Michael Worton, one time Professor of French Literature and a Vice-Provost at UCL, once told me Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was the most important philosopher of the 20th century. Against that I once heard A J Ayer explain to Malcolm Muggeridge live on TV that Heidegger misused the verb ‘to be’. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between. That Heidegger was influential, a significant catalyst for others’ thinking, there is no doubt. Hence this brief blog on his core ideas. His output was immense and even now not all of it has been collected and made generally available. Moreover his ideas evolved. Just as commentators on Sartre debate his early work (‘Being and Nothingness’) with his later work (the two-volume ‘Dialectic of Critical Reason’), so too writers on Heidegger debate the relationship between his early ‘Being and Time’ and the later ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’. Experts, forgive this snapshot on my part.
In his ‘Being and Time’ Heidegger introduced the concept of ‘Dasein’, defining ‘being there’ as the distinctive character of human existence. In doing so he opted to open up the philosophical question of the nature of being. ‘What does it mean for something to be?’ For Heidegger this is a question more fundamental than the one traditionally asked by philosophers. For him the question hinges on what any understanding of entities necessarily presupposes – ‘namely, our understanding of that by virtue of which entities are entities’. ‘Being as such’ is not the ultimate entity. Heidegger wants to ask ‘the meaning of being’. What does ‘to exist’ mean?
In ‘Being and Time’ he queries the kind of being we humans have (how it is we have the kind of being that allows us to ask about the meaning of being). He describes this ‘phenomenological context’ as ‘Dasein’. Dasein’s ‘pre-ontological’ understanding of mundane everyday experience, of ‘being-in-the-world’, affords us access to the question of the ‘meaning of being’.
Dasein refers to a ‘living being’ through its activity of ‘being there’. The ‘in’ of ‘being-in-the-world’ is the ‘in’ of involvement or engagement (Heidegger gives examples: ‘having to do something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something’). “Being in’ does not denote physical enclosedness; nor does the ‘world’ denote a universe of physical objects. Things present themselves to us in light of our projects. Knives and forks are not physical objects, but rather ‘ready-to-hand’. We must think in terms of a structure of practically ordered reference relations that Heidegger terms the ‘worldhood of the world’.
Heidegger goes on the differentiate between three structural features – or ‘existentialia’ – of being-in-the-world. These are:
- ‘Understanding’ – referring to our basic ability or ‘know-how’ to be someone, do things, which is more fundamental than theoretical understanding.
- ‘Attunement’ – this refers to our finding ourselves in a situation where things and opinions already matter’.
- ‘Discourse’ – involves ‘the articulation of the world into recognisable, communicable patterns of meaning’ (Heidegger: ‘the articulation of intelligibility’).
This existential trio possesses a unity under the rubric of ‘care’ (Heidegger again: ‘ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world) as being-amidst (entities encountered within-the-world’). ‘attunement’ is shaped by the past; and ‘discourse’ discloses the present in those terms. This is captured in the title ‘Being and Time’.
Dasein is ‘always already’, or a priori, a social being. Dasein, Heidegger writes, is ‘Dasein-with’. By others, Heidegger does not mean ‘everyone else’, but me – that is, ‘those from whom for the most part, one does notdistinguish oneself – those among whom one is too’. Individuals, in other words, do not, as phenomenologists influenced by Husserl contend, generate an intersubjective world from their separate activities. Instead, these activities presuppose the disclosure of one shared world. This represents a break from the Cartesian tradition which starts from individual subjectivity.
‘Publicness’ is written into this analysis. In Heidegger’s words:
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 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 we all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness.’
An interesting argument of relevance surely for sociologists! But what of the (existentialist) notion of ‘authenticity’? It seems to have gone missing in, even been precluded by, this quotation. According to Heidegger authenticity is a matter of taking responsibility for being, in other words for our ‘ultimate projects’. It is a matter of adopting a resolute stand on ‘for-the-sake-of-which. The self is in this sense a matter of ‘on-going narrative construction’.
George Steiner in his brief summary of Heidegger’s work argues that ‘Being and Time’ was not aiming at a novel definition of being:
‘It was meant to prepare Dasein ‘to apprehend, to hear the word of ‘Being’. Its purpose was to make Dasein accessible to the supreme existential question. But even this preparation makes manifest the cardinal fact of ontological difference: Being is not itself an extant, it is not something that can simply be identified with or deduced from particular beings … To enquire into Being is not to ask: What is this or that? It is to ask: What is ‘is’?’
He adds:
‘Even to ask is to realise that this question has not been posed so nakedly in Western thought since the pre-Socratics, and that Western systematic philosophy has, indeed, done everything to conceal the question.’
Zohreh Shariatinia has considered Heidegger on death, showing that it is through death that people become aware of their finitude. This is why he ‘chose’ human beings as the only route to an understanding existence among Earth’s creatures.
‘In his view, the most authentic thought about existence comes from wisdom, and that thought can begin when human beings believe that the idea of a saviour among the centuries is the largest enemy of original thought. In his view, death is the most original form of the possibility of Existence that threatens the entire universe, so the existence understood by the notions of the way to be in charge of his own life.’
We are thrown into this life, are mortal, and must come to face this fact.
Did Heidegger change direction in his later writings? Was there a ‘turn’? The debate continues. The pre-Socratics, he went on the insist, have been systematically misinterpreted, especially Heraclitus. He turned his attention to the language of ‘technology’. Language speaks, not the person: people only speak if they neatly correspond to language. People participate in a language they have not created. His focus was on reaching ‘a place we are already in’.
I am aware of the brevity of this synopsis. And of my harsh editing of what is a complex body of thought. But the blog will have served its purpose if it directs people to Heidegger’s own works, tough going though they are!
References
George Steiner (1978) Heidegger. London; Fontana Modern Masters.
Zohreh Shariatimnia (2015) Heidegger’s ideas about death. Pacific Science Review B: Humanities and Social Sciences 1 92-97.