Heidegger: A Guide for the Perplexed

David R. Cerbone

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781441157829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Martin Heidegger is one of the twentieth century's most influential, controversial and challenging philosophers. His Being and Time is a landmark text in modern philosophy, required reading for anyone studying Continental thought. However, the concepts encountered in Heidegger are intricate and frequently confusing, while the language through which they are articulated is deliberately dense and obscure. Heidegger: A Guide for the Perplexed is a thorough, cogent and reliable account of Heidegger's philosophy, ideal for the student who needs to reach a sound understanding of this complex and important thinker. The book covers Heidegger's oeuvre in its entirety, offering not only exposition of Being and Time, but also his later work. His perspectives on, and contributions to, both ontology and phenomenology are explored in full, as is the concept of Dasein, Heidegger's term for the human way of existence. Geared toward the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Heidegger's philosophy, this is the ideal companion to the study of this most influential and challenging of twentieth century philosophers.

PART I

HEIDEGGER’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER 1

THE QUESTION OF BEING AND BEING AND TIME

In my introductory remarks, I appealed to the epigraph Being and Time, taken from Plato’Sophist, as illustrative of the kind of perplexity Heidegger wishes to awaken and cultivate in his readership. More specifically, the perplexity Heidegger invites concerns what he calls simply ‘the question of being’ (Seinsfrage), which is meant to serve as the subject matter of the entirety Being and Time (and beyond, as I’ll explain below). Heidegger’s opening remarks are meant to suggest that Western philosophy has slowly but surely whittled away at the perplexity felt by the ancient Greeks, with whom the question of being, Heidegger claims, first arose. The kind of wonder or astonishment felt by the Greeks in the presence of reality, and so their wonder and astonishment at the question of what it means to be, has slowly and lamentably faded as Western philosophy has developed: the question of being ‘sustained the avid research of Plato and Aristotle but then on ceased to be as a thematic question of actual investigation’ (BT, p. 1/2). Too often, the question of being has simply been ignored, or, worse, taken to admit all too easily of an answer. A facile answer, Heidegger thinks, is tantamount to ignoring the question, i.e. the question is answered in a way that really amounts to little more than a quick dismissal. Heidegger canvasses three of these ready answers to the question of being in the opening paragraphs of his first Introduction – being is the ‘most universal’ concept; being is ‘indefinable’; and being is ‘self-evident’ – none of which Heidegger finds satisfactory, and all of which point only to the need for further investigation. (That being is universal does not mean that its meaning is clear; that being is indefinable does not eliminate the question of its meaning; and that the meaning is self-evident and yet we find ourselves at a loss to say what it means only shows that we are more in the dark than we care to admit.) Thus, part of the burden of Heidegger’s first Introduction is to impress upon us that the question of being the most fundamental philosophical question, though the obscurity of the question, due in part to centuries of philosophical distortion and neglect, means that formulating the question properly and setting out to answer the question will require considerable care.

1A DA-SEIN AND THE QUESTION OF BEING

After his opening remarks concerning the need to revisit the question of being and reconsider its formulation, Heidegger devotes the majority of the first Introduction to devising and justifying a strategy for clarifying and answering the question of being. The strategy focuses on the nature of human existence, which Heidegger refers to using the term ‘Da-sein’. The term is left untranslated in English editions Being and Time, largely to signal the peculiarity of Heidegger’s terminology even in German. The ‘Daseiri is not one coined by Heidegger: my nearest German dictionary lists ‘daseirt as a verb meaning ‘to exist’ or ‘to be there’, and ‘Daseirf as a noun meaning ‘presence’, ‘existence’ and ‘life’. To disrupt any assimilation of Heidegger’s usage to these standard meanings, the Stambaugh translation inserts a hyphen between the two component (‘da\ meaning ‘here’ or ‘there’, ‘sein\ meaning ‘being’); in her own introduction, she explains the addition of the hyphen as conforming to Heidegger’s own directives (BT, p. xiv). Heidegger’s appropriation of the term for one kind of being or entity is thus idiosyncratic, and deliberately so: Heidegger wants to reserve a special term for the kind of beings we are that does not carry with it any unwanted connotations or prejudices, as is often the case if we use locutions such as ‘human being’, ‘homo sapiens’, ‘man’ and so on. These terms are beset by various, potentially mis-leading, anthropological, biological and even theological ideas that will only serve to distract. For example, Heidegger does not want his conclusions regarding what is fundamental and distinctive about our way of being to be circumscribed by the facts of biology: it is perfectly conceivable on Heidegger’s account that biologically different beings, even wildly different ones (suppose, for example, that we some day encounter extraterrestrials), exhibit these same characteristics or features. Thus, ‘homo sapiens^ as principally a biological categorization is incorrect for Heidegger’s purposes. What is distinctive about Da-sein, as the entity each of us is, is not a matter of biology or theology, but rather characteristics that are to be exhibited and worked phenomenologically (just what that means will be spelled out later on).

Consider again the perplexity that we feel (or, from Heidegger’s perspective, ought to feel) upon first hearing the question of being. Insofar as we understand the question at all, i.e. insofar as we respond with something more than ‘Huh?’ or ‘Say what?’ it is still likely to be the case that we will very quickly run out of things to say. Certain other terms may spring to mind or to our lips – reality, actuality, existence and so on – but spelling out these terms really mean appears to be no less daunting than our trying to say what ‘being’ means. Heidegger fully expects this kind of difficulty; all he asks initially is that we not forego the difficulty and that we not interpret our difficulty as a basis for condemning the question. By way of reassurance, perhaps, he is quick to point out that we are not as lacking in resources as we might feel. In fact, we turn out to be the principal ‘resource’ for answering the question of being, though that piece of information may no doubt come as a surprise.

To see what Heidegger has in mind here, let us consider two perplexing claims he enters in the first Introduction:

1. Da-sein is a being whose being is an issue for it.

2. Da-sein is a being who has an understanding of being.

Claim (2) for Heidegger holds the key to making progress in clarifying and answering the question of being: that Da-sein is a being who has an understanding of being means that Da-sein is a good place to look to get started. In other words, since Da-sein already understands what Heidegger wants to know the meaning of (namely, being), then Da-sein is the best clue available for working out what it means for anything to be. While this is roughly Heidegger’s reasoning, it is still rather schematic: we need to know more about just what (1) and (2) mean, how they are interconnected and how Heidegger plans to exploit them to further his philosophical project.

On the face of it, (1) and (2) just sound like two different ideas, both of which may happen to be true about us (or about Da-sein). For Heidegger, however, (1) and (2) are importantly interconnected. A general lesson about Being and Time is in the offing here: rarely for Heidegger is a series of claims he enters on a particular topic merely a number of things that happen to be true about the topic; they are nearly always connected by relations of derivation, implication and interdependence. This is evident in Heidegger’s frequent talk of something’s being a ‘unitary phenomenon’ and of two notions being ‘equiprimordial’ or equally fundamental. The interconnectedness of (1) and (2) is just one example, but an important one. Indeed, I would contend that the relation Heidegger claims (1) stands in to (2) is one of the most important ideas Being and Time.

To begin working out these ideas and exploring the connections among them, let us first consider the following paragraph from Being and Time where they both make their appearance:

Da-sein is an entity that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is about its very being. Thus it is constitutive of the being of Da-sein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being. And this in turn means that Da-sein understands itself in its being in some way and with some explicitness. It is proper to this being that it be disclosed to itself with and through its being. Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein. The ontic distinction of Da-sein lies in the fact that is ontological. (BT, p. 10/12)

There is quite a bit going on in this paragraph and unpacking it completely will take some doing. (Notice in particular how Heidegger begins with claim (1) and by the end of the paragraph has reached claim (2), which indicates their interconnected character.) First, though, a bit of terminological clarification concerning the distinction ontical and ontological is needed. The distinction is one between entities and their way of being. To consider an ontically means to consider its particular characteristics as a particular entity or particular kind of entity, whereas to consider that entity ontologically means to consider that entity’s way of being. Thus, an ontological characterization is one that spells out what it means to be that kind of entity, while an ontical characterization enumerates the entity’s particular features. Another way to consider the distinction is to think of the ontical as the instantiation of some ontological category or determination. So, for example, the claim that Da-sein is a being whose being is an issue is ontological claim, but the particular way its being is an issue for any particular Da-sein is ontical matter. For Heidegger, disciplines that study human beings such as sociology and anthropology (as well as biology) are all ontical or ontic, since they all investigate particular ways human beings behave and interact, as well as how their internal workings function. All of these disciplines positive, concerned with positive matters of facts, as well as the laws and principles that can be formulated on their basis. Heidegger thinks that the natural sciences are ontical in another respect, in that the sciences by and large work within some taken-for-granted understanding of what it is to be the kind of entity studied by the various sciences. When, however, a science suffers a crisis, such that the question of what that takenfor-granted domain really comes to, then it begins to approach ontological inquiry. If a physicist steps back and asks, ‘Just what is meant by “physical” anyway?’ or, ‘How do we demarcate the domain of the physical?’, then she is raising ontological, rather than ontical, questions.

To return to the paragraph, Heidegger is here claiming, first, that Da-sein is ‘ontically distinguished’ from other entities by the fact that it does not ‘just occur’ among them. Da-sein, of course, does occur among other entities: as I work at my desk writing this, I stand in various spatial relations, for example, to my desk and the various items on it, as well as the floor, the door to my study and the hallway outside it (indeed, I stand some spatial relation to any and every entity in the universe). Da-sein is thus a being among or alongside other entities, but there is something further to be said by way of characterizing Da-sein that marks it out as an altogether different kind of being than all the other entities that occur. What is distinctive is registered in the second sentence of the paragraph, which is precisely claim (1): Da-sein is distinctive in that its being is issue for it. But what does this mean? The basic idea is this: to say that Da-sein’s being is an issue for it is to say that Da-sein is a being that can and does confront its own existence, and that it confronts its own existence as something to be worked out or determined. That is, Da-sein’s own existence is present to it as a matter of ongoing concern: the idea that its being is an issue for it includes both these ideas, its being present and being a matter of concern. Confrontations of this sort happen explicitly from time to time – when we ask ourselves what we really want to be, or worry about who we really are, or wonder about the point of something we’re doing, or try to decide if some project we’ve embarked upon is what we really want to be doing and so on – but Heidegger’s claim is meant to be more general: our being always an issue, since we are always in the process of working out what it is to be the beings that we are, even when we do not stop to think explicitly about it. That our existence is always an issue is indicated by the fact that can always stop and reflect explicitly on where our lives are going and on how we want our lives to look, but even if we do not stop to reflect, our lives are going one way or another and taking shape so as to have a particular look to them. As such, our existence is a matter of concern for us, even when that concern amounts to nearly complete disregard (indifference towards one’s own existence is something Heidegger would regard as a ‘deficient’ mode of concern).

That we can take up such attitudes as indifference and concern towards our own existence signals our uniqueness in comparison with other kinds of entities. Other kinds of entities ‘just occur’. We can see this most readily if we consider inanimate objects, such as a rock I find lying in a field or the desk in my study: what it is to be a rock or a desk is not something that is of concern or at for the rock or for the desk. (I might worry about where I found the rock, whether throwing it is a good idea and so on, but none of that is something the rock has any stake in; likewise, I may worry that my desk has become too messy, that it might look better elsewhere in my study, that I’d be happier with something more sleek and modern and so on, but again, none of this is of to the desk.) Neither of these entities confronts its own existence in any way, nor is there anything either of them does by way of working out or determining their respective ways of being. Heidegger would also claim, more controversially perhaps, that even animate objects, i.e. animals, do not confront their own existence as an issue. For Heidegger, an animal is, one might say, ‘hard-wired’ to act out a predetermined set of instinctual drives in response to the particulars of the environment that the animal finds itself in. Nothing about those drives is an issue for the animal, which means, among other things, that there are no attitudes the animal can adopt towards the drives it happens to have. (This is not to deny that animals ‘try’ to stay alive, but such striving for survival is just one more hard-wired disposition or instinct, and so is not something the animal in any way chooses, reflects upon or can change.) For any such non-Da-sein entity, its ‘being is a matter of “indifference,” more precisely, it “is” in such a way that its being can neither be indifferent nor non-indifferent to if (BT, p. 40/42). Heidegger adds the more precise formulation to make it clear that the range of attitudes characteristic of Da-sein pertains only to Da-sein: my desk neither cares nor does not care about its existence; the same is true for the deer I see occasionally outside my study window. That these attitudes pertain exclusively to Da-sein means that no other entity bears this kind of relation to its own existence, i.e. other kinds of entities do not confront their own existence as a matter of concern, as something to be determined or worked out.

1B DA-SEIN AND THE UNDERSTANDING OF BEING

Da-sein is thus distinctive in that the question of what it is to be Dasein is one that it can and does confront. To say that Da-sein ‘is ontological’, which means that the capacity to raise and work out the question of being, in particular its own being, is part and parcel of what it is to be Da-sein. Da-sein is a being that confronts the question of what it is to be that being, and, by extension, the question of what it means to be anything at all. If we reflect further on this ‘capacity’, we will find ourselves very quickly in the vicinity of claim (2), since all of this talk of Da-sein’s ‘confronting’ its existence, of ‘raising’ and ‘working out’ the question of what it means to be the being that it is, clearly implies that Da-sein has understanding of the kind of being it is, indeed an understanding of its own way of as something to be worked out or determined; hence Heidegger’s emphatic claim ‘understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein’. Considerable care is needed in spelling out the idea that Da-sein has an understanding of being, or that it is ontological, since it would be wrong, and quite obviously so, to conclude from this that we all already have an answer to the question of being. If that were the case, then we would have none of the perplexity or confusion we experience upon first hearing the question raised (nor would we have anything to learn from reading Being and Time). Shortly after the paragraph we are considering, Heidegger will qualify his claim concerning Da-sein’s understanding of being as pre-ontological, which serves to indicate that the understanding of being Da-sein (always) possesses is not usually to any great degree explicit or ‘thematic’. Instead, Da-sein’s understanding is largely implicit, manifest primarily in how it acts, rather than what it explicitly thinks. We do not, that is, already have a theory of being (as Heidegger says, ‘To be ontological does not yet mean to develop ontology’ (BT, p. 10/12)), but instead we think, talk and act in ways that register some sensitivity to different ways for entities to be. We can see this in our general facility with respect to various forms of the verb ‘to be’, i.e. we are all generally competent with respect to what it means to say of something that is (was, will be) and this includes having at least a vague sense that ‘is’ means something different when spoken of with respect to different kinds of entities. For example, when we say:

1. There is a prime number between four and six and
2. There is a squirrel in the tree over there

we understand each of these as entering related claims, in that each of them makes a claim regarding the existence and location of something, a prime number in one case, a squirrel in the other, and yet we also feel there to be something quite different going on in each case, for example in the sense that prime numbers are not the kind of thing one might find in a tree and that squirrels are not found between four and six. (Moreover, it makes perfectly clear sense to say that there was a squirrel in the tree, whereas it is not immediately clear what it would mean to say that was a prime number between four and six (the existence of numbers would appear to be ‘tenseless’). This again suggests a difference in the meaning of ‘is’ in each case.) We thus have a sense not only that prime numbers and squirrels are different, but that the difference between a prime number and squirrel is a different kind of difference from the difference between a squirrel and, say, a tiger, or even a rock. Now again, this is only something that we have a vague intimation about, which means that we would come up short fairly quickly were we to try to spell out just what these sorts of differences come to.

Though we may come up short when trying to spell out these differences explicitly, we rarely are so confounded when it comes to how act. Consider, for example, the following two commands:

1. Don’t come back until you have five dollars for me!
2. Don’t come back until you have five good ideas for me!

Each of these commands is relatively straightforward, though perhaps not especially polite, and so we understand straight away what is involved in acting upon them and what would count as fulfilling them. How we act upon each of the requests and how we determine whether the command has bee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbervation
• Indroduction
• Part I: Heidegger’s early philosophy
• Part II: Heidegger’s later philosophy
• Suggestion
• eCopyright Page