What is the philosophy of today? Perhaps Hume provides an answer to this question.

In his
‘Enquiry’, Hume distinguishes between two kinds of philosophy: Active philosophy and rational,
reasonable philosophy. Active philosophy as described by Hume appeals to emotion and
passion, directing people how to live their lives, by drawing examples from everyday life. I see
Hume’s description of active philosophy as akin to self-help today; pseudo-intellectuals such as
Jordan Peterson and Deepak Chopra repeat common-sense aphorisms with little to no
intellectual rigour, making this style of philosophy relatively easy. On the other hand, reasonable
philosophy deals with rigorous certainty and methodical inquiry; it pursues principles to further
human knowledge through the methods of logic and science, employing a healthy dose of
scepticism. It does not easily influence behaviour.

Hume seems to have anticipated this division in the Enquiry, saying that reasonable philosophy
helps to inform the active kind by giving it principles to base its teachings on. But to most
people, rational philosophy seems divorced from true lived experiences of actual humans. There
seems to be something rational philosophy glosses over in its focus on certainty and logic.
However, if our only alternative is active philosophy, it seems problematic to relay these issues
to charlatanism. Is there a bridge between the two?

It is not my position to authoritatively say that Heidegger thought this way about Hume’s first
section of the Enquiry. But considering all that Heidegger has said about reason and rational
philosophy, I found it fitting to apply some of that to Hume’s work. I believe that Heidegger’s
perspective on this problem is important. Heidegger furnishes a reason for the sterile, artificial
nature of rational philosophy, while providing an alternative that does not devolve into appealing
solely to emotion. For him, the problems of rational philosophy can be traced to the origin of
Western metaphysics in Greek philosophy, with its forgetfulness of ‘Being’. This will be explored
more in Section 1. Section 2 analyses the development of rational philosophy alongside
technology, and Heidegger’s reasons for why rational philosophy may be dangerous. Section 3
deals with Heidegger’s approach to philosophy that can neither be classified as ‘active’ or
‘rational’ as Hume does, and why he believes his approach is the most important one.

Section 1: The separation of Being in the history of Western philosophy

For Heidegger, philosophy is not professional knowledge in the same sense as science and
mathematics. Even here he disagrees with Hume. The history of philosophy as it stands today is
primarily metaphysics. But for Heidegger, there are problems with the history of Western
metaphysics. Active philosophy and rational philosophy are both ignorant of the question of
Being. Heidegger’s analysis of the historical evolution of Being provides some insights into why
this may be so.

For Heidegger, the question of Being is the most important question of them all. ‘Being’ holds
much significance for Heidegger; he believes that the word has lost much of its meaning in
philosophy, resulting in a muddled tradition that doesn’t understand what it’s talking about.
There is an ontological difference between Being and that of other metaphysical concepts.
Being is not a predicate or a category as traditionally understood, and to name it as such is a
mistake. Heidegger believes that the Western philosophical tradition has forgotten this
difference and has so far treated the Being of beings as a being itself.

In view of this mistake, Heidegger seeks to inquire as to what Being is through the human (as
Dasein)1, which he believes has privileged access to Being. But Dasein is verfallen, and in its
fallenness it has ‘forgotten’ Being. It has ‘fallen’ away from Being and into beings. Dasein’s
‘fallenness’ is manifest in the ways it interacts with the world, choosing to immerse itself in
menial discourse and ambiguous tasks.2 I think that Heidegger would have considered active
philosophy as part of Dasein’s fallenness; the semblance of meaning in a world devoid of it. In
contrast, philosophy as reasonable philosophy can’t elucidate the meaning of Being through
scientific, rational methods.

But what is the reason for Dasein’s condition? Why has Dasein ‘forgotten’ Being, and immersed
itself in the world?

The Greeks first used the words φύσις and οὐσία for Being. φύσις for Heidegger means ‘the
emerging-abiding sway of constant coming-to-presence’. What does this mean? It is meant to
describe the way in which beings come into Being. In beings’ coming into Being, they emerge
and dwell within Being. φύσις can be understood as a dwelling place for beings, and οὐσία
describes the process by which beings ‘become’ in Being as they constantly abide in Being.
Beings come into Being through φύσις and οὐσία.

But the word ‘Being’ today has become a mere abstraction. We don’t really have an idea of
anything when we say the word Being, using it to refer to everything and nothing in particular.
The word itself has become meaningless, indefinite, and blurry. The separation of Being and
Thinking. In this separation, Being came to stand against thinking as an object, reifying the
subject-object distinction so prevalent in Western Metaphysics. While the original Greek thinking
of Being saw Being and Thinking as the same (as in Parmenides’ poem),3 the evolution of
thought in Plato and Aristotle saw a clear division between the two. The word λόγος, the original
Greek manner of thinking, originally meant ‘the gathering of beings in Being.’ λόγος is the way in
which the humans of pre-Socratic philosophy encountered beings and brought them into Being.
It was invoked in the activity of thinking as the gathered gatheredness of beings in φύσις.

In Plato, however, Being became relegated to the realm of εἶδος/ideas. In the works of Aristotle
one finds a study of Being qua beings. Here we glimpse upon the determination of λόγος as
reason and ontology concerned with arriving at Being through present-at-hand beings. This
determination is solidified even further in the translation of Greek truth (ἀλήθεια) to Latin truth
(Veritas). The latter refers to an agreement between assertion and fact, with the former directly
translating to ‘unconcealment’. For Heidegger, this lies at the root of the problem of Western
Metaphysics. The determination of truth as Veritas and thinking as Logic set Western
Metaphysics astray from Being.

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But what does Heidegger mean by ‘unconcealment’? Unconcealment, or ἀλήθεια, refers to the
way in which Dasein encounters entities, and how these entities come into Being. There is not a
‘correct’ way in which beings originally come into Being and are revealed to Dasein;
unconcealment speaks of the way these entities dwell in Being without the frame of correctness
being applied to them. It is the most primordial disclosure of the world to Dasein. Compare this
to how we conceive of truth today. Theories of truth that are common in epistemology are
primarily concerned with certainty. More specifically, they all share one thing in common: They
are about how an assertion relates to a fact about the world. Heidegger believes that thinking of
truth in this way leaves Dasein blind to the truth of Being through unconcealment.

This relates to the differing views of logos (λόγος). The original Greek meaning brought beings
into Being such that they would be unconcealed, revealing being as
coming-into-unconcealment. In simpler terms, it was the most original way of interacting with
entities and understanding them. It was the means by which humans brought beings into φύσις.
But logos became unrecognisable with the determination of man as animal rationale in Aristotle.
Logos became an assertion with the locus of truth in the sense of correctness. Instead of taking
entities as they were in Being in unconcealed, Dasein closed off these avenues of
understanding in favour of ‘certainty’. Logos became a tool for reasoning rather than a way to
beings in Being.

Let’s examine this in the context of Hume’s rational philosophy. In the Enquiry, Hume takes
rational philosophy to its limit. His restriction of knowledge to the realms of experience leads him
to the famous problem of induction. His account of how we come to believe in necessary
connections, causal reasoning, and induction, ultimately takes him to sceptical conclusions.
From a Heideggerian perspective, this is par for the course for Western philosophy. Hume’s
insistence on what is demonstrable and verified by experience results in him ignoring the
question of Being and the ontological tradition in which he operates.

In summary, Heidegger believes that the rational philosophy Hume speaks so highly of is
oblivious to the problem of Being. This is because of its reliance on truth as certainty rather than
unconcealment and logic rather than λόγος. In essence, we are closed off from Being in this
form of philosophy, and the entirety of Western metaphysics so far has gone severely off
course.

Section 2: Heidegger on the essence of technology

Hume believes that rational philosophy is necessary and important to the development of
knowledge and values.4 He also believes that it is for the good of society that a ‘spirit of
accuracy’ is acquired such that knowledge may be better perfected and applicable. But
Heidegger believes the opposite: That rational philosophy is a flawed way of thinking, and, in
fact, it is a technological way of thinking, and could spell disaster for mankind to persist in.

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Heidegger believes that the essence of modern technology lies in enframing. Enframing can be
understood as such: Technology forces nature to comply with a set ‘order’ of existence. It
challenges nature to be ordered into a ‘standing-reserve’, to be at hand to man. For example,
technology sets upon a river by viewing it as a set of calculable facts, in order to put it to use as
an object. In the time of the Greeks technology was a mode of revealing as techne (τέχνη), a
‘bringing-forth’ into Being. But modern technology’s mode of revealing reveals the actual as
standing-reserve: Pure facts of resources to be put to use as purely present-at-hand objects.

The way rational philosophy paves the way for the advent of modern technology is through the
relationship of truth and certainty. Heidegger views the rise of modern physics as one such
example - He says that physics does not merely ‘applies apparatus to the questioning of nature’,
but in fact, physics as ‘pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces
calculable in advance, it orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and
how nature reports itself when set up in this way.’ In essence, Heidegger believes that the
questions that technology asks about nature are restrictive; they present themselves as already
able to be solved through calculation in pure theory. This is a result of the aforementioned focus
on truth as certainty rather than unconcealment, and the technological urge to force beings into
certainty rather than let beings be.

For Heidegger, truth is not the correspondence of fact to reality, but the way in which Being
unfolds and is revealed to man. Technological thinking conceives of truth only as certainty, as
modern science does. It is oblivious to the Being of beings. It does not think in terms of the
meaning of entities in Being, but sees only pure presence, the observable.

Thus Hume’s rational philosophy, according to Heidegger, would be beholden to the essence of
technology, and could result in an even further forgetfulness of Being. The essence of
technology threatens to eclipse all thinking and conceal Being.

Section 3: Now what?

As we have seen, Heidegger doesn’t believe that reasonable philosophy in the Humean sense
is meaningful as it stays oblivious to the problem of Being. But that creates a problem: What
next? Does Heidegger offer an alternative to this kind of philosophy that isn’t active philosophy?
Yes, actually. Heidegger offers two ways out of this problem, the first philosophical and the
second artistic: Fundamental ontology and poetry.

First, fundamental ontology. Heidegger’s philosophical project was primarily concerned with
overcoming the problems in Western metaphysics that he saw, namely, a ‘forgetting’ of Being. In
Being and Time, Heidegger believes that the way to Being is through Dasein. As Dasein is the
one positing the question of Being, it is only through understanding Dasein’s being that Being
can be revealed. And Dasein’s being is distinguished from the being of all other entities by the
fact that its being is an issue for it - Meaning Dasein has some relationship with Being, and this
relationship is disclosed in Dasein’s Being.5
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Fundamental ontology is not to be confused with Humean active philosophy’s focus on the
human. Opening oneself up to Being, for Heidegger, is not purely emotional. Heidegger
distinguishes between emotions and Befindlichkeit (attunements); only the latter are capable of
disclosing Being as a whole and the ‘there’ of Dasein.6 It is not an appeal to passion or emotion
to sway one in living one’s life in a certain way, but is rather a way for Dasein to open itself to
Being.

Later Heidegger, however, will soon change his mind about this. He will no longer see an
ontological analysis of Dasein as the main point of entry into Being, as the method of inquiry
itself is caught up in so much ontological baggage that attempting to start the project of
fundamental ontology comes ‘too soon’.7 Instead, Heidegger will turn to poetry as the primary
way in which Being may be disclosed.

Poetry for Heidegger must be distinguished from how someone like Hume would view poetry.
Hume would view poetry as an attempt to sway opinion by appealing to passion or the faculties
of emotion, and thus not find very much philosophically meaningful out of it. In contrast,
Heidegger’s view of poetry is as poiesis (ποίησις), a ‘bringing-forth’ of the essence of beings in
Being. Compared to the technological mode of bringing-forth, ποίησις lets the entities show
themselves in themselves as themselves. It is a mode of revealing that ties in with Heidegger’s
view of truth as unconcealment.

Compare this with Hume’s active philosophy: Although there is less of an emphasis on reason,
Heidegger’s alternatives do not attempt to appeal to emotion or passion. Rather, the poetry and
ontology of Heidegger attempt to disclose Being and the ways Being is revealed to Dasein. Of
course, there is an ‘active’ perspective to take, but it is not ‘obvious and easy’ like Hume
assumes. The mystery of Being lies concealed for Heidegger, and to catch a glimpse of its
revelation through poetry requires opening oneself up to the essence of Being, not getting
caught up in the vicissitudes of the world through active philosophy.

Conclusion

It is apparent that Heidegger would not jive with Hume’s union of the two different philosophies.
One may be tempted to lump Heidegger’s philosophy in with active philosophy. But it is
important to note that Heidegger’s philosophy is primarily concerned with the question of Being,
and attempts to interrogate into Being through poetry or Dasein. Active philosophy merely tells
one how to live one’s life - It is indulgent self-help disguised as saccharine self-flagellation. It still
remains oblivious to the question of Being as rational philosophy is, but with even less
intellectual rigour.

Thus I think both Heidegger and Hume would be greatly dissatisfied with Jordan Peterson.

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 Reference List

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward

Robinson. New York: HarperCollins, 1962.

Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by John Macquarrie and

Edward Robinson. New York: HarperCollins, 1935.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. Translated by John

Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: HarperCollins, 1962.

` Hume, David. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Translated by Jonathan

Bennett, 2017. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/hume1748.pdf