Being And Time: Care

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In the previous post I mentioned that we are concerned about our being. Or as Heidegger puts it “Dasein is a being which is concerned in its being about that being” (191). What does this mean? Basically, in our daily lives we take care of things. We undertake tasks. We project ourselves forward and make goals for ourselves. We are always “ahead of ourselves” as being-in-the-world and surrounded by other people and things (innerworldly beings) in the world. Being-in-the-world for Heidegger is care [Sorge] and being-together-with these other things in our world shows our concern. Care is not “an isolated attitude of the ego toward itself” (193). Rather, for Heidegger care is an “ontological condition” in which our being is free to choose authentic or inauthentic possibilities for itself. In our inauthenticity, we flee from ourselves and ignore our potentiality of being. Either way, Dasein is “a being that is concerned about its being” (193). Simply put, our being matters to us.

Heidegger was influenced by a fable that came from the Roman librarian Hyginus, through Goethe, and to a scholar named Burdach. I’ll reproduce it here in its entirety since it seems to have had quite an impact on Heidegger:

“Once when Care was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took a piece and began to shape it. While she was thinking about what she had made, Jupiter came by. Care asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, Jupiter forbade this and demanded that it be given his name instead. While Care and Jupiter were arguing, Earth (Tellus) arose, and desired that her name be conferred upon the creature, since she had offered it part of her body. They asked Saturn to be the judge. And Saturn gave them the following decision, which seemed to be just: ‘Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you should receive that spirit at death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since Care first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And because there is a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called ‘homo,’ for it is made out of hummus (earth)” (198).

Heidegger sees an ancient truth disclosed in this fable. He thinks it shows us an interpretation of ourselves that is more than just “animal rationale” or mind-body substance dualism. Saturn was the Roman god of time. While our being-in-the-world takes its being from the earth, its meaning unfolds over time.

“The pre-ontological characterization of the essence of human being expressed in this fable thus has envisaged from the very beginning the mode of being which rules its temporal sojourn in the world” (199).

Heidegger is saying that, as long as we are being-in-the-world, the meaning of our being is care. Only at death are we released from care. Death is a topic for later sections of the book and I’m not going to get into it here. But basically, Heidegger will suggest that death is the ultimate limit, and because we know we will die, we care deeply about our brief existence. If we lived forever, then we probably wouldn’t care much about anything. Or as Wittgenstein put it in a similar context:

“This assumption [the temporal immortality of the human soul] completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?” (TLP, 6.4312).

After his concluding remarks about care, Heidegger moves on to a discussion of reality, the ontological tradition, and truth. Let me say a few things about Heidegger’s view of truth. There is an idea of truth, which goes back to Aristotle, in which a proposition is true if it agrees with the facts. For example, I might say to you “the sky is blue.” You look up and see a blue sky for yourself. We then both agree that since my statement corresponds to reality it is a true statement. This is known as the correspondence theory of truth. The important thing to note with the traditional view is that truth is “outside” of us, that is, it is an objective truth whether we are around to know it or not.

As previously discussed, for Heidegger there is no world outside of Dasein. There are no objective truths independent of our knowledge of them. So, he seeks to ground truth in a deeper “primordial sense” that exists alongside our disclosed being-in-the-world:

“Insofar as Dasein essentially is its disclosedness, and as disclosed, it discloses and discovers, it is essentially ‘true.’ Dasein is ‘in the truth.’ This statement has an ontological meaning” (221).

For Heidegger “all truth is relative to the being of Dasein” and belongs to our “fundamental constitution” (227). Just as he believes that, as being-in-the-world, world and Dasein are unified so that there cannot be one without the other, so too without Dasein there can be no truth. Take for example Newton’s Second Law of Motion in which the force on an object is equal to its mass times its acceleration (F = m * a). These forces have always been in effect on objects. But for Heidegger this law of motion was not true until Newton discovered (or disclosed) it. Truth then is wrapped up in judgments that we make about our world. When one day we are no more? Truth is also no more. While the traditional view holds that a statement is true whether we observe it or not, Heidegger argues that if there are no observers then there are no true statements either.

I’d like to bring us to the end of Heidegger’s preparatory analysis of Dasein. He concludes:

“We have found the fundamental constitution of the being in question, being-in-the-world, whose essential structures are centered in disclosedness. The totality of this structural whole revealed itself as care. The being of Dasein is contained in care. The analysis of this being took as its guideline existence, which was defined by way of anticipation as the essence of Dasein. The term existence formally indicates that Dasein is as an understanding potentiality-of-being which is concerned in its being about its being. I myself am in each instance the being existing in this way” (231).

Heidegger had foreshadowed this conclusion when he wrote early on that our essence lies in our existence (41). We are not an immutable soul trapped in a body for a time before being released. Rather, we are thrown into the world, and our essence (our being) evolves over our lifetime by the possible ways for us to be and the choices we make among those possibilities.

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