Was Heidegger a relativist?

Abstract

At first glance, it might seem that relativism was not a central issue for Heidegger. He was, of course, extremely familiar with the Husserlian and post-Kantian debates which linked relativism, logic and psychologism: these had been the focus of his 1914 dissertation, Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus. There he attacks psychologism in part by linking it to relativism as Husserl had done before him: the challenge, Heidegger suggests, is to move beyond this negative point and to articulate a positive story about judgmental content, one that respects the phenomenology of the act of judging in a way that Husserl's own theory allegedly does not (Ga21:107,111). i But whilst Heidegger presses the issues of judgment and content closely in his mature work, by the time we reach Sein und Zeit, there is little explicit treatment of relativism. At points, Heidegger uses it there simply as a byword for philosophical error: he is quick to insist that his views have nothing to do with "a crude relativizing" [schlechte Relativierung], he warns against readings of Dilthey as offering a "relativistic" Lebensphilosophie and he praises Yorck for seeing through "all 'groundless' relativisms" (SZ:22,399,401). Admittedly, he does state that "all truth is relative to Dasein's being", but, having clarified that this does not mean that truth is 'left to the subject's discretion', he promptly drops the term and does not take it up again (SZ:227). Similarly, in other works, both before and after SZ, relativism is directly treated only in marginal contexts. The 1921 lectures Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, for example, warn against the "atrophy of relativism" when discussing the link between philosophy and the university (Ga61:69), whilst 1935's Die Frage nach dem Ding , perhaps the clearest treatment of the Galilean paradigm shift, uses "Relativismus" only once, in a dismissive survey of standard views on indexicals. As elsewhere, it is clear that Heidegger regards both the term, this "cheap label", and the typical reactions to it, as problematic (Ga41:28).