Heidegger: Being and Time
(Macquerrie and Robinson translation, HarperCollins Books, 1962)
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Being and Time is about a problem. This problem is the problem of Being. It stands as the first and essential question of philosophy, that which has bothered men since the Greeks. What is Being? What is essential? How do we discover it? For two and a half thousand years, people have been trying to answer this question.
And for about two point three thousand years, people have done it wrong.
Among other things, Martin Heidegger is known as one of the originators and essential members of the movement known as existentialism, a movement often associated with brooding French types sitting in basement coffee houses. In fact, existentialism was not developed with coffee houses in mind. ‘Existentialism’ the name comes from a method known as ‘existential’ analysis, the method Heidegger uses in Being and Time to try to give a new formulation to the same old questions of metaphysics. For him the past two millennia have been largely a deception in the area of philosophy, based upon ungrounded assumptions about the nature of things. The attempt to discover that essential subject of metaphysics, pure Being as it exists in itself, has been a flawed search. The work of metaphysicians of the past has followed a wrong method, and as a result “a dogma has been developed which not only declares the question about the meaning of Being to be superfluous, but sanctions its complete neglect.” (21) The real question of Being has been buried under false beliefs beyond any point of recognition. As a result, someone has to dig way, way down in order to get to the root of this deception and fix it.
This is the objective of Being and Time, and so it must start from as basic (‘primordial’, as Heidegger says) a starting point as possible. What is this point? How can we get to Being? How do we even know where to start? Heidegger’s first step is to flatly reject standard methods of interpretation. As has been said, these methods depend upon flawed premises about the essential nature of things; that is to say, they start with a faulty conception of Being. “We can only infer that ‘Being’ cannot have the character of an entity. Thus we cannot apply to ‘Being’ the concept of ‘definition’ as presented in traditional logic . . . .” (23) If Being is something which is more fundamental than anything else, than it seems to precede logic. Essential Being is not something which is defined by categories such as quantity or continuity. If we think back for a moment to Kant, categories aren’t things existent in themselves. Thus to use logic and certain conceptions of Being (even the most abstract ones) already presupposes something about the Being of what is being discussed, making the arguments circular. “Hence Being, as that which is asked about, must be exhibited in a way of its own, essentially different from the way in which entities are discovered.” (26) Kant used the rejection of categories and rules as existent things to reject the study of ontology altogether, but Heidegger isn’t going to let it go. He has a plan.
Heidegger believes that, even without logic, one can still get a grip on Being, though it obviously won’t be through the standard methods. Here he makes a divergence from standard method, the move that will come to define the existentialist movement in its most essential point. Being, according to Heidegger, is necessary for any understanding of entities. This seems to make sense. Things aren’t just floating blobs isolated from everything and sharing no qualities. We see things as certain things, group them, analyze them. Our categories have as their most basic presupposition that thing which all entities (all ‘beings’) share, which is Being. In other words, to have any understanding of things (which we, at least in some sense, do) requires some understanding of Being. So the key to Being is within us. We have some sort of understanding of Being, for without it we would have nothing. We just have to search within ourselves to find it.
Time for some clarifications before we continue. When Heidegger says that asking about Being is “an entity’s mode of Being”, what he means is that searching for Being is a part of our Being. Being is essential to everything we are and do. This includes (and, as we’ll see, consists of) our ways of ‘being’. Our ways of living are ways of Being, and so all reflect Being itself. If we understand what is essential to our modes of Being, then, we can theoretically solve the puzzle and correctly make our way towards an understanding of Being.
What is ‘Dasein’? Dasein is the German term for ‘there it is’. Dasein is an entity, but “does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it.” (32) Dasein is, then, that entity which can be concerned with questions about being; i.e. you and me. Dasein’s questioning, its thinking, are ways of Being. They must have knowledge of Being to even be possible. Therefore our investigation of Being shall begin with the investigation of that being known as Dasein.
Dasein is not just an entity like a chair or a sandwich is. Ordinary objects are merely ‘present-at-hand’. The present-at-hand does not consider the world around it, and it does not comport itself towards anything. Considered without a context, an object simply is itself and nothing more. That Being (Dasein) which takes in its world and comports itself towards things “does not have the kind of Being which belongs to something merely present-at-hand within the world, nor does it ever have it.” (68)
Here we must stop at an essential point. Let us go back to the German ‘Dasein’. Dasein, in its strictest translation, would say, “To be there”. The immediate question that comes from such a phrase is, “To be where?” “There.” That is, somewhere. Dasein does not exist as some isolated thing. It is defined as that Being for whom Being is an issue, and that is not an issue that simply exists without context. Neither does Dasein. “Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence – in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself.” (33) To ask questions about its Being is to ask what Dasein is, what it could be, what it should be. These are not questions isolated to an abstract floating thing that is nothing more than an aggregate of atoms. This is a question about goals, about values, about the properties of a living thing that exists in a world. Thus “Being in a world is something that belongs to it essentially.” (33) In other words, Dasein’s essence is its existence. Thus, existentialism: roughly, the study of man's essence as his existence.
Here we find the fundamental break that separates Heidegger and the existentialists from the standard philosophical tradition. For thousands of years the program had been to look at man as a thing to be analyzed and studied. One could observe man and, using the information gleaned along with the formulations of logic, one could infer, either inductively or deductively, what it was that made up man. A system that existed in itself could be isolated and studied as the apparatus by which things ran. This was sometimes ramped up to the scale of the universe to discover the nature of reality or the moral world order, or it could be scaled down to man to discover what his moral purpose is and what he is capable of. But all of this assumes that man, world, and system are three things that can be pulled apart and put back together at will, assuming one has the right philosophical tools. Heidegger flat-out rejects this as wrong, and with it the metaphysical tradition. “[T]he question of his (man’s) Being has remained forgotten, and . . . this Being is rather conceived as something obvious or ‘self-evident’ in the sense of the Being-present-at-hand of other created Things.” (75) According to the old tradition, man ‘exists’ in the same sense that a chair ‘exists’. A chair can be split into its legs, seat, and back, which can then be split into wood pieces, and so on. One can do the same to man to discover what he is made of. Heidegger disagrees. “The world, Dasein, and existence are equiprimordially disclosed . . . .” (176) Dasein doesn’t simply exist; it exists in a world. The world doesn’t simply exist; it exists as something which Dasein is an essential part of. “Ontologically, ‘world’ is not a way of characterizing those entities which Dasein is essentially not; it is rather a characteristic if Dasein itself.” (92) Dasein and world are not like two peas in a pod; without one, the other does not exist at all. Thus Dasein is not simply Being, but it is Being-in. And it is not simply Being-in any old thing, but it is Being-in-the-world.
The existentialist will not try to define things as though they exist like a bunch of abstract Legos that have been put together in some manner; instead he or she will observe things as they exist within a world of other things, not in isolation, not as ‘things in themselves’, but as members of a community. A good word for this is ‘involvement’ (note: though this term is used in this translation of Heidegger, I am using it in a different and more general sense). Dasein, that subject which we seek to study, is involved in the world. It is a part. “A bare subject without a world never ‘is’ proximally, nor is it ever given.” (152)
Not only Dasein, but other Beings have their place in the world as well. They become the ‘ready-to-hand’. They are ‘equipment’, and they are so ‘in-order-to’. What does that mean, “in-order-to”? It simply means that, like Dasein, objects do not exist without a context. Heidegger employs the example of a hammer to demonstrate this. A hammer is not a certain size, weight, or even shape. Something could share all the physical characteristics of a hammer and yet not be a hammer. What distinguishes a hammer is hammering. A hammer is designed to hit things, a stick with a rock tied to the end is not. Typically, however, we don’t notice this, at least not until the hammer breaks. Now what is it? Nothing, really. At least, not anything useful. It has lost its status as ‘ready-to-hand’; its context has lost hold of it. Now it becomes only something present-at-hand, and so it is worth nothing to us.
When equipment becomes ‘ready-to-hand’, it does so in the context of an ‘in-order-to’. In order to what? Depends on the task, of course. A hammer is a hammer in the context of hammering a nail, and a weapon in the context of hammering someone’s face. Objects, then, are defined primarily in terms of their situational context. This context, this ‘in-order-to’, is their mode of Being at that time. Remember, Being is more primordial than categorical measurements like size and shape. Thus what a thing essentially is has to do with what it is there for, the ‘in-order-to’. Of course, tasks are not isolated, and so one ‘in-order-to’ is often (always) involved with a larger ‘in-order-to’, which is involved with another, and so on. -“The primary ‘towards-which’ is a ‘for-the-sake-of-which’. But the ‘for-the-sake-of’ always pertains to the Being of Dasein, for which, in its Being, that very Being is essentially an issue.” (116)
Man is not, for Heidegger, something that is simply there. It is ‘there’ – in a place, a context, a situation. Man cannot be observed in isolation, for man is always already in a world where objects present-at-hand present themselves as equipment ready-to-hand for use in-order-to accomplish goals for-the-sake-of-which Dasein is acting in the first place. Dasein is absolutely nothing without the world, the world which has context given by Dasein. Likewise, “If no Dasein exists, no world is ‘there’ either.” (417) The world is not just a bunch of things, not even as objects present-at-hand. It is things which are necessarily within a context, one given by Dasein. One does not come before the other; they are equiprimordial. To try to isolate man and object, to analyze them as though they were merely objects present-at-hand, is not only inappropriate, but it is destructive of the real search for Being. To find that Being, man must start the search again, this time from the real starting point. But that has its own problems.
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Haha! My mission for the summer is done! Victory over philosophy!
What next? Difficult to say. Currently I am focusing all my energy on passing the GRE, and so in terms of reading I am taking a break (and by ‘taking a break’ I mean reading The Will to Power, though probably not with the goal of writing anything here). I may write a second part to the entry on Being and Time. If you noticed the quotation references, there was a good 300 pages I kind of passed by there, and they are by no means light. I do not know if I will do this; we’ll see. Other than that, my next semester has centers around composing a writing sample (on Nietzsche), a philosophy of religion course (where I will probably focus on Kierkegaard), and a directed study on Heidegger (where my thesis, as currently conceived, will be on Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard), so you can at least see clearly what my following posts will probably cover. Until then!
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Our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the meaning of Being and to do so correctly. (19)
Being and Time is about a problem. This problem is the problem of Being. It stands as the first and essential question of philosophy, that which has bothered men since the Greeks. What is Being? What is essential? How do we discover it? For two and a half thousand years, people have been trying to answer this question.
And for about two point three thousand years, people have done it wrong.
Among other things, Martin Heidegger is known as one of the originators and essential members of the movement known as existentialism, a movement often associated with brooding French types sitting in basement coffee houses. In fact, existentialism was not developed with coffee houses in mind. ‘Existentialism’ the name comes from a method known as ‘existential’ analysis, the method Heidegger uses in Being and Time to try to give a new formulation to the same old questions of metaphysics. For him the past two millennia have been largely a deception in the area of philosophy, based upon ungrounded assumptions about the nature of things. The attempt to discover that essential subject of metaphysics, pure Being as it exists in itself, has been a flawed search. The work of metaphysicians of the past has followed a wrong method, and as a result “a dogma has been developed which not only declares the question about the meaning of Being to be superfluous, but sanctions its complete neglect.” (21) The real question of Being has been buried under false beliefs beyond any point of recognition. As a result, someone has to dig way, way down in order to get to the root of this deception and fix it.
This is the objective of Being and Time, and so it must start from as basic (‘primordial’, as Heidegger says) a starting point as possible. What is this point? How can we get to Being? How do we even know where to start? Heidegger’s first step is to flatly reject standard methods of interpretation. As has been said, these methods depend upon flawed premises about the essential nature of things; that is to say, they start with a faulty conception of Being. “We can only infer that ‘Being’ cannot have the character of an entity. Thus we cannot apply to ‘Being’ the concept of ‘definition’ as presented in traditional logic . . . .” (23) If Being is something which is more fundamental than anything else, than it seems to precede logic. Essential Being is not something which is defined by categories such as quantity or continuity. If we think back for a moment to Kant, categories aren’t things existent in themselves. Thus to use logic and certain conceptions of Being (even the most abstract ones) already presupposes something about the Being of what is being discussed, making the arguments circular. “Hence Being, as that which is asked about, must be exhibited in a way of its own, essentially different from the way in which entities are discovered.” (26) Kant used the rejection of categories and rules as existent things to reject the study of ontology altogether, but Heidegger isn’t going to let it go. He has a plan.
Heidegger believes that, even without logic, one can still get a grip on Being, though it obviously won’t be through the standard methods. Here he makes a divergence from standard method, the move that will come to define the existentialist movement in its most essential point. Being, according to Heidegger, is necessary for any understanding of entities. This seems to make sense. Things aren’t just floating blobs isolated from everything and sharing no qualities. We see things as certain things, group them, analyze them. Our categories have as their most basic presupposition that thing which all entities (all ‘beings’) share, which is Being. In other words, to have any understanding of things (which we, at least in some sense, do) requires some understanding of Being. So the key to Being is within us. We have some sort of understanding of Being, for without it we would have nothing. We just have to search within ourselves to find it.
[T]o work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity – the enquirer – transparent in his own Being. The very asking of this question is an entity’s mode of Being; and as such it gets its essential character from what is inquired about – namely, Being. This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term “Dasein”. (27)
Time for some clarifications before we continue. When Heidegger says that asking about Being is “an entity’s mode of Being”, what he means is that searching for Being is a part of our Being. Being is essential to everything we are and do. This includes (and, as we’ll see, consists of) our ways of ‘being’. Our ways of living are ways of Being, and so all reflect Being itself. If we understand what is essential to our modes of Being, then, we can theoretically solve the puzzle and correctly make our way towards an understanding of Being.
What is ‘Dasein’? Dasein is the German term for ‘there it is’. Dasein is an entity, but “does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it.” (32) Dasein is, then, that entity which can be concerned with questions about being; i.e. you and me. Dasein’s questioning, its thinking, are ways of Being. They must have knowledge of Being to even be possible. Therefore our investigation of Being shall begin with the investigation of that being known as Dasein.
Dasein is not just an entity like a chair or a sandwich is. Ordinary objects are merely ‘present-at-hand’. The present-at-hand does not consider the world around it, and it does not comport itself towards anything. Considered without a context, an object simply is itself and nothing more. That Being (Dasein) which takes in its world and comports itself towards things “does not have the kind of Being which belongs to something merely present-at-hand within the world, nor does it ever have it.” (68)
Here we must stop at an essential point. Let us go back to the German ‘Dasein’. Dasein, in its strictest translation, would say, “To be there”. The immediate question that comes from such a phrase is, “To be where?” “There.” That is, somewhere. Dasein does not exist as some isolated thing. It is defined as that Being for whom Being is an issue, and that is not an issue that simply exists without context. Neither does Dasein. “Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence – in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself.” (33) To ask questions about its Being is to ask what Dasein is, what it could be, what it should be. These are not questions isolated to an abstract floating thing that is nothing more than an aggregate of atoms. This is a question about goals, about values, about the properties of a living thing that exists in a world. Thus “Being in a world is something that belongs to it essentially.” (33) In other words, Dasein’s essence is its existence. Thus, existentialism: roughly, the study of man's essence as his existence.
Here we find the fundamental break that separates Heidegger and the existentialists from the standard philosophical tradition. For thousands of years the program had been to look at man as a thing to be analyzed and studied. One could observe man and, using the information gleaned along with the formulations of logic, one could infer, either inductively or deductively, what it was that made up man. A system that existed in itself could be isolated and studied as the apparatus by which things ran. This was sometimes ramped up to the scale of the universe to discover the nature of reality or the moral world order, or it could be scaled down to man to discover what his moral purpose is and what he is capable of. But all of this assumes that man, world, and system are three things that can be pulled apart and put back together at will, assuming one has the right philosophical tools. Heidegger flat-out rejects this as wrong, and with it the metaphysical tradition. “[T]he question of his (man’s) Being has remained forgotten, and . . . this Being is rather conceived as something obvious or ‘self-evident’ in the sense of the Being-present-at-hand of other created Things.” (75) According to the old tradition, man ‘exists’ in the same sense that a chair ‘exists’. A chair can be split into its legs, seat, and back, which can then be split into wood pieces, and so on. One can do the same to man to discover what he is made of. Heidegger disagrees. “The world, Dasein, and existence are equiprimordially disclosed . . . .” (176) Dasein doesn’t simply exist; it exists in a world. The world doesn’t simply exist; it exists as something which Dasein is an essential part of. “Ontologically, ‘world’ is not a way of characterizing those entities which Dasein is essentially not; it is rather a characteristic if Dasein itself.” (92) Dasein and world are not like two peas in a pod; without one, the other does not exist at all. Thus Dasein is not simply Being, but it is Being-in. And it is not simply Being-in any old thing, but it is Being-in-the-world.
Being-in is thus the formal existential expression for the Being of Dasein, which has Being-in-the-World as its essential state.”(80)
The existentialist will not try to define things as though they exist like a bunch of abstract Legos that have been put together in some manner; instead he or she will observe things as they exist within a world of other things, not in isolation, not as ‘things in themselves’, but as members of a community. A good word for this is ‘involvement’ (note: though this term is used in this translation of Heidegger, I am using it in a different and more general sense). Dasein, that subject which we seek to study, is involved in the world. It is a part. “A bare subject without a world never ‘is’ proximally, nor is it ever given.” (152)
Not only Dasein, but other Beings have their place in the world as well. They become the ‘ready-to-hand’. They are ‘equipment’, and they are so ‘in-order-to’. What does that mean, “in-order-to”? It simply means that, like Dasein, objects do not exist without a context. Heidegger employs the example of a hammer to demonstrate this. A hammer is not a certain size, weight, or even shape. Something could share all the physical characteristics of a hammer and yet not be a hammer. What distinguishes a hammer is hammering. A hammer is designed to hit things, a stick with a rock tied to the end is not. Typically, however, we don’t notice this, at least not until the hammer breaks. Now what is it? Nothing, really. At least, not anything useful. It has lost its status as ‘ready-to-hand’; its context has lost hold of it. Now it becomes only something present-at-hand, and so it is worth nothing to us.
When equipment becomes ‘ready-to-hand’, it does so in the context of an ‘in-order-to’. In order to what? Depends on the task, of course. A hammer is a hammer in the context of hammering a nail, and a weapon in the context of hammering someone’s face. Objects, then, are defined primarily in terms of their situational context. This context, this ‘in-order-to’, is their mode of Being at that time. Remember, Being is more primordial than categorical measurements like size and shape. Thus what a thing essentially is has to do with what it is there for, the ‘in-order-to’. Of course, tasks are not isolated, and so one ‘in-order-to’ is often (always) involved with a larger ‘in-order-to’, which is involved with another, and so on. -“The primary ‘towards-which’ is a ‘for-the-sake-of-which’. But the ‘for-the-sake-of’ always pertains to the Being of Dasein, for which, in its Being, that very Being is essentially an issue.” (116)
This is what makes up the structure of the world – the structure of that wherein Dasein as such already is. Dasein, in its familiarity with significance, is the ontical condition for the possibility of discovering entities which are encountered in a world with involvement (readiness-to-hand) as their kind of Being, and which can thus make themselves known as they are in themselves. (120)
Man is not, for Heidegger, something that is simply there. It is ‘there’ – in a place, a context, a situation. Man cannot be observed in isolation, for man is always already in a world where objects present-at-hand present themselves as equipment ready-to-hand for use in-order-to accomplish goals for-the-sake-of-which Dasein is acting in the first place. Dasein is absolutely nothing without the world, the world which has context given by Dasein. Likewise, “If no Dasein exists, no world is ‘there’ either.” (417) The world is not just a bunch of things, not even as objects present-at-hand. It is things which are necessarily within a context, one given by Dasein. One does not come before the other; they are equiprimordial. To try to isolate man and object, to analyze them as though they were merely objects present-at-hand, is not only inappropriate, but it is destructive of the real search for Being. To find that Being, man must start the search again, this time from the real starting point. But that has its own problems.
-----
Haha! My mission for the summer is done! Victory over philosophy!
What next? Difficult to say. Currently I am focusing all my energy on passing the GRE, and so in terms of reading I am taking a break (and by ‘taking a break’ I mean reading The Will to Power, though probably not with the goal of writing anything here). I may write a second part to the entry on Being and Time. If you noticed the quotation references, there was a good 300 pages I kind of passed by there, and they are by no means light. I do not know if I will do this; we’ll see. Other than that, my next semester has centers around composing a writing sample (on Nietzsche), a philosophy of religion course (where I will probably focus on Kierkegaard), and a directed study on Heidegger (where my thesis, as currently conceived, will be on Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard), so you can at least see clearly what my following posts will probably cover. Until then!
posted by Derek at 4:08 PM
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