Inquiry, 45, 1914

Symposium: Cristina Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure*

Comments on Cristina Lafonts Interpretation of Being and Time

Hubert L. Dreyfus
University of California, Berkeley

What is striking about Cristina Lafonts work is the range of her knowledge, the depth of her insight, and the clarity of her arguments. Her basic claim in both her books is that the realization that language does not merely mirror reality has led to an understanding of the basic function of language as worlddisclosing. Lafont shows that taking the essential function of language to be world disclosure can lead to a linguistic idealism and a cultural relativism that has no place for the fact that, no matter what language we speak, we are able to communicate concerning a common objective reality. Lafont further claims that Heideggers world-disclosing account of language in Being and Time commits him to a rejection of a shared objective world by claiming that Heidegger holds that meaning determines reference, thereby neglecting the way reference actually works. Reference need not be mediated by a linguistic description of the object referred to. Indexicals, for example, refer directly to their objects. Speakers can, therefore, agree about which object they are referring to even though they accept differing descriptions of it. I disagree completely with Lafonts treatment of Being and Time in Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure. Lafont constructs a lucid and coherent argument that, for Heidegger in Being and Time, meaning determines reference and that all of his views follow from this fundamental (and mistaken) assumption. There are some passages in the text that support her account, but Lafont simply ignores the many passages that dont t into her elegant construction. For example, Lafont claims that Heideggers account of the ontological difference shows that, according to Heidegger, we can only have access to entities through our understanding of their being, and therefore Heidegger must be an idealist. This reading is hard to reconcile with passages such as the following:
*Cristina Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosur e, trans. Graham Harman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), originall y publishe d as Sprache und Welterschliessung : Zur linguistische n Wende der Hermeneutik Heideggers (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). All unprefixed page reference s are to the English translation .
# 2002 Taylor & Francis

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Physical nature can only occur as innerworldly when world, i.e., Dasein, exists. This is not to say that nature cannot be in its own way, without occurring within a world, without the existence of a human Dasein and thus without world. It is only because nature is by itself extant that it can also encounter Dasein within a world.1

Or again:
[I]ntraworldliness does not belong to natures being. Rather, in commerce with this being, nature in the broadest sense, we understand that this being is as something extant, as a being that we come up against, to which we are delivered over, which on its own part already always is. It is, even if we do not uncover it, without our encountering it within our world. Being within the world devolves upon this being, nature, solely when it is uncovered as a being. 2

If his emphasis on the world-disclosive function of language requires Heidegger to be an idealist, how can he make such claims? The answer is simple. According to Heidegger, entities in the world are, indeed, constituted by our taking them as something, but, according to Heidegger, the entities studied by science, the entities in the universe are deworlded.
Nature is what is in principle explainable and to be explained because it is in principle incomprehensible. It is the incomprehensible pure and simple. And it is the incomprehensible because it is the deworlded world, insofar as we take nature in this extreme sense of the entity as it is discovered in physics.3

Lafont simply ignores many such passages that contradict her unquestioned assumption that, since he prioritizes world-disclosure, Heidegger must be an idealist. But one might well ask how Heidegger could consistently hold such realist views, if for him, as Lafont claims, meaning determines reference. The answer is that Heidegger discovered on his own in 1921 that not all reference is mediated by a description of the object intended; that, in fact, language allows us to refer to objects directly. In his 1921 lectures, Heidegger presented an account of non-committal reference made possible by what he called formal indicators or designators (formalen Anzeige). Non-committal reference starts by referring to some object or class of objects provisionally, using contingent features, and arrives at the referents essential features only after an investigation. Heidegger explains:
The empty meaning structure [of the formal designator] gives a direction towards lling it in. Thus a unique binding character lies in the formal designator; I must follow in a determinate direction that, should it get to the essential, only gets there by ful lling the designation by appreciating the non-essential.4

Thus, like Putnam in his account of direct reference and Kripke in his account of rigid designation, Heidegger holds that reference need not commit one to any essential features; rather, it binds one to determine, in whatever way is appropriate to the domain, starting with whatever features one can nd, which features of the referent, if any, are essential. Of course, such direct reference is provisional. Heidegger continues:

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The evidence for the appropriateness of the original de nition of the object is not essential and primordial; rather, the appropriateness is absolutely questionable and the de nition must precisely be understood in this questionableness and lack of evidence. 5

In Being and Time, Heidegger is taking the non-committal nature of formal designation for granted when he says: When we came to analyzing [the being of Dasein] we took as our clue existence. This term formally designates that Dasein, in its being makes an issue of that being itself.6 He stresses that such a designation is provisional when he asks about the I of everyday Dasein. The word I is to be understood only in the sense of non-committal formal designation , indicating something which may perhaps reveal itself as its opposite in some particular phenomenological context of being.7 So it looks like Heidegger would agree with Lafont that:
[I]nsofar as we intend to refer to something that is independent of our concrete descriptions, we cannot avoid understanding the descriptions implicit in our methods for identifying them as provisional characterizations that may (or may not) be correct for the referent. Thus, the expression reference to the things themselves, does not imply denying that they can be considered only under various descriptions or within various theories. Instead, this expression simply represents the linguistic correlate of our fallibilist understanding with respect to our knowledge about objects in a world of entities independent of theory. (p. 243)

Yet, consistent with her reading, and in at denial of Heideggers account of provisional reference, Lafont claims that Heidegger is committed to
a rejection of any possibility of referring to something that cannot yet be identi ed with ultimate validity or cannot be identi ed correctly in all cases. This means something whose identity one does not fully know or understand, at least not yet. (p. 230)

One might argue in Lafonts defense that although the lectures that explain formal designation were published in 1985, the importance of formal designation for Heideggers method in Being and Time was not recognized until 1993, when Theodore Kisiel published The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time and launched a urry of articles on the subject. Since both of Lafonts books were presumably nished by 1993, she should not be expected to know of Heideggers discovery of direct reference. But one might at least hope for some response, in Lafonts recent Prefaces to the English editions of her books, to what seems to be a refutation to her fundamental thesis. But in the English preface to Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure Lafont still insists that, since Heidegger holds that meaning determines reference, he is committed to an implausible rei ed language, and that, given his meaning holism, Heidegger cannot have an account of direct reference. She repeats that the ontological difference is established by Heidegger in such a way that it follows that there can be no access to entities without a prior understanding of their being(p. xiii, my italics). This is true as an account of

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access, but, given his understanding of formal designation, this in no way commits Heidegger to idealism, or denies the possibility that all essentialist descriptions are provisional and may well be mistaken. Lafont is right that:
[b]y insisting on the speci city of designation, it becomes clear that the meaning of theoretical concepts can indeed be theory-dependent, but that it makes no sense to assert the same of their reference, of the things to which they refer. (pp. 2445)

But this is no objection to Heidegger. He puts the same point in a way that shows he understands the way out of the supposed closed world dictated by the ontological difference when, in Being and Time, he says: Being (not beings) is dependent upon the understanding of being; that is to say, reality (not the real) is dependent upon care.(p. 255) Ironically, it is the great merit of Lafonts two brilliant books that her lucid account of the unacceptable consequences of an exclusive concern with the world-disclosing function of language enables us to see what no other commentator has seen, why Heidegger was so excited by his discovery of formal designation. But her single-minded determination to illustrate the failings of the world-disclosive view of language through a reading of Being and Time shows her to be a prisoner of her coherent construction.
NOTES 1 M. Heidegger, Phenomenologica l Interpretatio n of Kants Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington/Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 14. 2 M. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenolog y, trans. Albert Hofstadter. (Indianapolis /Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 169. 3 M. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Indianapolis /Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 2178, my italics. 4 M. Heidegger, Pha nomenologisch e Interpretatione n zu Aristoteles: Einfu hrung in die pha cker nomenologisch e Forschung, in Martin Heidegger: Gesamtausgabe, ed. Walter Bro and Ka te Bro cker Oltmanns (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), div. 2, 61, p. 33. 5 Ibid., pp. 3435. 6 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 274. 7 Ibid., p. 152. Received 4 March 2002 Hubert L. Dreyfus, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. E-mail: dreyfus@cogsci.berkeley.ed u