In Which I Complain About Things I Like

Lately I've been looking for articles that try to tie in Heidegger and what came after him with current "analytic pragmatist" philosophy. This strikes me as a potentially very fruitful area of research, but I keep being frustrated by how little fleshing-out a lot of claims are given.

"What Does The (Young) Heidegger Mean By The Seinsfrage?" is a nice example: Despite what the title might lead one to expect, most of the article is devoted to discussing Marburg neo-Kantianism (especialyl Cassirer and Cohen) and relating their concerns to those of Rorty and Brandom. (It's enlightening to see how easily one can be lead to Rortyan views from an explicitly scientistic starting-point. In an attempt to revise philosophy to be "in tune" with modern science, Cohen is said to have rejected the correspondence view of truth, limited the world's contribution to our knowledge to a "merely causal" one, adopted an explicitly social notion of "reason" as the various ways in which we justify and revise our beliefs, severely limited all claims to a priority (leaving only a vague imperative to understand nature as law-governed as genuinely a priori), delimited "reality" to just whatever our best physical theories talked about, and denied any epistemic role whatsoever to experience. And he billed all of this as "Kantian"!) Sellars is mentioned once or twice in the paper; Davidson a little more often. None of these four analytic-type figures is quoted in the paper; they don't even make it into the bibliography. They are all mentioned in the article abstract, though!

The author likes to throw in lines like this: "With this, the neo-Kantians have basically adopted the thoroughly coherentist conception of experience currently advocated by Sellars, Davidson, Rorty, and Brandom." At no point in the paper are the various views on "experience" held by these philosophers discussed; they are merely gestured at, and associated with the figures Heidegger is about to be introduced as overcoming. Also, by the point this paper was written, Sellars hadn't advocated any sort of view for a good decade. He’d been dead since '89.

I actually really like this article; I am inclined to agree with most of the unsupported claims the author throws out, and often find them insightful. For instance, take this footnote: "Hegel, of course goes a step further than Fichte, claiming to demonstrate philosophically that this Anstoss does not just factically occur, but rather for the sake of initiating Reason’ s process. Consequently, Fichte, not Hegel, is the more appropriate precedent for neo-Kantianism, and indeed for Brandom’ s social pragmatism." I find this a very suggestive remark: Both Brandom and Fichte want (in some sense) to found their systems on practical reason; both (in some sense) ground objective purport in the imperative that others should agree with a judgement; Brandom distinguishes perceptual judgements from others by their being casually, but not epistemically, distinctive (they are judgements which arise as the result of reliable differential responsive dispositions); Fichte's account of the genesis of consciousness is that it is "ocassioned" by a "shock" (Anstoss) which stimulates the Ego to posit both the Ego and the Non-Ego (but the "shock" is neither Ego nor Non-Ego; it is outside of cognition generally, a "noumenon in the negative sense" which Fichte uses to justify his claim to being a "realist"). In all of these, Brandom is closer to Fichte than to Hegel -- Hegel doesn't want to give primacy to either thinking or doing, objectivity or intersubjectivity, and his understanding of the world's "causal" role in our epistemic lives is one that lets it contribute genuinely conceptual matters for us to take up.

For Hegel on Fichte's "shock", see the second addition to ss60 in the Encyclopedia Logic. This is the last section before Hegel moves on to "The Third Position of Thought with Respect to Objectivity: Immediate Knowing", wherein Jacobi is taken to task in a way that is strikingly reminscent of "Mind and World" -- Jacobi manages to both affirm the Mythical Given and spin frictionlessly in the void. On Jacobi's account, our only true knowledge is of what is immediately given without mediation; all mediation is a form of ungrounded speculation. This is a form of the Myth of the Given, since our knowledge of particulars is supposed to be independent of all other sorts of knowledge (which we just don't have, on Jacobi's account; he takes Hume to have refuted all claims to knowledge of anything beyond bare sense-data). To compensate for denying that we can have knowledge of anything beyond these barren particularities, Jacobi attributes tremendous import to Faith, which includes both everyday beliefs which are unable to be grounded in our knowledge of particulars (such as whatever Hume believed when he stopped philosophizing) and more particularly religious doctrines, all of which are "immediately" held to -- they are not held for any reasons; reason cannot speak to matters of Faith. It is this Faith that Jacobi holds to actually be important; what we can know is nothing for us, is of no use in living. Hence in Jacobi Hume becomes a Fideist, and the Myth of the Given is tied to a "frinctionless coherentism" among our beliefs. (It's a good section. Hegel even argues against Jacobi by reminding us of the role of education in what is "immediate", as McDowell does, and as Sellars did in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind". And unlike McDowell & Sellars, Hegel goes on to use his line of argument to object to Fideism in religion, which is something I'm always in the market for.)

But in the article, the remark is just hanging there. Not even a footnote to other work which discusses it, not even a “(forthcoming)” or “(manuscript)". The literature is seriously gappy, and name-dropping is a real problem.

The article doesn’t actually get around to giving much of an answer to “What does the (young) Heidegger mean by the Seinsfrage”; the neo-Kantians eat up most of the space, and then the Heidegger stuff is mostly just about his criticisms of them. Certainly I don’t have a better grip on what “the question of Being” is supposed to be than I did before reading the article. But I like the article. It’s fun. But it’s becoming clear that some of the stuff I’d like to read still needs to be written.