This post is part of a series. Go to the Introduction
First Thoughts
My overall reaction after reading Heidegger’s Being and Time was that I had a vague sense something important was being said but I wasn’t sure what it was. Heidegger is repetitive, opaque, baffling, and difficult. But he also has some central insights that on balance make the challenge of reading him worth it. Heidegger provided a unique alternative to the traditional way of seeing our being. Before him, those of us in Eurocentric cultures were used to seeing ourselves as static, unchanging souls buried somewhere in the heart or maybe consciousness operating at a distance somewhere inside the head. After him, to see one’s being as mere substance seems limited. We are signifiers, possibilities, events, and references, all in relation to each other and the world in which we are thrown and entangled. Who we are is in constant motion. Our existence forms according to the choices made over time. That’s why he thinks the meaning of our being is time. This is all expressed in his observation that our essence lies in our existence, which Sarte famously reformulates in his humanism as “existence precedes essence”. I have criticisms regarding this brief summary, which I’ll get to below. But I want to say at the outset that Heidegger has some thought provoking and original ideas that are to his credit.
A Wild Ride
Heidegger’s overall approach reminds me of a cab ride I once took in San Francisco. The driver, knowing my fare would be paid by my employer, took the liberty of giving me an expansive tour of Chinatown before dropping me off at my final destination. Similarly, in the existential analysis, Heidegger takes us on a trip. Heidegger suggests that we care about our being because our time in the world is limited. This psychological value statement evolves into an ontological assertion that our existence is care. But then later, our existence is really temporality.
Somehow the three-part structure of care maps onto the temporal structure of past, present, and future. This connection is supposed to be worked out in the more difficult chapters of the second half of the book. If so, I just didn’t see it. Why not take us directly to the conclusion if the evidence warrants it? What is gained by detours that are tenuously connected at best? I get that we’re on a hermeneutic circle. The analysis deepens with each turn. But these turns seem arbitrary. Disjointed.
To help me make sense of the connection between care and temporality I read Stephan Käufer’s paper Temporality as the Ontological Sense of Care. First, he reassured me that I wasn’t alone:
“For all its importance, the argument of §65 is obscure, as Heidegger does not provide a lot of detail. The connections to the existentialist theme of authenticity are unclear. The transcendental argument that temporality makes care possible is so quick that it is easy to miss altogether. Heidegger claims that temporality somehow unifies the various aspects of care, but it is hard to see what justifies this claim” (Wrathall, p. 338).
Let me stop right there for a moment to describe a transcendental argument. Here’s the classical formulation:
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- If P is possibly true, then Q is necessarily true.
- P is actually true.
- Therefore Q.
Käufer goes on to say that Heidegger developed a transcendental argument, modeled on Kant’s transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason, such that the unity of the threefold structure of temporality necessarily belongs to the threefold structure of care. Put as a transcendental argument:
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- In order for the care structure to be possible, temporality must ground it.
- The care structure is the meaning of the being of Dasein.
- Therefore, temporality grounds the care structure.
If I understand Käufer – and I can almost guarantee that I do not – we have to fill in the missing gaps of Heidegger’s analysis with Kant’s “threefold synthesis in the A-deduction” from the Critique. That is to say, Heidegger is refashioning Kant’s transcendental deduction in order to make it conform to his threefold structure of temporality. I am just going to leave that right there and slowly walk away. I admire Käufer’s attempt to interpret what Heidegger means by care being grounded in temporality. I don’t know if he succeeded. But it would have been better if Heidegger were less obscure and connected the dots more clearly himself.
His opaque writing style aside, there’s something else that bothers me about Heidegger’s method. Is he struggling to find the right words for difficult ontological concepts that can barely be explained? Or is he enigmatic on purpose because at bottom there’s nothing to explain? There are technical terms introduced that go undeveloped. Others seem needlessly introduced and serve only to pad out the narrative. And there are mystical symbols that seem to come in patterns of three. Being- in-the-world has a threefold structure. Disclosedness has a threefold structure. Fallenness has a threefold structure. There are other structures and categories that I never talked about and wheels within wheels that were all hidden for 2,500 years until Heidegger came along to discover them. Did these phenomena just happen to reveal themselves to him in patterns of three? Or is there a confirmation bias at work here akin to a “Holy Trinity” or some other symbolic reference? I can’t say and am forced either to take his word for it or dismiss him altogether.
Being Itself
In my brief summary of the ontological tradition, I pointed out that the question of being itself was dropped. Heidegger promised us an answer to the metaphysical question of the meaning of being. He never provides it. Instead, he walks us through our being, the being of Dasein. This is one reason why Husserl said in a 1931 lecture that Being and Time was anthropological rather than phenomenological. Heidegger had planned to write a second volume. It was never written. Instead, the later Heidegger turned to art and poetry, the dangers of technology, and a “fourfold” mysticism involving earth, sky, mortals and the divine.
To be charitable, we could allow that Heidegger sought nothing more than to “reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question.” Fair enough. But that’s like finding out that instead of the brand-new car you won a set of steak knives. Heidegger gave a lecture at the University of Freiburg in 1929 – later published under the title “What is Metaphysics?” – that is full of mystical references about “the nothing”:
“The nothing is the complete negation of the totality of beings” (BW, 98).
“Anxiety reveals the nothing” (BW, p. 101).
“Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nothings” (BW, p. 103).
My grammar checker wants to remove the definite article “the” from “the nothing” [Das Nichts]. But it’s no mistake. Heidegger peppers his lecture with many references to “the nothing” and seeks a way to talk about it in terms of anxiety. Anxiety pushes being away from us. It strips away all pretense and reveals “the nothing” that we ourselves are. Heidegger might be talking about existential death [Tod] here but I’m not sure. So much for the notion that anxiety was said to free us from worldliness and give us “the possibility of an authentic potentiality-of-being” (344). In any case, this seems to be his final answer to the being of being. Being is grounded in… nothing. Enjoy those steak knives.
Rudolf Carnap famously took issue with Heidegger’s lecture and declared that assertions like “the nothing itself nothings” were metaphysical nonsense. The idea that “the nothing” is something becomes a central tenant of Heidegger’s thinking. In his Letter on Humanism (1947) Heidegger continues to try to speak of the essence of being as the nothing:
“Being nihilates — as Being. Therefore the ‘not’ appears in the absolute Idealism of Hegel and Schelling as the negativity of negation in the essence of Being…. The nihilating in Being is the essence of what I call the nothing” (BW, p. 261).
Is this little more than a flowery, yet meaningless, tautology that says Being negates negation and therefore is Being? Perhaps. Heidegger has long since left the rough ground of language and slips around on metaphysical ice.
By the way, this lecture and Heidegger’s thought thereafter is important because it signals a split between Continental and analytic philosophy that exists to this day. The analytic school will focus on the boring stuff: science, epistemology, logic, and cleaning up grammatical pseudo-problems in our language games. The Continental school will focus on Marxism, existentialism, metaphysics, deconstruction, and later build clever postmodern theories about semiotics, race, gender, power, and colonialism.
Is The Question Meaningful?
Heidegger’s entire project rests on the question of the meaning of being. Heidegger laments that “whoever persists in asking about it is accused of an error of method” (2). Probably for good reason. Early on I reviewed the three prejudices about the question and Heidegger’s response. Briefly they were being is (a) universal; (b) indefinable; and (c) self-evident. For the second prejudice Heidegger writes:
“Indeed ‘being’ cannot be understood as a being…. But does it follow from this that ‘being’ can no longer constitute a problem? Not at all…. The indefinability of being does not dispense with the question of its meaning but forces it upon us” (4).
Heidegger is right to say that universal Being cannot be understood in terms of a particular being. Being is not a predicate. But he’s probably wrong to insist that just because the question “forces” itself upon us we must seek to answer it. So many philosophical problems occur when we ignore or abuse the logic of ordinary language. Just because a sentence can be framed as a question, that doesn’t mean it has a meaningful answer.
For example, if someone asks, “why is the sky blue?” we can see after some reflection that the question is meaningful. Our answer might be “because light is refracted in the upper atmosphere toward the blue end of the spectrum.” But suppose I ask you a metaphysical question like “what is the meaning of life?” You would probably say something like “it depends, what do you mean by life?” or “there’s no one right answer to that.” And you’d be right. The question is meaningless on its own as it is currently framed. It only becomes meaningful in a particular context. An evolutionary biologist asking this question will have a different frame of reference from that of the theologian. As a result, we’d get two different answers that derive their meaning and sense from the particular domain in which the question was framed and considered. But there wouldn’t be a single answer to the universal question of the meaning of life itself. We wouldn’t ask “what is the Life of particular lives?”
After Heidegger insists that the question of the meaning of being should be taken seriously, he does some hand waving and shifts from the universal to the particular. Not to do so would have made for a very short book. It’s like the man who dropped his wallet on the ground at night somewhere down the street but walks half a block away to look for it under a streetlight because the light is better there. To ask about the meaning of being itself sounds like a valid question. But Heidegger walks half a block away to answer a different (and answerable) question about the particular being of Dasein.
Is Heidegger Doing Philosophy?
Was Russell correct to say that Heidegger was doing psychology? Was Husserl right to say that Being and Time is a work of anthropology? I have no idea. I know that Heidegger abandoned Husserl’s phenomenological method of analyzing “the things in themselves” as they appear to us in consciousness. He saw Dasein as a being thrown into the world rather than a separate subject gazing out at the objects of perception.
Hannah Arendt suggests in her essay “What is Existential Philosophy?” that Heidegger was a philosophical romantic (Arendt, p. 187). We know that Heidegger was influenced by Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthey, and probably other nineteenth-century romantics. He lifted his idea of anxiety straight from Kierkegaard who spoke of anxiety in terms of being at a crossroads and needing to choose which way to go. Schopenhauer developed the idea of the “will to live” [Wille zum Leben] which propels us forward in a world without meaning. From Nietzsche we get the “superman” (Übermensch) who must strive for meaning in this life as opposed to the promise of an “other worldliness” in the hereafter. All of these ideas are echoed in one way or another in Being and Time.
Heidegger never talks about the experience of the phenomena but speaks of the need to have an “intuitive grasp” of the hidden layers of being (37). And yes, I realize that it sounds like I’m expecting Heidegger to be an analytic philosopher. I just mean that phenomenology is supposed to involve sense data as it is experienced in consciousness. Heidegger could have dismissed phenomenology altogether, admitted he relied instead on intuition, and nothing would have been lost. It’s almost like phenomenology is a fig leaf to avoid admitting that he relied heavily on intuition to uncover the structures of being. One key tenet of romanticism from Schelling is the idea that intuition is far more important than evidence, deduction, logic, or sense data. Heidegger famously said about Kant in his 1929 disputation with Cassirer that the truth was veiled, and he needed a novel way to “recover” it:
“In order to wring from what the words say, what it is they want to say, every interpretation must necessarily use violence” (When Philosophy Mattered by David Nirenberg, The New Republic, January 1, 2011).
It’s easy to see how this attitude could have been at work a few years prior when he wrote Being and Time. Philosophical intuition looks to access hidden truths that lay beneath (or transcend) the physical world. Most of the structures of being that Heidegger “recovers” do not seem self-evident to me. It’s all reasonably consistent and, if you have the patience to stick with the book, he tells a nice story as he pieces them together. But why should we take him at his word? Is there a way to verify all of these layers upon layers of ontological structures? It’s not like his methods are repeatable.
Suppose Heidegger really is doing phenomenology. That would entail that the ontological structures of being that he is recovering from Dasein are universal. Everyone has a mood of anxiety caused by the realization of death as the possibility of the impossibility of existence. Everyone lives inauthentically for the most part except in moments when attunement turns away from the they-self. Everyone’s being is care. Care really does have a threefold structure. Originary temporality is more primordial than clock time and forms the basis of the care structure. Universal claims like these have a much higher bar than general subjective psychological observations about the human condition. It seems like Heidegger goes beyond the experience of the phenomena as they appear to him. He makes an awful lot of metaphysical assertions about ultimate reality that seem based on pure intuition alone. The book just doesn’t make as much sense if I try to read it as a metaphysical theory of reality and being. However, I find the book to be very meaningful as a work of psychology. It holds up well alongside Freud’s Totem and Taboo or Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious, individuation, and the shadow self.
The Others
One of the disturbing things for me with Being and Time was Heidegger’s argument that we are inauthentic when immersed in and entangled with others in our world but become authentic when we are resolute and choose our own being. This is what is known in the secondary literature as Heidegger’s radical individuality. He does insist that authenticity and inauthenticity are not ethical issues. Our fallenness is a natural state of our being-in-the-world. But I can read between the lines just as well as the next person. Inauthenticity is bad. He describes how inauthentic Dasein is in “subservience” to the others who have a “dictatorship” over it. Only by being resolute in the moment can you, as an authentic person, hope to break free of the rabble and fulfill your destiny.
Don’t misunderstand me. I do relate to Heidegger’s views on idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. Anyone who has spent more than 30 minutes on social media can see it for themselves. But all that talk of subservience and dictatorship goes overboard, especially given Heidegger’s political views. What’s wrong with idle talk? Does anyone have the right to judge two guys who spend an hour talking about last night’s football game? There’s a fine line between impatience at how shallow we can be and outright contempt for how other people choose to spend their time.
The hero’s arc is not as individualistic as Heidegger suggests. It’s true that Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces descends alone into hell. But after battles with dark forces the hero emerges victorious and reconnects with the world. Odysseus got tossed around by Poseidon for ten years before landing back in Ithaca. Jesus comes back from the dead to enlighten his disciples on their way to the village of Emmaus. Luke Skywalker peers into the dark side of the Force before returning as a Jedi Knight to help his friends. These are our stories. Once the journey is complete, the transformed hero always comes back into society to help others. Heidegger seems to forget that part. For him our authentic individuality is a zero-sum game. Either you go it alone and gain yourself or you fall into the world and lose everything. There doesn’t seem to be room in Heidegger’s philosophy for an authentic society. We humans are social creatures with empathy for those around us. We are hard-wired by evolution for cooperation, connection, and camaraderie. For millennia we worked together as hunter-gatherers and as members of the tribe. To try to isolate or to go it alone is not just existential death but probably physical death as well.
Ethics
If you were going to write a book on authentic and inauthentic ways of being, with themes on guilt, fallenness, and being-with others, wouldn’t you say a few words about ethics? In Division 2, Heidegger will introduce the “call of conscience” but he is very clear that the call is not ethical but a neutral summoning of “Dasein to existence” (294). Overall Heidegger is very careful to steer clear of any mention of ethical behavior. That opens him up to the accusation that the “good” is merely whatever potentiality-of-being we choose for ourselves. How is Heidegger’s authenticity any different from philosophical egoism or Nietzsche’s will to power?
In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre published his essay Existentialism Is a Humanism. Later that year Jean Beaufret wrote a letter to Heidegger mentioning Sartre’s essay. At one point in his letter, he stated, “What I have been trying to do for a long time now is to determine precisely the relation of ontology to a possible ethics” (BW, p. 255). Heidegger replied in what is now his Letter on Humanism (1947). His response to Beaufret’s comment is worth a closer look given the omission of ethics in Being and Time.
Heidegger begins by lamenting that “technological man” is organized in our society to serve technology, which has “enslaved” us. Until we can be free, introducing ethics at this time is a predicament. Some observers saw this as a sort of proto environmentalism. It turns out that with the later publication of his private diary – the Black Notebooks – Heidegger’s warning against technology was a dog whistle for the “machinational unessence” of Jews who threaten humanity. In this, Heidegger was no different from other Nazis who dismissed modern physics as “Jewish science.”
His antisemitism aside, by declaring that conditions weren’t right, or that certain impediments must first be removed, Heidegger makes the perfect the enemy of the good. James Madison said famously in Federalist 51 that if men were angels there would be no need for government. But people are not angels and “technology” has been around since someone first flint-knapped a stone to make a spear.
Heidegger then delivers a pretentious history lesson about the Greek view of ethics with a focus on Heraclitus:
“The saying of Heraclitus (Fragment 119) goes: ethos anthropoi daimon. This is usually translated, ‘A man’s character is his daimon.’ This translation thinks in a modern way, not a Greek one. Ethos means abode, dwelling place” (BW, p. 256).
Heidegger then mistranslates the fragment as “man dwells… in the nearness of god” (BW, p. 256). In one stroke he steers the subject away from ethics and toward ontology. He goes on to say we must strive to dwell in Being and “rescue” ourselves from science by means of poetry. Only then will we be ready to ponder the truth. In other words, by properly dwelling in the divine, we will no longer have the need for an ethics. There is so much I could say right now. But I think Heidegger’s dreamy idealism speaks for itself.
This isn’t the first time I noticed Heidegger translating something into what he wants it to mean rather than what it actually means. Right near the beginning of Being and Time he interprets οὐσία as παρουσία thereby switching from the Greek meaning of being to a different word presence [Anwesenheit]. Heidegger probably needed the shift in words because it allowed him to say the Greeks lost the meaning of being in favor of a metaphysics of presence. That accusation would surprise Plato and Aristotle.
Just to be clear, the “usual translation” of ethos anthropoi daimon is the accepted one. For the ancient Greeks, a daimon was a sort of spirit guide. This is one of the shorter fragmentary sayings and there’s not much to go on, but it seems pretty clear that Heraclitus is pointing out that it is one’s own morality, rather than divine direction, that governs ethical behavior. It’s unlikely that Heraclitus is saying we must dwell with the divine. It’s probably just a simple statement about personal integrity.
Heidegger’s Fascism
After the success of Being and Time, Heidegger became a professor at Marburg in the fall of 1927. A year later Husserl retired and Heidegger succeeded to his chair at the University of Freiburg. Adolf Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933 and just a few weeks later Heidegger was appointed (or elected depending on who you believe) to be the Rector at Freiburg. A week later, on May 1, 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. His rectorship was problematic from the start. In his inaugural address he invoked blood and soil themes of the destiny of the state. He also decried the “historical struggle of the German” people using the technical terms of his own philosophy. Heidegger ended his address with a quote from Plato’s Republic:
τά … µєγάλα πάντα ἐπισφαλῆ …
“All that is great stands in the storm …” (497d)
For some apologists this is supposed to mean that because Heidegger ended the address with a quote from Plato rather than Hitler, he wasn’t drinking the Kool Aid. But for me the interesting part is it’s the Republic where Plato describes his plan for a government ruled by philosopher-kings. I wonder if Heidegger’s ego was such that he thought he could direct and influence the Nazi movement rather than be tainted and dragged down by his association with them? In recent years I’ve seen this happen to countless politicians who thought they could influence a certain would-be king who craves his own throne. But to a man, when the king was done with them they too were discarded.
Heidegger employs a questionable translation about standing “in the storm,” which I’m sure sounded very heroic and patriotic at the time. The adjective ἐπισφαλής (episphales) means “precarious” or “unstable” so that it should read “All great things are precarious…” (see the Greek text online at Perseus). This part of Plato’s dialogue is about how hard it is to create a durable government:
“[It] is by no means easy.”
“Just what do you mean?”
“The manner in which a state that occupies itself with philosophy can escape destruction. For all great things are precarious and, as the proverb truly says, fine things are hard.” (497d).
It’s astonishing how blind Heidegger was to Plato’s point. Just twelve years after his rectoral address, the vaunted Third Reich lay in ruins.
Heidegger only lasted a year as Rector. He struggled to find some middle ground between pleasing his masters in Berlin and his colleagues and students at Freiburg, succeeding at neither. On the one hand he prevented radical students from burning books and hanging anti-Semitic posters on campus. On the other hand, according to Graham Harman’s survey, he sought to “cleanse the university of ‘inferior’ and ‘degenerate’ elements” (Harman, p. 101). Heidegger worked to indoctrinate students with Nazi ideology, organizing philosophy camps in which he marched students out into the forest and by the light of the campfire delivered anti-Christian and pro-Hitler propaganda speeches (Harman, p. 103). He resigned in frustration in April 1934. But he remained an enthusiastic supporter of Nazi ideology right up until the end of the war in 1945. He never apologized and he never seemed to have abandoned the “German destiny” and blood and soil nonsense. By 1933 when he joined the party, Heidegger was the most famous philosopher in Europe. So Hannah Arendt and some others believed him to be a sort of “useful idiot” or a trophy for Nazi propagandists. However, many others have pointed out that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter and needed no handling or manipulation.
Post-war, Heidegger went through the denazification process and in 1949 the allies released him with the label of “follower” [Mitläufer]. That category was used for people who were Nazi sympathizers but did nothing that would lead to legal prosecution. Heidegger went back to Freiburg where allegedly one of his former colleagues asked him if he was “back from Syracuse” – a reference to Dionysius II, tyrant of Syracuse, who invited Plato to his court as an advisor. Let’s just say the whole philosopher-king-in-training part didn’t work out and Plato had to abandon the project. I can almost feel the Schadenfreude of his colleague who asked him this question. In any case, Heidegger stayed at Freiburg and taught in the fifties and sporadically after that until his death in 1976.
So the big question is does Heidegger’s fascism mean he should be removed from the canon and no longer taught? I don’t think there’s a right answer here. For you, the answer might be yes. For me, I have to say no. Maybe it’s because I’m an American and believe firmly in counterspeech, which we usually repeat reverently to each other as “the best antidote to bad speech is more speech not less.” That’s true as far as it goes but it’s not quite fitting since Heidegger was no propagandist. There are those who claim to see proto-fascist language in Being and Time but this is debatable. We’re dealing here with the question of the personal failings of the man himself rather than something he wrote. A better comparison is in the paradox of certain successful artists. Most people can think of rock musicians who, on the one hand, created legendary music, while on the other destroyed hotel rooms, drove drunk, and sexually assaulted underage girls. In my opinion, you can study the book and bracket out the writer’s serious personal failings.
In Closing
If you stuck it out to the very end, congratulations! Heidegger is not for the faint of heart. My only real goal with all of this was to take his technical philosophy and try to make sense of it. Hopefully, I succeeded for the most part. I do want to thank my wife Katherine for her editorial help. She took a rough draft and helped me turn it into something coherent and readable. You can blame my blog software for the dash failures. For some reason it can’t distinguish between regular, en, and em dashes. Last, there is an irony that I can’t help but mention. Nearly all of the post-war leftist academic projects – postmodernism, deconstruction, post-structuralism, Situationism, Marxist theory, and French existentialism – all owe a tremendous debt to the ideas of an anti-democratic, antisemitic, unrepentant Nazi.