Contents:

1 ... On Heidegger

2 ... On Terminology (a guide to reading)

3 ... Textual Reflection Questions

4 ... On the Text

Under Revision ... A Smoother Version to Come Soon ...

1 ... On Heidegger

Martin Heidegger, 1889-1976, is rather difficult to introduce.  He may rightly be the most influential 20th c. thinker, exercising tremendous influence on later phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, poststructuralism, postmodernism, theology, psychology, etc..  {{Please see here for an overview of Heidegger in relation to Phenomenology and Existentialism}}  Within Continental thought, most call him an immeasurably innovative thinker, even while his work spurs great argument.  In a certain sense, Heidegger is not an innovator if we take him at his word in the Introduction to Being and Time wherein he is calling for a return to the Greek question of “what is the meaning of Being?”  His return is, though, quite innovative and profound.

Also, many have difficulty reading him without an overemphasis on his life.  He was a German during WWII and briefly a card-carrying member of the Nazi party.  Add to this that his long time lover was Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political philosopher and his teacher Edmund Husserl the Jewish father of phenomenology, and people have ammunition to both damn him and forgive him, and people have made careers on both. 

Heidegger was concerned with the study of Being.  He is more concerned with ontology than with metaphysics.  Ontology is the study of being that typically asks about fundamental features and properties of human existence.  Metaphysics, on the other hand, is the study of being that asks about the nature of reality and general first principles.  He adapted his teacher’s phenomenological method for his own investigations, saying that Husserl had remained too abstract, and need to look more closely at the concrete existence of Being through Da-sein.  Temporality and language were two of his other long lasting concerns.  These three themes are often inseparable in his work. 

His indispensable concept, Da-sein, “being-there,” refers to the structures of human existence that make possible an understanding of being.  Da-sein’s preontological understanding of being is embodied in the everyday; there is a “clearing” where things appear in their being as tools, mental events, numbers, etc.  In order to understand being one must first understand Da-sein.  This means he begins from a phenomenology of everydayness.  He says that when we are caught up in the everyday we reveal the totality of our existence: our moods, capacity for authenticity, and our involvement with the world and with others.  See more on Da-sein, below.

Now, a word about this text, Being and Time, the work from which this reading comes, is Heidegger’s most often read work and often thought to be his most important.  He wrote this book in the mid 1920’s, whereas his other works we will read were written in the 1950’s-60’s.  This separation of works has been held up as one of the reasons to argue for a “turn” in his works, that there is an early-Heidegger and a later-Heidegger who believed two different lines of thought.  This is an arguable position, one the one hand, his writing style does seem to change, however, this may be because one was for a book and the later were mostly born as lectures.  He does tackle different questions, more diverse than his first thesis, however, again, this is not a substantial difference to argue on a “turn.”  The other position is that while the content may grow, his initial thesis remains crucial throughout his writings.  Along with the thesis that there is a “turn,” many add a value judgment that his earlier works on mathematics and Being and Time is “real” philosophy and that his later works are incomprehensible, too poetic, mystical, crazy, or, perhaps the worse academic insult, too metaphysical.  His later works do indeed seem to embrace these adjectives to an extent.  The continuity of investigation, however, seems to suggest not two Heideggers, but one very complex thinker. 

2 ... On Terminology (a guide to reading)

Heidegger’s writing is challenging … but, while it seems convoluted (he is seeking the meaning of the Being of beings), he also writes very logically and methodically.  I encourage you to read slowly (even reading it aloud is often helpful) and note how he divides his points into sections and delineates lists of important points.

Ontology: The study of being, from the Greek to on (“to be”) plus logos (meaning ‘the study of’).  This is one of the branches of philosophy, alongside others like metaphysics (the study of being and reality), epistemology (the study of knowledge), ethics, logic, etc.

… BUT … Heidegger is doing ontology, studying being, but proceeds to do so by dividing ‘being’ into two categories (and one derivative or qualified category):

1. The Ontological: [of Being] this designates being itself, the essence of Being (shared by all beings).  There is a parallel here to Gilson’s “philosophical” questions (e.g., the how it is that something is, or that something is at all).
   

2. 
   

3. The Ontic: [of beings] this designates the everydayness of beings.  There is a parallel here to Gilson’s “scientific” questions (e.g., what this thing is).
   

4. 
   

5. The Pre-Ontological: (the derivative category) this designates an even more everydayness of beings wherein one isn’t even thinking scientifically about anything, but simply in the flow of life and not thinking about it.
   

Dasein: The being for whom Being is a question—i.e., the person (being) who thinks about the meaning of his/her Being (of the essence of what it means to be).  Heidegger coins this word from the conjunction of the German Da (“there”) and Sein (“being”), so it is literally that being there … Dasein is the object of our study of Being; it is ontic, because we want to know about the Being of beings, but it is not the Being of Sally or Jimmy, because that would be too specific, and may not reveal the essential meaning of Being that we all share. 

3 ... Textual Reflection Questions:

Why are we not perplexed by “being?”  Should we be?  How?  If we say we should, and maybe how we should, is this First Philosophy?  Or is that how this ontology will differ from metaphysics? 

What is Da-Sein?  Can we collapse all the descriptions into one?  Or Not? 

Heidegger is talking about the sciences and humanities in sections 3 and 4.  What is he saying about the development of knowledge and how does this relate to questioning being?  (Relation to Husserl.)

Why do we need to question the meaning of being in general before we can question the meaning of Da-Sein?

4 ... On the Text

Frontspiece:

Quoting Plato’s Sophist and working its ideas further, the point of this poignant frontspiece is to challenge our lack of perplexity as to the meaning of being. 

More Comment, here, to come ...

INTRODUCTION: THE EXPOSITION OF THE QUESTION OF THE MEANING OF BEING: Chapter I: THE NECESSITY, STRUCTURE, AND PRIORITY OF THE QUESTION OF BEING:

1) The Necessity of an Explicit Retrieve of the Question of Being:

The first sentence recalls the idea from the frontspiece, that today in our modern age we have forgotten the question of being.  He makes an almost snide comment about how we think ourselves progressive in thinking about metaphysics in quotes.  Now let me explain why I consider this almost snide.  Recall that metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the question of being and reality.  Well, this is true, but Heidegger re-defines metaphysics to be almost a dirty word.  He calls metaphysics the naming of Being as something other than being.  For example, he calls Sartre a metaphysician because Sartre says that being is a human being, that ontology is a humanism.  He calls Nietzsche a metaphysician because Nietzsche says that being is the will to power.  According to Heidegger, Sartre and Nietzsche (and most philosophers) are wrong because they are calling being something it is not; that they are saying X is Y.  Heidegger says that this is misidentification that being is being, and that is all.  (Let being be).  This also reveals the peculiar linguistic nature of being because a grammatically correct definition of being using a conjugation of being in the definition—so the thing in question is explained by referring to itself. 

So this first sentence is saying that misidentifying being is all the rage today, for example, saying that being is getting ahead in life, being is being good to others, being is becoming wealthy and powerful, being is conquering one’s enemies, etc.  And despite how often our modern times talk about being, they are not talking about being qua being. 

The last sentence of the first paragraph makes a reference to being having been forcefully separated from phenomena with great strain.  What he is referring to here is that Plato and Aristotle, much against the thought of their days, intellectually separated the idea of being from that of appearance; what it is from how it appears to be.

In the second paragraph Heidegger has his famous line that “…‘being is the most universal and the emptiest concept.”  In other words, “being” means everything and nothing.  Everything is being, has a being, but nothing is being in and of itself.  You can say the tree has a being, the world has a being, you have a being, the tree is a being, the world is a being, you are a being, but you cannot say that being is the tree, world, or you.  So everything shares in being, but being is not any of these things.  Quite a puzzle.

On page two, the first paragraph, Heidegger is saying that the prejudices against re-asking the question of the meaning of being are actually rooted in the ancient thinking (in the thinking of the last ones who got it right, according to Heidegger).  When he says we must proceed to this soil from which the question came, he is referring to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which is an examination of being.  The demonstration of categories is also a reference to Aristotle.

Under the listing if prejudices, number 1 is again referencing Aristotle.  When he says that the universality of being is not genus he is referring to how Aristotle divided substances, things, into genus and species.  It is from Aristotle that we receive our biological distinctions of family, genus, species, etc..  So we can just think if genus and species like that, of two different levels of divisions made to classify animals.  Heidegger’s point is that being is not the top level of classification, like “mammal,” “animal,” etc. 

Now, really, Aristotle does not suggest that being is this highest level of classification.  If any of you go on in philosophy and read his Metaphysics you will see how Aristotle by no means gives such an easy answer!  So why does Heidegger suggest he does?  Did he misunderstand Aristotle?  Hardly.  Heidegger is simply following the rhetorical devises created and implemented by the Greeks, in order for your own theory to look good, misquote the opponent’s theory and then disprove it in a wave of the hand.  This is a very powerful debate method; you see done by our most intelligent politicians today.

Anyway, to return to this difficult first prejudice about re-asking the question of being, we see that Heidegger is giving us about 2000 years of philosophical thinking on the question of being within a paragraph.  He is attributing to Aristotle the following points: being is universal, it is a unity within itself (thus not a genus), and that all of the categories of being make up a manifold unity within being (thus being is not composed of pieces and parts).  He rightly says that the medieval thinkers, especially St. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus and their respective followers, followed Aristotle in the belief about the unity and transcendence of being, but that as much as they thought and worked on the idea, they did not get to a much better explanation of why or how being was like this.  Then Heidegger talks about Hegel’s definition of being, following from Aristotle’s idea of universality, as the indeterminate intermediate, and how, in Heidegger’s opinion, this is entirely unclear and mostly incorrect.  (Although he does give Hegel half a nod for giving up the struggle of trying to reconcile the concept of the unity of being with the manifold of categories).  Heidegger believes that most philosophers have been caught up in the same prejudices made by the Greeks about being, and that no one has broken free.  We can guess pretty easily here that the next assumption is going to be that he, Heidegger, is going to be the one to break free of these assumptions. 

Prejudice 2:  “Being” is indefinable.  Heidegger says thinkers have assumed this for two reasons: one, because if being is more universal than the most universal classification of being, then it must be so universal it cannot be thought of; and two, because if being is not genus, and definitions are made by determining genus and difference, than something with no genus cannot have a definition. 

He says that this is only right if you are assuming that definition means calling being a being (recall his definition of metaphysics).  He says it is also true that we cannot define being as something higher or lower than it.  This is also an idea from Aristotle, and much quoted by medieval religious thinkers, that you cannot derive something from something higher than it, for example, you cannot explain what a person is by defining what God is, these two concepts may conceptually go together, but their definitions do not follow from one another.  Also, you cannot represent something by something lower than it; for example, you cannot attribute rational thought to an earthworm.  So, in regards to being, this is saying that you cannot say that being has the same definition as Spirit, Absolute, God, Nature, etc.; nor can you give being the attributes of humans or other living things (sensory perception, etc., for example, you cannot say that being gets hungry, animals get hungry, not being). 

But, says Heidegger, none of these disclaimers mean that being cannot be defined or that it is not a problem.  On the contrary, he says, it is all the more a problem that demands recognition.  We just cannot use the classic notions of definition in our search for the meaning of being. 

Prejudice 3:  “Being” is a self-evident concept.  This is the prejudice that says that we use “being” all the time, therefore we must know what it means; it is obvious.  “Being” is just like any other word, even children know it, right?  Heidegger says no, just because we use it, it does not mean that we know what it means.  Actually, because we understand the concept on a very simple level just contributes all the more to the confusion about its actual meaning.  Saying that we know it because on some simplistic level we use it or live it is not philosophical evidence. 

Taking these three prejudices against re-asking the question of the meaning of being into account, Heidegger says, it becomes clear that not only do we have absolutely no concept about being’s meaning, we do not even know where to begin with the questions.  So this is our first project.  We cannot examine being until we know the right question to ask.

Education functions in must the same way.  Greek philosophy also demonstrates the ultimate importance of questions.  In order to begin learning, we must begin by thinking about questions.  We need to acknowledge what we do not know.

2)  The Formal Structure of the Question of Being:

Here, Heidegger begins by talking about the ultimate importance of questioning, and what, precisely, is questioning.  The first point is that question is seeking.  It involves desire to know.  Second, it begins by knowing what is wanted.  What we want is the meaning of being; therefore our direction of questions is going to concern being.  But what about being?  Heidegger says that the question will ask about thatness and whatness.  What does this mean?  Thatness is knowing that something is, it is a question of existence.  Whatness is knowing what something is, therefore it is a question of discernment or classification. 

When we are going to question the meaning of being, we already know being in a sense.  This is what he means when he says (l.2, p.4) “… questioning has what it asks about …”  What we are going to do with being, that which we already have, is define it and conceptualize it.  In order to define and conceptualize being we have to adopt a certain attitude of questioning.  This attitude is a certain questioning closeness and distance. 

He then says that the fact we can begin with in our search is how we know and do not know what being is.  What we want to know is what is being and what makes beings beings?  We know this, but it is inarticulable knowledge.  What makes you or me a being is not itself a being.  Therefore we cannot resort to a story, a myth, or a creator to explain this.  We are not asking how you came about, but how being is being.

So where we find ourselves (p.5, para. 2) is that the subject matter of our search for the meaning of being is beings.  It is beings which we ask with regard to their being.  But being is everything!, he says, where in the world do we start?  Do we just pick a random beginning?  Which is the best being to examine to find out the meaning of being in general?

(p.6, l.2-3)  We must ask the question of the meaning of being to a being who is transparent in its being.  What does this mean?  This means that the pure being we are investigating, which we now learn is called Da-sein, is that being who is not you or me.  It is not a person, but it is the being each of us is.  Da-sein is the being who questions itself, who is always involved in being, but is not a single person, it is the generic being. 

(p.6, para.2-4)  But isn’t this a vicious circle, Heidegger rhetorically asks.  No.  Why?  For several reasons, first, because all ontological knowledge has to pre-suppose a little bit.  This is how we are able to know what question to ask, we have a little bit of insight as to the answer, but we do not hold this preliminary look as the answer.  The fact that we know a little bit about “being” before we begin is precisely part of what we are questioning.  Besides, Heidegger says, we are not working in a circle, we are working in a backwards and forwards manner, we kinda know the answer so we use that knowledge to work backwards to a good starting point, and then work forwards again.

3)  The Ontological Priority of the Question of Being.

In paragraph two of this section Heidegger poses the question about the worth of the question of the meaning of being.  Is it merely “free-floating speculation” or is it the “most basic and at the same time most concrete question?”  Obviously, he is writing a very long book about this, so we can safely guess he views it as the most basic and most concrete of questions. 

Paragraph three begins “Being is always the being of a being.”  This sounds confusing, but pause and think about it.  Does the idea of being make any sense divorced from some living thing?  No.  He then compares how he is going to ask questions about being to how science (here construed broadly as natural and social sciences) divides and classifies the world in order to study it.  Eventually, he says, these divisions become taken as fact, when really they just began as almost arbitrary divisions.  When this happens one must cause a paradigm shift, must have a crisis of its foundations.  He then gives examples of how this is happening in all of the different fields.

He is explaining this first to say that some investigation must be conducted first, to establish foundations, before the “real” investigation can begin.  This is like how he is using a very vague understanding of being to begin his own quest for the meaning of being.  Second, he is implicitly saying that he is going to cause a crisis of foundations in ontology by his new approach and return to the question.

Now, two terminology points to clarify.  First, (p.9, l.9-13) sounds very confusing, but really, what he is saying is that the most basic questions of philosophy have not begun by people abstractly deducing questions logically from pre-planned methodologies.  No, that actually, the most basic of questions, those that come first, are about figuring out people in their times and places with special regard to the fact that they are in times and places (historicality and historicity).  This is why the question of being is so concrete.

The second terminology point to clarify is in the first full paragraph on p.9, where he contrasts ontological inquiry from ontic inquiry.  Ontological is in the realm of being of Da-sein as no specific person; ontic is in the realm of the everyday, of this being or that being, of you or me.  Ontology studies the meaning of being; psychology or medicine studies the ontic (e.g., human personality, so as to “cure” Suzy’s personality or anatomy, so as to mend Joe’s broken knee). 

Then Heidegger reiterates how ontology must begin with a preliminary understanding of being.  Part of the reason why this is so important, he now tells us, is that it is crucial to really really understand what we mean when we say being if we are really going to do ontology.  And, not only is this so crucial for people doing ontology, but for all of the social and natural sciences as well because they all need a solid foundation, which will be the meaning of being, that ontology deduces.

4)  The Ontic Priority of the Question of Being.

Here Heidegger is talking more about what is Da-sein.  I consider this section to be the most difficult so far, and must be read slowly and carefully, but even so, some of it just will not make perfect sense.  Part of the understanding of Heidegger comes after you have read the several hundred pages of the book. 

Anyway, first he gives us a definition of science as the “totality of fundamentally coherent true propositions.”  Remember here that science is not just what we call science (biology, physics, etc).  What he is doing, ontology, is also science.  He tells us that this is not a complete definition.  Then he implies that it is not complete because our human behavior influences science, or, rather, that science is made by humans, and just as humans have idiosyncrasies that are not rational, science too has quirks. 

This is a pretty radical notion.  He is saying that science is not made up of facts we simply “discover,” but that we also create (make, “fabricate,” but loosen the negative connotation this presents) science.  We are creative beings because of the theory of meaning from which he is working--phenomenology posits meaning to be co-founded in the world giving itself to the subject and the subject giving him/herself to the world, as opposed to an ego-centric model where we “rational animals” serve as the “measure of all things” and deem meaning, impose it from a presumed “objective” standpoint. 

So how is this, the existence of idiosyncrasies in science, Da-sein?  Da-sein is like the object of scientific research.  It is both something real (like the being of a human), and something slightly fabricated (by being abstracted from the human, traits or characteristics are abstracted).  Da-sein is both like the human and not like the human in the same way that what science studies is both like and unlike reality. 

We are not going to meet Da-sein walking down the street is essentially what Heidegger is telling us in the first full paragraph of page 10.  Da-sein is different because it is being that is questioning being.  The everyday worldliness of Da-sein is precisely in the fact that it is ontologically concerned.  This ontological concern-ment is what Heidegger will from now on call the pre-ontological character of Da-sein (i.e. it is neither ontic nor ontological, but in the right frame of mind to develop an ontology).

(3rd full para.)  The being that Da-sein relates to, i.e. this or that everyday human being, is called existence.  Existence is not what we are asking about when we ask what being means.  Existence always belongs to someone or something.  Da-sein is not possessed by any one thing.  But it is through existence that we know a little bit about what being means, so because Da-sein can relate to existence and yet be more “pure” than it, it will become our starting point, or our object of study to investigate the meaning of being.

The last paragraph of page 10 that continues to page 11 is contrasting “existentiell” and “existential.”  Existentiell understanding is an ontic question, it asks about existence of person X or Y in a specific time and place, in the everyday lived world.  For these sorts of questions we do not need to understand the essential structures of the meaning of being.  Existential understanding, on the other hand, asks questions about the structures of existence, therefore, the structures of the meaning of being, of Da-sein.  These structures of being are dependent upon the ontic, upon the existentiell, but are not directly concerned with them.  (For example, especially when we need a little foresight about what being is in order to frame our first question, here we are asking for existential ontological understanding in the existentiell ontic world).

The second full paragraph on page 11 brings up the next crucial issue: being-in-the-world (Stambaugh’s translation is “a” world and no hyphens).  Heidegger tells us that being in a world belongs essentially to Da-sein.  What does this mean?  This means that it is not ontic nor existentiell beings only who have a time and a place.  Da-sein is historical.  The object of our study needs to have a relation to the world because the meaning of being is tied to the world.  Thus Da-sein will be a being-in-the-world; and we will have to understand world just as much as we will have to understand the meaning of being, these two ideas cannot be separated.

Therefore what Heidegger is going to do is a fundamental ontology sought in the existential analysis of Da-sein.

The fourth full paragraph on page 11 tells us the three reasons why we give priority to Da-sein, or, in other words, why we begin our search by looking at Da-sein: 1) the ontic priority, Da-sein’s being is defined by existence; 2) the ontological priority, because Da-sein’s being is defined by existence, its concern for this existence makes it pre-ontological; 3) the ontic-ontological priority, all other ontologies can be based upon this one of Da-sein’s because of the way it understands existence (relates to beings) it also originally possesses a knowledge of beings unlike itself. 

Chapter II:  THE DOUBLE TASK IN WORKING OUT THE QUESTION OF BEING; THE METHOD OF THE INVESTIGATION AND ITS OUTLINE

5) The Ontological Analysis of Da-sein as exposure of the Horizon for an Interpretation of the Meaning of Being in General

The question that begins this section is, now that we have established Da-sein as the being in question about its Being, how should Da-sein become accessible?  How can we envision Da-sein in this interpretation? 

The ontic-ontological priority of Da-sein may lead one back to the presupposition that the notion of its Being is self-evident, but this is not the case.  While ontically, Da-sein is nearest to itself, yet, ontologically, it is farthest away.  Da-sein tends to understand its own Being in terms of what is closest to it, the “world,” yet the way we understand the world is ontologically reflected back upon the interpretation of Da-sein.  Here we see the blending of the ontic and the ontological—this pre-ontological that is neither ontic nor ontological alone, is still not a foreign concept to Da-sein.  [[MIRROR?]]  (p.58).

The Being of Da-sein remains hidden to itself because of this ontic-ontological structure (p.58).

This understanding of Da-sein develops and decays—is not static knowledge—according to the manner of being of Da-sein at any time.  Because of this flux, we have the possibility of disciplines—of areas like anthropology, “politics” (why this in quotes?), poetry, history, etc.  [[does this regulation of disciplines harm the primacy of these disciplines—history, society, politics—in Chinese thought?]]  It is a question, however, about the manner of study of these areas; existentiell or existential?  These two divisions neither necessarily go together nor exclude one another.  One can require the other (p.59). 

No presuppositions can be brought to the study of the question of the meaning of Being (p.59).

TEMPORALITY:  The meaning of the Being of that being we call Da-sein is temporality.  The structures of Da-sein preliminarily laid out must be shown as modes of temporality.  A pre-ontological Being belongs to Da-sein as its ontic constitution.  In that it IS as it is, it understands something like Being.  It is by TIME that Da-sein tacitly understands its Being (p.60).  

Time as horizon for every understanding/interpretation of Being.  Thus—cannot understand time as clock-time, as traditional understanding of time, as ontic time (p.60).  Traditionally, time was understood in terms of being “in time.”  “Being in time” is that which separates the regions of Being.  But, for time to be our horizon for understanding Being, it cannot mean “being in time,” nor can it differentiate atemporal and supratemporal from time itself.  Being is only comprehensible in terms of the horizon of time—in terms of the consideration of time (61-2).

If the answer to the question of the meaning of time is ...

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