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Heidegger's representationalism

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Heidegger's Representationalism
Author(s): Carleton B. Christensen
Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Sep., 1997), pp. 77-103
Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.
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 REPRESENTATIONALISM
HEIDEGGER'S
CARLETONB. CHRISTENSEN

F OR at least the last twenty years, Anglo-American philosophers

have displayed two interrelated tendencies in their efforts to make
sense of Martin Heidegger. First, they have frequently mapped
Heidegger onto debates and problems within contemporary cognitive
science and North American philosophy of psychology. Second, they
have often attempted to discern deep identities and affinities with
more familiarphilosophers and traditions, in particular, with Wittgen
stein and American pragmatism. That these twin strategies of inter

pretation are so popular is in large part due to the work of Hubert L.

Dreyfus has pursued both lines of hermeneutic attack with a

Dreyfus.
vengeance, and in so doing has devised an interpretation of Heidegger
which makes him appear as a theoretical philosopher whom even

hard-nosed cognitive scientists and analytical philosophers of mind

can take seriously.
As Dreyfus reads him, Heidegger's central achievement lies in his

anticipating contemporary antirepresentationalist critiques of repre

sentational theories of mind. According to Dreyfus, Heidegger's prime
innovation and novelty is to challenge the subject/object model of
mind which has dominated philosophy and psychology from Des
cartes through Husserl to the present. The subject/object model con
strues the knowing and acting "self" as a "subject" which is always re
lated intentionally to the world via "representations" of "objects."

Heidegger, according to Dreyfus, rejects this: "Heidegger accepts in

tentional directedness as essential to human activity, but he denies
that
[all] intentionality is mental, that it is, as Husserl (following Bren

tano) claimed, the distinguishing characteristic of mental states."1 In

other words, while Heidegger concedes that intentionality is essential
to being a "subject" or "self," he rejects the traditional idea that

Correspondence to: Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, The

Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0020, Australia.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1991), 50-1.

The Review ofMetaphysics 51 (September 1997): 77-103. Copyright ? 1997 by The Review of
Metaphysics
78 CARLETON B. CHRISTENSEN

intentionality is always and only a feature of the standard folk-psycho

logical states and experiences. It is not always and only what Dreyfus
calls representational intentionality, that is, a matter of being in, or
having, the standard folk-psychological intentional states and experi
ences.2 While "we sometimes experience ourselves as conscious sub

jects relating to objects by way of intentional states such as desires,

beliefs, perceptions, intentions, etc-,"3 Dreyfus's Heidegger also in
sists that our actually relating to objects by way of such standard folk

psychological states and experiences is "a derivative and intermittent

condition."4 Only when our normal, everyday dealings with familiar

things become problematic, or even break down completely, do psy

chological states and experiences with any kind of mental or repre

sentational content arise.5 In general, claims Dreyfus, Heidegger
maintains that "all relations of mental states to their objects presup
pose a more basic form of being-with-things which does not involve
mental activity."6
Elsewhere I have shown
that Dreyfus really has no basis at all in
Heidegger's texts for attributing to Heidegger the thesis that represen
tational intentionality is an intermittent condition founded in such

nonrepresentational "absorbed coping" with familiar things.7 In this

same paper, I also suggest that this purely negative demonstration
must be complemented by a more positive account of what Heidegger
is really getting at, an account which clearly entails the falsity of at

tributing this thesis to Heidegger. Sketching at least the broad out

linesof, the Entwurf or Vorgriff for, just such an account is the task
of the current paper. Specifically, I shall outline an account of what

Heidegger means
by Dasein, preciselymore specifically, and
by
Dasein's self-comportment toward innerworldly entities, from which
it clearly follows that Heidegger is not at all out to reject the tradi
tional idea that subjects or selves relate to the world via representa

tions, at least not when these notions are correctly understood.8

Indeed, the account to be outlined here not merely does not en

tail Dreyfus's central thesis, it positively contradicts it. Heidegger in

2 72-4.
Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World,
3Ibid., 5.
4 Ibid.

5Ibid., 76.
6Ibid., 52.
7See Carleton B. off the West
Christensen, "Getting Heidegger Coast,"
Inquiry 41 (March 1998).
 79
REPRESENTATIONALISM
HEIDEGGER'S
fact endorses the traditional idea that the subject always relates to the
world via once again provided that these notions are
representations,
properly understood. Attaining just such a proper understanding is
his real objective. His real concern is not at all simply to
precisely
shift the boundaries of the concept of representation while leaving the

concept itself untouched. Rather, he is seeking to overcome the tradi

tion's misinterpretations of its own abstract characterization of the
and its relation to the world. In particular, Heidegger is out to
subject
overcome the characteristically modern misinterpretation of this rela
tion as a psycho-physical transaction modellable in a powerfully ex

planatory, natural scientifically oriented psychological theory.

Clearly, if this is the right way to read him, then, pace Dreyfus, Heideg
ger is not at all a friend of antirepresentationalist cognitive science.
Nor is he any kind of naturalist, not even of the laid-back, nonreduc
tive kind endorsed by Dreyfus and much contemporary antirepresen
tationalism.

The in which Dasein Continually Lives. In order to see

"Sight"
is not out to deny representations, or even merely to
why Heidegger
restrict the notion of representation to certain kinds of intentional be

havior, we must understand what he means by self-comportment to

ward innerworldly entities (Sich-Verhalten zum innerweltlich

This, however, requires us to delimit more precisely the

Seienden).
terrain to be traversed. For Heidegger in fact
distinguishes three
kinds of self-comportment: (1) apoietic self-comportment toward in

nerworldly entities, that is, concern (Besorgen); (2) a practical self

comportment toward others, that is, solicitude (F?rsorge); and (3) an

autopoietic self-comportment toward one's own self. With each of

these he associates a distinctive kind of sight: practical circumspec
tion (Umsicht) in the case of concern, regard (R?cksicht) in the case

8 is wrong to re
Hannay has argued, rightly in my opinion, that Dreyfus
so-called absorbed coping as absolutely nonrepresentational; see
gard
Alastair Hannay, Human Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1990), chap. 6,
esp. 101-17. Hannay does, however, appear to accept that Dreyfus has got
Heidegger right. Thus, his critique of Dreyfus on this point is at the same
time a critique or correction of Heidegger, whose analysis he describes on p.
124 as ". . . too defensively anti-Cartesian to bring out the extent to which
worlds belong to the category of consciousness...."
80 CARLETON B. CHRISTENSEN

of solicitude, and, in the case of the third kind of self-comportment,

"the sight toward that Being as such for the sake of which any Dasein
is as it is."9
Now inwhat follows Iwill be concerned solely with the first kind
of self-comportment, that is, self-comportment toward innerworldly
entities. In the lecture History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger
speaks of an innerworldly entity in two senses. This is either (1) some
entity actually in use as a tool or piece of equipment (Zeug, das Zu
handene, the ready-to-hand), or (2) some entity present in the context
of some ongoing activity, an
entity one might take into use,10 but
which one might also, depending on what one is doing, need to moni
tor, avoid, circumnavigate, or in some way come to terms with in or
der to succeed in what one is doing. Heidegger calls the latter kind of
entity the always already present-at-hand (das immer schon Vorhan
dene).11 (This notion of something present-at-hand in an inner
worldly sense regrettably disappears, or is at least effaced, in the later
work Sein und Zeit.12 In that work, the innerworldly present-at-hand
is swallowed up from two opposing directions, namely, from one side
by the ready-to-hand, where it survives at best as das
Unzuhandene;
and from the other by that more
side emphatic conception of the
present-at-hand according to which the present-at-hand is an entity in
its capacity as a "deworlded," objectified member of the universe of
discourse of natural science.) Clearly, being ready-to-hand and being
always already present-at-hand are different roles one and the same

thing can play at different times.

9Martin Sein und Zeit (hereafter,

Heidegger, "SZ"), 15th ed. (T?bingen:
Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979), ?31, p. 146 (186); translation modified. In cita
tions of this work, the number(s) in parentheses refer to the relevant pages
of the English translation Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962). Each kind of sight is also
described as a kind of understanding (Verstehen); see Heidegger, SZ, ?31, p.
146 (186).
10That
is, "was st?ndig verf?gbar, aber nicht ausdr?cklich im besor
. . .";Martin
genden Griff ist Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des
Zeitbegriffs (hereafter, "PGZ"), (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979), ?23, p. 270
(198-9). In citations of this work, the number(s) in parentheses refer to the
relevant pages in the English translation History of the Concept of Time,
trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
11 See Heidegger, PGZ, ?23, pp. 258 (190), 262 (193), 263 (194), and 270
1 (198-9), esp. 263 and 270.
12See
Heidegger, SZ, ?16, 73 (103), in particular, the last lines of the
page. InPGZ, Heidegger speaks of "Unzuhandenheit" at ?23, p. 256 (189).
 REPRESENTATIONALISM
HEIDEGGER'S 81
In order to make this first kind of self-comportment and its asso
ciated sight both intelligible and at least to some extent plausible, I
want to tell a little story. A computer scientist builds a sophisticated
robot called Rl.13 Rl knows that its last spare battery is sitting on a
wagon in the storeroom, but that also in the storeroom there is a time
bomb set to go off. Rl computes that if the battery is not removed
from the room, it will soon be destroyed, leaving Rl without any en
ergy supply. Rl then computes a solution to the problem it confronts:

pull the trolley out of the room. So in Rl goes and pulls the wagon
out. Unfortunately, what Rl does not know is that the bomb is also

sitting on the wagon. Nor has anyone programmed Rl to look out for
this possibility. So Rl just goes ahead and pulls the wagon out. Of
course, the bomb comes along for the ride, thereby foiling Rl's other
wise quite sensible
plan.
The computer scientist goes back to the drawing board and
builds a new robot, R1D1. R1D1 is programmed to check out whether
there is a bomb on the wagon. Thus, when R1D1 confronts a situation
similar to what brought Rlto grief, it does look to see whether the
bomb is on the wagon. This time, there is no bomb on the wagon, so
the robot pulls the wagon out.
Unfortunately, there is a slight novelty
in this second situation: a second wagon is tied to the first, and the
bomb is on this wagon. Once again the bomb comes out with the bat

tery, foiling yet another seemingly well-laid plan.

It is clear enough that with a little creative, lateral thinking one
can iterate this story indefinitely, each time introducing a new novelty
to which the computer scientist's latest robot would remain curiously
and unintelligently blind, while an ordinary human being would not.
There are after all in principle no limits on how things in the room

might be arranged in humanly recognizable ways such that a plan of

action which would normally, or ceteris paribus, achieve the desired

result, not
will do so in these
particular circumstances.
Perhaps the
bomb is tied by string to the wagon. Perhaps it is attached not to the

top of the wagon, but to its side. Perhaps the bomb is in the way of the

wagon, so the robot must first push it out of the way before attempting
to pull the wagon out of the room. Nor can the robot restrict its

13This little story is adapted from Daniel Dennett, "Cognitive Wheels," in

The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem and Other Problems of Holism
in Artificial Intelligence, ?d. Zenon Pylyshyn (Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex
Publishing, 1987), 41-64.
82 CARLETON B. CHRISTENSEN

attention just to the bomb. Perhaps the wagon has a clearly visible
broken wheel, or has been wheel-clamped. Perhaps the floor of the
storeroom has gaping holes in it, or is coated with a sticky substance,

thereby making it impossible to maneuver the wagon. The possibili

ties are endless.
It seems, therefore, that by simply adding ever more routines to
the original program our computer scientist will never come up with

R2D2, the fictional robot from "Star Wars" whose intelligence is, in all
its context-sensitivity, quite comparable and perhaps even superior to
its human models. Of course, one standard response of so-called
hands-on research in artificial intelligence (AI) would be to demand
more money with which to develop even faster computer hardware,
more efficient search algorithms, and more sophisticated databases

containing tons of information about the scenarios one is likely to en

counter when attempting to retrieve a battery from a storeroom. This

response, however, quite apart from its infinitely promissory charac

ter, which disenfranchises a priori all possible external critique, is

also objectionable on theoretical grounds.
For the rales by which our robots determined whether pulling the

wagon out of the storeroom in the given circumstances is appropriate

or not have an unavoidably heuristic, ceteris paribus character. Both
robots appealed, for example, to the rale that if x is on y, then?all
else being equal?pulling y will pull x along with y. It is clear, how

ever, that things could very well be unequal.14 Thus, x could be firmly
chained to something z which, relative to y, is immovable. If so, then

resorting to this rale in these

particular circumstances will lead to a
false conclusion as to the wisdom of pulling y in order to pull x. Yet it
is strictly, and not merely practically, impossible to check out in ad
vance whether or notall things are equal. For one thing, there is no
clear upper limit on what could or could not be equal. Before the cru
cial computation of what to do takes place, one would first have to
work through an indefinite number of ceteris paribus conditions. For
another and more important thing, establishing that things are un

equal would require appeal to further general rales with a similarly ce

teris paribus character. An indefinite regress has for all intents and

purposes become infinite. Of course, one could imagine that either

14 the ceteris paribus clause in these rules is pre

Indeed, exploiting
cisely how our story is built up; it is also the key to the indefinite iterability of
our story.
HEIDEGGER'S REPRESENTATIONALISM 83

evolution or MIT hadprogrammed in a certain inability or unwilling

ness to follow out beyond a certain point the tangled threads of ceteris

paribus conditions. This would at least ensure

eventually the that
crucial computation took place. Yet this too is to dodge the real prob
lem with a quick fix. For any such cut-off point would both be arbi

trary and, more important, inflexible; in indefinitely many cases it

would either extend deliberation too long, or cut it off too soon for

genuinely intelligent, context-sensitive action to be possible.

So to respond in this way is to miss entirely what our thought ex

periments teach. They teach that in addition to whatever computation

and calculation is involved in the genuinely intelligent assessment of
courses of action and their subsequent revision in the light of the con
text, such assessment must also involve a decidedly noncomputa
tional ability to see what is relevant in for
its particular relevance
what one is doing. Let us home in on this ability by considering a clas
sic example of the kind ofthing our robots had trouble doing. Imagine
that I am riding to the university on my bike when a man suddenly
steps out in front of me. What exactly do I see? The subject-indepen

dent, neutral fact that a man stepping out in front of me, say, about
two to three yards away, travelling about three miles per hour perpen
dicularly tomy own line of travel? No, for if I did, then Iwould be like
the robot R1D1
who, having seen the bomb on the wagon, still had
then to compute the significance of this fact for its activity. I do not
see the neutral fact and then infer its subjective significance for what I
am doing. I see directly and immediately that the man is stepping out
too closely and too slowly for comfort, that is, so closely and slowly
that I cannot continue on as I am.

Indeed, if I did not directly see this significance, if I did have to

calculate it, then Iwould also have to be calculating that the magpie

flying up to my left was not moving too closely and slowly to present a

problem, that the garbage can standing on my right was not in my way,
and so on and so forth. For if I have to calculate the relevance of the
one neutral fact, then no fact can be standing out from all the rest in
virtue of its relevance. They must all be standing out and Imust be

engaged in a combinatorially exploding exercise of sorting the myri

ads of neutral facts into those that are, and those that are not, relevant
for what I am doing. So I do not, indeed cannot, see mere neutral facts
and then sort them according to their relevance or irrelevance.

Rather, I simply see them in their significance or relevance for me.

More accurately, I do not see mere neutral facts at all. Against a
 84 CARLETONB. CHRISTENSEN

general background awareness of context, which has no particular

entity, event, or set thereof as its intentional object, I see certain
things and events standing out as relevant for what I am doing in cer
tain ways.15 I suddenly see that a man is stepping out in front of me in
such a close and slow way that Imust take evasive action in order to
keep my current activity on track toward its end point and purpose.
In this and similar cases, I respond fluently and supplely on the basis
of my seeing the relevances and saliences for what they are, thereby
directly recognizing what concrete response is demanded of me in my
current situation.16
Thisability to see the relevant in its relevance is what the frame
problem in classical AI is pointing to. In the literature on this prob
lem, there has been extensive hair splitting about just what the frame
problem is. Yet however many variations and descendant sub-prob
lems17 one be able to resolve the frame problem
might into, they all
turn around, and originate in, one thing: the ability of be
intelligent
ings like humans to recognize relevance or salience. Not only has it
proved insuperably difficult to model, and thereby to explain, this
ability, it has been hard even to describe it, that is, to recognize it for
what it is. This ability seems to defy all efforts to explain it away.
Thought experiments like the story of R1D1 bring out the problematic
character of these reductive efforts. Importantly, they do this by ex
ploiting a feature of this ability which must be characterized in tempo
ral terms. This feature is the capacity to recognize relevance even
when this relevance is unexpected, that is, not something which fol
lows in any deductive or algorithmic way from what the possessor of
this ability knows in advance.

15
Precisely because what I see is structured in terms of relevance, I am
not merely able to see what I need to see, I am also able not to see what I do
not need to see. Without this focus, which is determined by my overall goal,
Iwould not be able to act and adapt.
16Note that this is not to
say that I form the intention to respond as re
quired, which then causes the appropriate bodily movement. In no way does
this account commit one to the view that for all things I do intentionally, I
have an intention to do these things. A proper account of action would point
out the character of intentions and conscious goals as Entw?rfe, a character
which how I can do some things intentionally without
explains intending to
do them, for instance, pulling the trigger when carrying out my intention to
assassinate the Prime Minister.
17For the persistence
example, problem, the ramification problem, and
the qualification problem; see Jozsef A. Toth's review of Reasoning Agents
in a Dynamic World: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence 72
(1995): 323-69, esp. 324.
 REPRESENTATIONALISM
HEIDEGGER'S 85

Now to say that this ability to recognize the relevant is irreducibly

primitive is in effect to say that it consists in recognizing the relevant

in its relevance, that is, as relevant. Intelligent beings do not infer to
the relevance of things around them on the basis of what they see,
rather they see things directly and insightfully as relevant in this or
that way for current activity. For them, there is no frame problem in
need of solution. So the lesson of the frame problem and the thought

experiments which articulate it is that what an intelligently behaving

system works on, what it relates to as "data," are irreducibly those re
lations of relevance or salience in which entities and events in its op

erating environment stand, given what the system is doing. Such rela
tions constitute the input to any system insofar as it is genuinely

perceiving and on that basis responding intelligently to things in its

environment. Theto any genuinely
inputs perceiving, intelligently be

having system alwaysare already structured in terms of their rele

vance for what the system is doing. Anything less and the frame prob
lem will not be solved?or more correctly, avoided.
Thus whatever representations may in fact be causally implicated
in the generation of intelligent behavior, these must be understood as

taking effect only as embedded within seeing and re

a process of

sponding to what is given as relevant in the light of that future goal to

ward which the behavior tends. Representations, in order to be repre

sentations, must be generated by "inputs" which are in themselves

always already meaningfully structured, relative to that toward which

the bearer of theserepresentations is on its way. Correspondingly,
the bearer of representations, in order to be such a bearer, is always
more than the causal sum of the individual representational parts
which make it up. As essentially future-directed, it can only be recog
nized and understood for what it is from the perspective of that to
ward which it is moving.18 Finally, as such a future-directed, "sighted"
process of adjusting itself to potentially unprecedented challenges
and opportunities, it must always be internally related to a situation
and context which throws up such challenges and opportunities, a
situation and context in which entities and states of affairs are struc
tured into foreground and background, near and far, according to
their relevance.

18This
point proves useful when one comes to extend this account of
self-comportment to the third kind of self-comportment, namely, Dasein's
self-comportment toward its own self, which is discussed in the Second Divi
sion of Being and Time.
86 CARLETON B. CHRISTENSEN

We can now return to the notion

of self-comportment, at least to
ward innerworldly entities, and its particular kind of sight. For my
claim is that when Heidegger speaks of Dasein as itself
comporting
understandingly toward entities in and of the world into which it is
contingently "thrown," he intends in part precisely what I have just
outlined. The self, the subject of representation, or whatever you
want to call it, is essentially and primarily a process of regulating and
adjusting behavior in response to perception of the relevant in the
light of an overall goal. This character of the self precedes any sense
in which itmight be legitimately describable as either a bundle or a
bearer of representations or intentional acts. In other words, inten
tional states and events in the
pre-theoretical, folk-psychological
sense are essentially dependent parts of a whole which is future-di
rected in the sense of being a tending-toward, a being-on-the-way-to,
some future end state. Furthermore, this future-directed, anticipatory
whole is sighted in the sense that it can see without prior precedent
what it needs to see as this is determined by that toward which it is
under way.
Such prudential sightedness is, I maintain, what Heidegger
means by practical circumspection. Self-comportment toward inner
worldly entities is, he tells us,
. . .not blind, it has its own kind of
seeing which guides manipulation
and imparts to it its specific sureness. Our dealings with equipment
subordinate themselves to the matrix of functional references defined
by each item's "in-order-to." The sight with which such dealing accom
modates itself is circumspection (Umsicht).19

That practical circumspection is quite literally a guiding, prudential

sight and thus quite genuinely and nonmetaphorically perception is
also indicated by a comment Heidegger makes about what he calls
"natural perception" (nat?rliche Wahrnehmung). In History of the
Concept of Time, Heidegger speaks of
... a concrete and natural perception, the perception of a chair which I
find upon entering a room and push aside, since it stands inmy way....
Natural perception as I live in it in moving about my world is for the
most part not a detached observation and scrutiny of things, but is
rather absorbed in dealing with the matters at hand concretely and
practically. It is not self-contained; I do not perceive in order to per
ceive but in order to orient myself, to pave the way in dealing with
something. This is a wholly natural way of looking in which I continu
ally live.20

19
Heidegger, SZ, ?15, p. 69 (98); translation considerably modified.
 REPRESENTATIONALISM
HEIDEGGER'S 87

Evidently, the natural perception of which Heidegger is here speaking

is precisely practical circumspection. Thus understood, practical cir

cumspection is quite literally a form of perception, hence of represen

tational intentionality. Moreover, it is one in which I continually live,
even when skillfully and unproblematically dealing with everyday
things. So-called absorbed coping is, for all its absorbedness, essen

tially and always sighted. It is always on the lookout for the unexpect

edly relevant intrusions of ambient things. When I enter a furnished

room, I literally see the chair, and moreover see it as in the way?to
which I then respond by pushing it to one side. In this particular in

stance, the chair is not something ready-to-hand, but rather a case

of
das immer schon Vorhandene, that is, the always already present-at
hand. It is one of those innumerable ambient entities which intrude
upon my skillful use of the ready-to-hand. And intrude it does?as in
my way, needing to be pushed aside, and so on. It stands out in this its
relevance against the unobtrusive presence of all the things which to

gether constitute the functionally structured spatial whole of, say, a

dining room as opposed to an office or a bedroom. Yet in so doing it
does not cause breakdown or even a minor hitch; it is just something I

genuinely cope with precisely because I see it in its relevance and for
this reason genuinely know how to accommodate it. Thus, practical

circumspection does indeed qualify as perception in a natural sense: it

is certainly not a staring contemplation, nor is it independent. I do not

perceive simply in order to perceive but in order to orient myself, to

prepare the way, or to work on something. This is indeed a quite natu
ral way of looking in which I continually live.

Evidently, this broad sketch of Heidegger's notion of self-com

portment toward innerworldly entities and its associated sight is

highly reconstructive. Nonetheless, if it is right, then Heidegger's nov

elty and innovation cannot be what Dreyfus thinks it is. Heidegger by

no means denies the (minimally!) representational character of all
intentional activity, and in particular, of our everyday dealings with fa
miliar things. In comporting oneself toward innerworldly entities, one
is always practically circumspect (umsichtig), and hence always

20
Heidegger, PGZ, ?5, pp. 37-8 (29-30). Of recent Anglo-American com
mentators, Olafson has shown himself most sensitive to just how important
perception is for Heidegger. The interpretation offered here can be seen as
spelling out part of what Heidegger means by aisthesis, which, as Olafson
points out, iswhat Heidegger sometimes calls perception; see Frederick Olaf
son, "Heidegger ? laWittgenstein or 'Coping' with Prof. Dreyfus," Inquiry 37
(1994), 45-64, esp. 51.
88 CARLETON B. CHRISTENSEN

perceiving. Heidegger is thus not at all maintaining that perception,

and with it, the other kinds of so-called representational intentional
ity, constitute an "intermittent condition"21 founded in a non-represen
tational skillful engagement with things?as if our intentional behav
ior consisted mostly of nonrepresentational, absorbed coping
punctuated by bouts of representational intentionality. Indeed, his ac
tual position contradicts this claim. Because self-comportment to
ward entities is essentially sighted in the sense outlined, it always in
volves perception, and therefore volition and affective disposedness.
So pace Dreyfus, genuinely skillful, context-sensitive intentional be
havior always involves a (minimally!) representational awareness, in

deed, a consciousness of entities. In particular, it always involves

everyday, natural perceptual consciousness of entities as relevant in

this or that way, hence requiring this or that response, given what one
is currently doing.
Of course, when I am using my hammer, I am not conscious of it
in the sense of looking at it, listening to it, noting how it is to touch,
and so forth. Indeed, when expertly using it, my hammer becomes so
much part of me, so much an extension of my body, that I have no
awareness in which reference is made
specifically if, as
to it. Yet

Heidegger intimates, in such use I look away from my hammer (Weg

sehen),22 this is only because I am so to speak looking along it (En

tlangsehen) to the always already present-at-hand entities upon which

I am working, or which have intruded upon what I am doing. I am and
must be aware things as how the nail is going
of such in, how the sur
face is faring, and finally,
of the wood last but not least, that the nail
has been driven in as required, so that it is time-to stop hammering
and to do the next thing. Furthermore, when I do move on to the next

thing, say, to sand back the surface of the wood, I positively look for
the sandpaper and thus positively see where and how it is lying. Natu

rally, when I am actually using the sandpaper, it too recedes into the

background; Imerely look along it.

Thus in no sense does this interpretation of self-comportment
and its associated sight contradict the obvious point that in everyday
engagement with things, we do not see things in the sense of a con

templative, inspecting staring (ein starrendes Betrachten). To think

this is to confuse Umsehen with Hinsehen. It is to fail to understand
what Heidegger means by natural perception, that is, everyday per

21 5.
Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World,
22See 259 (191).
Heidegger, PGZ, ?23ba, p.
HEIDEGGER'S REPRESENTATIONALISM 89

ception as it really is, undistorted by externally motivated philoso

phical interpretations such as the
psycho-physical subject/object
model of cognition and action. Such everyday perception is insight
into the possibilities of a situation on the basis of the past and in the

light of the future. It is a being-on-the-lookout-for those relevant nov

elties which the everyday harbors as an essential possibility. It is be
cause such sight is in this way watchful, that is, care-full, that Heideg

ger describes its various kinds as so many forms of understanding. In

so doing, he seeks to emphasize precisely the cognitive and thus (min

imally) representational element implicated in genuinely intelligent

trial and error, that is to say, in any skill qua normatively and teleolog
ically structured ability to do what is appropriate, and not qua mere
motor ability of the kind we share with insects and Rodney Brooks's
mobots.

II

Heidegger's Antinaturalist Critique of the Subject/Object Model

of Mind. The above interpretation does not merely allow us to see
how Dreyfus gets Heidegger wrong. It also allows us to identify within
Heidegger a much more sophisticated understanding of the subject/

object model of mind, and a much more radical critique thereof, than
one finds and those influenced
in Dreyfus by him.
Just what is the subject/object model anyway? Dreyfus regards it,
rightly enough, as a product of early modernity which is very much
alive in much contemporary psychological theory. Like Richard Rorty
and many others, however, he regards the defining characteristic of
this model as its appeal to representations. Surely this is incorrect.
Much of what Descartes, for example, says about ideas, that is, repre
sentations, is borrowed from the late Scholastic nominalism in which
he had been brought up. Some of the things he says are indeed mod
ern. One particularly important example is his claim that our ideas
need in no way resemble their causes.23 Precisely such genuinely
modern claims as this seem to speak against, rather than for, any con
ception of mind as a mirror of nature, at least when this metaphor is

23 the Third Meditation of Descartes' Meditationes de

See, for example,
-Meditations on First A
prima philosophia philosophy: Bilingual Edition,
ed. George Heffernan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990),
para. 11, pp. 126-7.
90 CARLETONB. CHRISTENSEN
allowed to do some serious work. A mirror image is, after all, an im
age, and hence implicates perception. So a mind which genuinely mir
rored nature would be quite premodern in its reliance on a sense-per

ception untutored by reason and its method. In any case, even if it

were right to describe Descartes as making a distinctive appeal to the
mind as a mirror of nature, this alone would not be sufficient to gener
ate the possibility of evil demons and brains in vats. For this one
needs to presuppose, as in fact Descartes does, the early modern
metaphysics of mind and self as a psycho-physical unity. This meta

physics underlies Descartes' claim that my ideas

need not resemble
their causes. Crucially, he presupposes this metaphysics in making
his fatal move from the obvious and completely uninteresting fact that
any one of my perceptions may be wrong to the much more dramatic
conclusion that all my perceptions could be wrong all at once, or
across the board.
In fact, it is not at all the notion of representation, not even in the

nonfolk-psychological, theoretical sense of little entities, for example,

images or sentences, in the mind which generates the modern, sub

ject/object model of mind. What generates this model and its con
comitant pseudo-problem of the external world is the psycho-physical

spin which early modernity quite deliberately gives the notion of hu

man cognition and action. Descartes and other early modern thinkers
shared the metaphysical conviction that the created world, when de
scribed as it truly is, is the purely physical world of mathematico
physical natural science. This conviction led them to conceive of the
human subject as existing a world in which objects act upon the sub

ject in lawful ways to generate representations and ultimately inten

tional behavior, while this intentional behavior in turn reacts lawfully
back upon these objects to induce change in the world. Crucially,
these causal transactions back and forth among objects, representa
tions, and intentional behavior take place according to descriptions
which are not at all the descriptions impressed upon the subject by
these representations themselves. For these latterdescriptions are
the qualitative, subject-relative descriptions of everyday life and untu
tored sense perception; they thus do not capture how the world really
is. Evidently, under this interpretation of them, everyday human cog
nition and action, indeed the human
subject itself, become phenom
ena in principle modellable in, and hence explainable by, a unified
theory which systematically maps psychological phenomena and in
tentional behavior onto physical causes. Commitment to this idea is
 REPRESENTATIONALISM
HEIDEGGER'S 91

what unites the otherwise competing metaphysical doctrines of dual

and the like. When in the
ism, reductive materialism, eliminativism,
nineteenth century Gustav Fechner (1801-87) articulates the idea of a
free of paralogistic metaphysical and theological bal
pyscho-physics
last, he is only bringing this unifying commitment to the fore.
It is thus this underlying commitment to a conception of everyday
and action as psycho-physical which defines the subject/ob
cognition
ject model. It is this feature of it which forms the real target of
For he regards this conception as inducing a rad
Heidegger's critique.
ically distorted notion precisely of human subjectivity and its repre

sentations, that is to say, of its intentionality. The substance of this

critique is as follows: in comporting myself toward the entities of this

I am most definitely perceiving. Yet what am I perceiving? En
world,
tities in their relevance or salience for me, given what I am doing. I am

thus not seeing states of affairs which are objective, or, more accu
in the sense of having no
internal relation to myself.
rately, objectified,
In fact, what I perceive, what I am perceptually conscious of, is so to
The reality perceived, and thus my
speak a function of my volitions.

itself, are fundamentally structured by what I am trying to

perceiving
and affections: What I see is
do, and thus by my intentions, desires,
how a man is stepping out in front of me too closely and slowly for
comfort. The man is seen as stepping out in such and such an imperil

ling way.
Thus, properly understood, perceiving, and hence cognizing, are
not separable from intending and desiring. Indeed, since intending
and desiring presuppose desiring or valuing certain things in and for

themselves, and since, as Anscombe's saucer of mud shows, what one

desires or values in and for itself depends upon one's Befindlichkeit,
that is, one's affective disposedness, natural perception is not at all a

faculty merely contingently, hence separably, wired up to faculties of

desire and feeling. Heidegger, like the Romantics, Hegel, and Dilthey
before him, rejects the idea of faculties (Verm?gen) in any stand-alone
sense. Similarly, the objects of everyday perception and cognition,
while they are objective facts in the sense of being or not being the
case whether one likes it or not, are always subject-relative in the
sense that they are ideologically and affectively structured. In that

self-comporting to innerworldly entities which constitutes a necessary

component of selfhood, perception, cognition, volition, and affection

are inseparably intertwined. Correlatively, the entities themselves
92 CARLETON B. CHRISTENSEN

form a structured, subject-relative but not subjectivistic whole,24 part

of what Heidegger would call a "world."

If, however, the original objects of experience are not subject-in

dependent and contextless, but rather states of affairs internally re

lated to the subject, then there is no ubiquitous lawful correlation be
tween external objects in their purely physical capacity on the one
hand and
the subject's mental life and behavior on the other. For the

causally relevant properties of the entities I comport myself toward

are their subject-relative, ideologically and ultimately affectively
structured ones. The fact that the man is stepping out in front of me
too closely and slowly, given what I am doing and how I am doing it,
causes me to swerve to the right on my bike, not the no doubt coex
tensional fact that the man is stepping out in front of me at approxi

mately three miles per hour less than two yards from my bike, which
is travelling at approximately fifteen miles per hour. The local co

extensionality between the latter purely physical description and the

former subject-relative one means that one can certainly establish

specific correlations extending from specific objects as they are un

der purely physical descriptions to specific psychological phenomena
and intentional behaviors. This
happens regularly in psycho-physical
investigations. However, if the causally relevant facts are the subject
relative ones, then this coextensionality is not
global. Rather, the cau
sality of what I see is also conditional upon the whole psychology
with which I see it. This effectively reverses the priority over the in
tentional which Descartes and other early modern thinkers gave to

causality: specific physical phenomena are of course sufficient for

specific psychological phenomena and intentional behaviors?but

only given the subject's intentional behavior and his overall cognitive,
volitional, and affective make-up as described in everyday, folk-psy
chological, and indeed ultimately socio-historical terms. One can nei
ther reduce nor eliminate the folk-psychological and ultimately socio
historical context in which the local correlation is embedded. As to

talities, the physical and the psychological are anomalous,25 just as

24 This
unity of self-comporting and structured, subjective-relative
whole is the correlation, if that is what one wishes to call it, of Sorge and Be
deutsamkeit, which is the basic structure of "life" or Faktizit?t; see Heideg
ger, PGZ, ?24e, p. 304 (221).
25Note that to
say this is not to say that things are anomalously monis
tic: monism, however anomalous, is an ontologically unnatural metaphysical
attitude.
HEIDEGGER'S REPRESENTATIONALISM 93

the psychological is holistic?holistic not, or not just, in the sense pro

moted by Davidson, but in the sense that in its very modularity the
whole precedes the parts.
There can therefore be no
total psycho-physical theory or model
of the self. For Heidegger, the traditional idea of cognition and action
as psycho-physical transactions, and thus the subject/object model it

self, must fundamentally distort the phenomenon of selfhood. That

this model distorts the phenomenon of selfhood in this way is Heideg

ger's real objection to it. His critique of the traditional subject/object

conception of cognition and action is not the rejection of an assump
tion underlying merely one
particular psycho-physical model, namely,
the informationprocessing model of computationalist cognitive sci
ence and classical AI. It is rather the rejection of an assumption which
this model shares with all other psycho-physical conceptions, namely,
that the mind operates according to a unified set of strictly physical
and psychological laws which systematically map purely physically
characterized inputs onto behavioral outputs. Heidegger's critique is
thus directed at the whole idea of a natural scientifically oriented psy
chology. His anti-Cartesianism is much more radical than either Drey
fus or contemporary antirepresentationalist appropriators of Heideg

ger appreciate?so much so that they would not endorse it.

Ill

A Heuristic for Nonjargonized Interpretation. Not only can the

conception of self-comportment and its sight sketched here generate a

much more interesting critique of the subject/object model than Drey

fus's, it also provides a powerful heuristic for making sense of some of

Heidegger's most difficult notions, and for seeing how he links up with
successors like Gadamer and indeed predecessors like Dilthey. This
constitutes a powerful indication that the interpretation is on the right
track.
On this interpretation, the "subject of representation" exists es

sentially as a future-directed seeing of the relevant in its relevance,

even when this relevance is unexpected. This is, as we have just seen,
to insist on the anomalous, nondetermined character of the subject?
to use Kantian language, on its "spontaneity." Talk of such spontane
ity, however, raises a rather important question: just what role do rep
resentations play if, pace the functionalist, they are not internal
94 CARLETON B. CHRISTENSEN

entities or states whose lawful

interaction is causally sufficient for the

generation of behavior? In particular, how are we to understand the

way in which the general rales and representations one has from the

past take effect in the present? Curiously, we find in Dreyfus and his
brother, Stuart, a nice way of elaborating this issue. In an article pre

cisely on the frame problem, they speak of "a person's ability to see
the relevance in a situation with which he or she is already familiar, of
certain events which have never before been experienced. ..." They
then give the following example:

[I]f a horse player who bets using his sense of the similarity of the cur
rent horse, jockey, weather, etc. to past patterns were to discover that
the race course landscaping was in full flower and that one of the jock
eys had hay fever, he might well see the relevance for his bet of these
two normally irrelevant and unrelated facts.26

Clearly, no gambler would see this relevance if he had no previous

knowledge of flowers and hay fever. The seeing of relevance is thus

necessarily insight into the potentially quite novel possibilities of this
specific situation on the basis of what one knows in advance and in

general about such situations. Seeing the relevant in its relevance cer

tainly does involve the past. It is a matter of genuinely applying to the

present situation the general lessons of the past in the light of the fu
ture end state of current activity.
Now this quasi-Gadamerian talk of application effectively brings
out the sense in which the seeing of relevance constitutive of intelli

gent selfhood is essentially the unprecedented adaptation of the past

to the present in the light of the future one is trying to bring about.
This of course entails that the insights into the possibilities of the situ
ation which it brings could never be a simple function, a mere deduc
tive or computational consequence, of whatever one
representations
brings into the situation. This is aptly demonstrated by the gambler.
The gambler knows from past experience that placing a bet on the
horse to be ridden by the hay-fever prone jockey would normally, that

is, all else being equal, be a prudent thing to do: the horse is good, the
jockey talented. However, precisely because the gambler under
stands both this general ceteris paribus rale and the specifics of the

26Hubert L. and Stuart E. Dreyfus, "How to Stop Worrying

Dreyfus
about the Frame Problem Even though It's Computationally Insoluble," in
The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem and Other Problems of Holism
in Artificial Intelligence, ?d. Zenon Pylyshyn (Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex
Publishing, 1987), 95-111, esp. 110-11.
 REPRESENTATIONALISM
HEIDEGGER'S 95

situation, he also recognizes that in this particular situation all things

are not equal: in this particular situation placing a bet on this particu
lar horse would be manifestly imprudent.
Such nondeductive, creative adaptation of the past to the present
in the light of the future is related to what Aristotle, Machiavelli, and
Kant intended by phron?sis, virt?, and Urteilskraft respectively. For

Heidegger, however, such futurally structured insight into specific sit

uations is not a virtue of the few; it is a structural or ontological fea
ture of the self qua self. Furthermore, such insight is for Heidegger a
form of understanding.27 This shows why, and in what nontrivial

sense, understanding is for Heidegger built into the self from the out
set, that is, how and why understanding is "the primary ontological re
lation of Dasein to the world and to itself."28 As Heidegger says,
Dasein comports itself understanding^ toward entities.
This ability to comport oneself understanding^ is precisely what
the robots discussed above lack. They cannot genuinely apply previ
ously acquired representations in context-sensitive, and hence often

ways. They cannot draw on the past as a resource

unprecedented
which enables them to see and then respond "on the fly" to what is rel
evant in the present, as this determined by the future toward which
current activity tends. All they can do is combine and reorganize their

representations in predetermined ways?for which reason they do

not, strictly speaking, have any representations at all. For they lack
the futurally temporal character of that in which real
representations
are embedded and come to insightful application. In short, they lack
what Heidegger calls "[t]he primordial unity of the care-structure"?9?
precisely that which would allow them to count as intelligently behav

ing, context-sensitive selves. Precisely because they do not display

this structure of care (Sorgestruktur), their behavior in the present
and future is always a function of their past. They are thus essentially
ahistorical beings which can bring forth no genuine novelty or emer

gent properties.30

27See
Heidegger, SZ, ?31, p. 146 (186).
28
Heidegger, PGZ, ?23, p. 286 (209); translation modified.
29
Heidegger, SZ, ?65, p. 327 (375); translation modified.
30The
futurally temporal character of care, as instanced in its capacity
for genuinely novel, emergent properties, is perhaps vaguely reminiscent of
what the physicist and mathematical biologist Robert Rosen is striving to
capture in his notion of a genuinely anticipatory system; see Robert Rosen,
Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodological
Foundations (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985).
96 CARLETONB. CHRISTENSEN
IV

Why Heidegger is No Pragmatist. Finally, our interpretation en

ables us to indicate precisely why it is a fundamental mistake to asso
ciate Heidegger in any way with pragmatism. Most Anglo-American
interpreters, of course, appreciate that Heidegger is not a pragmatist
in the trivial sense of insisting on the priority of practical activity over
theoretical.31 Even they still manage
so, to pragmatize Heidegger.
Dreyfus is a case in point. His interpretation of Heidegger as antici
pating contemporary antirepresentationalism leads him to construe
Heidegger as insisting on the priority and founding significance ofthat
dimension of nonrepresentational, nonmental, embodied motor skill
which is implicated in any practice and in any intentional attitude,
whether theoretical or practical. In other words, Dreyfus is led to
read Heidegger as claiming that in all practices and in all attitudes,
whether theoretical or practical, skillful engaged know-how is irre
ducibly prior to knowing-that. This conviction comes out most
crassly where Dreyfus roundly declares that for Heidegger "under
standing is know-how."32
Now our sketch of what Heidegger means by self-comportment
toward entities allows us to see that he is actually saying something
much more interesting than this. In comporting oneself toward inner
worldly entities, one
is always practically circumspect (umsichtig).
In other words, is one
always seeing?seeing taken, of course, in the
natural sense of insight into the possibilities of a situation on the basis
of the past and in the light of the future. If this, however, is what nat
ural perception is, then there is clearly something very cognitive
about it. This makes clear why Heidegger so often describes the vari
ous kinds
of sight he distinguishes as so many forms of understand

ing: he is emphasizing precisely the cognitive element which is and

must be involved in perception insofar as it enables genuinely intelli
gent, unprecedented adjustment "on the fly" to the novelties of the sit
uation. In other words, Heidegger talks of such sight as understand
ing because he wants to bring out the ineliminable cognitive
dimension of skill?skill understood not as the mere motor skillful

31
See, for example, Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 49. See also Heideg
ger, SZ, ?41, p. 193 (238), where Heidegger says that "[c]are, as a primordial
structural totality ... by no means expresses a priority of the 'practical' atti
tude over the theoretical."
32
Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 184.
HEIDEGGER'S REPRESENTATIONALISM 97

ness we share with insects, but rather as that normatively and ideo
structured ability to do what is appropriate which shows us
logically
to be much more than insects.

Heidegger does indeed point out how the German sentence "Er
versteht sich darauf" means "He understands how it," that is to
to do

say, "He is well able to do it," "He can do it adroitly."33 It is a complete

misunderstanding, however, to interpret this as the claim that every

day German recognizes a noncognitive, nonrepresentational kind of

understanding, namely, embodied practical know-how. If anything,

Heidegger is claiming just the opposite, that is, that this usage displays
the sensitivity of everyday language to the presence within know-how
of a cognitive aspect, precisely that seeing of relevance which makes
know-how more than just mindless motor skills like the ability to walk
without falling over.
Dreyfus misses this completely, just as he fails to
see how important it is to distinguish between motor skills, such as
the ability to walk, and genuine know-how, such as the ability to play
the piano or drive a car. Dreyfus's Deweyan assimilation of Heidegge
rian understanding to know-how obliterates entirely the cognitive res
onances which it is Heidegger's whole point to preserve. Understand

ing is not know-how, but rather that aspect of it which motivates talk
of knowing how.
Of course, as Heidegger
as much wishes to point out the cognitive

aspect of genuine know-how, so too he wishes, by speaking of sight, to

point out the essentially intuitive, perceptual character of this cogni

tive aspect. In other words, he is just as much drawing attention to
the ineliminably aesthetic character of any genuine skill. The prece
dent for this is in Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle de
scribes phron?sis, that
is, practical wisdom, the ability to act appro

priately, as involving a kind of perception. Aristotle then goes on to

advise us to attend to the opinions of those who display such practical
wisdom "because experience has given them an eye ..." and thus

"they see aright."34

33See Martin der Ph?nomenologie, 2d ed.

Heidegger, Grundprobleme
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989), ?20, p. 392 (276). The number in parentheses
refers to the relevant page of the English translation Basic Problems of Phe
nomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988).
34 Ethics An
Aristotle, Nicomachean (hereafter, "iVE") 6.11.1143bl3.
other place where Aristotle speaks of phron?sis, as involving something akin
to perception, indeed, an "eye of the soul," is NE 6.12.1144a29-31. (Many
thanks to James Morauta for both references.)
98 CARLETON B. CHRISTENSEN

Finally, we should note that none of the above entails that

Heidegger is not also

asserting the
priority knowing-how of over

knowing-that. He is certainly doing at least that. If an ability only

counts as a genuine skill insofar as it has an eye set into it which en
ables one to see the possibly quite novel opportunities and hazards of
the situation, then it is equally true that this eye, this "phronetic" sight,
is only possible as embedded in such a skill. Iwould not see that the
man is stepping out in front of my bicycle too closely for comfort un
less I could ride a bicycle. Thus my natural perception of this rele
vance certainly does depend on my having the relevant know-how.
Correlatively, this relevance for what I am doing only exists as
founded in the character of my bicycle, the bicycle path, and the like,
as ready-to-hand.

Why the "Ocular" must be distinguished from the Visual. No

doubt there are many objections one might want to raise against the
sketch of an interpretation articulated here. One objection, however,
stands out as particularly important: in this sketch so much is made of

Heidegger's talk of sight and seeing that his efforts to overcome the
traditional Western Lichtmetaphysik are obscured. This objection
might well be suggested by the considerations which Theodore Kisiel
has raised in the course of defending Heidegger against Jacques
Taminiaux's charge that fundamental ontology "is . . . infected by a
subtle 'intuitionism'. . . ."35 Kisiel claims that
Against Taminiaux,
Heidegger, in denying that the primary given is the individual object of
perception, overcomes precisely the idea that our most primordial
contact with the world is one of intuition.

World can never be reached by intuition but only by way of understand

ing and its interpretation, here, by way of the concerned preoccupation
by which we "get around" that world. The basic mode of knowing here
is no longer intuition but instead interpretive exposition out of the prior
meaningful whole.36

35Theodore
Kisiel, "From Intuition to Understanding: On Heidegger's
Transposition of Husserl's Phenomenology," ?tudes Ph?nom?nologiques 22
(1995): 31-50, p. 33.
36
Ibid., 42.
 REPRESENTATIONALISM
HEIDEGGER'S 99

According to Kisiel, by WS 1921-22, Heidegger had taken this point so

much to heart that in his analysis of the environing world (Umwelt),
he had replaced "looking around" (Umsehen), for example, "seeing my
desk," by "getting around" (Umgehen), things in one's "going about"
the business of everyday life.37
IfHeidegger were in this way led genuinely to replace the notion
of Umsehen by Umgehen, then presumably the latter would end up
This would indeed place sketch
the above of an interpreta
sightless.
tion in some difficulty. However, is it at all right to suggest, as do
some of the remarks Kisiel makes about know-how,38 that Heidegger
eliminates the notion of circumspect perception from
progressively
his analysis of everyday dealing (Umgang) with familiar things?
Surely not. In his 1925 lecture History of the Concept of Time,
.
Heidegger does indeed say that "[w]hat is really given immediately is
.. not what is perceived, but rather what is present in concerning deal
the within our reach and grasp."39
ings with entities, ready-to-hand
The very next page, however, makes quite clear how this is to be un
derstood. For here we find Heidegger saying that

... is the presence of an immediately available

[r]eady-to-handedness
ambient thing, indeed a presence of such a kind that one's dealing with
it lives precisely in functional references of serviceability and the like as
a concerned reaching for something, a setting it up for use. One can ex
pressly keep an eye (ins Auge fassen) on what is encountered in such
dealings, e.g., in a making-present of some instrument which consists in
looking it over and checking it out for whether it cannot after all be set
up in some other way to serve its appointed end. In such checking out
and looking over of a tool, the currently ready-to-hand ambient thing is
thematic in its being ready-to-hand. This thematization, however, holds
itself entirely and only in that kind of sight which guides the genuinely
concerned use of the thing, namely, in practical circumspection (Um
sicht).40

This clearly
quote indicates both that Umsicht is an essential, ever

present part of our dealings with everyday things, and indeed that it
can include, but is not identical with, an explicit, thematic awareness
of the ready-to-hand (and, one might add, of the always already
Thus, in speaking a page earlier of the perceived,
present-at-hand).
Heidegger must mean something quite specific; he cannot mean the

37See 40.
Kisiel, "From Intuition to Understanding,"
38Ibid.
39
Heidegger, PGZ, ?23b?, p. 264 (194-5); translation modified.
40
Ibid., ?23b?, p. 265 (195); translation modified.
 100 CARLETON B. CHRISTENSEN

perceived in absolutely any sense at all.In fact, it is quite clear that by

the perceived he means what is perceived in a quite specific and in
deed unnatural sense, namely, "in einem puren Vernehmen, einem
puren Wahrnehmen," which is "ein bestimmt geartetes Nur-noch-Mn
sehen auf die Welt."41
It is of course also true that Heidegger on these very same pages
also says that "[s]uch presence of the ambient (des Umweltlichen),
which we call ready-to-handedness, is a,founded presence."42 Once

again, however, this must be read in context. This presence of the

ready-to-hand and always already is of course

present-at-hand only
possible insofar as familiar things appear of a
in and
context, that is,
as pointing to their typical contexts of use. This is indeed a simple
consequence of Heidegger's undoubtedly correct view that we prima
rily perceive equipment purely and simply as equipment, and not as
mere things with various natural properties. We first see chairs as

chairs, and only subsequently, by a deliberate "deworlding," as, say,

brown colored objects with a flat horizontal surface, four long protu
berances extending downwards, and so on. If this is so, then our con

cept of a chair cannot consist in a nominal essence composed of vari

ous natural properties and relations which we use as a rale for

identifying likely possessors of the nonsensible functional property of

being something on which one can sit.

Rather, we must see things di

rectly and noninferentially as chairs, that is, as things one can use in a
manner similar to those things one has seen and used in dining rooms,
offices, and the like, qua
typical spatially structured sites of such and
such practices. Precisely because this point is a consequence of the
claim that Umgang, and with it, Umsicht, is the most original level of
encounter, it is perfectly compatible with an account of such Umgang
as always guided by its kind of sight.
In fact, so little is Heidegger concerned to replace Umsicht by
some kind of sightless, nonrepresentational Umgang that both His

tory of the Concept of Time and Being and Time itself are replete
with the metaphors of perception and sight that Heidegger is allegedly
trying to overcome. In neither work is there any attack on metaphors
of perception and sight as such. Indeed, as his use of expressions like
"ins Auge fassen," "sich umsehen" and "nachsehen" illustrates,
Heidegger continually appeals to them in order to present his own

41
Heidegger, PGZ, ?23b?, p. 265 (195); emphasis added.
42
Ibid., ?23b?, p. 264 (194-5); translation modified.
 REPRESENTATIONALISM
HEIDEGGER'S 101

views. There is certainly an attack on early modern misinter

positive
pretations of perception. Further, when Heidegger is discussing Dil

they and Yorck, he certainly mentions, in some senseapprovingly, the

latter's attack on "the ocular."43 Yet it would be wrong to conclude
from any of these that Heidegger
passages is rejecting the visual as
such. Indeed, a careful reading of the relevant passages makes clear
that not even Yorck is necessarily rejecting the visual as such. Yorck
is simply criticizing an ocular conception of the historian's relation to
the object of historiographie investigation as a detached, ruminative

staring or ogling, that is, an antiquarian contemplation?what Gada

mer was subsequently to call the historical consciousness. Once this

point is appreciated, both Heidegger's undoubted rejection of intuition

(Anschauung) as giving primordial access to the world and his tren
chant reliance on visual metaphors fall into place as perfectly compat
ible: whenever Heidegger is attacking perception (Wahrnehmung)
and the like, he always has in mind
perception in a quite specific
sense, namely, perception in the unnatural sense of a detached, con

templative Betrachten. Moreover, Heidegger takes pains inHistory of

the Concept of Time to distinguish perception in this quite specific
sense of intuition (Anschauen) or looking-at (Hinsehen) from practi
cally circumspect seeing.44 Kisid's own article provides ample evi
dence of what Heidegger's realtarget is. For in all the criticisms he
cites Heidegger as making ofthe primacy of perception, Heidegger
clearly intends perception in this restricted sense of a disengaged con

templation or looking-at.
Once the distinction Heidegger always makes between Umsehen
and Hinsehen, between everyday natural perception (nat?rliche
Wahrnehmung) and disengaged staring or inspecting, is appreciated,
one need have no residual worry about rejecting a nonrepresenta
tional reading of what
Heidegger means by our most primordial level
of engagement with the world. Heidegger nowhere denies that repre
sentations are always implicated in any intentional relation to the

world, however primordial. For his real project is actually much more
ambitious than Dreyfus imagines. Merely to restrict the extension of
the concept of representational intentionality to higher, more deriva
tive levels of Dasein's engagement with the world while leaving the
traditional interpretation of this intension intact would be to address a

43See
Heidegger, SZ, ?77, p. 400 (451-2).
?See Heidegger,PGZ, ?23b?, p. 265 (195).
 102 CARLETON B. CHRISTENSEN

mere question of truth. A much more radical and genuinely herme

neutic affair would be to raise
questions of sense about the traditional

interpretation of this and related intensions. Just such a critique of

sense is Heidegger's real enterprise. This is what it means to do phi
losophy phenomenologically, hermeneutically, and thus historically.

Heidegger seeks to correct the traditional misinterpretation of repre

sentational intentionality as a psycho-physical transaction modellable
in a unified, natural scientifically oriented, psychological theory. In
particular, he to correct
seeks traditional misinterpretations along
psycho-physical lines of a particular form of representational intentio
nality, namely, perception itself. That this is Heidegger's real concern
is both indicated by, and explains, the great attention Heidegger gives
to perception, both in Basic Problems of Phenomenology and the His
tory of the Concept of Time. Dreyfus appears quite unable to explain
this emphasis. Perhaps this is why he selectively omits the numerous
references to perception from the passages he adduces to support his
interpretation.45
In fact, precisely because he does not deny the minimally repre
sentational character of all intentionality, Heidegger shows himself to
be much more open phenomenologically than Dreyfus. Dreyfus is
much impressed by such possibilities as driving effortlessly and un

problematically to work while deeply engrossed in reflectionon some

philosophical problem. Such possibilities are for Dreyfus representa

tive cases of skillful mastery; they suggest to him the irrelevance of
representations to skillful getting about the world. Underlying all this,
however, is an unquestioned assumption about the essential contin
gency of a world of surprises. This assumption becomes explicit in
Dreyfus's claim that

[a] simplified culture in an earthly paradise is conceivable in which the

members' skills mesh with the world so well that one need never do
anything deliberately or entertain explicit plans and goals.46

Clearly our world is no such paradise. It contains the unexpect

edly relevant as an intrinsic feature with which we must always

reckon. Such occurrences as a man stepping out in front of me as I
ride my bike to the university are quite common. It is not as if they

only come along every so often, jolting us out of absorbed coping, first

45See
Christensen, "Getting Heidegger off the West Coast."
46
Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 85.
 HEIDEGGER'S
REPRESENTATIONALISM 103
into deliberate coping when the going gets tough, and then, when the
going becomes impossible, into explicit reflection on the source of the
problem. Surely that such things occur, and moreover happen so fre

quently, is not just a contingent feature of our world, but an essential

feature of any complex world with multiple interacting entities. If this
is so, then dealing with the unexpectedly relevant cannot be merely in
cidental to, but must be rather an essential part of, smooth and effort
less functioning in a rough-edged world. Everyday, effortless, un

thinking bike riding consists in dealing smoothly with things which

are by their nature refractory to one degree or another: never perfect
for the job, never just where they ought to be, always obdurate and
above all capable of interacting with other things in unexpected but
relevant ways. For this very reason the law, if not Dreyfus, would not

regard philosophical absentmindedness at the wheel as in any way ex

emplifying motoring expertise. It is presumably because he appreci

ates this much more so than Dreyfus that Heidegger does not actually

distinguish between absorbed and deliberate coping; when Heidegger

talks about "the conspicuousness, obtrusiveness and obstinacy"47 of

equipment, he is not describing a merely occasional feature of equip

ment to which one answers with an equally occasional bout of repre
sentational deliberation. Heidegger is describing something which
equipment always is to one degree or the other. Right from the outset,
that is to say, precisely when "everything is going in its customary

way,"48 I am not merely responding appropriately "to the solicitations

of the situation, doing what worked last time,"49 but also seeing how to
respond appropriately in this particular situation, since very often I
cannot afford to do what worked last time. This difference in how
Dreyfus and Heidegger conceive worlds bespeaks a world of differ
ence between them.

The Australian National University

?Heidegger, SZ, ?16, p. 74 (104).

t? 187.
Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World,
49Ibid.

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