Notes on Heidegger's Being and Time - 1.III: The worldhood of the world (pp. 91-148, §§ 14-24) - Wednesday, 28 October 2015

1.III: The worldhood of the world (pp. 91-148, §§ 14-24)

Wednesday, 28 October 2015 (Notes by Marton Ribary)

Zeug

In our everyday dealings (Umgang), things do not primordially present themselves as objects of formalised and abstract perception (Vorhandenheit/presence-at-hand). Rather, we encounter things as we go about our life and carry out the minutest projects (this is Merleau-Ponty’s term used in his Phenomenology of Perception) like opening a door by using the doorknob. In order to delineate things encountered in this way from things as object of formalised and abstract perception, Heidegger introduces the concept of Zeug (“equipment”/”useful thing”/”utensil” according to different English translations). Zeug is essentially “etwas um zu”, a thing with which we carry out a project (e.g. an instrument), or a thing which refers to something else (e.g. a sign). Zeug is encountered in the context of references. It opens up a network of interrelated entities which eventually constitute a totality, i.e. the “worldhood”, which is a key characteristic of Dasein’ existence.

Disengagement and the critique of modernity

Leif Jerram pointed out that Heidegger’s description of Zeug can be read in the context of the 19-20^th century critique of modernity. The industrial revolution and the standardised machine production of everyday goods resulted in a disengagement from the object we encounter in our daily life. We do not know anymore where, how and by whom the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the pencil we write with were created. Objects have lost their reference to the human side of production. The frozen pizza just shows up in our basket, the waste just disappears into the bins. We do not know anymore where they come from and where they go. Heidegger’s account of Zeug can be understood as an attempt to reconstruct the context of references which modernity pushed into oblivion, but still operates under our everyday dealings.

From Zeug to the mere Thing

The type of existence Zeug uncovers during our everyday dealings is what Heidegger calls readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). This is the primary mode of existence of the entities, and it is only by privative modes that the presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) can be discovered. The avenue from readiness-to-hand of the Zeug to the presence-at-hand of a mere Things is marked by conspicuousness. When the Zeug is unusable (the doorknob does not open the door), missing (the doorknob is not on the door), standing in the way (the doorknob blocks the way to reach the keyhole) or used as a sign (the doorknob left on the kitchen table referring to the necessity of having it fixed), that is, when the Zeug fails a primary intention of a project, this is the moment when Zeug presents itself as an entity which has another type of existence, which points beyond the intended project. The Zeug has suddenly become a piece of useless metal and revealed an existence without the context of references. The Zeug has become a mere Thing, the conspicuousness has discovered its existence as presence-at-hand.

The critique of Descartes’ ontology

Heidegger’s criticism of Descartes is directed against his Thing-ontology which fails to acknowledge that the primary mode of encounter with entities is not the formalised and abstract perception of mere Things. Descartes’ description is correct, but only inasmuch as it is emphasised that it is not the primordial one – and that is where Descartes is wrong as he claims that the existence of mere Things is the primary mode of existence, and “values”, “intentions” etc. are attached to the entities only afterwards. According to Descartes, perception reveals the entities in their arithmetic purity, and the untrained human mind simply struggles to achieve perfect perception and muddies it with his/her own interests. According to Heidegger, it is the other way round. Entities are encountered within the involved dealings of Dasein. The complexity is the primary form of their existence, and there is a long way before we can extract the formalised and abstract perception from our primordial experience.

Ent-fernung/Ausrichtung

Towards the end of the section about the “worldhood of the world”, Heidegger discusses the mode by which the spatiality of Dasein can be grasped. After he has rejected Descartes’ division of entities into three groups, that is, mere things with only material substance (res extensa), God with only intellectual substance (res cogitnas), and the human being which is a combination of both, Heidegger needs to reinterpret Dasein’s spatiality which parts with Descartes’ idea of extensio. The concepts of Ent-fernung (de-severance/de-distancing) and Ausrichtung (directionality) try to capture the “active and transitive” (105) nature of perception which goes against the passive description of perception in Descartes. The encounter with entities is a perceptive-emotional-cognitive-etc. complex, these elements cannot be clearly delineated from each other in the first step. The complex everyday experience opens up a totality referring to the world shared by Dasein and the entities encountered during her/his dealings. This complex network of Dasein, entities and the world uncovers Dasein’s true spatiality. ”Both directionality and de-severance, as modes of Being-in-the-world, are guided beforehand by the circumspection of concern.” (108) “…that circumspective Being-in-the-world is spatial. … Space is not in the subject, nor is the world in space.” (110-111).

Page numbers in these notes refer to those on the margin of Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) and its reprints. These page numbers on the margin correspond to the German original published by Max Niemeyer Verlag (Tübingen) and Band 2 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe published by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag (Frankfurt). Being and Time is abbreviated as SZ in these notes.

Notes on Being and Time - 1.I-II: Preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein & Being-in-the-world (pp. 65-90, §§ 9-13) - Wednesday, 14 October 2015

1.I-II: Preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein & 

Being-in-the-world in general as the basic state of Dasein (pp. 65-90, §§ 9-13)

Wednesday, 14 October 2015 (Notes by Birsen Dönmez)

Key concepts for the hermeneutic of Dasein

Heidegger begins his ‘Exposition of the Task of a Preparatory Analysis of Dasein’ (§9) by stating that we are in each case ourselves the ‘Being’(das Seiende  - “who does the being”) subject to analysis, the ‘being’ (das Sein) of which is in each case our own – “in each case myself” and “in each case mine” (Jemeinigkeit). Further key concepts are Eigentlichkeit und Uneigentlichkeit (authenticity and inauthenticity), Alltäglichkeit ("everydayness"), Durchschnittlichkeit (“averageness”), Sorge (care), and Erkennen (knowing).

Vorhandensein and Dasein

Heidegger writes: »The essence of Dasein lies in its existence.« (67) (Das »Wesen« des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz. (42)) – thereby turning traditional ontology that concedes primacy to nature (essence) on its head. On that basis, he distinguishes Existenz (existence), denoting the mode of being of Dasein, from Vorhandensein (existential/“Being present-at-hand”) of a mere thing. The term Vorhandensein marks the clear distinction between Dasein and a thing. Whereas Dasein is characterised by various possible modes of being that can never be said to indicate properties ready to be classified. Consequently, Heidegger introduces the term Existenzialien (“existentialia”) referring to modes of Being as to be distinguished from classical ontological categories (see Aristotle and Kant). One of Dasein’s existentiale is the »In-der-Welt-sein« (‘Being-in-the world’). In light of Heidegger’s rejection of an application of these hierarchical categories to Dasein, it stands out that he denies any such judgement of value to the modes of Being (Existenzialien), i.e. in considering both authenticity and inauthenticity, as equally revelatory access points to the hermeneutic of Dasein. Heidegger's refusal to differentiate the modes of Being from the outset of his project lends a preliminary method to his inquiry: it is Dasein’s uncharacteristic everydayness that gives clues in their "averageness" (des Daseins Durchschnittlichkeit) to Dasein’s "positive phenomenal characteristics of Being". It is interesting that, for Heidegger, knowledge also denotes no more than such a mode of being - no doubt we will get to find out more about this in course of our reading.

»In-der-Welt-sein« as Cartesian critique

With Descartes the relationship between the human and the external world became central to Western philosophy. But whereas traditional epistemology proceeded from the philosopher as a detached observer of objects in the world Heidegger shifts the focus in SZ to active engagement as characteristic of human existence in the world - a world participated in and inhabited by Dasein - 'Being-there' as the human way of existence as being implicated in the world, or 'Being-in-the-world'. Sorge (care), is a term Heidegger introduces to further elucidate the relationship of Dasein with the world and does here not refer to anxiety or worry, which would also be meanings of Sorge in German. Its task is to give a point of access to a further analysis of the 'in' in 'Being-in-the-world'.

Page numbers in these notes refer to those on the margin of Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) and its reprints. These page numbers on the margin correspond to the German original published by Max Niemeyer Verlag (Tübingen) and Band 2 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe published by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag (Frankfurt). Being and Time is abbreviated as SZ in these notes.

Notes on Being and Time - Introduction (pp. 19-64; §§ 1-8) - Wednesday, 30 September 2015

Page numbers in these notes refer to those on the margin of Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) and its reprints. These page numbers on the margin correspond to the German original published by Max Niemeyer Verlag (Tübingen) and Band 2 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe published by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag (Frankfurt).

Being and Time is abbreviated as SZ in these notes.

Introduction (pp. 19-64; §§ 1-8)

Wednesday, 30 September 2015 (notes by Marton Ribary)

The language of SZ

Heidegger creates an idiosyncratic language in SZ which deliberately deviates from the standard philosophical vocabulary. Loaded nominal constructions, neologisms and etymologically sensitive reinterpretations of everyday words create a German which is hardly recognisable for the native speaker, and poses an almost insurmountable challenge for the translators. Philosophy, which is understood by Heidegger as “universal phenomenological ontology” starting with “the hermeneutic of Dasein” (38), “lack[s] not only most of the words but, above all, the ‘grammar’”. (39)

Members of our group read SZ in the German original as well as in English, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Hungarian. The translations sometimes make Heidegger’s German even more obscure by covering etymological references, or by reintroducing traditional philosophical language which Heidegger wanted to avoid. For the former, an example is the Italian ‘l’essere’ which fails to mirror the grammatical form (verbal noun) and the added meaning of “presence” encoded in the German “Dasein”. For the latter, an example is the English “entity” which reintroduces a scholastic term as the translation of the present participle “das Seiende” which literally means “that which is”. Macquarrie and Robinson draw attention to this choice of word in their very first footnote of the book (3). Readers of SZ in any language need to remain alert to terminological problems, something which our multilingual reading group promises to highligh during the year.

Dasein

Our discussion departed from the concept of Dasein which is left untranslated in Macquarrie-Robinson, while other translations struggled to reproduce it in any meaningful way. For example, the Hungarian term “jelenvalólét” is an almost nonsensical neologism which literally means “the being which is present”.

In Heidegger’s definition, “this entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term ‘Dasein’” – “Dieses Seiende, das wir selbst je sind und das unter anderem die Seinsmöglichkeit das Fragens hat, fassen wir terminologisch als Dasein.” (7) The Dasein only happens to be the human being, because we, who embark on the inquiry targeting the meaning of Being, happen to be humans. Potentially, Dasein could denote God, a Martian or any other entity (Seiende) which reflects on its own possibilities of Being (Seinsmöglichkeit). However, the phenomenological method which Heidegger employs allow no other entry to the inquiry than through the entities who are the inquirers themselves. It is only because of the human perspective of the inquirer that Dasein effectively denotes the human existence in SZ, but this is purely accidental.

The deconstruction of the philosophical tradition

Heidegger criticises the philosophical tradition which has eliminated Dasein, the entity reflecting on its own Being. Heidegger notes this line of inquiry in the fragments of Parmenides, but he notices that they start to sink into oblivion already in Plato. The metaphysical framework of Aristotle (Categories) which offered a solid description of “things” has dominated philosophy and the sciences, and the supposed metaphysical innovations of Descartes and Kant did not manage to break away from the perspective of “things”. The “what … which pertains to a subject-matter” (eines sachhaltigen Was) (12) cannot be applied to an entity the Being of which surpasses the “what-like” Being of mere things. The metaphysical tradition, according to Heidegger, needs a radical turn: an existential metaphysics from the perspective of Dasein needs to be developed which will be able to encompass the more restricted perspective of the metaphysics of things. (Please note that this is MR’s interpretation of the SZ’s main objective.)

Things and Dasein – ontic and ontological

Dasein is distinguished among the entities by the very fact that it reflects on its own Being, that “in its very Being, that Being is an issue”. (12) The non-reflective “things” and the reflective Dasein are both entities (τὰ ὂντα - ta onta), but the peculiar reflective position grants Dasein an ontic priority. On the one hand, the log of wood cannot reflect on its own Being, neither understands itself in terms of remaining a log of wood, or becoming a table. On the other hand, Dasein cannot avoid making its own Being an “issue” for itself, because either by choosing to become something other than it currently is, or by neglecting to make any decision, it acts towards its own Being one way or another. Heidegger’s positions seems to be a radical reformulation of Aristotle’s metaphysical distinction of potentiality and actuality from the perspective of Dasein (MR). In Aristotle, the entity which is a log of wood in actual terms is potentially a table – that potentiality is part of that particular entity’s metaphysical profile. Similarly, in Heidegger, the Dasein holds an actual and potential Being with one crucial difference, namely that unlike the log of wood, Dasein reflects upon and acts towards its potential forms of Being. “Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence – in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself.” (12) The ontical inquiry is concerned about the metaphysical structure of entities (τὰ ὂντα - ta onta), the ontological inquiry asks the more primordial question of what it means to be.