This sixth installment of our Postmodern epistemology series will provide a quick (and all too superficial) survey of the last of the so-called transitional figures who have been influential in the development of “Postmodern Epistemology” - Martin Heidegger.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (who in his own words attempts to take Nietzsche especially seriously as a thinker) is deeply concerned with overcoming the subject/object-dichotomy which (although extant even in ancient Greek philosophy) has been brought to particular prominence in the philosophy of Enlightenment figures such as Descartes and later Kant.

In order to surmount this dichotomy, Heidegger brushes aside any abstract notion of being and replaces it with Dasein (Being-there). Over and against the Cartesian-Kantian understanding of the self which stands squarely opposite external objects, Heidegger wants to know of the self only in terms of a Dasein.

Since Dasein includes not only what is “external” to us but also our very self as “in der Welt sein” (Being-in-the-world), the subject/object-dichotomy is no longer relevant or problematic for Heidegger.

For Descartes (and modernism) true knowledge is largely mathematical. This, however, is far too abstract for Heidegger. He distinguishes between calculative and meditative thinking, and he argues that the latter has at least as much right to be called true knowledge as the former.

Heidegger thinks the subject/object-problem arises only from an overly abstract notion of knowledge. “Heidegger agrees with Nietzsche’s contention that Christianity is simply Platonism for the people”¹ because Platonism distinguishes sharply between the world of appearance below and the world of real being above, which in turn leads to the subject/object-dilemma of epistemology.

Heidegger’s knowledge project, however, is much more personal in nature. We must understand that, for Heidegger, Dasein is always Dasein als (as).

We never encounter anything as merely vorhanden (present-at-hand or simply existent), but always as zuhanden (ready-to-hand) - as indissolubly bound up with a pragmatic and a priori fore-structure (which is defined by a Vorhabe, a Vorsicht and a Vorgriff - a fore-having, a fore-sight and a fore-conception).

And, of course, the understanding of anything als something presupposes the a priori interpretation and pragmatic determination of that very thing.

Heidegger has much to say about art and language, much like Nietzsche. In this respect, he can also be regarded as an aestheticist philosopher. As part of this aesthetic tradition, he can be seen to provide a tertium quid to the Kantian dilemma between epistemological uncertainty and the practical necessity of the noumena.

This new approach is part of Heidegger’s self-declared goal of destroying traditional ontology,² which is so pertinent to our discussion of postmodernism.³

In due time, after the Kehre (reversal) in Heidegger’s thought in the 1930s, it gives way to a renewed interest in completing the aestheticist project Nietzsche left unfinished. Both Heidegger’s aestheticism and his existentialism exert a strong influence on some French intellectuals from the 1960s onward, some of whom (such as Jaques Derrida) become - willingly or unwillingly- the prophets of postmodernism.

1. Erickson, Truth, 96.↩
2. Sometimes called “ontotheology.”↩
3. Heidegger’s use of the German noun “Destruktion” is not intended to be understood (as one might assume from the English cognate) in a purely destructive sense, but rather – interestingly enough - as a positive reconstruction after the destruction.↩