Introduction 2
“For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression "being". We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.”
Plato, Sophist
Being and Worldhood: The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger
Episode 167 of Converging Dialogues. A dialogue with Richard Polt about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. They define and discuss Dasein, 3 forms of Dasein, and how it is different from other types of being. They talk about authenticity and inauthenticity, being as metaphysics, and the role of Aristotle's philosophy on Heidegger's thought. They discuss Heidegger's "turn" in the 1930s, being-in-the-world, 4 senses of the world, and what a shared world means. They also talk about environment, present-at-hand, and ready-to-hand. They engage on Heidegger's concepts of care, thrownness, and anxiety. They also mention Heidegger's thoughts on language and technology, along with his involvement in the Nazi party, and many other topics.
Richard Polt is Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of philosophy at Xavier University. He has a Bachelors in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD from the Committee on Social Thought from the University of Chicago. His major interests are in Greek and German philosophy and he has translated and written over seven books, mostly on German philosophy, namely Heidegger's philosophical thought. Click here for a copy of Professor Polt’s CV.
The Ontological Difference
Many of Heidegger's translators capitalize the word ‘Being’ (Sein) to mark what, in the Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger will later call the ontological difference, the crucial distinction between Being and beings (entities). The question of the meaning of Being is concerned with what it is that makes beings intelligible as beings, and whatever that factor (Being) is, it is seemingly not itself simply another being among beings. Unfortunately the capitalization of ‘Being’ also has the disadvantage of suggesting that Being is, as Sheehan (2001) puts it, an ethereal metaphysical something that lies beyond entities, what he calls ‘Big Being’. But to think of Being in this way would be to commit the very mistake that the capitalization is supposed to help us avoid. For while Being is always the Being of some entity, Being is not itself some kind of higher-order being waiting to be discovered. As long as we remain alert to this worry, we can follow the otherwise helpful path of capitalization.
According to Heidegger, the question of the meaning of Being, and thus Being as such, has been forgotten by ‘the tradition’ (roughly, Western philosophy from Plato onwards). Heidegger means by this that the history of Western thought has failed to heed the ontological difference, and so has articulated Being precisely as a kind of ultimate being, as evidenced by a series of namings of Being, for example as idea, energeia, substance, monad or will to power. In this way Being as such has been forgotten. So Heidegger sets himself the task of recovering the question of the meaning of Being. In this context he draws two distinctions between different kinds of inquiry. The first, which is just another way of expressing the ontological difference, is between the ontical and the ontological, where the former is concerned with facts about entities and the latter is concerned with the meaning of Being, with how entities are intelligible as entities. Using this technical language, we can put the point about the forgetting of Being as such by saying that the history of Western thought is characterized by an ‘onticization’ of Being (by the practice of treating Being as a being). However, as Heidegger explains, here in the words of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, “an ontic knowledge can never alone direct itself ‘to’ the objects, because without the ontological… it can have no possible Whereto” (76). The second distinction between different kinds of inquiry, drawn within the category of the ontological, is between regional ontology and fundamental ontology, where the former is concerned with the ontologies of particular domains, say biology or banking, and the latter is concerned with the a priori, transcendental conditions that make possible particular modes of Being (i.e., particular regional ontologies). For Heidegger, the ontical presupposes the regional-ontological, which in turn presupposes the fundamental-ontological. As he puts it:
The question of Being aims… at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine beings as beings of such and such a type, and, in doing so, already operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundations. Basically, all ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental task. (Being and Time 31)
Approaching the Question
Martin Heidegger opens Being and Time with a passage in Plato’s Sophist, quoted above. There are interesting parallels between the two texts. Both are works on the question of being; both are highly logical, although their ‘logics’ operate on far more dispositional levels; both are countering sorts of sophistic thinking more concerned with winning arguments than with revealing the truth of being; both seek to genuinely grasp not just the answer of the question of being, but to reawaken our ability to hear being as a question; both are exceedingly challenging works that have been derided by their respective critics; both require and allow their works to begin and end in a degree of aporias, perplexity: opening by making the unquestioned be questioned, closing by refusing a simple declarative answer.
Heidegger demands the same thing as does the speaker of the lines from Plato’s Sophist: that we must be the beings who ask the question of Being, that we must seek to understand the question before we can proceed to seeking to understand its answer. The disposition by which we approach the question in these texts is of greatest import.
The Question and the Method
What does it mean for something to exist? The intent of Being and Time is to understand the meaning of being.
The inquiry into the question of the meaning of being is carried out “phenomenologically.” Such an investigation must not be confused with a study of scientific facts, empirical studies, or humanistic studies; it is not a study of a being. Rather, it is a phenomenological study of the Being of beings.
Heidegger begins by analyzing of the only kind of being for whom such a question arises, namely, human beings. Heidegger states “[t]his guiding look at being grows out of the average understanding of being in which we are always already involved and which ultimately belongs to the essential constitution of Dasein itself.”
Human Being as Dasein
Heidegger reconceptualizes the notion of human being anew not as subject with qualities – as most of the tradition, at least in one way or another, holds – but rather as what he calls “Dasein,” which literally means “being-here” or “being-there”.
Dasein is the kind of being whose Being is disclosed to itself in a manifold of ways. Most of Being and Time is an analysis of how Dasein exists in the world, of what it means for Dasein to exist in the world, and of how Dasein’s existence in the world is disclosed to it.
Disclosedness refers specifically to the way in which the “Da” is here or there. Human existence, as Dasein (i.e., as always a “being-here” or a “being-there”), is essentially a worldly existence. For Dasein to exist means that it always already exists in a world, but not insofar as we are simply located in some container called “world.”
Rather, being-in-the-world is a basic constitution of our Being and to exist in the world means to be embedded in it within a complex web of relations, to be familiar with it, and to be open to it in a way that matters to us. ‘By its very nature, Dasein brings its “there” along with it…Dasein is its disclosedness.
Heidegger thus rejects a subject-object model of worldly existence and with it, eschews the language of consciousness, awareness, and, to a large extent, intentionality. A model that is rooted in consciousness as the primary mode of explaining Dasein’s way of Being in or relating to the world is misconstrued, according to Heidegger, because from the outset it “splits the phenomenon asunder”: it conceptually and, indeed, irrevocably severs human beings from their world.
On the contrary, disclosedness as a model of existence circumvents such concerns. Instead of relating to the world primarily by being conscious of it, by representing it, or by intentionally ‘reaching out’ to it, we relate to and are engaged with the world directly and pre-theoretically and on a more primordial level.
Time as the Provisional Aim
Heidegger adds that provisional aim of the investigation is the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being. As the analysis unfolds, time may also be the mode of Being itself.
Three Ontological Prejudices
In our current age we have forgotten the question of being. Early Greek thinkers thought the question of Being without prejudice, but today, we fail to make Being itself a serious question for study. The following are three prejudices with regard to modern thinking about being:
Being is the most universal concept.
Being is indefinable.
Being is a self-evident concept.
Based on the prevalence of these common prejudices, Heidegger concludes we sorely lack even a basic understanding about Being’s meaning. To make matters worse, we don’t even know where to begin with the questions. So, the first project is to ensure the right questions are being asked.
