Introduction
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a student of Husserl. He started his intellectual career as a student of theology. He is more concerned with the deep questions of human existence, rather than the more abstract questions that fascinated his teacher. He later commented that the purpose of philosophy was to "invent a new God."
He questions the ultimate benefits of technology, suggesting that our view of the world as "'resource" betrays both our own nature and the nature of our relationship to the world
Heidegger's early work is often referred to as "existentialist," although he himself rejected that affiliation. His first work, Being and Time, 1927, has existentialist themes. The central question of Heidegger's philosophy was the question of “Being."
He develops a unique synthesis of phenomenology and existentialism: His philosophy is based on phenomenology, but without the phenomenological "framing" of experience. It merges phenomenology and reality - it is a direct engagement thinking / world.
The world is no longer a mere object of knowledge. Heidegger elevates the German word "Dasein" instead; we exist in a world, we have a life and a destiny, and these life forms define our worlds.
Heidegger called his philosophy a "fundamental ontology" and began with an examination of "Dasein" - our Being-in-the-World. Unlike Husserl, however, he rejects "'mind" and "consciousness.." But Dasein has an identity crisis. It wants to know “who'' it is.
The quest for Being first of all requires an understanding of "that being through whom the question of Being comes into being," in other words, Dasein. Looking at Dasein from a phenomenological point of view, it is first of all Being-in-the-World.
Unlike Husserl and Descartes, Heidegger says our primordial experience is a unified experience of being in the world. Heidegger would not describe us in the more naturalistic terms of "human being," because from the innocence of the first-person view', the question of what we are in nature remains to be determined.
He does not talk about consciousness or subjectivity, but instead, he asks: What is the starting point of our thinking?
Heidegger on the World and the Self
From the point of view of Dasein, the world is no longer a mere object of knowledge but a matter of tasks to be done. Yet Heidegger questions the benefits of technology, as well as the disastrous split between the mind and the body.
Heidegger says we are not first of all "knowers." We are, instead, engaged in the world, faced with tasks.
From the point of view of Dasein, it is no longer clear what the self is. He is therefore against a Cartesian reductionist approach to philosophy.
Against the idea of a "Cogito," he develops the concept of the self as “das man,” an ordinary socialized self that is mainly defined by others. We are mostly inauthentic. When we describe ourselves, we refer to the roles we play, and to social categories.
"Das Man" is a german word for a plain entity. It is an ordinary, just existing self, in a state of "Seinsvergessenheit." (a being that forgets its own beingness.) Although this outward dimension is essential to life, it is not who we we genuinely are.
It is useful to ask where Heidegger's idea of a genuine life originates: He seems to prefer the German farmer who works in nature over the politicized citizen.
He develops a strand of thinking that originates in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: the tension between the unique individual with a human soul, and the socialized masses of modernity shaped by industrial consumer societies. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche developed their thinking in the attacks against the herd mentality of contemporary society.
Heidegger follows in their footsteps, but doesn't accept an extreme form of rejection of everyday social life. He replaces it with an analysis of "Dasein."
Heidegger's contrasting notions of authenticity play an enormous role in later existentialist literature and philosophy. One can feel in his writings the yearnings for authenticity that also characterized the German Fascist movement. (See also: Theodor Adorno: The Jargon of authenticity. 1973)
Heidegger distinguishes three "existential" features of Dasein: Existence, Facticity, and Fallenness. He also talks about the importance of moods as ways of ‘tuning" into the world.
Existence (or "Dasein") :
Dasein has no essence other than the fact that it exists. "Existence precedes essence.”
Dasein has "possibilities.''
Existence is that feature of Dasein through which we envision our possibilities, our future. It is the capacity to make choices. (Heidegger's later philosophy will question this existential concept of choice.)
It is our necessary ability to look into the future and disclose to ourselves the three interwoven dimensions of time, the present, the past, and the future.
Our moods (not to be conceived as merely transient mental states) are ways of being "tuned" into the world, in which our existence is disclosed to us. Heidegger says our moods are shared. They are not ''in our minds, but out there, in the world.
Facticity
consists of the brute facts that characterize us, such as height, weight, date of birth, and so on. We are "thrown" into a world not of our choosing. Our "historicity" is our historical situation.
But fallenness alone is just one dimension of human life and not yet authentic.
Fallenness
It is the pre-ontological way in which Dasein fails to face up to its ontological condition and "falls back" to daily inauthenticity, ("das Man.")
It is the everyday core of inauthenticity, falling back into tasks. It is what we experience in our everyday lives; Heidegger says that we should respect it for what it is in its suchness.
Authenticity
Heidegger distinguishes various authentic and inauthentic modes of being: Understanding is opposed to curiosity, thinking is opposed to calculation, and authentic speech is opposed to chatter.
He uses these distinctions to analyse human consciousness, even though he does not like this term. According to him, we are never "outside" of our own intellectual journey: We cannot help but ask questions about what we are and who are are; and we feel anxiety about our own existence.
The most dramatic suggestion in Being and Time (1927) is that we are all characterized by “Being-unto-death" (Sein-zum-Tode). The recognition of our own mortality is that it is a necessary fact that determines our lives. But we normally don't take this seriously. Our mortality prompts us to take hold of ourselves in an "authentic resolution" in relation to our own existence. It also forces us to appreciate our limitations and immerse ourselves in our historicity, our historical embeddedness. Being-unto-death forces us to see ourselves and our whole life as a singular unity.
Afterthoughts
Ontological Difference. Dasein is the place of what Heidegger calls the “ontological difference” between beings (Seiende, l’étant) and Being as such (Sein, l’être). Therefore, thinking and philosophy can start from anywhere. What is meant by "ontological difference," and how do we detect it?
Temporality. Heidegger says that philosophy has gone wrong for centuries because it forgot a major feature of its own being, namely its temporality. Philosophy is characterized by a repression of the temporal horizon; it always focused on constancy and permanence. Parmenides’ unchanging Being, Plato’s eidos, Aristotle’s substance, the medieval God, and the founding principle of modernity, the “human subject” - all these terms confirm the forgotten dimension of time. Where does this privileged position of permanence and timelessness come from? Why was Being systematically understood through a negation of time?
Mortality: For Heidegger, only a resolute, lucid, or authentic Dasein can come to terms with its insurmountable mortality, which he calls its Being-towards-death. "Taken ontically, the results of the analysis [of death] show the peculiar formality and emptiness of any ontological characterization." (BT, 248). To take the results ‘ontically’ is to take them as factual claims about Dasein’s Ableben, its death or demise as a living creature. To take them ‘ontologically’ is to take them as philosophical claims about the Being of Dasein and about its Sterben, about Dasein’s dying as Dasein. Heidegger’s results comprise the following propositions:
1. It is certain that I shall die.
2. I have to do my dying for myself. On particular occasions someone else may die in my place, as they may pay my telephone bill, or attend a meeting, on my behalf. But sooner or later I shall die in person, not by proxy.
3. That I shall die is not merely empirically likely or even empirically certain. If anyone seems not to know about death, this is really because he is ‘fleeing in the face of’ death (BT, 251).
4. Death will terminate all my possibilities. I cannot do anything after I am dead.
5. It is not certain when I shall die.
6. It is possible that I shall die at any moment.
7. Dying confers wholeness on Dasein.
8. Death is ‘non-relational’: death severs all one’s relationships to others.
Heidegger's Metaphysics? “The question of Being has today been forgotten [even if] in our time we deem it progressive to give our approval to ‘metaphysics’ again [wieder zu bejahen].” What does he mean? As a thinker, can he really claim to understand philosophy better than other contemporary philosophers?
Quotes from Jean Grondin
(Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Metaphysics. Columbia University Press. 2012)
The symbiotic interrelation of Being and time had already been recognized by metaphysics which had also grasped Being through time. But it did so, says Heidegger, in a very particular temporal perspective: constancy and permanence. Parmenides’ permanent Being, Plato’s eidos, Aristotle’s substance, the medieval God, and the “human subject”—modernity’s founding principle—all confirm this forgotten attitude toward time. Where does the privileged position given to permanence and timelessness come from? Why was Being systematically understood through a negation of time? Could the “meta-physical” deletion of time stem from the negation of the time that we are? Could the meta-physical expunging of time stem unnoticed from our own flight from the finitude of our being “there”?
Indeed, for Heidegger our own Being is best summarized by his most important term Dasein (“being-there”), which in everyday German simply means existence (existentia). His use of this term was meant to draw attention to the temporal irruption, the “there” that I am, know and occupy. The term Dasein also underlines the fact I am there where there is Being. I inhabit a clearing where Being uncovers this “wonders of wonders,” as Heidegger put it in What is Metaphysics?, namely, that there is something rather than nothing. He sees this as humanity’s specific difference: Humans are open to Being, to the fact there are beings or things that are. Dasein is the place of what Heidegger calls the “ontological difference” between beings (Seiende, l’étant) and Being (Sein, l’être).
Beyond beings that draw my attention and are available to me, “there is” Being and my own Being, both completely unavailable. For Heidegger, metaphysics, in its search for explanation determined by the principle of reason, remains on the level of beings, which can be grasped and understood only through the eidos or some other dominating perspective. It can never think of Being as the abyssal ground of all that is. Metaphysics had thus closed itself off from the mystery of Being, of the “there is.” Hence the paradox: We may only think Being through a destruction of metaphysics. (p. 202).
For Heidegger, the priority of the question of Being is twofold: an ontological priority and an ontic priority. The ontological priority means that the question of Being claims priority in the order of knowledge (as was the case for Avicenna, Thomas, and Duns Scotus). Every science—every relation to beings—presupposes a certain comprehension of the Being (Seinverständnis) it studies: The Being studied by physics is not the one studied by chemistry or theology. According to Heidegger, philosophy is responsible for the ontological determinations belonging to a given type of knowledge’s domain of objects. Although he inflects it is an ontological way, Heidegger’s analysis here takes an epistemological turn that seemed obvious in this period, marked as it was by neo-Kantianism. Neo-Kantianism took science as a given and reconstructed its subjective and logical conditions of possibility. Heidegger defends the ontological priority of the question of Being in a similar way. Every science, he explains, pertains to a certain domain of beings. It employs fundamental concepts, which are themselves neither beings nor ontic, most often drawn from prescientific experience. They are rather the Being of such and such domain of beings, says Heidegger. The founding concepts of mathematics, of physics, or of the human sciences are thus derived from an ontological reflection. But these sciences, which are merely ontic, cannot themselves elucidate their own ontological concepts that circumscribe their domain of objects. Philosophy makes these clarifications and thereby becomes the “productive logic” of the positive sciences. Sein und Zeit thus ascribes an ambitious ontological and scientific primacy to philosophy since it must elaborate the specific ontologies on which rest the sciences of beings. Husserl spoke here of “regional” ontologies. But the idea of regional ontologies that belong to each science does not exhaust the ontological ambition of philosophy. Every ontological explanation, such as the one philosophy must produce for the sciences, implies that the sense of Being has already been elucidated. The clarification of the sense of Being is therefore the primary task, which Heidegger calls “fundamental ontology.” The fundamental sense of Being, presupposed by all regional sciences, must therefore be clarified if philosophy is to be devoted to Being.
Heidegger’s ontological project can thus be sketched out in a way that preserves something of the Scholastic hierarchy:
Ontic Sciences Task: exploration of a domain of beings.
Ontologies Task: elucidation of the fundamental concepts that circumscribe the way of being of these beings.
Fundamental Ontology Task: clarification of the sense of Being as the “aprioristic condition of these ontologies.”
But one must begin with Dasein’s understanding of Being in order to elucidate the fundamental sense of Being and clarify it conceptually (Sein und Zeit, 6). Dasein is not indifferent to the question of Being. Not only does it always have a vague understanding of Being, Dasein is also specifically distinguished by “the fact that, in its very Being, Being is an issue for it” (Sein und Zeit, p.12). Heidegger calls this priority of Being for Dasein the ontic priority. The term means that the question (of the sense) of Being is not only a priority in the hierarchy of knowledge, it is also a priority for a specific being named Dasein that is ontically distinguished “by the fact that, in its very Being, Being is an issue for it” following the expression Heidegger had already used in his classes. This priority is obviously informed by the care all individuals have for themselves, a care that will eventually come to summarize Dasein in §41. But care not only characterizes Dasein itself. Its careful concern is also responsible for Dasein’s flight from the question of its Being because the dizzying question that Dasein is for itself strikes deep into its most intimate parts so that it takes great care to rid itself of it, or better yet, to avoid it altogether. Therefore Dasein usually exists at a distance from itself. Heidegger speaks sometimes of a Wegsein, a being-elsewhere, a being far from oneself, in short, of Dasein slipping away, or that is not all “there.” Dasein’s forgetting of its own self is unquestionably a flight away from its temporality or its mortality. A flight into the inauthentic, believes Heidegger, since it thereby closes itself off from the condition of all Dasein from which all its projects are determined. One can however ask what this primacy of the question of Being for Dasein has to do with the more general question of Being in classical metaphysics? Can one really identify the general question of Being with Dasein’s care for itself? Is it really the same question? Does Heidegger not merge Aristotle with Kierkegaard? What is the link he seeks in Being and Time between Dasein’s care and the more general question of the sense of Being, or, between the ontological primacy of Being (for science) and the ontic primacy (for each Dasein)? In fact, the two are intimately linked. Dasein embodies the location of the understanding of Being, and is Heidegger’s point of departure in Being and Time. Dasein is haunted by the care it has for its own Being because it knows it is racing towards its death, it is a Sein-zum-Tode. Before the cogito sum, it is the sum moribundus that embodies Dasein’s most fundamental fundamental certitude, says Heidegger at the end of a course of the summer semester 1925. Therefore I am not a res cogitans that can be erected as fundamentum inconcussum, but rather a Being-towards-death. (Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Metaphysics (pp. 205-207).
Being and Time’s main thesis is that the history of ontology has silently understood Being as a permanent presence derived from Dasein’s inauthentic relation to its own temporality. Forgetting Being therefore belongs to both Dasein and to philosophy.
1. As Dasein flees its most intimate, most destabilizing, but most pressing question, it forgets about Being. Sein und Zeit thus seeks to remind Dasein of its most essential question, that of its Being.
2. This reminder is also aimed at awakening philosophy to itself since the question of Being is one it has willingly forgotten. This admission is especially important for modern philosophy, which since Descartes and Kant has turned away from Being and devoted itself to the knowing-subject. The modern obsession with epistemological certitude conceals Dasein’s fundamental uncertainty. But as Heidegger increasingly shows, this also applies to all metaphysics. Not only has the relation between Being and time never been thought on its own terms, but metaphysics has always favored beings (Seiende) over Being (Sein). This amounts to saying that metaphysics forgot the ontological difference between beings, which can be explained logically or theologically, and the event that is Being, which does not have a reason behind it. The emphasis on (present) beings and their essence erases the mystery of Being and its donation in time. Heidegger opposes this human and philosophical forgetting of the question of Being (or of its primacy), by lucidly and frankly restating the question of Being. All of Heidegger’s thought—his metaphysics, perhaps—consists in reminding Dasein, and philosophy, of the elementary experience of Being that scares all certitude away. (Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Metaphysics (p. 208).
In the sketches Heidegger drew of the history of metaphysics, he often concentrated on the ambiguity of the object of metaphysics starting with Aristotle. The problem is a classic one: Being as Being can be either Being in its universality, or the principle of Being (or, “God”). Rather than defending an ontological (universal) or theological reading, Heidegger simply takes stock of this duality, which he increasingly grasps as the “system” that corresponds to the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics. According to Heidegger, the principal and the universal approaches are part of the same perspective of which the Thomist doctrine of the analogy of Being is its best expression. To think beings through their universality is also to think them in reference to a unique focal point that is their principle. And conversely, the search for a principle seeks to assure a mastery over beings reduced to an ultimate form of rationality. Metaphysics’ project is thus one of total rationality, (Grondin, Jean. Introduction to Metaphysics (p. 214).
Discussion Questions
For Heidegger, what is the difference between the "ontic" and the "ontological''? Why is it important that we (i.e., "Dasein") are ''ontological"?
What does Heidegger gain by referring to "Dasein" ("being-there") rather than "human consciousness" or just “people," for example? Is Dasein an individual existence? The human collective? Both? Neither?
What, in general, is the relationship between a philosopher and his philosophy? Nietzsche comments (in Beyond Good and Evil) that every philosophy is "the personal confession and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir."
Heidegger's political past (he was a member of the NSDAP): What are the “pro-Nazi" implications in a treatise such as Being and Time? How explicit would such resonances have to be for us in order to consider his philosophy a form of fascist ideology?
What role does death, or more precisely, "Being-unto-death,"play in the realization of authenticity?
What would it mean to live "authentically" in the world? Is there any way that you could live authentically in a world that is otherwise "fallen' or does individual authenticity depend on living in a more "authentic"context?