Heidegger

Heidegger’s Life

Even before Martin Heidegger published anything, his reputation as an extraordinary thinker had spread among students in the German universities. What was unusual about Heidegger as a teacher was that he did not develop a “set of ideas” or a “system” of philosophy. He produced nothing in the way of a neat structure of academic ideas that a student could quickly understand and memorize. He was not interested so much in objects of scholarship as in matters of thinking. He shifted attention away from the traditional concerns about theories and books and focused instead on the concerns of thinking individuals. We are born in the world and respond to all of our experiences by thinking. What Heidegger set out to explore was the deepest nature of our thinking when we are thinking as existing human beings.

            Born in 1889 in Germany’s Black Forest region, Heidegger received his preparatory schooling in Constance and Freiburg. He was introduced to philosophy at the age of 17 when the pastor of his church gave him Franz Brentano’s book On the Manifold Meaning of Being according to Aristotle. This book, though difficult, made such an impression on the young Heidegger that it launched him on his lifelong quest for the meaning of Being, or “the meaning that reigns in everything that is.” Along the way Heidegger was also influenced by Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche, from whom he discovered that some concerns of philosophy are most creatively clarified by paying attention to concrete and historically relevant problems. At the University of Freiburg he began his studies in theology, but after four semesters he came under the influence of Husserl and changed his major to philosophy. Upon completing his dissertation and some further advanced studies, Heidegger became Husserl’s assistant until he was appointed in 1922 as an associate professor at the University of Marburg. Here, he pursued his studies in Aristotle, formulated a fresh interpretation of phenomenology, and was hard at work on a manuscript that was to become his most famous book. To facilitate his promotion, his dean at Marburg urged him to publish this manuscript, and in 1927, deliberately leaving it incomplete, Heidegger hurriedly published his book with the title Being and Time. One year later, in 1928, Heidigger was chosen to be Husserl’s successor to the chair of philosophy at Freiburg.

            He was elected rector of the University in 1933, and for a brief period he was a member of the Nazi party. In less than a year, in 1934, he resigned as rector and, for the next ten years, taught courses critical of the Nazi interpretation of philosophy. He was drafted into the “People’s Militia,” having been declared in 1944 the “most expendable” member of the Freiburg faculty. The French occupying forces did not permit him to return to his teaching post until 1951, one year before his retirement. Even after his retirement, he published several essays and interpretations of the history of philosophy, including a two-volume study on Nietzsche (1961) and his last work, The Matter of Thinking (1969). Heidegger died in 1976 in Freiburg at the age of 86.



Dasein as Being-in-the-World

Husserl, we have seen, argued that we understand the phenomena of the world only as they present themselves to our conscious selves. Heidegger takes a similar approach in Being and Time and attempts to understand Being in general by first understanding human beings. The notion of “human being” can be deceptive. This is particularly so since, throughout the history of philosophy, definitions of “human being” have tended to resemble the definition of things. Inspired by Husserl’s phenomenology, Heidegger avoids defining people in terms of properties or attributes that divide them from the world. Phenomenology focuses rather on the full range of experienced phenomena without separating them into distinct parts. Heidegger took seriously the meaning of the Greek word phenomenon as “that which reveals itself.” It is our human existence that reveals itself, and this is a quite different conception of “human being” than we find in traditional philosophy. To clearly separate his view of human beings from traditional theories, he coined the German term Dasein, meaning simply “being there.” People—Dasein—are best described as a unique type of being rather than defined as an object. As Heidegger points out, “because we cannot define Dasein’s essence by citing a ‘what’ of the kind that pertains to [an object]... we have chosen to designate this entity [person] as ‘Dasien,’ a term which is purely an expression of its being.” If, then, we ask what the essence of human nature is, the answer lies not in some attributes or properties but rather in how people exist. That is, what do our basic human experiences tell us about who we are?

            Our basic state of human existence is our being-in-the-world. Consider, first, our ordinary daily experiences, what Heidegger calls “average everydayness.” To be in the world as Dasein is not the same as one thing being in another thing, as water is in a glass or as clothes are in a closet. Dasein is in the world in the sense of “dwelling on,” or “being familiar with,” or “I look after something.” Here the emphasis is not on one object related in space to another object, but rather on a type of understanding. To say, for example, that “she is in love” does not refer to her location but rather to her type of being. Similarly, to say that people are in the world is not only to place them in space but to describe the structure of their existence that makes it possible for them to think meaningfully about the world.

            The central feature of our being-in-the-world is that we encounter things as “gear,” as what they are for. That is, we see things as utensils. Take, for example, a hammer. Our first encounter with a hammer is how we use it. We use it as a utensil to accomplish some purpose. The more I hammer, the less I am aware of the hammer as an object. There seems to be no distance between me and the hammer. I also see the hammer as part of a project, fulfilling its purpose within a context of various purposes included in the project. If the hammer breaks, I see it in a different way—as a thing or an object. According to Heidegger, we have a special kind of insight, called “circumspection,” which reveals the purpose of the item. We do not choose a tool or utensil by inspecting its properties first and then inferring its purpose from those properties. Instead, we see its purpose first. This means that it is not the properties of a thing that determine whether it is a utensil, on the one hand, or a mere object, on the other. Rather, we project the context within which any item assumes its unique role that explains our different views of that item. Moreover, an item, such as a hammer, has a purpose only in relation to a task that involves several other purposes. No item possesses any properties that throw light on other purposes in the undertaking; for example, no properties in the hammer show that a ladder will also be needed to hammer nails on the roof. Any particular item has meaning only as it is related to other purposes. It is this networked relation of purposes that is revealed prior to our encounter with things as utensils and that gives us the understanding of items as being utensils. It is part of our nature to develop this network or context of purposes. There can be different worlds even composed of the same things because of the different ways individuals project “their” world.

            Dasein possesses a threefold structure that makes possible the way that we project the world. First is our understanding, by which we project contexts and purposes to things. It is through these projected interrelationships that things derive meaning. Second is our mood or approach, which affects how we encounter our environment. In a despairing or joyful mood, our task will open up as either despairing or joyful. These are not merely attitudes; instead, they describe our manner of existence and the way the world exists for us. Third is our discourse. Only something that can be formulated in speech can be understood and become subject to our moods.



Dasein as Concern

For Heidegger, Dasein’s “being-in-the-world” is our most primitive and basic view of things. But this is not the whole story. More important is the fact that we become preoccupied with things that we encounter. In a sense we are consumed by things, tasks, and relationships. We have a practical concern for the tools and tasks in our environment. We have a personal concern for the community of people that surrounds us. This is so central to our identities that concern is our fundamental attribute. To understand Dasein, then, we must understand the underlying nature of this concern. Heidegger argues that there are three components of concern, each of which generates a substantial amount of anxiety within us. First, we all have simply been thrown into the world. I did not ask to be born, but here I am nonetheless. This feature of our past he calls facticity. Second, we have freedom of choice. We are responsible for transforming our lives, and we must constantly become our true selves by making appropriate decisions. This involves our future and is a feature that he calls existentiality. Third, we are fallen, in the sense that we lose our “authentic” character. My authentic existence requires me to recognize and affirm my unique self and my responsibility for my every action. As facticity and existentiality involved my past and future, respectively, fallenness involves my present situation. My drift into an inauthentic existence is subtle, but in every case it involves a tendency to escape from myself by finding shelter in a public self and an impersonal identity. I become an impersonal “one,” behaving as one is expected, rather than a concrete “I,” behaving as I ought to. I suppress any urge to be unique and excel, and thereby bring myself down to the level of an average person. I gossip, which reflects my shallow interpretation of other people. I seek novelty for the sake of distraction, and I have an overall sense of ambiguity for failing to know my own purpose. However, I cannot indefinitely avoid confronting my true self. Anxiety intrudes. For Heidegger anxiety is not simply a psychological state but rather a type of human existence. Nor is anxiety similar to fear. Fear has an object, such as a snake or an enemy against which it is possible to defend ourselves. But anxiety refers to nothing—precisely, to no-thing. Instead, anxiety reveals the presence of “nothingness” in my being. There is no way to alter the presence of nothingness in the center of my being— the inevitability that I will die. Time itself becomes an element of anxiety for me. I know time principally because I know that I am going to die. Each moment of my life is bound up with the fact that I will die, and it is impossible to separate my life from my death. I attempt to deny my temporality and to evade the inevitability of my limited existence. In the end I must affirm my authentic self and thereby see transparently what and who I am. I will then discover that, in my inauthentic existence, I have been trying to do the impossible, namely, to hide the fact of my limitations and my temporality.