Heidegger

Thinking of Being

Lee Braver

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745681177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Martin Heidegger is among the most important philosophers of the Twentieth Century. Within the continental tradition, almost every great figure has been deeply influenced by his work. For this reason, a full understanding of the course of modern philosophy is impossible without at least a basic grasp of Heidegger. Unfortunately, his work is notoriously difficult, both because of his innovative ideas and his difficult writing style. In this compelling book, Lee Braver cuts through the jargon to present Heidegger's ideas in clear English, using illuminating examples and explications of thorny passages. In so doing, he offers readers an accessible overview of Heidegger's entire career. The first half of the book presents a guide through Being and Time, Heidegger's early masterpiece, while the second half covers the key themes of his later writing, including technology, subjectivity, history, nihilism, agency, and the nature of thought itself. As Heidegger's later work is deeply engaged with other philosophers, Braver explains the relevance of Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche for Heidegger's thought. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars trying to find their way through Heidegger's difficult ideas. Anyone interested in Twentieth Century continental philosophy must come to terms with Heidegger, and this book is the ideal place to begin.

Part I

Being and Time

1

Introduction to Being and Time

Being and Time Introduction I

Being and Time opens with a quote from one of Plato's late dialogues where the speaker admits that he no longer understands what being means. Interestingly, rather than invoking Plato as one of the great metaphysicians and making some kind of connection with his views on the nature of being, this quote praises him for his lack of understanding about it. By the end of many of Plato's dialogues, Socrates brings his conversation partners to the realization that they didn't know what they thought they knew, which opens the way for them to learn. So, before answering the question of being can even be a possibility, Heidegger wants us to pause and fully realize our profound perplexity before this question that dominates his thought from one end of his career to the other: what is the meaning of being? What does it mean to be?

Let's stop and think about this question for a minute – how would you go about answering it? Where should we travel to in order to find being? What instruments might we use to bring it into focus – are there things that could function as ontoloscopes or ontometers? What kinds of experiments or surveys or meditations could uncover being? After just a brief consideration, we should see that not only do we not know how to answer the question, we don't really even know how to ask it, and this is what the Introduction tries to prepare us for. Be warned: the Introduction is probably the hardest part of the book. It is thorny, abstract, and it throws term after term at you with little to no explanation. It's rough going, but once we get to the body of the book, we will find concrete experiences to anchor our understanding of the text. This is the great advantage of phenomenology (which I will define in just a minute): no matter how difficult the writing, if you can find the experience it's trying to describe, that can serve as a life-line in interpreting the text.

In fact, Heidegger gives us the answer to “the being-question” (this question is so important to him that it gets a name!) on this first unnumbered page of the book: time is the meaning of being. Not very helpful, is it? As Douglas Adams showed us, if we don't understand the question then we won't be able to make much sense of the answer. Being and Time begins by quoting a great philosophical authority not for his knowledge but for his perplexity, then tells us that we don't understand the question, and demonstrates this by giving us the answer which means nothing to us at this point. Just to add a flourish to the peculiarity of these opening moves, the very last sentence of the book puts this answer into question (488/437).¹

In fact, there's a well-known problem lurking in the bushes here. It's called Meno's Paradox since it first arose in the Platonic dialogue titled “Meno” for the main character talking to Socrates in the text. When Socrates demolishes Meno's attempts to define virtue, Meno responds with a dilemma, that is, two exhaustive choices, both of which appear to be unacceptable: either we know what virtue is or we don't. If we do know it then our inquiry is obviously unnecessary, but if we don't our inquiry is impossible since we won't know when and if we run across the right answer. In other words, if we genuinely don't know what virtue is, then we won't be able to recognize its correct definition if we find it. Plato's solution to the dilemma is his theory of recollection that proposes a third alternative between the dilemma's options of either complete knowledge or absolute ignorance. He suggests that we have had knowledge of what he calls the Forms, which provide definitions of the highly abstract notions his dialogues examine such as beauty or justice, but we have forgotten them. This means that we do in fact need to search for them since at present we don't have an explicit grasp of them, but when we come across the truth we will recognize it by its distant familiarity.

Heidegger adapts a version of Plato's theory, albeit stripped of its mythological trappings. “Inquiry, as a kind of seeking, must be guided beforehand by what is sought. So the meaning of Being must already be available to us in some way” (25/5). The very fact that we can ask the question at all, even in a confused way, means that we have some understanding of being, at least that it exists and can be questioned. But pay attention to the qualification: “in some way.” We do have an understanding of being, but not in the way we usually think of understanding. Philosophy has traditionally been dominated by the demand Socrates puts to those he questions – define the topic in a fully articulate way that can be defended from objections, or else you don't really know it. Philosophers have traditionally conceived of knowledge in terms of explicit thoughts you can explain and argue for. One of the more radical innovations of the first division of Being and Time is its proposal of a different kind of knowledge, one sometimes called “know-how” rather than “knowing-that.”² I know how to walk or have a conversation or what honey tastes like but I'm not sure I could explain any of these, at least not to anyone who didn't already know them.

Surprisingly, Heidegger wants to spell out something as seemingly abstract and esoteric as the meaning of being in terms of these mundane know-hows. This is why he continues the quote above: “we always conduct our activities in an understanding of Being.” He locates this understanding more in our actions than our thoughts, though it's there too. At the most general level, we must have some sense of what it means to be, just to pick out real entities to interact with. By picking up this book, you have demonstrated that you can tell a real object from all the non-existing things you might have reached for. In fact, everything you interact with has to be some kind of being; even a daydream of imaginary scenes is a being of some sort. Every second you're awake you're dealing with something or other, even if only in your thoughts, and all of these interactions successfully pick out things that are. Therefore, your actions must be guided by an understanding of what it means to be, if a tacit one.

But that's not all. Not only do you recognize real beings, but you recognize differences among them. I don't ask my wallet for permission when I take money out of it, the way I would ask permission to get money from you. I don't worry about whether my coffee cup is lonely when I lock it in my office at night, nor do I try to discover and nurture its ambitions. We're constantly differentiating types of beings by treating particular beings differently, which means that we have an understanding of a number of different ways to be. This is what Husserl, Heidegger's teacher, calls “regional ontology,” meaning that reality contains profoundly heterogeneous types of things. This understanding of being that we have is turning out to be rather sophisticated.

It isn't explicit, however. We rarely think about the fact that people and objects are completely different kinds of things which call for diverse actions because it's so self-evident. Heidegger calls this kind of understanding “pre-ontological,” which just means that it's not an express theory (32/12). It can become explicit when people undertake specialized studies of particular topics because each discipline carves out a particular type of being for its subject: language or historical events or atoms or arguments, for example. But even these disciplines take place on the basis of a pre-ontological understanding, what Heidegger calls here “productive logic” (30/10). One has to start off with a basic, rough and ready sense of what, say, historical events are in order to go about the business of studying them. After a detailed examination, we gain a deeper understanding that can enrich and refine our initial definition, which can then enable us to do a better job examining the topic, and so on. I will be calling this the Hermeneutic Spiral, and the movement of the book as a whole is to continue turning it, going back over material already covered but at a deeper level, with greater focus and understanding. Thus, the vicious circle that Meno had posed as an obstacle that prevents inquiry is actually a virtuous spiral that enables us to learn at all. “What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way” (195/153). What Heidegger calls the ontological priority of the question of being in ¶3 means that any empirical inquiry into beings rests on more fundamental notions of what it means to be that kind of being, and ultimately what it means to be at all. Sciences are “naive” or “dogmatic” in that they presuppose these deeper understandings of being without subjecting them to investigation. That they do not do this deeper investigation is not a criticism; that isn't their job. It is the task of philosophy.

Now there are two things you need to know about being right off the bat. First is what Heidegger calls the ontological difference, which is the difference between being and beings or entities or things that are. Beings are just the things and people around us – this book, that cup, Marlon Brando, toenails, etc. Being (at least at this point in Heidegger's thought) is the way they are, the different kinds of behavior we can expect from them. These “levels” are not separate or separable, but are fundamentally different kinds of phenomena, which he calls “ontic” and “ontological,” respectively (note: don't confuse this sense of “ontological” as referring to being in contrast to beings with the other sense of “ontological” as an explicit theory in contrast to pre-ontological understanding; Heidegger really should have come up with different terms). Claims like, “the Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity” (26/6) mean that the way a thing exists is not itself a thing. People, for example, have a distinctive way of existing that is very different from the way inanimate objects are, but this way of existing is plainly not itself a person or a thing or any other entity. It is a way of being – making it ontological – rather than a being itself – which would make it ontic. Confusing the two – treating being as a being – forms one of the most common mistakes in philosophy, what he comes to call onto-theology. This is encouraged by capitalizing “Being,” which makes it sound like the great being in the sky, so I will leave it uncapitalized, though I will preserve its original expression in quotations (Heidegger encouraged Joan Stambaugh to translate the German “Sein” by “be-ing” in English in order to capture its dynamism). Once you understand what Heidegger means by being the point is rather obvious, so hopefully it will become clearer as we become familiar with the three kinds of being that appear in Being and Time. The second preparatory point is that “Being is always the Being of an entity” (29/9). You can never find a way of being just floating around. It's only particular beings that are in specific ways, so we only encounter being by seeing how entities are. We learn about their being by watching them be, so to speak.

And this starts to ease our initial perplexity about how to answer the being-question. If we only find being among beings, then that's where we should look for it: we need to question beings about their being (26/6). Of course, this solution immediately creates a new problem: which beings should we examine? Everything we encounter is a being so taking a survey of them all would be an infinite labor. Heidegger narrows our search in ¶4 The Ontical Priority of the Question of Being where, remember, ontic just means having to do with particular beings as opposed to ontological which pertains to being.

Where should we look for the meaning of being? Happily, we already have the answer to this. The mere fact that we are asking the question of being means that we ourselves have some understanding of its meaning, so we should look for it in us. Metaphysicians have looked far and wide for what it means to be but, like Dorothy's slippers, they had it with them all along. It's initially pre-ontological, as we have seen, but the book as a whole attempts to make it ontological in the sense of an explicitly stated theory.

“Dasein,” an ordinary word for existence in German, is used as a technical term for beings like us in the book, specifically beings with the ability to be aware. Another potential terminological landmine appears here: Heidegger uses the term “existence” exclusively for our way of being so, technically, only Dasein exists; other things have their own ways of being. Heidegger initially defines Dasein as the entity for whom, “in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (32/12). This means that “we cannot define Dasein's essence by citing a ‘what’ of the kind that pertains to a subject-matter … its essence lies rather in the fact that in each case it has its Being to be, and has it as its own” (32–3/12). Our essence is to have no essence in the sense of specific features or tasks or activities assigned to us by our nature. Rocks have a definite essence that cannot be changed; animals are guided by instinct and cannot reflect on what they ought to do. But we are to some degree unformed, which means that it is up to us to form our selves. We become a particular kind of person by living a particular life, making what Heidegger calls “existentiell” decisions, which means that they pertain to specific Dasein, as opposed to “existential” features that all Dasein have (33/12). To connect this distinction with a previous one, existentiell qualities are ontic ones that pertain to particular Dasein whereas existential features pertain to our ontological way of being that is common to all Dasein.

As we will see in the next two chapters, we can only live a life within the context of a community and by using a whole bunch of tools. In order to be a professor, I need to have specific kinds of relationships with students, colleagues, and administrators, and use a loose collection of tools such as books, classrooms, chalkboards, and so on. I cannot be a professor by simply willing it or believing that I am; I have to be involved in certain ways with others and things. Unlike the traditional definition of substance, we are essentially not self-sufficient; we are inescapably amid the world and among others. But, as we have seen, this means that we must understand their ways of being in order to be able to pick them out and interact with them appropriately (33/13).

And this closes the circle opened on the first page, thus ending the first part of the Introduction. We started off completely befuddled about how to answer, or even ask the question of the meaning of being. Now we have the first step – we will find that meaning in the entity who possesses an understanding of being as part of its basic make-up: us. A pre-ontological understanding lives in our activities because we act in the world in our attempts to become a particular kind of person, trying to settle the issue of our being. This requires an understanding of our own way of being, because we must realize that it is up to us to live out our lives, and of the ways of being of the entities we need to do so: objects, tools, and other people. An understanding of these three ways of being is built into our way of being, what Heidegger calls existence, so this is what we must analyze as the foundation for understanding all of these ways of being. Or, as Heidegger densely summarizes the conclusion of the first part of the Introduction, “therefore, fundamental ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein” (34/13). The analysis of existence, Dasein's way of being, forms the foundation for the study of being, ontology.

Being and Time Introduction II

If Part I of the Introduction addresses the why and the what of the inquiry – why it's important and what to study – Part II looks at how to conduct it. We now know that we have to examine Dasein's way of being, what he calls the existential analytic, but how do we do this? This may seem easy – after all, every second of our life gives us data since we are always with ourselves. But ¶5 introduces one of the guiding ideas of Heidegger's thought: that which is most familiar is, for that very reason, especially hard to grasp (36/15). Although this sounds paradoxical, you can see it at work in your daily life. Think about some of the features in your room – your desk, or posters on the wall, or the position of the bed. These are things you see every day but, because they're constantly in view, you take them for granted and they become, if not exactly invisible, then unseen, rarely noticed unless something changes. If that's true of your closet door which you often see, how much more does it apply to your self which is always there?

It will take work to analyze ourselves, then, and for more than one reason. Heidegger thinks that philosophers have typically started their examination of the self with a presupposition about which activities are essential to our nature. Ever since the Greeks defined humans as the rational animal these presuppositions have usually focused on our ability to think, but this concentration is just an artifact of the way philosophers approach the subject. Think about how Descartes begins his Meditations, for instance. He says that he must cease all normal activities and retreat to a cabin where he can just sit in a chair by the fire and think. And lo and behold, what he finds there is that he is really just a thinking thing! Well no wonder – all he's doing while he's examining himself is thinking (85/59). This method prejudices the investigation by intentionally screening out the kinds of things we do the vast majority of the time, just the kinds of things Descartes makes sure to stop doing before he starts studying himself. Plato similarly praises the activity of philosophizing because it takes us away from the mundane flotsam and jetsam of life, the insignificant and rather distasteful bodily processes that take up so much of our time.

Heidegger asks an intentionally naive question: if these activities are what we do most of the time, why filter them out when we want to understand ourselves? We spend vastly more time eating cereal and walking to the store and talking with our friends than we do contemplating triangles or ruminating on the nature of justice. Instead of screening them out, we should c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: An Initial Orientation
• Part I: Being and Time
• Part II: Later Heidegger
• Conclusion: Influences, Developments, and Criticisms
• References
• Index