Heidegger's Ontological Confusion

Jud Evans

Heideggerian ontological confusion arises from a misunderstanding of the role of abstractions in language. Abstractions are either straightforward fictions, or reifications, nominalisations, generalisations and universalisations of human, animal, organic and nonorganic  actions and states. Such reified actions and states do not in themselves exist, but often reflect the generality of states, modes, ways and manners of specified or unmentioned] entities that DO exist
Abstractions, reifications, hypostatisations,  verbal nouns, abstract nouns, adjectival nouns, gerunds, act as useful fictions for communicating human meaning through speech

Pointing to a cat and describing it as black causes no confusion if  both the addressor and the adressee are agreed what is meant by the word  cat (the denotatum) and the adjectival word black.

However abstractive terms  lack such ontological clarity and can cause confusion when they are used  in relation to a specified and to an unspecified entity, or to  the generality or universality of entities. 

     Abstractions are not significations which correspond to actual denotata (like the cat) which can be found in the real world, but are designata which refer to unspecified universalistic generalisations concerning  nonexistent entities and events.

     Abstractions are vitally necessary insubstantial significations (useful fictions)  of the ideative meaning of all intentional utterances, but are not themselves a part or property of the object encountered in perception.

LOVE is not a part or property of the lover, but reflects the manner or the way that the generality of lovers exist whilst they are in a state of loving somebody or some thing. Put another way, what we refer to as love is the state of loving of the loving person  in which they exist whilst they emote love, or act out loving behaviour. But it is the loving  lover that exists in the world and not the loving - the loving is simply the existential modality of the lover whilst he or she loves somebody.

Whatever abstractive  terms of description of the loving lover are used, if the distinguishing words include love or loving as: a property, a mode, a behaviour, a manner, an action, a deportment, a demeanour or even an existential modality or an aggregate of the responses, reactions or movements made by an organism in any situation - then such a description is ontologically false. All entities exist in the way they exist and humans are not equipped either sensorially nor linguistically to perceive or to give an absolutely accurate account of the observed entity.

There is usually an accurate identification and absolute objectivity of meaningful correspondence achieved between the proper noun: Bill Jones, and the real-world denotative entity which is indicated. There are many persons named Bill Jones. Such a person named Bill Jones (who denotively  corresponds to that signification)  may be actually reading these words on the screen at this moment.  If there is more than one Bill Jones, then the addition of a simple descriptive qualifier such as: of Earl Road, Memphis, or the artist, is often enough to establish the noun Bill Jones, for those people who are aware of someone called by that name, as a genuine referent (denotatum)  indicating a genuine nominatum who exists with that name  and responds positively to  the linguistic expression: Bill Jones.

Most of us are aware and reconciled to the fact  that we will never in the future confront the irreal object love anywhere in our experience. In this respect we are already cognisant that love is not a real thing. If this is the case, then when we use expressions such as: I hope to find love one day, or love doesn't obey the rules, then we are actually using the word love as a figure of speech in which the word love is used to refer to an unspecified  human person that we will love and who hopefully will love us in return.

    We are aware that an irreal object cannot exist, for that which is not really an object cannot be a real-world existing entity. WE know that to find love we must find an actual real flesh and blood person to love or to love us, for love is a state or activity of human beings, not a thing, and if we exclude human beings as possible ultimate enactors or enablers of these states or activities, we will fail to find, identify and perhaps experience the actual originative or seminal denotatum which gave rise to the abstraction in the first place - and enjoy the loving states and activities of loving human beings.

      If one attempts to treat an abstraction such as love  to the same identificatory, designatory, or denotational reduction as one can reduce the noun Bill Jones to: he whom I am referring to, one proceeds down a torturous corridor of designation or identification of the origin of the significatum  love until one finally arrives at the  actual source of the word - which turns out to be a manner or state of behaviour of a real flesh and blood human being. Human beings and other real-world entities alone  are the source and progenitors of all abstractions.

                             

Nazis are also subject to fantasies and the reality-disconnectedness associated with reificative confusion. Heidegger proved to be no exception.  He is often referred to by non-apologists for his onto-fascist beliefs as: The Philosopher of Nazism, for could never grasp the difference between fact and useful fiction. He reified the semantic structures of the copious irreal objects which pepper his bumper philosophical fun-book Being and Time and his curious doctrines are brimming over with verbal nouns and gerunds and other abstractions created by mankind for their descriptive and communicative value rather than their ubietic actuality or state of existing and being localized in space. The busy little ex-Jesuit promoted them all into quasi-corporeal independent entiative actualities without scarcely a blush - as if he had never left the seminary at all.

                                                     HIS GREATEST MISTAKE

His greatest ontological [and pathological] mistake was of course to reify the existential modality of the earthly presence of human entities and other real objects into the notorious reificative object and ontological perversion: BEING and its gerundialised humanised alter-ego DASEIN.

Nominalists and eliminativists see nothing wrong with applying the products of their neurological activity to philosophical problems, nor in communicating these ideas to others via the meaningful linguistic codes that we call language, and see no difficulty in using denotataless linguistic coding, as long as they themselves and their interlocutors are aware that these abstractions are merely instrumental for conveying meanings concerning the activities and states of the real entities from which they are ultimately derived and associated.

In other words, the employment of abstraction as a linguistically useful fiction in the interests of brevity and in order to avoid periphrasis and circumlocution  is fine - as long as the impression is not given that the abstractions are instantiated and textually treated as actual objects or things that exist.

In many respects Heidegger's phenomenology can be described as obsessional preoccupation with the irreal or unreal, in that what he seems to be interested in is not so much the of entities, but the factuality of nonexistent phenomena including the term nothing.

Now for someone to be obsessed with that which doesn't exist over and above that which does exist seems to me to be a very abnormal kind of ontologist.

The employment of the useful linguistic fictions we call abstraction is fine in natural language or regular speech in the bar or the bus-queue where it can be used to convey meaning conveniently, quickly and economically, but in areas of communication such as philosophy, or even more so in science it if foolish and counterproductive. In ontological investigation, the unscholarly and unthinking employment of reified abstraction is verging upon the felonious, risible and unprofessional.  

Both *Being* and *Existence* are non-existent dualised ontological reifications or content-less shell-nouns in which the fact of occurring in the world is considered as (an extra)  pure transcendentally instantiated entity; abstracted from all circumstances. They are wholly imaginary conceptualised instantiations of a sham worldly presence retailed by Heidegger as the pure or entitative (considered as pure entity – abstracted from all existential circumstances) conception of the fact that the entity exists as a being. For a definition of  being see (B) below.

     ************************************************************************************************************

(B) BEING AS A COMMON NOUN:

This version of being is picked out in red.

This different version of the word being (note lower case) means a noun that denotes any or all members of a class. As in - an alien being, a human being, Angela was a being of absolute beauty, etc., having the meaning of a res extensa, or an object, a material entity, a living thing that has (or can develop) the ability to act or function independently.


    ***************************************************************************************************************

(C) *BEING* OR *EXISTING* AS A "VERB":

VERB: (INDICANT)

Being. This is the third-person continuous version of the indicant */be/ which indicates or points to the existential modality (the way or manner or mode in which an entity occurs) example: *Billy is being naughty again.* Much of the linguistic tradition calls this the property of a entity being in an existential state or modality. This is the version which is improperly ontologically appropriated and gerundialised into the verbal noun or gerund we know as *Being* which refers to the pure state or bald fact of existing (as described in (A)

But when /be/  is used sententially  in the present continuous third person sense as in:  *The cat  is black* it uses the conjugate /is/ rather than being which is the simple present form it presents in the gerundialised examples which follow. We can state a a xxx that *BE* in any of its forms can only ontologically refer to an existential modality of an object - and NOT ever to the (simple Heideggerian) fact

Consider:  

*Just being there with Dorothy was happiness enough for Stanley.
Bill was blamed for being there at the time of the accident.*
Nurse Williams, being there at the time of the crash, was able to offer immediate medical help.

Here are some copuletic examples of *is* where the word acts as a device signalling the present tense and for indicating a predicate of the subject of a sentence. In the sentence that follows  being refers (points to) to predicate which informs us that Alice exists in the mode of being or existing as short-sighted and refers us to some antecedent situation in which her bad eyesight proved unhelpful.

*Alice being short sighted did not help.*

*Birmingham being a hundred miles from London made transport difficult. *

Da sein (*there being* or *human existence*) is a gerundial phrase which is confused with and is represented as a common or proper noun. *Being there* obviously falls under the semantic and grammatical category of a gerund, abstract noun or verbal noun, originally derived from the third person continuous conjugation of  being there.

Consider the quotation from Being and Time below.

Martin Heidegger:
Dasein revealed itself to be that being [1] which must first be elaborated in a sufficiently ontological manner if the inquiry is to become a lucid one. But now it has become evident that the ontological analysis of Dasein in general constitutes fundamental ontology, that Dasein consequently functions as the being [2] that is to be interrogated fundamentally in advance with respect to its *Being.* [3] If the interpretation of the meaning of *Being* [4] is to become a task, Dasein [5] is not only the primary  being [6] to be interrogated; in addition to this it is the being [7] that always already in its *Being* [8] is related to what is sought in this question. But then the question of *Being* [9] is nothing else than the radicalisation of an essential tendency of *Being* [10] that belongs to Dasein itself, namely, of the pre-ontological understanding of *Being.* [11]

NOTES
[1] Notice Heidegger reifies Dasein (human existence) as a concrete being in the sense of a common noun as in (B)

[2] Again Heidegger crudely reifies (thingifies) *Being* and thingifies and maps Dasein (the gerund *being there* or *human existence*) as a member of putative a class of beings called Dasein. From the manner in which it is employed here and elsewhere is obviously a word that remains the same in the plural as the singular.

[3] Here Heidegger attaches the so-called  *Being* (*human existence* or the state or fact of existing) to the gerundial *being there* of Dasein (human existence) as a property (existential modality) of a existential or locative behaviour which is the gerund *being there*. Thus Dasein (human existence) is ridiculously characterised here as: THE BEHAVIOUR OF A BEHAVIOR.

[4] At this point Heidegger reverts to *Being* (the state or fact of existing,) which it is important to remember is not a (B) and does not exist in itself.

[5] Here Dasein (*being there* or *human existence*) is blatantly concretised again, Heidegger thingifies human existential behaviour as a primary common being as per (B)

(6) An outrageous reification and conspicuously pseudo-academic thingification of *act* as *fact* - and *fact* as a res extensa as the nominatum of a common noun.

[7] We finally arrive in a fantasy Munchhausen world, where the concretised experience of *being there* or *being here* (*human existence* ) which, by virtue of its falsely attributed concrecity in [5] and [6] is said to relate to...yes...wait for it...*its *Being* in...
[8] ...which it is being what it already is in... [5].

[9] Heidegger now reintroduces the verbal noun version of (A) which is now characterised (in [10] as...

[10] ...the tendency or pre-dispositional desire of the class of cognoscenti of beings known both collectively and individually as Dasein to uncover, reveal and return to an understanding of *Being* by *Being* before it was made the muddle it now is by people who lack the Heideggerian genius of correct ontological/ontic discernment.


Heidegger's fantastical gerundial phrase Dasein is a concept which, due to its obfuscational ontological character, can only be clarified as to its meaning with patience and a good understanding of the subtle semantic interchange between the various meanings of the word being.

Perseverance pays dividends, for it reveals the essential absurdity and danger  of using  Dasein as a tool for ontological understanding

Jud Evans.



For a more in depth study of reification and its corrosive effects on philosophy and ontology see my:  

                                          Philosophy and the Reification of the Unreal