Beholdenness to Entities and the Concept of ‘Dasein’: Phenomenology, Ontology and Idealism in the early Heidegger

Abstract

The fear that Heidegger's early philosophy cannot ultimately be distinguished from a problematic idealism has a number of sources in his work. For example, Christina Lafont maintains—I think rightly—that the fact that ‘[w]e always move about in an understanding of being’ (SZ 5)1 lies ‘at the basis of Heidegger's philosophy as a whole’ (Lafont 2000: xiii). But she sees this as trapping us within that understanding such that ‘[t]here is no way to step outside of [it] in order to check its validity, to test whether or not our understanding of being coincides with the being of the things themselves’ (Lafont 2000: xiv); and the only way to escape the scepticism to which such trapping would seem to lead is to embrace the idealistic notion that, in some sense, that understanding determines the being of such things.