Category: Philosophy

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:

1. 1. If P is possibly true, then Q is necessarily true.
   2. P is actually true.
   3. 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:

1. 1. In order for the care structure to be possible, temporality must ground it.
   2. The care structure is the meaning of the being of Dasein.
   3. 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.

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

Previous Post in Series: Care

The preparatory analysis in the previous post reached the preliminary conclusion that our being is care. Heidegger goes on to conclude later that our being is time, or more specifically ecstatic temporality. This is the main topic of the second half of the book. It’s very technical and I’d be a fool to attempt the same level of commentary as I did for the first half. But I can at least provide a brief summary.

The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős used to say that colleagues “died” if they stopped doing mathematics. If someone really did die, he said that the person “left” us. Heidegger has similar verbiage. He uses the word “death” [Tod] or “being-towards-death” to refer to a way of being in which we reflect on our fragile existence and how it could end at any moment. The mood of anxiety brings death to the surface for us. The physical end of our life he calls our “demise” [Ableben]. We care about our being because our “death” is always a reality for us. Therefore, anxiety and death are grounded in care. Heidegger refers to something he calls “anticipatory resoluteness” as “the being toward one’s ownmost, eminent potentiality-of-being” (325). This is Heidegger’s way of saying that in rare moments we come face-to-face with the reality that we will die. We have two choices when anxiety prompts us to see death. We can flee from it inauthentically and go back to the everyday conformity of the others in the world. Or we can become resolute and choose our possibilities knowing full well that our demise will close off all possibilities.

Our potentiality of being occurs in time. But not an ordinary concept of time. Since the ancient Greeks, time was always divided into three parts: past, present, and future. Aristotle compared time to a flowing river where each moment came at us from upstream, passed before us, to then quickly recede downstream and out of sight. This is a view in which time is an infinite series of moments. But there is another view of time that goes back to Augustine (and Plato before him). Augustine sought to reconcile the human experience of time with God’s eternal experience of time. Augustine reasoned that for God there is no past or future, but an eternal being in the now or the moment. There are theological advantages to this idea having to do with omniscience but I’m not going to get into it here.

Heidegger borrows from Augustine to expand on his idea of eternal (or primordial) temporality. Temporality has a threefold structure that maps his ontology onto the idea of eternal time: being-toward-death (future), having-been thrown into the world (past), and being-together-with (present). Heidegger calls these three structures “ecstases” (singular: ecstasy) which is a Greek word that means “to stand outside the self.”

As I mentioned in the post on care, we project ourselves forward and make goals for ourselves. We are always “ahead of ourselves” in the world. We are thrown from the past into a future with little more than a moment [Augenblick] in which to reflect and get our bearings. Ecstatic (or primordial) temporality is not ordinary time. It’s past, present, and future that is unified into actual possibility, that is, possible ways for us to be in an Augustinian eternal moment:

“Coming back to itself, from the future [zukünftig], resoluteness brings itself to the situation in making it present. Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. This unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having-been is what we call temporality” (326).

Heidegger concludes that temporality is the ground of our being and the meaning of care (436). The book is unfinished. Heidegger never gets to the being of being. He ends with this question: “Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?” It is left for the reader to ponder.

Next Post in Series: Final Opinions

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

Previous Post in Series: Authentic Self

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.

Next Post in Series: Temporality

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

Previous Post in Series: Average Everydayness

In the last post, I surveyed the threefold structure of fallenness (ambiguity, curiosity, and idle talk). For Heidegger, this is the typical way in which we are in the world or as he says our “average everydayness”. We become entangled in that world and live away from ourselves to take on a “they-self” of the others.

In this post, I turn to authenticity. Here again Heidegger identifies another threefold structure. These three, that I’ll group under disclosedness, are attunement, understanding, and discourse. They can be seen as counterparts to the threefold structure of fallenness:

Fallenness	Disclosedness
Ambiguity	Attunement [Befindlichkeit]
Curiosity	Understanding [Verstehen]
Idle Talk	Discourse/Speech [Rede]

For Heidegger, to be authentic is to act for ourselves given the possibilities of being that lie before us. This is not a psychological change in perspective. It doesn’t mean to take a good long look in the mirror. It is seeing clearly and taking action. Not action just for the sake of doing something. But action that makes a decision to choose for the self from among our own possibilities rather than picking up the easy options that the world offers us.

Heidegger thinks it is difficult to go through life and encounter those moments when we disclose our being to ourselves. Dasein, our “being there,” is usually hidden from us in plain sight. Just like with other innerworldly beings, at different times our being is both veiled and disclosed – absent and present. And as previously discussed, we are also “thrown” into the world. This primordial thrownness is prior to any rational or conscious realization that we are there. Our being is “there” and not “here” – or as Heidegger says “delivered over” to the world (135).

We do not directly experience our thrownness. Ironically, Heidegger asserts that we become most aware of it when we turn away from the world. What brings our being-there into awareness? Mood. Or rather being in a mood [Stimmung]. By “mood” Heidegger does not mean the type of ordinary mental observations such as when we say, “I’m in a good mood today.”

Mood is something deeper and serves as a sort of barometer for how we feel we are in the world. “Mood makes manifest ‘how one is and is coming along.’ In this ‘how one is’ being in a mood brings being to its ‘there'” (134).  When Heidegger uses the term “mood” he means to describe this more fundamental component of our being. We are always in a mood whether we realize it or not. When we sit up and take notice of our moods, Heidegger calls this attunement [Befindlichkeit]:

“Mood does not disclose in the mode of looking at thrownness, but as turning toward and away from it. For the most part, mood does not turn itself toward the burdensome character of Dasein manifest in it, it does this least of all in an elevated mood in which this burden is lifted. This turning away is always what it is in the mode of attunement” (135).

Moods break our equanimity. They disrupt the status quo. They stir us from the slumber of everydayness and the tranquil way in which we are a “they-self” for others. When we are attuned to a mood this attunement is a pre-conscious, ontological mode of being that “turns away” in order to see our being. “Attunement is an existential, fundamental way in which Dasein is its there” (139). At the same time, it reveals our thrownness into the world.

One very powerful mode of attunement is fear. Fear is always being afraid of something. It can be a threat like a wild animal. Or a sudden sound in the night. But there is another related mood in which there is no definable threat and yet we feel profound unsettledness when we experience it. That mood is anxiety [Angst]. When we are anxious, we do not know why we are anxious. We do not know the cause of our anxiety. Heidegger suggests “that about which anxiety is anxious is being-in-the-world itself” (187). Anxiety is a curious mood that seems to take us out of our average everydayness. We might have a vague sense of unease. Or a sudden feeling that nothing matters, or that the world seems suddenly meaningless:

“In anxiety, the things at hand in the surrounding world sink away, and so do innerworldly beings in general. The ‘world’ can offer nothing more, nor can the Dasein-with of others. Thus anxiety takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, falling prey, in terms of the ‘world’ and the public way of being interpreted” (187).

It sounds pretty bleak, but for Heidegger this is a good thing. Anxiety removes our identification with the they-self. We become momentarily individualized as the mood of anxiety separates us from being with others in the world. It’s an opportunity to pull back from the “entangled” average everydayness that keeps us busy in order to reveal to us a certain “uncanny” feeling of freedom. We are free to become. To choose for ourselves from among our possibilities of being. Anxiety has a way of showing us to ourselves without being filtered through social norms that tend to distract us.

“In anxiety there lies the possibility of a distinctive disclosure, since anxiety individualizes. This individuality fetches Dasein back from its falling prey and reveals to it authenticity and inauthenticity as possibilities of its being. The fundamental possibilities of Dasein, which are always my own, show themselves in anxiety as they are, undisguised by innerworldly beings to which Dasein, initially and for the most part, clings” (191).

I have a personal anecdote that might make this clearer. When I was young, I had a job that required a substantial commute by car. Every morning, I drove with thousands of others on a freeway that became a bumper-to-bumper crawl. It would take over an hour to get to work. And then I’d repeat the experience on the way home that night. Did I think about what was going on? Vaguely. I got irritated from time to time, but for the most part I gave it very little thought. This was just “what one does” as an adult. On one particular and routine day we all came to a halt for several minutes. I found myself looking fully to my left. The person in that car was staring straight ahead. I looked to my right and saw another doing the same. I looked in my rear-view mirror and all around me were stony-faced people sitting motionless in the driver’s seat staring straight ahead. An eerie feeling came over me. It was a moment of clarity, or as Heidegger would say, it was a disclosure showing me in my thrownness that for which I felt anxiety. What am I doing? Is this all there is?

The mood of anxiety calls us back to ourselves. But it doesn’t have anything to say. It is little more than a brief uncanny interruption that alerts us to the fact that something is not quite right. Like it wants us to stop what we’re doing and take a look. Take a look at what? At the crossroads where the authentic and inauthentic possibilities of our being present themselves.

The second part of authentic existence is what Heidegger calls understanding [Verstehen]. It’s common in ordinary language for us to say things like “I get what you’re saying” or “I understand what it is you need me to do.” But this is Heidegger so of course ordinary uses of the word “understanding” is not what he means here. Just like with other technical terms, understanding is an ontological or existential part of Dasein’s being.

Where mood and attunement are the interruption of a routinized existence, understanding is the realization of our potentiality of being. At every moment we can choose a different way to be. Our understanding then is “being possible,” which is to say, out of the possibilities and choices that are always in front of us we consciously pick one over the others. Through our understanding we are “the possibility of being free for [our] ownmost potentiality of being” (144). As possibilities are chosen, we disclose to ourselves our being. Your mother likely told you at some point “you are what you eat.” Ontologically speaking, you are what you choose. When anxiety calls, will we choose authentically for ourselves? Or is anxiety so uncomfortable, and the burden of our existence so heavy, that we instead flee back to the welcome embrace of the others?

Needless to say, Heidegger’s not talking about choosing between vanilla or chocolate. He means projecting yourself into a self for the sake of which you want to be in the world:

“[Dasein] is existentially that which is not yet in its potentiality of being, understanding, and its character of project, only because it is what it becomes or does not become, can it say understandingly to itself: ‘become what you are!” (145).

In the margins of his copy of the book, Heidegger later made this enigmatic comment: “But who are ‘you’? The one who let’s go – and becomes.”

Remember that first premise I quoted at the beginning? “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence” (42). This has all been a deep dive into the structures of our being to explain that premise. Simply put, Heidegger is saying that who we are – our being – is not spirit, soul, or consciousness. It is not something immutable that remains fixed throughout life. We are not doomed by Fate to propel toward a preordained outcome. Instead, who we are is a recognition of the potentiality of our being, the possibilities that we choose, and the sum total of those choices.

Heidegger believes that in our everyday lives we are entangled in the world in such a way that for the most part we fail to see or choose our possibilities. We close ourselves off from authenticity. But at the same time, we are concerned about how things are going and how we are doing in the world. We are invested (absorbed) in the various careers, projects and tasks that we undertake. In short, we care. And not just about our thrown being but especially about the potentiality of our being and what we can do with the time we have.

Dasein “projects its being upon [and toward] possibilities” (148). But this movement on our part is not serendipity or some kind of amble down a path in random directions. In our understanding we interpret our potentiality and being is disclosed to us as something meaningful. “All interpretation is grounded in understanding” (154).

Heidegger then walks through a dense thicket of some derivative grammatical structures: interpretation, statements, communication, the Greek idea of λόγος (logos) and language [Sprache]. Finally, he concludes that “the existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse [Rede]” (160).

Discourse is the third leg of the stool for authentic being. It exists alongside (or in Heidegger’s technical term “equiprimordially”) with attunement and understanding. Unlike the meaninglessness of idle talk, discourse makes intelligible and articulates what is known in the interpretation given by understanding. I found this section very pedantic unfortunately. It’s even more obscure than earlier sections if that can be believed. The bottom line is Heidegger is looking for a way to ground meaningful discourse in our ontological being rather than in ordinary language, higher order logic, or reason. It is a pattern with Heidegger throughout the book. There is always something primordial, something ontological, something deep, that lies beneath and grounds what is seen on the surface.

Heidegger calls the threefold of attunement, understanding, and discourse the “being of disclosedness” (180) and this is contrasted with the threefold of fallenness: idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. For Heidegger, only when we turn away from the they-self and disclose ourselves to ourselves can we be authentic. In his unique jargon, that only a philosopher could love, Heidegger summarizes the existential analytic thusly:

“On the basis of the attunement essentially belonging to it, Dasein has a mode of being in which it is brought before itself and it is disclosed to itself in its thrownness. But thrownness is the mode of being of a being which always is itself its possibilities in such a way that it understands itself in them and in terms of them (projects itself upon them). Being-in-the-world, to which being together with things at hand belongs just as primordially as being-with others, is always for the sake of itself…. The average everydayness of Dasein can thus be determined as entangled-disclosed, thrown-projecting being-in-the-world, which is concerned with its ownmost potentially in its being together with the ‘world’ and in being-with with others” (181).

Let me try to unpack the jargon here. We are always in a mood. The mood of anxiety is important because we are attuned to it. If we listen, if we set aside our routinized existence, attunement calls attention to our anxiety. Our understanding then provides the means by which we can see ourselves as a mode of being that is its possibilities. We are concerned about our being. We care about those possibilities that lie before us. Discourse is a way for us to articulate that understanding in order to act on our possibilities for the sake of which we become who we are. This is us choosing authentically for our true self.

The alternative approach is for us to succumb to anxiety. It makes us deeply uncomfortable, and we want to push it away. Heidegger says our being becomes a “burden” for us. We flee from it and back into the they-self that others offer to us. We don’t have to make difficult choices because the world provides templates for living that are easy to pick up and adopt as our own. This is us choosing inauthentically.

We now take another turn on the hermeneutic circle. Heidegger will conclude that our being is care. I’ll take that up in the next post.

Next Post in Series: Care

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

Previous Post in Series: The Others

Heidegger uses the word Verfallen to describe our regular everyday way of being as a they-self in the world with others. Variously translated as fallenness, falling prey, or entanglement, it does not represent a fall “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 a threefold structure of fallenness: idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. When Heidegger refers to a “threefold structure” or sometimes “constitutive components” or “categories that exist equiprimordially” what he means is that they are essential parts of the whole phenomenon. A threefold is like a stool with three legs. You cannot remove one leg. The legs are “constitutive components” and without all three you cannot have a stool.

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 about the choices we make. We care about the person we become. 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 possibilities of our being and what we can become. Will we choose for ourselves? Or will we flee from the self and fall prey to the world of others? This is the focus of authentic self in the next section.

Next Post in Series: Authentic Self

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

Previous Post in Series: Being-In-The-World

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.

Next Post in Series: Average Everydayness

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

Previous Post in Series: Dasein

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.

Next Post in Series: The Others

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

Previous Post in Series: Rebuilding

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.

Next Post in Series: Being-in-the-World

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

Previous Post in Series: Destruction

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.

Next Post in Series: Dasein

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

Previous Post in Series: The Ontological Tradition

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