Month: February 2025

Being And Time: The Ontological Tradition

This post is part of a series. Go to the Introduction

Previous Post in Series: The Meaning of Being

The Presocratic philosopher Parmenides struggled with the Greek verb ἐστί (esti) which means “it is.” If I say “the unicorn is white” am I saying that there is a unicorn that exists? Or that a creature of my imagination is white? For the Greeks this sentence was ambiguous and there was not yet a clear distinction made in the language between an existential understanding (a being is) and a predicative understanding (a being has the property of whiteness). What complicated matters further was that if someone said “it is not” this seemed to cause a contradiction because you were saying something was before going on to say that it wasn’t. As a result, Parmenides argued that we can only think of what is and must avoid thinking about what is not. He went on to say that change and motion are impossible. His student Zeno invented humorous thought puzzles where swift-footed Achilles can never catch up to a slow-moving tortoise. But that’s a story for another time.

These thoughts on “is” and “is not” provide the context for why the unnamed visitor from Elea expresses confusion about the word “being.” Plato theorized that particular beings in the world had their cause in transcendental Forms from which copies of beings were created. For every type of being there is a form. Picture one of those rubber stamps that you cover with ink and then stamp out dozens of impressions on a piece of paper. There were stamps for trees, rocks, water, dogs and cats, beds, numbers, even one for human beings.

Aristotle rejects this idea with a humorous criticism:

[Plato teaches that] “corresponding to each thing there is a synonymous entity apart from the substances… both in our everyday world and in the realm of eternal entities…. [It’s] as though a man who wishes to count things should suppose that it would be impossible when they are few, and should attempt to count them when he has added to them” (Aristotle 990a).

In other words, if our explanation of beings involves postulating more transcendental beings, all we’ve succeeded in doing is doubling the number of beings now in need of explanation.

Aristotle will arrive at a different theory of being. He argues that the essence of a thing is “the primary cause of its existence” (Aristotle 1041b). The acorn causes the oak tree to be. Biological parents cause their offspring to be. Each effect is preceded by a cause which in turn is preceded by other causes and effects. But surely these causes can’t go back forever? There must have been a primary cause. This primary cause Aristotle calls the Unmoved Mover, a causeless cause that kick-started the whole chain of events. This is the “god of the philosophers,” a single changeless eternal Being that is the ground of all being.

Aristotle’s way of looking at being will make its way into Neoplatonism and then early Christianity. It reaches a sort of maturity in the medieval period as the vertical “great chain of being” with plants and rocks at the bottom, animals and humans somewhere in the middle, all the way up to angels and God at the top. The medieval period still accepts the Greek view in which the soul is an immaterial substance bound to the material body and released from the body at death.

In his Meditations, Rene Descartes walks through a thought experiment to argue that the essence of our being is that of a thinking subject. He famously declares “I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum). In doing so, his substance dualism equates the immaterial soul with the mind. From now on we tend to see our essence as an immaterial mental subject, one-step removed from, and gazing out at the material world of objects around us. This way of looking at our being comes to dominate the tradition. And it is what Heidegger wishes to destroy.

Next Post in Series: Destruction (forthcoming)

Being And Time: The Meaning of Being

This post is part of a series. Go to the Introduction

What is the meaning of being? In philosophy “being” is the main question in metaphysics, or more specifically ontology. This is also the question that drives Heidegger’s project. He sets the scene in his preface with a quote from Plato’s Sophist. The visitor from Elea has been in dialogue with the young Theaetetus. They’ve been going back and forth about such things as what we mean when we use expressions like is and is not. In the spirit of inquiry, Theaetetus goes along and acts as a foil to the visitor’s line of questioning. But the more they talk about the expression “being,” the more tangled things seem to get. Finally, the visitor asks:

“What do you want to signify when you say being? Obviously, you’ve known for a long time. We thought we did, but now we’re confused about it” (Plato 244a).

Heidegger quotes this line right at the start of his book. He says we’re still waiting for the answer. To make matters worse, we are no longer “perplexed at our inability to understand the expression ‘being.'” We’ve forgotten to ask the question altogether. His task is to “reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question.” Heidegger lists three prejudices or objections that come up when questions about being are raised:

1. Being is universal. For example, we can talk about individuals but at the end of the day we’re all human beings.

2. Even if we wanted to ask, the question makes no sense. We know what it means to be human, to be a dog, or a cat, but we can’t talk about being in the abstract. So don’t ask.

3. Isn’t it obvious? Everyone already knows what it means to say, “the dress is green” or “the girl has pigtails”. If we want to understand being, all we have to do is just look at the person or object.

Heidegger addresses each in turn. To assert that being is universal doesn’t make the question any clearer. Do we know what we mean when we say that being is a universal concept? Since “being” is obscure, this is all the more reason to discuss it.

As for the second one, just because the question makes no sense that’s no reason to continue to ignore it. Quite the reverse, Heidegger thinks. The question “forces it upon us.”

As for the last prejudice, Heidegger is skeptical that being is self-evident. Like the visitor from Elea, we get confused easily just talking about it. This talk of self-evidence and confusion presents an interesting enigma. We think the question of being is obvious to everyone and yet being remains “shrouded in darkness.” He muses at another point that the question “is the most universal and the emptiest” (40).

The whole book is Heidegger’s attempt to answer the question of the meaning of being. Before diving into it, I need to present a very brief survey of the history of philosophy with respect to being. Heidegger calls this “the tradition” since it’s a view that has shaped Western philosophical thinking for over 2,500 years.

Next Post in Series: The Ontological Tradition

Being And Time: Introduction

Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. With the publication of his book Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) in 1927, he revolutionized how we thought of our world and our existence in it as human beings. Pretty much all later Continental philosophy – existentialism, structuralism, and postmodernism – go back to him in one way or another.

Over a series of blog posts, I’m going to organize my thoughts on major themes found in Division One (the first 44 sections of Being and Time). This is the first half of the book known as the existential analysis of Dasein. I’ve read Stambaugh’s translation of the book twice recently and have gone back over certain sections numerous times. I’ve also kept a notebook and have sketched out some of the relationships between his technical terms. But it’s time to put all of this down in writing because that’s how I learn best. For me, that means blogging. A word of caution. Although I have a philosophy undergraduate degree, I am not an academic. My training was in the analytic tradition with an emphasis on philosophy of science and first-order logic. I went on to have a career as a software developer. So, Heidegger’s phenomenological method, his opaque terms, and his inability to communicate in clear language, have been a serious challenge for me. I have gone through multiple bouts of frustration. You will too. Have patience with yourself.

There’s an elephant in the room. Namely, the repulsive fact that Heidegger was an egomaniac, antisemitic, and joined the Nazi Party in 1933 as a true “blood and soil” nationalist. So why did I bother to read him? Well, when I was an undergrad, a professor declared that we would read Sartre but not Heidegger. Heidegger’s fascism made him strictly verboten. You can guess what I did next. I picked up a copy of the Macquarrie and Robinson translation to seek out this “forbidden knowledge” for myself. But I had a full course load, the book was impenetrable, and despite several attempts to read it over the years I never understood it. That always bothered me.

Fast forward a few decades and I picked it up again. I remained curious. But more than that, I traced in my own mind a connection between today’s relativism of “alternative facts” where truth is whatever one wants it to be, back through the postmodern rejection of objective scientific truth, and to Heidegger’s philosophical relativism where truth is a function of our own being. For Heidegger if we do not exist then there is no truth. I’m not sure what to make of that since I’m firmly in the camp that says a tree falling in the forest makes a sound even if no one is around to hear it. Unless you want to say that the displacement of air molecules by a falling object is mere truthiness. The point is my return to Heidegger is not just undergrad nostalgia but also something that feels very present.

My goal is to understand and describe what Heidegger is saying rather than to dwell on a flawed man. As much as possible I’ll adopt a journalistic detachment in my interpretation. At the end of the day, don’t take anything I say at face value. Read the book for yourself and come to your own conclusions.

Citations

This is the primary source which is the focus of my survey:

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (BT). Translated by Joan Stambaugh and Revised by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1996.

A full list of works cited is on its own page and I will link to that page when I make a citation to a primary or secondary source. A word about page numbers. Both the Macquarrie and Robinson and the Stambaugh translations include in the margins the pagination from the original Niemeyer edition of Sein und Zeit. I have Stambaugh’s translation. So, when I cite BT, I’ll quote from her with the Niemeyer page in parenthesis. For example, from page 10 of Stambaugh:

“Science in general can be defined as the totality of fundamentally coherent true propositions” (11).

In Macquarrie and Robinson this is on page 32:

“Science in general may be defined as the totality established through an interconnection of true propositions” (11).

Both are on page 11 of the Niemeyer edition. This convention is common in the secondary literature, so I’ll follow it as well. Last, Heidegger loves to italicize for emphasis. All italicized words in quotations originate from him unless I indicate otherwise. However, I will italicize words now and then when they are one of Heidegger’s technical terms (e.g., ontic).

Next Post in Series: The Meaning of Being

The Series

This series on Heidegger’s Being and Time is divided into the following parts:

The Meaning of Being

The Ontological Tradition

Destruction (forthcoming)

Rebuilding (forthcoming)

Dasein (forthcoming)

Being-In-The-World (forthcoming)

Worldliness (forthcoming)

The Others (forthcoming)

Average Everydayness (forthcoming)

Authentic Self (forthcoming)

Care (forthcoming)

Temporality (forthcoming)

Final Opinions (forthcoming)