Continental Philosophy Review 34: 361401, 2001.

2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed

HEIDEGGER in the Netherlands.
AND SCIENTIFIC REALISM 361

Heidegger and scientific realism

TRISH GLAZEBROOK
Department of Philosophy, Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA 18018, USA
E-mail: pglazebr@twcny.rr.com

Abstract. This paper describes Heidegger as a robust scientific realist, explains why his view
has received such conflicting treatment, and concludes that the special significance of his
position lies in his insistence upon linking the discussion of science to the question of its
relation with technology. It shows that Heidegger, rather than accepting the usual forced option
between realism and antirealism, advocates a realism in which he embeds the antirealist the-
sis that the idea of reality independent of human understanding is unintelligible. This reading
is defended against Rortys antirealist interpretation, as well as Dreyfus depiction of him as
a deflationary realist, and his assessment of background realism is contrasted with Fines.
Further, the robustness of Heideggers realism is laid out across several texts from 1912 to
1976, in order to show that he is neither an instrumental realist nor an internal realist. Finally,
the point is made that the development of his view concerning realism gives rise to a critique
of objectivity that is now being similarly advocated by numerous thinkers from a variety of
disciplines, and that this critique is inevitably ethical and political.

Introduction1

It is in general not at all clear how Heidegger is to be positioned in relation to

the analytic tradition of philosophy. This is not because he fails to address its
questions. His accounts of language, truth, and representation, for example,
have been engaged critically against the philosophy of Carnap, Putnam,
Davidson, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Rorty, Fine, and Whitehead. With regard to
the philosophy of science, however, which arguably stands at the center of
the analytic tradition, it remains especially unclear how Heideggers views
are to be situated, despite recent comparative work against Kuhn, Hacking,
Lakatos and Feyerabend.2 Above all, Heideggers Anglo-American readers
have failed to reach a consensus regarding his position in relation to the real-
ismantirealism debates. Indeed, he has been claimed for both sides. If he is
to be positioned with respect to Anglo-American philosophy and further com-
pared and contrasted against its central figures in order to contribute construc-
tively to their debates concerning realism, then his views require clarification.
By way of response to this task, I will attempt to explain his realism, and to
show why it has been such a difficult issue to resolve.
362 TRISH GLAZEBROOK

In brief, I argue that Heidegger is a realist who nonetheless holds antirealist

assumptions, and that this position is neither garbled nor self-contradictory.
Rather, it exchanges the either/or of realism/antirealism for a both/and. His
realist commitment to the transcendent actuality of nature goes hand in hand
with the thesis that human understanding is projective, and its corollary that
the idea of a reality independent of understanding is unintelligible. He devel-
oped this view over several decades. In 1912, he was a nave realist. Nave
here is not a derogatory term, but indicates rather a realism in which the ob-
jects of experience are taken at face value ontologically, that is, their onto-
logical status is taken for granted rather than made thematic. He extends the
experiential aspect of the everyday realism of the lifeworld into the realm of
theoretical science, and by Being and Time, he has come to see all understand-
ing, including scientific, as essentially hermeneutic. His on-going develop-
ment of the problem of realism involves, on one hand, a continuing critique
of background realism and instrumentalism, and on the other hand, a lifelong
concern to sustain the realist stance with which he began by accommodating
it to his later insights. His engagement with realism brings him to the critical
question of the relation between science and technology, and for him this
question is inevitably political and ethical.3 For if there are many ways to
interpret reality, among which the scientific has no particular epistemic privi-
lege, then a new attitude is called for towards science itself.
Since Heidegger wrote consistently throughout his life on the topic of sci-
ence, there is far too much material to give a complete account here. Hence I
will draw from both earlier and later writings to show how specific themes
and issues develop concerning realism; for example, his treatment of the re-
lation between logoj and fusij. Rather than presenting a close reading of
a single text, this analysis traces the evolution of his view through time. A par-
ticular intention is to bring to the Anglo-American debate about his realism,
which largely remains focussed on writings prior to 1935, his later work on
Aristotles Physics, and his treatment of the question of art. My concern is to
assess the question of his realism as it has been debated in the literature against
a broader background of his texts, propaedeutic to the possibility of situating
his work against the substantive positions put forward by Anglo-American
philosophers of science. That task of comparison with other views that also resist
reduction to either side of the realism/antirealism debate belongs to another
paper that can only be written once it is clear what Heideggers position is.
My argument has five parts. First, I distinguish antirealism from idealism,
and begin to make a case for Heideggers realism within that distinction on
the basis of the ontological difference. Secondly, I analyze Rortys antirealist
reading and demonstrate that, although Heidegger holds the antirealist theses