Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

Early in the introduction to Mind and World John McDowell takes an almost apologetic tone as he leads the reader away from the overriding focus of empiricist philosophy since the birth of the Modern period, that of properly conceiving and analyzing human knowledge of the world, to what McDowell argues is the more primordial relation between homo sapiens and their environment, that of thought. While affirming the insight that problems of knowing are rooted in failures to understand adequately what is involved in thinking, we the authors of this essay wish to join the early Heidegger in taking a further step back beyond McDowell’s destination to what we contend is the further fundament of all human relations, that of existing.

For Wittgenstein and Heidegger linguistic meaning is grounding in the meanings established in praxis. Conceiving language primarily as a mode of action, these philosophers acknowledge that people can do certain things with language that they cannot do as easily if at all via other sorts of activity, but indicate that linguistic actions mean what they do only because they play their particular roles in the spatiotemporal structures of social practices. In the order of meaning, then, for the Founders praxis meaning is prior to linguisitc meaning.

For the Heidegger of Being and Time praxis contributes at least as much as language to the constitution of meaning. Dasein’s engagement with the equipment he or she finds ready to hand always already comprises an interpretation both of that equipment and of Dasein’s own Being. That is, in their everyday activity human beings typically find themselves dealing with an array of entities (clothes, vehicles, pens, tools) in an unreflective, “transparent” way to carry out a variety of tasks, and in so doing they manifest understandings both of what those entities are and of who they are. For example, I get into my car and run, without need for thought, through all the motions that comprise driving until I reach my destination and deliver my pizza or pick up my date, thereby living out an understanding of what cars, roads, and stop lights mean, as well as what it means to be a pizza delivery guy or a boyfriend. The further articulations of such interpretations via what Heidegger terms “discourse” build upon, refine, or otherwise intertwine with those contained in Dasein’s praxis, but do not found that activity or its meaning. In talking about my car, this pizza, my date, and the terrible traffic, I expand upon the interpretations already active in my praxis, but the meanings embedded in those interpretations do not depend on my talk for their instantiation. Human activity alone is enough to generate such meaning. Furthermore, Heidegger states that the content of any discourse is not something that can be gathered from language, but is instead that which makes anything like language ontologically possible (SZ 162). That is not to say that praxis in turn founds language for the early Heidegger, but rather simply that praxis is its own source of meaning.

Cristina Lafont’s Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure is quite a book. Against both those (such as Gethmann) (p. 12) who see Being and Time as merely an adjustment from the philosophy of consciousness (p. 2, note 3)(particularly, of course, as propogated by Husserl) and those (such as Okrent in Heidegger’s Pragmatism, Dreyfus in Being-in-the-World, Lorenz and Mittelstrass in “Die Hintergehbarkeit der Sprache,” and, presumably, Schatzki and perhaps Rorty and those Pittsburgh Hegelians who take note of Heidegger) who interpret the early Heidegger as some sort of pragmatist (p. 12), Lafont marshalls an impressive range of quotations from a number of sources, particularly Heidegger’s lectures from the 1920s but also from several of his works after his Kehre, to argue that language, rather than Dasein or praxis, was always the “house of Being” for Heidegger, though at times in his early writings he lost sight of this commitment.

Ultimately Lafont will wish to indict Heidegger for the unfortunate reification of language that she believes his resulting “linguistic idealism” commits him to, and it is unclear to me what position Lafont herself would ultimately prefer. Her focus is largely exegetical, and so from the fact that she thinks that the early Heidegger committed himself to linguistic idealism in lieu of some sort of practice theory it does not follow that Lafont herself would reject the latter view. That matter remains unclear. In any case, in line with things I have said on this blog before, whether or not Lafont is correct about the early Heidegger’s views is of less interest to me than how she articulates the case for language as the source of human meaning.

She begins by noting that in Being and Time Heidegger attempts to overcome the classic subject-object opposition while still remaining, perhaps against his own ultimate inclinations, within that framework. He does this by reconceiving the subject as Dasein, objects as equipment, and adding the world to this arrangement: hence subject/object gives way to Dasein/world/equipment. Lafont notes that this attempt to escape the transcendentalist enterprise, via the substitution of understanding for perception, hinges on the efficacy of the ontological difference between the ontic (things, including Dasein) and the ontological (Dasein alone). But Lafont argues that even in the context of Being and Time it becomes repeatedly clear, no matter how much Heidegger tries to contend otherwise, that language, too, is like Dasein in being both ontic and ontological. In other words, Lafont contends that even the early Heidegger is committed to the claim that the understandings that comprise the world into which each Dasein finds him or herself always already thrown are at root linguistic.

Even in the pre-thematic dealings with equipment characteristic of life in the Heideggerian workshop, linguistic signs take precendence. Chastizing Heidegger a bit in passing for attempting to treat language as a mere tool, in keeping with the philosophy of consciousness he is trying to overcome (but also in keeping with the more pragmatic approaches derived from Heidegger to which Lafont pays little attention), Lafont argues that the fact that “the being of equipment…always [belongs (to)] a totality of equipment” is “not constituted by equipment itself” (p. 32). Instead, Lafont urges, Heidegger’s immediately following analysis shows, almost against his will, how this referential totality is disclosed by the sign, which is “an item of equipment which explicitly raises a totality of equipment into our circumspection so that together with it the worldly totality of equipment announces itself” (p. 34, quoting BT, p. 110).

There’s much going on here that will take a while to unpack. I think that Lafont is arguing that early Heidegger held, though he did not fully appreciate the implications of this conviction until later, that language discloses to Dasein even those world-ly relations at play in wordless, ready-to-hand, transparent coping. We are close here to the repeated theme, taken up by Charles Taylor and Robert Brandom among many others, of language’s power to articulate, or make explicit, that which is somehow already there, implicitly (inarticulately), in praxis. Lafont’s Heidegger goes a large step further, however, to allege that what language really does is to disclose possibilities of being that would, absent language, never appear at all. This is a much stronger claim, arguably parallel to, though quite different from, Sellars’s critique of the Myth of the Given. Furthermore, both of these critiques seem to me to be oriented toward so-called philosophies of consciousness, and thus not necessarily to touch on praxis theories. It might help to sketch these three possibilities:

1. Philosophies of Constitutive Consciousness — Cartesianism, Husserlian Phenomenology, and early analytic empiricisms;

2. Philosophies of Constitutive Language — Sellars and Lafont’s Heidegger; and

3. Philosophies of Constitutive Praxis — Taylor, Dreyfus, Schatzki, and Heidegger and Wittgenstein as interpreted by each of them.

The challenges for approaches of type 3 are (a) showing how they avoid 2’s critique of 1 (b)successfully overcoming 1 themselves, and (c) clarifying the relationship between praxis and language. For this article we’ve set (c) as our main task. Accomplishing (a) and (b) here as well might make the project too big, but I think it could be done in principle.

One puzzling aspect of the Sellarsian account of meaning I presented in my last post concerns the sentience of non-human animals and human infants. While the danger of anthropomorphizing the former and “adultizing” the latter should not be ignored, I propose that an accurate account of the lives of a great many animals and infants would require an inferential vocabulary that allowed for something like a self-understanding in a roughly Heideggerian sense. As the early Heidegger said (again, roughly) shortly before he made the famous turn toward becoming the late Heidegger, humans have worlds, rocks have no worlds, animals are world poor.

To clarify, “world” and “self-understanding” refer to the same fundamental arrangement I glossed in an earlier post while presenting Dasein engaged with equipment. Coping transparently with equipmental totalities entails, among other things, having ends, tasks, and projects (Schatzki’s terms in The Site of the Social), and this typically unexplicated teleology forms much of the structure of the Dasein/world whole. To have ends and a sense for how to pursue them is to have an understanding at once of oneself and one’s world.

The philosophies of the Pittsburgh Hegelians and praxis philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, and Theodore Schatzki approach one another yet remain at a remove in significant part because the latter orient themselves toward human ends whereas the former are more concerned with epistemology, or human knowledge. Even the example I gave in my last post of a chain of inferences flowing from “That apple is red” to “I should take that apple to my sister” was couched more in praxis-terms than in Pittsburghese.

In spite of this divide, the parallels are powerful. In claiming that a Sellarsian should employ an inferential vocabulary in order to make sense of the behavior of infants and some non-human animals (that is, that he should speak of them as if they were making inferences themselves), I am saying that those creatures are world poor — that they have ends, even if they are either incapable or scarcely capable of articulating them. I am close here to advocating a “constitution” (in Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne’s sense in their The Grammar of Meaning), or perhaps something a bit more like a treaty, that would license the easy translation of Sellarsian language into a Heideggerian idiom and vice versa. Indeed, I am entirely in favor of such an agreement. This treaty is not yet ready to be signed, however.

Even if one made the Pittsburghers more practical, and oriented their inferences (and inference attributions) more toward human ends and away from human knowledge absent such ends, it’s not clear that inferences really match up with, say, signifying chains or practical intelligibility (both adaptations of Heideggerian concepts by Schatzki in his Social Practices). For one thing, as presented by Brandom, inferences move from the inside-out, so to speak. One begins with a claim and moves from there to conclusions. By contrast, a signifying chain seems to move instead outside-in, from ends to means, as when my desire to be famous signifies my appearing on American Idol, which signifies going to local open mike nights, which signifies practicing, which signifies my going into the basement right now to warm up my voice. I believe that these accounts could be brought into greater confluence, but as yet they do not coincide. For now, however, I am going to continue to pair Sellarsian inference and Heideggerian signification to see in practice how well these perspectives mesh.

Back, then, to infants and non-humans, e.g. chimpanzees and bonobos.  Are they merely sentient, or do they exhibit signs of sapience even in the absence of language? Let’s understand sapience here as that which allows me to see something as something — as that which leads me, on the rare occasions that I draw, to draw what I know is there rather than what I actually see, literally to draw my inferences. Don’t infants and bonobos alike act as if they see as? Doesn’t understanding them require attributing inferences and ends to them, albeit typically of a simpler sort than those we attribute to other human adults? Indeed, a careful reading of Sellars indicates that he agrees that infants at least must develop sapience in something like stages, which suggests that sentience is itself a proto-sapience. Holding such a view without giving into a full-blown version of the Myth of the Given, however, is no easy task.

Using the old Macquarrie and Robinson translation of Being and Time one finds on p. H. 68 Heidegger’s referencing of the ancient Greek term for things (pragmata) which he glosses thus: “…that is to say, that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings,” which dealings he further denotes as the ancient Greek praxis. So “praxis” refers to concernful dealings with “pragmata,” or things as they figure in those dealings — which is not as they appear to distinterested contemplation.

Heidegger then designates these pragmata as “equipment,” and notes that equipment is always part of a totality, is something one uses in order to do something else by means of further equipment. The relationship of equipment to other equipment is that of Verweisung, translated here as “reference.” Heidegger states that we encounter a totality of equipment, an arrangement, first, and only within the context of such arrangements do we use and become aware of particular bits of equipment. For example, I encounter the road and stop lights and my car and other cars all together as an arrangement, and only within this context do I deal with my steering wheel and the gas pedal.

 Heidegger goes on to stress that our original engagement with such equipment is ready-to-hand and hence non-thematic. That is, equipment such as a hammer appears to us first not as a distinct thing, an object, set over against us as subjects and distinct from other objects, but instead fits in seemlessly as that which is transparently referenced by our activity in the workshop. When we need to hammer, we reach for the hammer. When our coping in this manner works smoothly, we need not even be aware of the hammer in the sense of awareness priviledged by most Western philosophy.

This account reverses the order of meaning presumed by most philosophers since Descartes and even Plato. The more traditional account begins with the individual mind’s representations of that which it encounters, from the sum of which are eventually somehow built up the subject’s valuings of and involvements in the world. In this always already thematized world it is easy to discern where language would fit. Language provides extensive resources for representing entities to subjects (a point not contradicted by those such as Brandom who conceive of language primarily as means of making inferences rather than representations), and thematic thought can easily be understood as language-spoken-to-oneself.

My question here is whether the early Heidegger’s alternative account of being human effectively elides this link with language. As I stated in my last post, clearly Heidegger’s account in Being and Time does give a prominent place to language. So, what I’m asking is not whether early Heidegger actually showed how language is unnecessary for a meaningful existence, but whether he provided resources for making such a case. 

Assuming for the sake of argument that his account of transparent coping with equipmental totalities is basically correct, we can ask whether language is necessary for such experience, and if so, whether such a languageless experience is in fact meaningful. For now, simply to stake a claim without yet supporting it, I will posit that language, in any appropriate sense of the term, is not necessary for transparent coping with equipmental totalities, either proximally (i.e. actually employed in the experience) or foundationally (i.e. providing a prior structure for the understanding at work in such endeavors), and that the hammer and the nails, the steering wheel and the road, are indeed all meaningful to the Dasein engaged with them. And this is primal praxis.