Author: James Still

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Entanglement [Verfallen] is sometimes translated as “fallenness” or “falling prey” and it is our regular everyday way of being as a they-self in the world with others. Heidegger is a philosophical atheist. So he explicitly states that our fall is not “from a purer and higher” way of being. Nor does he mean that our fallenness is something like original sin or a fall from grace. Fallenness is just a regular habit pattern in our average everyday lives in which we ignore our own potential for being and have “fallen” into the world of others. We do what they do. We choose what they choose. Heidegger doesn’t want to say entanglement is good or bad. However, in my own reading it seems pretty clear that entanglement is inauthentic (that is, bad). It’s even tempting to say it’s a secular version of a fall from grace. Heidegger identifies three parts to entanglement: idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity.

Idle talk is a type of discourse (or language) and a part of our understanding and interpretation of the world. But it’s disconnected from the subjects of language and instead engages in casual fluffery. Idle talk is “groundless” and superficial. Heidegger writes, “what is spoken about as such spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because one says so” (168). The strange aspect of idle talk is that in the telling it takes on a life of its own and “closes off” the original source that inspired the gossip in the first place. Heidegger distinguishes “genuine understanding” from this shallower “average understanding” that is the primary way we talk with others. Idle talk shapes our everyday being and “determines what and how one ‘sees'” (170). In other words, we take on a convenient public understanding of others [das Man] rather than come to our own deeper conclusions about the matter.

Curiosity is “a peculiar way of letting the world be encountered in perception” (170). That sounds like a good thing, right? Not in the way Heidegger means it. Curiosity is our puerile everydayness in seeking spectacle, entertainment, or “the pleasure of the eyes” without going deeper into genuine understanding. We perceive without really seeing:

“[Curiosity] takes care to see not in order to understand what it sees… but only in order to see. It seeks novelty only to leap from it again to another novelty” (172).

Suppose I point my telescope to an object in the night sky. I gesture to the eyepiece and invite you to take a look. You take a quick peek, say “wow!” and then ask me to show you some other objects. But then after a few more you get bored and find that your mind wanders to something else. This is what Heidegger means by curiosity. Curiosity levels everything down to mere amusement. Nothing really goes very deep. We are entertained but miss out on deeper truths and real understanding.

For example, you might have asked me what it was you were seeing. I might say it was the Andromeda Galaxy. You ask more questions. I realize I don’t know the answer. We find ourselves looking it up online or in a reference book. Soon we discover that the Andromeda Galaxy contains about a trillion stars, is 152,000 light years across, and that in a few billion years it will collide spectacularly with our own Milky Way Galaxy.

The third part of entanglement is ambiguity. “When, in everyday being with one another, we encounter things that are accessible to everybody and about which everyone can say everything, we can soon no longer decide what is disclosed in genuine understanding and what is not” (173). Ambiguity is the failure to distinguish between genuine understanding and idle talk. Gossip, rumors, hearsay, titillating stories, or social media conspiracy theories all become mixed and mingled with factual news or evidence-based conclusions. Dasein is usually embedded in its public being with others in such a way that it risks losing itself in ambiguity:

“The loudest idle talk and the most inventive curiosity keep the ‘business’ going, where everything happens in an everyday way, and basically nothing happens at all. Ambiguity is always tossing to curiosity what it seeks, and it gives to idle talk the illusion of having everything decided in it” (174).

Heidegger stresses that these aspects of entanglement are “implied in being-with-one-another, as thrown being-with-one-another in a world” (175). In other words, for us they are like water to a school of fish: pervasive, normative, and wholly unnoticed. Our entanglement interconnects us with other beings in the world at such a deep level that the phenomena remain largely hidden. If you were to bring it up with someone in polite company, they would likely give you a blank stare or maybe a confused “what are you talking about?”

The collective purpose of idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity is to provide the illusion of a “genuine ‘lively life'” without actually being challenged (173). Someone else has already made the hard decisions. And yet no one has decided anything. Heidegger says we are reassured by the illusion that others are in charge. We don’t have to worry about anything. This reassurance tranquilizes us and serves to increase our entanglement in the world of others. We lose ourselves in them. Their values become our values. We did not choose them.

Entanglement keeps us in a vicious circle with respect to our average everydayness. In rare moments we try to go back to our genuine understanding in order to find the self in its possibilities. But possibilities are never truly present, they are always in the future as a potential way of being. To press ahead we must first find ourselves in order to make choices. That takes effort. It’s much easier to pick up the “busyness” that the world offers. We find ourselves “surrendered to thrownness” [Geworfenheit] and thus “always already gone astray” such that we fail to recognize the self (144). Yet the self is a burden which calls us back to it when we go astray — more on that later. So, we go back to our understanding and again seek to revisit the self in its possibilities. Did you notice past and future tense here? This temporality will be the focus of the second division of the book.

Why do we bother to seek ourselves in our possibilities? In short, we are concerned. We care. We didn’t ask to be born but here we are, thrown into the world with no roadmap and no clue. Our thrownness is our being-in-the-world. And when we occasionally turn away from our entangled being-in-the-world, we disclose to ourselves the fact that we care about the choices we make and the person we become. This is the focus of an authentic self in the next section.

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So where are we thus far? Heidegger has said that my essence lies in my existence – that is, who I am is determined by the actions I take given the possibilities that lie before me. I’m surrounded by people, hammers, doors, and thousands of other innerworldly beings in the world. My world is a holistic context of purposes and meanings that shapes me as much as I shape it.

This has all been a way of saying that by being-in the world we are also being-with [Mitsein] other innerworldly beings. We are invested deeply (or absorbed) in our surrounding world: careers, families, sports, projects, tasks, hobbies, amusements, and a thousand other things that keep us busy or distracted. As a result, Heidegger believes we have a tendency to live away from ourselves and get caught up in the world:

“The nearest and elemental way of Dasein encountering the world goes so far that even one’s own Dasein initially becomes ‘discoverable’ by looking away from its ‘experiences’ and the ‘center of its actions,’ or by not yet ‘seeing’ them at all. Dasein initially finds ‘itself’ in what it does, needs, expects, has charge of, in the things at hand which it initially takes care of in the surrounding world” (119).

In other words, we identify with a self formed only in relation to the things we do in the surrounding world. We are so absorbed in the world, our “being there,” that the only way we can discover (or know) our existence is by setting aside or pausing the myriad tasks and projects we undertake in the world. A good example of this “setting aside” is the role that meditation plays in Buddhism.

Heidegger thinks it is rare that we “come up for air,” so to speak, and look away from our average public self. This is what he’s getting at in section 27 when he drops this bomb:

“Dasein stands in subservience to others. It itself is not; the others have taken its being away from it. The everyday possibilities of being of Dasein are at the disposal of the whims of others. These others are not definite others. On the contrary, any other can represent them. What is decisive is only the inconspicuous domination by others that Dasein as being-with has already taken over unawares. One belongs to the others oneself, and entrenches their power. ‘The others,’ whom one designates as such in order to cover over one’s own essential belonging to them, are those who are there initially and for the most part in everyday being-with-one-another. The who is not this one and not that one, not oneself, not some, and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the they [das Man]” (126).

“The they” is an unfortunate translation of das Man. But honestly, from what I’ve read in the secondary literature there is no good way to express Heidegger’s use of das Man into English, so I’ll pick “the others” or just “others” because it works better for me than the awkward “the they.”

Who are the others? Everyone and no one. They are the surrounding culture, the crowd, peer pressure, norms, traditions, spoken and unspoken expectations, or as Heidegger says, “the public ‘surrounding world'” (126). Heidegger asserts that we feel overwhelmed by the pressure of choosing our being. An easy way out is to pick up the norms that the others offer as a template for living. For example, every woman has been told, implicitly or explicitly, that she should have children in her twenties because that’s just what one does. Or a man is told to hide his emotions because that is what is expected of him. Who is doing the telling here? Maybe a parent. More likely, it’s just something in the air. Of course, Heidegger is not saying people shouldn’t be parents in their twenties. What he’s saying is that it should be an authentic decision. When we succumb to possible ways of being that are not of our own choosing, this veils our own authentic being and leads to another way of being that is inauthentic:

“This being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of being of ‘the others’ in such a way that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the they unfolds its true dictatorship. We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also withdraw from the ‘great mass’ the way they withdraw, we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite and which all are, though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness” (127).

Heidegger calls this state of being, in which we are dissolved into their world, the “they-self.” Here we lose ourselves and take on values and ways of being that are inauthentic because we did not choose them. This “losing ourselves” is what Heidegger calls fallenness or entanglement [Verfallen]. I’ll go deeper into that in the next post.

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Earlier I mentioned that Heidegger saw the need for the destruction of traditional ontology. Heidegger had planned to write a second volume to counter Descartes and the tradition. It was never written. But he wrote enough in the first published volume to paint a vivid picture. At the risk of oversimplifying, let me summarize the differences between the Cartesian and Heideggerian worldview to lay the groundwork for Heidegger’s idea of being-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-sein].

Heidegger writes that “Descartes sees the fundamental ontological determination of the world as extensio” (89). That is to say, the world is physical in three-dimensional space. Descartes also made a distinction between mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa). Our being is composed of mind and matter. Our mind is an immaterial substance that has no extension in space while our body is a material substance that does extend into space. For Descartes, when the mind wants to do something – “I want to pick up the hammer” – it passes instructions to the body for it to act. This is known as Cartesian dualism.

In a series of letters between the two, Elisabeth, the Princess of Bohemia, challenged Descartes to explain exactly how an immaterial mind could communicate with a material body. She reasoned that the mind would have to extend into space in order to give instructions to the body. Descartes was unable to provide a sufficient answer. He speculated that maybe the pineal gland was a conduit between the two. In the end, their correspondence ended with his death in 1650. Had philosophers paid more attention to her a lot of hand wringing might have been saved. Instead, the metaphysical game went on, and philosophers continued to struggle for several hundred more years with the pseudo problem of dualism.

Gilbert Ryle, in his plain-spoken book The Concept of Mind (1949) famously criticized Cartesian dualism as a “ghost in the machine.” Heidegger anticipates Ryle’s objections in his own opaque way:

“Dasein does not first go outside of the inner sphere in which it is initially encapsulated, but rather, in its primary kind of being, it is already ‘outside’ together with some being encountered in the world already discovered. Dasein is ‘inside,’ correctly understood; that is, it itself is as the being-in-the-world which knows. Again, the perception of what is known does not take place as a return with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it…. in knowing, Dasein gains a new perspective of being toward the world always already discovered in Dasein” (62).

By thinking of ourselves as a mental substance removed from the world it was easy to question whether the “outside” world was real or rather some kind of illusion. We wondered if we could know anything at all. Kant provided a solution that explained how we can justify our experience of an external world. For his part, Heidegger rejects the idea that we need to justify anything. For him, it is a given for us. He argues that the real scandal isn’t that there are no good arguments for a real world outside of consciousness, but that such proofs are “expected and attempted again and again” (205).

We do not live as “thinking subjects” gazing passively out at a world of objects. I don’t have an essence (a mind or soul) that is in a body. Instead, my whole being is part and parcel of the world.

“The kind of being we are is being-in-the-world” (53).

“The compound expression ‘being-in-the-world’ indicates, in the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a unified phenomenon” (53). I am a unified whole, in the world, which is to say, alongside other beings in my world. And as I mentioned in the previous post, Dasein is thrown into this world. This is why the world is “always already discovered.” It is there prior to and in parallel with my realization of it.

This phenomenon of being-in-the-world has a threefold structure: being, being in, and in-the-world.

The first part of being can be us (Dasein) or other beings in our world which Heidegger calls innerworldly [innerweltlich] beings. An innerworldly being is Heidegger’s technical term for anything with which we interact, a phenomenon he calls an “encounter” with beings. We encounter things like cars, people, tools, telephones, weather, and hundreds of other beings as we move through our daily lives.

As for being in, Heidegger distinguishes two meanings of the preposition “in.” The first one he calls “categorial” and it refers to the ontic fact that objects have location in space. The water is in the glass. The dress is in the closet. But there is a second more important meaning, an ontological one, and this belongs to Dasein alone. In this meaning, we are together with the world “in the sense of being absorbed in the world” (54). For Heidegger, “being-in” is an existential designating our “essential constitution” of being in the world. To illustrate this subtle distinction between the two uses of the preposition “in” Heidegger considers the sentence “the chair touches the wall”:

“Strictly speaking, we can never talk about ‘touching’, not because in the last analysis we can always find a space between the chair and the wall by examining it more closely, but because in principle the chair can never touch the wall, even if the space between them amounted to nothing. The presupposition for this would be that the wall could be encountered ‘by’ the chair” (55).

This is a difficult passage to grasp. What Heidegger means here is that “being-in” is not mere physical contact between objects in space. It is instead an existential that designates our “essential constitution” of being in a world of meaning and context. Only we can encounter the world. We interact with it and our interactions are prior to any logical or epistemological statements we might make. We are not subjects in the world the way water is in the glass. Our being-in the world is not a statement about extension in space. Rather, our existence is such that in the act of living our lives we immerse ourselves deeply into tasks and projects going on for us in the world. This is what Heidegger calls being “absorbed” in the world.

The third part of the threefold structure (in-the-world) refers to the world in which we exist. I need to distinguish between two uses of “world” to avoid confusion. The first is the common sense idea of “mere objective presence” [Vorhandenheit]. This is what we mean when we think of the totality of objects in physical space. Often we say “universe” or “cosmos” when thinking of the world in this way. In this sense of “world” objects exist whether we’re there to interact with them or not. This is the physical domain of science. When we study things under the microscope, or a photograph of the light spectrum of a distant star, the object becomes what Heidegger calls present-at-hand [vorhanden]. This is when we regard only the surface properties of particular objects and bracket out any kind of ontological significance. We frequently look at the world in this way, especially when doing science, but Heidegger feels that it is an impoverished view if that’s all we do.

The second sense Heidegger calls “worldhood” or “worldliness” [Weltlichkeit]. In this sense the world is the totality, not of objects around us, but of our interactions and relationships we form with beings in our surroundings. These beings we encounter, Heidegger refers to as “innerworldly beings.” We become absorbed in them over the course of our daily activities as we seek to get things done. We are at home in our world and move fluidly through it. Think of worldliness not as a physical stage on which the players strut, but as the contexts, meanings, and relationships between the players themselves. This way of looking at the world has ontological significance.

We are surrounded by a “totality of useful things” like pens, papers, tools, doorknobs, and furniture. The being of these useful things typically does not manifest themselves purely as physical entities, but rather it is in their use, our interaction with them, and being absorbed in them through our daily lives, that their being reveals itself. When “opening the door, I use the doorknob” (67). I don’t first think of the doorknob as a metal cylinder of such-and-such a circumference. I don’t form an idea in my mind and then issue an order to my hand. If I think of it at all it is only as something useful I can grab in order to open the door. Heidegger uses the phrase “ready-to-hand” [zuhanden] to describe the being of tools and objects that remain handy but largely unnoticed in our world. The hammer is Heidegger’s famous example:

“The less we just stare at the thing called hammer, the more we take hold of it and use it, the more original our relation to it becomes and the more undisguisedly it is encountered as what it is, as a useful thing. The act of hammering itself discovers the specific ‘handiness’ of the hammer…. No matter how keenly we just look at the ‘outward appearance’ of things constituted in one way or another, we cannot discover handiness” (69).

When a tool is useful, it shrinks into the background of my world and becomes absent. But suppose the doorknob falls off into my hand. Or the wooden handle comes loose and separates from the hammer’s head. In these cases, the thing becomes conspicuous. It is “unhandy” so that “what is at hand enters the mode of obtrusiveness” (73).

Heidegger defines a technical term he calls reference, which is a pointer of sorts that connects an action with the motivation for doing the action. I pick up the hammer for the sake of driving a nail into a board. Our world is an interconnected “totality of references” that reveal why we do the things we do. Richard Polt has a clear description of this part of Heidegger’s thought:

“Our understanding [of the things we do for the sake of ends that meet our needs] discloses references…. We ‘signify’ our own possibilities for Being and the involvements of the things we use…. The totality of references, the totality of involvements, and the totality of signifying are just subtly different perspectives on a single phenomenon, worldhood. In non-Heideggerian terminology, a world is a system of purposes and meanings that organizes our activities and our identity, and within which entities can make sense to us” (Polt, p. 54).

Worldliness is where our lived experiences take on ontological significance for us. When Heidegger talks about being-in-the-world, he means worldliness – this holistic context of “purposes and meanings” that we care about, and which ultimately define us and our being in relation to ourselves and others in the world.

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Dasein (pronounced DOT sayn) is Heidegger’s technical term for us. Our being. In ordinary German the word means “existence” but Heidegger prefers the literal meaning of “being-there.” For Heidegger, there isn’t an essence separate from our existence as in the tradition. Our essence – the who of Dasein – “lies in its existence” [Existenz] which means who Dasein is consists of the “possible ways for it to be” (42). Our existence over our lifetime defines who we are, and this is our essence.

Already you can see in Heidegger’s statement the idea that time has a role to play in our being. If you are your possible ways to be, then necessarily you have a past where you made choices. In the present, you see possibilities before you. And you face a future in which you can choose to be what you become. This is why Heidegger rejects the tradition’s view of being as substance. It is too limiting. Too static. What we are is something in flux formed over time.

“The characteristics to be found in this being are thus not present ‘attributes’ of an objectively present being… but rather possible ways for it to be, and only this” (41).

We’re used to thinking of ourselves as embodied beings, an ontic understanding of ourselves as “an objectively present being.” Heidegger is not denying that we have a body or anything like that. He’s just saying that our existence – the ontological understanding of the “who” of our being – is in the possible ways we can be rather than in any physical characteristics of our body or mind. We have freedom to choose from among our possibilities. If we choose for ourselves this is what Heidegger calls authentic being. On the other hand, it’s common for us to lose our being and become entangled in the world. This Heidegger calls inauthentic being.

What does it mean to lose ourselves and be inauthentic? I’ll get into it in detail later when I discuss “the others.” But Heidegger previews it for us in one of his early lectures. He describes inauthentic being as Dasein’s tendency to “live away from itself” (HCT, p. 156). For the most part we are “indifferent” to our possibilities of being. Our ontic selves–that person that stares back from the mirror–is what we believe ourselves to be. Heidegger calls this usual way of being our average everydayness. This doesn’t mean something lower, or in Heidegger’s words, something primitive. It’s just our “default setting” in the world while our ontological selves are covered over and remain hidden because we’re not used to looking:

“What is ontically nearest and familiar is ontologically the farthest, unrecognized and constantly overlooked in its ontological significance” (43).

What about this “there” [Da] of Dasein? What does it mean to say that I am “there” and not here? Basically being-there relates to the feeling we have that we are “thrown” [Geworfen] into and entangled with the world. In much of the secondary literature “thrownness” [Geworfenheit] is portrayed as being born into a caste, a family, a culture, a country, a people, a time and place, and so on. And that’s certainly true. But that’s just one part of it. Heidegger emphasizes thrownness as a disorienting condition in which the future is upon us in the present moment as we negotiate our way forward within a world.

“We shall call this character of being of Dasein which is veiled in its whence and whither, but in itself all the more openly disclosed, this ‘that it is’ the thrownness of this being into its there; it is thrown in such a way that it is the there as being-in-the-world” (135).

I’ll discuss being-in-the-world in the next post. Heidegger’s idea here is that for the most part we are unaware of our own existential (ontological) being. We can feel as if our life is not our own but is surrendered or “delivered over” [Überantwortung] to the world in which we have been thrown. This is a perfect segue to look next at how we are in the world.

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Heidegger explains in section 7 how he is going to rebuild the ontology of being using the tools of the phenomenological method. Heidegger studied under Edmund Husserl who developed the method in order to observe the phenomena as they appeared in consciousness. Heidegger defines “phenomenon” as “what shows itself in itself, what is manifest” (29). From this he offers a definition of phenomenology:

“Phenomenology means: ἀποφαίνεσθαι τα φαινόμενα– to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself. That is the formal meaning of the type of research that calls itself ‘phenomenology.’ But this expresses nothing other than the maxim formulated above: “To the things themselves!” (34)

The Greek expression above is transliterated as “apophainesthai ta phainomena” which means “explanation of phenomena” or as Heidegger puts it “to let what shows itself be seen from itself.”

In philosophy, a phenomenon is an observable event or object. The phenomenological method allows an observer to look at subjective experiences in order to build a description of what is seen. For Heidegger this method means much more than just looking at something and saying, “it is round, soft, and it looks to be red in color.” He is going to plumb deeper depths in order to see the structures of the phenomenon’s being.

The phenomenological method might be disorienting for those of us coming from the analytic tradition. At times it looks like Heidegger is pulling things out of thin air. This is captured perfectly by Bertrand Russell when he wrote:

“Highly eccentric in its terminology, [Heidegger’s] philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. An interesting point in his speculations is the insistence that nothingness is something positive. As with much else in existentialism, this is a psychological observation made to pass for logic” (Russell, p. 303).

In his early lectures, Heidegger denies that he is doing psychology or logic. He asserts that his findings are drawn from self-articulating entities. “Nothing is read into the matters… instead everything is drawn from them” (HCT, 302).

Heidegger looks at “the matters themselves” for the sake of having those things reveal their being to him. This approach must be understood or else the book makes little sense. Whether you believe him or not is another matter of course. In any case, my task here is merely to outline what Heidegger discovered for himself during his investigations. I’ll save any critical remarks for the end.

I need to say a few words about hermeneutics (from the Greek word for interpretation). Along with the phenomenological method this is another tool in Heidegger’s toolbox. What Heidegger will do is start with an initial understanding, examine it, reach a new understanding, and then use that new understanding to go deeper into a new context. If it feels sometimes when reading the book that Heidegger is going around in circles, it’s because he is. After Heidegger, we now call this the hermeneutic circle. It’s an admission that, like a merry-go-round, there is no starting point. Interpretation has to begin somewhere so you just hop on and grab the first horse you see.  As Heidegger describes it, “our attempt must aim at leaping into this ‘circle’ primordially and completely, so that even at the beginning of our analysis… we make sure that we have a complete view” (316).

Heidegger asserts that we can’t just observe things in a casual way. Like the earlier example with the candle, beings can be hidden (absent) and must be disclosed. This is why Heidegger argues that a naive “first glance” approach to phenomenology, where the observer does little more than report the surface properties of an object, will not get at deeper meanings. Heidegger is going to take a more active role in his project and interpret what he’s observing in order to reveal what is hidden:

“The way of encountering being and the structures of being in the mode of phenomenon must first be wrested from the objects of phenomenology. Thus, the point of departure of the analysis, the access to the phenomenon, and passage through the prevalent coverings must secure their own method. The idea of an ‘originary’ and ‘intuitive’ grasp and explication of phenomena must be opposed to the naivete of an accidental, ‘immediate’ and unreflective ‘beholding'” (37).

This is a good time to introduce a few more technical terms. Heidegger will refer to ontic and ontological being. Ontic refers to a particular entity, object, or person. This is the domain of science. Ontological refers to being in general. This is the domain of metaphysics, and it is what interests Heidegger most. The term primordial [ursprünglich] means an aspect of being that is more original or ontological and goes deeper than mere surface descriptions of a particular being.

For example, suppose I hold in my hand a red ball and begin to describe it to you. This is an ontic description of a particular entity as it appears to me. However, suppose I’m empty-handed but I say to you “a ball must be round, or it isn’t a ball.” Now I’m not talking about a particular red ball. I’m talking about what it means to be a ball. This is an ontological statement. Heidegger believes that ontological descriptions of being are more original or “primordial” than ontic descriptions.

Heidegger is going to use both the phenomenological method and hermeneutics to slowly but surely arrive at (and evolve) his conclusions over the course of the book. The place he begins is with us. “The being whose analysis our task is, is always we ourselves” (42). That is the subject of the next blog post.

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There are three observations to note from the history of the tradition I outlined in the previous post. First, notice that the question of being was dropped somewhere along the way. Instead, the focus shifted to individual beings. Trees, rocks, animals, humans, angels and God are all beings. But what is the being of those beings?

Second, notice that in the tradition being is explained as having two distinct parts: its essence and its existence. A being’s essence is its necessary core or its qualities without which it would not be what it is. A being’s existence is the brute fact that it exists in reality rather than being an object of my imagination. For Plato, the essence of a thing is a transcendental form. Aristotle believed the essence to be a prior cause. For Descartes, the essence is an immaterial mental substance separate from the physical body.

Third, the tradition holds that beings are always something present. Heidegger points out that the Greeks “conceived [of beings] as presence” (21). In other words, we are prejudiced to think that a being cannot be something that is not (absent) but must be something that is (present). Heidegger rejects this “metaphysics of presence” to say instead that being fluctuates between presence and absence.

That probably sounds counterintuitive. Most of us privilege presence as something and absence as nothing. To help me understand this part of Heidegger’s thought, I benefited greatly from Graham Harman’s explanation. He writes:

“The being of things such as candles and trees never lies fully present before us, and neither does being itself. A thing is more than its appearance, more than its usefulness, and more than its physical body. To describe a candle or tree by referring to its outer appearance, or by concepts, is to reduce it to a caricature, since there is always something more to it than whatever we see or say. The true being of things is actually a kind of absence. A key term for Heidegger is “withdrawal”: all things withdraw from human view into a shadowy background, even when we stare directly at them. Knowledge is less like seeing than like interpretation, since things can never be directly or completely present to us” (Harman, p. 1).

The key point here is we’re in the habit of reducing things to objects of our awareness. We see the physical form of something and take that to be the whole of the being. But the full being of the thing is lost in this reduction. If we just look at a candle, we might think it’s nothing more than a wax cylinder. But when we light it more of its being is revealed to us. But I hear you say, “everyone who sees a candle already knows that it provides light.” Are you sure? Is that something you would know just by staring at it? Or did you learn it by seeing someone strike a match and using the candle in a situation where it was dark?

For Heidegger, the question of being cannot be found by thinking of forms, objects, presence, or consciousness. It’s something defined as much by its absence as by its presence, and by its context and use as by its physical form. Heidegger doesn’t see a way to salvage the assumptions we have made in the ontological tradition. Rather than clear away some philosophical brush, he plans to uproot it all:

“The question of being attains true concreteness only when we carry out the destruction (Destruktion) of the ontological tradition” (26).

Destruction here does not mean wonton vandalism. It has the goal of sweeping away bad ideas in order to uncover original ideas worth saving. This is why he introduces so many technical terms and hyphenated words. He thinks there are too many assumptions and wrong ideas about the words used in the ontological tradition. For example, “human being” presupposes the very thing under consideration. So, he will invent new words for his ontology.

Heidegger starts with the phenomena of our being. His big breakthrough is to see our being not as a separate essence and existential but as a unified whole enmeshed in the world. Much more on that later.

Next Post in Series: Rebuilding

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

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

Rebuilding

Dasein

Being-In-The-World

The Others

Average Everydayness

Authentic Self (forthcoming)

Care (forthcoming)

Temporality (forthcoming)

Final Opinions (forthcoming)