Beyond epistemology

Michael Inwood’s Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction is superb. It is, as the title indicates, very short. It is, however, thorough; and it is, unlike its subject, completely lucid. Inwood has the English knack of making Heidegger’s most abstruse concepts seem perfectly down-to-earth.

Near the beginning of the book, he notes Heidegger’s suspicious about epistemology as the leading concern of modern philosophy. Knowledge, Heidegger observes, involves a relation of knowing between a knower and an object. As Inwood says, Heidegger has doubts about the way epistemology deals with each of these three elements.

What, for starters, is the knower? “Is it a pure subject wholly absorbed in the disinterested, theoretical knowledge of its subject-matter, or is it an interested human being, situated in a particular place and a particular time?” For epistemology, it is the former. But one of Heidegger’s insights (obvious enough in itself) is that this kind of subject doesn’t really exist, since all human existence is “being-in-the-world,” existence in particular times and places in such a way that the human is co-determined by the world in which he exists.

And Heidegger also wants to know why “knowing” is privileged above other relations that we have with the world: As Inwood says, “Knowing is only one relation among many that we may take up to the things of the world; it is not the first relation we adopt towards them, it is taken up fairly late in one’s career, and then only sporadically; nor is it the most obvious attitude to take towards, say, one’s spouse or the key to one’s own front door.” Epistemology tends “to speak as if knowing were a uniform thing, as if electrons were known in the same way as historical events. Or if we notice that this is not so we are tempted, like Descartes, to propose an ideal form of knowledge which will guarantee unerring results about, say, the dimensions and movements of material particles. But this will not do for, say, historical events, which are thereby excluded from the realm of knowable objects.”

The objects known are also not just there for the knowing. The knower always comes to the object with some prior classification, and modern knowers often operate with scientific classifications: “How do we come to divide up the world of entities in this way? The world does not naturally present itself to us carved up in readiness for the sciences. When two lovers walk hand in hand across a meadow under a starry sky, they do not see themselves and their surroundings as objects separated out for the geologist, the botanist, the meteorologist, even if they are themselves, say, geologists in their professional lives.”

For epistemology, objects are just objects of knowledge, but that is not the way we actually encounter objects. Objects come to us in a context, with prior uses and assumed relations with us (Inwood, following Heidegger, often speaks of hammers to illustrate). Epistemology sees things as simple “present at hand,” rather thanm, as we really encounter them “ready-to-hand,” ready for a particular use: “It is, for example, easier to see a hammer as vorhanden, as a thing with certain properties or a bearer of predicates, if one ignores the engrossed carpenter hammering in a nail.”

What we encounter and know is never an object stripped of its various associations and uses: “What I see is not just a table, but the table, the table in this room. The table is for writing on, or for eating at. I see it as for something. I do not first see it as an extended object and then only later as for something. I hardly take note of the geometrical dimensions of the table or its spatial location with respect to the points of the compass.” It takes an effort of abstraction to think of tables in general, and then to objects in general. Heidegger doesn’t reject this abstraction, but he wants to analyze the human encounter with the world as it takes place in “average everydayness” rather than in the rarefied conceptions of philosophers. The uses and purposes of objects, their relation to humans as “tools” or “equipment” is not a secondary overlay on the thing itself: “when I interpret something as a hammer I do not first see the entity as simply present at hand, as a length of wood with a piece of iron attached to it, and then interpret this as a hammer. I implicitly understand it as zuhanden , as equipment, from the start.”

For these and other reasons, Heidegger wanted to move philosophy beyond its epistemological obsessions into the realm of ontology.