[Felix Hoenikker]

Heidegger for Beginners
3:4 | 2000 Simon Critchley

'It's not always easy being Heideggerian'

Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? blankblankblankblank

I have two questions in this paper. Where should one begin with Heidegger? And why should one begin philosophizing with Heidegger rather than elsewhere? I will turn to the second of these questions in detail presently, but let me begin by giving the most formal of indications as to how I answer the first question.1
The beginning of Heidegger's philosophy is phenomenological. That is, Heidegger's thought begins as a radicalization of Husserlian phenomenological method. To make good on this claim, I give a reading of the Preliminary Part of Heidegger's important 1925 lecture course, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, a text that I see as the buried phenomenological preface to Sein und Zeit.2 Rejoining Heidegger's magnum opus to its phenomenological preface, permits one, in my view, to clarify the philosophical presuppositions that are required in order for Sein und Zeit to begin. That is, in order for the question of the meaning or truth of being to be raised as a matter of compelling philosophical interest, and not as some magical and numinous vapour.
My basic premise, to echo one of Heidegger's reported remarks from the 1962 Protokoll to the seminar on Zeit und Sein, is that 'In der Tat, wäre ohne die phänomenologische Grundhaltung die Seinsfrage nicht möglich gewesen' ('Actually, without the basic phenomenological attitude, the question of being would not have been possible').3 If this is true, then it means that the interpretation of the Prolegomena assumes great importance, for it is there that Heidegger's radicalization of phenomenology is systematically presented as part of a critical confrontation with Husserl and not gnomically intimated as the novice to Sein und Zeit often feels in reading the crucial methodological Paragraph 7 for the first time.
The reading of Husserl is dominated by a double gesture which permits Heidegger both to inherit a certain understanding of Husserl, whilst at the same time committing an act of critical parricide against him, what von Herrmann sees as the ambiguity of speaking against Husserl in Husserlian language.4 Let me quickly sketch the first moment of this double gesture. For Heidegger, there are three essential discoveries of Husserlian phenomenology: intentionality, categorial intuition and the original sense of the a priori. These discoveries are linked together in what we might call a 'nesting effect', where intentionality finds what Heidegger calls its 'concretion' in categorial intuition, whose concretion is the a priori, which provides, in turn, the basis for a new definition of the preliminary concept (Vor-Begriff) of phenomenology itself, a definition that is only accidentally modified in Paragraph 7 of Sein und Zeit. I believe that this definition of phenomenology remains at least formally determinative for the rest of Heidegger's philosophical itinerary
To put this into a schema: intentionality + categorial intuition + the apriori = the preliminary concept of phenomenology. It should be noted that the condition of possibility for Heidegger's concept of phenomenology is a certain understanding of the intentionality thesis. That is, for Heidegger - like Husserl - intentionality is the essential structure of mental experience, insofar as it has the character of 'directing itself towards' (Sich-richten-auf) objects, things or matters. However - unlike Husserl - the fundamental quality of intentionality is not located in the contemplative immanence of consciousness, but is rather Da, it is had there, outside, alongside things and not divorced from them in some mental capsule full of representations.(SuZ 62) Heidegger's handling of the intentionality thesis therefore permits him to make the passage from Bewußtsein to Dasein, from theoretical consciousness to practical being-there, in a reading of Husserl which, beneath the apparent generosity, ultimately works against the latter's intentions. That is, under the surface of the exposition in the Prolegomena, Heidegger has already insinuated an anti-Husserlian, pre-theoretical model of intentionality, what one might call a phronetic intentionality.5 However, although intentionality is the essential structure of mental experience, it is not the original or a priori structure, which is given in the analysis of categorial intuition. That is, the doctrine of categorial intuition provides Heidegger with a method that allows the philosopher to pick out the a priori features of intentional experience, what Kant in the transcendental analytic saw as the deduction of the categories. In Sein und Zeit, however, insofar as they are predicated of a practically embedded being defined by a 'who' rather than decontextualised consciousness defined by a 'what', these a priori features of intentionality are not called categories but 'existentials'.(SuZ 44-45) The phenomenologist is meant to describe these 'existentials'. This is why Heidegger can, with complete consistency, define phenomenology in the Prolegomena as the 'analytic description of intentionality in its apriori'.(PGZ 108/HCT 79)
As we all know, Heidegger's thinking is preoccupied - and perhaps a little too preoccupied, but that is another story for a separate occasion - with the Seinsfrage, the question of being. Now, for Heidegger, phenomenology opens a space where the question of being can be raised, releasing being from the subjectivistic determination to which it had been submitted in philosophical modernity, most obviously in Descartes, but more closely in the Neo-Kantianism of Heidegger's peers and superiors in Marburg. Heidegger's leading, but hardly self-evident, philosophical claim is that being is an aspect of phenomenological seeing, in some sense a matter for phenomenological intuition.6 We might say that being is the 'seeing' of what is seen, or the 'appearing' of what appears, although this should not be misunderstood as announcing some sort of metaphysical dualism (Heidegger's philosophical instincts are always holistic). Thus, for Heidegger, against the modern philosophical self-understanding, phenomenology grants to being a new sense of non- or, better, trans-subjective givenness. As Klaus Held insightfully remarks, Husserl's discovery for Heidegger is 'die Vorgegebenheit einer transsubjectiven Offenbarkeitsdimension' ('the pre-givenness of a trans-subjective dimension of manifestation').7
As the work of Jacques Taminiaux has shown in detail, the pregivenness of this trans-subjective dimension of manifestation is the work of categorial intuition.8 When Heidegger famously remarks at the end of Paragraph 7 of Sein und Zeit, that the latter book only became possible on the ground or basis (auf dem Boden) laid down by Husserl, then this Boden, this ground or basis, alludes to categorial intuition.(SuZ 38) The central position that Heidegger gives to categorial intuition in the interpretation of Husserl and to Heidegger's self-understanding as a phenomenologist remains unaltered from Sein und Zeit to the final seminar in Zähringen in 1973. In my view, Heidegger's contribution to philosophy is his radicalization of the basic idea of phenomenology, a radicalization that paradoxically shows the extent of his debt to Husserl, and, by extension, the radicality of Husserlian phenomenology. As Heidegger points out in 1963, with an explicit look back over his shoulder to the very same lines from Paragraph 7 of Sein und Zeit that were cited above, phenomenology must not be understood as a movement or school, but as the possibility of thinking as such. That is, phenomenology is the possibility of corresponding to the claim of that which is to be thought ('...dem Anspruch des zu denkenden zu entsprechen').9 For the early Heidegger, what is to be thought is the meaning of being, and for the later Heidegger, the truth of being.
However (putting the Heideggerese to one side), in order to conceive of the task of thinking as a correspondence between thought and that which is to be thought, what has to be presupposed is the idea of phenomenological correlation that Heidegger finds in Husserl's intentionality thesis and pursues in his analysis of categorial intuition. The difference with Husserl is that the thought of phenomenological correlation is deepened by the claim, ultimately inherited from Dilthey, into the primacy of factical life that requires a corresponding mode of practical or hermeneutic insight.10 But it is this idea of a phenomenological correlation irreducible to either subjectivism or objectivism that is the basis, in my view, for the early claim that Dasein and World must be viewed as a unitary phenomenon, and for the later claim that das Ereignis, the appropriative event, is to be understood as the belonging together of the human being and being (die Zusammengehörigkeit vonMensch und Sein). The thought of phenomenological correlation thus bridges 'Heidegger 1' and 'Heidegger 2' and problematizes the whole idea of the Kehre.11 The unity of Heidegger's work is phenomenological.
However, my claim that the beginning of Heidegger's thought is phenomenological opens itself to the objection, raised by John Sallis and Robert Bernasconi at the Utah Heidegger conference, that such an approach plays down the destructive or deconstructive side to Heidegger's project.12 That is, as Heidegger puts it at the end of Paragraph 6 of Sein und Zeit, 'The question of being does not achieve its true concreteness until we have carried through the destruction of the history of ontology'.(SuZ 26) On this understanding, the beginning of Heidegger's philosophy is found in his repetition or retrieval (Wiederholung) of the question of being as it was first articulated by the Greeks in the ontology of Plato and Aristotle. This is why the text of Sein und Zeit begins on the untitled first page with a quotation from Plato's Sophist.
This is an important objection, but let me clarify what I am trying to do in the project of which this paper is a part. I am seeking to analyze and, if possible, justify, the formal-methodological concept of phenomenology at work in Heidegger. Now, such an approach undoubtedly needs to be de-formalized, to use Heidegger's word (entformalisiert - SuZ 35), through both the specific phenomenological analyses of Sein und Zeit and the destruction of the ontological tradition, if the concreteness of which Heidegger speaks above is to be achieved. Therefore the phenomenological approach I am recommending has to be complemented by a destructive or deconstructive approach in terms of Heidegger's engagement with the philosophical tradition. For example, Heidegger's strategy with regard to the three discoveries of phenomenology in the Prolegomena is to locate the point where each of these concepts crosses the path of the ancient ontology of Plato and Aristotle. Ultimately, the trans-subjective givenness of being expressed by the doctrine of categorial intuition allows Heidegger to reactivate the Greek determination of being as presencing (Anwesenheit, ousia - SuZ 26), and hence to reawaken link between being and time. This is what Taminiaux calls, in a nice formulation, 'the Aristotelianization of Husserl'.13 The de-formalization of the phenomenological approach is achieved, for Heidegger, by way of a repetition of the Greek beginning of philosophy, what he calls in the Prolegomena, the 'assumption of the tradition as a genuine repetition'.(PGZ 187/HCT 138) However, my ambition is simply to analyze the formal-methodological tools that permit this deformalizing assumption of tradition. By itself - I would insist - tradition can and should assume no authority in philosophical matters.
In this highly abridged version, this is all I want to say in response to my first question as to where one should begin with Heidegger. I now want to turn, more slowly and in greater detail, to my second question as to why one should begin philosophizing with Heidegger rather than elsewhere. This will take us in a rather different direction.

Transforming the Natural Attitude
As I said above, Heidegger's reading of Husserl is governed by a double gesture. For the remainder of this paper, I would like to turn to the other side of this double gesture, Heidegger's critique of Husserl's later phenomenology, the tenor of which also remains unchanged in his later work. The general claim here is that if Husserl's notion of categorial intuition is the Boden upon which the question of the meaning of being can be raised as a substantive philosophical issue, then after the publication of the Logical Investigations in 1900, Husserl failed to pursue the Seinsfrage with sufficient radicality. The publication of the first volume of Husserl's Ideas in 1913 constitutes, for Heidegger, a philosophical decision to sacrifice radicality for traditionality.
This pairing of terms in Heidegger's work of this period should be noted, where what is continually valorized in philosophy (and in much else, it would appear) is an absolute radicality whose antonym is tradition. Heidegger's work - and this is hardly a neutral matter, particularly when one thinks of the somewhat overdetermined philosophical and political thematics governing the language of the decision (Entscheidung) in the Germany of the 1920's - is motivated by a passion for absolute philosophical radicality. As is common in Heidegger, tradition is always understood in terms of the Cartesian legacy of the modern determination of being as subjectivity. Husserl's traditionality is therefore synonymous with his alleged Cartesianism, where the phenomenological field in Ideas I is constituted as a realm of pure consciousness, and where the latter is determined as what is called 'absolute being', whose investigation is the subject matter of a rigorous science: transcendental phenomenology.
Heidegger takes a rather malicious delight in referring extensively to Paragraphs 46-50 of Ideas I, where consciousness is determined as indubitable, pure, absolute and immanent being in opposition to the dubitability, relativity and contingency of reality, and where Husserl famously claims that consciousness would be modified (indeed!) by the nullification of the world, but not affected in its own existence.14 But the core of Heidegger's critique of the later Husserl is that in determining the phenomenological field as that of pure consciousness, he fails to pose the question of what consciousness is, in Heidegger's parlance the question of 'the being of the intentional' (das Sein des Intentionalen). As a consequence, Husserl loses sight of the Seinsfrage. In other words, in determining pure consciousness as 'absolute being', Husserl takes over a conception of consciousness from the tradition without interrogating its meaning.
If this claim is justified - and I am not saying that it is, as Heidegger's reading of Husserl's work after the Logical Investigations is extremely myopic - then this explains why Heidegger goes on to claim that the Husserlian notion of consciousness is unphenomenological insofar as it is not drawn from the matters themselves, i.e. from the lived experiences of a concrete human being, but is inherited from the tradition, specifically the Cartesian tradition.(PGZ 147/HCT 107)
Now, if this is the fate of Husserlian phenomenology, then the Heideggerian question becomes: how should one begin phenomenology such that philosophizing can maintain itself in absolute radicality? For Heidegger, this means returning to the beginning point of phenomenological reflection in the natural attitude and attempting to give a redescription of how human existence is first given. This is what Heidegger attempts to do in Paragraphs 12 and 13 of the Prolegomena, which in many ways are the most intriguing pages of the Preliminary Part of the lecture course, where, despite giving a rather limited and unfair reading of the development of the personalistic attitude in Ideas II, he makes some more penetrating remarks on Dilthey's and Scheler's attempts to produce a personalistic psychology.
How is human Dasein given in specifically personal experience? (PGZ 162/HCT 117) It is with the response to this question that Heidegger begins the existential analytic of Dasein in Paragraph 9 of Sein und Zeit.(SuZ 41-42) In this sense, the beginning of Heidegger's philosophical project is not only methodologically dependent upon Husserlian phenomenology, but can be seen specifically as a radicalized extension of the phenomenology of the person in Dilthey, Scheler and the later Husserl. As Heidegger rather gnomically remarks at the beginning of the Main Part of the Prolegomena, 'There is an intrinsic material connection(innerlicher sachlicher Zusammenhang) between what we treated in the Introduction (i.e. The Preliminary Part) and what we now take as our theme.'(PGZ 192/HCT 141-42) To put this in terms that Heidegger would doubtless have refused, the First Division of Sein und Zeit attempts to transform the natural attitude with which phenomenology begins. Access to the beginning point of Heidegger's existential analytic is achieved by a transformation in our understanding of the natural attitude, what we might call a hermeneutic redescription of this moment of facticity.15
Let me pause and try to clarify this important point. Phenomenology begins in the natural attitude, as a description of our pre-theoretical immersion in the familiar, everyday, environing world, as the reality of our intentional lives.16 This leads Heidegger to raise the question: 'To what extent is the being of the intentional experienced and determined in this starting position?'(PGZ 152/HCT 111) That is, is there a moment when the question of the being of intentional is raised by phenomenology if only to be subsequently discarded?
This moment is that described by Husserl as the general thesis of the natural attitude. But, how is the natural attitude experienced in Husserlian phenomenology? As Heidegger puts it, 'what being is attributed to it?'(PGZ 153/HCT 111) Heidegger claims that the reality of the natural attitude is experienced as 'objectively on hand' ('objektiv vorhanden'). That is, in the Husserlian natural attitude, things are experienced in the mode of Vorhandenheit, as objects (Gegenstände) available to a theoretical inspection by consciousness, as things standing over against (gegen) a subject. But that is not all. Not only are things experienced in the mode of Vorhandenheit as objects, but this is also the determination of the being of the person intentionally relating to things. Thus, the being for whom the world appears in its reality as something on hand to a theoretical regard is also fixed as something real and on hand, as an entity objectified into an ego. Such is the Boden upon which the impoverished world of naturalism erects its structures.
Thus, Heidegger's claim is that the Husserlian understanding of the natural attitude presupposes an understanding of both things and persons that is part of an ontology of Vorhandenheit, the present-at-hand, to which Heidegger will oppose, in the opening chapters of Sein und Zeit, an ontology of things based in the category of Zuhandenheit or handiness, and a fundamental ontology of persons rooted in the analysis of Existenz.
But is the natural attitude natural? Is it even an attitude? Heidegger seems to respond with a double negative. Let me take up the first question: is the natural attitude natural? The natural attitude is unnatural because it presupposes a particular theoretical orientation borrowed from tradition and not taken from the things themselves. That is, the natural attitude is a theoretical attitude, and insofar as it is theoretical the philosophical obligation of the phenomenologist is to work against it in order to be true to the maxim 'to the things themselves'. If our access to things were not blocked by the theoreticist prejudice of the tradition, then the maxim 'to the things themselves' would have no meaning, for we would already be with those things.
This is a point fascinatingly amplified by Levinas in the Conclusion to his 1930 Doctoral Thesis, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, a work utterly pervaded by the climate of the early Heidegger, where Levinas completely accepts the necessity for an ontological critique of phenomenology and claims that the natural attitude is fatally framed by the presuppositions of a representationalist epistemology.17 Levinas argues that Husserlian phenomenology is theoreticist and intellectualist and thereby overlooks the historical situatedness of the human being, which is a claim that Levinas obviously made in ignorance of the Krisis manuscripts. He writes,
Consequently, despite the revolutionary character of the phenomenological reduction, the revolution that it accomplishes is, in Husserl's philosophy, possible because of the nature of the natural attitude, to the extent that the natural attitude is theoretical.18
Of course, the dramatic irony of Levinas's remarks in relation to his later critique of the fundamentality of ontology must be noted, and I have explored this elsewhere.19 But, crucially, Levinas's later claim that ethics and not ontology is first philosophy continually presupposes the Heideggerian critique of Husserl. This is why, in the Introduction to De l'existence à l'existant in 1947, he claims that not only are his reflections commanded by the need to leave the climate of Heidegger's philosophy, but - more importantly - that one cannot leave that climate for a philosophy that would be pre-Heideggerian, '...we cannot leave it for a philosophy that one could qualify as pre-Heideggerian'.20 The Heideggerian paradigm shift in 20th Century philosophy is as important a turning point as Hegel's for the 19th Century, which is a point which even Habermas begrudgingly concedes.21 Everything turns here on Levinas's word 'climate', which I would choose to view as a translation of ethos, and, of course, it is with that word that all the problems with Heidegger begin.
Turning to the second question, if the natural attitude is not natural, then, secondly, it is also not an attitude. The human being's 'natural' manner of experiencing the world is not an Einstellung, something I put myself into (einstellen) in the same way as I might put a car in the garage, a book on the shelf, or my pet hamster in the refrigerator. Why? Because, for Heidegger, I always already find myself (ich befinde mich) in the world. I am always already practically disposed in a world that is familiar and handy, a world in which we are immersed and with which we are fascinated. Thus, adopting an attitude towards experience is already to look at things from the standpoint of reflection, in an act by which we consider life, but no longer live it.
Thus, the Heideggerian beginning point for the question of the being of the intentional is already distorted by the Husserlian description of that beginning point with the thesis of the natural attitude. That is, it is the wrong description of the right beginning point. The natural attitude, with its theoreticist, intellectualist, vorhanden understanding of reality and consciousness is an unphenomenological distortion of the human being's primary practical and personal access to the world. In this regard, Heidegger's Sein und Zeit can - minimally but compellingly,I think - be seen as attempting to provide clarification of what is first given in personal experience, as a hermeneutic redescription of the natural attitude.
Of course, the meta-question that should be raised here is whether Heidegger is justified in his critique of the natural attitude in Husserl. Even if it is granted that he gives a plausible interpretation of the natural attitude in Ideas I, then is this valid for Husserl's later work? In this regard, simply as a counter-balance to Heidegger's claims, one might consider Merleau-Ponty's claims about the natural attitude in his stunning late essay, 'The Philosopher and his Shadow' ('Le philosophe et son ombre').22 Although the avowed hermeneutic strategy employed by Merleau-Ponty in this essay is Heideggerian, attempting to locate the unthought in Husserl's texts, the whole essay can be read as a problematization of Heidegger's portrayal of transcendental phenomenology, based on a reading of Ideas II.23 Of course, the unpublished manuscript of the latter text was lying on Heidegger's desk in 1925 (PGZ 167-71/HCT 121-23) and he even refers obliquely to it in an early footnote to Sein und Zeit (SuZ 47). For Merleau-Ponty, 'It is the natural attitude that seesaws (bascule) in phenomenology'. Or again, 'When Husserl says that the reduction goes beyond the natural attitude, he immediately adds that this going beyond preserves "the whole world of the natural attitude"'.24 That is to say, from Ideas II onwards Husserl recognizes that the natural attitude contains a higher phenomenological truth that must be regained. To capture this truth, Husserl makes the distinction between the naturalistic attitude, the theoretical or vorhanden relation to things that defines the methodology of the natural sciences, and the personalistic attitude, which tries to capture the sense of life as it is lived in terms of what is first given in personal experience, what Merleau-Ponty calls 'notre proto-histoire' ('our proto-history').25 So, the natural attitude only becomes the theoretical understanding of things and persons when it is transformed into the naturalistic attitude. The task of a personalistic phenomenology, then, is one of trying to 'unveil the pre-theoretical layer' (dévoiler la couche pré-théorétique) of human experience upon which the various idealizations of naturalism are based.26 It is this obdurate yet almost intangible dimension of pre-theoretical experience that phenomenology has the job of elucidating, the mystery of the familiar that Merleau-Ponty tried to express with the notion of the perceptual faith (la foi perceptive).

Doing Phenomenology - neither scientism nor obscurantism
Now, although such a run of thought needs to be wrested from the Black Sea of a mystical Neo-Schellingianism into which it, like other trends in contemporary thinking, risk sinking, it is something like this conception of personalistic phenomenology that I want to defend.27 In a nutshell, I think this is why one should begin philosophizing with Heidegger rather than elsewhere. On my understanding, it is a question of doing phenomenology in order to try and uncover the pre-theoretical layer of the experience of persons and things and to find a mode of felicitous description for this layer of experience with its own standards of validity. For me, such a conception of phenomenology can be employed to avoid two pernicious tendencies in our current thinking: scientism and obscurantism.
Let me begin with scientism. Scientism rests on the fallacious claim that the theoretical or natural scientific way of viewing things, what Heidegger calls Vorhandenheit, provides the primary and most significant access to ourselves and our world, and that the methodology of the natural sciences provides the best form of explanation for all phenomena überhaupt. Heidegger shows that the scientific conception of the world, what Carnap and Neurath called the wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung, is derivative or parasitic upon a prior practical view of the world as zuhanden, that is, the environing world that is closest, most familiar, and most meaningful to us, the world that is always already colored by our cognitive, ethical and aesthetic values. That is to say, scientism or what Husserl calls objectivism, overlooks the phenomenon of the life-world as the enabling condition for scientific practice. The critique of scientism, at least within phenomenology, does not seek to refute or negate the results of scientific research in the name of some mystical apprehension of the unity of man and nature, which is a risk in some of the ecstatical pronouncements of the later Merleau-Ponty; rather, it simply insists that science does not provide the primary or most significant access to a sense of ourselves and the world. Anti-scientism does not at all entail an anti-scientific attitude, and nor does it mean that 'science does not think', which is a remark of Heidegger's that has caused more problems than it has solved. What is required here is what Heidegger called, in a much-overlooked late remark in Sein und Zeit, 'an existential conception of science'(einen existenzialen Begriff der Wissenschaft' SuZ 357) that would show how the practices of the natural sciences arise out of life-world practices, and that the latter are not simply reducible to the former.28
Moving to more contemporary philosophical concerns, it is at least arguable that such a position is approached by John McDowell in his highly influential Mind and World.29 McDowell borrows Aristotle's notion of second nature and Hegel's notion of Bildung in order to try and escape the traditional predicament of philosophy, namely the epistemological subject-object construal of how to relate thought to things and mind to world and, in particular, the naturalistic version of that construal in someone like Quine. McDowell seeks to avoid the Scylla of 'bald naturalism' (the reduction of reason to nature) without falling into the Charybdis of 'rampant Platonism' (the idealist separation of reason from nature). What is so interesting about McDowell for my purposes is that the view he advances, what he calls 'naturalised Platonism', implicitly borrows at least four Heideggerian themes (via Gadamer's account of them in Truth and Method - a choice which is itself revealing): (a) the unintelligibility of scepticism, which recalls the argument of Paragraph 44 of Sein und Zeit (p.113); (b) the attempt to construe experience as "openness to the world" which recalls Heidegger's notions of disclosure and the clearing (die Lichtung des Seins); (c) the idea that human life in the world is structured environmentally, which recalls Heidegger's idea that Welt is first and foremost an Umwelt (p.115); and (d) the claim that language is the repository of tradition, which recalls Heidegger's ideas about historicity and heritage (p.126). Thus, the attempt to avoid the traditional predicament of philosophy, and the baldly naturalistic construal of that predicament, leads someone like McDowell to the adoption of a number of leading Heideggerian motifs.
Also interesting in this regard is Robert Brandom's rather Hegelian reconstruction of the argument of Sein und Zeit. Brandom tries to show how the Heideggerian claim that the present-at-hand arises out of the ready-to-hand - that is, how knowing is a founded mode of being-in-the-world - implies a social ontology where the condition of possibility for the scientific, criterial identification of entities (Quinean ontology) arises out of a shared communicative praxis based on a mutual recognition of shared norms (fundamental ontology). Such is the position that Brandom describes as Heidegger's 'ontological pragmatism'; that is, it is a question of acknowledging and describing the social genesis of the categories and criteria with which the world is described, '...fundamental ontology...is the study of the nature of social being - social practices and practioners.'30
Let me develop this point a little further with reference to Heidegger's notion of phenomenology as a pre-science (Vor-wissenschaft). Although one can find this idea in Heidegger as early as his 1919 lecture course The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldviews (Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem),31 it is also prominently discussed in the 1924 lecture The Concept of Time (Der Begriff der Zeit), which Gadamer famously and rightly described as the Ur-form of Sein und Zeit.32 In the latter lecture, Heidegger describes his reflections as belonging neither to theology nor to philosophy, but rather to a pre-science (Vor-Wissenschaft), that would be a hermeneutics of the factical conditions of possibility for scientific research, i.e. their social genesis in life-world practices. In what I shall generously assume is an attempt at humour on Heidegger's part, he describes this pre-science as the police force (Polizeidienst) at the procession of the sciences, conducting an occasional house search of the ancients and checking whether scientific research is indeed close to its matter (bei ihrer Sache), and hence phenomenological, or whether science is working with a traditional or handed down (überlieferten) knowledge of its Sache (One imagines the mass arrest and detention of whole crowds of naturalists by such a phenomenological police force, with summary beatings, torture and execution for the worst scientistic offenders). In the Prolegomena, this phenomenological policing is called - and it is a phrase retained in Paragraph 3 of Sein und Zeit - a productive logic (SuZ 10; PGZ 2/HCT 2). That is, it is a pre-scientific disclosure of the life-world that leaps ahead (vorausspringt) and lays the ground for the sciences.33 What Heidegger would seem to mean here is that unlike the empiricist or Lockeian conception of the philosopher as an underlabourer to science, a productive phenomenological logic - which for Heidegger corresponds to the original logic of Plato and Aristotle - leaps ahead of the sciences by showing their basis in a fundamental ontology of persons, things and world, the pre-theoretical layer of experience spoken of above. What I have called 'a phenomenological pre-science' or 'an existential conception of science' does not dispute or refute the work of the sciences. On my understanding, it shows three things:
I.that the theoretical attitude of the sciences finds its condition of possibility in our various life-world practices;

II.that such practices require hermeneutical clarification and not causal hypotheses or causal-sounding explanations;

III.that the formal apriori structure of persons, things and world can be deduced from that hermeneutic clarification, which is what Heidegger attempts to do with his various 'existentials'. The latter are what Heidegger calls 'formal indications', a key term in Heidegger's early work.34
Allow me a final word on obscurantism. It is important to point out that such a phenomenological anti-scientism can lead to an anti-scientific obscurantism, which in many ways is the inverted or perverted counter-concept to scientism, but it need not do so if we are careful enough to engage in a little intellectual policing. Obscurantism might here be defined as the rejection of the causal explanations offered by natural science by referring them to an alternative causal story, that is somehow of a higher order, but essentially occult. That is, obscurantism is the replacement of a scientific form of explanation, which is believed to be scientistic, with a counter-scientific, mysterious, but still causal explanation (the earthquake was not caused by plate tectonics but by God's anger at our sinfulness). As a cultural phenomenon, this is something that can be observed in every episode of The X-Files, where two causal hypotheses are offered, one scientific, the other occult, and where the former is always proved wrong and the latter is right, but in some way that still leaves us perplexed. Now, as a cultural distraction, arguably this does little harm, but elsewhere its effects can be more pernicious. Familiar candidates for obscurantist explanation are the will of God, the ubiquity of alien intelligence, the action of the stars on human behaviour, or whatever. Less obvious, but arguably equally pernicious, candidates are the Jungian archetypes, the Lacanian real, Foucauldian power, the self-occlusion of the trace in Derrida, the trace of God in Levinas, or - indeed - the epochal withdrawal of being in and as history in the later Heidegger. This list might be extended.35
In my view, what we can still learn from phenomenology is that when it comes to our primary and most significant access to persons and things, what we might call our entire stock of tacit, background know-how about the social world, we do not require causal scientific explanations, or pseudo-scientific hypotheses in relation to obscure causes, but what I am tempted to call, in a Wittgensteinian spirit, clarificatory remarks. For example, 'The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something - because it is always before one's eyes)'.36 Clarificatory remarks make familiar phenomena more perspicuous, change the aspect under which they are seen, and give to matters a new and surprising overview. Of course, viewing Heidegger's work in this way does not sound as exciting as talking about the epochal donation of being in its withdrawing movement or whatever, but perhaps that sort of excitement is something we are best off without. 37

Simon Critchley is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Essex, and Directeur de Prgramme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. During 1997-98 he was Humboldt Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. He is the author of The Ethics of Deconstruction, Very Little, Almost Nothing, and Ethic, Politics, Subjectivity, and a member of the board of coordinating editors of Theory & Event. He can be reached at: imonc@essex.ac.uk..