Aristotle’s “Politics”: A Reader’s Guide, Judith A. Swanson
Badiou’s “Being and Event”: A Reader’s Guide, Christopher Norris
Berkeley’s “Principles of Human Knowledge”: A Reader’s Guide, Alasdair Richmond Deleuze’s “Difference and Repetition”: A Reader’s Guide, Joe Hughes
Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus”: A Reader’s Guide, Eugene W. Holland Deleuze and Guattari’s “What is Philosophy”: A Reader’s Guide, Rex Butler
Descartes’ “Meditations”: A Reader’s Guide, Richard Francks Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit“: A Reader’s Guide, Stephen Houlgate
Heidegger’s “Being and Time”: A Reader’s Guide, William Blattner Hobbes’s “Leviathan": A Reader”s Guide, Laurie M. Johnson Bagby Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgement”: A Reader’s Guide, Fiona Hughes
Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling”: A Reader’s Guide, Clare Carlisle
Levinas’ “Totality and Infinity”: A Reader’s Guide, William Large Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government”: A Reader’s Guide, Paul Kelly
Marx and Engels’ “Communist Manifesto”: A Reader’s Guide, Peter Lamb
Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”: A Reader’s Guide, Christa Davis Acampora and Keith Ansell Pearson Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: A Reader’s Guide, Clancy Martin
Rousseau’s “The Social Contract”: A Reader’s Guide, Christopher Wraight
Spinoza’s “Ethics”: A Reader’s Guide, J. Thomas Cook
Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations”: A Reader’s Guide, Arif Ahmed
Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”: A Reader’s Guide, Roger M. White
Heidegger’s Being and Time
A Reader’s Guide
Second Edition
William Blattner
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For Alisa, Willie, and Sam my Worum-willen
Preface to the Second Edition ix
Acknowledgments xii
Notes on the Text, Translations, and Linguistic Sources xiv
1 Context 1
2 Overview of Themes 11
i. Rejecting the Subject–Object Model of Human Experience 12
ii. Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Everydayness 15
iii. The Implications of the Phenomenology of Everydayness for Traditional Philosophical Problems 16
iv. Existentialist Thematics in Division II 17
v. Existential Temporality and Historicality 18
3 Reading the Introduction 21
i. Ontology 21
ii. Phenomenology 27
4 Reading Division I 35
i. Existence 35
ii. Being-in-the-World 44
iii. The World and the Ready-to-Hand 49
iv. Existential Spatiality 63
v. The Self and the Anyone 66
vi. Disclosedness and the There 76
vii. Disposedness, Attunement, and Thrownness 78
viii. Understanding and Interpretation 87
ix. Discourse and Language 96
x. Interlude: Cognition as a Founded Mode of Being-In 107
xi. Falling and Dasein’s Everydayness 115
xii. Anxiety and Care 122
xiii. Realism and Idealism in Being and Time 129
xiv. Truth 137
5 Reading Division II 145
i. The Demand for a Primordial Interpretation of Dasein 145
ii. Existential Death 148
iii. Guilt and Conscience 157
iv. Anticipatory Resoluteness 164
v. The Authentic Self 174
vi. Temporality 178
vii. Authentic Temporality and Historicality 189
viii. Historicality 191
ix. Time 201
x. Temporality, Time, and Temporalität 213
6 Reception and Influence 217
Glossary 225
Further Reading 241
Notes 243
Bibliography 270 Index 282
Preface to the Second Edition
I have made a number of significant changes to the first edition of this Reader’s Guide, changes that I hope will make the book more useful and exciting for its readers. On advice from six anonymous reviewers secured by Bloomsbury, I have added treatments of the final quarter of Being and Time on temporality, historicality, and time. I have also reorganized the book into six chapters (where once it was only four), breaking up the discussions of the introduction and the two divisions into their own chapters. I have added a more detailed table of contents, which will make finding material in the book easier, and I have added a glossary (a version of which lived on my website for years). The reader will also find more extensive engagement with the secondary literature. All of this has been made possible by the additional space granted by Bloomsbury.
In the intervening seventeen years, I have changed my views on a number of important aspects of Being and Time. I have modified my reconstruction of Heidegger’s conception of the Anyone in the wake of looking more closely at the relationship between social normativity and degraded forms of public life, as Heidegger discusses them in §27. I have also completely revised my approach to understanding, interpretation, and cognition, primarily in light of Mark Wrathall’s work. I have altered my interpretation of anxiety as well, and even though our views remain quite different, Kate Withy’s work has played a large role here. There is a lot of continuity in my approaches to death, guilt, resoluteness, and authenticity between the two editions. I have changed some details, however, especially the reading of conscience, here influenced by the work of Quill Kukla and Steven Crowell.
The first edition of this Reader’s Guide did not address the topics of temporality, historicality, and time. Here I do. Some who read this book will be aware of my reconstruction of Heidegger’s concept of temporality in my 1999 Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism. 1 The interpretation I offer here is radically different. Although I still think we have reason to attribute temporal idealism to Heidegger, I now think we do not have to do so to make sense of the argument of Being and Time. My new interpretation of temporality is heavily influenced by Clark Remington’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago. I ended up in a different place than Remington did, but I would not have gotten there without his insights.
Since the publication of the first edition of this Reader’s Guide, much more has come to light about Heidegger’s politics. Volume 86 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (complete works) was published in 2011.2 It contains a series of lectures that Heidegger gave on Hegel and Schelling between 1927 and 1957. Emmanuel Faye focused on a couple of these lectures (those from 1933 to 1935) in writing his Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. 3 Faye’s work started a second wave (or perhaps third wave, depending on how you count)4 of scholarly attention to Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism and the Nazi Party. Two of the lectures from vol. 86 have been translated into English: “On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State” (1933–4) and “Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1934–5).5 In these lectures, Heidegger explicitly endorses the “Führer principle” (hence Hitlerism). He further argues that the state is “the being” of the people (Volk) it organizes and that it is only through obedience to the will of the Führer that the individual achieves true destiny.6 Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, the translators of the 1933–4 lectures, remark that “It should be clear from this overview that in the seminar Heidegger was ready to put the ontological and existential concepts of Being and Time into the service of an authoritarian, expansionist, and exclusivist political program—in short, the program of National Socialism.”7 A few years after the publication of these lectures, the first of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” (volumes 94–7 of the Gesamtausgabe) were published, and they provide further damning evidence of Heidegger’s racism and anti-Semitism.8 In the words of Dieter Thomä, “Anti-semitism enters the innermost part of philosophical reflection for the first time in these notebooks.”9
For readers of Being and Time, the question we face is whether Heidegger used or abused the conceptual tools of Being and Time in his lectures from 1933 to 1935 and the Black Notebooks. There are, of course, other possibilities as well. Perhaps he developed or extended his concepts to serve his politics. There are passages in Being and Time that use language that resonates with the “folkish” (völkisch) ideology of the German extreme right.10 Do such resonances show that Heidegger’s politics are central to the conceptuality of Being and Time or merely that when Heidegger seeks to illustrate his ideas, he draws on ideologically charged descriptions of concrete phenomena?
Working through these issues adequately would require a detailed scholarly study of its own. It would do a massive disservice to those who take this question seriously, as well as do injustice to the text and legacy of Being and Time, to attempt to address it in a few pages in this Reader’s Guide. I will say this much, however: I would argue that there are central elements of the philosophy presented in Being and Time (as I interpret it) that directly conflict with Nazi ideology. It’s hard to reconcile Nazi ideology with the critique of inauthentic life as disburdening Dasein of its “answerability.” The Führer principle and the idea that the individual “belongs to” the ethnic, racial, or linguistic community rob the individual of the authority to own their own life.11 I shall argue (in Section iv of Chapter 5) that Heidegger’s conception of authenticity requires individuals to take personal ownership of their lives and adapt them to their own situation. Does this “exonerate” Being and Time? No, for of course it’s possible that like a great many important philosophical texts, Being and Time is not internally consistent. I will point out worrisome passages in the text as we proceed, and make some preliminary comments about how we might think about them. I will not, however, presume to resolve the questions they raise nor to allay the worries about the political implications of Being and Time.
Notes on the Text, Translations, and Linguistic Sources
Sein und Zeit1 was first published in Husserl’s journal, Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 8, in 1927, and simultaneously as an offprint from the journal. Max Niemeyer Verlag became the publisher of the stand-alone edition of the treatise. By 2006 the most recent stand-alone edition (the nineteenth) is published by De Gruyter, which absorbed Niemeyer in the intervening years. The “definitive” pagination of the German edition is that of the seventh edition, published by Niemeyer in 1953. That pagination has been preserved in the subsequent stand-alone editions and is reproduced in the margins of the edition that is incorporated into Heidegger’s complete works (Gesamtausgabe) as vol. 2.2
The Gesamtausgabe3 is the authorized edition of Heidegger’s works, published by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag. The Gesamtausgabe is not a critical edition, but rather “eine Ausgabe letzter Hand,” that is, an edition (initially) overseen and approved by Heidegger. There is nothing inherently problematic with such an edition, but one should note that the absence of an independent editor can lead to errors.4 The guiding role of the author, moreover, allows them to sculpt their own legacy. In Heidegger’s case, the complex issues that arise from Heidegger’s involvement in National Socialism present a special challenge. There are currently two translations of Sein und Zeit into English: John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s 1962 translation published by Harper & Row,5 and Dennis J. Schmidt’s 2010 revision of Joan Stambaugh’s translation published by SUNY Press.6 I prefer the
Macquarrie and Robinson translation and will rely on it for quotations. All quotations from Being and Time will be cited thus: (BT 269/227), where the first is the page in Macquarrie and Robinson’s English translation and the second is the page according to the definitive German pagination. I will make two sorts of changes to the translated text. First, I will systematically change some of the technical terminology and alert the reader to such changes when I first introduce them, thus: “my translation (German; MR: Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation).” I will also collect my terminological preferences in the Glossary at the end of the book. Second, I will sometimes alter the translation beyond the substitution of technical terms. In the latter cases I will add an asterisk to the page citation thus: (BT 269/227*).
Macquarrie and Robinson employ three translational practices to which I object, two that concern quotation marks and another that concerns capitalization. First, they introduce quotation marks into the text when the English word they’ve chosen can be misleading. For example, they put quotation marks around “they” in their rendition of Heidegger’s technical term (and neologism) “das Man.” Second, they also use quotation marks to indicate nominalized pronouns, adverbs, and so forth. For example, they place quotation marks around “now” when Heidegger writes “das Jetzt.” Fortunately, they rigorously distinguish between their own introduced quotation marks (double quotes) and those in the original (single quotes). I have eliminated all of Macquarrie and Robinson’s introduced quotation marks. I have also chosen to capitalize the nominalized pronouns and adverbs, so “the Now.” In German one must capitalize these words when used as a noun. Capitalizing them in translation clearly signals to the reader that the word is nominalized. The third practice to which I object is the regular use of capitalization to distinguish translations of two related German words. For example, Macquarrie and Robinson distinguish the German words “Faktum” and “Tatsache” by capitalizing “Fact” for the former but lowercasing the latter. I find the capitalization distracting and difficult to track. I have opted either to use two different English words or sometimes to add a clarifying or qualifying word in parentheses (in the main text) or brackets (in quotations).
I occasionally dive into the connotations and etymologies of Heidegger’s German. In doing so, I have relied on the resources available through the invaluable online Digitales Wörterbuch
der deutschen Sprache (DWDS), made available by the BerlinBrandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. DWDS helpfully includes both the Deutsches Wörterbuch first compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, which provides historical information on word-use, and the Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen, compiled by Wolfgang Pfeifer and his collaborators.7 To corroborate my intuitions about English, I have relied on the online Oxford English Dictionary and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, by Rodney D. Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum.8
Finally, a word about references to the parts of the text of Being and Time. It has become customary to use a variety of forms of numbering to designate the parts of the text, even though Heidegger does not use them himself. Scholars use spelled-out numerals to name the two official parts of the text, Part One and Part Two. (Note, Heidegger never wrote Part Two, but it appears in his projected table of contents in §8 on “The Design of the Treatise.”) We refer to the two extant divisions of Part One, Divisions I and II, by capital Roman numerals, and we refer to the six numbered chapters of each division with Arabic numerals. With these different numbering schemes, we can refer to Division I, Chapter 3, simply as I.3. The sections of the treatise are sequentially numbered from 1 to 83. The German text uses the paragraph symbol (¶) to designate these sections because they are called “Paragraphen” in German. Calling them “paragraphs” in English would be confusing, so we call them “sections” and use the section symbol (§) instead. Thus, we can also simply refer to a section or page number if that is what is relevant.9
Acknowledgments
My fascination with Heidegger’s Being and Time began at U.C. Berkeley more than forty years ago. In 1981, I took Bert Dreyfus’s Husserl course, on a dare. I was worried that Husserl would be impenetrable. An older and wiser student challenged me to take the course along with him. I did, loved it, and then enrolled in Dreyfus’s course on Being and Time. From Berkeley I went on to the University of Pittsburgh, where I wrote my doctoral thesis on Heidegger under the supervision of John Haugeland. I am indebted to Dreyfus and Haugeland for their inspirational teaching, their encouragement, and their brilliant thought. Sadly, since 2010, we have lost both of these formidable scholars.
In the early 2000s, Continuum Publishing approached me about writing a book on Being and Time for their Reader’s Guide series. Limitations of space led me to skip the final quarter of the treatise on temporality, historicality, and time. Two years ago Bloomsbury (which had acquired Continuum in the intervening fifteen years) asked me whether I would be interested in doing a second edition. Bloomsbury has allowed me to add significantly to the text, so that I might cover the entire treatise. Bloomsbury secured six anonymous reviews of the first edition, as well as a final review by an additional anonymous reader. All seven of these reviews have proved invaluable. I am grateful to Bloomsbury for giving me this opportunity and to Lucy Harper, Katrina Calsado, and Ben Piggott for guiding me through the process.
As described in the Preface to the Second Edition, I have changed a number of important aspects of my interpretation of Being and Time over the seventeen years between editions of this Reader’s Guide. I must especially thank my friends in the International Society for Phenomenological Studies, which has met almost annually since the summer of 1999 and which has been the primary venue for professional
debate for me the past quarter century. These debates have constantly challenged my reading of Being and Time. I have had a great many conversation partners through the Society, whose influence one can trace in the notes to this edition. I want also to thank my graduate students who have worked with me on Heidegger since the first edition and have repeatedly challenged my interpretations and assumptions: James Olsen, Clark Remington, Tucker McKinney, Oren Magid, Andy Blitzer, Francisco Gallegos, and Katherine Ward. I want also to thank my Heideggerian colleague here at Georgetown, Kate Withy, who has opened my eyes to new ways of looking at Heidegger.
I must also thank Georgetown University and its College of Arts and Sciences for a year’s research leave to complete the bulk of the work on this second edition.
Finally, Alisa, Willie, and Sam have been a constant source of love, encouragement, and support through joyous times and tragic.
Chapter 1 Context
Being and Time was published in 1927 and rapidly became one of the most significant and controversial philosophical texts of the twentieth century. It sits at the confluence of several important streams of thought in the early twentieth century, including phenomenology, existentialism, neo-scholasticism, and hermeneutics. It also stands at the “parting of ways” between so-called analytic and continental philosophy, as one scholar has called it.1 It is, in short, a focal point of many of the most interesting and contentious philosophical debates of the past century. Martin Heidegger’s journey on the way to Being and Time is improbable.2 It was a journey that led him from his childhood in Meßkirch, a small town in rural Baden not far from Lake Constance, where he was born in 1889, to Freiburg, one of the more cosmopolitan cities in Germany at the time, situated in close proximity to Basel, Switzerland, and Strasbourg, France (part of the German Empire from 1871 until 1918). Heidegger was raised Catholic, and his education was supported by the Church. He attended college preparatory secondary schools in Konstanz and Freiburg while pursuing his early ambition in life, to be a Jesuit priest. After completing his secondary education in Freiburg in 1909, Heidegger briefly sought to join the Jesuit order, then subsequently to become a diocesan priest, but in both cases he was judged physically unfit due to a heart ailment. (The same ailment kept him off the front lines during the First World War.)
Heidegger studied at Freiburg University, spending his first two years in theology, then his third and fourth years in mathematics. While studying theology and math, he also studied philosophy, and four
years after entering university, he earned his doctorate in 1913 with a dissertation on the philosophy of logic, “The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism.”3 In order to advance along the academic career path in Germany at the time (and largely still today), one had to secure a further qualification, the habilitation, which involved writing a second dissertation and delivering a lecture to the faculty in one’s area. Between 1913 and 1915, Heidegger wrote his habilitation dissertation under the nominal supervision of the influential neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), “The Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus,”4 while supported by a grant from the Church in Freiburg. He delivered his lecture on “The Concept of Time in the Science of History.”5 Heidegger was ready to begin his professional career.
Heidegger’s intellectual focus during this time period was already indicative of his future course: in both his doctoral and habilitation dissertations, Heidegger explored issues in the foundation of meaning, logic, and intentionality (the mind’s capacity to represent the world around it) by means of phenomenological method. Phenomenology was the name that Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) gave to his philosophical methodology.6 Heidegger’s interest in and commitment to phenomenology was enhanced by the arrival of Husserl at Freiburg in 1916, and shortly afterward, Heidegger became Husserl’s “assistant” (something like a postdoctoral researcher) while also teaching his own courses as a Privatdozent (lecturer). We will look at the idea of phenomenology in more detail in 3.ii, but for now, the following should suffice.
Phenomenology is a reflective method of philosophical inquiry in which we focus on our consciousness of the world, rather than the world itself. To do this, we “put out play” all of our assumptions about the way the world is. We perform a “phenomenological epochē,” a bracketing of everything beyond our consciousness, so as to focus only on consciousness itself. In a revolutionary twist that distinguishes Husserl’s method from, for example, Descartes’s, this epochē brackets our own inner, psychological states and not just the natural world around us. You might ask, how can one study consciousness if one brackets one’s psychological states? The idea is this: we can distinguish between our conscious experience and the psychological states in which (we believe) experiences are realized. Those psychological states are events or conditions in the world; psychology studies them. In bracketing the
world tout court, phenomenology brackets those psychological states as well. Phenomenology is not a form of introspective psychology.7 If we bracket both the material and psychological domains, what’s left for phenomenology to study? Husserl’s answer: the object of consciousness just as it presents itself to us. I am visually aware of a cat. I bracket both the cat itself and the psychological state in which my experience is realized, both of which belong to the world, and focus instead on the cat as it appears to me. What is the point of doing this?
The phenomenological epochē frees philosophy from dependence on insecure foundations. It frees philosophy, first, from the ever-changing content of the sciences. We do not seek to explain how entities in the world function, come to be, or perish. We just describe them as they present themselves to us. This allows philosophy to be more than a summation of the state of empirical knowledge at a time and frees it from the threat of being rendered passé by advances in science. This independence from empirical science includes independence from empirical psychology and its changing paradigms.8 Second, it frees philosophy from the temptation of metaphysical speculation. Traditional philosophers ask questions such as whether the cat is really there or just an illusion. Is the cat a “basic” entity, or is it dependent on something ultimate and not disclosed to the senses, such as Platonic Ideas, God, or Leibnizian monads? Is redness something on its own, independent of red objects? Am I alone in the universe, or are there things and other people beyond my mind? Empiricist philosophers of the early modern period charged traditional metaphysics with indulging in idle speculation. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) joined the empiricists in their critique, and Kant’s influence dominated German philosophy from the mid-nineteenth century through Heidegger’s time. By putting “out of play” any assumptions or questions about the object itself and focusing instead on the object as it presents itself to us, phenomenology puts metaphysics out of play. Finally, phenomenology frees philosophy from dependence upon, or as Heidegger will put it, “infiltration” by unexamined common-sense opinions. It asks us to attend carefully to the way things show themselves to us and to put out of play “what one says” about the world.
Heidegger appropriated phenomenological method to address questions of ontology, the science or study of being. In doing so, he was deeply influenced by another side of Kant’s thinking. Kant argued
that any attempt on our part to think about objects is governed by a special form of logic, “transcendental logic.” The logic taught in elementary logic courses in philosophy and mathematics departments is what Kant called “general” logic. It is a logic of consistency: it tells us when our thoughts are consistent and how we preserve truth in our inferences. Transcendental logic is the set of rules that govern how we must think about objects so that our thoughts can get a grip on the world, so that our thoughts can be true or false. Transcendental logic is a logic of truth, not consistency. The details of Kant’s analysis are not important here (and they are fantastically complicated!),9 but to give a flavor of the conclusions he draws, he argues that to think about or represent a world of objects, we must represent it as a system of causally interacting substances in space and time.
Apart from the question whether Kant can really establish these rules of thought, the obvious worry is that this tells us nothing about the world. It tells us how the world must appear to us. Kant’s response is to distinguish the world as it appears to us from the world “as it is in itself.” The world as it is in itself is inaccessible to human cognition. We can know nothing about it. Our knowledge is limited to the world of appearance. Kant blunts the skeptical implications of this conclusion by arguing that the rules of thought, and so the structure of appearance he has identified, are binding on all human minds. So his conclusions are not about how you or I see the world; they are about how any of us must see the world. Kant’s successors during the nineteenth century called into question the distinction between the world as it appears and the world as it is in itself. The basic gist of the argument is this: if we are only able to have coherent thoughts about objects by tying those thoughts to the world of appearance, then how can we even have the thought of the world as it is in itself? To this day, Kant scholars debate the force of this challenge. Heidegger accepts it and so rejects the distinction between things in themselves and appearances.10 For latterday Kantians (specifically, the neo-Kantians), philosophy is the study of objectivity, the rules that govern our attempts to represent things objectively.
Heidegger transforms this study of objectivity into a study of being. How can he do this? Have we not put out of play all metaphysical questions about the world beyond experience? Once we have dispensed with the distinction between appearances and things in themselves,
there is no reason not to regard the objects of our thought as things that are, entities. In Being and Time, Heidegger prefers the term “ontology” to “metaphysics” to describe this study of being.11 “Metaphysics” suggests the traditional project of cataloging the ultimate furniture of the universe and addressing questions about the world beyond the senses. “Ontology” refers to the study of what it is to be. We ask not, What is there? but rather, What is it for an entity to be? Being is a concept that belongs to our ability to understand things, and ontology’s job is to explore that concept.
This brings Heidegger’s mature philosophical thinking back into contact with his earliest interests in ontology. Traditional ontology, beginning with Aristotle and reaching an apex in the high middle ages, sought to develop a theory of the basic categories of things that are. Detailed questions, such as whether there are both cats and dogs or whether duck-billed platypuses are mammals, should be left to scientific research. Philosophers concern themselves only with the highest-order genera of entities, such as souls, physical things, and numbers, as well as with the ontological structure of entities, such as the distinction between an essential trait and an accidental characteristic. Neo-scholasticism became a prominent force in the Catholic intellectual world in the late nineteenth century, and it revived these ontological questions. Heidegger reports reading Franz Brentano’s On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle12 at the age of eighteen in 1907,13 finding himself drawn to Neo-Scholastic ontological questions. For traditional philosophy and neo-scholasticism, ontological questions are “hard” metaphysical questions about the nature of the world as it is in itself. Once he found phenomenology and Kant, Heidegger converted ontology into a study of the structure and rules of our understanding of being.
Two other major streams of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century thought feed into Heidegger’s philosophical project of the 1920s as well. In his youth Heidegger was a deeply religious man, and during his studies he was supported by the Catholic Church. After completing his habilitation, Heidegger’s religious convictions began to change. At the same time, he also met and courted his future wife, Elfride, who was a Protestant. By 1919, Heidegger was ready to break formal ties with the Catholic Church, and in a letter to his friend Father Engelbert Krebs he avowed that “Epistemological insights extending to a theory of
historical knowledge have made the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me, but not Christianity and metaphysics—these, though, in a new sense.”14 Heidegger continued to lecture on the philosophy of religion, but increasingly his philosophical perspective on religion reflected the influence of Luther and a conception of the early Christianity of the New Testament. His restructured philosophical focus on Christian experience dovetailed with his interest in Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), the Danish theologian and philosopher who is sometimes credited as the first existentialist thinker.15
“Existentialism” is not a precisely defined term. It refers not to a movement or school of thought, but rather to a sensibility and a set of issues. It is, moreover, as much a literary sensibility as it is a set of philosophical ideas. Heidegger was influenced by two existentialist philosophers in particular, Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are in many respects deeply opposed in their ways of thinking, yet they share a reaction to the philosophical tradition that precedes them. They regard it as overly focused on the achievements of cognition and as offering very little insight that can touch the lives of individuals. It is also characteristic of existentialism to regard everyday human life as something of a sham, as a distortion of a more distressing underlying truth. This truth, once exposed, can serve as a springboard for personal liberation, however, and that makes confronting it worthwhile. Heidegger’s interest in existentialism led to a friendship with Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), one of the chief exponents of existentialist philosophy in Germany at the time. The correspondence between Heidegger and Jaspers16 makes for fascinating reading. Heidegger conceived of himself and Jaspers as philosophical revolutionaries aiming to overturn the abstractions of the philosophical research of the previous generations.
This interest in the meaning of everyday experience calls for a method of interpreting human behavior. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) had developed just such a method with his theory of hermeneutics. Dilthey argued that the techniques we must use in order to understand human behavior, symbols, and linguistic expressions differ from the techniques used in the natural sciences. The natural sciences seek to “explain” natural events by subsuming them under general laws that are applicable everywhere and at all times, whereas the human studies aim to “understand” human behavior by putting it into its concrete
social and historical context. The natural sciences aim for generality, whereas the human studies aim for context-sensitivity. In Being and Time, Heidegger frames Dilthey’s insights ontologically: human activity, language, and the artifacts and paraphernalia of our world only are what they are in their social contexts.
The last major influence on Heidegger’s early thought that I must mention here is Aristotle. Heidegger engages extensively and repeatedly with Aristotle during the period leading up to Being and Time. He lectures on the Nicomachean Ethics, Physics, and Metaphysics. During the time of his assistantship with Husserl, Heidegger began working on what he hoped would be his first significant piece of scholarship: a monograph that was to develop a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle. The only written result of this project was the introduction to the intended work.17 On the basis of the draft introduction, Heidegger was appointed an “extraordinary” or associate professor at the University of Marburg in 1923.
During his time at Marburg (1923–8), Heidegger focused on Aristotle and Kant, and he wrote Being and Time. Heidegger’s lectures from this time have also proven to be of lasting interest for scholars, especially his History of the Concept of Time, 18 Logic: The Question of Truth, 19 Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 20 and Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. This was a creative period in Heidegger’s life, and it was the time when wrote Being and Time. In 1926, while he was working on Being and Time, the philosophical faculty at Marburg recommended Heidegger for promotion to a vacant chair in philosophy (an “ordinary” or full professorship), but the promotion request was denied higher up on the grounds that Heidegger had not published any significant work in ten years. The draft of Division I of Being and Time was not sufficient. Heidegger kept hard at work, and Divisions I and II were published in Husserl’s journal of phenomenological research in 1927. The reception of Being and Time was strong enough to secure Heidegger appointment as Husserl’s successor at the University of Freiburg upon the latter’s retirement in 1928.
Despite succeeding to Husserl’s chair, Heidegger had drifted rather far from his mentor’s guiding ideas, as became clear to everyone quite rapidly. Heidegger’s “inaugural address” as professor of philosophy at Freiburg was his “What is Metaphysics?” In this lecture, he argues for two theses that are antithetical to Husserl’s thought: that
philosophy must break the “dominion of logic” and that the experience of anxiety is indispensable for carrying out intellectual research. “What is Metaphysics?” was a pivot point in Heidegger’s intellectual development. By 1929, he was beginning to abandon the philosophical project of Being and Time and turn in a new direction. By 1936 or so, the complexion of Heidegger’s writing had changed dramatically. Gone was the systematic ontology of his earlier years. Gone was the explicit devotion to phenomenology.21 Gone were the repeated forays into Aristotle, the scholastics, and Kant (although of course he never abandoned these authors entirely). Nietzsche supplanted the earlier authors as the prime focus of Heidegger’s interest, and Heidegger developed a critique of modernity that featured Nietzsche as the culmination of the Western philosophical tradition. Poetry supplanted logic as the bearer of our understanding of being. This transformation of Heidegger’s thought is generally called his Kehre (turn). Like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and others, Heidegger’s later thought takes on a style that places it on the outskirts of philosophy.22
In 1933 Heidegger became Rektor (president) of Freiburg University, joined the Nazi Party, and implemented some of the Nazi program of Gleichschaltung (realignment), which aimed to Nazify all institutions in German society. Heidegger’s engagement with extreme right-wing thought had been growing for a number of years. He served as Rektor for only about a year, after which he returned to his regular teaching duties until the end of the Second World War in 1945. He broke off or destroyed many friendships during this period, including with Jaspers (whose wife was Jewish). Heidegger’s subsequent self-exculpation— that he had sought to protect the intellectual or “spiritual” (geistig) autonomy of the Freiburg University from encroachment by politics23 has been conclusively refuted. When he tried to enlist Jaspers in his defense during his de-Nazification trial, Jaspers rebuffed him and submitted a damning letter recommending that Heidegger lose his right to teach.24 The de-Nazification commission stripped him of his right to teach, a right he regained some years later along with the title of professor emeritus 25
During the 1950s and 1960s, Heidegger lectured extensively, held seminars, and continued to think about the issues that had come to organize his reflection: the history of being (the way in which both our understanding of being and the being of entities itself change);
the modern understanding of being, which he called “technology”; the “truth of being” as the most basic experience of intelligibility, one which he came to associate with the thematics of medieval mysticism; and the role of language in human experience. His later works have no magnum opus, as Being and Time is for his early period, and his reflections appear to wander this way and that, groping for an adequate way to talk about his themes. Heidegger gave a final interview to Der Spiegel magazine in which he covered a lot of ground, including the dire threats to human life that he saw in the modern era. He also touched in an unsatisfactory way on his involvement with Nazism. He asked that the interview not be published until his death. It was published shortly after he died in 1976 at the age of eighty-six.26
Chapter 2
Overview of Themes
Being and Time offers a phenomenological ontology of human life. Heidegger develops this ontology in two stages. The first stage, Division I, is the “Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein.” (“Dasein” is Heidegger’s term for us.) It approaches the question of the ontology of human life by offering a phenomenological ontology of everyday life. Phenomenological ontology identifies the structures in terms of which we understand a phenomenon. So Division I aims to construct an “analytic of Dasein,” which is a phenomenological account of the structural features that make everyday human life what it is. Division II is titled “Dasein and Temporality.” It aims to expose the intrinsic unity of the structural features laid out in Division I. One of the central theses of Division II is that the temporal form of Dasein’s existence is different from that of things unlike Dasein. To get to this conclusion, Heidegger first develops an account of an extreme type of experience, anxiety in the face of death, which he believes reveals modes of human life that require the novel temporal analysis he offers. The temporal analysis paves the way for a new understanding of human history, as well as for clarity about the place of time in our understanding of being.
Divisions I and II of Part One were meant to set the table for Division III, “Time and Being.” The extant portion of the treatise offers a phenomenological ontology of human life. The announced aim of the treatise, however, is to offer a general phenomenological ontology, that is, a phenomenological account of being. Division III was intended to connect the ontology of Dasein with this account of being. Part Two of the treatise was meant to be a phenomenological
reconstruction of several important moments in the history of Western philosophy: Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle. Scholars generally believe that much of what might have gone into Part Two may be found in Basic Problems . Division III, however, was never written, and what traces of it may be found in Basic Problems are fragmentary and unsatisfactory. So despite its loftier intentions, the legacy of Being and Time is a new ontology of human life. In reading the text and trying to understand it, we must nonetheless bear the loftier ambitions in mind. 1
In this chapter, I will sketch several of the themes that emerge in the extant portion of Being and Time and lay them out in general, nontechnical terms. My aim is to make it easier to follow the more technical treatments in the subsequent chapters of this Reader’s Guide.
i. Rejecting the Subject–Object Model of Human Experience
The central negative argument of Division I is that the philosophical tradition has misunderstood human experience by imposing a subject–object schema upon it. Only the most extreme reductionists or “eliminativists” in the debate about the relation between mind and body deny that we are persons and that persons are centers of subjective experience. If left rather vague, there is no harm in such a way of talking about our experience. The tradition has gone wrong, however, by interpreting subjectivity in a specific way, by means of concepts of “inner” and “outer,” “representation” and “object.” The language of inner and outer dominates modern philosophy from Descartes through Kant to Husserl. It is not, moreover, an unnatural way to talk about experience. You and I can disagree about how we see the world: I look out over the ocean and see a container ship, while you see an island. We each have our own “perspective” on the world, our own “subjective take.” We assume that there are facts of the matter: it either is a container ship or an island (or something else). So how do we express the divergent subjective perceptions
of an objective, factual world? How I see things is somehow “in my head,” inside me, and how you see things is somehow “in your head,” inside you. It’s hard to know what the sense of “in” is here, however. Are your perceptions in your head in the way in which there is gray matter between your ears? This reductionist proposition has not had many adherents over the centuries. We want to say, instead, that your thoughts, your perceptions, your view of things are not exactly in your head; they’re in your mind or soul. Your mind or soul is not an ordinary physical object, like a brain. It seems to bear some complex relation to your brain or central nervous system, but it’s hard to see how it could be exactly the same thing. Even if we have the conviction that, ultimately, our minds and our central nervous systems are the same, when we talk about our subjective view of the world, we are talking about our minds, and talk about minds and talk about brains do not neatly align. So most modern philosophers have used the language of thoughts “in a mind,” regardless of what their ultimate position on the mind–body problem is.
One of Heidegger’s fundamental charges against this modern consensus is that it is “ontologically vague”:
And no matter how this inner sphere may get interpreted, if one does no more than ask how cognition makes its way “out of” it and achieves “transcendence,” it becomes evident that the cognition which presents such enigmas will remain problematical unless one has previously clarified how it is and what it is. (BT 87/60)2
Heidegger charges that philosophers do not really know what they mean when they say that cognition (thoughts, ideas, etc.) are “in” the mind. The objection cannot merely be that the language of inner and outer, subject and object, is metaphorical. Heidegger relies extensively on metaphors throughout Being and Time. In §28 he introduces the metaphor of a clearing in a forest, an open space in which things can make their appearance, as a substitute for the enclosed subjective inner realm. He replaces one metaphor with another. So Heidegger’s objection cannot be that the language of the inner and outer is metaphorical.
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