Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Reader’s Guides)
Summary of a book by William Blattner
Just in case you care, I started trying to edit down this document into something shorter which is here, and having started doing that, I started using the shorter version as the primary one that I was developing. So consequently this version has kinda fallen behind. (So I’d suggest reading the “shorter” version, which in some respects is now actually longer.)
This article is essentially a summary of part of a book by William Blattner which is a reader’s guide to Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (BAT). I try to summarise the part of the book that leads up to and includes dealing with Heidegger’s response to tradional problems in the philosophy of science: Sceptism, Realism/Idealism and Truth. I do not attempt to summarise the more existential concerns such as Anxiety, Death and Self-ownership.
Let’s contrast two approaches to articulating the world:
The Cartesian subject-object approach
Start from a conceptual reflection of the world as we already understand it (which is largely a consequence of inheriting the thinking of previous thinkers as it has been diseminated into our common sense view of the world).
There is only one type of being — in fact even the notion of “types of being” is kind of alien — that one type of being is: things which have persistence over time.
Humans are subjects standing over and against objects. Subjects are somehow located inside bodies, and look out of eye-holes at an “external” world.
The world is composed of objects and objects have properties.
Humans (just like everything) are also objects of a particular kind — objects which have a property of cognitive activity.
Heidegger’s phenomenological approach
Start from the world as we actually experience it (“the world as it occurs”), including observation of the behaviour of others.
Interpret the structures and conditions of possibility of this experience (this occuring) — ie. humans act as though xyz is the case.
If we do this, Heidegger thinks our behaviour and experience (the occuring world) implies the existence of at least 3 types of being, not just one: equipment, objects and dasein (that is to say “us” ourselves, our own type of being whatever our own type of being is — this is something we need to illucidate).
The fundamental nature/condition of dasein is familiarity (“disclosedness” “being-in”) with the world in which it is embedded. As such, dasein is existentially “being-in-the-world”, and cannot be disentangled from it.
A whole variety of philosophical consequences arise from this alternative articulation.
If you want to go to London, don’t start from here
One of the difficulties we may face in appreciating Heidegger’s approach is that we are already steeped in a subject-object conceptualisation. So we may in the first instance try to make translations from our subject-object conceptualisation to Heidegger’s, but ultimately there is no translation — and that is the point. If there was a translation, then our existing conceptualisation would be just as adequate. Heidegger’s point is that it is not adequate.
So while in the first instance, we have no choice but to try to build bridges from our previous way of talking to the way Heidegger thinks we should talk, in the end if we want to appreciate Heidegger, we will need to speak Heideggarian.
There’s an old joke about a passerby stopping and asking the way to London, and the answer of course: “if you want to get to London, don’t start from here.”
Similarly, if we want to see the world rightly, we perhaps should not start by conceptualising our experience in a way that filters out everything that is not an object.
Taxonomy
Dasein — “being there” or “being the there”. The kind of being that we ourselves are or have. Again translating back to a world of subjects and objects we can say: human beings (subjects) experience a world composed of objects. This experiencing of that world is being-in-the-world or being-the-there. But Heidegger won’t accept the supposedly obvious viewpoint of subjects and objects because he thinks it distorts the articulation of our being-in-the-world.
Comportment, comport oneself, comports itself — this is like the b-i-t-w viewpoint of behaviour — in a conceptual view which sees only subjects and objects, humans behave in a particular way, but it does not exactly make sense to say that being-in-t-world behaves thus and so. Instead we say it comports itself, ie. carries itself.
pp.9
pp.11
pp.12
1. Ontology
Heidegger uses the word “ontology” (ie. some equivalent German word — the same goes throughout the following discussion) to refer to the articulation we bring to our pre-existing pre-understanding of “being”. Heidegger says understanding, not pre-understanding, but what Heidegger usually means by the word understanding is pre-conceptual — something akin to “know-how”. For example, knowing how to ride a bycicle does not mean you have any particular conceptual understanding of riding a bicycle. Rather it means just that you know how to do it — that is to say, you can do it.
The idea is that we have a pre-existing understanding of being that is encoded in our actions and in the occuring of the world as it occurs for us.
Heidegger says “being” is:
“that which determines entities as entities” and
“that in terms of which entities are already understood [as entities], however we may discuss them in detail”
Also:
“the being of entities is not itself an entity”
So being determines entities as entities not by making entities into entities but by being implicit in the way the world occurs and the way humans act in the world. (Equating being with “the-highest-being” ie. with a “creator-god” is a conceptual mistake Heidegger calls “ontotheology”.)
We understand entities as entities in terms of what makes an entity an entity (not what makes entities). pp.17
(ie. we understand what distinguishes an entity as being an entity in these terms.)
Heidegger’s point is that we “already understand” what it is to be, in so far as we already employ a set of standards that determine whether something is or is not. These standards are the meaning of the word “being” (and of being itself), and they are encoded in our actions and experience as beings living and functioning in the world.
So our job in responding to the question of being is to interpret what our actions, behaviour, experience and functioning in the world indicate in respect of what they tell us about what being is … that is to say, what “is” is. The task is one of “interpreting” (explicating / making explicit) what is implicit about being in human action and existing and so this task is referred to as “hermeneutic” (ie. interpretation).
For example, it is implicit in the way we act around tea-mugs that any given tea-mug is and more specifically that it is a “for-drinking-tea”.
Heidegger thinks that our actions and experience imply the validity of at least 3 kinds of being:
(1) Equipment — tools,materials,signs,environments — what Heidegger calls the “ready-to-hand”
(2) Objects — what Heidegger calls the “present-at-hand”
(3) Dasein — that is to say us (ourselves and each other) — the kind of being that humans have (although possibly other things may have it too … Proxima Centaurians perhaps also have or are dasein).
Probably we should also note that certainly the “ready-to-hand” and probably the “present-at-hand” are dependent on dasein.
Primarily and mostly we live in a world composed of equipment and ourselves (and each other). Heidegger sees present-at-hand objects as being available to us, for example when we do scientific research, but typically objects are a smaller part of our lives than tools and each other are.
Also worth noting that while Heidegger sees objects as being a less significant part of our lives, the prevailing Cartesian subject-object conceptual structures, that we consider the world in terms of, prevent us from seeing tools as being tools or ourselves as being ourselves. Instead, we conceptualise everything as objects with properties. Instead of seeing our own being-the-there, humans are viewed as objects which somehow have minds inserted into them.
The conceptualised objectification of all other types of being, then gives rise to a series of philosphical conundrums, which if we don’t start from the mistake of conceptualising everything as objects in the first place (and ontotheologically created objects at that), these philosophical conundrums do not arise.
The upshot of all this is that we must be continually on the look-out for misconceptualising non-things like tools and/or dasein (and possibly other non-things as well) in terms of a conceptual framework inside which everything that is is a thing with properties.
2. Phenomenology
Having established Ontology (as a process of articulating the implicit meaning of being, articulating our pre-conceptual pre-understanding of being) as his aim, Heidegger needs a methodology to achieve this aim: hermeneutic phenomenology.
The antecedents of Heidegger’s phenomenological method, Brentano (who coined the notion “intentionality” ie. directedness, aboutness) and Husserl (who devised “the phenomenological reduction”), provide a method for studying the structural prerequisites of the elements of experience as they are in themselves (experienced?): we are to ignore questions about whether something “really exists” or whether it exists as I experience it, and to ignore any consideration of psychological acts by which I do my experiencing.
Such questions are simply jumping to conclusions provided by previous indoctrination into a subject-object “indirect representationalism” (as referred to at the top). Having already assumed or presupposed the subject-object view of everything, these questions are reasonable. But we should not start the explication of an ontology by presupposing that the structure it should have must fall within the structure of the ontology we have already been indoctrinated into.
Instead we attend to the entities of experience themselves just as they arise and occur within that experience. That is to say, phenomenology seeks to describe and interpret the structure and the conditions of possibility that must be the case, such that the elements of our experience occur as they do and therefore have the meaning that they have. It is a process of making sense of our experience, interpreting our experience in a way that makes sense to us to do so.
Traditional philosophy, we might say, proceeds from a set of axioms (either explicit or implicit) and then by way of a series of logical / “rational” arguments tries to convince us of a particular way of viewing or understanding the world.
Phenomenology in contrast interprets how the world occurs for us, so as to draw out insights into what must necessarily be the structure of our-being (and ultimately being itself) in order that the world occurs for us in the way that it does and humans behave how they do. So the method is one of describing/illucidating how the world occurs.
Heidegger planned to proceed from an analysis of the various types of being he saw occuring (equipment, objects and dasein) to conclusions about being itself — what do all these types of being have in common. However he never completed his project. Possibly he discovered that it is not in the end viable. The 2 divisions of Part 1 of Being and Time that were written are for the most part an illucidation of the kind of being that we ourselves are: this is what Heidegger calls “dasein” — being the there, or “being-in-the-world”.
3. * Existence (Dasein)
Out of the three types of being that Heidegger explicates, “dasein” (the kind of being that we humans have or are) may be the most conceptually difficult.
Heidegger identifies 4 traits of Dasein:
(1) Dasein’s being is in each case mine
(2) Dasein comports itself towards its being
(3) Dasein is delivered over to its being
(4) Dasein is the being whose being is at issue for itself
Something I have noticed about Dasein is that it is in each case an un-asked-for gift; possibly a surprise, even.
This section of Blattner’s book is quite hard, and I’m not clear how relevant it is to recent conversations at the philosophy club. So for now I’m going to skip to the summing up:
pp.41
4. Being-in-the-world / Familiarity
We [humans] are existentially in the world, not merely physically located in it. Contrast this with a thing being in another thing.
pp42–43
“My computer is located in my study but it does not experience the study as being “its study”. The study does not “matter” to the computer. I am also in my study. I am included in the set of things contained in my study. More important than such inclusion, however, is that I experience the study as mine; the study matters to me. The word “mine” might suggest legal ownership, and we do not want to focus on that. Even when I work at my local coffee house, I still experience it as mine in so far as I am familiar with it. This familiarity is a pervasive background feature of our experience, one that we do not normally notice. This familiarity is most apparent in its absense. When I travel and find my way to a coffee house in another city, I often experience a certain level of discomfort. The familiarity of my normal stomping grounds is salient for me in its absence.
Familiarity is key to Heidegger’s conception of our [human] being. We live in a world in which we are overwhelmed by being familiar with it. And our fundamental familiarity makes the world as it is nearest to us also be most transparent to us.
pp.43 — Four senses of “world”
The second facet of being-in-the-world is that being-in-the-world is our basic constitution.
The third facet is that cognition is a founded mode of being-in. For cognition we can think of theoretical (“thematic”) knowledge, sometimes referred to as “know-that” and contrasted with “know-how”. Heidegger’s thesis is that cognition is founded or grounded in being-in — which is to say that “know-that” is founded on “know-how” — which is to say further that familiarity is more basic than cognition, that cognition is not self-sufficient, and rather is derived from familiarity and arises as a by-product of familiarity.
For more on this, see pp.46–47.
5. The world / Significance
Dealings and equipment
The “proximate world” is the world we are surrounded by, not spatially, but existentially: the immediate world in which we are immersed and absorbed. Our dealings take place in the “environment” — again existential environment — and are guided by what Heidegger calls “circumspection” ie. “around-sight” — what we might otherwise call practical intelligence, or more colloquially “know-how”… the skills that we have and activities that we are familiar with doing and able to do.
In using tools, equipment, materials, signs, paraphernalia, the equipment “withdraws” so that the work we are undertaking can receive our full attention.
For example competent drivers of manual geared cars are mostly not paying attention to the process of pressing down the clutch, disengaging the drive, and changing gears and then releasing the clutch to reengage the drive. We probably do this a fifty times even on a quick trip to the shops, but if we are any good at driving we barely notice ourselves doing it. Instead our attention is on maneuvering around other traffic and getting to where we are heading, or even just the conversation we are having with someone in the car with us.
Similarly as you move around a building you are familiar with, doors and door handles are barely even part of your experience.
The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work — that which is to be produced at the time.
BAT (99/69)
*Side note:
*Assignment and involvement.
In sum, the ready-to-hand is a sort of entity that is defined by its involvement in our practices. In order to say what a spatula, an egg, a turn signal, a chalice or a drama is, we must describe these entities in terms of the roles they play in our lives. In contrast the present-at-hand is what it is independently of our lives and the roles that entities play in our lives. Galaxies, quarks, electrical charge and lizards are what they are irrespective of our concerns and interests.
pp.55
Circumspection and breakdown
Our average everyday dealings in the world are not guided by cognition. Rather they are a matter of engaged familiarity.
We are familiar with our environment and the paraphernalia we encounter in it primarily through our skills/abilities/competences rather than through cognition.
Such skills, to the degree to which they are skillful, are tuned into the subtle details of the varying situations with which I am dealing. I focus my cognitive attention on the level of my activity at which my skills are challenged. I focus on the goal for which I am struggling, rather than aspects of my activity over which I have mastery.
Our primordial being-in-the-world is a matter of familiarity, and when it comes to making our way about the world, familiarity is a function of competence or mastery.
For more on this see pp. 57–58
* Significance and worldhood
Circumspection is guided by the totality of assignments that contextualise the task on which we are working.
The world is a horizon of understanding, a space of possibilities, on the background of which we understand both paraphernalia and ourselves.
6. * The self and the anyone
I am what matters to me, and what matters to me is the “with-world” that I enhabit with others.
This has been described as ontological communitarianism. But I don’t think it is especially relevant to the concerns I am trying to get clear about.
7. Disclosedness and “the there”
Dasein is in its world not primarily by being conscious of it or having beliefs about it and intentions to act in it. Rather, dasein is most fundamentally in its world by being familiar with it.
Heidegger replaces traditional notions of consciousness and intentionality with a triple-faceted analysis of:
- understanding — by which he means practical undersanding, that is to say: know-how, competence — skillful mastery of the world around us
- mood — disposedness — sensitivity to how important something is and the way things matter to us
- language — discourse — the ability to articulate the world in language
Heidegger considers these elements to be equally foundational in the nature of dasein.
“The there”
Phenomenologically we are not located in space-time; rather, we are always somewhere with which we are more or less familiar.
9. Understanding and Interpretation
In Heidegger’s everyday use of the word, to understand something is to be able to do it or manage it or master it. This practical everyday sense of understanding is not a specifically cognitive phenomenon, although it may have cognitive aspects to it.
One of the interesting things that is being pointed out here is how skills cannot be exhaustively translated into a finite set of articulated propositional rules: for example consider how to explain riding a bicycle to someone who cannot do it. Any significant skill serves as an example: playing jazz, building a house, presenting a talk to roomful of people.
Heidegger wants to reject subject-object models of human experience. Mostly in respect of the world that is closest to me, I am not a disengaged subject trying to transcend to the world. Rather I am already engaged in the world, familiar with it, disposed towards it, and acting in it.
So how does Heidegger conceive of cognition as different to understanding?
To address this issue, Heidegger introduces the notion of “interpretation” as a specific mode of understanding in which possibilities are made explicit.
An interpretation is thus an act of understanding in which we make what we understand explicit by understanding it as something.
That which is disclosed in understanding — that which is understood — is already accessible in such a way that it’s “as which” can be made to stand out explicitly. The “as” makes up the structure of the explicitness of something that is understood. It constitutes the interpretation.
BAT (189/149)
Interpretation is an “existential derivative” of understanding. Understanding that has propositional content (ie. is “explicit”, ie. is made determinate by cognition, ie. is an “interpretation”) is derivative of understanding that does not.
Our ability to grasp the world in such a way that we can characterize it descriptively is derivative of our engaged abilities, our skills and capacities: representation is derivative of our engaged abilities.
pp.94
*[Side note: Represenational language is derivative of structural and immediate language.]
There is a level of mastery and intelligence in human life that is not conceptually mediated, and cannot be captured in assertions.
Heidegger analyses this preconceptual intelligence as being a “fore-structure”. The fore-structure connects interpretation with understanding and draws out the distinction between them. Heidegger says this fore-structure has three elements: Fore-having, Fore-sight, Fore-conception.
Heidegger illucidates the relationship between interpretation and understanding by using how we interpret the ready-to-hand:
Fore-having is the understanding of the background context in terms of which any concrete interpretation takes place. In the case of the ready-to-hand, the this background context is the totality of involvements — the “equipmental whole”. The keyboard connects to the computer, and sits on a desk with a chair or a stool in front of it, in a study providing shelter and lighting, and connecting over wifi to the internet. Our access to this totality is our ability to use the equipment.
Fore-sight then brings the keyboard into view as a keyboard. Fore-sight introduces the “as-a-whatever” into the experience of the keyboard.
In such in an interpretation, the way in which the entity we are interpreting is to be conceived can be drawn from the entity itself, or the interpretation can force the entity into concepts to which it is opposed in its manner of being. In either case, the interpretation has already decided for a definite way of conceiving it, either with finality or with reservations; it is grounded in something we grasp in advance — in a fore-conception.
BAT (191/150)
pp.97
10. Language
Discourse
The word “articulate” has two meanings in english — a structural sense as in “articulated lorry” and the linguistic expressive sense of putting something into words.
Heidegger says: “The intelligibility of something has always been [structurally] articulated, even before there is any appropriative interpretation of it.” BAT
It has been discussed previously that what an entity is and how it can be interpreted are derivative of the holistic situation to which it belongs. This holistic situation is disclosed through practical understanding, the “fore-having”, more fundamentally than through the conceptually articulate interpretation of it. Heidegger is now adding to this that pre-conceptual intelligibility is structurally articulated.
Structural language, we could say, is a “silent language” composed of actions we do with our bodies (“how we comport ourselves”), and with the equipmental totality with which we are engaged.
If Blattner is right, Heidegger thinks that this pre-conceputual structural language can be expressed (articulated) in representational language by means of our capacity for discourse.
In traditional philosophy, the assertion has served as the paradigm of linguistic activity, but according to Heidegger, assertion is a highly derivative form of communication… The question then becomes which forms of our expressive activity are more pervasive in our familiarity with the world, assertion or the broader forms of language and expression highlighted by Heidegger?
pp. 103
Assertion
Heidegger casts assertion as a derivative mode of interpretation that makes something explicit. In making things explicit, assertion, like all interpretation, relies on a fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception.
Assertions direct our attention, focus and salience.
In order to make an assertion about an aspect of the occuring world, the world must already be disclosed to me in such a way that I can focus our attention onto that entity. Such an entity must be already accessible to assertion.
The signification of assertion is predication: that is to say that assertion first directs our attention to a particular entity in the world with which we are already familiar, and then further narrows our focus to a particular feature of that entity.
For more details on this, see pp.106–107
11. Scepticism, Realism and Idealism
Epistemological Scepticism
In Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy; Meditation 1 introduces the idea that an evil demon could be deceiving us — and so the “external” world could simply be a fabrication. An updated version of this thought is the brain-in-a-vat story — in which we image ourself to be a brain in a vat with our sensory inputs being fed all the necessary electrical impulses to simulate the experience we appear to be having.
In the 6th Meditation Descartes refutes his own evil demon story by saying that God would not permit such a deception — so pretty conclusive really. I don’t know why anyone ever brought it up again. But they did.
Heidegger responds to the challenge:
“Such expectations, aim, and demands arise from an ontologically inadequate way of starting with something of such a character that independently of it and ‘outside’ of it a ‘world’ is to be proved as present-at-hand.”
BAT (249/205)
whereas in fact
Dasein is not fundamentally a knowing subject, and the world is not an object of knowledge.
pp. 111
“Even if one should invoke the doctrine that the subject must presuppose and indeed always does unconsciously presuppose the presence-at-hand of the ‘external world’, one would still be starting with the construct of an isolated subject.”
BAT (249/205–206)
Metaphysical Idealism vs. Realism
Philosophers have traditionally not only asked whether we can know the world, but also whether the world exists independently of our subjective understanding of it.
pp. 113
Blattner thinks that Heidegger again rejects the entire debate. But it is not entirely clear to me why he thinks that. I find Blattner to be a bit muddled about this, although perhaps this is a reflection of Heidegger also being muddled about this at least here in Being And Time.
BAT says:
Deflationary reading of Heidegger’s view on this
“It cannot be said that entities are, not can it be said that they are not” — of course it can’t be said if there is no one around to do the saying. This is obviously true, but also trivially true and philosophically un-interesting.
Robust reading of Heidegger’s view on this
If we focus on the last sentence in the quote, Heidegger appears to be saying that because being depends on dasein, the being of the present-at-hand depends on dasein as well. If presence-at-hand is not, then entities can neither be nor not be present-at-hand.
Blattner thinks we should distinguish three significant propositions out of this:
(a) The being of the present-at-hand depends on dasein
is not to say
(b) If dasein did not exist, entities present-at-hand would not be
but rather to say that
(c) Presence-at-hand (ie. the being of the present-at-hand) depends on dasein.
More generally if being depends on dasein, then when dasein does not exist there is no possibility for entities to be, so entities can neither be nor not be.
In section 69b of BAT (408/356) Heidegger proposes two theses about natural science:
(1) The theoretical/cognitive achievements achievements of natural science depend on a set of practices (we have seen that all cognition depends on practice).
(2) The domain of entities uncovered by science is defined precisely by their being independent of our practices.
In other words science is a set of practices that are able to identify entities (ie. the present-at-hand) which exist independently of those practices.
Heidegger says early on in Being and Time that being itself is not a being. (This is referred to as the “ontological difference”.) And in particular being is not to be confused with the highest Being. (A mistake that Heidegger calls onto-theology.) Rather being is a set of standards in terms of which entities make sense as entities — ie. a set of standards for inteligibility. (And this set of standards can be articulated by interpreting the world as it occurs.) As such, being may be dependent of dasein even while entities which occur as present-at-hand are not dependent.
It seems to me that although Heidegger thinks the terms by which the realist/idealist debate is traditionally had are inadequate, he is arguably a realist in respect of the present-at-hand (the objects which science studies) although not in respect of them being present-at-hand. And Blattner does think that Heidegger is an “idealist” about time and being — what Blattner calls temporal and ontological idealism.
Blattner thinks Heidegger introduces a bunch of useful apparatus in Being And Time for clarifying the realism vs idealism debate, but that he stops short of a clear resolution of these issues.
Fuller treatment of these issues can be found here:
and here:
12. Truth
Heidegger’s objection to the Correspondence Theory [of Truth] is that the language of ideal contents and real objects, as well as of a relation of correspondence between them, is “ontologically unclarified”.
pp.120Is it accidental that no headway has been made with this problem in over two thousand years? Has the question already been perverted in the very way it has been approached — in the ontologically unclarified separation of the real and ideal?
BAT (259/216–217)
Correspond is a label for a relationship about which no one is able to say what that relationship actually involves.
Taski’s Convention (T): “S” is true if and only if S. This was proposed as a minimum requirement that any theory of truth should have. Roughly it is just Aristotle’s intuitive idea of truth but stated more simply.
“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false. While to say of what is that it is and what is not that it is not, is true.”
Aristotle Metaphysics Book4
Heidegger wants to stick with the deflationary intuitive view of truth, and then add the support of phenomenology to back up our intuitive understanding of truth.
Conclusions
We take philosophical talk about “consciousness”, “intentionality” and the composition of the world in terms of subjects and objects largely for granted.
Plausibly it might be the case that a phenomenological investigation of the structures of being might determine that being is indeed composed only of objects.
However when Heidegger gave his attention to what our behaviour and experience (“experience” crossed out and replaced with being-in-the-world and so on — because “experience” is a term that comes loaded with subject-object baggage) ie. being-in-the-world implies about the nature of being, he did not see only subjects and objects.
He did not see a mysterious consciousness, or an explanatory gap, or a mind-body problem, or a debate between idealism and realism, or a correspondence theory of truth.
Instead he saw engaged familiarity and the type of being that we are “being the there”.
If we assume the subject-object conceptualisation of the world that we have inherited from Descartes, all kinds of philosophical conundrums arise. But plausibly there is no need to do so.
Plausibly we don’t actually live in a world composed entirely of subjects and objects, but we make the mistake of thinking that we do, and thinking about everything we do in these terms.
There’s a shorter version of this article here: (and its going to get even shorter as I edit it down)
