World, World‐entry, and realism in early Heidegger

Abstract

Interpretations of Heidegger's Being and Time have tended to founder on the question of whether he is in the end a realist or an idealist, in part because of Heidegger's own rather enigmatic remarks on the subject. Many have thus depicted him as being in some way ambivalent, and so as holding on to an unstable combination of the two opposing positions. Recently, William Blattner has explained the apparent ambivalence by appealing to Kant's transcendental/empirical distinction. Although an ingenious reading of Being and Time, there are a number of difficulties involved in cashing out its central claims. I argue that it fails, moreover, to capture Heidegger's avowed animus toward both realism and idealism. After criticizing Blattner's reading, I recount several features of Heidegger's ‘existential analytic’ of Dasein in Division I of Being and Time and connect them with his (slightly later) notion of world‐entry. This latter notion provides a way of explaining how Heidegger retains a realistic conception of natural entities, while offering an overall view that cannot be identified with either realism or idealism.

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