Dan R. has Questions

He got these to me late to use for Ennis, but I’ll post them here:

1) When we talk about “realism” we are doing metaphysics, it would seem. Again? That is the question, at least as I see it. This is my first conclusion. Are we (“new” Realists) renewing an old, perhaps perennial question, kind of like Heidegger did with Being in Being and Time? Have we overlooked something so basic, once again? Or are we asking a radically new question and one which, it may seem, we do not yet know how to articulate with sufficient force? And if we are indeed asking a new question mustn’t we be asking, at least simultaneously, for a radically new way of communicating this issue? In other words: is our critical language as it stands able to withstand the force of the realist question? Are we asking for a new physics, and thus an entirely new way of listening to Nature, physis? (I am not succumbing to Romanticism, just wary of saying “new ways of speaking of physis” as if there were only one way to approach this Realist question, that being in the narrow “spoken” vocabulary of philosophers. Did not Pollock, for example, ask this question in his own way?) Are we really seeking for a new way of articulating the realist question (and one which would register how, in speaking, we are never merely calling attention to the world as it is given to language but are really letting the world speak for itself, as it were)? How is (what I take to be) the central question, or better, hypothesis, of so-called realists: In what ways, if any, can we speak about whatever is always already unable to speak for itself (in terms of our own manners of communicating), without speaking for these things? not only possible (perhaps this is already a false, too Kantian, step) but a question which already brings us a step decisively closer to the “Real”? How are we to press out our truly Realist question without pretending to be after another stripped, crippled, and mute wax-candle version of the Real?

Strangely, while on the surface the above hypothesis seems to take its force from precisely avoiding any direct contact with questions and assumptions about the nature of (human) understanding, let alone ways of speaking, I believe, it is greatly indebted to, if not articulated within, what we call the “linguistic turn” (or, more precisely, what has yet to be gleaned from this movement). (Thus, and this is part of my conclusion, I think it would be dangerous to reduce this question to a matter of semantics or non-sematics, so to speak.) This new hypothesis asks for new ways (notice the plural) of understanding our world—thus new ways of speaking, articulating it—that register the fact that our world has never been and can never be, despite all our efforts, reduced to our world if by our we understand only human kind (and even, once we begin to acknowledge other forms of life in this world, so-called sentient life of any kind). I think right now we are not satisfied with our ways of articulating the ways of the world (and thus ourselves). Perhaps more than ever. But that is not to say that this is just a linguistic matter (I really doubt that I know for certain what it would look like for an issue of such breadth, scope, and ambiguity to be just a linguistic matter). Not at all (at least not as I see it). And perhaps the first step towards new ways of speaking of the world and not for the world is to acknowledge how things speak to us all the time, in manifold ways, but that they do not speak to us as we speak of them does not give us the right to consign them to silence, ostensible or real (or what is the same, paying lip service to them in our “conceptual schemes”).

2) Another way of phrasing the Realist hypothesis would be: whether non-sentient things (I recognize that speaking in this way begs the question, but go with it for a second) not only share relations (i.e. in a community, or world, of things, without needing sentient life to acknowledge them) but, if so, whether these relations that would seem to defy the intelligence (i.e. Dasein’s way of assimilating them into its conceptual schemes) must therefore must lose their “reality”? The problem here is the therefore. Just because we are not able to give articulation to something right now does not make it unreal (but neither does being able to think something make it real). I think this is a better way of putting the Realist issue than presuming to ask whether such and such a rock could engage in a world (in the Heideggerean sense) with such and such a dandelion, blade of grass, sun, wind, lizard, etc. if Dasein did not exist (and by this we mean had never touched this planet, I presume). This question seems more science-fiction than anything else. I don’t see where it would bring us in understanding even the Realist question. But no doubt what this question is trying to get at is important, and I think it is captured better, though imperfectly, in the former. Thus I come to my second conclusion: any such question as the new (?) Realist asks, insofar as it problematizes the therefore of our former question is indeed a deeply important question and we ought seriously to ask ourselves how we might go about asking it.

Thus am I in strife: it seems the Realist as I have characterized her is asking a largely significant and, for the most part, radically new set of questions. In fact, it seems a whole can of worms is on the verge of spilling open. And yet I hesitate. Does she command a clear enough vision of the course of “metaphysics”, as critiqued by the likes of (late) Heidegger and (late) Wittgenstein, to ask this so basic of questions without falling into certain traps? (Now don’t take this as mystical or anything) but are we, as post-moderns or whatever we are now, in the position to be asking this question without falling into confusion and stirring up superficial debates over a potentially deeply troubling issue?

This brings me to my questions, though they may miss the mark entirely

(I remember now that they must stick to the theme of Heidegger, so I will limit myself to him; and since I am without the text, they will be broad):

If I am correct in saying, for simplicity’s sake, that Heidegger’s issue with the traditional Realist-Idealist debate in B&T is that it’s various questions and problems are pre-determined by a narrow subject-object metaphysics, any talk of Heidegger as a Realist must take into account this rejection. It might seem easy to say that most of the realist-idealist debates, for Heidegger, are flawed from the start because they both assume some sort of transcendental status for the subject. That much is obvious. But it does not seem that the structure of being-in-the-world can quite cope with the more modern Realist’s question either. So my question is: how is the later Heidegger’s understanding of physis, which is certainly radically different than that put forth in B&T—and as far as I can see, rejects precisely the conception of Nature in Being and Time as owing its existence to an equipmental context, that is, a set of human practices—to be reconciled with what most commentators take to be his central, life-long insight into the nature of the relation between world and human beings, or being-in-the-world? Can Heidegger’s basic insight stand up to the new Realist’s question?
It seems to me that we might allow some sort of robust, albeit imperfect, Realism to the Heidegger of Being and Time and even later (though in a different way), but that we would do so more easily in terms of spatiality as he conceives it. But I have trouble conceiving how we could allow (a Heideggerean, or more broadly, non-physicist/measurable/primarily mathematical conception of) temporality into a world of things related only to themselves. Thus my question: in the context of Heidegger, is there a place in the Realist understanding for a determinate and conceivable structure of temporality within the realm of things themselves which does not match up with that of Dasein’s (structure of temporality, i.e. authentic or inauthentic, etc.)?