Heidegger

The Cambridge Companion to

HEIDEGGER

Edited by Charles B. Guignon

(from: Introduction - CHARLES B. GUIGNON)

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The question of being is therefore reformulated as a question

about the conditions for the accessibility or intelligibility of things.

The constant references to Kant in the essays that follow (especially

in those by Hoy, Dostal, and Frede) show how this project can be

seen as a continuation of Kant’s “Copernican revolution,” the shift

from seeing the mind as trying to hook up with an antecedently

given world to seeing the world as being made over in order to fit the

demands of the mind But Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein also marks

an important break from Kant and from German Idealism generally.

For Heidegger brackets the assumption that there is such a thing as a

mind or consciousness, something immediately presented to itself

in introspection, which must be taken as the self-evident starting

point for any account of reality. Instead, though it is true that the

first-person standpoint is basic (as Hoffman clearly shows), it is not

the mental that is basic but rather what Taylor calls “engaged

agency.” We start out from a description of ourselves as we are in the

midst of our day-to-day practical affairs, prior to any split between

mind and matter. Our inquiry must begin from the “existentiell”

(concrete, specific, local) sense we have of ourselves as caught up in

the midst of a practical world (in the “life-world” sense of this term

found in such expressions as “the world of academia” or the “business

world”).

In Heidegger’s view, there is no pure, external vantage point to

which we can retreat in order to get a disinterested, presuppositionless

angle on things. So fundamental ontology begins with a description

of the “phenomena” where this means what “shows itself,”

what “becomes manifest” or “shows forth” for us, in relation to our

purposes as they are shaped by our forms of life. 6 But this need to start

from an insider’s perspective is not a restriction in any sense. On the

contrary, as Taylor shows, it is only because we are “always already”

in on a way of life, engaged in everyday dealings with things in a

familiar life-world, that we have some “pre-understanding” of what

things are all about. It is our being as participants in a shared practical

world that first gives us a window onto ourselves and reality.

The existential analytic therefore starts out from a description of

our average everydayness as agents in practical contexts. Heidegger’s

early writings are filled with descriptions of such mundane activities

as hammering in a workshop, turning a doorknob, hearing motorcycles,

and operating the turn signal on a car. But the goal of the

inquiry is to identify the “essential structures” that make up the

“formal scaffolding ( Geriist)” of any Dasein whatsoever. For this

reason the phenomenology of everydayness is coupled with a hermeneutic

or interpretation designed to bring to light the hidden

basis for the unity and intelligibility of the practical life-world. Because

interpretation reveals that in virtue of which (woraufhin)

everything hangs together, Heidegger says that it formulates “transcendental

generalizations” concerning the conditions for any interpretations

or worldviews whatsoever (BT 244). It is, as Hoy points

out, Interpretierung aimed at revealing the “primary understanding

of world” that underlies and makes possible our day-to-day existentiell

interpretations (Auslegungen). Since the goal of the inquiry

is not to give an account of entities but rather to grasp the being of

entities (what lets things be what they are, what “determines entities

as entities” in their various ways of being), phenomenology

seeks what generally “does not show itself at all,” the hidden “meaning

and ground” of what does show up (BT 25, 59). In the course of

this investigation, it becomes clear that the entities taken as basic

by certain regional sciences - for example, the material objects in

causal interactions of classical mechanics - are theoretical constructs

with no privileged status in helping us grasp the nature gf

reality.

Insofar as our commonsense outlook is pervaded by past theorizing,

and especially by the Cartesian ontology of modernity, fundamental

ontology will involve “doing violence” to the complacent

assumptions of common sense. Nowhere is this challenge to common

sense more evident than in Heidegger’s description of being

human, or Dasein.7 This description is sharply opposed to the picture

of humans we have inherited from Descartes. According to the

Cartesian view, we are at the most basic level minds located in

bodies. And this is indeed the way we tend to think of ourselves

when we step back and reflect on our being. The binary opposition

between mind and matter colors all our thinking in the modern

world, and it leads to a kind of Cartesian extortion which tells us

that if we ever question the existence of mental substance, we will

sink to the level of being crude materialists who can never account

for human experience and agency.

Heidegger’s way of dealing with this extortion is to subvert the

binary opposition that sets up the narrow range of options in the first

place. In my own essay (Chapter , I try to show that instead of

defining Dasein as a thing or object of any sort, Heidegger describes

human existence as a “happening,” a life story unfolding “between

birth and death” (BT 427). This conception of existence as the “historicity”

or “temporalizing” of a life course arises quite naturally

when we reflect on the nature of human agency. For what a person is

doing at any moment can be regarded as action (and not just as

inadvertent movement) only because of the way it is nested in the

wider context of a life story. For instance, what I am doing now can

be seen as writing a philosophy essay only because of the relation of

my current activity to my background (my training, my academic

career) and to my future-directedness (the outcome of this activity in

relation to my undertakings in general). In fact, it seems that what is

most important to an event being an action is not just the beliefs and

desires going on in a mental substance, since all sorts of things

might be going through my mind as I type away here. Rather, what is

crucial to this movement being action is its rootedness in meaningful

contexts of the past and its directedness toward some future end

state (despite the fact that this is all probably far from my “mind”

when I am busily engaged in everyday activities).

When we think of a human being as the temporal unfolding of a

life course, we can identify three structural elements that make up

human existence. First, Dasein always finds itself “thrown” into a

concrete situation and attuned to a cultural and historical context

where things already count in determinate ways in relation to a

community’s practices. This prior thrownness into the medium of

shared intelligibility, disclosed in our moods, makes up Dasein’s

“facticity.” Second, agency is “discursive” in the sense that in our

activities we are articulating the world and interacting with situations

along the guidelines of interpretations embodied in our public

language. Third, Dasein is “understanding” in Heidegger’s special

use of this term: it has always taken some stand on its life insofar as

it has undertaken (or drifted into) the vocations, roles, life-styles,

personal relationships, and so on that give content to its life. Because

our familiar skilled activities embody a generally tacit “knowhow,”

a sense of what things are all about in relation to our practical

concerns, taking a stand is said to be a “projection” of possibilities of

meaningfulness for things and ourselves.

As having taken a stand, Dasein’s existence is “futural” in the

sense that it is under way toward realizing some outcome (though

this goal-directedness might never expressly come into one’s mind)

Thus, agency is characterized as “coming-toward” (zu-kommend)

the realization of one’s undertakings, that is, as being-toward the

future (Zu-kunft). I attend a parent-teacher conference, for example,

as part of my “project” of being a concerned parent, and I do so even

though this way of doing things is so deeply ingrained in me, so

“automatic,” that I never think about why I am doing it. According

to Heidegger, the future has priority over both the past and the

present in defining the being of the self. This is so, first of all, because

what a person is shooting for in life determines both how the

past can be encountered as providing assets for the present and how

the present can show up as a situation demanding action. But the

future also has priority because, insofar as my actions commit me to

a range of possible ways of being in the future, their futuredirectedness

defines what my life - that is, my “being” - is adding

up to as a totality, “right up to the end.”

According to this description, Dasein’s “being” or personal identity

is defined by the stands it takes in acting in day-to-day situations

over the course of its lifetime. Heidegger expresses this by

saying that Dasein is an “ability-to-be,” which comes to realization

only through the ways it is channeled into concrete “possibilities,”

that is, into specific roles, relationships, personality traits, lifestyles,

and so on, as these have been made accessible in its cultural

context. 8 Thus, when I hold a door open for a friend or get on line at

the theater, I am constituting myself as a fairly well behaved person

as this is understood in my culture. Here I just am what I make of

myself by slipping into familiar patterns of action and reaction

throughout my life.

The conception of human existence as an emergence-into-presence

provides an insight into the understanding of being that Heidegger is

trying to work out, a conception Zimmerman calls “ontological
phenomenalism.”

My being - who I am - is nothing other than what

unfolds in the course of my interactions with the world over the

course of my life. In saying that “the ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its

existence” (BT 67), Heidegger suggests that there is no role to be

played by the notion of an underlying substance or a hidden essence

allegedly needed to explain the outward phenomena. What makes

agency possible is not some underlying substrate, not some mental

substance, but is rather the way our life stories unfold against the

backdrop of practices of a shared, meaningful world. From Heidegger’s

standpoint, then, the ability to think of ourselves as minds located

in physical bodies is a highly specialized self-interpretation

rooted in detached theorizing, an interpretation lacking any broader

implications for understanding human existence.

continued

Posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 6:02 am
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