On Heidegger's Being and Time

Simon Critchley, Reiner Schürmann, Steven Levine, Steven Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429603761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

On Heidegger's Being and Time is an outstanding exploration of Heidegger's most important work by two major philosophers. Simon Critchley argues that we must see Being and Time as a radicalization of Husserl's phenomenology, particularly his theories of intentionality, categorial intuition, and the phenomenological concept of the a priori. This leads to a reappraisal and defense of Heidegger's conception of phenomenology.

In contrast, Reiner Schürmann urges us to read Heidegger 'backward', arguing that his later work is the key to unravelling Being and Time. Through a close reading of Being and Time Schürmann demonstrates that this work is ultimately aporetic because the notion of Being elaborated in his later work is already at play within it. This is the first time that Schürmann's renowned lectures on Heidegger have been published.

The book concludes with Critchley's reinterpretation of the importance of authenticity in Being and Time. Arguing for what he calls an 'originary inauthenticity', Critchley proposes a relational understanding of the key concepts of the second part of Being and Time: death, conscience and temporality.

1
HEIDEGGER FOR BEGINNERS¹

Simon Critchley

It’s not always easy being Heideggerian.²

What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari

Introduction

Essentially, I want to deal with two questions:

1. Where should one begin with Heidegger?
2. More importantly, why should one begin philosophizing with Heidegger rather than elsewhere?

I will try and respond to these questions by showing that the beginning of Heidegger’s philosophy is phenomenological. That is, Heidegger’s thought begins as a radicalization of Husserlian phenomenological method. The consequences of this claim for our understanding of Heidegger’s work as a whole, and for the many conflicting interpretations to which it has given rise, will hopefully emerge as we proceed. To make good on my claim, I will give an interpretation of the Preliminary Part of Heidegger’s important 1925 lecture course, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, a text that I see as the buried phenomenological preface to Sein und Zeit. Rejoining Heidegger’s magnum opus to its phenomenological preface, permits one, in my view, to clarify the philosophical presuppositions that are required in order for Sein und Zeit to begin; that is, in order for the question of the meaning or truth of being to be raised as a matter of compelling philosophical interest, and not as some magical and numinous vapor.

My basic premise, to echo one of Heidegger’s reported remarks from the 1962 Protokoll to the seminar on Sein und Zeit, is that “In der Tat, wäre ohne die phänomenologische Grundhaltung die Seinsfrage nicht möglich gewesen” (“Actually, the question of being would not have been possible without the basic phenomenological attitude”).³ If this is true, then it means that the interpretation of the Prolegomena assumes great importance, for it is there that Heidegger’s radicalization of phenomenology is systematically presented as part of an Auseinandersetzung with Husserl and not gnomically intimated, as the novice to Sein und Zeit often feels in reading the crucial methodological Paragraph 7 for the first time.

Heidegger’s double gesture

The reading of Husserl is dominated by a double gesture that permits Heidegger both to inherit a certain understanding of Husserl, while at the same time committing an act of critical parricide against him, what von Herrmann calls the Zweideutigkeit or ambiguity of speaking against Husserl in Husserlian language.⁴ In these lectures, I would like to sketch this double gesture in some detail.

For Heidegger, there are three essential discoveries of Husserlian phenomenology: intentionality, categorial intuition, and the original sense of the a priori. These discoveries are linked together in a “nesting effect”, where intentionality finds what Heidegger calls its “concretion” in categorial intuition, whose concretion is the a priori, which provides, in turn, the basis for a new definition of the Vor-Begriff, the preliminary concept of phenomenology itself, a definition that is only accidentally modified in Paragraph 7 of Sein und Zeit. I believe that this definition of phenomenology remains at least formally determinative for the rest of Heidegger’s philosophical itinerary. To put this into a schema:

intentionality + categorial intuition + the a priori = the preliminary concept of phenomenology

I shall elaborate these concepts in more detail presently, but it should be noted that the condition of possibility for Heidegger’s concept of phenomenology is a certain understanding of the intentionality thesis. However, as Heidegger puts it, although intentionality is the essential structure of mental experience—what Heidegger calls ‘psychic life’—it is not the original structure, which is given in the analysis of categorial intuition.

As we all know, Heidegger’s thinking is preoccupied—perhaps a little too preoccupied, but that is another story for a separate occasion—with the Seinsfrage, the question of being. Phenomenology opens a space where the question of being can be raised, releasing being from the subjectivistic determination to which it had been submitted in philosophical modernity, most obviously in Descartes, Kant, Fichte and others, but more closely in the Neo-Kantianism of Heidegger’s peers and superiors in Marburg.

Heidegger’s leading, but hardly self-evident, philosophical claim, which I shall try to clarify below, is that being is an aspect of phenomenological seeing, in some sense a matter for phenomenological intuition. We might say that being is the ‘seeing’ of what is seen, or the ‘appearing’ of what appears, although this should not be misunderstood as announcing some sort of metaphysical dualism. Thus, against the modern philosophical self-understanding, phenomenology grants to being a new sense of non- or, better, trans-subjective givenness. As Klaus Held insightfully remarks, Husserl’s discovery for Heidegger is “die Vorgegebenheit einer transsubjectiven Offenbarkeitsdimension” (“the pre-givenness of a trans-subjective dimension of manifestation”).⁵

As the work of Jacques Taminiaux has shown in detail, the pre-givenness of this trans-subjective dimension of manifestation is the work of categorial intuition.⁶ When Heidegger famously remarks at the end of Paragraph 7 of Sein und Zeit that the latter book only became possible “auf dem Boden” laid down by Husserl, then this Boden, this ground or basis, alludes to categorial intuition (SZ 38). The central position that Heidegger gives to categorial intuition in the interpretation of Husserl and to Heidegger’s self-understanding as a phenomenologist remains unaltered from Sein und Zeit to the final seminar in Zähringen in 1973. In this sense, we might say that Heidegger’s real contribution to philosophy is his radicalization of the basic idea of phenomenology, a radicalization that paradoxically shows the extent of his debt to Husserl, and, by extension, the radicality of Husserlian phenomenology.

As Heidegger points out in 1963, with an explicit look back over his shoulder to the very same lines from Paragraph 7 of Sein und Zeit that were cited above, phenomenology must not be understood as a movement or school, but as the possibility of thinking as such. That is, phenomenology is the possibility of corresponding to the claim of that which is to be thought (“…dem Anspruch des zu denkenden zu entsprechen”).⁷ For the early Heidegger, what is to be thought is the meaning of being, and for the later Heidegger, the truth of being. In these lectures and my interpretation of Sein und Zeit, we will hopefully begin to understand what he means by the meaning or truth of being. In my view, the latter is intrinsically bound up with what I call below the “openedness” of thrown projective finite Dasein, but this will hopefully become clearer below.

Importantly, in order to conceive of the task of thinking as a correspondence between thought and that which is to be thought, what has to be presupposed is the idea of phenomenological correlation that Heidegger finds in the intentionality thesis and pursues in his analysis of categorial intuition. It is this idea of a phenomenological correlation irreducible to either subjectivism or objectivism that is the basis for the early Heidegger’s claim that Dasein and World must be viewed as a unitary phenomenon, and for the later Heidegger’s claim for the thought of das Ereignis as the co-belonging or Zusammengehörigkeit von Mensch und Sein, the belonging together of the human being with being or that which is to be thought. The thought of phenomenological correlation thus bridges any idea of a “Heidegger 1” and a “Heidegger 2” and problematizes the whole idea of the Kehre, or a turn in thinking that is alleged to take place in the mid-1930s when Heidegger is meant to move from the human being to being as such.

The classic statement of this view lies in Richardson’s hugely impressive 1962 text, From Phenomenology to Thought.⁸ In my view, the unity of Heidegger’s work is phenomenological. His difference with Husserl is that the thought of phenomenological correlation is deepened, firstly, by the claim, inherited from Dilthey, into the primacy of factical life that requires a corresponding mode of practical or hermeneutic insight; and, secondly, by the claim for truth as aletheia, as the temporalized bivalence of disclosure and closure, of unconcealment and concealment, or Ereignis and Enteignis.⁹ But this will become clearer as we proceed.

I would like to try to reconstruct the various conceptual moves that permit Heidegger to deduce his Vor-Begriff of phenomenology. I will pass over much of the fascinating intellectual history of these concepts, which is very clearly laid out by Heidegger in the opening pages of the Prolegomena, and try to bring out the central arguments that will hopefully philosophically justify those concepts. Let me begin with the intentionality thesis.

Intentionality

For Heidegger, intentionality is the essential structure of subjectivity qua Dasein. Mental experience is fundamentally characterized by what Heidegger calls Sichrichten-auf, directing itself towards. That is, mental experience is always directing itself towards its matters, it is always already outside, alongside and amidst things and not enclosed in what Heidegger calls “the cabinet of consciousness”. This understanding of the intentionality thesis can be found in a passage from Paragraph 13 of Sein und Zeit that is much less dramatic when read in the English translation. Heidegger writes:

Im Sichrichten auf…und Erfassen geht das Dasein nicht etwa erst aus seiner Innensphäre hinaus, in die es zunächst verkapselt ist, sondern es ist seiner primären Seinsart nach immer schon “draußen” bei einem begegnenden Seienden der je schon entdeckten Welt (SZ 62).

As Heidegger is reported to have said in his final seminar at Zähringen in 1973, Dasein ist das Ekstatische. That is, the fundamental quality of mental experience is not found in the immanence of consciousness, but is rather Da, it is had there, outside, alongside things, and not divorced from them in a mental capsule full of representations. Put another way, mental experience is fundamentally transcendent. As Heidegger, alluding to Kant, puts it in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, intentionality is the ratio cognoscendi of transcendence, and transcendence is the ratio essendi of intentionality.¹⁰

The intentionality thesis permits Heidegger to make the passage from Bewußtsein (consciousness) to Dasein in a readi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Heidegger for Beginners
• 2 Heidegger’s Being and Time
• 3 Originary Inauthenticity—On Heidegger’s Sein Und Zeit
• Index