Heidegger’s Being
& Time (1927) has been considered as merely a new move in
transcendental philosophy with its anthropocentric view. Heidegger himself became increasingly
unsatisfied with the role of human agency in Being and Time. His later
work shifts away from human being-in-the-world (Dasein) as a source of intelligibility
of things. He embarks on the project of
thinking the history of being where humans and their modes of understanding are
offshoots of a wider historical unfolding.
In understanding why being is important to Heidegger, keep
in mind the difference between
being and entities. Entities are things as they
exist, but what upholds the thing as thing is being? People through comportment
and gathering together make manifest and make to stand how entities count and
have meaning within a world. Heidegger regards the connection between the
coming-into-presence of entities and the role of human practices in
articulating what shows up as fundamental to understanding being.
*The event of being (that things stand forth) is made
possible by the understanding of being embodied in the practices of a
historical culture. Being shows itself and unfolds differently in different
cultures at different times. In Western culture our beginnings—primordial
experiences—predefine all subsequent ways of experiencing entities.
Historically shifting ways of understanding being in our culture have been
permutations of these early understandings. Physis,
as emerging and abiding, is not one outlook among others but who we are as
participants in Western history.
Over centuries the history of metaphysics has masked or
concealed the primordial experience. *In
asking about entities and experiencing entities as what come to presence, we
have overlooked what makes this presence possible—the presencing of what is
present. So, for Heidegger, being
remains forgotten. Instead of thinking
being, from the beginning of Greek thought, we have focused on beingness
understood as the essential property of actual existent entities. Being is
considered as what is always there and what endures—that which remains through
all changes (Descartes & his mallible
piece of wax, the shape changes but the wax endures). To the extent that
we focus on beingness and are blind to the conditions that let anything show
up, to that extent we are dominated by error and going astray.
How, then, can we begin to think being? Ereignis –event and appropriation (eigen), an event coming-into-its-own. Concealment or unconcealment
is not something humans do, it is something that happens to being itself. Concealment inevitably accompanies every
emerging-into-presence. Just as the
items in a room can become visible only if the lighting that illuminates them
itself remains invisible, so things can become manifest only if this manifesting
itself ‘stays away’ or ‘withdraws.’ This first-order concealment is unavoidable
and innocuous. But it becomes aggravated
by a second-order concealment that occurs when the original concealment itself
is concealed. That is, insofar as humans
are oblivious to the fact that every disclosedness involves concealment (of
being), they fall into the illusion of thinking that nothing is hidden and that
everything is totally out front. They
forget being which conceals itself as it reveals entities. For example, modern individualism conceals
the social practices that make this mode of self-understanding possible. Such cloaking of the concealment makes it
seem like the current way of thinking about reality is the only game in town,
that our current way of thinking about reality is self-evident and the only
way.
In our age, being’s withdrawal has been aggravated by a
complete abandonment of the question of being in modern technology. We live in an age that is characterized by
the thinking that “nothing is any longer essentially impossible or inaccessible. Everything ‘can be done’ and ‘lets itself be
done’ if one only has the will for it.”
We interpret entities as (fully) representable and capable of being
brought forth into production. The domination of ordering is “enframing” that
reduces entities, including humans, to the homogenized level of resources ready
at hand (standing reserve) to be ordered and used according to maximum
efficiency. We experience reality as a
world picture set before us to be challenged and controlled. In this way of being, enframing, being
withdraws. Being as that which gives
coherence, belonging and richness of possibilities is obscured from view. This withdrawal is evident in the natural sciences
that conceal the “essential fullness of nature” that is, the rich possibilities
for cohering and belonging together harbored within things. When entities are treated as interchangeable
or quantifiable sums cut off from their place or “region” they become
“unbeings” devoid of connectedness to context and meaning that allows them
become revealed as beings.
The danger that the essence of technology brings is also its
hope. If we can see that this way of
thinking blots out being, then we become aware of both the first order
(necessary) concealing and the second order forgetting of being. We can then, again, ask what is being (the
guiding question) and what is the truth of being (the basic question). As in the case of the first beginning, this
new beginning will not be something humans do.
Rather, something will happen within being itself. We will then experience ourselves as “thrown”
or “projected” into the clearing that allows an unconcealing. Truth allows humans to show up in the midst
of things “Truth contains and grants that which is, grants beings in the midst
of which man himself is a being, in such a way that he relates to beings.” We experience ourselves as thrown into an
open space (Da-sein or “being there”—see the movie with Peter Sellers) where
our task is to act responsibly, to shepherd being, protecting and preserving
the being in entities.
In “The Origin of the work of Art” Heidegger situates a
great work of art as the means of crystallizing an understanding of being for a
people, giving them a coherent focus and direction for their lives. The Greek temples is one such work:
Sanding there, the building holds its ground against the
storm raging above it and so makes the storm itself manifest in its
violence. The luster and gleam of the
stone . . . first brings to light the light of the day. . . . Tree and grass,
eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and
thus come to appear as what they are.
What Heidegger wants us to see in this description is the
way a work of art can open a clearing in which things become accessible and
intelligible (unveiled, unconcealed) and thereby bring to realization the being
of entities in a world. What was
initially only incoherent, fragmentary, and unclear is allowed to stand forth [ver-stellung] as something or other in its “thing-ness.” “But men and animals,
plants and things, are never [just] present and familiar as unchangeable
objects, only to represent incidentally also a fitting environment for the
temple, which one fine day is added to what is already there.” Such would be a shoebox theory of the world,
a container theory. On the contrary,
Heidegger offers a dynamic theory of relation determining identity. The appearance of the temple lets things show
up as having a definite articulation and so belonging in some determinate way
within the totality of the world: “The temple, in its standing there, first
gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves.” This crafting [techne] of the temple becomes an “event of being” that realizes
(makes real) the world in a certain way.
The work of art becomes the “measure of all measuring,” the standard
that discloses how things are for people.
For Heidegger, all truth happens through articulation and
composition. In a sense, all art is
poetry and poetry (in the narrow sense) has a privileged position among the
arts. Poetry draw on the background
folktales, slang, ways of saying and being of a people. It transforms this saying into an
articulation for people of their understanding of reality. They can look to and through this articulation,
this poetry, to the world. Homer, the
Psalms, the Sermon on the Mount are not just aesthetic objects. They formulate and bring to realization what
is definitive of a people’s way of life.
Heidegger—especially his work of the 1920s—is influenced by
existentialism (Kierkegaard and Nietzsche).
Existentialist believe that there is no objective, detached,
disinterested point of view from which to think. All thinking is situated. For Kierkegaard, our primary access to
reality is through action. We define
ourselves not by what we think but what we do (which then influences what we
think). The present action takes our past self with all its history and throws
it into the future. Identity is a
temporal structure. Kierkegaard saw a
loss of values in society and considered the way to maintain one’s identity in
such a culture was to make an absolute commitment. If you can commit yourself unconditionally,
then that becomes a focus for your whole sense of reality. You’re life takes on meaning through commitments. Heidegger sees recent undermining of
commitment in society due not to a failure of individuals but because there is
nothing in the modern world to solicit commitment from us and sustain us in it. The things that used to evoke
commitment—gods, heroes, statesmen, thinkers—have lost their authority. To make this more complicated, Heidegger
rejects Nietzsche’s idea that we once had values but do not have them now and
that we should regain values or choose new ones. The essence of value for Heidegger is
something that is completely independent of us.
He cites Plato who claims that the good shines on us and draws us to
it. During the Enlightenment we arrive
at a notion of values that are objective, passive objects that we must choose
between. These values have no claim on
us till we decide which ones to adopt.
With Nietzsche, if we can choose values, we can also un-choose them or
make new ones. For Heidegger this is a
problem since as long as we think in terms of value positing rather than being
gripped by shared concerns, we will not find anything that elicits our
commitment.
According to Heidegger the trouble begins with Socrates’ and
Plato’s claim that true moral knowledge, like scientific knowledge, is
disinterested. Heidegger questions this
possibility and desirability of making everyday understanding totally explicit
(objective & disinterested). He
introduces the idea that the shared everyday skills, concerns, and practices
into which we are socialized provide the conditions necessary for people to
make sense of the world and their lives.
Our general know-how (“readiness-to-hand”) is the social tools for
understanding the world. Dreyfus’s uses a Styrofoam cup and a Japanese tea cup
as an example of cultural know-how. Each
arises out of a different cultural milieu, a different comportment and a
different way of presenting being. The
Styrofoam cup arises out of a challenging forth (our comportment) and an
enframing (our way of presenting being).
In contrast, great works of art such as the Greek temple, show a
different society’s means of being-in-the-world. This art work stood as an action and
construction of values. It stood for and
was a part of an Athenian’s values. The
Greeks whose practices were manifested and focused by the temple lived in a
moral space of gods, heroes, and slaves, a moral space that gave direction and
meaning to their lives. As an exemplar,
the work of art is beyond any rational system of articulating values. It is too deeply woven into the way we live
to be full articulated. (If a rational
system were possible, the exemplar would not be necessary.) Further, the work
of art is situated between world (culture) and the earth (nature) from which
the materials for art come. The material
side of the work of art, like the earth itself, resists rationalization. The work of art clarifies and unifies
practices but being a concrete thing it resists rationalization. Between earth
and (human) world, the work of art helps us stand in the clearing, yet as the
work participates in the earth, we realize that what is unconcealed in the
clearing is not the whole picture, the full disclosure of being. Since no interpretation can ever completely
capture what the work means, the work of art sets up a struggle between earth
and world. This struggle is a necessary
aspect of the way meaning inheres in human practices. It is a fruitful struggle in that the
conflict of interpretations it sets up generates a culture’s history. Technology’s enframing demands full
disclosure and accounting of entities as standing reserve. In doing so, it forgets the guiding question
of being. The challenge, then, is to find marginal practices and works of art
that allow are common meanings for us.
Something we can all participate in and look to as focusing and
manifesting a moral space, how to live and die, what matters, etc.
Articles about Heidegger
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