Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Heidegger and Being and Time

Stephen Mulhall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134855087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Heidegger is one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. A difficult and powerful philosopher, his work requires careful reading. Being and Time was his first major book and remains his most influential work.
Heidegger and Being and Time introduces and assesses: Heidegger's life and the background of Being and Time; the ideas and text of Being and Time; Heidegger's importance to philosophy and to the intellectual life of this century.
Ideal for anyone coming to Heidegger for the first time, this guide will be vital for all students of Heidegger in philosophy and cultural theory.

Introduction
Heidegger’s project
(Being and Time, §§1–8)

The question of Being

According to Heidegger, the whole of Being and Time is concerned with a single question – the question of the meaning of Being. But what does he mean by the term ‘Being’? What, if anything, does it signify? Late in William Golding’s novel The Spire,¹ its medieval protagonist – a cathedral dean named Jocelin – has a striking experience as he leaves his quarters:

Outside the door there was a woodstack among long, rank grass. A scent struck him, so that he leaned against the woodstack, careless of his back, and waited while the dissolved grief welled out of his eyes. Then there was a movement over his head . . . . He twisted his neck and looked up sideways. There was a cloud of angels flashing in the sunlight, they were pink and gold and white; and they were uttering this sweet scent for joy of the light and the air. They brought with them a scatter of clear leaves, and among the leaves a long, black springing thing. His head swam with the angels, and suddenly he understood there was more to the appletree than one branch. It was there beyond the wall, bursting up with cloud and scatter, laying hold of the earth and the air, a fountain, a marvel, an appletree . . . . Then, where the yard of the deanery came to the river and trees lay over the sliding water, he saw all the blue of the sky condensed to a winged sapphire, that flashed once.
He cried out.
‘Come back!’
But the bird was gone, an arrow shot once. It will never come back, he thought, not if I sat here all day.

(Golding 1964:204–5)

Jocelin, as if for the first time, is struck by the sheer specificity of the appletree – its springing branches and trunk, the cloud and scatter of its leaves and blossom, everything that makes it the particular thing that it is. He is struck by what one might call the distinctive mode of its existence or being. The kingfisher, in the singular sapphire flash of its flight, conveys rather a sense of contingency, of the sheer, transient fact of its existence or being. Together, then, the appletree and the kingfisher impress upon Jocelin a fused sense of how the world is and that the world is; they precipitate an immeasurable astonishment and wonder at the reality of things, at the fact of there being a highly differentiated world to wonder at. It is just such a sense of wonder that Heidegger thinks of as a response to the Being of things, a response to Being; and he aims to recover in his readers a capacity to take seriously the question of its meaning or significance.

For some philosophers, the fact that a passage extracted from a novel can so precisely articulate the ground of Heidegger’s questioning might suggest new ways of connecting philosophy, literature and everyday human experience, and of recovering the sense of wonder with which the ancient Greeks held that the true impulse to philosophize originates; but for many others it suggests that to take such questioning seriously is to succumb to adolescent Romanticism. Despite these widespread qualms, however, it is perfectly possible to detect in Heidegger’s own introductory remarks a way of providing a more obviously ‘legitimate’ derivation or genealogy for his question – to provide it with a philosophically respectable birth certificate.

In everything that human beings do, they encounter a wide variety of objects, processes, events and other phenomena that go to make up the world around them. Taking a shower, walking the dog, reading a book: all involve engaging with particular things in particular situations, and in ways that presuppose a certain comprehension of the presence and the nature of those things. In taking a shower, we show our awareness of the plastic curtain, the shower-head and the dials on the control panel, our understanding of the way in which they relate to one another, and so our grasp of their distinctive potentialities. We cannot walk the dog – choosing the best route, allowing time for shrubsniffing, shortening the lead at the advent of another dog – without revealing our sense of that creature’s nature and its physical expression.
Enjoying a thriller on the beach presupposes being able to support its bulk and focus on its pages, to grasp the language in which it is written and the specific constraints and expectations within which novels in that particular genre are written and read.

In short, throughout their lives human beings manifest an implicit capacity for a comprehending interaction with entities as actual and as possessed of a distinctive nature. This capacity finds linguistic expression when we complain that the shower curtain is split, or wonder aloud what Fido is up to now, or ask where our novel is. Since this comprehending interaction seems to be systematically registered by our use of various forms of the verb ‘to be’, Heidegger describes it as an implicit understanding of what it is for an entity to be, and so as a capacity to comprehend beings as such, to comprehend beings qua beings. In other words, it is a capacity to comprehend the Being of beings.

Many of our cultural practices in effect amount to rigorous thematizations of particular forms of this comprehension and its corresponding objects; they constitute modes of human activity in which something that is taken for granted, and so remains undeveloped in other parts of our life, is made the explicit focus of our endeavours. For example, our everyday concern for hygiene may lead us to explore the cleansing properties of water, soap and shampoo, and so to a more general study of the structure of matter. Our life with pets may lead us into a study of domestic species and then of animal life more generally. Our ordinary reading habits may lead us to examine a particular author’s style and development, and then to investigate the means by which aesthetic pleasure can be elicited from specific literary genres. In other words, such disciplines as physics and chemistry, biology and literary studies take as their central concern aspects of phenomena that remain implicit in our everyday dealings with them; and the specific theories that are produced as a result go to make up a body of what Heidegger would call ontic knowledge – knowledge pertaining to the distinctive nature of particular types of entity.

However, such theory-building itself depends upon taking for granted certain basic ways in which the given discipline demarcates and structures its own area of study; and those foundations tend to remain unthematized by the discipline itself, until it finds itself in a state of crisis. Relativity theory precipitated such a crisis in physics; in biology, similar turmoil was caused by Darwinian theories of natural selection; and in literary studies, theoretical attacks upon prevailing notions of the author, the text and language have recently performed an analogous function. Such conceptual enquiries are not examples of theories that conform to the standards of the discipline, but rather explore that on the basis of which any such theory could be constructed, the a priori conditions for the possibility of such scientific theorizing. In Heideggerian language, what they reveal are the ontological presuppositions of ontic enquiry.

Here, philosophical enquiry enters the scene. For when physics is brought to question its conception of matter, or biology its conception of life, or literary studies its conception of a text, what is disclosed are the basic articulations of that discipline’s very subject-matter, that which underlies all the specific objects that the discipline takes as its theme; and that is not, and could not be, within the purview of intradisciplinary enquiry, because it would be presupposed by any such enquiry. What is needed is a reflection upon those articulations, an attempt to clarify the nature and validity of the most basic conceptualizations of this particular domain; and such a critical clarification is the business of philosophy. In these respects, philosophical enquiry is at once parasitic upon and more fundamental than other modes of human enquiry. There could be no philosophy of science without science, and philosophy has no authority to judge the validity of specific scientific theories. But any such theory is constructed and tested in ways which presuppose the validity of certain assumptions about the domain under investigation, assumptions that it can consequently neither justify nor undermine, and which therefore require a very different type of examination. The scientist may well be the best exponent of the practices of inductive reasoning as applied to the realm of nature; but if questions are raised about the precise structure of inductive reasoning and its ultimate justification as a mode of discovering truth, then the abilities of the philosopher come into play.

This is a familiar view of the role of philosophical enquiry in the Western philosophical tradition, particularly since the time of Descartes – at least if we judge by the importance it has assigned to the twin ontological tasks of specifying the essential differences between the various types of entity that human beings encounter, and the essential preconditions of our capacity to comprehend them. To learn about that tradition is to learn, for example, that Descartes’ view of material objects – as entities whose essence lies in being extended – was contested by Berkeley’s claim that it lies in their being perceived, whereas his view that the essence of the self is grounded in the power of thought was contested by Hume’s claim that its only ground is the bundling together of impressions and ideas. Kant then attempts to unearth that which conditions the possibility of our experiencing ourselves as subjects inhabiting a world of objects. Alternatively, we might study the specific conceptual presuppositions of aesthetic judgements about entities as opposed to scientific hypotheses about them, or interrogate the distinctive presuppositions of the human sciences – the study of social and cultural structures and artefacts, and the guiding assumptions of those who investigate them as historians rather than as literary critics or sociologists.

In a terminology Heidegger sometimes employs in other texts, such ontological enquiries broadly focus on the what-being of entities² – their particular way or mode of being. Their concern is with what determines an entity as the specific type of entity it is, with that which distinguishes it from entities of a different type, and grounds both our everyday dealings with such entities and our more structured and explicit ontic investigations of the domain they occupy. Such a concern with what-being is to be contrasted with a concern with that-being. ‘That-being’ signifies the fact that some given thing is or exists,³ and an ontological enquiry into that-being must concern itself with that which determines an entity of a specific type as an existent being – something equally fundamental both to our everyday dealings with it and to our ontic investigations of it, since neither would be possible if the entity concerned did not exist.
A general contrast of this kind between what-being and that-being is thus internal to what Heidegger means by the Being of beings; it is a basic articulation of Being, something which no properly ontological enquiry can afford to overlook. And indeed, the Western philosophical tradition since Plato has not overlooked it; but the way in which that tradition has tended to approach the matter has, for Heidegger, been multiply misleading.

With respect to the tradition’s investigations of what-being, Heidegger will quarrel with the poverty and narrowness of its results. For whilst human beings encounter a bewildering variety of kinds of entity or phenomena – stones and plants, animals and other people, rivers, sea and sky, the diverse realms of nature, history, science and religion – philosophers have tended to classify these things in ways which reduce the richness of their differentiation. The effect has been to impoverish our sense of the diversity of what-being, to reduce it to oversimple categories such as the Cartesian dichotomy between nature (res extensa) and mind (res cogitans) – a set of categories which, on Heidegger’s view, obliterates both the specific nature of human beings and that of the objects they encounter. Similarly, the basic distinction between what-being and that-being has been subject to over-hasty and superficial conceptualizations. In medieval ontology, for example, it was taken up in terms of a distinction between essence (essentia) and existence (existentia) – a distinction which still has great influence over contemporary philosophical thinking, but which embodied a highly specific and highly controversial set of theological presuppositions, and which overlooks the possibility that the Being of certain kinds of entity (particularly that of human beings) might not be articulable in precisely those terms. And, of course, if this basic distinction has been improperly conceptualized, then the philosophical tradition’s various attempts at comprehending the that-being of entities will have been just as erroneous as its attempts to grasp their what-being.

Accordingly, when Heidegger claims that the philosophical tradition has forgotten the question with which he is concerned, he does not mean that philosophers have entirely overlooked the question of the Being of beings. Rather, he means that, by taking certain answers to that question to be self-evident or unproblematically correct, they have taken it for granted that they know what the phrase ‘the Being of beings’ signifies – in other words, they have failed to see that the meaning of that phrase is itself questionable, that there is a question about the meaning of Being. By closing off that question, they have failed to reflect properly upon a precondition of their ontological conclusions about the articulated unity of Being, and so failed to demonstrate that their basic orientation is above reproach; and this lack of complete self-transparency has led their investigations into a multitude of problems. As Heidegger puts it:

The question of Being aims therefore at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such and such a type, and in so doing already operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundations. Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task.

(BT, 2:31)

Reclaiming the question

Nonetheless, apart from its earliest incarnation in ancient Greece, the philosophical tradition has tended to pass over this latter type of question in silence. As Heidegger begins his book by pointing out, ‘this question has today been forgotten’ (BT, 1:21), and largely because philosophers take themselves to have a multitude of reasons for dismissing it. Heidegger accordingly undertakes to counter each of those reasons; and although he does so very briefly, the strategies he employs shed important light on his own, provisional understanding of what may be at stake in the question.

First, then, it might be argued that the question of the meaning of ‘Being’ can easily be answered; it is a concept just like any other, distinctive only in the sense that it is the most universal concept of all. In other words, Being is not a being, not a particular phenomenon we encounter in our active engagement with the world; rather, we arrive at our concept of it by progressive abstraction from our encounters with specific beings. For example, from our encounters with cats, dogs and horses, we abstract the idea of ‘animalness’; from animals, plants and trees we abstract the idea of ‘life’, of ‘living beings’; and then, from living beings, minerals and so on, we abstract the idea of that which every entity has in common – their extantness or being. What more need be said on the matter?

Heidegger is happy to accept the claim that Being is not a being; indeed, that assumption guides his whole project. He also accepts that our comprehension of Being is nonetheless bound up in some essential way with our comprehending interactions with beings. Being is not a being, but Being is not encounterable otherwise than by encounters with beings. For if Being is, as Heidegger puts it, ‘that which determines entities as entities’ (BT, 2:25), the ground of their articulability in terms of what-being and that-being, then it is necessarily only to be met with in an encounter with some specific entity or other. In short, ‘Being is always the Being of an entity’ (BT, 3:29). But he rejects the idea that Being relates to beings in the particular manner we outlined above; for the universality of ‘Being’ is not that of a class or genus, and so the term ‘Being’ cannot denote a specific realm of entities that might be placed at the very top of an ontological family tree. Membership of a class is standardly defined in terms of possession of a common property, but the ‘members’ of the ‘class’ of beings do not manifest such uniformity; the being of numbers, for example, seems not to be the same as the being of physical objects, which in turn differs...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction: Heidegger’s Project: (Being and Time, §§1–8)
• Chapter 1: The Human World: Scepticism, Cognition and Agency: (Being and Time, §§9–24)
• Chapter 2: The Human World: Society, Selfhood and Self-Interpretation: (Being and Time, §§25–32)
• Chapter 3: Language, Truth and Reality: (Being and Time, §§33–34, 43–44)
• Chapter 4: Conclusion to Division One: The Uncanniness of Everyday Life: (Being and Time, §§34–42)
• Chapter 5: Theology Secularized: Mortality, Guilt and Conscience: (Being and Time, §§45–60)
• Chapter 6: Heidegger’s (Re)visionary Moment: Time As the Human Horizon: (Being and Time, §§61–71)
• Chapter 7: Fate and Destiny: Human Natality and a Brief History of Time: (Being and Time, §§72–82)
• Chapter 8: Conclusion to Division Two: Philosophical Endings – The Horizon of Being and Time: (Being and Time, §83)
• Bibliography