As inKant and Descartes both, succeeding in this aim means realizing my freedom. Itdoesn’t mean I always succeed in being open to entities in the way that I can beany more than understanding how to judge properly means, for Descartes, that Ialways do, but it at least means I have no excuse when I fail to be.38

5. Conclusion: The Necessity of Heideggerian Cartesianism

The foregoing establishes both the nature of Heidegger’s critique of Descartes (itsfocus on its methodology and presuppositions rather than any substantive‘theses’ it yields) as well as the ‘Cartesian’ nature of Heidegger’s own project. Thecentral insight behind the latter is that ontology must begin with that entity whois capable of doing ontology. This view, which is the chief ‘positive possibility’Heidegger finds in Descartes, we must see as positive as well: any adequategeneral ontological project must have a similar Cartesian cast to it, for I amnecessarily implicated in all my understanding of what is, and the examination ofthe first-person is one that can only be given by me as I take up the question ofwhat I am. This is not because there is something in me hidden to others to whichI have privileged access, or because I can only find certainty in the self-validatingcharacter of some set of my inner experiences. It is rather because of what I earlierreferred to as the inevitably of the self in ontological inquiry. The account thatresults of what it is to be an ‘I’, of what I am as the kind of entity I am, will, ifproperly done, be intelligible to and true of lots of other individual entitiesbesides me—all those who can say ‘I’—but only provided they take my accountas the means for their own ontological self-investigation.

This ought to be the most uncontroversial of views, for all it says is that wemust inquire into our own manner of being in a way that recognizes and neverloses sight of the fact that, as Heidegger puts it, this being is always something ‘atissue’ for us (e.g. SZ: 42/67). Failing to recognize and hold on to this meansrisking a fundamental distortion of what we are. Given the tendency ofphilosophers to start with an ontology drawn from other entities, usually thosephysical ones that have pride of place in certain forms of reductive, naturalscientific explanation, and to assume that an ontology of the first-person is onlysecondary, it is clear that what ought to be uncontroversial is not, and that much



contemporary philosophy is not only incomplete but misguided in the sameways Heidegger finds so much traditional ontology to be. We thus ought to readHeidegger, not simply for an alternative theory of what we are that may be setalongside and in opposition to reigning ‘Cartesian’ ones (or any others for thatmatter), but for a fundamental challenge to dominant views about what it is togive a theory of us at all. The driving insight of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein isthat an adequate theory of our own being can only come about through the rightsort of individual self-engagement, so such a theory is at once a performance anddescription of what it is to be the sort of being who can so perform. Failure torecognize this makes us prone to seduction by those philosophical and scientifictheories that purport to tell us what we are, even as they quietly reject the fact ofour self-engagement out of which all theorizing begins.39

R. Matthew ShockeyDepartment of PhilosophyIndiana University—South [email protected]

NOTES

1 Heidegger 1993 [1927], hereafter SZ. Page references are given both to the Germanand to Macquarrie and Robinson’s English translation, though I have occasionally alteredtheir rendering of the German. (For each of Heidegger’s works I cite a translation whenavailable, but I alter them as necessary.)

2 Important works in this vein include Haugeland 1982; Guignon 1983; Olafson 1987;Okrent 1988; Dreyfus 1990; Richardson 1991; and Mansbach 2002. Robert Pippin’s essay,‘On Being Anti-Cartesian: Hegel, Heidegger, Subjectivity, and Sociality’ (ch. 15 in Pippin1997), is perhaps the best short introduction to the variety of ways of reading Heideggerfrom an anti-Cartesian perspective. It takes issue with the pragmatist and Wittgensteinianreadings of Heidegger by people like Dreyfus and Okrent but still remains wedded to ananti-Cartesian interpretive framework. Richard Rorty may be the most widely knownAmerican philosopher to take Heidegger as inspiration for an attack on the Cartesianmentalism of modern philosophy, but, like Heidegger himself in later decades, Rorty tendsto see the early work circa SZ as still wedded to a certain problematic form of subjectivism(see esp. Rorty 1979). Rorty is right about the subjectivism; I argue here that, properlyunderstood, it is positive rather than problematic.

3 See, for example, Derrida 1987 and Haar 1993. Derrida is, of course, the primaryinspiration for those who work (or, perhaps at this point, worked) under the heading of‘deconstruction’, for whom opposition to Cartesian subjectivism has been central. Butanti-Cartesianism has been widespread among critical theorists and philosophers ofmany other stripes, many of whom also find at least some inspiration for this inHeidegger’s early work. The essays in Cadava, Conner and Nancy 1991 attest to thevariety of views regarding the status of subjectivity among major French theorists. Thetitle alone is a good indication of the perception that 20th century philosophy hadsomehow gotten beyond subjectivity, and the essays reflect in varying degrees the roleHeidegger is seen as playing in this. Subject-centered reason tends to get singled out for



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particular criticism within these circles, due to its alleged role in various schemes ofpower and discourse that are seen as Euro-, phallo- or anthropocentric. A helpful (ifsomewhat biased) discussion of these themes in the last two hundred years of Europeanphilosophy that offers a view of Heidegger’s place in their evolution can be found inHabermas 1990.

4 References in what follows are to Descartes 1983, cited as AT followed by the volumeand page numbers. Translations are from Descartes 1985, cited as CSM followed by thevolume and page numbers. There is extensive scholarship on Descartes, but myunderstanding of Descartes’ metaphysics owes a special debt to Jorge Secada (seeespecially Secada 2000), and my understanding of the wider project within which thatmetaphysics is located to Daniel Garber (see especially Garber 1992).

5 See SZ §35.6 I am not the first to see a positive dimension. Both Marion 1987 (a translation

appears as ch. 3 of Marion 1998) and Raffoul 1998 do as well. Marion has done seriousscholarship on both Descartes and phenomenology, as well as constructive work of hisown that brings the two together, though the essay cited was written before the publicationof the two Gesamtausgabe (GA) volumes (cited in the next note) with the most extensivediscussions of Descartes (as is also true of Raffoul’s book). The most basic idea Marion andRaffoul share, which the present paper aims to further support and elaborate, is thatHeidegger’s ‘Dasein’ rethinks rather than rejects the Cartesian notion of the subject.However, both Marion and Raffoul share the tendency common among Frenchphenomenologists of treating being (Sein) in Heidegger’s early period as something morethan the being of entities (Sein des Seienden), and more in line with the quasi-mysticalrendering it gets in his later work, which then distorts how they understand Dasein’sconstitutive relation to being. (See Crowell 2000 for a review of Raffoul’s book that bringsthis out. On the distinction between entities and being—the so-called ‘ontologicaldifference’—see Heidegger 1975 [1927] [hereafter GP] and §§3,4 below.) A similar problemis found in von Herrmann 1974, which, while an illuminating book on the topic of the first-person in Heidegger, sees him moving beyond subjectivity in virtue of thinking being(Sein) as something more than the being of entities, which then colors how he understandsDasein’s constitutive relation to being. Other significant works that challenge the reigninganti-Cartesian approach to Heidegger, but without substantially engaging with what heactually says about Descartes, include Crowell 2001b and MacAvoy 2001. There are also anumber of works that see Heidegger as focusing on selfhood or subjectivity, but which failto draw the necessary connection between that as a topic and that as necessitating aparticular kind of reflexive, self-engaged methodology. Mark Okrent’s work, especiallyOkrent 1988, and the lectures on Heidegger by Ernst Tugendhat in Tugendhat 1979, forinstance, both have many illuminating things to say about the role of self-understanding inHeidegger’s ontology of Dasein, but they do not take up the question of what form of self-understanding this ontology itself represents. That turns out to be the crucial question forunderstanding Heidegger’s methodology, as will emerge in what follows. (For more onthe nature of ontological self-understanding in Heidegger, see also Shockey (underreview)). Finally, I must note that, after most of the work on this paper had been done, Icame across a recent issue of the Les Etudes philosophiques with a number of essays directlyor indirectly addressing the question of subjectivity in Heidegger. Jean-Francois Courtine’sessay in particular, ‘Les Meditations Cartesiennes de Martin Heidegger’ (Courtine 2009),resonates in many ways with what I argue here.

7 Heidegger 1994 [1923/24], hereafter EPF. There is also much of interest in Heidegger2006 [1926/27], hereafter GPAK, but I will focus mostly on the former.



8 Not only do I not address all of the ‘positive possibilities’ Heidegger finds inDescartes, I also leave aside (except briefly in §4) another large and important issue,namely, how Husserl figures in Heidegger’s understanding of Descartes and Cartesianismand how Heidegger’s phenomenological project should be seen in relation to Husserl’s.What follows, however, provides the basis for an argument that, because of its implicitCartesianism (in the sense to be explained), Heidegger’s phenomenology is much morecontinuous with Husserl’s than is sometimes supposed, or than either he or Husserlwanted to believe. Compelling arguments for seeing this continuity that rest on otherbases may be found in Crowell 2001a.

9 Note that ‘taking’ need not connote judging or asserting. When I use a tool as the toolit is, for instance, I take it to be a tool, and a particular kind of tool, without saying or evennecessarily thinking verbally about what it is that I am doing.

10 Although in EPF Heidegger in fact downplays the novelty of Descartes’ philosophy(cf. SZ: 25/46-7), and in GPAK he offers a reading of nearly the entire modern tradition asessentially a continuation of medieval Greco-Christian metaphysics rather than therevolution it often took itself to be.

11 That is to say, a thing with properties, where that may be understood as thatwhich can take the subject place in standard predicate logic. A contemporary attackon the view that this logic is sufficient for articulating thought about all kinds ofentities, one with some interesting, though I believe unintentional, resonance withHeidegger, may be found in Michael Thompson’s work on thought about life and action(Thompson 2008).

12 Clinton Tolley suggests in a comment on a draft of this paper, and I agree, thatHeidegger would more accurately use the term ‘Dasein’ to designate the way of being ofthat entity we each are. That is, I am an entity, as are you, and we each have Dasein as ourway of being. Dasein itself is not, therefore, an entity, but the being of entities such as youand me. This is not, however, and however unfortunately, how Heidegger uses the term, atleast usually. Most of the time he says Dasein is an entity, the being of Dasein is care, andthe meaning of the being of Dasein is temporality. I believe that nothing philosophicallysignificant rests on this terminological confusion, so long as one keeps in view the entity/being-of-the-entity/meaning-of-the-being-of-the-entity distinction that is the heart ofHeidegger’s ontology. (John Haugeland is perhaps the only notable reader of Heideggerwho would disagree. For a brief articulation of his somewhat infamous view that it is noaccident that Heidegger calls Dasein an entity, and that it is an entity distinct fromindividual ‘cases’ of Dasein like you and me, see Haugeland 2005.)

13 The word is the same in German. Macquarrie and Robinson capitalize it todistinguish it from ‘Auslegung’. Heidegger uses capital-I ‘Interpretation’ to refer toexplicit, philosophical ‘thematization [Thematisierung]’, whereas ‘Auslegung’ designatesany form of taking-as, even that of non-verbal behavior such as the using of an object as ahammer to pound a nail. Of recent works to focus on Heidegger’s account ofinterpretation, Carman 2003 is the most developed, and yet it fails to even note thedistinction between Auslegung and Interpretation, much less see its important role in SZ.Robert Brandom’s ‘Dasein, the Being that Thematizes’ (in Brandom 2002), also misses thiscrucial distinction and treats thematizing as a general sort of ‘linguistic assertionalpractice’ (325), rather than a specifically philosophical form of linguistic expression.

14 Heidegger 1975 [1927], (GP).15 Though one may reasonably wonder what he means, as Heidegger claims this

return is central not only to Kant and Descartes but is also to be found in Plato andAristotle.



16 Again, capital-I Interpretation. See n. 13.17 Cf. SZ: 116/151–52. I say more about formal indication in §4 and in Shockey

(forthcoming).18 Heidegger 1978 [1928], hereafter MFL.19 The paragraph from which this is taken is worth quoting at greater length:

If we say ‘Dasein is in each case essentially mine’, and if our task is to define thischaracteristic of Dasein ontologically, this does not mean we should investigatethe essence of my self, as this factical individual, or of some other givenindividual. This object of inquiry is not the individual essence of my self, butrather the essence of mineness and selfhood as such. Likewise, if ‘I’ is the object ofthe ontological interpretation, then this is not the individual I-ness of my self, butI-ness in metaphysical neutrality; we call this neutral I-ness ‘egoicity’.

The chief question is what is required to get ‘I-ness’ or ‘egoicity’ in view in such a way anontological analysis of it may be given. The argument in the present paper is thatHeidegger sees this requiring a particular form of self-engagement by the philosopher,who finds it in her, yet as something over and above her ‘individual I-ness’, i.e. whatmakes her this or that particular ‘I’.

20 Cristina Lafont comes close to recognizing this reflexivity in her criticism ofDreyfus’s view of formal indication (Lafont 2002: 233). She does not follow through on itsconsequences, however, which undercut her anti-Kantian reading of Heidegger (cf.Shockey 2008 and Shockey (forthcoming)).

21 Care (Sorge) is in SZ the primary term for the being (Sein) of Dasein (see SZ Div. I,ch. 5, ‘Care as the Being of Dasein’), that structure which defines us as the sort of entitieswe are and which is instantiated in any and all particular modes of existence of any of us.It is, fundamentally, the structure of active orientation towards that which matters in ourengaged existence in a shared world, and so captures our teleological ‘nature’, aboutwhich more as we go. In the EPF course under discussion, Heidegger uses ‘care’ as atechnical term, but, as the occurrence here makes clear, it still retains a clear connection toordinary usage. This connection fades somewhat in SZ, but the idea that care is care forsomething that matters nevertheless remains central in SZ’s technical understanding ofcare as the being of Dasein.

22 One ought also recognize the goal not merely of securing knowledge, but of firstmaking it possible by generating, through the ‘analytic’ method, those basic concepts(thought, extension) which will the figure in all other ‘scientific’ claims. See n. 25 for howthis points to another sort of ‘positive possibility’ Heidegger sees in Descartes.

23 Which, he rightly sees, reflects the Augustinian influence on Descartes’ thought,though ‘influence’ may not be the best word, as it implies a direct engagement withAugustine by Descartes, whereas the influence in question may have been much lessdirect. (See Menn 1998 for a thorough examination of the philosophical connectionsbetween Descartes and Augustine.) Heidegger himself discusses Augustine at length inhis 1921 course on ‘Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus’ (in Heidegger 1995 [1918–21]).This discussion reinforces the basic picture I offer of Heidegger here and suggests thatwhat I am calling his ‘Cartesianism’ might be better termed his ‘Augustinianism’, whichwould no doubt make it more palatable to many (including perhaps him). Nevertheless,there is a systematic, scientific (i.e. wissenschaftlich) element in SZ that ties it to Descartesat least as much to Augustine. For a number of recent, illuminating essays on Heidegger’srelation to Augustine, see de Paulo 2006.



24 See esp. EPF: 198–99/150–51.25 Among the ‘positive possibilities’ Heidegger sees in Descartes that I do not deal with

in this paper are a number concerning the logic of substance. Descartes rejected theScholastic-Aristotelian idea of essence and accidents as a genus-species relation. His ‘truelogic’ (AT VII: 107–8/CSM II: 78) involved the idea of essential attributes (known throughreason) which are principles of intelligibility for all that we encounter they determine whatit is to be a certain kind of (finite) thing, and all determinations of such things must bereferred back to these attributes in order to be understood (cf. Secada 2000). Heideggersees in this an anticipation both of Kant’s claim that being is not a real predicate (SZ: 94/126–27), and so, at least indirectly, of his own view that being is not directly accessible butis nevertheless that on the basis of which all entities are understood. His adaptation of theHusserlian idea of regions of being depends on this as well. It may be seen as showing thatDescartes’ logic of substance, according to which any determinate empirical phenomenondepends for its intelligibility on understanding it in terms of basic a priori concepts thatdefine what it is to be the sort of phenomenon in question, can be divorced from theassumption that such intelligibility requires the concept of substance. This yields thepicture of understanding entities on the basis of an a priori projection of the various‘Grundbegriffe’ that define different regions of being.

26 Only quasi-causal because, for Descartes, God is the only true cause. Events in thephysical world are the ‘occasional’ causes of my perceptions of them, which is to say, uponthe event of God causing state S in the world he also causes corresponding idea I in mymind; the physical state does not cause the idea. This idea of occasionalism was more fullyworked out by, and is more often associated with, Descartes’ follower NicolasMalebranche later in the 17th century.

27 Descartes was, of course, restricted in what he could discuss by the Church, andso was careful not to wade into moral matters where the experience of freedom mighthave been cashed out by him in terms of action rather than just cognition. Heidegger payslittle attention to this fact, taking Descartes to be intending to offer with his cognitivism aquite general account of human existence and the freedom essential to it. He is hardly theonly one to do so, however. Cartesianism is, if nothing else, the legacy of applying apicture of the human being as most fundamentally a theoretical knower as broadly aspossible.

28 Heidegger’s analysis of equipment (Zeug) in SZ provides an analysis of an instancewhere letting the entities be what they are means using them to accomplish the tasks theyare designed to accomplish. Thinking about a tool as a tool depends on this more basicmode of comportment and is arguably unnecessary for it.

29 Cf. SZ §21.30 One immediate result Heidegger notes is that history and the Geisteswissenschaften

generally become unintelligible (EPF: 213–14/162). They are domains that cannot show upas they truly are ontologically in the framework of science defined by the rule of clarityand distinctness derived from mathematical knowing.

31 The statement is in Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy I.49 (AT VIII: 24/CSM I: 209),where it is listed as one of the innumerable but always recognizable eternal truths.

32 I develop this connection between mood and methodology in Shockey (in progress a).33 For more on formal indication, see Shockey (forthcoming).34 See SZ: 9/29 and GP: 22/17.35 Temporality (Zeitlichkeit) is supposed to be the key to answering these questions,

but I will not try to say why here. See Shockey (in progess-b) for an attempt to do so.



36 Kant 1900-, vol. 8: 36; translation in Kant 1996: 17.37 Cf. Haugeland 2000 and Crowell 2007 for developed versions of this. I think both are

too wedded to the challenging of norms as an exercise in rational reflection on the rulesgoverning practices (e.g. chess games, physics, morality), but much of what they say canbe separated from this rationalism.

38 One might worry that, because Heidegger has freed truth from judgment and actionmore generally from morality, the kind of freedom found in philosophy will entail a kindof alienation of oneself from the world and others in it. I touch on this in Shockey (underreview) and will explore it further in future work.

39 Thanks to Thomas Land, Clinton Tolley, and a referee for European Journal ofPhilosophy for comments on previous drafts of this paper, and to a Faculty Research Grantfrom Indiana University-South Bend for support that made writing it possible.

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