Martin Heidegger
Martin
Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most
readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking
should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme
care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the
development of contemporary European philosophy. They have also had an impact
far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory (see e.g., Sharr
2007), literary criticism (see e.g., Ziarek 1989), theology (see e.g., Caputo
1993), psychotherapy (see e.g., Binswanger 1943/1964, Guignon 1993) and
cognitive science (see e.g., Dreyfus 1992, 2008; Wheeler 2005; Kiverstein and
Wheeler forthcoming).
Martin
Heidegger was born in Messkirch, Germany, on September 26, 1889. Messkirch was
then a quiet, conservative, religious rural town, and as such was a formative
influence on Heidegger and his philosophical thought. In 1909 he spent two
weeks in the Jesuit order before leaving (probably on health grounds) to study
theology at the University of Freiburg. In 1911 he switched subjects, to
philosophy. He began teaching at Freiburg in 1915. In 1917 he married Elfride
Petri, with whom he had two sons (Jörg and Hermann) and from whom he never
parted (although his affair with the philosopher Hannah Arendt, his student at
Marburg in the 1920s, is well-known).
Heidegger's
philosophical development began when he read Brentano and Aristotle, plus the
latter's medieval scholastic interpreters. Indeed, Aristotle's demand in the Metaphysics
to know what it is that unites all possible modes of Being (or ‘is-ness’) is,
in many ways, the question that ignites and drives Heidegger's philosophy. From
this platform he proceeded to engage deeply with Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
and, perhaps most importantly of all for his subsequent thinking in the 1920s,
two further figures: Dilthey (whose stress on the role of interpretation and
history in the study of human activity profoundly influenced Heidegger) and
Husserl (whose understanding of phenomenology as a science of essences he was
destined to reject). In 1915 Husserl took up a post at Freiburg and in 1919
Heidegger became his assistant. Heidegger spent a period (of reputedly
brilliant) teaching at the University of Marburg (1923–1928), but then returned
to Freiburg to take up the chair vacated by Husserl on his retirement. Out of
such influences, explorations, and critical engagements, Heidegger's magnum
opus, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) was born. Although
Heidegger's academic and intellectual relationship with his Freiburg
predecessor was complicated and occasionally strained (see Crowell 2005), Being
and Time was dedicated to Husserl, “in friendship and admiration”.
Published
in 1927, Being and Time is standardly hailed as one of the most significant
texts in the canon of (what has come to be called) contemporary European (or
Continental) Philosophy. It catapulted Heidegger to a position of international
intellectual visibility and provided the philosophical impetus for a number of
later programmes and ideas in the contemporary European tradition, including
Sartre's existentialism, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, and Derrida's
notion of ‘deconstruction’. Moreover, although most philosophers in the
Anglo-American (Analytic) tradition remain apprehensive about a work that can
seem to have arrived from some distant intellectual shore, that particular
climate of suspicion now seems significantly less entrenched than it once did.
This shift in reception is in no small way due to the way in which Being and
Time, and indeed Heidegger's philosophy in general, has been presented and
engaged with by thinkers such as Dreyfus (e.g., 1990) and Rorty (e.g., 1991a,
b) who work somewhere near the interface between the two traditions. A
cross-section of broadly analytic reactions to Heidegger (positive and
negative) may be found alongside other responses in (Murray 1978). Being and
Time is discussed in section 2
of this article.
In
1933 Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and was elected Rector of Freiburg
University, where, depending on whose account one believes, he either
enthusiastically implemented the Nazi policy of bringing university education
into line with Hitler's nauseating political programme (Pattison 2000) or he
allowed that policy to be officially implemented while conducting a partially
underground campaign of resistance to some of its details, especially its
anti-Semitism (see Heidegger's own account in Only a God can Save Us). During
the short period of his rectorship—he resigned in 1934—Heidegger gave a number
of public speeches (including his inaugural rectoral address; see below) in
which Nazi images plus occasional declarations of support for Hitler are
integrated with the philosophical language of Being and Time. After 1934
Heidegger became increasingly distanced from Nazi politics. Although he didn't
leave the Nazi party, he did attract some unwelcome attention from its
enthusiasts. After the war, however, a university denazification committee at
Freiburg investigated Heidegger and banned him from teaching, a right which he
did not get back until 1949. One year later he was made professor Emeritus.
Against this background of contrary information, one will search in vain through
Heidegger's later writings for the sort of total and unambiguous repudiation of
National Socialism that one might hope to find. The philosophical character of
Heidegger's involvement with Nazism is discussed later in this article.
After
Being and Time there is a reorienting shift in Heidegger's philosophy
known as ‘the turn’ (die Kehre). Exactly when this occurs is a matter of
debate, although it is probably safe to say that it is in progress by 1930 and
largely established by the early 1940s. If dating the turn has its problems,
saying exactly what it involves is altogether more challenging. Indeed,
Heidegger himself characterized it not as a turn in his own thinking (or at
least in his thinking alone) but as a turn in Being. As he later put it in a preface
he wrote to Richardson's ground-breaking text on his work (Richardson 1963),
the “Kehre is at work within the issue [that is named by the titles
‘Being and Time’/‘Time and Being.’]… It is not something that I did, nor does
it pertain to my thinking only”. The core elements of the turn are indicated in
what is now considered by many commentators to be Heidegger's second greatest
work, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), (Beitrage zur
Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)). This uncompromising text was written in
1936–7, but was not published in German until 1989 and not in English
translation until 1999. Section
3 of this article will attempt to
navigate the main currents of the turn, and thus of Heidegger's later
philosophy, in the light of this increasingly discussed text.
Heidegger
died in Freiburg on May 26, 1976. He was buried in Messkirch.
Being
and Time is a long and complex book. The
reader is immediately struck by what Mulhall (2005, viii) calls the “tortured
intensity of [Heidegger's] prose”, although if the text is read in its original
German it is possible to hear the vast number of what appear to be neologisms
as attempts to reanimate the German language. According to this latter gloss,
the linguistic constructions concerned—which involve hyphenations, unusual
prefixes and uncommon suffixes—reveal the hidden meanings and resonances of
ordinary talk. In any case, for many readers, the initially strange and
difficult language of Being and Time is fully vindicated by the
realization that Heidegger is struggling to say things for which our
conventional terms and linguistic constructions are ultimately inadequate.
Indeed, for some thinkers who have toiled in its wake, Heidegger's language
becomes the language of philosophy (although for an alternative and
critical view of the language of Being and Time, see Adorno 1964/2002).
Viewed from the perspective of Heidegger's own intentions, the work is
incomplete. It was meant to have two parts, each of which was supposed to be
divided into three divisions. What we have published under the title of Being
and Time are the first two divisions of (the intended) part one. The
reasons for this incompleteness will be explored later in this article.
One
might reasonably depict the earliest period of Heidegger's philosophical work,
in Freiburg (1915–23) and Marburg (1923–6), before he commenced the writing of Being
and Time itself, as the pre-history of that seminal text (although for an
alternative analysis that stresses not only a back-and-forth movement in
Heidegger's earliest thought between theology and philosophy, but also the
continuity between that earliest thought and the later philosophy, see van
Buren 1994, 2005). Viewed in relation to Being and Time, the central
philosophical theme in these early years is Heidegger's complex critical
relationship with Husserl's transcendental phenomenology—what Crowell (2005, p.49)
calls “a dynamic of attraction and repulsion”—as driven by Heidegger's
transformative reading of Aristotle. As early as a 1919 lecture course, for
example, we find Heidegger arguing that Husserl's view (developed in the Logical
Investigations, Husserl 1900/1973), that philosophy should renounce theory
and concentrate on the things given directly in consciousness, is flawed
because such givenness is itself a theoretical construct. For the young
Heidegger, then, it is already the case that phenomenological analysis starts
not with Husserlian intentionality (the consciousness of objects), but rather
with an interpretation of the pre-theoretical conditions for there to be such
intentionality. This idea will later be central to, and elaborated within, Being
and Time, by which point a number of important developments (explained in
more detail later in this article) will have occurred in Heidegger's thinking:
the Husserlian notion of formal ontology (the study of the a priori categories
that describe objects of any sort, by means of our judgments and perceptions)
will have been transformed into fundamental ontology (a neo-Aristotelian
search for what it is that unites and makes possible our varied and diverse
senses of what it is to be); Husserl's transcendental consciousness (the
irreducible thinking ego or subject that makes possible objective inquiry) will
have been transfigured into Dasein (the inherently social being who
already operates with a pre-theoretical grasp of the a priori structures that
make possible particular modes of Being); and Husserlian intentionality (a
consciousness of objects) will have been replaced by the concept of care
or Being-in-the-world (a non-intentional, or perhaps pre-intentional,
openness to a world).
Each
of these aspects of Heidegger's framework in Being and Time emerges out
of his radical rethinking of Aristotle, a rethinking that finds its fullest and
most explicit expression in a 1925–6 lecture course entitled Logik
(later renamed Logik (Aristoteles) by Heidegger's student Helene Weiß,
in order to distinguish this lecture course from a later one he gave also
entitled Logik; see Kisiel 1993, 559, note 23). On Heidegger's
interpretation (see Sheehan 1975), Aristotle holds that since every meaningful
appearance of beings involves an event in which a human being takes a being
as—as, say, a ship in which one can sail or as a god that one
should respect—what unites all the different modes of Being is that they
realize some form of presence (present-ness) to human beings. This presence-to
is expressed in the ‘as’ of ‘taking-as’. Thus the unity of the different modes
of Being is grounded in a capacity for taking-as (making-present-to) that
Aristotle argues is the essence of human existence. Heidegger's response, in
effect, is to suggest that although Aristotle is on the right track, he has
misconceived the deep structure of taking-as. For Heidegger, taking-as is
grounded not in multiple modes of presence, but rather in a more fundamental
temporal unity (remember, it's Being and time, more on this later) that
characterizes Being-in-the-world (care). This engagement with Aristotle—the
Aristotle, that is, that Heidegger unearths during his early years in Freiburg
and Marburg—explains why, as Sheehan (1975, 87) puts it, “Aristotle appears directly
or indirectly on virtually every page” of Being and Time. (For more on
Heidegger's pre-Being-and-Time period, see e.g., Kisiel 1993, Kisiel and
van Buren 1994, and Heidegger's early occasional writings as reproduced in the
collection Becoming Heidegger. For more on the philosophical
relationship between Husserl and Heidegger, see e.g., Crowell 2001 and the
review of Crowell's book by Carman 2002; Dahlstrom 1994; Dostal 1993; Overgaard
2003.)
Let's
back up in order to bring Heidegger's central concern into better view. (The
‘way in’ to Being and Time that I am about to present follows Gelven
1989 6–7.) Consider some philosophical problems that will be familiar from
introductory metaphysics classes: Does the table that I think I see before me
exist? Does God exist? Does mind, conceived as an entity distinct from body,
exist? These questions have the following form: does x (where x =
some particular kind of thing) exist? Questions of this form presuppose that we
already know what ‘to exist’ means. We typically don't even notice this
presupposition. But Heidegger does, which is why he raises the more fundamental
question: what does ‘to exist’ mean? This is one way of asking what
Heidegger calls the question of the meaning of Being, and Being and Time
is an investigation into that question.
Many
of Heidegger's translators capitalize the word ‘Being’ (Sein) to mark
what, in the Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger will later call
the ontological difference, the crucial distinction between Being and
beings (entities). The question of the meaning of Being is concerned with what
it is that makes beings intelligible as beings, and whatever that factor
(Being) is, it is seemingly not itself simply another being among beings.
Unfortunately the capitalization of ‘Being’ also has the disadvantage of
suggesting that Being is, as Sheehan (2001) puts it, an ethereal metaphysical
something that lies beyond entities, what he calls ‘Big Being’. But to think of
Being in this way would be to commit the very mistake that the capitalization
is supposed to help us avoid. For while Being is always the Being of some
entity, Being is not itself some kind of higher-order being waiting to be
discovered. As long as we remain alert to this worry, we can follow the
otherwise helpful path of capitalization.
According
to Heidegger, the question of the meaning of Being, and thus Being as such, has
been forgotten by ‘the tradition’ (roughly, Western philosophy from Plato
onwards). Heidegger means by this that the history of Western thought has
failed to heed the ontological difference, and so has articulated Being
precisely as a kind of ultimate being, as evidenced by a series of namings of
Being, for example as idea, energeia, substance, monad or will to power. In
this way Being as such has been forgotten. So Heidegger sets himself the
task of recovering the question of the meaning of Being. In this context he
draws two distinctions between different kinds of inquiry. The first, which is
just another way of expressing the ontological difference, is between the
ontical and the ontological, where the former is concerned with facts about
entities and the latter is concerned with the meaning of Being, with how
entities are intelligible as entities. Using this technical language, we can
put the point about the forgetting of Being as such by saying that the history
of Western thought is characterized by an ‘onticization’ of Being (by the
practice of treating Being as a being). However, as Heidegger explains, here in
the words of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, “an ontic knowledge
can never alone direct itself ‘to’ the objects, because without the
ontological… it can have no possible Whereto” (translation taken from Overgaard
2002, p.76, note 7). The second distinction between different kinds of inquiry,
drawn within the category of the ontological, is between regional ontology and
fundamental ontology, where the former is concerned with the ontologies of
particular domains, say biology or banking, and the latter is concerned with
the a priori, transcendental conditions that make possible particular modes of
Being (i.e., particular regional ontologies). For Heidegger, the ontical
presupposes the regional-ontological, which in turn presupposes the
fundamental-ontological. As he puts it:
The
question of Being aims… at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for
the possibility of the sciences which examine beings as beings of such and such
a type, and, in doing so, 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
as 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. (Being and Time 3: 31)
(References to Being and Time will be given in the form of ‘section:
page number’, where ‘page number’ refers to the widely used Macquarrie and
Robinson English translation.)
So
how do we carry out fundamental ontology, and thus answer the question of the
meaning of Being? It is here that Heidegger introduces the notion of Dasein
(Da-sein: there-being). One proposal for how to think about the term ‘Dasein’
is that it is Heidegger's label for the distinctive mode of Being
realized by human beings (for this reading, see e.g., Brandom 2002, 325). Haugeland
(2005, 422) complains that this interpretation clashes unhelpfully with
Heidegger's identification of care as the Being of Dasein, given Heidegger's
prior stipulation that Being is always the Being of some possible entity. To
keep ‘Dasein’ on the right side of the ontological difference, then, we might
conceive of it as Heidegger's term for the distinctive kind of entity
that human beings as such are. This fits with many of Heidegger's explicit
characterizations of Dasein (see e.g., Being and Time 2: 27, 3: 32), and
it probably deserves to be called the standard view in the secondary literature
(see e.g., Haugeland 2005 for an explicit supporting case). That said, one
needs to be careful about precisely what sort of entity we are talking about
here. For Dasein is not to be understood as ‘the biological human being’. Nor
is it to be understood as ‘the person’. Haugeland (2005, 423) argues that
Dasein is “a way of life shared by the members of some community”. (As
Haugeland notes, there is an analogy here, one that Heidegger himself draws,
with the way in which we might think of a language existing as an entity, that
is, as a communally shared way of speaking.) This appeal to the community will
assume a distinctive philosophical shape as the argument of Being and Time
progresses.
The
foregoing considerations bring an important question to the fore: what,
according to Heidegger, is so special about human beings as such? Here there
are broadly speaking two routes that one might take through the text of Being
and Time. The first unfolds as follows. If we look around at beings in
general—from particles to planets, ants to apes—it is human beings alone
who are able to encounter the question of what it means to be (e.g., in moments
of anxiety in which the world can appear meaning-less, more on which later).
More specifically, it is human beings alone who (a) operate in their everyday
activities with an understanding of Being (although, as we shall see, one which
is pre-ontological, in that it is implicit and vague) and (b) are able
to reflect upon what it means to be. This gives us a way of understanding
statements such as “Dasein is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its
very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Being and Time 4:
32). Mulhall, who tends to pursue this way of characterizing Dasein, develops
the idea by explaining that while inanimate objects merely persist
through time and while plants and non-human animals have their lives determined
entirely by the demands of survival and reproduction, human beings lead
their lives (Mulhall 2005, 15). In terms of its deep ontological structure,
although not typically in terms of how it presents itself to the individual in
consciousness, each moment in a human life constitutes a kind of branch-point
at which a person ‘chooses’ a kind of life, a possible way to be. It is crucial
to emphasize that one may, in the relevant sense, ‘choose’ an existing path
simply by continuing unthinkingly along it, since in principle at least, and
within certain limits, one always had, and still has, the capacity to take a
different path. (This gives us a sense of human freedom, one that will be
unpacked more carefully below.) This can all sound terribly inward-looking, but
that is not Heidegger's intention. In a way that is about to become clearer,
Dasein's projects and possibilities are essentially bound up with the ways in
which other entities may become intelligible. Moreover, terms such as ‘lead’
and ‘choose’ must be interpreted in the light of Heidegger's account of care as
the Being of Dasein (see later), an account that blunts any temptation to hear
these terms in a manner that suggests inner deliberation or planning on the
part of a reflective subject. (So perhaps Mulhall's point that human beings are
distinctive in that they lead their lives would be better expressed as the
observation that human beings are the nuclei of lives laying themselves out.)
The
second route to an understanding of Dasein, and thus of what is special about
human beings as such, emphasizes the link with the taking-as structure
highlighted earlier. Sheehan (2001) develops just such a line of exegesis by
combining two insights. The first is that the ‘Da’ of Da-sein may be profitably
translated not as ‘there’ but as ‘open’. This openness is in turn to be
understood as ‘the possibility of taking-as’ and thus as a preintellectual
openness to Being that is necessary for us to encounter beings as beings in
particular ways (e.g., practically, theoretically, aesthetically). Whether or
not the standard translation of ‘Da’ as ‘there’ is incapable of doing justice
to this idea is moot—one might express the same view by saying that to be
Dasein is to be there, in the midst of entities making sense a certain
way. Nevertheless, the term ‘openness’ does seem to provide a nicely graphic
expression of the phenomenon in question. Sheehan's second insight, driven by a
comment of Heidegger's in the Zollikon seminars to the effect that the
verbal emphasis in ‘Da-sein’ is to be placed on the second syllable, is that
the ‘sein’ of ‘Da-sein’ should be heard as ‘having-to-be’, in contrast with
‘occasionally or contingently is’. These dual insights lead to a
characterization of Dasein as the having-to-be-open. In other words,
Dasein (and so human beings as such) cannot but be open: it is a necessary
characteristic of human beings (an a priori structure of our existential
constitution, not an exercise of our wills) that we operate with the
sense-making capacity to take-other-beings-as.
The
two interpretative paths that we have just walked are not necessarily in
conflict: in the words of Vallega-Neu (2003, 12), “in existing, Dasein occurs…
as a transcending beyond beings into the disclosure of being as such, so that
in this transcending not only its own possibilities of being [our first route]
but also the being of other beings [our second route] is disclosed”. And this
helps us to grasp the meaning of Heidegger's otherwise opaque claim that
Dasein, and indeed only Dasein, exists, where existence is understood
(via etymological considerations) as ek-sistence, that is, as a standing
out. Dasein stands out in two senses, each of which corresponds to one of the
two dimensions of our proposed interpretation. First, Dasein can stand back or
‘out’ from its own occurrence in the world and observe itself (see e.g., Gelven
1989, 49). Second, Dasein stands out in an openness to and an opening of Being
(see e.g., Vallega-Neu 2004, 11–12).
As
we have seen, it is an essential characteristic of Dasein that, in its ordinary
ways of engaging with other entities, it operates with a preontological
understanding of Being, that is, with a distorted or buried grasp of the a
priori conditions that, by underpinning the taking-as structure, make possible
particular modes of Being. This suggests that a disciplined investigation of
those everyday modes of engagement on the part of Dasein (what Heidegger calls
an “existential analytic of Dasein”) will be a first step towards revealing a
shared but hidden underlying meaning of Being. Heidegger puts it like this:
whenever
an ontology takes for its theme entities whose character of Being is other than
that of Dasein, it has its own foundation and motivation in Dasein's own
ontical structure, in which a pre-ontological understanding of Being is
comprised as a definite characteristic… Therefore fundamental ontology, from
which alone all other ontologies can take their rise, must be sought in the
existential analytic of Dasein. (Being and Time 3: 33–4)
It
is important to stress here that, in Heidegger's eyes, this prioritizing of
Dasein does not lead to (what he calls) “a vicious subjectivizing of the
totality of entities” (Being and Time 4: 34). This resistance towards
any unpalatable anti-realism is an issue to which we shall return.
Dasein
is, then, our primary ‘object’ of study, and our point of investigative
departure is Dasein's everyday encounters with entities. But what sort of
philosophical method is appropriate for the ensuing examination? Famously,
Heidegger's adopted method is a species of phenomenology. In the Heideggerian
framework, however, phenomenology is not to be understood (as it sometimes is)
as the study of how things merely appear in experience. Rather, in a
recognizably Kantian staging of the idea, Heidegger follows Husserl (1913/1983)
in conceiving of phenomenology as a theoretical enterprise that takes ordinary
experience as its point of departure, but which, through an attentive and
sensitive examination of that experience, aims to reveal the a priori,
transcendental conditions that shape and structure it. In Heidegger's
Being-centred project, these are the conditions “which, in every kind of Being
that factical Dasein may possess, persist as determinative for the character of
its Being” (Being and Time 5: 38). Presupposed by ordinary experience,
these structures must in some sense be present with that experience, but they
are not simply available to be read off from its surface, hence the need for
disciplined and careful phenomenological analysis to reveal them as they are.
So far so good. But, in a departure from the established Husserlian position,
one that demonstrates the influence of Dilthey, Heidegger claims that
phenomenology is not just transcendental, it is hermeneutic (for
discussion, see e.g., Caputo 1984, Kisiel 2002 chapter 8). In other words, its
goal is always to deliver an interpretation of Being, an interpretation
that, on the one hand, is guided by certain historically embedded ways of
thinking (ways of taking-as reflected in Dasein's preontological understanding
of Being) that the philosopher as Dasein and as interpreter brings to the task,
and, on the other hand, is ceaselessly open to revision, enhancement and
replacement. For Heidegger, this hermeneutic structure is not a limitation on
understanding, but a precondition of it, and philosophical understanding
(conceived as fundamental ontology) is no exception. Thus Being and Time
itself has a spiral structure in which a sequence of reinterpretations produces
an ever more illuminating comprehension of Being. As Heidegger puts it later in
the text:
What
is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it the right way…
In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of
knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in
our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last and constant task
is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception to be
presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific
theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things
themselves. (Being and Time 32: 195)
On
the face of it, the hermeneutic conception of phenomenology sits unhappily with
a project that aims to uncover the a priori transcendental conditions
that make possible particular modes of Being (which is arguably one way of
glossing the project of “working out [the] fore-structures [of understanding]
in terms of the things themselves”). And this is a tension that, it seems fair
to say, is never fully resolved within the pages of Being and Time. The
best we can do is note that, by the end of the text, the transcendental has
itself become historically embedded. More on that below. What is also true is
that there is something of a divide in certain areas of contemporary Heidegger
scholarship over whether one should emphasize the transcendental dimension of
Heidegger's phenomenology (e.g., Crowell 2001, Crowell and Malpas 2007) or the
hermeneutic dimension (e.g., Kisiel 2002).
How,
then, does the existential analytic unfold? Heidegger argues that we ordinarily
encounter entities as (what he calls) equipment, that is, as being for
certain sorts of tasks (cooking, writing, hair-care, and so on). Indeed we
achieve our most primordial (closest) relationship with equipment not by
looking at the entity in question, or by some detached intellectual or
theoretical study of it, but rather by skillfully manipulating it in a
hitch-free manner. Entities so encountered have their own distinctive kind of
Being that Heidegger famously calls readiness-to-hand. Thus:
The
less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and
use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more
unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The hammering
itself uncovers the specific ‘manipulability’ of the hammer. The kind of Being
which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call
‘readiness-to-hand’. (Being and Time 15: 98)
Readiness-to-hand
has a distinctive phenomenological signature. While engaged in hitch-free
skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious experience of the items of equipment
in use as independent objects (i.e., as the bearers of determinate
properties that exist independently of the Dasein-centred context of action in
which the equipmental entity is involved). Thus, while engaged in trouble-free
hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the hammer,
the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood
back and thought about them. Tools-in-use become phenomenologically
transparent. Moreover, Heidegger claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and
work-bench in this way not part of the engaged carpenter's phenomenal world,
neither, in a sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes absorbed in his
activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over
and against a world of objects. Crucially, it does not follow from this
analysis that Dasein's behaviour in such contexts is automatic, in the sense of
there being no awareness present at all, but rather that the awareness that is
present (what Heidegger calls circumspection) is non-subject-object in
form. Phenomenologically speaking, then, there are no subjects and no objects;
there is only the experience of the ongoing task (e.g., hammering).
Heidegger,
then, denies that the categories of subject and object characterize our most
basic way of encountering entities. He maintains, however, that they apply to a
derivative kind of encounter. When Dasein engages in, for example, the
practices of natural science, when sensing takes place purely in the service of
reflective or philosophical contemplation, or when philosophers claim to have
identified certain context-free metaphysical building blocks of the universe
(e.g., points of pure extension, monads), the entities under study are
phenomenologically removed from the settings of everyday equipmental practice
and are thereby revealed as fully fledged independent objects, that is, as the
bearers of certain context-general determinate or measurable properties (size
in metres, weight in kilos etc.). Heidegger calls this mode of Being presence-at-hand,
and he sometimes refers to present-at-hand entities as ‘Things’. With this
phenomenological transformation in the mode of Being of entities comes a
corresponding transformation in the mode of Being of Dasein. Dasein becomes a
subject, one whose project is to explain and predict the behaviour of an
independent, objective universe. Encounters with the present-at-hand are thus
fundamentally subject-object in structure.
The
final phenomenological category identified during the first phase of the
existential analytic is what Heidegger calls un-readiness-to-hand. This
mode of Being of entities emerges when skilled practical activity is disturbed
by broken or malfunctioning equipment, discovered-to-be-missing equipment, or
in-the-way equipment. When encountered as un-ready-to-hand, entities are no
longer phenomenologically transparent. However, they are not yet the fully
fledged objects of the present-at-hand, since their broken, malfunctioning,
missing or obstructive status is defined relative to a particular equipmental
context. The combination of two key passages illuminates this point: First:
[The]
presence-at-hand of something that cannot be used is still not devoid of all
readiness-to-hand whatsoever; equipment which is present-at-hand in this way is
still not just a Thing which occurs somewhere. The damage to the equipment is
still not a mere alteration of a Thing—not a change of properties which just
occurs in something present-at-hand. (Being and Time 16: 103)
And
second:
When
something cannot be used—when, for instance, a tool definitely refuses to
work—it can be conspicuous only in and for dealings in which something is
manipulated. (Being and Time 68: 406)
Thus
a driver does not encounter a punctured tyre as a lump of rubber of measurable
mass; she encounters it as a damaged item of equipment, that is, as the cause
of a temporary interruption to her driving activity. With such disturbances to
skilled activity, Dasein emerges as a practical problem solver whose
context-embedded actions are directed at restoring smooth skilled activity.
Although
Heidegger does not put things this way, the complex intermediate realm of the
un-ready-to-hand is seemingly best thought of as a spectrum of cases
characterized by different modes and degrees of engagement/disengagement. Much
of the time Dasein's practical problem solving will involve recovery strategies
(e.g., switching to a different mode of transport) which preserve the marks of
fluid and flexible know-how that are present in ready-to-hand contexts. In the
limit, however (e.g., when a mechanic uses his theoretical knowledge of how
cars work to guide a repair), Dasein's problem solving activity will begin to
approximate the theoretical reasoning distinctive of scientific inquiry into
present-at-hand entities. But even here Dasein is not ‘just theorizing’ or
‘just looking’, so it is not yet, in Heidegger's terms, a pure disengaged
subject. With this spectrum of cases in view, it is possible to glimpse a
potential worry for Heidegger's account. Cappuccio and Wheeler (2010; see also
Wheeler 2005, 143) argue that the situation of wholly transparent
readiness-to-hand is something of an ideal state. Skilled activity is never (or
very rarely) perfectly smooth. Moreover, minimal subjective activity (such as a
nonconceptual awareness of certain spatially situated movements by my body)
produces a background noise that never really disappears. Thus a distinction
between Dasein and its environment is, to some extent, preserved, and this
distinction arguably manifests the kind of minimal subject-object dichotomy
that is characteristic of those cases of un-readiness-to-hand that lie closest
to readiness-to-hand.
On
the interpretation of Heidegger just given, Dasein's access to the world is
only intermittently that of a representing subject. An alternative reading,
according to which Dasein always exists as a subject relating to the
world via representations, is defended by Christensen (1997, 1998). Christensen
targets Dreyfus (1990) as a prominent and influential exponent of the
intermittent-subject view. Among other criticisms, Christensen accuses
Dreyfus of mistakenly hearing Heidegger's clear rejection of the thought that
Dasein's access to the world is always theoretical (or theory-like) in
character as being, at the same time, a rejection of the thought that Dasein's
access to the world is always in the mode of a representing subject; but,
argues Christensen, there may be non-theoretical forms of the subject-world
relation, so the claim that Heidegger advocated the second rejection is not
established by pointing out that he advocated the first. Let's assume that
Christensen is right about this. The supporter of the intermittent-subject view
might still argue that although Heidegger holds that Dasein sometimes
emerges as a subject whose access to the world is non-theoretical (plausibly,
in certain cases of un-readiness-to-hand), there is other textual evidence,
beyond that which indicates the non-theoretical character of hitch-free skilled
activity, to suggest that readiness-to-hand must remain non-subject-object in
form. Whether or not there is such evidence would then need to be settled.
What
the existential analytic has given us so far is a phenomenological description
of Dasein's within-the-world encounters with entities. The next clarification
concerns the notion of world and the associated within-ness of Dasein.
Famously, Heidegger writes of Dasein as Being-in-the-world. In effect,
then, the notion of Being-in-the-world provides us with a reinterpretation of
the activity of existing (Dreyfus 1990, 40), where existence is given
the narrow reading (ek-sistence) identified earlier. Understood as a unitary
phenomenon (as opposed to a contingent, additive, tripartite combination of
Being, in-ness, and the world), Being-in-the-world is an essential
characteristic of Dasein. As Heidegger explains:
Being-in
is not a ‘property’ which Dasein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, and
without which it could just be just as well as it could be with
it. It is not the case that man ‘is’ and then has, by way of an extra, a
relationship-of-Being towards the ‘world’—a world with which he provides
himself occasionally. Dasein is never ‘proximally’ an entity which is, so to
speak, free from Being-in, but which sometimes has the inclination to take up a
‘relationship’ towards the world. Taking up relationships towards the world is
possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is as it is. This
state of Being does not arise just because some entity is present-at-hand
outside of Dasein and meets up with it. Such an entity can ‘meet up with’
Dasein only in so far as it can, of its own accord, show itself within a world.
(Being and Time 12: 84)
As
this passage makes clear, the Being-in dimension of Being-in-the-world cannot
be thought of as a merely spatial relation in some sense that might be
determined by a GPS device, since Dasein is never just present-at-hand within
the world in the way demanded by that sort of spatial in-ness. Heidegger
sometimes uses the term dwelling to capture the distinctive manner in
which Dasein is in the world. To dwell in a house is not merely to be inside it
spatially in the sense just canvassed. Rather, it is to belong there, to have a
familiar place there. It is in this sense that Dasein is (essentially) in the
world. (Heidegger will later introduce an existential notion of spatiality that
does help to illuminate the sense in which Dasein is in the world. More
on that below.) So now, what is the world such that Dasein (essentially) dwells
in it? To answer this question we need to spend some time unpacking the
Heideggerian concept of an ‘involvement’ (Bewandtnis).
The
German term Bewandtnis is extremely difficult to translate in a way that
captures all its native nuances (for discussion, see Tugendhat 1967; thanks to
a reviewer for emphasizing this point). And things are made more complicated by
the fact that, during his exposition, Heidegger freely employs a number of
closely related notions, including ‘assignment’, ‘indication’ and ‘reference’.
Nevertheless, what is clear is that Heidegger introduces the term that
Macquarrie and Robinson translate as ‘involvement’ to express the roles that
equipmental entities play—the ways in which they are involved—in Dasein's
everyday patterns of activity. Crucially, for Heidegger, an involvement is not
a stand-alone structure, but rather a link in a network of intelligibility that
he calls a totality of involvements. Take the stock Heideggerian
example: the hammer is involved in an act of hammering; that hammering is
involved in making something fast; and that making something fast is involved
in protecting the human agent against bad weather. Such totalities of
involvements are the contexts of everyday equipmental practice. As such, they define
equipmental entities, so the hammer is intelligible as what it is only with
respect to the shelter and, indeed, all the other items of equipment to which
it meaningfully relates in Dasein's everyday practices. This relational
ontology generates what Brandom (1983, 391–3) calls Heidegger's ‘strong
systematicity condition’, as given voice in Heidegger's striking claim that
“[t]aken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment” (Being
and Time, 15: 97). And this radical holism spreads, because once one begins
to trace a path through a network of involvements, one will inevitably traverse
vast regions of involvement-space. Thus links will be traced not only from
hammers to hammering to making fast to protection against the weather, but also
from hammers to pulling out nails to dismantling wardrobes to moving house.
This behaviour will refer back to many other behaviours (packing, van-driving)
and thus to many other items of equipment (large boxes, removal vans), and so
on. The result is a large-scale holistic network of interconnected relational
significance. Such networks constitute worlds, in one of Heidegger's key
senses of the term—an ontical sense that he describes as having a pre-ontological
signification (Being and Time 14: 93).
Before
a second key sense of the Heideggerian notion of world is revealed, some
important detail can be added to the emerging picture. Heidegger points out
that involvements are not uniform structures. Thus I am currently working with
a computer (a with-which), in the practical context of my office (an in-which),
in order to write this encyclopedia entry (an in-order-to), which is
aimed towards presenting an introduction to Heidegger's philosophy (a towards-this),
for the sake of my academic work, that is, for the sake of my being an academic
(a for-the-sake-of-which). The final involvement here, the
for-the-sake-of-which, is crucial, because according to Heidegger all
totalities of involvements have a link of this type at their base. This forges
a connection between (i) the idea that each moment in Dasein's existence
constitutes a branch-point at which it chooses a way to be, and (ii) the claim
that Dasein's projects and possibilities are essentially bound up with the ways
in which other entities may become intelligible. This is because every
for-the-sake-of-which is the base structure of an equipment-defining totality
of involvements and reflects a possible way for Dasein to be (an
academic, a carpenter, a parent, or whatever). Moreover, given that entities
are intelligible only within contexts of activity that, so to speak, arrive
with Dasein, this helps to explain Heidegger's claim (Being and Time 16:
107) that, in encounters with entities, the world is something with which
Dasein is always already familiar. Finally, it puts further flesh on the
phenomenological category of the un-ready-to-hand. Thus when I am absorbed in
trouble-free typing, the computer and the role that it plays in my academic
activity are transparent aspects of my experience. But if the computer crashes,
I become aware of it as an entity with which I was working in the practical
context of my office, in order to write an encyclopedia entry aimed towards
presenting an introduction to Heidegger's philosophy. And I become aware of the
fact that my behaviour is being organized for the sake of my being an academic.
So disturbances have the effect of exposing totalities of involvements and,
therefore, worlds. (For a second way in which worlds are phenomenologically
‘lit up’, see Heidegger's analysis of signs (Being and Time 17:107–114);
for discussion, see Dreyfus 1990, 100–2, Cappuccio and Wheeler 2010.)
As
already indicated, Heidegger sometimes uses the expression ‘world’ in a
different key sense, to designate what he calls the “ontologico-existential
concept of worldhood” (Being and Time 14: 93). At this point in
the existential analytic, worldhood is usefully identified as the abstract
network mode of organizational configuration that is shared by all concrete
totalities of involvements. We shall see, however, that as the hermeneutic
spiral of the text unfolds, the notion of worldhood is subject to a series of
reinterpretations until, finally, its deep structure gets played out in terms
of temporality.
Having
completed what we might think of as the first phase of the existential
analytic, Heidegger uses its results to launch an attack on one of the
front-line representatives of the tradition, namely Descartes. This is the only
worked-through example in Being and Time itself of what Heidegger calls
the destruction (Destruktion) of the Western philosophical tradition, a
process that was supposed to be a prominent theme in the ultimately unwritten
second part of the text. The aim is to show that although the tradition takes
theoretical knowledge to be primary, such knowledge (the prioritization of
which is an aspect of the ‘onticization’ of Being mentioned earlier)
presupposes the more fundamental openness to Being that Heidegger has
identified as an essential characteristic of Dasein.
According
to Heidegger, Descartes presents the world to us “with its skin off” (Being
and Time 20: 132), i.e., as a collection of present-at-hand entities to be
encountered by subjects. The consequence of this prioritizing of the
present-at-hand is that the subject needs to claw itself into a world of
equipmental meaning by adding what Heidegger calls ‘value-predicates’
(context-dependent meanings) to the present-at-hand. In stark contrast,
Heidegger's own view is that Dasein is in primary epistemic contact not with
context-independent present-at-hand primitives (e.g., raw sense data, such as a
‘pure’ experience of a patch of red), to which context-dependent meaning would
need to be added via value-predicates, but rather with equipment, the kind of
entity whose mode of Being is readiness-to-hand and which therefore comes
already laden with context-dependent significance. What is perhaps Heidegger's
best statement of this opposition comes later in Being and Time.
What
we ‘first’ hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking
waggon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the
woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling… It requires a very artificial and complicated
frame of mind to ‘hear’ a ‘pure noise’. The fact that motor-cycles and waggons
are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal evidence that in every case
Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand
within-the-world; it certainly does not dwell proximally alongside
‘sensations’; nor would it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations
to provide a springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives
at a ‘world’. Dasein, as essentially understanding, is proximally alongside
what is understood. (Being and Time 34: 207)
For
Heidegger, then, we start not with the present-at-hand, moving to the
ready-to-hand by adding value-predicates, but with the ready-to-hand, moving to
the present-at-hand by stripping away the holistic networks of everyday
equipmental meaning. It seems clear, then, that our two positions are
diametrically opposed to each other, but why should we favour Heidegger's
framework over Descartes'? Heidegger's flagship argument here is that the
systematic addition of value-predicates to present-at-hand primitives cannot
transform our encounters with those objects into encounters with equipment. It
comes in the following brief but dense passage: “Adding on value-predicates
cannot tell us anything at all new about the Being of goods, but would merely
presuppose again that goods have pure presence-at-hand as their kind of Being.
Values would then be determinate characteristics which a thing possesses, and
they would be present-at-hand”(Being and Time 21: 132). In other words,
once we have assumed that we begin with the present-at-hand, values must take
the form of determinate features of objects, and therefore constitute nothing
but more present-at-hand structures. And if you add more present-at-hand
structures to some existing present-at-hand structures, what you end up with is
not equipmental meaning (totalities of involvements) but merely a larger number
of present-at-hand structures.
Heidegger's
argument here is (at best) incomplete (for discussion, see Dreyfus 1990,
Wheeler 2005). The defender of Cartesianism might concede that present-at-hand
entities have determinate properties, but wonder why the fact that an entity
has determinate properties is necessarily an indication of presence-at-hand. On
this view, having determinate properties is necessary but not sufficient for an
entity to be present-at-hand. More specifically, she might wonder why
involvements cannot be thought of as determinate features that entities possess
just when they are embedded in certain contexts of use. Consider for
example the various involvements specified in the academic writing context
described earlier. They certainly seem to be determinate, albeit
context-relative, properties of the computer. Of course, the massively holistic
character of totalities of involvements would make the task of specifying the
necessary value-predicates (say, as sets of internal representations)
incredibly hard, but it is unclear that it makes that task impossible. So it
seems as if Heidegger doesn't really develop his case in sufficient detail.
However, Dreyfus (1990) pursues a response that Heidegger might have given, one
that draws on the familiar philosophical distinction between knowing-how and
knowing-that. It seems that value-predicates constitute a form of knowing-that
(i.e., knowing that an entity has a certain context-dependent property) whereas
the circumspective knowledge of totalities of involvements (Dasein's skilled
practical activity) constitutes a form of knowing-how (i.e., knowing how to use
equipment in appropriate ways; see the characterization of readiness-to-hand
given earlier). Given the plausible (although not universally held) assumption
that knowing-how cannot be reduced to knowledge-that, this would explain why
value-predicates are simply the wrong sort of structures to capture the
phenomenon of world-embeddedness.
In
the wake of his critique of Cartesianism, Heidegger turns his attention to
spatiality. He argues that Dasein dwells in the world in a spatial manner, but
that the spatiality in question—Dasein's existential spatiality—cannot be a
matter of Dasein being located at a particular co-ordinate in physical,
Cartesian space. That would be to conceive of Dasein as present-at-hand, and
presence-at-hand is a mode of Being that can belong only to entities other than
Dasein. According to Heidegger, the existential spatiality of Dasein is
characterized most fundamentally by what he calls de-severance, a
bringing close. “ ‘De-severing’ amounts to making the farness vanish—that is,
making the remoteness of something disappear, bringing it close” (Being and
Time: 23: 139). This is of course not a bringing close in the sense of
reducing physical distance, although it may involve that. Heidegger's proposal
is that spatiality as de-severance is in some way (exactly how is a matter of
subtle interpretation; see e.g., Malpas 2006) intimately related to the ‘reach’
of Dasein's skilled practical activity. For example, an entity is ‘near by’ if
it is readily available for some such activity, and ‘far away’ if it is not,
whatever physical distances may be involved. Given the Dasein-world
relationship highlighted above, the implication (drawn explicitly by Heidegger,
see Being and Time 22: 136) is that the spatiality distinctive of
equipmental entities, and thus of the world, is not equivalent to physical,
Cartesian space. Equipmental space is a matter of pragmatically determined
regions of functional places, defined by Dasein-centred totalities of
involvements (e.g., an office with places for the computers, the photocopier,
and so on—places that are defined by the way in which they make these
equipmental entities available in the right sort of way for skilled activity).
For Heidegger, physical, Cartesian space is possible as something meaningful
for Dasein only because Dasein has de-severance as one of its existential
characteristics. Given the intertwining of de-severance and equipmental space,
this licenses the radical view (one that is consistent with Heidegger's prior treatment
of Cartesianism) that physical, Cartesian space (as something that we can find
intelligible) presupposes equipmental space; the former is the present-at-hand
phenomenon that is revealed if we strip away the worldhood from the latter.
Malpas
(forthcoming) rejects the account of spatiality given in Being and Time.
Drawing on Kant, he argues that “[any] agent, insofar as it is capable of
action at all (that is, insofar as it is, indeed, an agent), acts in a space
that is an objective space, in which other agents also act, and yet which is
always immediately configured subjectively in terms of the agent's own oriented
locatedness” (Malpas forthcoming, 14). According to Malpas, then, equipmental
space (a space ordered in terms of practical activity and within which an agent
acts) presupposes a more fundamental notion of space as a complex unity with
objective, intersubjective and subjective dimensions. If this is right, then of
course equipmental space cannot itself explain the spatial. A further problem,
as Malpas also notes, is that the whole issue of spatiality brings into sharp
focus the awkward relationship that Heidegger has with the body in Being and
Time. In what is now a frequently quoted remark, Heidegger sets aside
Dasein's embodiment, commenting that “this ‘bodily nature’ hides a whole
problematic of its own, though we shall not treat it here” (Being and Time
23: 143). Indeed, at times, Heidegger might be interpreted as linking
embodiment with Thinghood. For example: “[as] Dasein goes along its ways, it
does not measure off a stretch of space as a corporeal Thing which is
present-at-hand” (Being and Time 23: 140). Here one might plausibly
contain the spread of presence-at-hand by appealing to a distinction between
material (present-at-hand) and lived (existential) ways in which Dasein is
embodied. Unfortunately this distinction isn't made in Being and Time (a
point noted by Ricouer 1992, 327), although Heidegger does adopt it in the much
later Seminar in Le Thor (see Malpas forthcoming, 5). What seems clear,
however, is that while the Heidegger of Being and Time seems to hold
that Dasein's embodiment somehow depends on its existential spatiality (see
e.g., 23: 143), the more obvious thing to say is that Dasein's existential spatiality
somehow depends on its embodiment.
Before
leaving this issue, it is worth noting briefly that space reappears later in Being
and Time (70: 418–21), where Heidegger argues that existential space is
derived from temporality. This makes sense within Heidegger's overall project,
because, as we shall see, the deep structure of totalities of involvements (and
thus of equipmental space) is finally understood in terms of temporality.
Nevertheless, and although the distinctive character of Heidegger's concept of
temporality needs to be recognized, there is reason to think that the
dependency here may well travel in the opposite direction. The worry, as Malpas
(forthcoming, 26) again points out, has a Kantian origin. Kant (1781/1999)
argued that the temporal character of inner sense is possible only because it
is mediated by outer intuition whose form is space. If this is right, and if we
can generalize appropriately, then the temporality that matters to Heidegger
will be dependent on existential spatiality, and not the other way round. All
in all, one is tempted to conclude that Heidegger's treatment of spatiality in Being
and Time, and (relatedly) his treatment (or lack of it) of the body, face
serious difficulties.
Heidegger
turns next to the question of “who it is that Dasein is in its
everydayness” (Being and Time, Introduction to IV: 149). He rejects the
idea of Dasein as a Cartesian ‘I-thing’ (the Cartesian thinking thing conceived
as a substance), since once again this would be to think of Dasein as
present-at-hand. In searching for an alternative answer, Heidegger observes
that equipment is often revealed to us as being for the sake of (the lives and
projects of) other Dasein.
The
boat anchored at the shore is assigned in its Being-in-itself to an
acquaintance who undertakes voyages with it; but even if it is a ‘boat which is
strange to us’, it still is indicative of Others. The Others who are thus
‘encountered’ in a ready-to-hand, environmental context of equipment, are not
somehow added on in thought to some Thing which is proximally just
present-at-hand; such ‘Things’ are encountered from out of a world in which
they are ready-to-hand for Others—a world which is always mine too in advance.
(Being and Time 26: 154)
On
the basis of such observations, Heidegger argues that to be Dasein at all means
to Be-with: “So far as Dasein is at all, it has Being-with-one-another as its
kind of Being” (Being and Time 26: 163). One's immediate response to
this might be that it is just false. After all, ordinary experience establishes
that each of us is often alone. But of course Heidegger is thinking in an ontological
register. Being-with (Mitsein) is thus the a priori transcendental
condition that makes it possible that Dasein can discover equipment in this
Other-related fashion. And it's because Dasein has Being-with as one of its
essential modes of Being that everyday Dasein can experience being alone.
Being-with is thus the a priori transcendental condition for loneliness.
It
is important to understand what Heidegger means by ‘Others’, a term that he
uses interchangeably with the more evocative ‘the “they” ’ (das Man). He explains:
By
‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me—those over against whom the ‘I’
stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not
distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too… By reason of this with-like
Being-in-the-world, the world is always the one that I share with Others. (Being
and Time 26: 154–5)
A
piece of data (cited by Dreyfus 1990) helps to illuminate this idea. Each
society seems to have its own sense of what counts as an appropriate distance
to stand from someone during verbal communication, and this varies depending on
whether the other person is a lover, a friend, a colleague, or a business
acquaintance, and on whether communication is taking place in noisy or quiet
circumstances. Such standing-distance practices are of course normative, in
that they involve a sense of what one should and shouldn't do. And the norms in
question are culturally specific. So what this example illustrates is that the
phenomenon of the Others, the ‘who’ of everyday Dasein, the group from whom for
the most part I do not stand out, is my culture, understood not as the sum of
all its members, but as an ontological phenomenon in its own right. This
explains the following striking remark. “The ‘who’ is not this one, not that
one, not oneself, not some people, and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is
the neuter, the ‘they’ ” (Being and Time 27: 164). Another way to capture
this idea is to say that what I do is determined largely by ‘what one does’,
and ‘what one does’ is something that I absorb in various ways from my culture.
Thus Dreyfus (1990) prefers to translate das Man not as ‘the “they” ’, but as ‘the one’.
This
all throws important light on the phenomenon of world, since we can now see
that the crucial for-the-sake-of-which structure that stands at the base of
each totality of involvements is culturally and historically conditioned. The
specific ways in which I behave for the sake of being an academic are what one
does if one wants to be considered a good academic, at this particular time, in
this particular historically embedded culture (carrying out research, tutoring
students, giving lectures, and so on). As Heidegger himself puts the point:
“Dasein is for the sake of the ‘they’ in an everyday manner, and the ‘they’
itself articulates the referential context of significance” (Being and Time
27: 167). Worlds (the referential context of significance, networks of
involvements) are then culturally and historically conditioned, from which
several things seem to follow. First, Dasein's everyday world is, in the first
instance, and of its very essence, a shared world. Second, Being-with and
Being-in-the-world are, if not equivalent, deeply intertwined. And third, the
sense in which worlds are Dasein-dependent involves some sort of cultural
relativism, although, as we shall see later, this final issue is one that needs
careful interpretative handling.
Critics
of the manner in which Heidegger develops the notion of Being-with have often
focussed, albeit in different ways, on the thought that Heidegger either
ignores or misconceives the fundamental character of our social existence by
passing over its grounding in direct interpersonal interaction (see e.g.,
Löwith 1928, Binswanger 1943/1964, Gallagher and Jacobson forthcoming). From
this perspective, the equipmentally mediated discovery of others that Heidegger
sometimes describes (see above) is at best a secondary process that reveals
other people only to the extent that they are relevant to Dasein's practical
projects. Moreover, Olafson (1987) argues that although Heidegger's account
clearly involves the idea that Dasein discovers socially shared equipmental
meaning (which then presumably supports the discovery of other Dasein along
with equipment), that account fails to explain why this must be the
case. Processes of direct interpersonal contact (e.g., in learning the use of
equipment from others) might plausibly fill this gap. The obvious move for
Heidegger to make here is to claim that the processes that the critics find to
be missing from his account, although genuine, are not a priori, transcendental
structures of Dasein. Rather, they are psychological factors that enable (in a
‘merely’ developmental or causal way) human beings to realize the phenomenon of
Being-with (see e.g., Heidegger's response to the existentialist psychologist
and therapist Binswanger in the Zollikon seminars, and see Dreyfus 1990,
chapter 8, for a response to Olafson that exploits this point). However, one
might wonder whether it is plausible to relegate the social processes in
question to the status of ‘mere’ enabling factors (Gallagher and Jacobson
forthcoming; Pöggeler 1989 might be read as making a similar complaint). If
not, then Heidegger's notion of Being-with is at best an incomplete account of
our social Being.
The
introduction of the ‘they’ is followed by a further layer of interpretation in
which Heidegger understands Being-in-the-world in terms of (what he calls) thrownness,
projection and fallen-ness, and (interrelatedly) in terms of Dasein
as a dynamic combination of disposedness, understanding and fascination
with the world. In effect, this is a reformulation of the point that Dasein
is the having-to-be-open, i.e., that it is an a priori structure of our
existential constitution that we operate with the capacity to
take-other-beings-as. Dasein's existence (ek-sistence) is thus now to be
understood by way of an interconnected pair of three-dimensional unitary
structures: thrownness-projection-fallen-ness and
disposedness-understanding-fascination. Each of these can be used to express
the “formally existential totality of Dasein's ontological structural whole” (Being
and Time 42: 237), a phenomenon that Heidegger also refers to as disclosedness
or care. Crucially, it is with the configuration of care that we
encounter the first tentative emergence of temporality as a theme in Being
and Time, since the dimensionality of care will ultimately be interpreted
in terms of the three temporal dimensions: past (thrownness/disposedness),
future (projection/understanding), and present (fallen-ness/fascination).
As
Dasein, I ineluctably find myself in a world that matters to me in some way or
another. This is what Heidegger calls thrownness (Geworfenheit),
a having-been-thrown into the world. ‘Disposedness’ is Kisiel's (2002)
translation of Befindlichkeit, a term rendered somewhat infelicitously
by Macquarrie and Robinson as ‘state-of-mind’. Disposedness is the
receptiveness (the just finding things mattering to one) of Dasein, which
explains why Richardson (1963) renders Befindlichkeit as
‘already-having-found-oneself-there-ness’. To make things less abstract, we can
note that disposedness is the a priori transcendental condition for, and thus
shows up pre-ontologically in, the everyday phenomenon of mood (Stimmung).
According to Heidegger's analysis, I am always in some mood or other. Thus say
I'm depressed, such that the world opens up (is disclosed) to me as a sombre
and gloomy place. I might be able to shift myself out of that mood, but only to
enter a different one, say euphoria or lethargy, a mood that will open up the
world to me in a different way. As one might expect, Heidegger argues that
moods are not inner subjective colourings laid over an objectively given world
(which at root is why ‘state-of-mind’ is a potentially misleading translation
of Befindlichkeit, given that this term names the underlying a priori
condition for moods). For Heidegger, moods (and disposedness) are aspects of
what it means to be in a world at all, not subjective additions to that
in-ness. Here it is worth noting that some aspects of our ordinary linguistic usage
reflect this anti-subjectivist reading. Thus we talk of being in a mood rather
than a mood being in us, and we have no problem making sense of the idea of
public moods (e.g., the mood of a crowd). In noting these features of moods we
must be careful, however. It would be a mistake to conclude from them that
moods are external, rather than internal, states. A mood “comes neither from
‘outside’ nor from ‘inside’, but arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of
such being” (Being and Time 29: 176). Nevertheless, the idea that moods
have a social character does point us towards a striking implication of
Heidegger's overall framework: with Being-in-the-world identified previously as
a kind of cultural co-embeddedness, it follows that the repertoire of world-disclosing
moods in which I might find myself will itself be culturally conditioned. (For
recent philosophical work that builds, in part, on Heidegger's treatment of
moods, in order to identify and understand certain affective phenomena—dubbed
‘existential feelings’—that help us to understand various forms of psychiatric
illness, see Ratcliffe 2008.)
Dasein
confronts every concrete situation in which it finds itself (into which it has
been thrown) as a range of possibilities for acting (onto which it may project
itself). Insofar as some of these possibilities are actualized, others will not
be, meaning that there is a sense in which not-Being (a set of unactualized
possibilities of Being) is a structural component of Dasein's Being. Out of
this dynamic interplay, Dasein emerges as a delicate balance of determination
(thrownness) and freedom (projection). The projective possibilities available
to Dasein are delineated by totalities of involvements, structures that, as we
have seen, embody the culturally conditioned ways in which Dasein may inhabit
the world. Understanding is the process by which Dasein projects itself onto
such possibilities. Crucially, understanding as projection is not conceived, by
Heidegger, as involving, in any fundamental way, conscious or deliberate
forward-planning. Projection “has nothing to do with comporting oneself towards
a plan that has been thought out” (Being and Time 31: 185). The primary
realization of understanding is as skilled activity in the domain of the
ready-to-hand, but it can be manifested as interpretation, when Dasein explicitly
takes something as something (e.g., in cases of disturbance), and also
as linguistic assertion, when Dasein uses language to attribute a definite
character to an entity as a mere present-at-hand object. (NB: assertion of the
sort indicated here is of course just one linguistic practice among many; it
does not in any way exhaust the phenomenon of language or its ontological
contribution.) Another way of putting the point that culturally conditioned
totalities of involvements define the space of Dasein's projection onto
possibilities is to say that such totalities constitute the fore-structures of
Dasein's practices of understanding and interpretation, practices that, as we
have just seen, are projectively oriented manifestations of the taking-as
activity that forms the existential core of Dasein's Being. What this tells us
is that the hermeneutic circle is the “essential fore-structure of Dasein
itself” (Being and Time 32: 195).
Thrownness
and projection provide two of the three dimensions of care. The third is fallen-ness.
“Dasein has, in the first instance, fallen away from itself as an authentic
potentiality for Being its Self, and has fallen into the world” (Being and
Time 38: 220). Such fallen-ness into the world is manifested in idle
talk (roughly, conversing in a critically unexamined and unexamining way
about facts and information while failing to use language to reveal their
relevance), curiosity (a search for novelty and endless stimulation
rather than belonging or dwelling), and ambiguity (a loss of any
sensitivity to the distinction between genuine understanding and superficial
chatter). Each of these aspects of fallen-ness involves a closing off or
covering up of the world (more precisely, of any real understanding of the
world) through a fascination with it. What is crucial here is that this
world-obscuring process of fallen-ness/fascination, as manifested in idle talk,
curiosity and ambiguity, is to be understood as Dasein's everyday mode of
Being-with. In its everyday form, Being-with exhibits what Heidegger calls levelling
or averageness—a “Being-lost in the publicness of the ‘they’ ” (Being and Time 38: 220). Here, in dramatic
language, is how he makes the point.
In
utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services
such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This
Being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein completely into a kind of
Being of ‘the Others’, in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as
distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness
and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the ‘they’ is unfolded. We
take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see,
and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we
shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find
‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The ‘they’, which is nothing
definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of
Being of everydayness. (Being and Time 27: 164)
This
analysis opens up a path to Heidegger's distinction between the authentic self
and its inauthentic counterpart. At root, ‘authentic’ means ‘my own’. So the
authentic self is the self that is mine (leading a life that, in a sense to be
explained, is owned by me), whereas the inauthentic self is the fallen self,
the self lost to the ‘they’. Hence we might call the authentic self the
‘mine-self’, and the inauthentic self the ‘they-self’, the latter term also
serving to emphasize the point that fallen-ness is a mode of the self, not of
others. Moreover, as a mode of the self, fallen-ness is not an accidental
feature of Dasein, but rather part of Dasein's existential constitution. It is
a dimension of care, which is the Being of Dasein. So, in the specific sense
that fallen-ness (the they-self) is an essential part of our Being, we are
ultimately each to blame for our own inauthenticity (Sheehan 2002). Of course,
one shouldn't conclude from all this talk of submersion in the ‘they’ that a
state of authenticity is to be achieved by re-establishing some version of a
self-sufficient individual subject. As Heidegger puts it: “Authentic
Being-one's-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the
subject, a condition that has been detached from the ‘they’; it is rather an
existentiell modification of the ‘they’ ”
(Being and Time 27: 168). So authenticity is not about being isolated
from others, but rather about finding a different way of relating to others
such that one is not lost to the they-self. It is in Division 2 of Being and
Time that authenticity, so understood, becomes a central theme.
As
the argument of Being and Time continues its ever-widening hermeneutic
spiral into Division 2 of the text, Heidegger announces a twofold transition in
the analysis. He argues that we should (i) pay proper heed to the thought that
to understand Dasein we need to understand Dasein's existence as a whole,
and (ii) shift the main focus of our attention from the inauthentic self (the
they-self) to the authentic self (the mine-self) (Being and Time 45:
276). Both of these transitions figure in Heidegger's discussion of death.
So
far, Dasein's existence has been understood as thrown projection plus falling.
The projective aspect of this phenomenon means that, at each moment of its
life, Dasein is Being-ahead-of-itself, oriented towards the realm of its
possibilities, and is thus incomplete. Death completes Dasein's existence.
Therefore, an understanding of Dasein's relation to death would make an
essential contribution to our understanding of Dasein as a whole. But now a
problem immediately presents itself: since one cannot experience one's own death,
it seems that the kind of phenomenological analysis that has hitherto driven
the argument of Being and Time breaks down, right at the crucial moment.
One possible response to this worry, canvassed explicitly by Heidegger, is to
suggest that Dasein understands death through experiencing the death of others.
However, the sense in which we experience the death of others falls short of
what is needed. We mourn departed others and miss their presence in the world.
But that is to experience Being-with them as dead, which is a mode of our
continued existence. As Heidegger explains:
The
greater the phenomenal appropriateness with which we take the no-longer-Dasein
of the deceased, the more plainly is it shown that in such Being-with the dead,
the authentic Being-come-to-and-end of the deceased is precisely the sort of
thing which we do not experience. Death does indeed reveal itself as a
loss, but a loss such as is experienced by those who remain. In suffering this
loss, however, we have no way of access to the loss-of-Being as such which the
dying man ‘suffers’. The dying of Others is not something which we experience
in a genuine sense; at most we are always just ‘there alongside’. (Being and
Time 47: 282)
What
we don't have, then, is phenomenological access to the loss of Being that the
dead person has suffered. But that, it seems, is precisely what we would need
in order to carry through the favoured analysis. So another response is called
for. Heidegger's move is to suggest that although Dasein cannot experience its
own death as actual, it can relate towards its own death as a possibility that
is always before it—always before it in the sense that Dasein's own death is
inevitable. Peculiarly among Dasein's possibilities, the possibility of
Dasein's own death must remain only a possibility, since once it becomes
actual, Dasein is no longer. Death is thus the “possibility of the
impossibility of any existence at all” (Being and Time 53: 307). And it
is this awareness of death as an omnipresent possibility that cannot become
actual that stops the phenomenological analysis from breaking down. The detail
here is crucial. What the failure of the ‘death of others’ strategy indicates
is that in each instance death is inextricably tied to some specific individual
Dasein. My death is mine in a radical sense; it is the moment at which all my
relations to others disappear. Heidegger captures this non-relationality by
using the term ‘ownmost’. And it is the idea of death “as that possibility
which is one's ownmost” (Being and Time 50: 294) that engages the second
transition highlighted above. When I take on board the possibility of my own
not-Being, my own being-able-to-Be is brought into proper view. Hence my
awareness of my own death as an omnipresent possibility discloses the authentic
self (a self that is mine). Moreover, the very same awareness engages the first
of the aforementioned transitions too: there is a sense in which the
possibility of my not existing encompasses the whole of my existence (Hinman
1978, 201), and my awareness of that possibility illuminates me, qua
Dasein, in my totality. Indeed, my own death is revealed to me as inevitable,
meaning that Dasein is essentially finite. This explains why Heidegger says
that death is disclosed to Dasein as a possibility which is “not to be
outstripped” (Being and Time 50: 294).
Heidegger's
account of Dasein's relation towards the possibility of its own not-Being forms
the backbone of a reinterpretation of the phenomenon of care—the “formally
existential totality of Dasein's ontological structural whole” (Being and
Time 42: 237). Care is now interpreted in terms of Being-towards-death,
meaning that Dasein has an internal relation to the nothing (i.e., to
not-being; see Vallega-Neu 2003, 21, for an analysis that links this ‘not’
quality to the point made earlier that sets of unactualized possibilities of
Being are structural components of Dasein's Being). As one might expect,
Heidegger argues that Being-towards-death not only has the three-dimensional
character of care, but is realized in authentic and inauthentic modes. Let's
begin with the authentic mode. We can think of the aforementioned
individualizing effect of Dasein's awareness of the possibility of its own
not-Being (an awareness that illuminates its own being-able-to-Be) as an event
in which Dasein projects onto a possible way to be, in the technical sense of
such possibilities introduced earlier in Being and Time. It is thus an
event in which Dasein projects onto a for-the-sake-of-which, a possible way to
be. More particularly, given the authentic character of the phenomenon, it is
an event in which Dasein projects onto a for-the-sake-of-itself.
Heidegger now coins the term anticipation to express the form of
projection in which one looks forward to a possible way to be. Given the
analysis of death as a possibility, the authentic form of projection in the
case of death is anticipation. Indeed Heidegger often uses the term
anticipation in a narrow way, simply to mean being aware of death as a
possibility. But death is disclosed authentically not only in projection (the
first dimension of care) but also in thrownness (the second dimension). The key
phenomenon here is the mode of disposedness that Heidegger calls anxiety.
Anxiety, at least in the form in which Heidegger is interested, is not directed
towards some specific object, but rather opens up the world to me in a certain
distinctive way. When I am anxious I am no longer at home in the world. I fail
to find the world intelligible. Thus there is an ontological sense (one to do
with intelligibility) in which I am not in the world, and the possibility of a
world without me (the possibility of my not-Being-in-the-world) is revealed to
me. “[The] state-of-mind [mode of disposedness] which can hold open the utter
and constant threat to itself arising from Dasein's ownmost individualized
Being, is anxiety. In this state-of-mind, Dasein finds itself face to face with
the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence” (Being and
Time 53: 310). Heidegger has now reinterpreted two of the three dimensions
of care, in the light of Dasein's essential finitude. But now what about the
third dimension, identified previously as fallen-ness? Since we are presently
considering a mode of authentic, i.e., not fallen, Dasein, it seems that
fallen-ness cannot be a feature of this realization of care, and indeed that a
general reformulation of the care structure is called for in order to allow for
authentic Being. This is an issue that will be addressed in the next section.
First, though, the inauthentic form of Being-towards-death needs to be brought
into view.
In
everyday Being-towards-death, the self that figures in the
for-the-sake-of-itself structure is not the authentic mine-self, but rather the
inauthentic they-self. In effect, the ‘they’ obscures our awareness of the
meaning of our own deaths by de-individualizing death. As Heidegger
explains: in “Dasein's public way of interpreting, it is said that ‘one dies’,
because everyone else and oneself can talk himself into saying that ‘in no case
is it I myself’, for this ‘one’ is the ‘nobody’ ” (Being and Time 51: 297). In this way, everyday
Dasein flees from the meaning of its own death, in a manner determined by the
‘they’. It is in this evasion in the face of death, interpreted as a further
way in which Dasein covers up Being, that everyday Dasein's fallen-ness now
manifests itself. To be clear: evasion here does not necessarily mean that I
refuse outright to acknowledge that I will someday die. After all, as I might
say, ‘everyone dies’. However, the certainty of death achieved by idle talk of
this kind is of the wrong sort. One might think of it as established by the
conclusion of some sort of inductive inference from observations of many cases
of death (the deaths of many others). But “we cannot compute the certainty of
death by ascertaining how many cases of death we encounter” (Being and Time
53: 309).
The
certainty brought into view by such an inference is a sort of empirical
certainty, one which conceals the apodictic character of the inevitability with
which my own death is authentically revealed to me (Being and Time 52:
301). In addition, as we have seen, according to Heidegger, my own death can
never be actual for me, so viewed from my perspective, any case of death, i.e.,
any actual death, cannot be my death. Thus it must be a death that belongs to
someone else, or rather, to no one.
Inauthenticity
in relation to death is also realized in thrownness, through fear, and
in projection, through expectation. Fear, as a mode of disposedness, can
disclose only particular oncoming events in the world. To fear my own
death, then, is once again to treat my death as a case of death. This contrasts
with anxiety, the form of disposedness which, as we have seen, discloses my
death via the awareness of the possibility of a world in which I am not. The
projective analogue to the fear-anxiety distinction is
expectation-anticipation. A mundane example might help to illustrate the
generic idea. When I expect a beer to taste a certain way, I am waiting for an
actual event—a case of that distinctive taste in my mouth—to occur. By
contrast, when I anticipate the taste of that beer, one might say that, in a
cognitive sense, I actively go out to meet the possibility of that taste. In so
doing, I make it mine. Expecting death is thus to wait for a case of death,
whereas to anticipate death is to own it.
In
reinterpreting care in terms of Being-towards-death, Heidegger illuminates in a
new way the taking-as structure that, as we have seen, he takes to be the
essence of human existence. Human beings, as Dasein, are essentially finite.
And it is this finitude that explains why the phenomenon of taking-as is an
essential characteristic of our existence. An infinite Being would understand
things directly, without the need for interpretative intercession. We, however,
are Dasein, and in our essential finitude we must understand things in a
hermeneutically mediated, indirect way, that is, by taking-as (Sheehan 2001).
What
are we to make of Heidegger's analysis of death? Perhaps the most compelling
reason for being sceptical can be found in Sartre, who argued that just as death
cannot be actual for me, it cannot be one of my possibilities either, at least
if the term ‘possibility’ is understood, as Heidegger surely intends it to be,
as marking a way of my Being, an intelligible way for me to be. Sartre argues
that death is the end of such possibilities. Thus:
[The]
perpetual appearance of chance at the heart of my projects cannot be
apprehended as my possibility but, on the contrary, as the nihilation of all my
possibilities. A nihilation which itself is no longer a part of my
possibilities. Thus death is not my possibility of no longer realizing a
presence in the world but rather an always possible nihilation of my
possibilities which is outside my possibilities. (Sartre 1956, 537)
If
Sartre is right, there is a significant hole in Heidegger's project, since we
would be left without a way of completing the phenomenological analysis of
Dasein.
For
further debate over Heidegger's handling of death, see Edwards' (1975, 1976,
2004) unsympathetic broadsides alongside Hinman's (1978) robust response. Carel
(2006) develops an analysis that productively connects Heidegger's and Freud's
accounts of death, despite Heidegger's open antipathy towards Freud's theories
in general.
In
some of the most difficult sections of Being and Time, Heidegger now
begins to close in on the claim that temporality is the ontological meaning of
Dasein's Being as care. The key notion here is that of anticipatory
resoluteness, which Heidegger identifies as an (or perhaps the)
authentic mode of care. As we have seen, anticipation is the form of
Being-towards in which one looks forward to a possible way to be. Bringing resoluteness
into view requires further groundwork that begins with Heidegger's
reinterpretation of the authentic self in terms of the phenomenon of conscience
or Being-guilty. The authentic self is characterized by Being-guilty. This does
not mean that authenticity requires actually feeling guilty. Rather, the
authentic self is the one who is open to the call of conscience. The
inauthentic self, by contrast, is closed to conscience and guilt. It is
tempting to think that this is where Heidegger does ethics. However, guilt as
an existential structure is not to be understood as some psychological feeling
that one gets when one transgresses some moral code. If the term ‘guilt’ is to
be heard in an ethical register at all, the phenomenon of Being-guilty will,
for Heidegger, be the a priori condition for there to be moral codes, not the
psychological result of transgressions of those codes. Having said that,
however, it may be misleading to adopt an ethical register here. For Heidegger,
conscience is fundamentally a disclosive rather than an ethical phenomenon.
What is more important for the project of Being and Time, then, is the
claim that the call of conscience interrupts Dasein's everyday fascination with
entities by summoning Dasein back to its own finitude and thereby to
authenticity. To see how the call of conscience achieves this, we need to
unpack Heidegger's reformulation of conscience in terms of anticipatory
resoluteness.
In
the by-now familiar pattern, Heidegger argues that conscience (Being-guilty)
has the structure of care. However, there's now a modification to the picture,
presumably driven by a factor mentioned earlier, namely that authentic Dasein
is not fallen. Since conscience is a mode of authentic Dasein, fallen-ness
cannot be one of the dimensions of conscience. So the three elements of care
are now identified as projection, thrownness and discourse. What is
discourse? It clearly has something to do with articulation, and it is tempting
to make a connection with language, but in truth this aspect of Heidegger's
view is somewhat murky. Heidegger says that the “intelligibility of
Being-in-the-world… expresses itself as discourse” (Being and Time 34:
204). But this might mean that intelligibility is essentially a linguistic
phenomenon; or it might mean that discourse is intelligibility as put into
language. There is even room for the view that discourse is not necessarily a
linguistic phenomenon at all, but rather any way in which the referential
structure of significance is articulated, either by deeds (e.g., by hammering)
or by words (see e.g., Dreyfus 1991, 215; Dreyfus translates the German term Rede
not as ‘discourse’ but as ‘telling’, and notes the existence of non-linguistic
tellings such as telling the time). But however we settle that point of
interpretation, there is something untidy about the status of discourse in
relation to fallen-ness and authenticity. Elsewhere in Being and Time,
the text strongly suggests that discourse has inauthentic modes, for instance
when it is manifested as idle talk; and in yet other sections we find the claim
that fallen-ness has an authentic manifestation called a moment-of-vision
(e.g., Being and Time 68: 401). Regarding the general relations between
discourse, fallen-ness and authenticity, then, the conceptual landscape is not
entirely clear. Nevertheless, we can say this: when care is realized
authentically, I experience discourse as reticence, as a keeping silent
(ignoring the chatter of idle talk) so that I may hear the call of conscience;
I experience projection onto guilt as a possible way of Being in which I take
responsibility for a lack or a not-Being that is located firmly in my own self
(where ‘taking responsibility for’ means recognizing that not-Being is one of my
essential structures); and I experience thrownness as anxiety, a mode of
disposedness that, as we have seen, leaves me estranged from the familiar field
of intelligibility determined by the ‘they’ and thereby discloses the
possibility of my own not-Being. So, reticence, guilt and anxiety all have the
effect of extracting Dasein from the ontological clutches of the ‘they’. That
is why the unitary structure of reticence-guilt-anxiety characterizes the Being
of authentic Dasein.
So
now what of resoluteness? ‘Resoluteness’ is perhaps best understood as simply a
new term for reticence-guilt-anxiety. But why do we need a new term? There are
two possible reasons for thinking that the relabelling exercise here adds
value. Each of these indicates a connection between authenticity and freedom.
Each corresponds to an authentic realization of one of two possible understandings
of what Heidegger means by (human) existence (see above). The first take on
resoluteness is emphasized by, for example, Gelven (1989), Mulhall (2005) and
Polt (1999). In ordinary parlance, to be resolved is to commit oneself to some
project and thus, in a sense, to take ownership of one's life. By succumbing
to, but without making any real commitment to, the patterns laid down by the
‘they’ (i.e., by uncritically ‘doing what one does’), inauthentic Dasein avoids
owning its own life. Authentic Being (understood as resoluteness) is, then, a
freedom from the ‘they’—not, of course, in any sense that involves extracting
oneself from one's socio-cultural embeddedness (after all, Being-with is part
of Dasein's existential constitution), but rather in a sense that involves
individual commitment to (and thus individual ownership of) one of the possible
ways to be that one's socio-cultural embeddedness makes available (more on this
below). Seen like this, resoluteness correlates with the idea that Dasein's existence
is constituted by a series of events in which possible ways to be are chosen.
At
this point we would do well to hesitate. The emphasis on notions such as choice
and commitment makes it all too easy to think that resoluteness essentially
involves some sort of conscious decision-making. For this reason, Vallega-Neu
(2003, 15) reminds us that resoluteness is not a “choice made by a human
subject” but rather an “occurrence that determines Dasein”. This occurrence
discloses Dasein's essential finitude. It is here that it is profitable to
think in terms of anticipatory resoluteness. Heidegger's claim is that
resoluteness and anticipation are internally related, such that they ultimately
emerge together as the unitary phenomenon of anticipatory resoluteness. Thus,
he argues, Being-guilty (the projective aspect of resoluteness) involves Dasein
wanting to be open to the call of conscience for as long as Dasein exists,
which requires an awareness of the possibility of death. Since resoluteness is
an authentic mode of Being, this awareness of the possibility of death must
also be authentic. But the authentic awareness of the possibility of death just
is anticipation (see above). Thus “only as anticipating does resoluteness
become a primordial Being towards Dasein's ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (Being
and Time 62: 354). Via the internal connection with anticipation, then, the
notion of resoluteness allows Heidegger to rethink the path to Dasein's
essential finitude, a finitude that is hidden in fallen-ness, but which, as we
have seen, is the condition of possibility for the taking-as structure that is
a constitutive aspect of Dasein. Seen this way, resoluteness correlates more
neatly with the idea that human existence is essentially a standing out in an
openness to, and in an opening of, Being.
In
a further hermeneutic spiral, Heidegger concludes that temporality is the a
priori transcendental condition for there to be care (sense-making,
intelligibility, taking-as, Dasein's own distinctive mode of Being). Moreover,
it is Dasein's openness to time that ultimately allows Dasein's potential
authenticity to be actualized: in authenticity, the constraints and
possibilities determined by Dasein's cultural-historical past are grasped by Dasein
in the present so that it may project itself into the future in a fully
authentic manner, i.e., in a manner which is truest to the mine-self.
The
ontological emphasis that Heidegger places on temporality might usefully be
seen as an echo and development of Kant's claim that embeddedness in time is a
precondition for things to appear to us the way they do. (According to Kant,
embeddedness in time is co-determinative of our experience, along with
embeddedness in space. See above for Heidegger's problematic analysis of the
relationship between spatiality and temporality.) With the Kantian roots of
Heidegger's treatment of time acknowledged, it must be registered immediately
that, in Heidegger's hands, the notion of temporality receives a distinctive twist.
Heidegger is concerned not with clock-time (an infinite series of
self-contained nows laid out in an ordering of past, present and future) or
with time as some sort of relativistic phenomenon that would satisfy the
physicist. Time thought of in either of these ways is a present-at-hand
phenomenon, and that means that it cannot characterize the temporality that is
an internal feature of Dasein's existential constitution, the existential
temporality that structures intelligibility (taking-as). As he puts it in his History
of the Concept of Time (a 1925 lecture course): “Not ‘time is’, but ‘Dasein
qua time temporalizes its Being’ ”
(319). To make sense of this temporalizing, Heidegger introduces the technical
term ecstases. Ecstases are phenomena that stand out from an underlying
unity. (He later reinterprets ecstases as horizons, in the sense of what
limits, surrounds or encloses, and in so doing discloses or makes available.)
According to Heidegger, temporality is a unity against which past, present and
future stand out as ecstases while remaining essentially interlocked. The
importance of this idea is that it frees the phenomenologist from thinking of
past, present and future as sequentially ordered groupings of distinct events.
Thus:
Temporalizing
does not signify that ecstases come in a ‘succession’. The future is not later
than having been, and having-been is not earlier than the Present. Temporality
temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in a process of having
been. (Being and Time 68: 401)
What
does this mean and why should we find it compelling? Perhaps the easiest way to
grasp Heidegger's insight here is to follow him in explicitly reinterpreting
the different elements of the structure of care in terms of the three
phenomenologically intertwined dimensions of temporality.
Dasein's
existence is characterized phenomenologically by thrown projection plus
fallenness/discourse. Heidegger argues that for each of these phenomena, one
particular dimension of temporality is primary. Thus projection is disclosed
principally as the manner in which Dasein orients itself towards its future.
Anticipation, as authentic projection, therefore becomes the predominantly
futural aspect of (what we can now call) authentic temporalizing, whereas
expectation, as inauthentic projection, occupies the same role for inauthentic
temporalizing. However, since temporality is at root a unitary structure,
thrownness, projection, falling and discourse must each have a multi-faceted
temporality. Anticipation, for example, requires that Dasein acknowledge the
unavoidable way in which its past is constitutive of who it is, precisely
because anticipation demands of Dasein that it project itself resolutely onto
(i.e., come to make its own) one of the various options established by its
cultural-historical embeddedness. And anticipation has a present-related aspect
too: in a process that Heidegger calls a moment of vision, Dasein, in
anticipating its own death, pulls away from they-self-dominated distractions of
the present.
Structurally
similar analyses are given for the other elements of the care structure. Here
is not the place to pursue the details but, at the most general level,
thrownness is identified predominantly, although not exclusively, as the manner
in which Dasein collects up its past (finding itself in relation to the
pre-structured field of intelligibility into which it has been enculturated),
while fallen-ness and discourse are identified predominantly, although not
exclusively, as present-oriented (e.g., in the case of fallen-ness, through
curiosity as a search for novelty in which Dasein is locked into the
distractions of the present and devalues the past and the projective future). A
final feature of Heidegger's intricate analysis concerns the way in which
authentic and inauthentic temporalizing are understood as prioritizing
different dimensions of temporality. Heidegger argues that because
future-directed anticipation is intertwined with projection onto death as a
possibility (thereby enabling the disclosure of Dasein's all-important
finitude), the “primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is
the future” (Being and Time 65: 378), whereas inauthentic temporalizing
(through structures such as ‘they’-determined curiosity) prioritizes the
present.
What
the foregoing summary of Heidegger's account of temporality makes clear is that
each event of intelligibility that makes up a ‘moment’ in Dasein's existence
must be unpacked using all three temporal ecstases. Each such event is
constituted by thrownness (past), projection (future) and falling/discourse
(present). In a sense, then, each such event transcends (goes beyond) itself as
a momentary episode of Being by, in the relevant sense, co-realizing a past and
a future along with a present. This explains why “the future is not later than
having been, and having-been is not earlier than the Present”. In the sense
that matters, then, Dasein is always a combination of the futural, the
historical and the present. And since futurality, historicality and presence,
understood in terms of projection, thrownness and fallenness/discourse, form
the structural dimensions of each event of intelligibility, it is Dasein's
essential temporality (or temporalizing) that provides the a priori
transcendental condition for there to be care (the sense-making that
constitutes Dasein's own distinctive mode of Being).
(Some
worries about Heidegger's analysis of time will be explored below. For a view
which is influenced by, and contains an original interpretation of, Heidegger
on time, see Stiegler's 1996/2003 analysis according to which human temporality
is constituted by technology, including alphabetical writing, as a form of
memory.)
In
the final major development of his analysis of temporality, Heidegger
identifies a phenomenon that he calls Dasein's historicality, understood
as the a priori condition on the basis of which past events and things may have
significance for us. The analysis begins with an observation that
Being-towards-death is only one aspect of Dasein's finitude.
[Death]
is only the ‘end’ of Dasein; and, taken formally, it is just one of the ends by
which Dasein's totality is closed round. The other ‘end’, however, is the
‘beginning’, the ‘birth’. Only that entity which is ‘between’ birth and death
presents the whole which we have been seeking… Dasein has [so far] been our
theme only in the way in which it exists ‘facing forward’, as it were, leaving
‘behind’ all that has been. Not only has Being-towards-the-beginning remained
unnoticed; but so too, and above all, has the way in which Dasein stretches
along between birth and death. (Being and Time 72: 425).
Here
Dasein's beginning (its ‘birth’) is to be interpreted not as a biological
event, but as a moment of enculturation, following which the a priori structure
underlying intelligibility (thrown projection plus falling/discourse) applies.
Dasein's beginning is thus a moment at which a biological human being has
become embedded within a pre-existing world, a culturally determined field of
intelligibility into which it is thrown and onto which it projects itself. Such
worlds are now to be reinterpreted historically as Dasein's heritage.
Echoing the way in which past, present and future were disclosed as intertwined
in the analysis of temporality, Dasein's historicality has the effect of
bringing the past (its heritage) alive in the present as a set of opportunities
for future action. In the original German, Heidegger calls this phenomenon Wiederholung,
which Macquarrie and Robinson translate as repetition. Although this is
an accurate translation of the German term, there is a way of hearing the word
‘repetition’ that is misleading with regard to Heidegger's usage. The idea here
is not that I can do nothing other than repeat the actions of my cultural
ancestors, but rather that, in authentic mode, I may appropriate those past
actions (own them, make them mine) as a set of general models or heroic
templates onto which I may creatively project myself. Thus, retrieving
may be a more appropriate translation. This notion of retrieving characterizes
the “specific movement in which Dasein is stretched along and stretches itself
along”, what Heidegger now calls Dasein's historizing. Historizing is an
a priori structure of Dasein's Being as care that constitutes a stretching
along between Dasein's birth as the entity that takes-as and death as its end,
between enculturation and finitude. “Factical Dasein exists as born; and, as
born, it is already dying, in the sense of Being-towards-death… birth and death
are ‘connected’ in a manner characteristic of Dasein. As care, Dasein is the
‘between’ ”(Being and Time 73: 426–7).
It
is debatable whether the idea of creative appropriation does enough to allay
the suspicion that the concept of heritage introduces a threat to our
individual freedom (in an ordinary sense of freedom) by way of some sort of
social determinism. For example, since historicality is an aspect of Dasein's
existential constitution, it is arguable that Heidegger effectively rules out
the possibility that I might reinvent myself in an entirely original way.
Moreover, Polt (1999) draws our attention to a stinging passage from earlier in
Being and Time which might be taken to suggest that any attempt to take
on board elements of cultures other than one's own should be judged an
inauthentic practice indicative of fallen-ness. Thus:
the
opinion may now arise that understanding the most alien cultures and
‘synthesizing’ them with one's own may lead to Dasein's becoming for the first
time thoroughly and genuinely enlightened about itself. Versatile curiosity and
restlessly ‘knowing it all’ masquerade as a universal understanding of Dasein.
(Being and Time 38: 178)
This
sets the stage for Heidegger's own final elucidation of human freedom.
According to Heidegger, I am genuinely free precisely when I recognize that I
am a finite being with a heritage and when I achieve an authentic relationship
with that heritage through the creative appropriation of it. As he explains:
Once
one has grasped the finitude of one's existence, it snatches one back from the
endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to
one—those of comfortableness, shirking and taking things lightly—and brings
Dasein to the simplicity of its fate. This is how we designate Dasein's
primordial historizing, which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which
Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it
has inherited and yet has chosen” (Being and Time 74: 435)
This
phenomenon, a final reinterpretation of the notion of resoluteness, is what
Heidegger calls primordial historizing or fate. And crucially,
historizing is not merely a structure that is partly constitutive of individual
authentic Dasein. Heidegger also points out the shared primordial
historizing of a community, what he calls its destiny.
When
the contemporary reader of Being and Time encounters the concepts of
heritage, fate and destiny, and places them not only in the context of the
political climate of mid-to-late 1920s Germany, but also alongside Heidegger's
later membership of the Nazi party, it is hard not to hear dark undertones of
cultural chauvinism and racial prejudice. This worry becomes acute when one
considers the way in which these concepts figure in passages such as the
following, from the inaugural rectoral address that Heidegger gave at Freiburg
University in 1933.
The
third bond [knowledge service, in addition to labour service and military
service] is the one that binds the [German] students to the spiritual mission
of the German Volk. This Volk is playing an active role in shaping its own fate
by placing its history into the openness of the overpowering might of all the
world-shaping forces of human existence and by struggling anew to secure its
spiritual world… The three bonds—through the Volk to the destiny of the
state in its spiritual mission—are equally original aspects of the
German essence. (The Self-Assertion of the German University, 35–6)
The
issue of Heidegger's later relationship with Nazi politics and ideology will be
discussed briefly below. For the moment, however, it is worth saying that the
temptation to offer extreme social determinist or Nazi reconstructions of Being
and Time is far from irresistible. It is at least arguable that Heidegger's
claim at this point in his work is ‘merely’ that it is only on the basis of
fate—an honest and explicit retrieval of my own culture which allows me to
recognize and accept the manifold ways in which I am shaped by that culture—that
I can open up a genuine path to personal reconstruction or to the possibly
enriching structures that other cultures have to offer. And that does not sound
nearly so pernicious.
One
might think that an unpalatable relativism is entailed by any view which
emphasizes that understanding is never preconception-free. But that would be
too quick. Of course, if authentic Dasein were individualized in the sense of
being a self-sufficient Cartesian subject, then perhaps an extreme form of
subjectivist relativism would indeed beckon. Fortunately, however, authentic
Dasein isn't a Cartesian subject, in part because it has a transformed and not
a severed relationship with the ‘they’. This reconnects us with our earlier
remark that the philosophical framework advocated within Being and Time
appears to mandate a kind of cultural relativism. This seems right, but
it is important to try to understand precisely what sort of cultural relativism
is on offer. Here is one interpretation.
Although
worlds (networks of involvements, what Heidegger sometimes calls Reality)
are culturally relative phenomena, Heidegger occasionally seems to suggest that
nature, as it is in itself, is not. Thus, on the one hand, nature may be
discovered as ready-to-hand equipment: the “wood is a forest of timber, the
mountain is a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in
the sails’ ” (Being and Time 15: 100). Under these
circumstances, nature is revealed in certain culturally specific forms
determined by our socially conditioned patterns of skilled practical activity.
On the other hand, when nature is discovered as present-at-hand, by say
science, its intelligibility has an essentially cross-cultural character.
Indeed, Heidegger often seems to hold the largely commonsense view that there
are culture-independent causal properties of nature which explain why it is
that you can make missiles out of rocks or branches, but not out of air or
water. Science can tell us both what those causal properties are, and how the
underlying causal processes work. Such properties and processes are what
Heidegger calls the Real, and he comments: “[the] fact that Reality
[intelligibility] is ontologically grounded in the Being of Dasein does not
signify that only when Dasein exists and as long as Dasein exists can the Real
[e.g., nature as revealed by science] be as that which in itself it is” (Being
and Time, 43: 255).
If
the picture just sketched is a productive way to understand Heidegger, then,
perhaps surprisingly, his position might best be thought of as a mild kind of
scientific realism. For, on this interpretation, one of Dasein's cultural
practices, the practice of science, has the special quality of revealing
natural entities as they are in themselves, that is, independently of Dasein's
culturally conditioned uses and articulations of them. Crucially, however, this
sort of scientific realism maintains ample conceptual room for Sheehan's
well-observed point that, for Heidegger, at every stage of his thinking, “there
is no ‘is’ to things without a taking-as… no sense that is independent of human
being… Before homo sapiens evolved, there was no ‘being’ on earth…
because ‘being’ for Heidegger does not mean ‘in existence’ ” (Sheehan 2001). Indeed, Being concerns sense-making
(intelligibility), and the different ways in which entities make sense to us, including
as present-at-hand, are dependent on the fact that we are Dasein, creatures
with a particular mode of Being. So while natural entities do not require the
existence of Dasein in order just to occur (in an ordinary, straightforward
sense of ‘occur’), they do require Dasein in order to be intelligible at all,
including as entities that just occur. Understood properly, then, the
following two claims that Heidegger makes are entirely consistent with each
other. First: “Being (not entities) is dependent upon the understanding of
Being; that is to say, Reality (not the Real) is dependent upon care”.
Secondly: “[O]nly as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an
understanding of Being is ontically possible), ‘is there’ Being. When Dasein
does not exist, ‘independence’ ‘is’ not either, nor ‘is’ the ‘in-itself’ ”. (Both quotations from Being and Time, 43: 255.)
How
does all this relate to Heidegger's account of truth? Answering this question
adds a new dimension to the pivotal phenomenon of revealing. Heidegger points
out that the philosophical tradition standardly conceives of truth as attaching
to propositions, and as involving some sort of correspondence between
propositions and states of affairs. But whereas for the tradition (as Heidegger
characterizes it), propositional truth as correspondence exhausts the
phenomenon of truth, for Heidegger, it is merely the particular manifestation
of truth that is operative in those domains, such as science, that concern
themselves with the Real. According to Heidegger, propositional truth as
correspondence is made possible by a more fundamental phenomenon that he dubs
‘original truth’. Heidegger's key thought here is that before (in a conceptual
sense of ‘before’) there can be any question of correspondence between
propositions and states of affairs, there needs to be in place a field of
intelligibility (Reality, a world), a sense-making structure within which
entities may be found. Unconcealing is the Dasein-involving process that
establishes this prior field of intelligibility. This is the domain of original
truth—what we might call truth as revealing or truth as unconcealing.
Original truth cannot be reduced to propositional truth as correspondence,
because the former is an a priori, transcendental condition for the latter. Of
course, since Dasein is the source of intelligibility, truth as unconcealing is
possible only because there is Dasein, which means that without Dasein there
would be no truth—including propositional truth as correspondence. But it is
reasonable to hear this seemingly relativistic consequence as a further
modulation of the point (see above) that entities require Dasein in order to be
intelligible at all, including, now, as entities that are capable of entering
into states of affairs that may correspond to propositions.
Heidegger's
analysis of truth also countenances a third manifestation of the phenomenon,
one that is perhaps best characterized as being located between original
truth and propositional truth. This intermediate phenomenon is what might be
called Heidegger's instrumental notion of truth (Dahlstrom 2001,
Overgaard 2002). As we saw earlier, for Heidegger, the referential structure of
significance may be articulated not only by words but by skilled practical
activity (e.g., hammering) in which items of equipment are used in culturally
appropriate ways. By Heidegger's lights, such equipmental activity counts as a manifestation
of unconcealing and thus as the realization of a species of truth. This fact
further threatens the idea that truth attaches only to propositions, although
some uses of language may themselves be analysed as realizing the instrumental
form of truth (e.g., when I exclaim that ‘this hammer is too heavy for the
job’, rather than assert that it has the objective property of weighing 2.5
kilos; Overgaard 2002, 77; cf. Being and Time 33:199–200).
It
is at this point that an ongoing dispute in Heidegger scholarship comes to the
fore. It has been argued (e.g., Dahlstrom 2001, Overgaard 2002) that a number
of prominent readings of Heidegger (e.g., Okrent 1988, Dreyfus 1991) place such
heavy philosophical emphasis on Dasein as a site of skilled practical activity
that they end up simply identifying Dasein's understanding of Being with
skilled practical activity. Because of this shared tendency, such readings are
often grouped together as advocating a pragmatist interpretation of
Heidegger. According to its critics, the inadequacy of the pragmatist
interpretation is exposed once it is applied to Heidegger's account of truth.
For although the pragmatist interpretation correctly recognizes that, for
Heidegger, propositional correspondence is not the most fundamental phenomenon
of truth, it takes the fundamental variety to be exhausted by Dasein's
sense-making skilled practical activity. But (the critic points out) this is to
ignore the fact that even though instrumental truth is more basic than
traditional propositional truth, nevertheless it too depends on a prior field
of significance (one that determines the correct and incorrect uses of
equipment) and thus on the phenomenon of original truth. Put another way, the
pragmatist interpretation falls short because it fails to distinguish original
truth from instrumental truth. It is worth commenting here that not every
so-called pragmatist reading is on a par with respect to this issue. For
example, Dreyfus (2008) separates out (what he calls) background coping
(Dasein's familiarity with, and knowledge of how to navigate the meaningful
structures of, its world) from (what he calls) skilled or absorbed
coping (Dasein's skilled practical activity), and argues that, for Heidegger,
the former is ontologically more basic than the latter. If original truth is
manifested in background coping, and instrumental truth in skilled coping, this
disrupts the thought that the two notions of truth are being run together (for
discussion, see Overgaard 2002 85–6, note 17).
How
should one respond to Heidegger's analysis of truth? One objection is that
original truth ultimately fails to qualify as a form of truth at all. As
Tugendhat (1967) observes, it is a plausible condition on the acceptability of
any proposed account of truth that it accommodate a distinction between what is
asserted or intended and how things are in themselves. It is clear that
propositional truth as correspondence satisfies this condition, and notice that
(if we squint a little) so too does instrumental truth, since despite my
intentions, I can fail, in my actions, to use the hammer in ways that
successfully articulate its place in the relevant equipmental network. However,
as Tugendhat argues, it is genuinely hard to see how original truth as
unconcealing could possibly support a distinction between what is asserted or
intended and how things are in themselves. After all, unconcealing is, in part,
the process through which entities are made intelligible to Dasein in such a
way that the distinction in question can apply. Thus, Tugendhat concludes,
although unconcealing may be a genuine phenomenon that constitutes a
transcendental condition for there to be truth, it is not itself a species of
truth. (For discussions of Tugendhat's critique, see Dahlstrom 2001, Overgaard
2002.)
Whether
or not unconcealing ought to count as a species of truth, it is arguable that
the place which it (along with its partner structure, Reality) occupies in the
Heideggerian framework must ultimately threaten even the mild kind of
scientific realism that we have been attributing, somewhat tentatively, to
Heidegger. The tension comes into view just at the point where unconcealing is
reinterpreted in terms of Dasein's essential historicality. Because
intelligibility, and thus unconcealing, has an essentially historical
character, it is difficult to resist the thought that the propositional and
instrumental truths generated out of some specific field of intelligibility
will be relativistically tied to a particular culture in a particular time period.
Moreover, at one point, Heidegger suggests that even truth as revealed by
science is itself subject to this kind of relativistic constraint. Thus he says
that “every factical science is always manifestly in the grip of historizing” (Being
and Time 76: 444). The implication is that, for Heidegger, one cannot
straightforwardly subject the truth of one age to the standards of another,
which means, for example, that contemporary chemistry and alchemical chemistry
might both be true (cf. Dreyfus 1990, 261–2). But even if this more radical
position is ultimately Heidegger's, there remains space here for some form of
realism. Given the transcendental relation that, according to Heidegger,
obtains between fields of intelligibility and science, the view on offer might
still support a historically conditioned form of Kantian empirical realism with
respect to science. Nevertheless it must, it seems, reject the full-on
scientific realist commitment to the idea that the history of science is
regulated by progress towards some final and unassailable set of scientifically
established truths about nature, by a journey towards, as it were, God's
science (Haugeland 2007).
The
realist waters in which our preliminary interpretation has been swimming are
muddied even further by another aspect of Dasein's essential historicality.
Officially, it is seemingly not supposed to be a consequence of that
historicality that we cannot discover universal features of ourselves. The
evidence for this is that there are many conclusions reached in Being and
Time that putatively apply to all Dasein, for example that Dasein's
everyday experience is characterized by the structural domains of
readiness-to-hand, un-readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand (for additional
evidence, see Polt 1999 92–4). Moreover, Heidegger isn't saying that any route
to understanding is as good as any other. For example, he prioritizes
authenticity as the road to an answer to the question of the meaning of Being.
Thus:
the
idea of existence, which guides us as that which we see in advance, has been
made definite [transformed from pre-ontological to ontological, from implicit
and vague to explicitly articulated] by the clarification of our ownmost
potentiality-for-Being. (Being and Time 63: 358)
Still,
if this priority claim and the features shared by all Dasein really are
supposed to be ahistorical, universal conditions (applicable everywhere
throughout history), we are seemingly owed an account of just how such
conditions are even possible, given Dasein's essential historicality.
Finally,
one might wonder whether the ‘realist Heidegger’ can live with the account of
temporality given in Being and Time. If temporality is the a priori
condition for us to encounter entities as equipment, and if, in the relevant
sense, the unfolding of time coincides with the unfolding of Dasein (Dasein, as
temporality, temporalizes; see above), then equipmental entities will be
intelligible to us only in (what we might call) Dasein-time, the time that we
ourselves are. Now, we have seen previously that nature is often encountered as
equipment, which means that natural equipment will be intelligible to us only
in Dasein-time. But what about nature in a non-equipmental form—nature (as one
might surely be tempted to say) as it is in itself? One might try to argue that
those encounters with nature that reveal nature as it is in itself are
precisely those encounters that reveal nature as present-at-hand, and that to
reveal nature as present-at-hand is, in part, to reveal nature within present-at-hand
time (e.g., clock time), a time which is, in the relevant sense, independent of
Dasein. Unfortunately there's a snag with this story (and thus for the attempt
to see Heidegger as a realist). Heidegger claims that presence-at-hand (as
revealed by theoretical reflection) is subject to the same Dasein-dependent
temporality as readiness-to-hand:
…if
Dasein's Being is completely grounded in temporality, then temporality must
make possible Being-in-the-world and therewith Dasein's transcendence; this
transcendence in turn provides the support for concernful Being alongside
entities within-the-world, whether this Being is theoretical or practical.
(Being and Time 69: 415, my emphasis)
But
now if theoretical investigations reveal nature in present-at-hand time, and if
in the switching over from the practical use of equipment to the theoretical
investigation of objects, time remains the same Dasein-time, then
present-at-hand time is Dasein-dependent too. Given this, it seems that the
only way we can give any sense to the idea of nature as it is in itself is to
conceive of such nature as being outside of time. Interestingly, in the History
of the Concept of Time (a text based on Heidegger's notes for a 1925
lecture course and often thought of as a draft of Being and Time),
Heidegger seems to embrace this very option, arguing that nature is within time
only when it is encountered in Dasein's world, and concluding that nature as it
is in itself is entirely atemporal. It is worth noting the somewhat Kantian
implication of this conclusion: if all understanding is grounded in
temporality, then the atemporality of nature as it is in itself would mean
that, for Heidegger, we cannot understand natural things as they really are in
themselves (cf. Dostal 1993).
After
Being and Time there is a shift in Heidegger's thinking that he himself
christened ‘the turn’ (die Kehre). In a 1947 piece, in which Heidegger
distances his views from Sartre's existentialism, he links the turn to his own
failure to produce the missing divisions of Being and Time.
The
adequate execution and completion of this other thinking that abandons subjectivity
is surely made more difficult by the fact that in the publication of Being
and Time the third division of the first part, “Time and Being,” was held
back… Here everything is reversed. The division in question was held back
because everything failed in the adequate saying of this turning and did not
succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics… This turning is not a
change of standpoint from Being and Time, but in it the thinking that
was sought first arrives at the location of that dimension out of which Being
and Time is experienced, that is to say, experienced from the fundamental
experience of the oblivion of Being. (Letter on Humanism,
pp. 231–2)
Notice
that while, in the turning, “everything is reversed”, nevertheless it is “not a
change of standpoint from Being and Time”, so what we should expect from
the later philosophy is a pattern of significant discontinuities with Being
and Time, interpretable from within a basic project and a set of concerns
familiar from that earlier text. The quotation from the Letter on Humanism
provides some clues about what to look for. Clearly we need to understand what
is meant by the abandonment of subjectivity, what kind of barrier is erected by
the language of metaphysics, and what is involved in the oblivion of Being. The
second and third of these issues will be clarified later. The first bears
immediate comment.
At
root Heidegger's later philosophy shares the deep concerns of Being and Time,
in that it is driven by the same preoccupation with Being and our relationship
with it that propelled the earlier work. In a fundamental sense, then, the
question of Being remains the question. However, Being and Time
addresses the question of Being via an investigation of Dasein, the kind of
being whose Being is an issue for it. As we have seen, this investigation takes
the form of a transcendental hermeneutic phenomenology that begins with
ordinary human experience. It is arguable that, in at least one important
sense, it is this philosophical methodology that the later Heidegger is
rejecting when he talks of his abandonment of subjectivity. Of course, as
conceptualized in Being and Time, Dasein is not a Cartesian subject, so
the abandonment of subjectivity is not as simple as a shift of attention away
from Dasein and towards some other route to Being. Nevertheless the later
Heidegger does seem to think that his earlier focus on Dasein bears the stain
of a subjectivity that ultimately blocks the path to an understanding of Being.
This is not to say that the later thinking turns away altogether from the project
of transcendental hermeneutic phenomenology. The project of illuminating the a
priori conditions on the basis of which entities show up as intelligible to us
is still at the heart of things. What the later thinking involves is a
reorientation of the basic project so that, as we shall see, the point of
departure is no longer a detailed description of ordinary human experience.
(For an analysis of ‘the turn’ that identifies a number of different senses of
the term at work in Heidegger's thinking, and which in some ways departs from
the brief treatment given here, see Sheehan 2010.)
A
further difficulty in getting to grips with Heidegger's later philosophy is
that, unlike the early thought, which is heavily centred on a single text, the
later thought is distributed over a large number and range of works, including
books, lecture courses, occasional addresses, and presentations given to
non-academic audiences. So one needs a navigational strategy. The strategy
adopted here will be to view the later philosophy through the lens of
Heidegger's strange and perplexing study from the 1930s called Contributions
to Philosophy (From Enowning), (Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)),
henceforth referred to as the Contributions. (For a book-length
introduction to the Contributions, see Vallega-Neu 2003. For a useful
collection of papers, see Scott et al. 2001.) The key themes that shape the
later philosophy will be identified in the Contributions, but those
themes will be explored in a way that draws on, and make connections with, a
selection of other works. From this partial expedition, the general pattern of
Heidegger's post-turn thinking, although not every aspect of it, will emerge.
The
Contributions was written between 1936 and 1938. Intriguingly, Heidegger
asked for the work not to appear in print until after the publication of all
his lecture courses, and although his demand wasn't quite heeded by the editors
of his collected works, the Contributions was not published in German
until 1989 and not in English until 1999. To court a perhaps overly dramatic
telling of Heideggerian history, if one puts a lot of weight on Heidegger's
view of when the Contributions should have been published, one might
conceivably think of those later writings that, in terms of when they were
produced, followed the Contributions as something like the training
material needed to understand the earlier work (see e.g., Polt 1999 140). In
any case, during his lifetime, Heidegger showed the Contributions to no
more than a few close colleagues. The excitement with which the eventual
publication of the text was greeted by Heidegger's readers was partly down to
the fact that one of the chosen few granted a sneak preview was the influential
interpreter of Heidegger, Otto Pöggeler, who then proceeded to give it some
rather extraordinary advance publicity, describing it as the work in which
Heidegger's genuine and complete thinking is captured (see e.g., Pöggeler
1963/1987).
Whether
or not the hype surrounding the Contributions was justified remains a
debated question among Heidegger scholars (see e.g., Sheehan 2001, Thomson
2003). What is clear, however, is that reading the work is occasionally a
bewildering experience. Rather than a series of systematic hermeneutic spirals
in the manner of Being and Time, the Contributions is organised
as something like a musical fugue, that is, as a suite of overlapping
developments of a single main theme (Schoenbohm 2001; Thomson 2003). And while
the structure of the Contributions is challenging enough, the language
in which it is written can appear to be wilfully obscurantist. Polt (1999, 140)
comments that “the most important sections of the text can appear to be written
in pure Heideggerese… [as Heidegger] exploits the sounds and senses of German
in order to create an idiosyncratic symphony of meanings”. Less charitably,
Sheehan (2001) describes it as “a needlessly difficult text, obsessively
repetitious, badly in need of an editor”, while Schurmann (1992, 313, quoted by
Thomson 2003, 57) complains that “at times one may think one is reading a piece
of Heideggerian plagiarism, so encumbered is it with ellipses and assertoric
monoliths”. Arguably, the style in which the Contributions is written is
‘merely’ the most extreme example (perhaps, the purest example) of a ‘poetic’
style that Heidegger adopts pretty much throughout the later philosophy. This
stylistic aspect of the turn is an issue discussed below. For the moment,
however, it is worth noting that, in the stylistic transition achieved in the Contributions,
Heidegger's writing finally leaves behind all vestiges of the idea that Being
can be represented accurately using some pseudo-scientific philosophical
language. The goal, instead, is to respond appropriately to Being in
language, to forge a pathway to another kind of thinking—Being-historical
thinking (for discussion of this term, see Vallega 2001, von Herrmann 2001,
Vallega-Neu 2003, 28-9). In its attempt to achieve this, the Contributions
may be viewed as setting the agenda for Heidegger's post-turn thought. So what
are the central themes that appear in the Contributions and which then
resonate throughout the later works? Four stand out: Being as appropriation (an
idea which, as we shall see, is bound up with a reinterpretation of the notion
of dwelling that, in terms of explicit textual development, takes place largely
outwith the text of the Contributions itself); technology (or
machination); safeguarding (or sheltering); and the gods. Each of these themes
will now be explored.
In
Being and Time, the most fundamental a priori transcendental condition
for there to be Dasein's distinctive mode of Being which is identified is
temporality. In the later philosophy, the ontological focus ultimately shifts
to the claim that human Being consists most fundamentally in dwelling. This
shift of attention emerges out of a subtle reformulation of the question of
Being itself, a reformulation performed in the Contributions. The
question now becomes not ‘What is the meaning of Being?’ but rather ‘How does
Being essentially unfold?’. This reformulation means (in a way that should
become clearer in a moment) that we are now asking the question of Being not
from the perspective of Dasein, but from the perspective of Being (see above on
abandoning subjectivity). But it also suggests that Being needs to be
understood as fundamentally a timebound, historical process. As
Heidegger puts it: “A being is: Be-ing holds sway [unfolds]”. (Contributions
10: 22. Quotations from the Contributions will be given in the form ‘section:
page number’ where ‘page number’ refers to the Emad and Maly English
translation. The hyphenated term ‘be-ing’ is adopted by Emad and Maly, in order
to respect the fact that, in the Contributions, Heidegger substitutes
the archaic spelling ‘Seyn’ for the contemporary ‘Sein’ as a way of distancing
himself further from the traditional language of metaphysics. This
translational convention, which has not become standard practice in the
secondary literature, will not be adopted here, except in quotations from the
Emad and Maly translation.)
Further
aspects of the essential unfolding of Being are revealed by what is perhaps the
key move in the Contributions—a rethinking of Being in terms of the
notion of Ereignis, a term translated variously as ‘event’ (most closely
reflecting its ordinary German usage), ‘appropriation’, ‘appropriating event’,
‘event of appropriation’ or ‘enowning’. (For an analysis which tracks
Heidegger's use of the term Ereignis at various stages of his thought,
see Vallega-Neu 2010). The history of Being is now conceived as a series of
appropriating events in which the different dimensions of human
sense-making—the religious, political, philosophical (and so on) dimensions
that define the culturally conditioned epochs of human history—are transformed.
Each such transformation is a revolution in human patterns of intelligibility,
so what is appropriated in the event is Dasein and thus the human capacity for
taking-as (see e.g., Contributions 271: 343). Once appropriated in this
way, Dasein operates according to a specific set of established sense-making
practices and structures. In a Kuhnian register, one might think of this as the
normal sense-making that follows a paradigm-shift. But now what is it that does
the appropriating? Heidegger's answer to this question is Being. Thus Heidegger
writes of the “En-ownment [appropriation] of Da-sein by be-ing” (Contributions
141: 184) and of “man as owned by be-ing” (Contributions 141: 185).
Indeed, this appropriation of Dasein by Being is what enables Being to unfold:
“Be-ing needs man in order to hold sway [unfold]” (Contributions 133:
177). The claim that Being appropriates Dasein might seem to invite the
adoption of an ethereal voice and a far-off look in the eye, but any such
temptation towards mysticism of this kind really ought to be resisted. The
mystical reading seems to depend on a view according to which “be-ing holds
sway ‘for itself’ ” and Dasein “takes up the relating to be-ing”, such that
Being is “something over-against” Dasein (Contributions 135: 179). But
Heidegger argues that this relational view would be ‘misleading’. That said, to
make proper inroads into the mystical reading, we need to reacquaint ourselves
with the notion of dwelling.
As
we have seen, the term ‘dwelling’ appears in Being and Time, where it is
used to capture the distinctive manner in which Dasein is in the world.
The term continues to play this role in the later philosophy, but, in texts
such as Building Dwelling, Thinking (1954), it is reinterpreted and made
philosophically central to our understanding of Being. This reinterpretation
of, and the new emphasis on, dwelling is bound up with the idea from the Contributions
of Being as appropriation. To explain: Where one dwells is where one is at
home, where one has a place. This sense of place is what grounds
Heidegger's existential notion of spatiality, as developed in the later
philosophy (see Malpas 2006). In dwelling, then, Dasein is located within a set
of sense-making practices and structures with which it is familiar. This way of
unravelling the phenomenon of dwelling enables us to see more clearly—and more
concretely—what is meant by the idea of Being as event/appropriation. Being is
an event in that it takes (appropriates) place (where one is at
home, one's sense-making practices and structures) (cf. Polt 1999 148). In
other words, Being appropriates Dasein in that, in its unfolding, it
essentially happens in and to Dasein's patterns of sense-making. This
way of thinking about the process of appropriation does rather less to invite
obscurantist mysticism.
The
reinterpretation of dwelling in terms of Being as appropriation is ultimately
intertwined with a closely related reinterpretation of what is meant by a
world. One can see the latter development in a pregnant passage from
Heidegger's 1954 piece, Building Dwelling Thinking.
[H]uman
being consists in dwelling and, indeed, dwelling in the sense of the stay of
mortals on the earth.
But
‘on the earth’ already means ‘under the sky.’ Both of these also mean
‘remaining before the divinities’ and include a ‘belonging to men's being with
one another.’ By a primal oneness the four—earth and sky, divinities and
mortals—belong together in one. (351)
So,
human beings dwell in that they stay (are at home) on the earth, under the sky,
before the divinities, and among the mortals (that is, with one another as
mortals). It is important for Heidegger that these dimensions of dwelling are
conceived not as independent structures but as (to use a piece of terminology
from Being and Time) ecstases—phenomena that stand out from an
underlying unity. That underlying unity of earth, sky, divinities and
mortals—the ‘simple oneness of the four’ as Heidegger puts it in Building
Dwelling Thinking (351)—is what he calls the fourfold. The fourfold
is the transformed notion of world that applies within the later work
(see e.g., The Thing; for an analysis of the fourfold that concentrates
on its role as a thinking of things, see Mitchell 2010). It is possible to glimpse
the character of the world-as-fourfold by noting that whereas the world as
understood through Being and Time is a culturally conditioned structure
distinct from nature, the world-as-fourfold appears to be an integrated
combination of nature (earth and sky) and culture (divinities and mortals).
(Two remarks: First, it may not be obvious why the divinities count as part of
culture. This will be explained in a moment. Secondly, the later Heidegger
sometimes continues to employ the sense of world that he established in Being
and Time, which is why it is useful to signal the new usage as the
transformed notion of world, or as the world-as-fourfold.)
There
is something useful, as a preliminary move, about interpreting the fourfold as
a combination of nature and culture, but it is an idea that must be handled
with care. For one thing, if what is meant by nature is the material world and
its phenomena as understood by natural science, then Heidegger's account of the
fourfold tells against any straightforward identification of earth and sky with
nature. Why this is becomes clear once one sees how Heidegger describes the
earth and the sky in Building Dwelling Thinking. “Earth is the serving
bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into
plant and animal… The sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the
changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year's seasons and their
changes, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency
and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether”
(351). What Heidegger's language here indicates is that the earth-as-dwelt-on
and the sky-as-dwelt-under are spaces for a mode of habitation by human beings
that one might call poetic rather than scientific. So, the nature of
dwelling is the nature of the poet. In dwelling we inhabit the poetic (for
discussion, see e.g., Young 2002, 99–100).
How
does this idea of dwelling as poetic habitation work for the cultural aspects
of the fourfold—dwelling among the mortals and before the divinities? To dwell
among the mortals is to be “capable of death as death” (Building
Dwelling Thinking 352). In the language of Being and Time, this
would be to enter into an authentic and thus non-evasive relationship with
death (see above). However, as we shall see in a moment, the later Heidegger
has a different account of the nothing and thus of the internal relation with
the nothing that death involves. It is this reworking of the idea of the
nothing that ultimately marks out a newly conceived non-evasive relationship
with death as an aspect of dwelling, understood in terms of poetic habitation.
The notion of dwelling before the divinities also turns on the development of a
theme established in Being and Time, namely that intelligibility is
itself cultural and historical in character. More specifically, according to Being
and Time, the a priori transcendental conditions for intelligibility are to
be interpreted in terms of the phenomenon of heritage, that is as culturally
determined structures that form pre-existing fields of intelligibility into
which individual human beings are thrown and onto which they project
themselves. A key aspect of this idea is that there exist historically
important individuals who constitute heroic cultural templates onto which I may
now creatively project myself. In the later philosophy these heroic figures are
reborn poetically as the divinities of the fourfold, as “the ones to come” (Contributions
248–52: 277–81), and as the “beckoning messengers of the godhead” (Building
Dwelling Thinking 351). When Heidegger famously announces that only a god
can save us (Only a God can Save Us), or that “the last god is not the
end but the other beginning of immeasurable possibilities for our history” (Contributions
256: 289), he has in mind not a religious intervention in an ‘ordinary’ sense
of the divine, but rather a transformational event in which a secularized sense
of the sacred—a sensitivity to the fact that beings are granted to us in
the essential unfolding of Being—is restored (more on this below).
The
notion of dwelling as poetic habitation opens up a path to what Heidegger calls
‘the mystery’ (not to be confused with the kind of obscurantist mysticism
discussed above). Even though the world always opens up as meaningful in a
particular way to any individual human being as a result of the specific
heritage into which he or she has been enculturated, there are of course a vast
number of alternative fields of intelligibility ‘out there’ that would be
available to each of us, if only we could gain access to them by
becoming simultaneously embedded in different heritages. But Heidegger's
account of human existence means that any such parallel embedding is ruled out,
so the plenitude of alternative fields of intelligibility must remain a mystery
to us. In Heidegger's later philosophy this mysterious region of Being emerges
as a structure that, although not illuminated poetically in dwelling as a
particular world-as-fourfold, nevertheless constitutes an essential aspect of
dwelling in that it is ontologically co-present with any such world.
Appropriation is necessarily a twofold event: as Dasein is thrown into an
intelligible world, vast regions of Being are plunged into darkness. But that
darkness is a necessary condition for there to be any intelligibility at all.
As Heidegger puts it in The Question Concerning Technology (330), “[a]ll
revealing belongs within a harboring and a concealing. But that which frees
[entities for intelligibility]—the mystery—is concealed and always concealing
itself…. Freedom [sense-making, the revealing of beings] is that which conceals
in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing shimmers the veil that hides
the essential occurrence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils”.
It
is worth pausing here to comment on the fact that, in his 1935 essay The
Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger writes of a conflict between
earth and world. This idea may seem to sit unhappily alongside the simple
oneness of the four. The essay in question is notoriously difficult, but the
notion of the mystery may help. Perhaps the pivotal thought is as follows:
Natural materials (the earth), as used in artworks, enter into intelligibility
by establishing certain culturally codified meanings—a world in the sense of Being
and Time. Simultaneously, however, those natural materials suggest the
existence of a vast range of other possible, but to us unintelligible,
meanings, by virtue of the fact that they could have been used to
realize those alternative meanings. The conflict, then, turns on the way in
which, in the midst of a world, the earth suggests the presence of the mystery.
This is one way to hear passages such as the following: “The world, in resting
upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure
anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always
to draw the world into itself and keep it there” (Origin of the Work of Art
174).
Because
the mystery is unintelligible, it is the nothing (no-thing). It is
nonetheless a positive ontological phenomenon—a necessary feature of the
essential unfolding of Being. This vision of the nothing, as developed in
Heidegger's What is Metaphysics?, his 1929 inaugural lecture as
Professor of Philosophy at Freiburg, famously attracts the philosophical
disdain of the logical positivist Carnap. Carnap judged Heidegger's lecture to
turn on a series of unverifiable statements, and thus to be a paradigm case of
metaphysical nonsense (Carnap 1932/1959; for an nice account and analysis of
the disagreement between Heidegger and Carnap, see Critchley 2001). But placing
Carnap's positivist critique to one side, the idea of the nothing allows
Heidegger to rethink our relationship with death in relation to poetic habitation.
In Being and Time, Being-towards-death is conceived as a relation to the
possibility of one's own non-existence. This gives us a sense in which Dasein
has an internal structural relation to the nothing. That internal structural
relation remains crucial to the later philosophy, but now ‘the nothing’ is to
be heard explicitly as ‘the mystery’, a kind of ‘dark matter’ of
intelligibility that must remain concealed in the unfolding of Being through
which beings are unconcealed. This necessary concealment is “the essential
belongingness of the not to being as such” (Contributions 160: 199). In
Being-towards-death, this “essential belongingness” is “sheltered” and “comes
to light with a singular keenness” (Contributions 160: 199). This is
because (echoing a point made earlier) the concealing-unconcealing structure of
Being is ultimately to be traced to Dasein's essential finitude. Sheehan (2001)
puts it like this: “[o]ur finitude makes all ‘as’-taking… possible by requiring
us to understand things not immediately and ontically… but indirectly and
ontologically (= imperfectly), through their being”. In Being-towards-death,
the human finitude that grounds the mystery, the plenitude of possible worlds
in which I am not, is highlighted. As mortals, then, our internal relation to
death links us to the mystery (see The Thing). So dwelling (as poetic
habitation) involves not only embeddedness in the fourfold, but also, as part
of a unitary ontological structure, a necessary relationship with the mystery.
(As mentioned earlier (2.2.7), it is arguable that the sense of the nothing as
unactualized possibilities of Being is already at work in Being and Time
(see Vallega-Neu 2003, 21). Indeed, Heidegger's explicit remarks on
Being-towards-death in the Contributions (sections 160–2) suggest that
it is. But even if that is so, the idea undoubtedly finds its fullest
expression in the later work.)
If
the essence of human Being is to dwell in the fourfold, then human beings are
to the extent that they so dwell. And this will be achieved to the extent that
human beings realize the “basic character of dwelling”, which Heidegger now
argues is a matter of safeguarding “the fourfold in its essential
unfolding” (Building Dwelling Thinking, 352). Such safeguarding is
unpacked as a way of Being in which human beings save the earth, receive the
sky as sky, await the divinities as divinities, and initiate their own
essential being as mortals. Perhaps the best way to understand this four-way
demand is to explore Heidegger's claim that modern humans, especially modern
Western humans, systematically fail to meet it. That is, we are marked out by
our loss of dwelling—our failure to safeguard the fourfold in its essential
unfolding. This existential malaise is what Heidegger refers to in the Letter
on Humanism as the oblivion of Being. As we are about to see, the fact that
this is the basic character of our modern human society is, according to
Heidegger, explained by the predominance of a mode of sense-making that, in the
Contributions, he calls machination, but which he later (and more
famously) calls technology.
In
his 1953 piece The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger begins with
the everyday account of technology according to which technology is the vast
array of instruments, machines, artefacts and devices that we human beings
invent, build, and then exploit. On this view technology is basically a tool that
we control. Heidegger claims that this everyday account is, in a sense,
correct, but it provides only a limited “instrumental and anthropological
definition” of technology (Question Concerning Technology 312). It
depicts technology as a means to an end (instrumental) and as a product of
human activity (anthropological). What needs to be exposed and interrogated,
however, is something that is passed over by the everyday account, namely the essence
of technology. To bring this into view, Heidegger reinterprets his earlier
notion of intelligibility in terms of the concept of a clearing. A
clearing is a region of Being in which things are revealed as mattering in some
specific way or another. To identify the essence of technology is to lay bare
technology as a clearing, that is, to describe a technological mode of Being.
As Heidegger puts it in the Contributions (61: 88), “[i]n the context of
the being-question, this word [machination, technology] does not name a human
comportment but a manner of the essential swaying of being”.
So
what is the character of entities as revealed technologically? Heidegger's
claim is that the “revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology…
[is]… a challenging… which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it
supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such” (Question
Concerning Technology 320). The mode of revealing characteristic of modern
technology understands phenomena in general—including the non-biological
natural world, plants, animals, and indeed human beings—to be no more than what
Heidegger calls standing-reserve, that is, resources to be exploited as
means to ends. This analysis extends to regions of nature and sections of
society that have not yet been harnessed positively as resources. Such
unexploited elements (e.g., an unexplored jungle, this year's unemployed school
leavers) exist technologically precisely as potential resources.
Heidegger's
flagship example of technology is a hydroelectric plant built on the Rhine
river that converts that river into a mere supplier of water power. Set against
this “monstrousness” (Question Concerning Technology 321) is the poetic
habitation of the natural environment of the Rhine as signalled by an old
wooden bridge that spanned the river for hundreds of years, plus the river as
revealed by Hölderlin's poem “The Rhine”. In these cases of poetic habitation,
natural phenomena are revealed to us as objects of respect and wonder. One
might think that Heidegger is over-reacting here, and that despite the presence
of the hydroelectric plant, the Rhine in many ways remains a glorious example
of natural beauty. Heidegger's response to this complaint is to focus on how
the technological mode of Being corrupts the very notion of unspoilt areas of
nature, by reducing such areas to resources ripe for exploitation by the
tourist industry. Turning our attention to inter-human affairs, the
technological mode of Being manifests itself when, for example, a friendly chat
in the bar is turned into networking (Dreyfus 1993). And, in the light of
Heidegger's analysis, one might smile wryly at the trend for companies to take
what used to be called ‘personnel’ departments, and to rename them ‘human
resources’. Many other examples could be given, but the general point is clear.
The primary phenomenon to be understood is not technology as a collection of
instruments, but rather technology as a clearing that establishes a deeply
instrumental and, as Heidegger sees it, grotesque understanding of the world in
general. Of course, if technological revealing were a largely restricted
phenomenon, characteristic of isolated individuals or groups, then Heidegger's
analysis of it would be of limited interest. The sting in the tale, however, is
that, according to Heidegger, technological revealing is not a peripheral
aspect of Being. Rather, it defines our modern way of living, at least
in the West.
At
this point one might pause to wonder whether technology really is the structure
on which we should be concentrating. The counter-suggestion would be that technological
thinking is merely the practical application of modern mathematical science,
and that the latter is therefore the primary phenomenon. Heidegger rejects this
view, arguing in contrast that the establishment of the technological mode of
revealing is a necessary condition for there to be mathematical science at all,
since such science “demands that nature be orderable as standing-reserve” by
requiring that “nature report itself in some way or other that is identifiable
through calculation and that it remain orderable as a system of information” (Question
Concerning Technology 328). Either way, one might object to the view of
science at work here, by pointing to analyses which suggest that while science may
reduce objects to instrumental means rather than ends, it need not behave in
this way. For example, O'Neill (2003) develops such an analysis by drawing
explicitly on (one interpretation of) the Marxist (and ultimately Aristotelian)
notion of the humanization of the senses. Good science may depend on the
capacity for the disinterested use of the senses, and so foster a
non-instrumental responsiveness to natural objects as ends rather than as
means. This is a ‘humanization’ because the disinterested use of the senses is
a characteristically human capacity. Thus to develop such a capacity is to
develop a distinctively human virtue, something which is a constituent of human
well-being. Moreover, if science may sometimes operate with a sense of awe and
wonder in the face of beings, it may point the way beyond the technological
clearing, an effect that, as we shall see later, Heidegger thinks is achieved
principally by some great art.
By
revealing beings as no more than the measurable and the manipulable, technology
ultimately reduces beings to not-beings (Contributions 2: 6).
This is our first proper glimpse of the oblivion of Being, the phenomenon that,
in the Contributions, Heidegger also calls the abandonment of Being, or
the abandonment of beings by Being (e.g., 55: 80). The notion of a not-being
signals two things: (i) technological revealing drives out any sense of awe and
wonder in the presence of beings, obliterating the secularized sense of what is
sacred that is exemplified by the poetic habitation of the natural environment
of the Rhine; (ii) we are essentially indifferent to the loss. Heidegger calls
this indifference “the hidden distress of no-distress-at-all” (Contributions
4: 8). Indeed, on Heidegger's diagnosis, our response to the loss of any
feeling of sacredness or awe in the face of beings is to find a technological
substitute for that feeling, in the form of “lived-experience”, a drive for
entertainment and information, “exaggeration and uproar” (Contributions
66: 91). All that said, however, technology should not be thought of as a
wholly ‘negative’ phenomenon. For Heidegger, technology is not only the great
danger, it is also a stage in the unfolding of Being that brings us to the
brink of a kind of secularized salvation, by awakening in us a (re-)discovery
of the sacred, appropriately understood (cf. Thomson 2003, 64–66). A rough
analogy might be drawn here with the Marxist idea that the unfolding of history
results in the establishment of capitalist means of production with their
characteristic ‘negative’ elements—labour treated merely as a commodity, the
multi-dimensional alienation of the workers—that bring us to the brink of (by
creating the immediate social and economic preconditions for) the socialist
transformation of society. Indeed, the analogy might be pushed a little
further: just as the socialist transformation of society remains anything but
inevitable (Trotsky taught us that), Heidegger argues that the
salvation-bringing transformation of the present condition of human being is
most certainly not bound to occur.
To
bring all these points into better view, we need to take a step back and ask
the following question. Is the technological mode of revealing ultimately a
human doing for which we are responsible? Heidegger's answer is ‘yes and no’.
On the one hand, humankind is the active agent of technological thinking, so
humankind is not merely a passive element. On the other hand, “the
unconcealment itself… is never a human handiwork” (Question Concerning
Technology 324). As Heidegger later put it, the “essence of man is framed,
claimed and challenged by a power which manifests itself in the essence of
technology, a power which man himself does not control.” (Only a God
can Save Us; 107, my emphasis). To explicate the latter point, Heidegger
introduces the concepts of destining (cf. the earlier notion of
‘destiny’) and enframing. Destining is “what first starts man upon a way
of revealing” (Question Concerning Technology 329). As such it is an a
priori transcendental structure of human Being and so beyond our control. Human
history is a temporally organized kaleidoscope of particular ordainings of
destining (see also On the Essence of Truth). Enframing is one such
ordaining, the “gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man,
i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as
standing-reserve” (Question Concerning Technology 325). This is, of
course, a way of unpacking the point (see above) that technology is “a manner
of the essential swaying of being” (Contributions 61: 88), that is, of
Being's own essential unfolding.
Enframing,
then, is the ordaining of destining that ushers in the modern technological
clearing. But there is more to it than that. To see why, consider the following
criticism of Heidegger's analysis, as we have unpacked it so far. Any
suggestion that technological thinking has appeared for the first time along
with our modern Western way of living would seem to be straightforwardly false.
To put the point crudely, surely the ancient Greeks sometimes treated entities
merely as instrumental means. But if that is right, and Heidegger would agree
that it is, then how can it be that technological thinking defines the spirit
of our age? The answer lies in Heidegger's belief that pre-modern, traditional
artisanship (as exemplified by the old wooden bridge over the Rhine), manifests
what he calls poiesis. In this context poiesis is to be understood as a
process of gathering together and fashioning natural materials in such a way
that the human project in which they figure is in a deep harmony with, indeed reveals—or
as Heidegger sometimes says when discussing poiesis, brings forth—the
essence of those materials and any natural environment in which they are set.
Thus, in discussing what needs to be learnt by an apprentice to a traditional
cabinetmaker, Heidegger writes:
If
he is to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself answer and respond above
all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood—to
wood as it enters into man's dwelling with all the hidden riches of its
essence. In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft.
Without that relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork,
any occupation with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns.
Every handicraft, all human dealings, are constantly in that danger. (What
is Called Thinking? 379)
Poiesis,
then, is a process of revealing. Poietic events are acts of unconcealment—one
is tempted to coin the ugly neologism truth-ing—in which entities are
allowed to show themselves. As with the closely related notion of original
truth that is at work in Being and Time, the idea of entities showing
themselves does not imply that what is revealed in poiesis is something
independent of human involvement. Thus what is revealed by the artisanship of
the cabinetmaker is “wood as it enters into man's dwelling”. This telling
remark forges a crucial philosophical link (and not merely an etymological one)
between the poietic and poetic. Poietic events and poetic habitation involve the
very same mode of intelligibility.
By
introducing the concept of poiesis, and by unearthing the presence of the
phenomenon in traditional artisanship, Heidegger is suggesting that even though
technological thinking was a possibility in pre-modern society, it was neither
the only nor the dominant mode of bringing-forth. So what has changed?
Heidegger argues that what is distinctive about enframing as an ordaining of
destining is (i) that it “drives out every other possibility of revealing” (Question
Concerning Technology 332), and (ii) that it covers up revealing as such
(more precisely, covers up the concealing-unconcealing character of
appropriation), thereby leaving us blind to the fact that technology is, in its
essence, a clearing. For Heidegger, these dual features of enframing are
intimately tied up with the idea of technology as metaphysics completing
itself. He writes: “[a]s a form of truth [clearing] technology is grounded
in the history of metaphysics, which is itself a distinctive and up to now the
only perceptible phase of the history of Being” (Letter on Humanism
244). According to Heidegger, metaphysics conceives of Being as a being (for
more on the reduction of Being to a being, see section
2.2.1 above). In so doing, metaphysics
obscures the concealing-unconcealing dynamic of the essential unfolding of
Being, a dynamic that provides the a priori condition for there to be beings.
The history of metaphysics is thus equivalent to the history of Western
philosophy in which Being as such is passed over, a history that, for
Heidegger, culminates in the nihilistic forces of Nietzsche's eternally
recurring will-to-power. The totalizing logic of metaphysics involves the view
that there is a single clearing (whatever it may be) that constitutes reality.
This renders thought insensitive to the fundamental structure of Being, in
which any particular clearing is ontologically co-present with the
unintelligible plenitude of alternative clearings, the mystery. With this
totalizing logic in view, enframing might be thought of as the ordaining of
destining that establishes the technological clearing as the one dominant
picture, to the exclusion of all others. Hence technology is metaphysics
completing itself.
We
are now in a position to deal with two items of unfinished business. First,
recall the stylistic shift that characterizes Heidegger's later work. Heidegger
not only increasingly engages with poetry in his later thinking (especially the
works of the German lyric poet Hölderlin), he also adopts a substantially more
poetic style of writing. But why? The language of metaphysics, which ultimately
unpacks itself as technological, calculative thinking, is a language from which
Heidegger believed he did not fully escape in Being and Time (see
quotation from the Letter on Humanism at the beginning of section 3.1
above, and Vallega-Neu 2003 24–9 for discussion). What is needed to think Being
historically, to think Being in its essential unfolding, is a different kind of
philosophical language, a language suggested by the poetic character of
dwelling. It is important to realize that Heidegger's intention here is not to
place Being beyond philosophy and within the reach of poetry, although he does
believe that certain poets, such as Hölderlin, enable us to glimpse the
mysterious aspect of Being. His intention, rather, is to establish that the
kind of philosophy that is needed here is itself poetic. This explains the
stylistic component of the turn.
Secondly,
recall the loss of dwelling identified by Heidegger. Modern humankind (at least
in the West) is in the (enframed) grip of technological thinking. Because of
this promotion of instrumentality as the fundamental way of Being of entities,
we have lost sight of how to inhabit the fourfold poetically, of how to
safeguard the fourfold in its essential unfolding. Such safeguarding would, in
a sense, be the opposite of technological thinking. But what ‘opposite’ amounts
to here needs to be worked out with care. Given contemporary concerns over
deforestation, global warming and the like, it is tempting to think that
Heidegger's analysis of technology might provide the philosophical platform for
some sort of extreme eco-radicalism. However, while there is undoubtedly much
of value to be said about the contribution that Heidegger's thinking may make
to contemporary debates in environmental ethics (see e.g., Zimmerman 1983,
1993, 2002), Heidegger was no eco-warrior and no luddite. Although he often
promoted a romantic image of a pre-technological age inhabited by worthy
peasants in touch with nature, he did not believe that it is possible for
modern humankind to forge some pastoral Eden from which technology (in both the
everyday and the essential sense) is entirely absent. So we should neither
“push on blindly with technology” nor “curse it as the work of the devil” (Question
Concerning Technology 330). Indeed, both these options would at root be
technological modes of thinking. The way forward, according to Heidegger, is
not to end technology, but rather to inhabit it differently (see e.g.,
Vallega-Neu 2003 93 note 15). We need to transform our mode of Being into one
in which technology (in the sense of the machines and devices of the modern
age) is there for us to enjoy and use, but in which technology (in the sense of
a mode of Being-in-the-world) is not our only or fundamental way of encountering
entities. And what is the basic character of this reinhabiting? It is to shelter
the truth of Being in beings (e.g., Contributions 246: 273), to safeguard
the fourfold in its essential unfolding. In what, then, does this
safeguarding consist?
Heidegger
argues that if humankind is to enter into safeguarding, it needs to learn (or
perhaps to learn once more) to think of Being as a gift that has been granted
to us in history. Indeed, to think properly is precisely to be grateful for the
gift of Being (see What is Called Thinking?). (Terms such as ‘gift’ and
‘granted’ should not be heard theologically, but in terms of secularized
sacredness and destining.) In this learning process, certain artworks
constitute ontological beacons that disrupt the technological clearing. Thus
recall that Heidegger identifies a shared form of disclosure that is
instantiated both by the old wooden bridge over the Rhine and by Hölderlin's
poem “The Rhine”. We can now understand this identification in terms of the
claim that certain artworks (although of course not those that themselves fall
prey to technological thinking) share with traditional artisanship the capacity
to realize poiesis. In so doing such artworks succeed in bringing us into
contact with the mystery through their expression of dwelling (poetic
habitation). In listening attentively and gratefully to how Being announces
itself in such artworks, humankind will prepare themselves for the task of safeguarding.
But
what exactly would one do in order to safeguard the fourfold in its
essential unfolding. Recall that in Building Dwelling Thinking Heidegger
presents safeguarding as a four-dimensional way of Being. The first two
dimensions—saving the earth and receiving the sky as sky—refer to our relationship
with the non-human natural world. As such they forge a genuine connection
between the later Heidegger and contemporary environmentalist thinking.
However, the connection needs to be stated with care. Once again the concept of
poiesis is central. Heidegger holds that the self-organized unfolding of the
natural world, the unaided blossoming of nature, is itself a process of
poiesis. Indeed it is poiesis “in the highest sense” (Question Concerning
Technology 317). One might think, then, that saving the earth, safeguarding
in its first dimension, is a matter of leaving nature to its own devices, of
actively ensuring that the conditions obtain for unaided natural poiesis.
However, for Heidegger, saving the earth is primarily an ontological, rather
than an ecological, project. ‘Save’ here means “to set something free into its
own essence” (Building Dwelling Thinking, p.352), and thus joins a
cluster of related concepts that includes dwelling and also poiesis as
realized in artisanship and art. So while, say, fiercely guarding the
integrity of wilderness areas may be one route to safeguarding, saving the
earth may also be achieved through the kind of artisanship and its associated
gathering of natural materials that is characteristic of the traditional
cabinetmaker. The concept of saving as a setting free of something into its own
essence also clears a path to another important point. All four dimensions of
safeguarding have at their root the notion of staying with things, of
letting things be in their essence through cultivation or construction.
Heidegger describes such staying with things as “the only way in which the
fourfold stay within the fourfold [i.e., safeguarding] is accomplished at any
time in simple unity” (Building Dwelling Thinking 353). It is thus the
unifying existential structure of safeguarding.
What
now of safeguarding in its second dimension—to receive the sky as sky? Here
Heidegger's main concern seems to be to advocate the synchronization of
contemporary human life with the rhythms of nature (day and night, the seasons,
and so on). Here safeguarding is exemplified by the aforementioned peasants
whose lives were interlocked with such natural rhythms (through planting
seasons etc.) in a way that modern technological society is not. One might note
that this dislocation has become even more pronounced since Heidegger's death,
with the advent of the Internet-driven, 24-hours-a-day-7-days-a-week service
culture. Once again we need to emphasize that Heidegger's position is not some
sort of philosophical ludditism, but a plea for the use of contemporary
machines and devices in a way that is sensitive to the temporal patterns of the
natural world. (For useful discussion see Young 2002, 110–113. Young makes an
illuminating connection with Heidegger's eulogy to van Gogh's painting of a
pair of peasant shoes to be found in The Origin of the Work of Art.)
Of
course, these relationships with nature are still only part of what
safeguarding involves. Its third and fourth dimensions demand that human beings
await the divinities as divinities and “initiate their own essential
being—their being capable of death as death—into the use and practice of this
capacity, so that there may be a good death” (Building Dwelling Thinking
352). The latter demand suggests that we may safeguard each other as mortals by
integrating a non-evasive attitude to death (see above) into the cultural
structures (e.g., the death-related customs and ceremonies) of the community.
But now what about the third dimension of safeguarding? What does it mean to await
the divinities as divinities?
Let's
again approach our question via a potential problem with Heidegger's account.
Echoing a worry that attaches to the concept of heritage in Being and Time,
it may seem that the notion of destining, especially in its more specific
manifestation as enframing, involves a kind of fatalism. Despite some apparent
rhetoric to the contrary, however, Heidegger's considered view is that
destining is ultimately not a “fate that compels” (Question
Concerning Technology 330). We have been granted the saving power to
transform our predicament. Moreover, the fact that we are at a point of
danger—a point at which the grip of technological thinking has all but squeezed
out access to the poetic and the mystical—will have the effect of thrusting
this saving power to the fore. This is the good news. The bad news is that:
philosophy
will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of the present condition
of the world. This is not only true of philosophy, but of all merely human
thought and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The sole possibility that is left
for us is to prepare a sort of readiness, through thinking and poetizing, for
the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of
foundering [Untergang]; for in the face of the god who is absent, we
founder. (Only a God can Save Us 107)
That
is what it means to await the divinities as divinities.
Heidegger
sometimes uses the term ‘god’ to mean the secularized notion of the sacred
already indicated, such that to embrace a god would be to maintain due
sensitivity to the thought that beings are granted to us in the
essential unfolding of Being. When, in the Contributions, Heidegger
writes of the last or ultimate god of the other beginning (where ‘other’ is in
relation to the ‘first beginning’ of Western thought in ancient Greece—the
beginning of metaphysics), it often seems to be this secularized sacredness
that he has in mind (cf. Thomson 2003; see Crownfield 2001for an alternative
reading of the last god that maintains a more robust theological dimension,
although one which is concrete and historicized). However, Heidegger sometimes
seems to use the term ‘god’ or ‘divinity’ to refer to a heroic figure (a
cultural template) who may initiate (or help to initiate) a transformational
event in the history of Being by opening up an alternative clearing (for this
interpretation, see e.g., Young 2002, 98). These heroic figures are the grounders
of the abyss, the restorers of sacredness (Contributions 2: 6, see
Sallis 2001 for analysis and discussion). It might even be consistent with
Heidegger's view to relax the requirement that the divine catalyst must be an
individual being, and thus to conceive of certain transformational cultural
events or forces themselves as divinities (Dreyfus 2003). In any case,
Heidegger argues that, in the present crisis, we are waiting for a god who will
reawaken us to the poetic, and thereby enable us to dwell in the fourfold. This
task certainly seems to be a noble one. Unfortunately, however, it plunges us
into the murkiest and most controversial region of the Heideggerian
intellectual landscape, his infamous involvement with Nazism.
Here
is not the place to enter into the historical debate over exactly what
Heidegger did and when he did it. However, given his deliberate, albeit
arguably short-lived, integration of Nazi ideology with the philosophy of Being
(see above), a few all-too-brief comments on the relationship between
Heidegger's politics and his philosophical thought are necessary. (For more
detailed evidence and discussion, as well as a range of positions on how we
should interpret and respond to this relationship, see e.g., Farias 1989; Neske
and Kettering 1990; Ott 1993; Pattison 2000; Polt 1999; Rockmore 1992; Sluga,
1993; Wolin 1990, 1993; Young 1997). There is no doubt that Heidegger's Nazi
sympathies, however long they lasted, have a more intimate relationship with
his philosophical thought than might be suggested by apologist claims that he
was a victim of his time (in 1933, lots of intelligent people backed Hitler
without thereby supporting the Holocaust that was to come) or that what we have
here is ‘merely’ a case of bad political judgment, deserving of censure but
with no implications for the essentially independent philosophical programme.
Why does the explanation run deeper? The answer is that Heidegger believed
(indeed continued to believe until he died) that the German people were
destined to carry out a monumental spiritual mission. That mission was nothing
less than to be at the helm of the aforementioned transformation of Being in
the West, from one of instrumental technology to one of poetic dwelling. In
mounting this transformation the German people would be acting not
imperialistically, but for all nations in the encounter with modern technology.
Of course destining is not a fate that compels, so some divine catalyst would
be needed to awake the German nation to its historic mission, a catalyst
provided by the spiritual leaders of the Nazi Party.
Why
did Heidegger believe that the German people enjoyed this position of
world-historical significance? In the later writings Heidegger argues
explicitly that “[t]hinking itself can be transformed only by a thinking which
has the same origin and calling”, so the technological mode of Being must be
transcended through a new appropriation of the European tradition. Within this
process the German people have a special place, because of the “inner
relationship of the German language with the language of the Greeks and with
their thought”. (Quotations from Only a God can Save Us 113.) Thus it is
the German language that links the German people in a privileged way to, as
Heidegger sees it, the genesis of European thought and to a pre-technological
world-view in which bringing-forth as poiesis is dominant. This illustrates the
general point that, for Heidegger, Being is intimately related to language.
Language is, as he famously put it in the Letter on Humanism (217), the
“house of Being”. So it is via language that Being is linked to particular
peoples.
Even
if Heidegger had some sort of argument for the world-historical destiny of the
German people, why on earth did he believe that the Nazi Party, of all things,
harboured the divine catalyst? Part of the reason seems to have been the
seductive effect of a resonance that exists between (a) Heidegger's
understanding of traditional German rural life as realizing values and meanings
that may counteract the insidious effects of contemporary technology, and (b)
the Nazi image of rustic German communities, rooted in German soil, providing a
bulwark against foreign contamination. Heidegger certainly exploits this
resonance in his pro-Nazi writings. That said there is an important point of
disagreement here, one that Heidegger himself drew out. And once again the role
of language in Being is at the heart of the issue. Heidegger steadfastly
refused to countenance any biologistic underpinning to his views. In 1945 he
wrote that, in his 1934 lectures on logic, he “sought to show that language was
not the biological-racial essence of man, but conversely, that the essence of
man was based on language as a basic reality of spirit” (Letter to
the Rector of Freiburg University, November 4, 1945, 64). In words that we
have just met, it is language and not biology that, for Heidegger, constitutes
the house of Being. So the German Volk are a linguistic-historical,
rather than a biological, phenomenon, which explains why Heidegger officially
rejected one of the keystones of Nazism, namely its biologically grounded
racism. Perhaps Heidegger deserves some credit here, although regrettably the
aforementioned lectures on logic also contain evidence of a kind of
historically driven ‘racism’. Heidegger suggests that while Africans (along
with plants and animals) have no history (in a technical sense understood in
terms of heritage), the event of an airplane carrying Hitler to Mussolini is
genuinely part of history (see Polt 1999, 155).
Heidegger
was soon disappointed by his ‘divinities’. In a 1935 lecture he remarks that
the
works
that are being peddled (about) nowadays as the philosophy of National
Socialism, but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness
of this movement (namely, the encounter between global technology and
contemporary man), have all been written by men fishing the troubled waters of
values and totalities. (An Introduction to Metaphysics 166)
So
Heidegger came to believe that the spiritual leaders of the Nazi party were
false gods. They were ultimately agents of technological thought and thus
incapable of completing the historic mission of the German people to transcend
global technology. Nonetheless, one way of hearing the 1935 remark is that
Heidegger continued to believe in the existence of, and the philosophical
motivation for, that mission, a view that Rockmore (1992, 123–4) calls “an
ideal form of Nazism”. This interpretation has some force. But perhaps we can
at least make room for the thought that Heidegger's repudiation of Nazism goes
further than talk of an ideal Nazism allows. For example, responding to the
fact that Heidegger drew a parallel between modern agriculture (as a motorized
food-industry) and “the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and
extermination camps”, Young (1997) argues that this would count as a devaluing
of the Holocaust only on a superficial reading. According to Young, Heidegger's
point is that both modern agriculture and the Final Solution are workings-out
of the technological mode of Being, which does not entail that they should be
treated as morally equivalent. (Heidegger draws the parallel in a lecture
called The Enframing given in 1949. The quotation is taken from Young
1997, 172. For further discussion, see Pattison 2000).
Heidegger's
involvement with Nazism casts a shadow over his life. Whether, and if so to
what extent, it casts a more concentrated shadow over at least some of his
philosophical work is a more difficult issue. It would be irresponsible to
ignore the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics. But it
is surely possible to be critically engaged in a deep and intellectually
stimulating way with his sustained investigation into Being, to find much of
value in his capacity to think deeply about human life, to struggle fruitfully
with what he says about our loss of dwelling, and to appreciate his massive and
still unfolding contribution to thought and to thinking, without looking for
evidence of Nazism in every twist and turn of the philosophical path he lays
down.
- The Gesamtausgabe
(Heidegger's collected works in German) are published by Vittorio
Klostermann. The process of publication started during Heidegger's
lifetime but has not yet been completed. The publication details are
available at the Gesamtausgabe Plan page.
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[NB: Page numbers in the article refer to the Macquarrie and Robinson
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Dikutip. Dari http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/
