- Original
- Huneeus & Orrego
Original
3. Theoretical Holism. Plato’s view that everything human beings do that makes any sense at all is based on an implicit theory, combined with the Descartes/Husserl view that this theory is represented in our minds as intentional states and rules for relating them, leads to the view that even if a background of shared practices is necessary for intelligibility, one can rest assured that one will be able to analyze that background in terms of further mental states. Insofar as background practices contain knowledge, they must be based on implicit beliefs; insofar as they are skills, they must be generated by tacit rules. This leads to the notion of a holistic network of intentional states, a tacit belief system, that is supposed to underlie every aspect of orderly human activity, even everyday background practices. Tacit knowledge — what Husserl calls “horizontal intentionality” in his answer to Being and Time1 — has always been the fallback position of consistent cognitivists.
Heidegger opposes this philosophical move. He denies the traditional assumption that there must be a theory of every orderly domain — specifically that there can be a theory of the commonsense world. He insists we return to the phenomenon of everyday human activity and stop ringing changes on the traditional oppositions of immanent/transcendent, representation/represented, subject/object, as well as such oppositions within the subject as conscious/unconscious, explicit/tacit, reflective/unreflective. Heidegger is definitely not saying what Peter Strawson rather condescendingly finds “plausible” in Heidegger’s works, namely, that we each have an “unreflective and largely unconscious grasp of the basic general structure of interconnected concepts or categories in terms of which we think about the world and ourselves.”2. This would make our understanding of the world into a belief system entertained by a subject, exactly the view that Husserl and all cognitivists hold and that Heidegger rejects.
Huneeus & Orrego
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 237; henceforth cited as Crisis.
Peter Strawson, Review of Martin Heidegger by George Steiner, New York Review of Books, 19 April 1979; my italics.