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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
- Sprache: Englisch
Martin Heidegger is among the most important philosophers of the Twentieth Century. Within the continental tradition, almost every great figure has been deeply influenced by his work. For this reason, a full understanding of the course of modern philosophy is impossible without at least a basic grasp of Heidegger. Unfortunately, his work is notoriously difficult, both because of his innovative ideas and his difficult writing style.
In this compelling book, Lee Braver cuts through the jargon to present Heidegger’s ideas in clear English, using illuminating examples and explications of thorny passages. In so doing, he offers readers an accessible overview of Heidegger’s entire career. The first half of the book presents a guide through Being and Time, Heidegger’s early masterpiece, while the second half covers the key themes of his later writing, including technology, subjectivity, history, nihilism, agency, and the nature of thought itself. As Heidegger’s later work is deeply engaged with other philosophers, Braver explains the relevance of Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche for Heidegger’s thought.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars trying to find their way through Heidegger’s difficult ideas. Anyone interested in Twentieth Century continental philosophy must come to terms with Heidegger, and this book is the ideal place to begin.
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Seitenzahl: 462
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Table of Contents
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: An Initial Orientation
Part I: Being and Time
1: Introduction to Being and Time
Being and Time Introduction I
Being and Time Introduction II
Further readings
2: Being and Time 1.I–IV: Being-in and the World
Being and Time 1.I Mineness and authenticity
Being and Time 1.II Being-in-the-world and being-in
Being and Time 1.III The world
Being and Time 1.IV The who
Further readings
3: Being and Time 1.V–VI: The There and Care
Being and Time 1.V The there
Being and Time 1.V.A The trifold constitution of the there
Being and Time 1.V.B The everyday there and falling
Being and Time 1.VI Anxiety, care, reality, and truth
Further readings
4: Being and Time 2.I–III.¶64: Authenticity
Being and Time 2.I Being-a-whole and death
Being and Time 2.II Conscience and resoluteness
Being and Time 2.III.¶¶61–4 Being-a-whole and selfhood
Further readings
5: Being and Time 2.III.¶65–VI: Temporality as the Meaning of Existence
Being and Time 2.III.¶65 Temporality as the ontological meaning of care
Being and Time 2.IV The temporality of everydayness
Being and Time 2.V Historicality
Being and Time 2.VI Dealing with everyday time
Further readings
6: Being and Time: Conclusion
Further readings
Part II: Later Heidegger
7: Introduction to the Later Heidegger
Further readings
8: History, Nazism, the History of Being and of its Forgetting
Being and history
“The greatest stupidity of my life:” Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis
The history of being
The pre-Socratics
Plato
Medieval
Modernity
The forgetfulness of being
Further readings
9: Descartes, Thinking, and Free Will
Descartes
Thinking
Free will
Further readings
10: Gratitude, Language, and Art
Gratitude
Language
Art
Further readings
11: Technology, Nietzsche, and Nihilism
Technology
Nietzsche
Nihilism
Further readings
Conclusion: Influences, Developments, and Criticisms
Further readings
References
Index
Key Contemporary Thinkers Series includes:
Copyright © Lee Braver 2014
The right of Lee Braver to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2014 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6491-0 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6492-7 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8117-7 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8116-0 (mobi)
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
What the hell – this one's for me. I wrote the damn thing after all.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank my children, Sophia, Julia, and Ben, and my wife, Yvonne, for their patience and support.
Abbreviations
Note: Smaller, numbered divisions within some texts are referred to using the following symbol: ¶
Introduction: An Initial Orientation
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is, by many estimations, the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, at least in what is known as the continental tradition. His work forms the connecting point of most of the major schools of the time. His early work brings together the dominant influences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – neo-Kantianism, existentialism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology – whereas his later thought is the dominant influence on much of what followed – post-modernism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction, as well as later forms of hermeneutics and phenomenology. Little in twentieth-century continental philosophy can be fully understood without a solid grasp of Heidegger's ideas.
This is what I try to provide the reader with in this book. There are certainly limits to how much I can cover of Heidegger's work, both in depth and breadth; his collected works amount to more than one hundred volumes, after all. But I will try to discuss many of his main ideas, the central themes he returns to again and again. No single book could hope to convey the nuances and complexities of his thought. This book is certainly not meant to be a substitute for reading Heidegger but an aid to doing so, a companion to give you an initial orientation to your own reading of his difficult works.
For they are disorienting indeed. Heidegger spends a great deal of time studying the history of philosophy, and I think it's fair to characterize this as a love–hate relationship. On the one hand, he is a relentless critic of the tradition, tirelessly berating past philosophers (with the exception of the pre-Socratics) for neglecting the question of being, his one unwavering focus. Philosophers have generally taken a particular understanding of what it means to be – usually something like a substance which is self-sufficient and self-enclosed – and applied it to everything that is. Heidegger's task, as he announces in his first book, Being and Time, is to reawaken this question that has been forgotten and ignored.
Yet, on the other hand, he constantly expresses enormous admiration for the great philosophers, seeing some of the best clues as to how to answer and even how to ask this question in the history of philosophy. These are the people who came closest to asking it, and even their negligence is informative. What they overlooked is not random but forms specifically shaped gaps in their thought and if we pay attention to both what they say and what they don't say, we can look through these holes to see the outlines of what they passed over and around.
The point is that Heidegger sees the vast majority of past philosophy as operating on the basis of certain deeply flawed assumptions. If we are to avoid their mistakes, we must not take over their taken-for-granted presuppositions. But, because of the ubiquity and depth of these presuppositions, a work that thinks without them will look exceedingly strange to eyes that have learned to see by their light. Like Plato's philosopher who, upon escaping the cave, must let his eyes adjust a while to the sunlight, so reading Heidegger requires a fundamental adjustment of our expectations and ways of reading and thinking.
Part of this readjustment is linguistic. He believes that our vocabulary and grammar tend to focus only on certain phenomena and contain hidden presuppositions about how they behave, just the presuppositions that he is taking pains to avoid. So if the way he expresses his ideas is not to betray the very ideas he's trying to express, Heidegger needs to come up with new terms (or use old terms very differently) and new ways of speaking and writing. This is probably the most notorious and off-putting feature of Heidegger's writings. You almost have to learn a new language – Heideggerese – just to read his works. And a vocabulary cheat-sheet won't solve the problem because the grammar of Heideggerese, the way he puts the words and sentences together, is also unusual. Most philosophy is hard to read but Heidegger's linguistic practice clashes with the ways we are used to reading, making his writing terrifically frustrating.
Another part of the readjustment is conceptual. Heidegger's thought moves in strange ways. For one thing, he is rather suspicious of logical argumentation. This does not mean that he eschews argumentation entirely – there are plenty of arguments to be found in his work, and many of them are quite good – but he does think that there are limitations to this way of thinking. Reason is an important tool in understanding the world, but it is only one tool, and many situations call for others. For example, moods and feelings can reveal much about the world, much that reason is simply blind to. In general, rational thought disengages from activity and involvement to weigh ideas disinterestedly. While this does reveal important facts, it covers over others, features that are only present or visible when we are engaged and involved. Thus, he isn't rejecting reason; I'm not sure what such a move would even look like. Instead, he's rejecting the exclusive reliance on it. Truth is more varied than this.
This approach is largely due to phenomenology, the school of thought founded by his teacher, Edmund Husserl. As we will see in Chapter 1, this form of philosophy favors careful description of experience exactly as it shows itself over argumentation. Rather than relying on reason to tell us how the world must or ought to be, we attend to our experience to tell us how the world actually is. Following this approach consistently means that if things show up irrationally or arationally, then that is how things are. It also means that whatever discloses the world to us is a legitimate means of access to truth and reality, so emotions, works of art, and historical texts, for example, all stand shoulder-to-shoulder with reason as ways of discovering truths. This gives Heidegger's work the appearance of an irresponsible cultivation of irrationality to some, but it also imbues it with a breadth and humanity that has few rivals in the canon.
That may sound strange given his almost monomaniacal pursuit of a single topic throughout his entire long career: the question of being. Heidegger never tires of thumping on this question as the one essential issue for all of philosophy, indeed, for human life, but this claim makes more sense when we get an idea of what he means. Being, for Heidegger, means to become manifest or to appear to us. He fully subscribes to phenomenology's rejection of all that transcends experience, such as Plato's Forms or Kant's noumena. These do not appear in experience so we cannot study them or incorporate them into a theory. Whatever God knows is His business; if it does not impact my life then it is not a phenomenon for me and so I have no business making claims about it. Phenomena – that which appears – is equivalent to that which is,1 an insight Heidegger credits the ancient Greeks with discovering (BT 51/28) and Husserl with recovering, although he came to consider Husserl unequal to the insight.
Heidegger's work studies all the different kinds of beings there are by examining all the various ways things can appear to us, and these prove to be extraordinarily various and rich. His thought accommodates every different kind of entity, respecting the profound differences among them without trying to reduce them to a few broad principles or only one. Thus, although the topic of being might sound extremely narrow, it actually covers everything, and in such a way as to highlight rather than wash out the vibrant bountiful diversity of reality. In particular, it captures the world's diversity far more successfully than philosophers who tend to see everything in terms of a single idea, like participation in the Forms, or substance, or mathematically measurable features, another deep flaw of the tradition. Phenomenology is the great enemy of reductionism in all its forms.
Martin Heidegger was born to a sexton in Messkirch, Germany in 1889. He initially studied theology at the University of Freiburg but later switched to philosophy, eventually becoming heir apparent to Husserl, one of the most prominent figures of the day. Heidegger assumed Husserl's Chair at Freiburg upon Husserl's retirement on the strength of his first book, Being and Time (1927). The story goes that he had to rush the unfinished book into print in order to secure the Chair since, while he had achieved an impressive reputation at the University of Marburg on the basis of his teaching, he needed a major publication for the promotion. The book was an instant success, catapulting Heidegger to world prominence, and it retains its position as one of the greatest books of the twentieth century.2
Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933 with considerable enthusiasm. He was elected Rector of the University of Freiburg where he implemented Nazi educational policies, though there is some uncertainty about how thoroughly. While he resigned the Rectorship in early 1934, he remained a member of the Nazi party, albeit with apparently little enthusiasm. The precise reasons for his resignation and his disillusionment with the party are also a matter of debate, as we will see in Chapter 8.
Around the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s his work underwent what some have called a Kehre or turn, although the nature, extent, and even the existence of such a change is hotly debated among Heidegger scholars. His writing style certainly changed, becoming, if anything, more difficult. He came to favor essays and lecture courses to massive tomes, although apparent attempts at full-scale books exist among the enormous mass of unpublished materials. His relationship to the history of philosophy intensified in the latter part of his career. While he had planned on a second part to Being and Time that would have examined the work of Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle, this was to have been separate from the first part's laying out of the topic. In his later works, he generally intertwines his own thought with a dialogue with earlier thinkers, much as Derrida, greatly influenced by Heidegger, does. My book will follow this division, devoting the first half to Being and Time and the second half to the later Heidegger. Since these later topics are drawn from a variety of texts, at the end of each chapter I will indicate the texts that I believe treat the topics best, and use endnotes to point the interested reader to other works discussing the same subjects. I will also use endnotes and a section at the end of each chapter to indicate connections with other philosophers and relevant secondary literature for readers who want to follow up topics in greater detail.
Notes
1 The one exception to this formula is being itself which can be made to appear but which can't be said to be, at least not in the sense that applies to beings. Thus beings are, but it would be a category mistake to say that “being is.”
2 See Lackey 1999.
Part I
Being and Time
1
Introduction to Being and Time
Being and Time Introduction I
Being and Time opens with a quote from one of Plato's late dialogues where the speaker admits that he no longer understands what being means. Interestingly, rather than invoking Plato as one of the great metaphysicians and making some kind of connection with his views on the nature of being, this quote praises him for his lack of understanding about it. By the end of many of Plato's dialogues, Socrates brings his conversation partners to the realization that they didn't know what they thought they knew, which opens the way for them to learn. So, before answering the question of being can even be a possibility, Heidegger wants us to pause and fully realize our profound perplexity before this question that dominates his thought from one end of his career to the other: what is the meaning of being? What does it mean to be?
Let's stop and think about this question for a minute – how would you go about answering it? Where should we travel to in order to find being? What instruments might we use to bring it into focus – are there things that could function as ontoloscopes or ontometers? What kinds of experiments or surveys or meditations could uncover being? After just a brief consideration, we should see that not only do we not know how to answer the question, we don't really even know how to ask it, and this is what the Introduction tries to prepare us for. Be warned: the Introduction is probably the hardest part of the book. It is thorny, abstract, and it throws term after term at you with little to no explanation. It's rough going, but once we get to the body of the book, we will find concrete experiences to anchor our understanding of the text. This is the great advantage of phenomenology (which I will define in just a minute): no matter how difficult the writing, if you can find the experience it's trying to describe, that can serve as a life-line in interpreting the text.
In fact, Heidegger gives us the answer to “the being-question” (this question is so important to him that it gets a name!) on this first unnumbered page of the book: time is the meaning of being. Not very helpful, is it? As Douglas Adams showed us, if we don't understand the question then we won't be able to make much sense of the answer. Being and Time begins by quoting a great philosophical authority not for his knowledge but for his perplexity, then tells us that we don't understand the question, and demonstrates this by giving us the answer which means nothing to us at this point. Just to add a flourish to the peculiarity of these opening moves, the very last sentence of the book puts this answer into question (488/437).1
In fact, there's a well-known problem lurking in the bushes here. It's called Meno's Paradox since it first arose in the Platonic dialogue titled “Meno” for the main character talking to Socrates in the text. When Socrates demolishes Meno's attempts to define virtue, Meno responds with a dilemma, that is, two exhaustive choices, both of which appear to be unacceptable: either we know what virtue is or we don't. If we do know it then our inquiry is obviously unnecessary, but if we don't our inquiry is impossible since we won't know when and if we run across the right answer. In other words, if we genuinely don't know what virtue is, then we won't be able to recognize its correct definition if we find it. Plato's solution to the dilemma is his theory of recollection that proposes a third alternative between the dilemma's options of either complete knowledge or absolute ignorance. He suggests that we have had knowledge of what he calls the Forms, which provide definitions of the highly abstract notions his dialogues examine such as beauty or justice, but we have forgotten them. This means that we do in fact need to search for them since at present we don't have an explicit grasp of them, but when we come across the truth we will recognize it by its distant familiarity.
Heidegger adapts a version of Plato's theory, albeit stripped of its mythological trappings. “Inquiry, as a kind of seeking, must be guided beforehand by what is sought. So the meaning of Being must already be available to us in some way” (25/5). The very fact that we can ask the question at all, even in a confused way, means that we have some understanding of being, at least that it exists and can be questioned. But pay attention to the qualification: “in some way.” We do have an understanding of being, but not in the way we usually think of understanding. Philosophy has traditionally been dominated by the demand Socrates puts to those he questions – define the topic in a fully articulate way that can be defended from objections, or else you don't really know it. Philosophers have traditionally conceived of knowledge in terms of explicit thoughts you can explain and argue for. One of the more radical innovations of the first division of Being and Time is its proposal of a different kind of knowledge, one sometimes called “know-how” rather than “knowing-that.”2 I know how to walk or have a conversation or what honey tastes like but I'm not sure I could explain any of these, at least not to anyone who didn't already know them.
Surprisingly, Heidegger wants to spell out something as seemingly abstract and esoteric as the meaning of being in terms of these mundane know-hows. This is why he continues the quote above: “we always conduct our activities in an understanding of Being.” He locates this understanding more in our actions than our thoughts, though it's there too. At the most general level, we must have some sense of what it means to be, just to pick out real entities to interact with. By picking up this book, you have demonstrated that you can tell a real object from all the non-existing things you might have reached for. In fact, everything you interact with has to be some kind of being; even a daydream of imaginary scenes is a being of some sort. Every second you're awake you're dealing with something or other, even if only in your thoughts, and all of these interactions successfully pick out things that are. Therefore, your actions must be guided by an understanding of what it means to be, if a tacit one.
But that's not all. Not only do you recognize real beings, but you recognize differences among them. I don't ask my wallet for permission when I take money out of it, the way I would ask permission to get money from you. I don't worry about whether my coffee cup is lonely when I lock it in my office at night, nor do I try to discover and nurture its ambitions. We're constantly differentiating types of beings by treating particular beings differently, which means that we have an understanding of a number of different ways to be. This is what Husserl, Heidegger's teacher, calls “regional ontology,” meaning that reality contains profoundly heterogeneous types of things. This understanding of being that we have is turning out to be rather sophisticated.
It isn't explicit, however. We rarely think about the fact that people and objects are completely different kinds of things which call for diverse actions because it's so self-evident. Heidegger calls this kind of understanding “pre-ontological,” which just means that it's not an express theory (32/12). It can become explicit when people undertake specialized studies of particular topics because each discipline carves out a particular type of being for its subject: language or historical events or atoms or arguments, for example. But even these disciplines take place on the basis of a pre-ontological understanding, what Heidegger calls here “productive logic” (30/10). One has to start off with a basic, rough and ready sense of what, say, historical events are in order to go about the business of studying them. After a detailed examination, we gain a deeper understanding that can enrich and refine our initial definition, which can then enable us to do a better job examining the topic, and so on. I will be calling this the Hermeneutic Spiral, and the movement of the book as a whole is to continue turning it, going back over material already covered but at a deeper level, with greater focus and understanding. Thus, the vicious circle that Meno had posed as an obstacle that prevents inquiry is actually a virtuous spiral that enables us to learn at all. “What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way” (195/153). What Heidegger calls the ontological priority of the question of being in ¶3 means that any empirical inquiry into beings rests on more fundamental notions of what it means to be that kind of being, and ultimately what it means to be at all. Sciences are “naive” or “dogmatic” in that they presuppose these deeper understandings of being without subjecting them to investigation. That they do not do this deeper investigation is not a criticism; that isn't their job. It is the task of philosophy.
Now there are two things you need to know about being right off the bat. First is what Heidegger calls the ontological difference, which is the difference between being and beings or entities or things that are. Beings are just the things and people around us – this book, that cup, Marlon Brando, toenails, etc. Being (at least at this point in Heidegger's thought) is the way they are, the different kinds of behavior we can expect from them. These “levels” are not separate or separable, but are fundamentally different kinds of phenomena, which he calls “ontic” and “ontological,” respectively (note: don't confuse this sense of “ontological” as referring to being in contrast to beings with the other sense of “ontological” as an explicit theory in contrast to pre-ontological understanding; Heidegger really should have come up with different terms). Claims like, “the Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity” (26/6) mean that the way a thing exists is not itself a thing. People, for example, have a distinctive way of existing that is very different from the way inanimate objects are, but this way of existing is plainly not itself a person or a thing or any other entity. It is a way of being – making it ontological – rather than a being itself – which would make it ontic. Confusing the two – treating being as a being – forms one of the most common mistakes in philosophy, what he comes to call onto-theology. This is encouraged by capitalizing “Being,” which makes it sound like the great being in the sky, so I will leave it uncapitalized, though I will preserve its original expression in quotations (Heidegger encouraged Joan Stambaugh to translate the German “Sein” by “be-ing” in English in order to capture its dynamism). Once you understand what Heidegger means by being the point is rather obvious, so hopefully it will become clearer as we become familiar with the three kinds of being that appear in Being and Time. The second preparatory point is that “Being is always the Being of an entity” (29/9). You can never find a way of being just floating around. It's only particular beings that are in specific ways, so we only encounter being by seeing how entities are. We learn about their being by watching them be, so to speak.
And this starts to ease our initial perplexity about how to answer the being-question. If we only find being among beings, then that's where we should look for it: we need to question beings about their being (26/6). Of course, this solution immediately creates a new problem: which beings should we examine? Everything we encounter is a being so taking a survey of them all would be an infinite labor. Heidegger narrows our search in ¶4 The Ontical Priority of the Question of Being where, remember, ontic just means having to do with particular beings as opposed to ontological which pertains to being.
Where should we look for the meaning of being? Happily, we already have the answer to this. The mere fact that we are asking the question of being means that we ourselves have some understanding of its meaning, so we should look for it in us. Metaphysicians have looked far and wide for what it means to be but, like Dorothy's slippers, they had it with them all along. It's initially pre-ontological, as we have seen, but the book as a whole attempts to make it ontological in the sense of an explicitly stated theory.
“Dasein,” an ordinary word for existence in German, is used as a technical term for beings like us in the book, specifically beings with the ability to be aware. Another potential terminological landmine appears here: Heidegger uses the term “existence” exclusively for our way of being so, technically, only Dasein exists; other things have their own ways of being. Heidegger initially defines Dasein as the entity for whom, “in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (32/12). This means that “we cannot define Dasein's essence by citing a ‘what’ of the kind that pertains to a subject-matter … its essence lies rather in the fact that in each case it has its Being to be, and has it as its own” (32–3/12). Our essence is to have no essence in the sense of specific features or tasks or activities assigned to us by our nature. Rocks have a definite essence that cannot be changed; animals are guided by instinct and cannot reflect on what they ought to do. But we are to some degree unformed, which means that it is up to us to form our selves. We become a particular kind of person by living a particular life, making what Heidegger calls “existentiell” decisions, which means that they pertain to specific Dasein, as opposed to “existential” features that all Dasein have (33/12). To connect this distinction with a previous one, existentiell qualities are ontic ones that pertain to particular Dasein whereas existential features pertain to our ontological way of being that is common to all Dasein.
As we will see in the next two chapters, we can only live a life within the context of a community and by using a whole bunch of tools. In order to be a professor, I need to have specific kinds of relationships with students, colleagues, and administrators, and use a loose collection of tools such as books, classrooms, chalkboards, and so on. I cannot be a professor by simply willing it or believing that I am; I have to be involved in certain ways with others and things. Unlike the traditional definition of substance, we are essentially not self-sufficient; we are inescapably amid the world and among others. But, as we have seen, this means that we must understand their ways of being in order to be able to pick them out and interact with them appropriately (33/13).
And this closes the circle opened on the first page, thus ending the first part of the Introduction. We started off completely befuddled about how to answer, or even ask the question of the meaning of being. Now we have the first step – we will find that meaning in the entity who possesses an understanding of being as part of its basic make-up: us. A pre-ontological understanding lives in our activities because we act in the world in our attempts to become a particular kind of person, trying to settle the issue of our being. This requires an understanding of our own way of being, because we must realize that it is up to us to live out our lives, and of the ways of being of the entities we need to do so: objects, tools, and other people. An understanding of these three ways of being is built into our way of being, what Heidegger calls existence, so this is what we must analyze as the foundation for understanding all of these ways of being. Or, as Heidegger densely summarizes the conclusion of the first part of the Introduction, “therefore, fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein” (34/13). The analysis of existence, Dasein's way of being, forms the foundation for the study of being, ontology.
Being and Time Introduction II
If Part I of the Introduction addresses the why and the what of the inquiry – why it's important and what to study – Part II looks at how to conduct it. We now know that we have to examine Dasein's way of being, what he calls the existential analytic, but how do we do this? This may seem easy – after all, every second of our life gives us data since we are always with ourselves. But ¶5 introduces one of the guiding ideas of Heidegger's thought: that which is most familiar is, for that very reason, especially hard to grasp (36/15). Although this sounds paradoxical, you can see it at work in your daily life. Think about some of the features in your room – your desk, or posters on the wall, or the position of the bed. These are things you see every day but, because they're constantly in view, you take them for granted and they become, if not exactly invisible, then unseen, rarely noticed unless something changes. If that's true of your closet door which you often see, how much more does it apply to your self which is always there?
It will take work to analyze ourselves, then, and for more than one reason. Heidegger thinks that philosophers have typically started their examination of the self with a presupposition about which activities are essential to our nature. Ever since the Greeks defined humans as the rational animal these presuppositions have usually focused on our ability to think, but this concentration is just an artifact of the way philosophers approach the subject. Think about how Descartes begins his Meditations, for instance. He says that he must cease all normal activities and retreat to a cabin where he can just sit in a chair by the fire and think. And lo and behold, what he finds there is that he is really just a thinking thing! Well no wonder – all he's doing while he's examining himself is thinking (85/59). This method prejudices the investigation by intentionally screening out the kinds of things we do the vast majority of the time, just the kinds of things Descartes makes sure to stop doing before he starts studying himself. Plato similarly praises the activity of philosophizing because it takes us away from the mundane flotsam and jetsam of life, the insignificant and rather distasteful bodily processes that take up so much of our time.
Heidegger asks an intentionally naive question: if these activities are what we do most of the time, why filter them out when we want to understand ourselves? We spend vastly more time eating cereal and walking to the store and talking with our friends than we do contemplating triangles or ruminating on the nature of justice. Instead of screening them out, we should come up with an understanding of the self starting with these kinds of activities, what he calls our “average everydayness” (38/16). These common, daily actions and interactions should not be shunned since it is here that our understanding of being happens. This is one way in which, as he announced on the first page, he conducts the inquiry into being “concretely” (19/1).
Just as he gave us time as the answer to the being-question right away, so Heidegger solves the existential analytic at the start by telling us that the meaning of Dasein is temporality as well (38/17). And, once again, we are not yet able to understand this. We can see one thing right away, however. Part of what it means for Dasein to be temporal is that it is historical. As we will see in 1.IV,3 the roles we take up in order to settle the issue of our being come from our community, and these roles have been passed down. I can only be a professor because my society has the relevant institutions which have themselves come from medieval universities, ultimately going back to Plato's Academy. It's not just roles that are historical; our most basic ways of thinking and seeing the world are also passed down. We are rarely aware of the fact that they are historical – they usually simply seem to be the way the world is – but that just shows how deeply they determine our ways of experiencing things (41/20).
One of the features of the being-question is how incredibly disorienting it is; as we have seen, we have no ready-made way to pursue it. So one possible way to orient our inquiry, which ¶6 takes up, is to look at how others have gone about it, looking to the great works of metaphysics for clues to the way explorers examine the maps of previous expeditions. Even for those who haven't actually read the canonical texts, Heidegger thinks that ideas from the history of philosophy have surreptitiously infiltrated our ways of thinking so that we employ diluted versions of Platonic or Aristotelian notions without even knowing it. When we think, we typically do so with other people's thoughts, prosthetic limbs for the brain so to speak (42–3/21). When this happens, however, we are not finding things out for ourselves, not having the experiences that originally inspired and informed these ideas when they were first formed. Over time, these traditional ideas have “hardened” (44/22) into clichéd thoughts that students can recite by rote; rather than helping us think, they now hinder it. They cover over instead of uncovering, so that we see what we expect to see, what we think we will see rather than what actually shows up.
If we are to see what appears for itself, we must loosen up these hardened ideas in what Heidegger calls a “destruction” of the tradition, though this isn't as violent as it sounds. Rather than smashing them, we need to dismantle these traditional ideas carefully, studying how they were put together so that we can take them apart and understand the original experiences that gave rise to them in the first place. This is a laborious and, for Heidegger, a deeply respectful, almost reverential activity, even though it is continuously criticizing what it takes apart. This task was originally to take up the entire second part of the book, with chapters on Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle in reverse chronological order.4
Heidegger thinks that the flaw common to virtually all metaphysicians is that they didn't ask the question of being rigorously enough. In particular, they ignored the varieties of ways to be, fixating instead on a single way of being which they applied to every thing that is. This is especially problematic when it comes to the subject of the foundation of all ontology – the existential analytic which studies us. The dominant thesis of Being and Time as we have it (we don't know where Division 3 would have taken us) is that Dasein's way of being is utterly unlike that of anything else, and the two divisions we have are an extended analysis of existence by constant contrast with two other modes of being. Heidegger repeatedly exhorts us to understand Dasein on and in its own terms rather than those borrowed from another kind of being. Let us call this demand the Existential Imperative.5 Metaphysicians have been seduced by a single idea and ideal of what it means to be – to participate in Forms, to be created by God, to be a substance, etc. – which they then force onto everything. Heidegger argues that the very fact that we treat, say, people differently from hammers or rocks shows that we have at least a vague, pre-ontological appreciation of multiple ways to be.
Turning back to the history of philosophy, one thing that Heidegger finds striking is the prominent role time has played “as a criterion for distinguishing realms of Being” (39/18). For instance, Plato distinguishes the things of this world that we sense and use and that are in time from the Forms that transcend this world as perfect and unchanging outside of time. One of the features that makes the former not fully real and the latter really real is that the latter are not temporal. Thus time plays a decisive role in this analysis of being and yet, Heidegger argues, no one asked why time gets to play this part. Why is it time that determines ontological status as opposed to all the other ways reality could have been divided up? His answer is that Dasein is itself, at bottom, temporal so we understand being in temporal ways.
In fact, these two early answers are connected: time is the meaning of being because Dasein is ultimately temporal. Heidegger is using a Kantian argument here that I will call The Law of Transcendental Transitivity. Kant argued, in what he called “the highest principle of all synthetic judgments,” that the features we use to structure experience will necessarily be found in everything we experience, my Law of Transcendental Transitivity (Kant 1965, A158/B197). Since our minds organize our experience of the world in spatial relations, for example, everything we will ever encounter through the senses will be in space.
Heidegger takes over this argument, with three specific changes. First, he broadens out the kinds of experience to include our mundane interactions with the world, limiting scientific experience (which Kant focused on exclusively) to only one kind of being: presence-at-hand. Second, Heidegger wants to show how time alone can account for all the ways we experience and understand the world and ourselves, as he starts to do in the second half of Division 2 (38/17). Whereas Kant has a wide assortment of forms, concepts, and ideas structuring experience, Heidegger thinks they can all be reduced to different forms of temporality. Third, as we will see in just a minute, Heidegger rejects Kant's belief that behind the phenomena we experience there lies a noumenal realm of reality-in-itself which therefore limits features like space to just phenomena. For Heidegger, the world we experience is the world as it really is, so the features we “impose” on it are really there, rather than just subjective projections.6 We will examine this idea in more depth in the next chapter.
Now that we have realized that we are unduly guided by traditional theories, we must figure out how to fight this influence and see what the world is actually like. Heidegger's answer is phenomenology, the method invented by his teacher, Edmund Husserl. ¶7 goes into a long etymological examination of the two Greek roots of the word, phainomena and logos, concluding that their meanings are strikingly overlapping (58/34). Phenomena means those things that come into the light (51/28), metaphorically speaking – that manifest themselves to us. He also goes into another long and rather confusing discussion of a constellation of terms that mean different ways of appearing.7 The gist of it is that he understands that which appears to us as true reality rather than a sign of something that does not appear, like Plato's Forms or Locke's substance or Kant's noumena: “least of all can the Being of entities ever be anything such that ‘behind it’ stands something else ‘which does not appear’” (60/35).
This means that when we study reality, we don't have to treat what we experience as second best, as a paltry substitute for real reality, or a mask we have to decipher in order to figure out what the real thing behind it is. If you want to know what the world is like, open up your eyes and take a look – that's the world. This is why he proclaims that, “only as phenomenology, is ontology possible” (60/35). Rather than sitting in a chair and logically reasoning out how the world must be, we should simply go “to the things themselves,” as Husserl said, and see what they're like. We no longer have to demote what appears to mere appearance, as the long tradition of metaphysics has taught us to do. Ultimately, for Heidegger, to be is to appear to us, so the study of experience is the study of reality. Phenomenology is ontology.
However, as was true of ourselves, the study of experience is not completely straightforward. Although we are to study what appears, things can appear in lots of different ways. In particular, our topic – being – paradoxically shows up as hidden (59/35). This apparent contradiction clears up when we remember what Heidegger means by being, namely, the way that things are. When we drive a car, we are only thinking about the car or, as we will see in 1.III, we often aren't thinking about much of anything but just enjoying the breeze or a song on the radio. The fact that the car is an instrument I am using to get to somewhere is not something that occurs to me, even though I have to pre-ontologically understand this in order to use it for this purpose. We primarily focus on beings; their being informs our interactions with them but while remaining in the background. This is one reason why we lack the grammar and vocabulary to properly talk about being – language is ontically oriented (63/39). While we don't have to go beyond the mundane things of daily life to find the true truth, neither is being a prominent, easily grasped feature of experience. Bringing it into focus will take work.
The second complication in studying experience is that we have a built-in tendency to misunderstand ourselves and the world. Division 1 gives us one reason for this tendency to misinterpret, and Division 2 gives us another, as we will see. Part II was to give us a third, historical one – that we use inappropriate views inherited from the tradition to understand ourselves – though that reason presupposes the other two as explanations for why philosophers have so consistently gotten it wrong in the first place.
These two reasons mean that we can't just take experience as it is; we have to do some work interpreting it to find its true significance. This is why Heidegger calls his phenomenology “hermeneutic” (62/37), which refers to a school of philosophy founded by Friedrich Schleiermacher in the eighteenth century. In traditional Catholicism, people depended on their priest to explain what God wants of them and what the Bible means. Initially this didn't pose a problem since so few people were literate and there were so few copies of the Bible to be read; peasants just looked at the pretty stained glass windows while the priest droned on in Latin. But the Protestant Revolution made the idea that individuals should forge their own personal relationships with God popular, and the invention of the printing press made books cheaper and more plentiful, so people started reading it on their own to figure out how to live and worship. The problem is that the Bible is not an easy book, and misunderstanding it may have rather serious consequences for one's soul. So hermeneutics was founded as the analysis of how interpretation works. Originally it focused on reading texts, but Wilhelm Dilthey expanded its subject matter to psychological and historical understanding, investigating how we understand other people and especially people from different time periods who think and speak differently from us. Heidegger, the next important figure in the history of the movement (the fourth one was his student, Hans-Georg Gadamer), expands interpretation into a constantly operating process in all of our experience. We will see this especially in 1.V.¶32.
Thus for Heidegger, phenomenology is the way to study being, which means that we study it as it appears to us. But phenomenology must be existential, which means that it begins by analyzing our way of being (existence). This fits with phenomenology since the fundamental feature that defines us is our ability to be aware. It must also be hermeneutic in that it interprets experience rather than just accepting it at face value. Furthermore, it must be accompanied by a historical destruction to clear away theories that may block or distort what we see. And finally, it is ontological in that what we experience is reality as it really is. All of these disparate streams of thought are united in Heidegger's form of phenomenology.
Further readings
There is a vast literature on tacit knowledge or know-how (as opposed to knowing-that). Classics include Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind and Michael Polanyi's The Tacit Dimension, although it can all be traced to Aristotle's discussion of phronēsis in Nicomachean Ethics. I argue in Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger that both Heidegger and Wittgenstein offer sophisticated accounts of tacit knowledge, and this idea runs throughout much of Hubert Dreyfus' work, e.g. What Computers Still Can't Do.
For further information on phenomenology, one can go to the source – Husserl's Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology and Cartesian Meditations both offer good overviews, while Heidegger's History of the Concept of Time goes into detail on certain issues. Dermot Moran's Introduction to Phenomenology, on the other hand, gives a more accessible introduction to the movement. One of the great works of hermeneutics is Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, though once again more introductory works abound. For an insightful discussion of the basic strategy of Being and Time, take a look at Jacques Taminiaux's Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology.
Notes
1 The numbers in the margins of Being and Time are from the original German pagination so that people using different translations can synchronize citations. Quotes are usually given with both the page of the translation being used and the original pagination, separated by a slash, e.g. 19/1. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes in Part I of this book are from Being and Time and I will be using the standard Macquarrie and Robinson translation throughout.
2 There are some precedents of this conception of knowledge, such as Aristotle; see Braver 2012, 168–70. Other twentieth-century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, and Michael Polanyi explore this distinction as well.
3 I will refer to sections of the book by division number, then chapter number (in Roman numerals), and then paragraph number (that is, the continuously numbered sections denoted by “¶”) when relevant, all separated by periods. So the chapter referred to above is Division 1, ch. IV.
4 We can piece together some of what Part II would have been from contemporary lecture series that deal with these figures.
5 This name plays on Kant's categorical imperative, the second form of which is to treat rational beings (as ends-in-themselves) as fundamentally different from non-rational beings (as means only), which may have been one of the influences on Heidegger's uncompromising dichotomy between Dasein and everything else.
6 Perhaps the classic statement of this reading of Being and Time is Heidegger's Temporal Idealism by Bill Blattner. It's an idealism because reality derives certain features from us, and it's a temporal idealism because temporality is the central, unifying feature derived. Many scholars have commented on the connection between Heidegger and Kant; book-length studies include Schalow 1992, Sherover 1971.
7 This is explained more clearly in History of the Concept of Time ¶9 if you're interested.
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Being and Time 1.I–IV: Being-in and the World
Now that we have finished the thorny and rather abstract Introduction, things get a bit smoother. The writing in the book proper is still very hard, but Heidegger slows down and takes more time explaining each new term instead of piling them up one after another as in the Introduction. Another advantage is that he starts using the method of phenomenology instead of just talking about it. The key to practicing phenomenology is that “everything about [the topic in question] which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly” (59/35). A phenomenological proof is not a logical argument where premises lead rationally to a conclusion, but a description that lets you see what the author is talking about. Heidegger's descriptions are correct if you find the same structures and phenomena in your experience, and wrong if you don't, although sometimes seeing them aright takes considerable effort (this need for interpretation is why he considers his work “hermeneutic,” as briefly discussed in Chapter 1 and further explained in Chapter 3).
This means that no matter how difficult the writing and how thick the terms, Heidegger is always trying to get at something you are already familiar with, albeit only tacitly. As with Plato's recollection, this pre-ontological familiarity allows us to recognize these phenomena when our attention is drawn to them (85/58). Furthermore, the experiences he is describing are from our normal, average everyday lives rather than any kind of exceptional state that you might not have encountered. So whenever you find yourself lost – and this will happen many times, believe me – try to figure out what experience he's trying to describe. If you can chop through the thick verbiage to get to the relevant experience, it can anchor your interpretation of the text.
