Reply to Vallicella Heidegger and Idealism

Published in: International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 2, June 1991, pp. 231-235.

IN A SERIES of articles,[1] culminating in his recent "Reply to Zimmerman” published in the June 1990 issue of this journal, Vallicella has developed a penetrating and illuminating critique of Heidegger’s thought. Although I agree with many of Vallicella’s criticisms, I think Vallicella goes wrong with one of his major positions, a position that Michael Zimmerman[2] seems to accept in his response to Vallicella. The problem concerns the threefold relation of Being, beings, and a certain distinctive being, Dasein. Vallicella writes that there is “no Being without beings; no beings without Being,”[3] The problem that then arises, according to Vallicella, is that

...Heidegger cannot maintain this internal relation of Being and beings in the face of his commitment to the dependence of Being upon Dasein....[for this commitment] entails an incoherent subjectivism: it amounts to the claim that beings other than Dasein are ontologically dependent on Dasein. For if beings are dependent upon Being, and Being is dependent upon Dasein, then beings are dependent upon Dasein....But how can the cosmic totality in all its vastness depend on a miniscule [sic] part thereof?...It is absurd (incoherent) to suppose that the totality of beings depends ontologically on a minuscule part of the totality.[4]

Zimmerman accepts Vallicella’s assumption that this dependence is absurd; Zimmerman finds it unbelievable that “if humans disappeared, the whole cosmos would suddenly disappear too---as if the cosmos were nothing more than a product of human experience!”[5]

But in what sense is it incoherent that all beings other than Dasein are dependent upon Dasein? Surely this is not a contradiction. It is not like saying that a tennis ball is round at a certain time and that it is not round at this very same time, Of course, we can generate a contradiction if we assume realism is true, where realism is the position that physical beings and the whole spatio-temporal framework exist non-dependently upon Dasein. Manifestly, it is a contradiction to assert both that realism is true and that all beings other than Dasein are dependent upon Dasein. But Heidegger, although he occasionally flirted with realism (as Vallicella has shown[6]), seems primarily committed to idealism, the view that there is a spatio-temporal matrix containing physical beings only because such a matrix is projected by Dasein. As Heidegger stated his position in 1935, there is time, and beings that are perduring in time, only insofar as humans exist:

Strictly speaking we cannot say: There was a time when man was not. At all times man was and is and will be, because time produces itself only insofar as man is. There is no time when man was not, not because man was from all eternity and will be for all eternity but because time is not eternity and time fashions itself into a time only as a human, historical being-there.[7]

This idealist position might be problematic or even false, but it is not “incoherent,” or, if it is incoherent, this needs to be shown and not simply asserted by Vallicella. This is the case regardless of whether Vallicella regards the incoherence to be a logical contradiction or some other form of incoherency (which Vallicella would then need to specify). As for the difficulty of “the cosmic totality” depending upon a “minuscule part” thereof, I would remind Vallicella (and Zimmerman) of Schopenhauer’s famous statement that

however immeasurable and massive it [the world] may be, its existence hangs nevertheless on a single thread; and this thread is the actual consciousness in which it exists...the objective, material world in general, exists as such simply and solely in our representation.[8]

Vallicella would respond to this that “I have nothing against idealism, but if one is going to be an idealist, one must be an objective or absolute idealist and hold that it is Absolute Mind to which all is relative.”[9] Let us then distinguish two forms of idealism, which I shall call factical idealism (the world is dependent upon particular, finite minds, e.g., Dasein or the finite human minds posited by Schopenhauer or the for-itself of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty[10]) and absolute idealism (the world is dependent upon one infinite mind, the Absolute Mind of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bradley or Royce). The Absolute Mind is what Heidegger calls “an idealized absolute subject” that belongs to the “residues of Christian theology.”[11] Vallicella’s position is that factical idealism is incoherent but absolute idealism is coherent. But why should we think this? I cannot see that Vallicella has given us any reason to think so, or to think that absolute idealism is preferable to factical idealism.

But the issue here is not that Heidegger is a factical idealist and not an absolute idealist, and therefore that absolute idealism can be dismissed as something Heidegger has “overcome.” In this regard, see Vallicella’s excellent section on ‘How Not to Defend Heidegger.”[12] The issue is whether the position instantiated by Heidegger can be rejected out of hand as “incoherent” and absolute idealism assumed without argument to be the only intelligible form of idealism.

I would also refer to Vallicella’s section on ‘How Not to Defend Heidegger” to defend my association of Heidegger’s factical idealism with the relevantly similar positions of Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. As Vallicella points out, the fact that Heidegger attempted to get beyond the traditional metaphysical distinctions, e.g., realism/idealism, and introduced a new terminology to articulate his own position does not imply that Heidegger succeeded in getting beyond these distinctions. I think Heidegger can be fruitfully discussed by regarding him as belonging to the factical idealist tradition, despite his rejection of Schopenhauer and related philosophers as proponents of a misconception of Dasein as “present-at-hand.”

Although Vallicella provides no argument for the incoherency of Heidegger’s factical idealism in his “Reply to Zimmerman,” he has subsequently offered (in a private communication of June 11, 1990) the following argument for this incoherency:

Suppose I am the last case of Dasein in existence after a nuclear holocaust. Then the existence of the entire cosmos depends on my existence. It follows that my existence depends on my existence (since I am a part of the cosmos). But that entails that depends on is a reflexive relation. But existential dependence is asymmetrical: if x depends on y, then it is not the case that y depends on x. Now every asymmetrical relation is irreflexive. Therefore, depends on is irreflexive. But that contradicts the intermediate conclusion that it is reflexive.

This argument is not without interest, but I believe it fails because of its false assumption that depends on is asymmetrical. The case is rather that one species of dependency is asymmetrical and a second species symmetrical. The asymmetrical species is exemplified by the dependence of animals upon air; animals require air to exist but air does not require animals to exist. The symmetrical species is exemplified by the dependence upon each other of the trilaterality and triangularity of a triangle; a triangle cannot be trilateral unless it is triangular, and cannot be triangular unless it is trilateral. Less abstract examples of symmetrical dependencies also obtain. A mountain is dependent upon a valley, and a valley upon a mountain. Thus, since dependency can be symmetrical, it can be reflexive; something can depend on itself. Indeed, it seems trivially obvious that every case of Dasein depends on itself, for no Dasein can exist unless that very Dasein exists. So the argument Vallicella offers to support his claim that Heidegger’s factical idealism is incoherent does not appear to succeed.

Although Vallicella believes factical idealism is incoherent, he does not mention the serious problems with absolute idealism. One problem is this. If everything is projected or posited by and is relative to the infinite consciousness (the Absolute Mind), then each human mind is posited by this infinite consciousness. But how can a particular human mind really be a consciousness if it is nothing but a posit in the Absolute Mind? In other words, how can a representation existing in the Absolute Mind itself be a representer? This is somewhat similar to the difficulty in the supposition that a fictional character phantasized by or dreamt by some human is actually itself a conscious being. Surely “I am phantasizing that there is a person Ed who is conscious of things” not only does not entail but is inconsistent with “Ed is a real mind that is actually conscious of things.” The defender of absolute idealism might respond that human minds are parts of the infinite mind, not posits of or representations of this mind. But this is untenable, for the infinite mind is not just the sum of all human minds; there are five billion human minds and five billion does not equal infinity. If it is said that the infinite mind includes human minds as parts, plus an additional part that is infinitely complex, I would respond that this supposition is indistinguishable from the claim that there is an infinite mind and, in distinction from this mind, many finite minds that are not posited by the infinite mind; and this latter claim is inconsistent with the central thesis of absolute idealism --- that everything that exists is posited by the one infinite mind.

Vallicella has responded to this (in his communication of June 11, 1990) that all that absolute idealism “requites is that every non-mind be posited by the absolute mind.” But this requirement upon absolute idealism is too weak since it fails to provide a demarcation between classical theism and absolute idealism. According to classical theists (Augustine, Aquinas, and such contemporaries as Plantinga and Swinburne) every physical thing is continuously created by the infinite mind (God), but the free choices and representations of finite minds are not created by the infinite mind. Of course, God creates souls, the finite mental substances of which free choices and mental representations are accidents, but these choices and representations are not created, posited or performed by God but by the finite mental substances themselves. For the absolulte idealist, on the other hand, all mental representations are representations in, or posits of, the Absolute Mind. As Fichte emphasizes, there is a distinction between empirical selves and the absolute Ich, but each empirical self and each representation experienced by an empirical self is itself a posit of the absolute Ich. This is allegedly what we discover when we perform an act of “intellectual intuition.”[13] Thus, I do not think Vallicella has shown absolute idealism, properly understood, has escaped the difficulties suggested above. Redefining absolute idealism so that Aquinas and Plantinga by implication become absolute idealists is not a helpful move; if Vallicella’s real objection to Heidegger is that he is not a classical theist, then his critique should be restated.

But I do not want to leave the impression that these brief remarks suffice to ‘refute’ absolute idealism or to “demonstrate” the coherency of factical idealism. Rather, I wish merely to point out that Vallicella has not made his case that Heidegger’s factical idealism is incoherent and that absolute idealism is the only viable choice if we are to reject realism.[14]

[1] See William F. Vallicella, “The Problem of Being in the Early Heidegger,” The Thomist 45 (1981), 388-406; “Kant and Heidegger and the Problem of the Thing in Itself,” International Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1983), 35-43; “Heidegger’s Reduction of Being to Truth,” The New Scholasticism 59 (1985), 156-76; “Reply to Zimmerman: Heidegger and the Problem of Being,” International Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1990), 245-54; “Phenomenon and Phenomenological Reduction in Heidegge”" in Phenomena: The Ancients and the Moderns. ed. Veda Cobbs-Stevens and Harold Reiche (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, forthcoming).

[2] See Michael E. Zimmerman, “On Vallicella’s Critique of Heidegger,” International Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1990), 75-99.

[3] Vallicella, “Reply to Zimmerman,” p. 246

[4] Ibid., pp. 246-7, 250.

[5] Zimmerman, “On Vallicella’s Critique of Heidegger,” p. 81.

[6] See Vallicella, “The Problem of Being in the Early Heidegger,” p. 403 and “Heidegger’s Reduction of Being to Truth,” pp. 166-68.

[7] Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 71.

[8] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, trans. E. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), pp. 3-4.

[9] Vallicella, “Reply to Zimmerman,” p. 250.

[10] For Schopenhauer and Sartre, there is something timeless and spaceless that is non-dependent upon human consciousness. For Schopenhauer, it is the Will and for Sartre, it is being-in-itself in respect of its features of being, being what it is and being for itself. But for Schopenhauer and Sartre, there is no spatio-temporal whole without human consciousness.

[11] Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 272.

[12] Vallicella, “Reply to Zimmerman,” pp. 245-46.

[13] For example, see sections 4 and 5 of Fichte’s “Second Introduction to the Science of Knowledge” in Science of Knowledge, with First and Second Introductions, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), pp. 34-42. On the distinction between the absolute self and empirical selves, see pages 60-61 and 71-74.

[14] Although I believe factical idealism to be a coherent position. I believe realism to be more plausible than factical Idealism. I have provided some phenomenological arguments for realism, and against factical idealism, in The Felt Meanings of the World: A Metaphysics of Feeling (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue Univ. Press, 1986), chapter 6. Accordingly, I am inclined to the view that realism is both coherent and true, that factical idealism is coherent but false, and that absolute idealism is both false and incoherent.