Heidegger’s and Descartes’ Discourse, Research Paper Example

Introduction

The philosophical heritage of humanity is diverse and rich; the philosophical thought originated far back in Antiquity, and brought about a range of teachings and paradigms to the modernity. The most outstanding philosophers of the ancient times are Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates. They offered the philosophical fundamentals, and philosophical teachings have been relying on, for example, Aristotelian philosophy of schools, the principles of Aristotelian vitalism opposed to the mechanistic theory emerging later, with the outbreak of the Industrial revolution of the 17^th century, etc.

It is obvious that the eternal metaphysical questions of what a human being is, what the world is, how people emerge in the world, and where they go after death, how things are interrelated in the surrounding environment, and what place the human being takes in the world, have been at the cutting edge of the philosophical thought and research for centuries. However, every period of human development, every epoch, and every evolutionary curve brought about new considerations and new perspectives that philosophers adopted regarding the essence of being, and the intricacies of humans, divinities, nature, and the world overall. Therefore, the evolution of philosophical thought has to be studied in line with the human evolution in general; they are intricately connected, and the background of philosophers’ activity offers an additional insight and rationale for the views they adopted.

Two bright representatives of philosophical thought who took an active interest in similar objects, but whose views differed dramatically, are Rene Descartes and Martin Heidegger. The role of Descartes in the philosophical thought of humanity can hardly be overestimated, since this natural philosopher, metaphysician, and mathematician offered a set of revolutionary ideas, methods of inquiry, and scientific paradigms that are still used by scholars in a wide range of disciplines. The main idea of Descartes was to refuse from the traditional scholastic paradigm of Aristotle and to offer a totally new philosophical perspective based on natural philosophy, metaphysics, and mechanistic physics and biology. The majority of Descartes’ ideas were affected by the coming of the Industrial revolution, and the discovery of basic mechanistic laws in the 17^th century, enabling people to create machines and production equipment, though rudimentary, but working, and allowing the manufacture to push the human labor far backward in importance. Therefore, the majority of Descartes’ theories are heavily influenced by the Industrial revolution: his Cogito Argument relating to the supremacy of self in the scholarly inquiry and world perception is still widely used in philosophy. Descartes undermined the vision of scholarly inquiry as only possible through experience and senses and discredited the sensual perception of the surrounding reality as deceptive. Descartes established the main principles of judgment based on clear reason and common sense, thus offering a new philosophical discourse for the successive generations.

As for martin Heidegger, this philosopher followed a different path, and his main contribution may be seen in distancing from the classical metaphysical theory of Descartes, and resorting to phenomenology as the main philosophical tool of inferences. Heidegger worked in the field of phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, and theology, thus contributing to the 20^th-century philosophical thought development considerably. However, the guiding principle of Heidegger was to question the traditional philosophical views, to pursue non-metaphysical thinking, and to focus on the very essence of being, which lacked in the Western mechanistic philosophy. Though the subject of inquiry, being and the human existence, is similar to the one of Descartes, there are many differences in the views of both philosophers on the issues of methods and objects, judgment, and proof. The present paper will compare and contrast the works of both philosophers for the sake of producing more grounded conclusions on the context of their opposition.

Philosophical Method of Descartes

As it has already been noted, Rene Descartes undertook a revolutionary endeavor, trying to overthrow classical philosophical dogmas of Antiquity and establishing a new philosophical paradigm for the metaphysical consideration of the world, human being, and God. The most famous work of Descartes dedicated to the explication of his method of philosophical inquiry is Meditations – it is the work written in the 1640s, and it contains six parts equaling six days of Descartes’ contemplations over the nature of being, the essence of a human being, the main characteristics of a human being, and the dilemma of God’s existence in the world.

The key point of Meditations is that there is no more reliance on the tradition and human senses (which was the basis of the tradition of schools of Aristotle). Descartes notes that there is nothing certain in the world, and people traditionally perceive the common, self-evident truths, just because they are subject to the impact of various prejudices and patterns imposed on them by the cultural and social norms. The philosopher emphasized the fact that senses can be deceptive, and there is no certainty in the suppositions held by people for centuries, since they may never be sure whether they are true or false:

“All that I have, up to this moment, accepted of the highest truth and certainty, I received from or through the senses. I observed, however, that these sometimes misled us; and it is the part of prudence not to place absolute confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived” (Descartes 74).

Proceeding with the discussion of the doubtful truths commonly taken for granted by people, Descartes compares the vision of reality people have with the dreams they sometimes see. Hence, Descartes employs the philosophical method of methodic doubt; he doubts every aspect of the stable human world image, hesitating whether the sky and the earth, the houses, the nature, the human beings that people see are real or phantasies. Going further, Descartes even doubts his own being – he doubts the fact that the hands, legs, and body he sees exist in reality, since it is only the complex of his senses that makes him believe he exists, nothing else. Therefore, by means of methodic doubt, Descartes denies everything commonly known and believed in part one of his Meditations, and goes on establishing a new basis for belief in the next parts.

The second part of Meditations contains the most significant idea of Descartes that has laid the foundation for the major part of philosophical thought for successive generations. Descartes explicates his new pattern of thought, representationalism, and disconnects the surrounding world from the human mind. However, he realizes the need to draw new bridges between the two, and makes his Cogito Argument – “cogito sum”, that is, “I think, therefore, I exist” (Descartes 80). There is a clear need for Descartes to identify what he actually is, if he deprived himself of all physical characteristics due to their doubtfulness; therefore, the main trait of a human being is that he is a thinking being, “the thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses” (Descartes 81).

After proving that people as thinking beings exist, Descartes goes on to a more troubling question – the problem of existence of God. Taking into account that Descartes lived in the Middle Ages, there is no slightest doubt that the answer to the philosophical inquiry “Is there a God?” could be only positive. Thus, Descartes addresses the existence of God in the third chapter of his Meditations, asking the provocative question: “Is there not a God, or some being, by whatever name I may designate him, who causes these thoughts to arise in my mind?” (Descartes 79). This way, Descartes emphasizes that there should be an entity prior to the human being, since humans are non-eternal. Descartes also claims that the idea about the existence of God is innate, i.t., the idea with which people are born, and that is not introduced from human experience or imposed by another human being:

“But, among these ideas, some appear to me to be innate, others adventitious, and others to be made by myself (factitious); for, as I have the power of conceiving what is called a thing, or a truth, or a thought, it seems to me that I hold this power from no other source that my own nature” (Descartes 88).

Part five of Meditations is also dedicated to the logical proof of the existence of God; making suppositions about other origins of human beings, Descartes discards each of them by means of deductive analysis, and finally assumes that there is no other viable explanation to the existence of people on the Earth but the God’s will (Descartes 103). Therefore, one may see that the focus on the metaphysical inquiry in the world of things and people, existence of God, and the proof for human existence are present in the philosophical framework of Descartes. Descartes can also be credited for the contribution to the mechanistic physics – the philosopher and scientist employed basic biological, mathematical, and physical laws in his philosophical argumentation to prove the existence of both man and God, which differed fundamentally from the scholastic physics traditionally used at his time. Moreover, Descartes became the first proponent of mechanistic trends in science as opposed to Aristotelian vitalism so strongly protected and supported by Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger and the Study of Being

Martin Heidegger was a philosopher who started his activity and made his revolutionary philosophical, theological, and psychological inquiries much later than Descartes did. Heidegger is fairly regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20^th century, mainly due to his distinct style of philosophical thought, his daring ideas in the fields of human existence, the nature of the world’s existence, the dilemma about God’s existence, the major turn in the scientific inquiry, etc. However, one may state that the major focus of Heidegger’s interest was the nature of being, and the quest for the answers to the question of being characterized the overwhelming majority of Heidegger’s works. Two most notable works in this account are The Thing (Das Ding) and Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). Both works are dedicated to the nature of a thing, and introduce the readers to the nature of phenomenology, as well as the phenomenological inquiry into the essence of ‘thingness’.

The work The Thing is considered one of the most fundamental writings of Heidegger representing the gist of his philosophical discourse. Martin Heidegger dedicates much attention in this work to the identification of the essence of a thing in the human world, and explicates his most detailed criticism of metaphysics in terms of analyzing the ontological problems of humanity: “Because the word thing as used in Western metaphysics denotes that which is at all and is something in some way or other, the meaning of the name “thing” varies with the interpretation of that which is–of entities” (“The Thing” 177). In his overview of the correct and truthful approach to the analysis of things, Heidegger resorts to the ideas of Kant:

“Kant […] means by this term something that is. But for Kant, that which is becomes the object of a representing that runs its course in the self-consciousness of the human ego. The thing-in-itself means for Kant: the object-in-itself. To Kant, the character of the “in-itself” signifies that the object is an object in itself without reference to the human act of representing it…”Thing-in-itself,” though in a rigorously Kantian way, means an object that is no object for us (“The Thing” 177)

The key idea, though quite complex for a nonprofessional’s understanding, presented by Heidegger in The Thing, is that the world is four-fold, and one thing always mirrors the characteristics of other three. Therefore, the essence of being is characterized by the presence (worlding) of the world itself that contains four elements: earth, heaven, mortals, and divinities. They constantly and reciprocally revert, but at the same time, they can be particularized in their individualized being. Heidegger schematizes a more detailed overview of the essence of the interconnections among all things in the world as follows:

“[T]he inexplicable and unfathomable character of the world’s worlding lies in this, that causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the world’s worlding. As soon as human cognition here calls for an explanation, it fails to transcend the world’s nature, and falls short of it. The human will to explain just does not reach to the simpleness of the simple one-fold of worlding. The united four are already strangled in their essential nature when we think of them only as separate realities, which are to be grounded in and explained by one another (“The Thing” 180).

Proceeding to the work Being and Time, one should pay proper attention to the new term that Heidegger coins to define any entity, any Being, with a set of definite characteristics, is ‘Dasein’ – a certain entity possessing the quality of Being, and having relation to Being as such.

At the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger explains the need to dwell deeper with the question of Being. He states that the modern period of scientific, theological, and philosophical research is characterized by revolutionary discoveries that challenge the very scientific focus; Heidegger uses the examples of biology, mathematics, and other sciences that challenge themselves as a result of the discoveries going beyond the scope of scientific outreach (“Being and Time” 30). At the same time, Heidegger criticizes the modern scholarly community for the neglect to the essence of being, and states that both professionals and laypersons conceive being as evident, universal, and indefinable. The philosopher states that people are possessed by presuppositions and prejudices about the inquiry into the true essence of “being” – “they are rooted in ancient ontology itself, and it will not be possible to interpret that ontology adequately until the question of Being has been clarified and answered and taken as a clue” (“Being and Time” 22).

Therefore, martin Heidegger assumes the need to develop a new, non-deductive genealogy for the ontological inquiry. The question that the inquiry should focus on is what we really mean by the expression “being” (“Being and Time” 31). The philosophical discourse offered by Heidegger for this inquiry is phenomenology; the philosopher characterizes it as letting “that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself” (“Being and Time” 58). This approach is highly congruent with what Descartes attempted to do in the 17^th century, though the work of Descartes is subject to fierce criticism and underestimation by Heidegger. Notwithstanding this fact, one can see a clear analogy between the philosophy of supremacy of the individual in the philosophical inquiry of Descartes, and the vision of Dasein by Heidegger:

“Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence – in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. Dasein has either chosen these possibilities itself, or got itself into them, of grown up in them already” (“Being and Time” 33).

This fragment actually shows the parallels between the inquiry to the essence of universal being by Descartes made three centuries earlier than the work of Heidegger began. However, Heidegger attacks the alleged revolutionary shift of philosophical discourse brought about by Descartes in the 17^th century by stating that Descartes failed to give any answer to the question regarding the being and structure of ‘ego’, ‘cogito’, and the ‘sum’. Heidegger claimed that the writing of Descartes created the ‘ego cogito’ argument, and raised the issues of the subject, the “I”, reason, spirit, and person (“Being and Time” 44). However, the major failure of Descartes on his way to give a new and firm footing to philosophy was that he left the kind of Being belonging to the res cogitans (or, more precisely, the meaning of the being of the ‘sum’) undetermined (“Being and Time” 46).

Heidegger does not underestimate the value of the ontological debate initiated by Descartes, but assumes that there is no possibility to lead it to a final and fruitful ending with the application of metaphysics alone. According to the opinion of Heidegger, his phenomenological inquiry is what can help resolve the long-term issue of “cogito sum” by means of a destructive retrospect of the history of ontology (“Being and Time” 46). One more drawback Heidegger sees in the work of Descartes is that the latter attributed the traits of temporality to people, and the characteristics of non-temporality to God, thus making people ens creatum, and God – ens infinitum, thus ens increatum. The present inference contradicts the concept of createdness essential for the structure of the ancient conception of Being, which disrupts the temporal coherence thereof (“Being and Time” 46). The justification Heidegger gives to the metaphysical ideas of Descartes is that he was heavily dependent on the medieval trend of scholasticism, and even used its terminology for outlining his revolutionary ideas. Therefore, Descartes investigated ‘cogitare’ of the ‘sum’ only within certain limits, which was not enough to give the answers to the fundamental ontological questions of being.

Conclusion: Similarities and Differences in the Philosophical Approaches of Descartes and Heidegger

As one can see from the present analysis, there are many commonalties in the viewpoints of Descartes and Heidegger in their methods of philosophical inquiry; they both intended to change the traditional philosophical discourse dramatically, and they both pursued the question of being and existence, which was detailed, profound, and revolutionary for their time. However, the impact of both philosophers’ background inevitably played a role in the formation of their philosophical approach. For example, Descartes lived in the Middle Ages, and simply could not afford doubting the existence of God, or neglecting the topic of God’s existence in his philosophical writings. Heidegger, in contrast, lived and wrote at the period of turbulent and rapid progress in all spheres of science and technology; he turned out disenchanted in the mechanistic approach to human life, thus praising Aristotelian vitalism as opposed to Descartes who saw the future in mechanistic physics (which actually turned out true for the next couple of centuries). Heidegger possessed a much wider scope of consideration as compared to Descartes, so it stands to reason that the findings of Descartes appeared incomplete and limited to him. However, the heritage of Descartes, the establishment of deductive metaphysics and natural philosophy as the guiding discourses for upcoming philosophers proved quite fruitful for the field of philosophy and philosophical inquiry. The phenomenological and ontic-ontological approach of Heidegger is also revolutionary for the modernity, as it is characterized by the impact of relatively new trends – existentialism and hermeneutics. Therefore, the philosophical discourses of Descartes and Heidegger can be assessed as fundamentally different, though signifying the most fundamental quest of the humanity – understanding the essence of being in itself.

Works Cited

Descartes, Rene (trans John Veitch). Meditations. New York, NY: Cosimo, Inc., 2008. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1962. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. What is a Thing? Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, 1968. Print.