Keywords: Heidegger • Things • Fundamental ontology
Martin Heidegger begins “The Thing” (1971) remarking that the modern world is becoming smaller.1 “All distances in time and space are shrinking,” he writes. “Distant sites on the most ancient cultures are shown on film as if they stood this very moment amidst today’s street traffic. […] The peak of this abolition of every possible remoteness is television, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of communication” (p. 163). But something is missing. Such a view passes over the way we dwell in the spaces of everyday life: Objective, measurable proximity is not the true measure of distance, at least, not in phenomenal terms. What is truly close? In our everyday dwelling, read as both verb and noun, “near to us are what we usually call things” (p. 164). A scientific account of the thing, Heidegger continues, does not tell us much about our meaningful existence with them. “The unpretentious thing evades thought most stubbornly” (Heidegger 1993a, p. 157). The jug, for example, is not a physically extended thing, containing liquid substance, to be replaced by a gaseous one when poured out—no, not in the first instance. We find some hints, as Heidegger frequently does, in languages past. The “Old High German word thing means a gathering, […] specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter under discussion, a contested matter.”2
Thankfully, Heidegger asks us to look to implication, rather than strict definition, in his ancestral word search.3 In terms of the jug, this means that what is gathered is what is closest to us. The wine, in ancient times, gathered divine favor, a gift from the Gods. Today’s wedding toast gathers more liquid and glassware; it celebrates the union of lovers. As we dwell with it and as it deals with us, the thing gathers meaningful life.In consequence the Old German words thing and dinc become names for an affair or matter of pertinence. […] The Romans called a matter of discourse res. […] Res publica means, not the state, but that which, known to everyone, concerns everybody and is therefore deliberated in public. (emphasis in original; Heidegger 1971, p. 172)
This short book is not about the capacity of jugs. It is about the capacity of human existence. Not existence in general—this is the incomplete project Heidegger tried to pursue in Being and Time. I want to read that book’s achievements as a way to rethink the basis of disability politics. This will require as much of an adjustment to disability studies as it will Heidegger’s phenomenology. Together, I want to establish a theoretical approach to disability that takes all ways of being human possible, a way of thinking that outlines how ability and disability are gathered in shared life in societies like ours. In this introduction, then, I would like to establish what Heidegger’s phenomenology offers disability politics. I begin by outlining the benefits of his philosophy, address the disability studies’ existing phenomenological alternatives, and discuss Heidegger’s personal involvement in Nazi politics, which no account of his thought can ignore. I conclude by outlining the content of the chapters to follow.
Fundamental Ontology
This study draws most extensively on Heidegger’s Being and Time (1996), first published 1927. In this, his most famous work, Heidegger seeks to outline the basic problem of Being, one presumed throughout the Western philosophical tradition. Heidegger argues that the fundamental structures of existence can be uncovered by reflecting on our everyday practices. As we saw in the interrogation of “the thing” above, scientific measurement fails to encounter the world as we do in our daily lives, as beings-in-the-world. To see things as mere objects, divorced from our meaningful dwelling in daily life, is to fail to consider the relevance that they have for us as things. To explore the pen in my pocket, for example, as a hunk of materials extended in three-dimensional space is to fail to understand how it is bound with meaning when applied in tasks; in short, it fails to see the relevance gathered through it. Only on the basis of these sorts of gatherings, this system of reference, do things have the properties they do, on later examination as things. To reduce things of the world to mere objects “out there,” occupying this or that much space, is to pass over being-in-the-world. To reflect on the way that we use the pen in daily modes of concern, however, gives us a window into the structures that make it possible to be human. The difference between the two kinds of inquiry, Heidegger calls the “ontological difference” (Heidegger 1996, p. 211n).
Though only present in a footnote in Being and Time (p. 211n, 230 in the original German), the ontological difference forms the basis of my reading of Heidegger.4 The difference is manifest not only in the gathering of things but also in terms of time and space. As Heidegger shows in “The Thing,” phenomenal space is found not in the objectively measurable distance between things but rather in terms of availability. My copy of Being and Time is not sitting on the table, thirty centimeters away from my hand, but rather is “in reach,” “at hand,” “right here,” and so forth. Thus, instead of existence, the English-speaking Heidegger scholarship uses the untranslated “Dasein,” literally there-being. So too does phenomenal time differ from clock time. The times and spaces of daily life are found in anticipation, in the way we continually dwell in the “what is to come,” not in minutes and seconds. These are what Heidegger calls the times and spaces of “care.” Now, as “The Thing” shows, following Being and Time, Heidegger turns from fundamental ontology—a project he abandoned—to the ways of being manifest in modern life. He explored not only in how the measurable modes of time and space were underpinned existentially but also in how they were being obscured by overtly technological life. Heidegger offers both a philosophy of Being and of being measured.
In this book, I use Heidegger’s phenomenology as a way to rethink how disability manifests in our shared world. “Disability,” “ability,” or any other attribute of human being refers not to the ultimate structures of human existence, but is rather a collective achievement brought to life within the interaction order (Goffman 1983). From Heidegger’s early work, I use the fundamental concepts of Dasein, being-in-the-world, and care (to name but three) to describe how meaningful human existence is possible. Despite the varying ways that these structures unfold in a particular life, various modalities of being-in-the-world, and a particular mode of embodiment, they remain intact. So, Heidegger’s work provides an ontological baseline on which we can explore the structures of existence. Alongside this baseline, he offers us a theory of coexistence (with-there-being, “mitdasein”).5 This mode of coexistence describes the materially situated, institutionally organized settings in which we body forth into the world (2001), where human lives unfold.6 In and through this worldly coexistence, subjectivity can emerge. I write “can emerge” because, in this formulation at least, there is no necessary link between existence, even copresence, and subjectivity. The ability to describe oneself as subject, to participate in the shared structures of intersubjectivity, these are interpersonal achievements put to work in collective life. I will explore the philosophical basis of this threefold typology of human existence, of Dasein–mitdasein–subjectivity, in the following chapter of this book.
Reorganizing the Canon
This threefold ontological framework is not simply useful in discussing the politics of disablement as an emergent mode of personhood, but allows us to realign the phenomenological canon in new and novel ways. Taking lead from the queer and feminist phenomenologies of Ahmed (2006) and Oksala (2006), I believe that attending to disablement as a mode of personhood has deeper consequences for the phenomenological product itself. These must be addressed if phenomenology is truly to be inclusive of the various “frontiers of humanity” (Rémy and Winance 2010). By attending to these consequences, I do not mean to suggest that all phenomenology to this point has been rubbish, that this book offers a “Copernican revolution” toward a more enlightened phenomenology. No, my intentions are far more humble. I believe that dwelling on disability as a way of being means that we should question the kinds of bodies and modes of being together that have been taken as representative of human lives in phenomenological philosophy. This means rethinking the place of embodiment and intersubjectivity in the canon. I address each in turn.
Within phenomenological philosophy, social theory, and disability studies, the term “embodiment” and the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty are practically synonymous. In each case, his Phenomenology of Perception is required reading. Looking to disability studies, Hughes and Paterson’s (1997) highly influential embodied critique of the social model, for instance, relies deeply on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, especially as it is read by Leder (1990). Bryan S. Turner too, whose The Body and Society (first ed. 1984) continues to be extremely influential in the sociology of the body, employs Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment alongside Foucault’s governmentality, charting how disability is lived and managed in Western, somatic society (Turner 2001). Here I do not mean to be unnecessarily iconoclastic. I do, however, want to question the fundamental role that a particular sensuous mode of being, visual perception, plays in human life. I contend, following Aho’s (2005) reading of Heidegger’s early work, that embodiment is a regional concern to fundamental ontology. It is not regional because it is unimportant. It is regional because it is only on the basis of our existence that we might explore the body as part of human life. The capacity for world disclosure, in the first place, is the preserve of fundamental ontology, whereas embodied existence is a problem downstream from the structures of existence that I will lay out in the following chapter. Merleau-Ponty himself worried that he neglected these structures of Being, “due to the fact that in part I retained the philosophy of ‘consciousness’” (1968, p. 183). There is a political dimension to this as well. The very basis of disability studies is to accord value to all modes of personhood, despite differences in human lives. By outlining “the body” as a regional concern, I am advancing this same goal. I am arguing, and will continue to argue throughout this book, that particular modes of subjectivity, particular kinds of bodies, and particular ways of being together are shaped, received, and accorded in the interaction order.
Attending to disablement as an interpersonal outcome also requires that we rethink the role played by intersubjectivity in phenomenological philosophy. Heidegger’s mentor Edmund Husserl, and particularly his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970), is the thinker whose name is closely associated with the concept, especially as part of the shared membership in the ...