1. Contents:
   

2. I) On Martin Heidegger
   

3. II) Contextualization with Phenomenology
   

4. III) Heidegger’s Advancement to a Phenomenological Ontology
   

5. IV) From “Existentiells” to the “Being-In As Such Structure” to the “Care Structure”
   

6. V) From Care to Time: The Importance of Death and Development of an Ethic
   

I) On Martin Heidegger (1889-1976):

Heidegger is an infinitely influential 20th c. thinker, notably furthering studies of phenomenology, grounding the development of existentialism, hermeneutics, and postmodernism, aiding the furtherance of critical theory, Marxist philosophy, feminism, race theory, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and birthing unique fields within aesthetics, environmental philosophy (deep ecology), and architecture.  In many ways, however, Heidegger is not an innovator, but leads us to a return to the ancient Greek ideal of philosophy’s intimacy with living the good life that feeds the question of the meaning of Being—a return guided by phenomenological insights as to the cooperative construction of meaning and ways to ask the questions of value.  His is a return—but one that is both innovative and profound.

There is a great bias against Heidegger, however, which comes from many fronts (his frustratingly complex style of writing and thinking, his coinage of terms, etc.), but primarily his blind nationalism that led to his public endorsement of the Nazi party during a speech given upon receiving a teaching position.  This disgrace was more vivid given his long term love affair with Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political philosopher, and his eminent teacher, Edmund Husserl, the Jewish father of phenomenology.  The final insult was Heidegger’s complete withdrawal (to a hut in the woods) after the war and his public silence and lack of apology. 

II) Contextualization with Phenomenology:

To understand Heidegger’s importance for our course on existentialism, recall last class’ consideration of Edmund Husserl. 

Husserl’s phenomenology is the study of phenomena—all that is that appears to us—as founded upon the premise that one can reliably capture and describe experience, from which meaning, and hence our knowledge, comes.  Phenomenology’s coda—that the world gives itself to us as we give ourselves to the world—locates the creation of meaning in this communal giving and indicates a mode of experience wherein our presumptions of having an egoistic supremacy over an essentially independent world (in which we are its sole interpreter and judge of its value) are unsettled.  This suspension of bias, called the epoché, is what switches us from our Natural Attitude to the Phenomenological Attitude. 

III) Heidegger’s Advancement to a Phenomenological Ontology:

Heidegger, Husserl’s most famous student, then took up his master’s method to closely investigate ontological questions—those about being and existence.  He wanted to study Being by examining how phenomena appear to human consciousness so as to better understand what is Being? 

He adopts, with some revision, Husserl’s starting distinction of the Natural Attitude from the Phenomenological Attitude, calling the former the Ontic and the latter the Ontological.  His object of study is the Ontological Attitude—he wants to understand Being itself, not just an individual being (Bobby, Suzy, etc.), so he abstracts away the personal qualities to reveal the ontological essence (the structures of human existence that make possible an understanding of Being) he calls Da-sein.

Da-sein: the being who questions his or her own Being.

Da-sein is not a particular person, but the ‘any-person’ (literally, in German, this is “There-Being,” or the “being-there”); it is the being who asks itself questions about its Being or the being for whom Being is a question (note the distinction between the lower-case “being,” you, me, Billy, or Suzy, and the capitalized “Being,” which is the category of Being that all beings share).  “Da-sein is a being that does not simply occur among other beings.  Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 12—in his original pagination).  It is important to note that while Da-Sein sounds like a dramatic abstraction, it is fully engaged in the essential everydayness of life—not the specifics as to whether you are male or female, young or old, but what any living human being experiences; it is not the idea of a single “soul,” but Being as a “happening” [Ereignis], or life as the event that it is.  When we begin from this essential living, we reveal the totality of our existence: our moods, our capacity for authenticity, and our involvement with the world and others. 

Thus, Da-sein is a human being who is always already embedded in the world and inherently social (is the three existentiells: being-in-the-world, being-towards-death, and being-with, as described more below) and is naturally operating with a preontological (there, but there before theoretical reflection) grasp of the a priori structures of Being (the prior-to-experience, inherent structures of the Being of beings, described below as the “care structure”) that make the adoption of particular modes of Being possible (the underlying structures of Being that make it possible to be these beings we are in the many different ways we can be).  “… [I]t is constitutive of the being of Da-sein to have, in its very being, a relation of being to this being.  And this in turn means that Da-sein understands itself in its being in some way and with some explicitness.  It is proper to this being that it be disclosed to itself with and through its being.  Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Da-sein.  The ontic distinction of Da-sein lies in the fact that it is ontological. …  We shall call the very being to which Da-sein can relate in one way or another, and somehow always does relate, existence [Existenz]” (Heidegger, B&T, 12).

Studying Da-Sein, Heidegger reveals that every existential (the specific, local way of being/living of an existant, an individual) shares three characteristics called existentiells:

(1) Being-in-the-World: Da-Sein finds itself thrown into the world not of its choosing, already delivered to the task of living (choosing) its concrete contextual life.  We call this fact of life we discover the “thrownness” of Being.  This “facticity” of our lives is revealed by our common moods (burden of concern, care, etc.). 

“Da-sein always understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms of its possibility to be itself or not to be itself.  Da-sein has either chosen these possibilities itself, stumbled upon them, or in each instance already grown up in them.  Existence is decided only by each Da-sein itself in the manner of seizing upon or neglecting such possibilities” (Heidegger, B&T, 12).

Studying these ways we seize or neglect possibilities is to do an existential analysis.  We study these in the way most natural to us—as our way of being-in-the-world.  “Da-sein tends to understand its own being in terms of that being to which it is essentially, continually, and most closely related—the world” (Heidegger, B&T, 15).

(2) Being-towards-Death: Da-sein is always already taking a stand on its life by acting in the world.  This is “agency,” where human existence is “ahead of itself” by being able to deal with the now and therefore predict the course of the future and by the fact that each of our actions shape our lives into being people or a certain sort.  In other words, Da-sein is future-oriented with a being-towards-death (everything we do defines our being as a totality).  This reveals how our Being is inextricably entwined with temporality.

“The meaning of the being of that being we call Da-sein proves to be temporality [Zeitlichkeit]” (Heidegger, B&T, 17).

“Da-sein is in such a way that, by being, it understands something like being.  Remembering this connection, we must show that time is that from which Da-sein tacitly understands and interprets something like being at all” (Heidegger, B&T, 17).  To understand this, we have to understand time not as “clock time,” but as the way through which we live and thereby make meaning.  Reflecting carefully on time, we realize that past, present, and future are not so clearly distinguished; instead, all three of these categories are squashed together—there is no “now” (try to capture “now,” as soon as you say it, it is gone), instead, what we call “now” is a drifting set wherein the past and future are infused together.  Imagine singing a simple tune … to have harmony, you must pull forward from the past what you just sang, you must anticipate into the future and pull from it what will come, and in this nothingness of the now, you are putting the past and future together in a spontaneous, ever drifting forward and backwards, event.

However, how it feels when we, as Being and as time embodied, live life, we feel ourselves always, ever thrown forwards into time not yet come.  We live “ahead of ourselves”—imagine: you go through school to go to college to start this course to get a good grade to get the credit to get a requirement over with to get degree to get a job to advance in a job to get a spouse to get a family to get a retirement to get to that finish line of death.  We live with some presumption that when the race is over we can stop at the finish line, turn around, evaluate and sum up the whole of life, and judge it as meaningful.  The falsity of this view is that at the finish line, life is no more.  This terrifies us—this realization that our ownmost possibility of meaning is that which we can never, for ourselves, experience—but we squash the fear and hold on the presumption that soothes us and allows us to ignore the truth in the midst of our busy day in and day out race forward.  (This will become integral to the idea of living life authentically or inauthentically.)  Our way of being in time allows us to have a narrative, which leads us to the last existentiell. 

(3) Being-With: Da-sein is “discourse” in the sense that we are always articulating, addressing, and discussing the entities that appear in our concernful absorption in current situations.  Time gives us structure that allows for this discussion or narrative creation of meaning, but, this cannot happen without there being content.  The content reveals how our Being is as Being-With: there is always a cooperative dimension of meaning, subjects who are also objects and objects that are also subjects, both sides give and take so as to create meaning.  This is intersubjectivity: a subjectivity (a beingness) that is created and shared between beings, as opposed to be a sole possession of a solitary being.  It becomes manifest in our “discourse,” which is not just speaking as in the act of opening mouths and expelling sounds, but in our engagement, our gestures, our body language, our reactions, etc.

These three existentiells define human existence as a temporal unfolding in the world and with others.  Their unity is “Care.”  Care is a mood that is the fundamental key to the Being of beings.  Humans are those things whose beings are an issue for them—we are the beings who care about being, who are concerned with what and how it is that we are (that we exist as these particular beings).  Care, or concern, unifies what it is that we essentially are, and thereby leads us to be in particular types of ways, which we demonstrate through our seizing or neglecting various modes of being.  Thus, by (concernfully) taking a stand in our own Being we make our own identity (as particular beings).  In this revelation, we see Heidegger’s development of phenomenology.  For Husserl, our attentiveness, or our concernful turning to this or that was his understood by his theory of intentionality—we intend to this or that, it is a mode of perceiving that is always of something.  Here, intentionality becomes Heidegger’s care—it is not just a perceptual intending of something, but is the full, fundamental unification of the structures of Being.

IV) From “Existentiells” to the “Being-In As Such Structure” to the “Care Structure”:

Now that we understand the existentiells—Being-in-the-world, Being-towards-Death, and Being-With—we have to understand their full development into a preliminary and final depiction of the structure of Da-sein. 

To begin: we know already that Being is Being-in (in the world, in time, with others, etc., all that was shown above), which means that Being is Care (it is the concernfulness designated by our “-in”).  We understand from above all of these modes of caring, all of these ways of Being-in; now, Heidegger (over the course of 150 plus pages) codifies them into a more rigorously distinguished structure and then examines it as mapped upon his theory of time.  The first distinguishing is referred to as the “Being-In As Such Structure,” and when this is mapped upon time, the other essential component of what we are, it is referred to as the “Care structure.” 

“Being-In As Such Structure:” the fundamental modes of the being of Da-sein are the existentialia (the four existentiells) renamed and more distinctly categorized: Attunement, Understanding, Discourse, and Falling Prey/Entanglement.

(1) Attunement: the mood in which Da-sein always finds itself.

In Attunement, we discover:

(A) Thrownness—“thrown into the world,” described above as the primary feature of Being-in-the-world.

(B) Facticity—the quality or condition of our being, which involves the concrete everydayness, our historicity, our grounding in the world, etc., as well as our being more than just these things, but as having this overarching Being we beings have; it is inextricable with our throwness.

(C) Angst—anxiety (not fear, which has its object—I fear this spider—instead, anxiety has no-thing, it is the nothingness that unsettles us, terrifies us, attracts us, as it repulses us, for the nothingness is becomes of some sort of primordial somethingess); this is fundamental to Being; it is what brings Da-sein before itself (i.e., anxiety makes us turn our attention back to ourselves) and thereby yanks us out of the mindless ignoring we typically live in (see Entanglement, below).  The fact that we run away from the truth of Being shows how important Angst is—it is the fleeing that is also a returning to this truth (anxiety repels us and compels us)—and reveals that the key to the fundamental truth of Being is one that must be grasped experientially, not just rationally: we must feel the truth of Being, it is a mood (Care) that demands our Attunement to it.

(2) Understanding: Da-sein exists for possibilities of being that are not yet actual, projection is the pressing forward to these possibilities, and interpretation is the seeing-in-advance.  This level shows the relation between different aspects in the existentiells being-in-the-world (our throwness led to our having to deal with it and live, to seize opportunities or neglect them, which requires judgment, which requires some degree of understanding) and Being-towards-Death (namely, the revelation herein of how Being is inextricable from time).

In Understanding, we discover:

(A) Possibility—from our perspective, there is a vast horizon of possibilities, these are forged through practice, and then spark our theorizing them, throwing us to new practices within the world.  This shows experience to be perspectival—full of perspectives, of possibilities.

(B) Projection—this is akin to the Being-towards-Death discussed above, that way in which we are living ahead of ourselves.

(C) Interpretation—this is the way we take up and grapple through possibilities and projections; it is guided by all of the previous creations of meanings we have made.

(3) Discourse: the expression of meaning or articulation of the world that organizes attunement and understanding. While Being as Discourse is critical to Heidegger, and extensively discussed in other works, he does not fill out much more about here, other than what was discussed above under the existentiell Being-With.

(4) Entanglement: like being-with but holds the potentiality to be caught up (trapped) in “The They.”

In Entanglement, we discover:

(A) Falling Prey—this is how we slip (in Husserl’s language) from the phenomenological attitude to the natural attitude; it is how we slip (in Heidegger’s language) from authenticity to inauthenticity (instead of thinking ontologically, we slip into trivial ontic thoughts); it is how we slip (in Sartre’s language) from Good Faith to Bad Faith (from a just and true way of being ourselves to a false, following the crowd, cowardly way of living).  When we “Fall Prey” to “The They,” we are fleeing from the responsibility we bear to the truth of our very Being.

From the Being-In As Such Structure, we focus on Attunement because it allows us to realize that Being-in-the-world is primordial and whole, but has a phenomenal manifold (a collective of many modes of being), which distorts the unified phenomenological view of the whole.  Despite the distortion, it is precisely because of it that we realize there is an unity.  The unity is revealed to us via moods.  Mood is a mode of existing of Da-sein—it is revealed theoretically by thrownness and primordially reveals this same throwness.  Mood reveals the importance of Care, and leads us to realize the Care Structure.

Care Structure  (primordial contents revealed by Angst):  Care designates that Da-sein is a being concerned about being in its Being; Da-sein is ahead of itself, yet entrusted in itself; Da-sein is beyond its worldliness, and it is thrown in a world, hence, Heidegger coins a term only translatable as: “… being-ahead-of-itself-in-already-being-in-a-world” (Heidegger, B&T, 192).  The Care Structure is the expression of the unity of Being; what it is is simply a reconsideration of the Being-In As Such Structure that will become mapped upon the temporal ways of being in time; it is composed of:

(1) Existentiality: which captures the way of Being that is Being-ahead-of-itself.

This maps upon the future.

(2) Facticity: which captures the way of Being of Thrownness.

This maps upon the past.

(3) Falling Prey: which captures the way of Being succumbing to The They.

This maps upon the present.

Essentially, to put the above into a narrative form, the Care Structure tells us that Da-sein, entangled with the world, flees from the feeling of uncanniness (the absurd) that the world continually tries to cover over, and ends up confronting itself, even if not explicitly understanding the confrontation.  Here, we see how Da-sein can be both ahead of itself in the world and together-with the world.  In this way, the constitution of Da-sein is primordially a whole, yet absorbed in the world by care.  The fact that we exist in both these ways shows how care functions essentially as Being-in-the-World and functions as Taking-Care in Being-With—both “cares” are ontological, we can Take-Care-Of because this is a mode determined by the fundamental structure of care.  Thus we see care to be an existential a priori primordial structure in every attunement of Da-sein.  Care is the basis for all of these modifications of mood.  This establishes the primacy of care as the unifying structure, and rules out any other moods as candidates for the primordial attunement or most fundament way of Being.  (However, we cannot forget that the Care Structure maps the Being-In-As-Such Structure onto time … this is what he turns to in the second division of the book so as to show that Care is the most fundamental structure of Being, but that time is as or even more fundamental to Being because we cannot understand Care without Time or Time without Care.)

V) From Care to Time: The Importance of Death and Development of an Ethic

Heidegger moves the analysis of the fundamental structure of Being to a reading of the temporality of Care.  He first reveals time to be a function of the structure of Care, which involves considerations of death, conscience, resoluteness, and historicality.  This consideration re-raises all of the preceding points we have learned, including Da-sein, the existentiells, time, Being-In, angst, and authenticity.

The Care Structure shows the static, synchronic (concerned with something at one point in time) wholeness (unity) of Da-sein.   Being, however, is experienced as dynamic.  Thus, it is through the idea of death that we see the dynamic, diachronic (concerned with the evolution and development of something) wholeness of Da-sein.  Death is the not-yet of Da-sein.  Death, as the end of the existence of Da-sein, provides a point where all of Da-sein’s existence can be considered.  However, there is an obvious problem, I do not experience my own death, only the deaths of others. 

Death has to be analyzed in terms of three characteristics:

(1) it is an ownmost possibility (as my possibility of not existing);

(2) it is non-relational (no one else can die for me);

(3) it is unavoidable. 

We can thus only confront death ahead of the event by an attitude of being-towards-death.  Being for my end in a way so that I realize I may die anytime, this brings me face to face with an eventuality that individualizes me in the attunement of anxiety (Angst).  Taking over for myself my own possibility of death (i.e., facing up to the realization that I can and will die) reacts back on my life making me realize the necessity of conducting my life so that my ownmost possibilities of becoming my self are realized (i.e., it wakes me up and makes me realize the importance of living well and rightly).  Being-towards-death opens the way for authenticity. 

The awakening of a recognition of and desire for authenticity instills a sense of resoluteness within Da-sein. 

Resoluteness: is a complement of anxiety.  Anxiety isolates, shakes Da-sein to its foundations, out of the complacency of “The They.”  Anxiety is a realization of coming to terms with the necessity of being-self; resoluteness is a further needed realization.  Resoluteness is a realization of one’s ownmost potentiality for being-self through concrete decisions and actions. 

Resoluteness is the realization that leads to the birth and development of conscience.

Conscience: The “voice” of conscience, the “call” of conscience is that which builds a bridge between Anxiety and Resoluteness.  For Heidegger, conscience is not the traditionally theological notion; instead, it is a radically secular conception that commands resoluteness and authentic Being-Self.  The call of conscience is an existential structure and a mode of Discourse.  (Recall “Discourse” from the third existentiell and the Being-In-As-Such Structure.)  However, what is really unique about the call of conscience is that it is not discourse with another per se; instead, it is Da-sein who is the one who calls to Da-sein.  (The call of conscience is in and from ourselves.)  Da-sein is called to itself back out of its lostness in “The They” (and idle talk—the trivial absorption in meaningless distractions that keep us from thinking about what really matters and forging our own, authentic paths in life).  And, even more uniquely, this call of conscience, since it is from ourselves and to ourselves, is silent—it doesn’t really say anything, even as it is overfull with meaning and pushes us to react. 

Here, we see the ethical intensity of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology.  Most of the time, we go through life paying no attention to what matters, even as we are, fundamentally, essentially concernful Being.