HEIDEGGER
ON BEING
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HEIDEGGER ON BEING
From Heidegger
Being is not an entity – “what is the being of entities?” – and in this way not definable
We live in understanding of being, yet its meaning is cloaked in darkness… this requires us to face the question of [the meaning of being]
It is Dasein
that can and does ask: “What is [the meaning of] being?”
This entity which each of us is and includes inquiring as a possibility
of its being, denote by ‘Dasein’
The question’s occurrence implies at least vague understanding – we cannot ask a question about a subject of which we have no awareness
There is no circularity in the question, for time is the horizon for understanding / interpretation / meaning
Ontology must clarify the meaning of
Being
Every ontology is blind to its own aim if it has not first
clarified the meaning of being and conceived this clarification as its
fundamental task
Dasein
takes priorities over all other entities in several ways:
It’s being has the determinate character of existence – is ontical
Existence is determinative for it – the ontological character
As constitutive for its understanding of existence, it possesses an understanding of the being of all entities of a character other than its own – the ontico-ontological condition for the possibility of any ontologies
Preliminarily, the following is a selection / paraphrase from the
introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Charles Guignon, ed., Cambridge University Press, 1993
Introductory part to the Introduction to the Cambridge Companion
We go beyond Heidegger’s realism and beyond knowledge as object knowledge [object knowledge includes description, representation, and presentation.]
Heidegger’s ambition: rejuvenate Western Philosophy to recover a clearer richer
ontology… by clearing away the rubbish, i.e. substance ontology and
related confusions, accumulated since 2500 BC in the tradition from
Plato-Descartes-contemporary scientific naturalism. But the problem of the
objectifying outlook is in the “theoretical attitude”… and
not, today, in naturalism or natural science as such
He does this from, in part, a complex range of sources:
He blends the opposites:
|
Systematic rigor |
- |
Kierkegaardian passion |
|
Romantic individual fulfillment |
- |
Hegelian communitarianism |
|
German idealism |
- |
hardheaded realism |
|
Historicity and finitude of life |
- |
search for stable ground |
Fundamental Ontology in Being and Time
There are knots in the thinking that characterizes western philosophy due to “substance ontology” that arose at the dawn of western philosophy and dominates thought today. Due the emphasis on permanence or enduring presence, this traditional ontology is also called the “metaphysics of presence.”
Either / ors [dualisms] due to the substance ontology since Descartes:
There is mind, or, all is matter
Ideas represent objects, or, nothing exists outside mind
Something in an individual remains constant in change,
or, there is no personality
Values have objective existence, or, everything is permitted
“These either / ors lay out a grid of possible moves and countermoves in a philosophical game that eventually can begin to feel as predictable and tiresome as tic-tac-toe.”
Heidegger’s intention is to undercut this game by challenging the
idea that reality must be understood in terms of a substance
ontology. Mind and matter exist but are derivative, the result of some high
level theorizing. Note that Heidegger finds matter, in addition to mind, to be
a theoretical construct[1].
Such concepts are fundamental only in certain regional inquiries or sciences[2]
The problem originates at the dawn of western philosophy and continues
through Plato, Descartes and down to contemporary scientific naturalism. But
the problem is not so much natural science as the “theoretical
attitude,” the idea of a disengaged, presuppositionless,
external view of the world… Heidegger hopes to recover a more original
sense of things by setting aside reality as seen from theorizing and focusing
on the way things show up in the flux of every pre-reflective activities
Heidegger begins by asking the question of traditional ontology,
“What is the being of entities?” But Heidegger quickly asks
“What is the meaning of being?” or else ontology will remain
naïve and opaque
Since what things are [their being] is accessible only if intelligible
to us, “fundamental ontology” will clarify the meaning [that is,
the conditions of intelligibility] of things in general
Since our existence [being-there = Dasein]
is the original place of intelligibility, fundamental ontology must clarify the
conditions of having any understanding which itself belongs to the entity
called Dasein
This inquiry, the conditions for the possibility of understanding, is
the analytic of Dasein and constitutes the published
portion of Being and Time
…Therefore, the investigation starts with inquiry into our own being - so far as we are entities with some understanding of being - and does so to lay basis for inquiry into the being of entities in general. The question of being is, then, reformulated as a question of the intelligibility of things - this is Kantian; but Heidegger also breaks from Kant in that mind and consciousness as a self-evident point to start an account of reality is questioned. Instead, Heidegger starts from a description of ourselves in our every day practical affairs before the mind / matter split; i.e., the start is from the “existentiell.” There is no external presuppositionless vantage point of understanding and so “fundamental ontology” must begin with the phenomena of our everydayness as agents in practical contexts. This requirement is reasonable... but I believe that “everydayness” is undefined. Heidegger’s carpenter is no more ordinary than Heidegger. How did everydayness come about?
Heidegger’s description of being human
[Dasein] will “do violence” to the
inherited commonsense Cartesian view of humans as minds in bodies. Heidegger subverts the mind-matter
opposition. He describes human existence as a happening, a life unfolding
between birth and death. Existence as a temporal life course arises quite
naturally from consideration of human agency: action is nested in the contexts
of the world and a life story. Action is rooted in meaningful contexts of the
past and directed to some future end
As a temporal unfolding of a life course three structural elements that
make up human existence can be identified [1] the given situation [culture,
history, shared practices… ] into which Dasein is “thrown.” This thrownness
into a given situation constitutes Dasein’s “facticity,”
[2] Agency is discursive in that action is articulation - interpreted in words
or language, and [3] Dasein is understanding in that
it takes a stand on the possibilities of meaningfulness for things and itself,
i.e., Dasein is futural,
i.e., Dasein is on the way to realizing some future
outcome. Dasein’s being is defined by the stands taken over its lifetime.
My being is what unfolds in interaction with the world in the course of my life
…and the same matrix of relations defines the being of entities [including tools] in the environment. This, not substance ontology and the mind-body split, shows that being-in-the-world is a unitary phenomenon. What is to be explained is not how the elements of being and the world hook up but, rather, “why the tradition has overlooked this unified phenomenon and how the disjunction of self and things ever arises in the first place.”
Heidegger explains the appeal of the substance ontology by describing
“how the spectator attitude and the objectifying ontology result from a
“breakdown” in average everydayness.” It is in the breakdown
that we notice things as such, catch a view of the worldhood
of the world, can look at things as brute present-at-hand objects to be
investigated from a theoretical perspective in which things are explicitly
noticed, are seen as value-free, as enduring, as meaningless objects whose
usefulness is merely a product of our own subjective interests and needs.
According to Heidegger, reality as built up from contextless
objects arises only derivatively from a “more primordial” way of
being absorbed in a more meaningful life world. Therefore, such contextless objects[3]
cannot be the base components of the world. Self and world belong together in
the single entity Dasein. Being is a temporal event
inseparable from the understanding of being embodied in Dasein’s forms of
life
It follows that there can be no presuppositionless
knowledge - we are always caught up in a hermeneutic circle, e.g., were we to
seek ground for all knowledge. But this does not mean that we do not have
access to things in them selves. Since the way things
show up are what those things really are, access to appearances just is access
to those things. All appearances are presentations, not merely re-presentations
This shows how Heidegger tries to undercut traditional skepticism about
the external world by undermining the source of the skepticism - the representationalist model. The idea of a contextless world distinct from all modes of presentation
is an illusion bred by the dominance of representationalism.
That the world is just the human[4]
world in its various manifestations is an affirmation of the reality of what
shows up for us
[1]
I have long argued that both matter and mind are theoretical constructs or
concepts. More accurately, I argue that both ideas have a perceptual and a
conceptual nature and, further from an examination of the history of the ideas,
do not designate something definite. That is, the ideas are in evolution. There
are many other ideas that are possessed of a similar nature: death,
space-time…
[2]
The appeal of some of the regional sciences, were they to be projected to the
whole, is the unified account of Being that would be
provided. For example, there is hope that matter can be described in terms of
forces and fields that stand in a unified relation to one another.
[3]
We may say, approximately, that the absoluteness attributed to boundaries that
make up objects and that make up isolated events are convenient fictions for
various purposes but, as absolute, are not real. And, in this way, the
distinction between things and appearances, also, is a convenient fiction but
not, finally, real.
[4]
Taken as a starting point, this is not anthropocentric but just acknowledges
that our immediate knowledge is our first knowledge – Heidegger’s
approach to the fundamental ontology has been criticized as being
anthropocentric. One response is that whatever is / known as ultimate is in
some way in contact with human being. Therefore the start with Dasein is no real limitation. In so called
"objectivity" the start is Dasein(-) which is less than Dasein.
What may be limitations, and therefore what may need review, are in the meaning
of Dasein and what are the phenomena that provide the
start for the investigation of being - "everyday pre-reflective
activities" and "our everydayness as agents in practical
contexts." My main questions regarding these issues are (i) what is the "everyday", and (ii) why
artificially exclude the esoteric from the every day or from the phenomena?
Note, that if we hold that there is no start, that the entire issue is one of
being in a hermeneutic circle then rather than going from phenomena to being we
are engaged in a continuing give and take: … being --phenomena -- being
-- phenomena -- being …
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