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Inquiry: An
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Comments on Cristina
Lafont's Interpretation
of Being and Time
Hubert L. Dreyfus

Available online: 06 Nov 2010

To cite this article: Hubert L. Dreyfus (2002): Comments on Cristina

Lafont's Interpretation of Being and Time, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Philosophy, 45:2, 191-194

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 Inquiry, 45, 191–4

Symposium: Cristina Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure*

Comments on Cristina Lafont’s

Interpretation of Being and Time
Hubert L. Dreyfus
Downloaded by [Australian National University] at 17:12 19 February 2012

University of California, Berkeley

What is striking about Cristina Lafont’s work is the range of her knowledge,
the depth of her insight, and the clarity of her arguments. Her basic claim in
both her books is that the realization that language does not merely mirror
reality has led to an understanding of the basic function of language as world-
disclosing. Lafont shows that taking the essential function of language to be
world disclosure can lead to a linguistic idealism and a cultural relativism that
has no place for the fact that, no matter what language we speak, we are able
to communicate concerning a common objective reality.
Lafont further claims that Heidegger’s world-disclosing account of
language in Being and Time commits him to a rejection of a shared objective
world by claiming that Heidegger holds that meaning determines reference,
thereby neglecting the way reference actually works. Reference need not be
mediated by a linguistic description of the object referred to. Indexicals, for
example, refer directly to their objects. Speakers can, therefore, agree about
which object they are referring to even though they accept differing
descriptions of it.
I disagree completely with Lafont’s treatment of Being and Time in
Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure. Lafont constructs a lucid and
coherent argument that, for Heidegger in Being and Time, meaning
determines reference and that all of his views follow from this fundamental
(and mistaken) assumption. There are some passages in the text that support
her account, but Lafont simply ignores the many passages that don’t Ž t into
her elegant construction. For example, Lafont claims that Heidegger’s
account of the ontological difference shows that, according to Heidegger, we
can only have access to entities through our understanding of their being, and
therefore Heidegger must be an idealist. This reading is hard to reconcile with
passages such as the following:

*Cristina Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosur e, trans. Graham Harman

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), originall y publishe d as Sprache und
Welterschliessung : Zur linguistische n Wende der Hermeneutik Heideggers (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). All unprefixed page reference s are to the English translation .

# 2002 Taylor & Francis

 192 Hubert L. Dreyfus

Physical nature can only occur as innerworldly when world, i.e., Dasein, exists. This
is not to say that nature cannot be in its own way, without occurring within a world,
without the existence of a human Dasein and thus without world. It is only because
nature is by itself extant that it can also encounter Dasein within a world.1

Or again:
[I]ntraworldliness does not belong to nature’s being. Rather, in commerce with this
being, nature in the broadest sense, we understand that this being is as something
extant, as a being that we come up against, to which we are delivered over, which on
its own part already always is. It is, even if we do not uncover it, without our
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encountering it within our world. Being within the world devolves upon this being,
nature, solely when it is uncovered as a being. 2

If his emphasis on the world-disclosive function of language requires

Heidegger to be an idealist, how can he make such claims? The answer is
simple. According to Heidegger, entities in the world are, indeed, constituted
by our taking them as something, but, according to Heidegger, the entities
studied by science, the entities in the universe – are ‘deworlded’.
Nature is what is in principle explainable and to be explained because it is in principle
incomprehensible. It is the incomprehensible pure and simple. And it is the
incomprehensible because it is the ‘deworlded’ world, insofar as we take nature in this
extreme sense of the entity as it is discovered in physics.3

Lafont simply ignores many such passages that contradict her unquestioned
assumption that, since he prioritizes world-disclosure, Heidegger must be an
idealist. But one might well ask how Heidegger could consistently hold such
realist views, if for him, as Lafont claims, meaning determines reference.
The answer is that Heidegger discovered on his own in 1921 that not all
reference is mediated by a description of the object intended; that, in fact,
language allows us to refer to objects directly. In his 1921 lectures, Heidegger
presented an account of ‘non-committal reference’ made possible by what he
called formal indicators or designators (formalen Anzeige). Non-committal
reference starts by referring to some object or class of objects provisionally,
using contingent features, and arrives at the referent’s essential features only
after an investigation. Heidegger explains:
The empty meaning structure [of the formal designator] gives a direction towards
Ž lling it in. Thus a unique binding character lies in the formal designator; I must
follow in a determinate direction that, should it get to the essential, only gets there by
fulŽ lling the designation by appreciating the non-essential.4

Thus, like Putnam in his account of direct reference and Kripke in his account
of rigid designation, Heidegger holds that reference need not commit one to
any essential features; rather, it binds one to determine, in whatever way is
appropriate to the domain, starting with whatever features one can Ž nd, which
features of the referent, if any, are essential. Of course, such direct reference
is provisional. Heidegger continues:
 Cristina Lafont’s Interpretation of Being and Time 193

The evidence for the appropriateness of the original deŽ nition of the object is not
essential and primordial; rather, the appropriateness is absolutely questionable and
the deŽ nition must precisely be understood in this questionableness and lack of
evidence. 5

In Being and Time, Heidegger is taking the non-committal nature of formal

designation for granted when he says: ‘When we came to analyzing [the being
of Dasein] we took as our clue existence. This term formally designates that
Dasein, in its being makes an issue of that being itself.’6 He stresses that such
a designation is provisional when he asks about the ‘I’ of everyday Dasein.
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‘The word “I” is to be understood only in the sense of non-committal formal

designation, indicating something which may perhaps reveal itself as its
“opposite” in some particular phenomenological context of being.’7 So it
looks like Heidegger would agree with Lafont that:
[I]nsofar as we intend to refer to something that is independent of our concrete
descriptions, we cannot avoid understanding the descriptions implicit in our methods
for identifying them as provisional characterizations that may (or may not) be correct
for the referent. Thus, the expression ‘reference to the things themselves,’ does not
imply denying that they can be considered only under various descriptions or within
various theories. Instead, this expression simply represents the linguistic correlate of
our fallibilist understanding with respect to our knowledge about objects in a world of
entities independent of theory. (p. 243)

Yet, consistent with her reading, and in  at denial of Heidegger’s account of

provisional reference, Lafont claims that Heidegger is committed to
a rejection of any possibility of referring to something that cannot yet be identiŽ ed with
ultimate validity or cannot be identiŽ ed correctly in all cases. This means something
whose identity one does not fully know or understand, at least not yet. (p. 230)

One might argue in Lafont’s defense that although the lectures that explain
formal designation were published in 1985, the importance of formal
designation for Heidegger’s method in Being and Time was not recognized
until 1993, when Theodore Kisiel published The Genesis of Heidegger’s
Being and Time and launched a  urry of articles on the subject. Since both of
Lafont’s books were presumably Ž nished by 1993, she should not be expected
to know of Heidegger’s discovery of direct reference. But one might at least
hope for some response, in Lafont’s recent Prefaces to the English editions of
her books, to what seems to be a refutation to her fundamental thesis. But in
the English preface to Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure Lafont
still insists that, since Heidegger holds that ‘meaning determines reference’,
he is committed to ‘an implausible reiŽ ed language’, and that, given his
meaning holism, Heidegger cannot have an account of direct reference. She
repeats that the ontological difference ‘is established by Heidegger in such a
way that it follows that there can be no access to entities without a prior
understanding of their being’(p. xiii, my italics). This is true as an account of
 194 Hubert L. Dreyfus

access, but, given his understanding of formal designation, this in no way

commits Heidegger to idealism, or denies the possibility that all essentialist
descriptions are provisional and may well be mistaken.

Lafont is right that:

[b]y insisting on the speciŽ city of designation, it becomes clear that the meaning of
theoretical concepts can indeed be theory-dependent, but that it makes no sense to
assert the same of their reference, of the things to which they refer. (pp. 244–5)
But this is no objection to Heidegger. He puts the same point in a way that
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shows he understands the way out of the supposed closed world dictated by
the ontological difference when, in Being and Time, he says: ‘Being (not
beings) is dependent upon the understanding of being; that is to say, reality
(not the real) is dependent upon care.’(p. 255)
Ironically, it is the great merit of Lafont’s two brilliant books that her lucid
account of the unacceptable consequences of an exclusive concern with the
world-disclosing function of language enables us to see what no other
commentator has seen, why Heidegger was so excited by his discovery of
formal designation. But her single-minded determination to illustrate the
failings of the world-disclosive view of language through a reading of Being
and Time shows her to be a prisoner of her coherent construction.

NOTES

1 M. Heidegger, Phenomenologica l Interpretatio n of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans.

Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington/Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1997),
p. 14.
2 M. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenolog y, trans. Albert Hofstadter.
(Indianapolis /Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 169.
3 M. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel
(Indianapolis /Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 217–8, my italics.
4 M. Heidegger, Phänomenologisch e Interpretatione n zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die
phänomenologisch e Forschung, in Martin Heidegger: Gesamtausgabe, ed. Walter Bröcker
and Käte Bröcker Oltmanns (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), div. 2, 61, p.
33.
5 Ibid., pp. 34–35.
6 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962), p. 274.
7 Ibid., p. 152.

Received 4 March 2002

Hubert L. Dreyfus, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720,

USA. E-mail: dreyfus@cogsci.berkeley.ed u