description. The world is already there before us for rational consideration, with no “absurd” noumenon lying beyond all possible mental access. Like Hegel, Husserl is an idealist and a rationalist; unlike Hegel, he is fascinated by all sorts of specific entities – mailboxes, blackbirds, imaginary battles of centaurs – that can be understood only when their concrete sensual profiles are analyzed and their essential properties sifted from their inessential ones. We will soon see that there is more to Husserl than this. But first, we should speak of his student Heidegger’s effort to challenge and radicalize his phenomenology.
The young Heidegger felt called to philosophy after reading Brentano’s early thesis on the different meanings of “being” in Aristotle.7 He soon learned that Husserl was considered one of Brentano’s leading disciples, and by sheer luck Husserl was called to a professorship at the University of Freiburg in Germany, where Heidegger was already enrolled. A close partnership formed between the two, despite their thirty-year age difference, and Husserl came to regard Heidegger as his intellectual heir. But Husserl’s expectations would be disappointed, since it was not long before Heidegger put an independent spin on phenomenology. We have seen that the phenomenological method involves describing things as they appear to us, carefully sifting the wheat from the chaff so as to discover by intellectual means the essential features of every object in the world, as opposed to their transient silhouettes as perceived by the senses. But in Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture course Towards the Definition of Philosophy, held when he was aged twenty-nine, his decisive break with Husserl is already visible.8 Our primary way of dealing with the world, Heidegger tells his students, is not through direct consciousness of it as phenomenology holds. For the most part, we deal with things as equipment, meaning that we take them for granted unconsciously rather than encountering them sensually or intellectually. For example, the podium in the lecture hall is something the professor normally does not think about explicitly. We could make the same point about the oxygen in the room or the bodily organs of the professor and students, all of them normally invisible unless some environmental or health disaster leads us to notice them. In short, the phenomenal world that is primary for Husserl first arises for Heidegger from an invisible system of background entities. In most cases these are not directly observed by the mind, but are pre-theoretically relied upon or used. Our life-world is filled with equipment, all of it tacitly understood as useful for further human purposes. With this step, the basic assumption of phenomenology is rejected: it is simply not the case, Heidegger contends, that appearance in our mind is the primary way we encounter the world.
Over the next decade he continued to develop this model, culminating in his 1927 masterpiece Being and Time, regarded by many – myself included – as the most important philosophical work of the twentieth century.9 Here, Heidegger gives an even more detailed version of his tool-analysis. A hammer is usually not noticed, but silently relied upon as it works to help us achieve some more conscious ulterior purpose. It helps us to build a house, and the house in turn assists our aspiration to remain dry and warm, which in turn provides support for more intricate family life and personal health. All the items of equipment in our environment are locked together in a holistic system, so that in a sense there are no individual pieces of equipment at all. This situation of unconscious holism can be disrupted in a number of ways, with the most famous such case occurring when equipment breaks or fails. If the hammer shatters into pieces, is too heavy, or is otherwise ineffective, our attention is suddenly seized by this individual utensil. Only at this late and derivative stage does the hammer finally become an individual phenomenon viewed directly by the mind in Husserl’s sense.
Over the ensuing decades Heidegger has gained wide influence, and is now taken seriously even in analytic philosophy circles that tend to be allergic to philosophers from the heavily Franco-German continental tradition. Unfortunately, the mainstream interpretation of Heidegger limits his importance by reducing his insight to a trivial form of pragmatism. Heidegger’s chief lesson is widely said to be as follows: prior to any theoretical or perceptual access to things, we deal with them through a set of unconscious background practices, one that is holistically determined by our total social-environmental context.10 But there is a serious problem with this interpretation, and OOO first arose in the 1990s in direct opposition to it. For one thing, it should be clear that our practical contact with things is no more exhaustive than our theoretical or perceptual awareness of them. Heidegger is certainly right that our scientific objectification of a fish or flower fails to exhaust the full depths of these things. Perceiving something directly with the mind does not mean capturing the whole of its reality: no sum total of views of a mountain, for instance, can ever replace the existence of that mountain, any more than the set of all organic chemicals exhausts the existence of their key ingredient, carbon. Even if God could see all sides of a mountain simultaneously from every possible vantage point, this would not be enough: for the mountain is simply not a sum of views, as claimed tacitly by the idealist philosopher George Berkeley and explicitly by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.11 Quite the contrary: the mountain is the reality that makes all the views possible in the first place. In Heideggerese, we could say that the being of the chemical or mountain are not commensurate with any knowledge or perception of them; the mountain is always a surplus unmastered by all our efforts to grasp its properties. And yet, is the same not true of our practical dealings with an object? When we use a chemical in preparing a medicine or poison, or when we climb a mountain in a spirit of adventure, in these cases too we abstract certain features from these objects, which exist in their full and unexhausted plenitude quite apart from all our theoretical, perceptual, or practical encounters with them.
Another, harsher way of putting it is that the widely celebrated difference between the conscious theory or perception of a thing and the unconscious use of it is too superficial to count as a genuine philosophical insight. Far more important is the unbridgeable gap between the being of an entity and any human dealings with it at all, whether they be theoretical or practical. Another way of looking at it is that Heidegger, unlike Husserl, unwittingly revives a sense of the Kantian thing-in-itself. While it is true that Heidegger does not usually put it this way, there is a frequently overlooked passage where he directly invites this interpretation. In his important book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, published shortly after Being and Time, he writes as follows: “What is the significance of the struggle initiated in German Idealism against the ‘thing-in-itself’ except a growing forgetfulness of what Kant had won, namely … the original development and searching study of the problem of human finitude?”12
But ultimately, it is not Heidegger’s own statements that authorize us to interpret his tool-analysis as leading back toward the Kantian noumenon. Thought experiments are often better understood by later figures than their original authors, as is clear from the history of science: Einstein’s ingenious reinterpretation of the Michelson/Morley experiment on aether drag comes immediately to mind. As soon as we realize that unconscious practices fail to grasp the reality of things just as much as theory and perception do, we come to see that Heidegger’s tool-analysis is not just a new theory of practical reason, but the demonstration of a noumenal surplus beyond all praxis no less than all theory. Furthermore, we must reject Heidegger’s claim that the system of tools is holistic, with all tools linking together in a totality that is determined by the purposes of some human being. For we must never forget that one of the chief features of tools for Heidegger is that they can break, and that nothing would break if it were seamlessly assigned to other tools in its environment. A hammer can break only because it has more features – such as feebleness or fragility – than the current practical system takes into account. While Kant seemed to place the noumena in another world far from human everyday life, Heidegger shows that the thing-in-itself enters and disrupts all thought and action in this world. We are always merely caressing the surface of things, only half-aware that they are more than our theory or praxis takes them to be at any moment. To summarize, what Heidegger bequeaths to philosophy is a model of individual beings impenetrable to the human senses and intellect, but equally opaque to everyday human use. Though he was too focused on the internal drama of human being ever to read his own tool-analysis in quite this way, I believe it would be possible to convince him of this interpretation if he were still alive.
