Before we can analyze the finitude of Dasein we must get clearer about the nature of this entity. For the purposes of my discussion of time and death, I do not need to go into all the details of the first division of Part One of Being and Time, the early work that provided an 'existential analytic' of Dasein's being and set up Heidegger's lifelong task in philosophy. But we do need an account of the general project and structure of the published work, which I provide in Section 1.1. Sections 1.2 and 1.3 examine Dasein's selfhood and the difference between authenticity and inauthenticity. The fourth section examines the issue of the 'turn' or 'reversal' in Heidegger's thought and the relevance of his later work for understanding what is at issue in Being and Time.
In Being and Time Heidegger suggests that we should start a discussion of the nature of what it is 'to be' by examining the entity that is asking the question about the meaning of being. If we ourselves ask the question, we must have some idea, however vague, of what can count as an answer. And it is we who understand what things 'are' and constantly speak of them using conjugations of the verb "to be.' Indeed, according to Heidegger's definition of Dasein, our very way of being consists of having this 'pre-ontological' understanding of what it is 'to be.' An understanding of being 'constitutes' our being (12); our way of being is 'existence' as a 'standing toward' being. In this early work Heidegger does not argue that we would fail to discover the meaning of being if we started by examining the being of things which we encounter, and he does use this approach in later works when, for example, he investigates the nature of the work of art and what it is to be 'a thing." But in Being and Time he concentrates on the being of Dasein, since we ourselves are the ones asking the question and hence must have some vague, 'pre-ontological' understanding of what would count as an answer.
Heidegger calls his investigation of Dasein 'fundamental ontology (13). He later admits that the term is misleading since it suggests that he still is engaging in a traditional kind of ontology, one which will find some hidden presupposition or secure ground that earlier ontologies failed to discover (Way 276f./380). He does not, however, seek some rock-bottom, rock-solid 'foundation' from which all ways of being will be derived once and for all, as if there is ultimately one right answer to the question of what it is to be. Indeed, his claim that Temporality is the meaning of being implies that there is no such foundation - or no such right answer.1
The phrase 'fundamental ontology' as applied to the analysis of Dasein is also misleading in so far as it suggests that Dasein's invention of ontologies for the other realms of what-is makes things what they are. Disputants in the current controversy over Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis frequently make this implied subjectivist, voluntaristic view the link between Heidegger's philosophy and Hitler's effort to re-make Germany. Indeed, this view is so common that Luc Ferry and Alain Renault call it the 'orthodox position.' They suggest its advocates can excuse Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis on the grounds that in the early 1930s he was still beguiled by the metaphysical quest of Western culture. According to this view, in the latter part of the decade he would begin to cleanse himself from this contamination in his lectures on Nietzsche and Hölderlin in which he refers to the Nazi ideology as the ultimate expression of the last metaphysical epoch, the epoch of the Nieztschean 'will to power' and the technological drive to organize all things to serve self-chosen ends.2
However, in this chapter I will tacitly argue that this assumption about the 'subjective' and 'voluntaristic' nature of Being and Time is mistaken. The first stage of this argument is to clarify the level of analysis on which it operates. Drawing on his characterization of Dasein's being as 'existence,' he sets out to look for the 'existential structures' manifest in this being.
A simple way to comprehend the analysis of Dasein presented in Division One of Being and Time is to see it as going through a series of layers or excavations prompted by the question, what makes this aspect of Dasein's being possible?3 In the Introduction Heidegger posits what could be taken, depending on one's sympathies, as either a fundamental fact or a definition, perhaps an arbitrary one. He declares that Dasein is the entity that makes an issue of being (11f.).
If this is to be taken as an indisputable fact, one would appreciate being told more about how the phenomenological analysis uncovers it. Heidegger notes that science, a particular creation of Dasein, has undergone revolutions when it has questioned the being of the things it investigates, but he argues that Dasein in its 'everydayness,' not just its revolutionary periods, exhibits at least a tacit questioning of being. But this is not at all obvious. On the other hand, if the declaration is offered as a definition of what human beings are, or what they have been in Western culture, one would appreciate some justification of its adequacy and accuracy. How does it differ from defining humans as the rational animal or the self-conscious one?
Since the whole of Heidegger's philosophy depends on the truth of this initial, foundational claim, some readers might want to block the building of Heidegger's "house of being' right here. But, once this premise is accepted, Heidegger's version of a transcendental argument can get off the ground. In the following chapters, he proceeds to ask, how is Dasein's way of being possible?
The 'existential analysis' of Part One of Being and Time examines the 'ontological structures' of Dasein's way of being, that is, of 'existence' in Heidegger's technical sense. Such a structure is referred to as an 'existentiale,' the adjective turned into a noun. Existential understanding of Dasein's being at this level is contrasted with the 'existentiell' understanding of any particular Dasein in its quest to answer the question of being (12). An existentiell understanding takes a particular stance toward what it is to be, including what it is to be us.' We all share an understanding of ourselves and what-is: 'Every Dasein moves in such an interpretation, which for the most part coincides with the way the generation of a particular time has been interpreted and which changes with the time' (HCT 270/372).
As we read through the six chapters of Division One, Heidegger uncovers successive "layers' of Dasein's being. Given the peculiar being of its object, Heidegger's phenomenology cannot just describe the facts of experience; it must interpret something whose very being is constituted by an understanding of being. Heidegger claims that the phenomenology of Dasein is 'hermeneutical.' Hermeneutics is the study of the principles of interpreting texts, and discovering the meaning of Dasein's being is analogous to discovering the meaning of a text.
Although the 'meaning' of Dasein's being and the 'meaning' of being in general are not equivalent to the 'meaning' or 'significance' of the verb 'to be,' or the meaning of any words in any language, understanding them involves a similar process. The meaning of a word must be determined in the context of a sentence; the meaning of a sentence in the context of a paragraph; the meaning of a paragraph in the context of a passage; and so on. Hermeneutics neither begins nor ends with what is self-evident. The data for interpretation can only be understood against the background of a context which can itself only be interpreted against a broader context, that is, against its own 'horizon.'
What is the condition for the possibility of Dasein asking the question of being? The first regressive argument is that, to make an issue of being, Dasein is 'being-in-the-world.' This being-in-the-world depends on 'being-at-home-with'5 things around us, 'being-with' others, and 'being-itself' as Dasein. Next Heidegger argues that the condition for this three-faceted being-in-the-world is Dasein's understanding, situatedness, and discourse.6 Understanding, as I suggested in the Introduction, refers to the way that Dasein 'projects' its dealings with things and people on the basis of its comprehension of what-is; situatedness refers to this understanding's personal and cultural embeddedness in ways of responding and acting; and discourse refers to the way the significance of the world is articulated, both literally in language and practically in the involved activity on which it is based.7
In Chapter 6, completing the excavation of the layers presented in Division One, Heidegger argues that these aspects of Dasein are made possible by its being as care. Dasein's being is a caring for things, other people, and its own being. Things matter to it, and this sets up the context of concern in which we move every day. 'Care' is a technical term: things and people can matter to us in hate and indifference as well as the liking or affection we ordinarily call 'care.'
Chapter 6 introduces the phenomenon of anxiety in which Dasein's understanding of being is brought into question and its being as a 'standing toward being,' as simply caring, revealed most starkly. The other important feature of the last chapter of Division One is its re-description of understanding, situatedness, and discourse as aspects of care having an orientation toward the past, present, and future dimensions of time. This makes his task in Division Two much easier; in fact, he may seem to stack the deck so that its cards will fall easily into place without much argument.
When Heidegger wants to show us that the meaning of Dasein's being is timeliness, he can draw directly on his earlier analysis. Understanding has been correlated with care as being 'ahead-of-itself,' that is, being ready to deal with whatever is yet to come. Situatedness refers us to Dasein's past in that care is being-already-in a context of mattering; we always find ourselves already possessing a certain understanding of being and 'attuned' to things in certain ways. In Heidegger's famous way of putting it, we are 'thrown' into our world; we appropriate the complex significance of social practices as we are trained to be human according to our culture as we grow up. Discourse is the articulation of the significance of this present world.
This anticipation of Division Two's discussion of timeliness serves as a reminder that the transcendental layers of Dasein's being do not come to an end when we discover that behind understanding, situatedness, and discourse stands care. The second division of Part One begins by noting that, so far, the analysis has only considered Dasein in its everydayness and inauthenticity (332—33). The existential generality of Division One's discussion, with its focus on everyday activities, has neglccted Dasein's authentic being-itself; the 'layers' unearthed so far are necessary aspects of any Dasein's being. What further conditions make possible the being of authentic Dasein? We now know what it means to have an understanding of being, but how is it possible for Dasein to make an issue of being or change its understanding of being? These questions refer us to Dasein's finitude and timeliness, which in turn lead to a discussion of its historicality. These subjects occupy Division Two of the text.
Before turning to a more detailed analysis of the level of Heidegger's analysis, though, we should pause to consider its initial assumption. By analyzing Dasein in its 'everydayness,' Heidegger hopes to bring out structures common to every Dasein and avoid any bias introduced by a particular existentiell understanding of what it is to be human. Certainly it seems harmless to think that any Dasein, no matter what its time, place, or culture deals with tools, relates to other humans, understands itself in a particular way, and so forth.
However, Heidegger seems to have no a priori guarantee that his own philosophy is not another episode in the history of being, one which clearly finds its roots in the history-conscious culture of his age. John Caputo argues that the conclusion of Heidegger's analysis of culture should be the discovery that no epoch is privileged.8 So why assume that his own account of the structure of Dasein, for example, is not biased by his own particular, historical understanding of being? This is not a problem to which Heidegger is oblivious. It is the problem of justifying an interpretation, the problem of the 'hermeneutic circle,' which he says we cannot get out of but rather must 'come into' in the right sort of way (153). Any interpretation picks out the evidence it considers relevant according to the conclusion it is advancing. Heidegger's hermeneutic of Dasein seems to aim for a level of abstraction where differences in Dasein's self-interpretation are irrelevant. Hence he avoids analyzing either authentic or inauthentic Dasein, Dasein that questions being, or Dasein that takes an understanding of being for granted, and chooses instead to focus on everyday activities common to both and necessary in any culture.9
Yet such an analysis performed from within the understanding of being of the Middle Ages would surely not have considered historicality as a structure of our existence, even though the people of that time lived within a tradition to an extent unsurpassed by any previous or subsequent phase of culture. This culture's answer to the question of being presupposed its timelessness as well as its finality.
Heidegger himself acknowledges that myth-oriented culture or 'primitive Dasein' has its own distinct form of everydayness (313), thus suggesting that everydayness is always the everydayness of a particular culture. Everyday routines of work, cooking, eating, and so forth, take place as aspects of a whole way of understanding being which also sets up its distinctive possibilities for non-everyday behavior such as sacred rituals, mourning, and celebrations (51). The self-understanding of a myth-oriented or an Asian culture may set up quite different ways of relating our activities. Looked at from the perspective of his own later work, Heidegger's own analysis in Being and Time can be seen as focused on our twentieth-century understanding of ourselves and things around us. For example, we are the Dasein that regards a forest as timber, a mountain as a quarry, a river as water-power (70).
The persistence of an 'individualistic" or 'personalistic' interpretation of the level of discussion in Being and Time hinders an adequate understanding of Heidegger's conception of both Dasein and being. The prevalent English translation of the singular term 'das Seiende' as the plural 'entities' or 'beings' has helped to reinforce this misunderstanding.10 Even more influential than the translation, though, and perhaps influencing it, is our own pervasive tendency, diagnosed by Heidegger, to think of everything on the model of what-is present-at-hand, that is, as discrete, independent things. Under both influences, people reading the work in English are inclined to think that when Heidegger speaks of the 'being of entities,' he is talking, for example, about what makes this hammer a hammer or this screwdriver a screwdriver. Each thing was a different entity, and the being of the hammer was different from the being of the screwdriver and indeed perhaps each item had its unique 'being.' Then when we read that 'we are ourselves the entities to be analyzed,'11 we assume that each person is an 'entity' and that 'Dasein,' the subject of the analysis, is just another name for 'a person' or 'a human being.' No matter how much the scholar purports to be avoiding this equation, the personalization shows up in what sorts of characteristics are attributed to Dasein and to its possibilities and choices.
According to this view, the being of 'the entities to be analyzed' is unique to each one, and the investigation focuses on particular things. Instead of viewing Heidegger as a curious admixture of Kierkegaard and Husserl. we should read Heidegger as a descendant of Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. His discussion moves on an ontological level similar to that of the great traditional works of metaphysics. He focuses on being "in general'12 and the being of 'what-is' rather than what makes the hammer a hammer and not a screwdriver, or me me and not you.
In Division One of Being and Time Heidegger analyzes the way Dasein encounters things in the world in three basic ways of being: the ready-to-hand disclosed in active involvement, the unready-to-hand manifest when things resist our use of them, and the present-at-hand that shows up in detached reflection.13 The same particular thing can exhibit any of the three ways to be depending on the being manifest at a particular moment. A thing is ready-to-hand when used as a tool or an item of gear in Dasein's practical activities, but it can shift to being present-at-hand when regarded as merely a discrete, independent thing. For example, a hammer pounding in a nail is what-is ready-to-hand for the carpenter, but when regarded by a philosopher as an discrete thing with particular properties of color, shape, and weight, a 'mere thing' independent of any practical involvement, it becomes what-is present-at-hand.
Heidegger distinguishes a number of 'domains' of 'what-is with different kinds of being as well as three different ways they can be. In Being and Time he lists nature, history, space, Dasein, and language as domains of what-is (9). In the Basic Problems of Phenomenology he asks:
What can be given apart from nature, history, God, space, number? We say of each of these, even though in different senses, that it is. We call it what-is.
(BPP 10/13)
In Heidegger's vocabulary the term 'what-is' does not usually refer directly to a particular thing, for example, a hammer, a rock, or the number twelve, but rather to things with the same type of being considered collectively or as a mode of being. Consequently, Heidegger uses the singular term 'das Seiende' and the singular verb 'is.' Thus, Dasein, nature, or number collectively is an 'it' which we call 'what-is' and can be disclosed as ready-to-hand, unready-to-hand, or present-at-hand.
Understanding the ontological level of Heidegger's discussion helps clarify his account of the being of what-is. The domains of what-is are formally analogous to types of Cartesian substances. Descartes focused on criteria for distinguishing thinking substance from material substance, not criteria for distinguishing one thinking thing from another, or rock from water. Similarly, Kant's a priori category of 'substance' enables us to discriminate a thing as a thing, not a dog as a dog. Something more is needed for recognizing the latter, specifically an empirical concept acquired through encounters with different dogs. Heidegger comments that for Kant 'what-is' is 'nature' or 'that which can be determined and is determined in mathematical-physical thinking' (IM 197/151). A dog is an item encountered in this nature in so far as it has mass, falls under the laws of Newtonian physics, and so on.
Contrary to the usual explanation of his notion of 'what-is,' Heidegger is in fact not focusing on the being of particular things. He expects, however, that the question he poses will lead to an explanation of the 'more' that allows us to understand each thing. In one of his most lucid and straightforward books, What is a Thing?, he comments that he poses the question 'what is a thing?' not to differentiate particular things from each other but to determine what it is to be a thing. Becoming lyrical, he adds:
And nevertheless, we pose the question only in order to know what a rock is, and a lizard taking a sunbath on it, a blade of grass that grows beside it, and a knife which perhaps we hold in our hands while we lie in the meadow.
(WIT 8f./8f.)
Although Heidegger focuses on the fundamental question, it is easy enough to infer from Division One of Being and Time what the 'more' would be that differentiates particular things, especially in regard to what-is ready-to-hand. A hammer and a screwdriver in use are both 'what-is ready-to-hand.' What makes a hammer or a screwdriver the thing it is involves its 'position' in the network of significance which makes possible the being of what-is ready-to-hand, in this case the connections between boards, nails, screws, carpenters, houses, and so on. The totality of significance laid out by Dasein's activity constitutes its being-in-the-world.
Heidegger makes this point in lecture notes written during the period in which he was preparing Being and Time:
The specific thisness of a piece of equipment, its individuation, if we take the word in a completely formal sense, is not determined primarily by space and time in the sense that it appears in a determinate space-and-time position, Instead, what determines a piece of equipment as an individual is: its equipmental character and equipmental context.
(BPP 292/414f)
By this definition, two identical hammers, for example, would be the same piece of equipment - the same 'individual' in this formal sense.
Significantly, one distinguishing characteristic of what-is ready-to-hand is that it can vanish as a separate 'thing.' For example, the hammer in use becomes a transparent extension of the user's body; we are focally aware not of the hammer as a particular thing but rather of the nail and the wall toward which our activity is 'aimed.' And we are not even explicitly aware of the nail and wall as separate, discrete things but only in terms of their significance in an overall project.
In light of this, we can see how a rock used for pounding, two identical hammers, or a hammer and a screwdriver all can have the same way of being, that is, the being of what-is ready-to-hand. They can also all be what-is present-at-hand, but Heidegger argues that our understanding of them as ready-to-hand is primary. Our understanding of things as present-at-hand derives from our grasp of what-is ready-to-hand since involved activity sets up our 'classifications' of things as 'things' - as rocks, hammers, screwdrivers, and so forth - and such a thing can then be viewed disinterestedly as a discrete object whose properties of color, weight, and so on, are simply observed.
Recognizing the 'en masse' or 'as a whole' character of what-is ready-to-hand and present-at-hand brings us one step closer to seeing the commonalities in what Heidegger calls 'domains' of what-is and the 'being of what-is.' Particular things are not isolated in a unique atom of being. Rather, they are already joined as a type of what-is, for example, nature, number, language, gear, and encountered as ready-to-hand or otherwise. With this idea in mind, a shorter step then takes us to the being of what is in general, the character of historically determined 'commonality' that sparked Heidegger's interest.14 Presumably the Greeks and medieval Christians learned to distinguish a dog from a cat or a hammer from other tools in the same way we do, that is, by learning how to deal with them in a context of practical activity as well as distinguishing the characteristics found in different kinds of things. And both cultures dealt in a unified way with Nature, number, language, the divine, and other domains of what-is. But, according to Heidegger, the Greeks and the Christians understood the being of what-is quite differently. To inquire how this is possible is to inquire into the 'meaning of being.'
Now that we have an idea of the ontological level of Heidegger's discussion, we can get clear about the sort of 'individual' that is under analysis in most of the published portion of Being and Time - 'the entity' that 'we ourselves always are' (41).15 'Dasein' is not equivalent to 'a human being' or 'a person,' any more than 'what-is ready-to-hand' is equivalent to 'a hammer.' Human beings are Dasein, just as hammers in use are ready-to-hand, but this tells us something about their being and not what differentiates a particular human being from another or a particular hammer from another. The quantifying 'a' demands other criteria of differentiation than just a characterization of the thing's being. Heidegger very rarely speaks of 'a Dasein', or of 'Daseins' in the plural, and the few times he does he seems to be speaking of interrelationships between things with the being of Dasein rather than simply a person or a collection of them.16 Later he writes of 'the Dasein in man,' as if to correct the misunderstanding that the term 'Dasein' is equivalent to 'a person.' For example, he comments that the Dasein in man 'is the essence that belongs to being itself' (N4 218/358). Pluralizing 'Dasein' in this usage would be like pluralizing a property or feature just because more than one thing exhibited it. Yet Dasein is 'the entity' we are, not just a way of being; its way of being is 'existence,' to stand toward being (BPP 28/36).
When Heidegger speaks in Being and Time of 'individuating' Dasein, as for example in his discussion of authentic being toward death, the issue is not the difference between two human beings but rather the difference between Dasein and other domains of what-is. In introducing the section where he provides us with an outline of the projected analysis to be carried out in the format of Being and Time, Heidegger remarks:
The question of the meaning of being is the most universal and emptiest of questions; however, at the same time, in it lies the possibility of its own sharpest individuation in the actual Dasein.
(39)
We are actual Dasein, and as such we can either question being or take an understanding of being for granted. The Dasein who makes an issue of being is authentic; the one who lives comfortably in the current understanding is inauthentic.
An understanding of being is not what differentiates some particular person from another, as if we each have our own different, 'individual' or 'personal' understanding of being. On the other hand, Heidegger clearly thinks that our contemporary understanding of being is very different from the understanding of being possessed by the Ancient Greeks or medieval Christians. We who are 'actual Dasein' share an understanding of being because of such phenomena as falling and inauthenticity, which we discuss in Section 1.4, while anxiety and being toward death are phenomena which 'individuate' us precisely as the entity which can make an issue of being.
In his impressive recent studies of the development of Heidegger's thought in the years before he published Being and Time, Theodore Kisiel notes that as early as 1919 Heidegger was groping his way toward an understanding of the character of Dasein as being-in-the-world, but Kisiel seems to see the personal T as built upon an 'impersonal' subject who experiences the happening of a world. While each person individually is certainly 'deeply involved' in the world, the "it' through which the world happens is the community, and more expansively, the culture. Through the world we come to experience ourselves as an individual personality. The 'it' of the world is not 'an experience proper to me,' as opposed to anyone else, or unique to 'my life, my full historical I,' but the context of significance, of roles, goals, and ways of comportment in which we first discover ourselves.17 In Being and Time Heidegger tries to express this relation not, as Kisiel says, by claiming that 'Dasein is at once One and the Other,'18 but by saying that 'proximally and for the most part' Dasein's self is 'das Man,' the Anyone.
Division One of Being and Time considers the ontological character of Dasein as the entity that understands being by examining its manifestation in our use of tools and dealings with other people. The analysis of being toward death, timeliness, and historicality which follows in Division Two is an investigation of what makes our being possible and not just of what makes personal individuality possible, as I argue in the following chapters. Such notions as 'repetition' and 'guilt' do not refer us to the uniquely personal events of an individual's life but to the 'existence' - the standing toward being - of Dasein, a way of being that extends from Ancient Greece to today. In Heidegger's 'fundamental ontology' we investigate the historicality of 'the entity that we are,' not primarily or even simply the individual personality. Getting clear about this would enable us to see Heidegger's project as unfolding and deepening from 1919 onward; no retreat from or retraction of the basic points of Being and Time is necessary.19
Heidegger notes the difference in these levels in a remark about Nietzsche's philosophy: '. . . Ecce Homo deals neither with Nietzsche's biography nor with the personality of "Mr. Nietzsche." It deals with a "destiny" - not of the fate of an individual but rather of the history of the modern era as the end of Western culture.'20 Similarly, as I will go on to argue at length, Heidegger's own analysis of 'being towards death." 'destiny,' and 'fate,' does not deal directly with the individual personality. Heidegger quotes one of Nietzsche's own remarks, perhaps agreeing with his goal: 'Enormous self-reflection! To become conscious not as an individual but as mankind. Let us reflect, let us think back: let us go all the small and great ways!' (WIT 43/41).21
Of course, I do not want to deny that Dasein is personal in the sense that, in speaking of Dasein, we are always speaking of particular people, Dasein is, Heidegger says, 'always mine' (41).22 Unlike other things, whose being can change from, for example, ready-to-hand to present-at-hand, we are always Dasein, even when we think of ourselves as present-at-hand. Hence Heidegger constantly refers to Dasein's 'jeweils' or 'jemeinig' character. Correlatively, Dasein is always the Dasein of particular people; it is not something beyond them, or over and above them, as some Absolute Spirit or transcendent ideal. Thus, Heidegger can use the term to refer to persons or personal activities, for example, he can speak of Dasein taking a trip (250). Dasein itself must always be addressed, Heidegger comments, by personal pronouns such as 'you' and 'they' (42). This latter point would not need to be made, indeed it would be a very odd point to make, if 'Dasein' simply denoted 'a person.'
This notion of 'mineness'23 tries to capture the peculiar relation which exists between the species human being and its individual members, or, rather between Dasein and we who are Dasein. 'Species' is a misleading term in this context since it suggests a purely biological category, and a person is not related to Dasein in the same way that a human being is related to the species Homo sapiens or a dog is related to its species. We are concerned about what it is to be us, that is, what it is to be human, and this concern constitutes our connection to our 'species being.' Our relationship to our 'essence' is one of self-understanding, or, in Heidegger's vocabulary, 'care,' not class membership. People take up an understanding of being in learning to be human according to their culture, and, without this understanding, an individual would not be Dasein even if he or she was biologically human, as is, for example, a profoundly retarded child or the legendary 'wild child' raised by apes or wolves.
We each take up the same understanding of being, yet we each do so in our own way. We can make an analogy with a comment that Heidegger makes about our being-in-the-world. He says: 'The surrounding world is different in a certain way for each of us, and yet we move about in a common world' (BPP 164/234).24 The world of a poet is different from the world of a car mechanic; the world of a quadriplegic is different from the world of a marathon runner. But each person's surrounding world fits together and is intelligible to others because we share a common world. Since Dasein is 'always mine,' Dasein is in a certain way different and yet the same for each of us. We each take up the patterns of significance, the roles, goals, and standards, laid out by our culture in a different way, but we are each members of one culture.
This notion of 'mincness' is not new with Heidegger. He seems to borrow it from Kierkegaard, who says in The Concept of Anxiety that 'At every moment, the individual is both himself and the race.'25 Kierkegaard is protesting Hegel's neglect of the particular person in favor of the Spirit working through him or her. For Heidegger, too, the particular person is always the one who understands, makes decisions, and acts, whether these decisions and actions simply define us as individual people or help bring about a change in significance for the culture as a whole, as did Nietzsche's self-reflection. Only in the latter case they are decisions within the realm of authenticity.
Comments in later works about the 'je meines' character of Dasein seem prompted more by a desire to correct misunderstanding than to go back and fill in the idea. In his Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger says that 'always mine' does not mean 'posited through me' or 'apportioned to an individual ego' (IM 28f./22). By then he had realized that such terminology would inevitably be interpreted through the modern understanding of human beings as subjects or particular consciousnesses, and he preferred to drop the word.
Dasein's character as 'always mine' is closely related to its selfhood, another notion that we must see in a new light. The term 'self,' like 'existence,' has an accepted meaning in both ordinary speech and more theoretical investigations, but it is another term to which Heidegger gives his own particular meaning. The 'self' of Dasein is not identical with the self of a particular person in the sense of the personality or the unity of characteristics that a person manifests. Just as Dasein is something we all share in common, Dasein's self is not something which differentiates one person from another but rather what makes us both Dasein. Using the term 'man' instead of 'Dasein,' in the Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger comments:
Man's selfhood means this: he must transform the being that discloses itself to him into history and bring himself to stand in it. Selfhood does not mean he is primarily an T and an individual. This he is as little as he is a we, a community.
(IM 143f./110)26
Dasein is neither simply an individual 'I' nor a collection of such 'I's," even closely interacting ones, but rather the being of such 'I's.' At a point in the text of Being and Time where Heidegger refers to Dasein existing 'as itself,' he later added the marginal notation 'However not qua subject and individual or qua person' (146 and 443*). He will also comment in his 'Letter on Humanism' that it is a mistake to pose the question of Dasein's being in such a way that we expect to find as our answer 'something like a person or object.' He adds:
... the personal, no less than the objective, misses and misconstrues the way of being of ek-sistence as being-historical.
(LH 207/327)27
Dasein's self is the existential self, not the personal self, though it is the prerequisite for understanding oneself as a particular person. We must have an understanding of being in general and our own being in particular in order to differentiate ourselves as particular persons.28
In The Essence of Reason Heidegger explains:
Only because Dasein is determined by selfhood can an I-self relate 'itself' to a thou-self. Selfhood is the presupposition of the possibility of being an 'I' which is revealed only in the 'thou.' Selfhood is never related to a thou; it is neutral toward I-being and thou-being, and even more toward 'sexuality,' since it is what makes them all possible in the first place.
(ER 87/86)
As Heidegger suggests in his lectures on logic, this sort of shared metaphysical 'individuality' in his formal sense is the precondition for any sort of communication 'between Dasein and Dasein' (MFL 209/270). This is true not just in regard to communication between particular people within a culture where we understand each other because we share the same understanding of being, but in regard to communication between Dasein and Dasein in the collective sense, that is, communication between people in different cultures.29 Because human beings engage in similar practices at a fundamental level, for example, getting food, building shelter, creating families, worshipping, we have some leverage for understanding the activities and language of another culture. Without this, we might as well be confronting aliens from another planet, Remember Wittgenstein's comment that, 'If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.'30
Heidegger's additional comment about selfhood's relation to sexuality is not explained. Two reasons besides the social reserve of his time may account for his reticence. First, the remark seems to refer to the role embodiment plays in the development of the sense of 'I-ness.' In his attempt to break down Cartesian dualism with his concept of Dasein, Heidegger evidently prefers to avoid discussing the role of the body in the acquisition and expression of an understanding of being. Even just the use of the terms 'body' or 'embodiment' suggests this dualism by implying that consciousness is the other feature of human beings and one which somehow gets absorbed in a body. In Being and Time Heidegger's only comment about the body is that Dasein's '"bodily nature" hides a whole problematic of its own, though we shall not treat it here' (108).
A more likely reason for Heidegger's silence about how sexuality can be the precondition for personality is his direct reliance again on Kierkegaard's ideas from The Concept of Anxiety. Kierkegaard suggests that the 'fall' into personal self-awareness involves the recognition of one's sexuality, but his remarks on the subject are even more obscure than Heidegger's, especially since they are couched in the imagery of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. But for both philosophers, at the most fundamental level personal self-awareness involves an understanding of oneself as female or male and, more exactly, femininity or masculinity. Such understanding is culturally dependent. Understanding oneself involves understanding the 'race' through an appropriation of the roles and goals, the practices and responses, designated as appropriate to being feminine or masculine. However, unlike Kierkegaard, Heidegger has little interest in the details of a person's understanding of herself. He aims at 'suggesting, methodologically, an extreme existential-ontological model' (MFL 190/245), not giving his readers advice on how to live, as Kierkegaard did.31
Once the existential character of Heidegger's analysis of Dasein's selfhood is grasped, or, more to the point, once the existential character of Dasein's self is recognized as well as the nature of its 'individuality' as a domain of what-is, a common criticism of Heidegger's early work falls by the wayside. Calvin Schrag asks whether an ontology which 'takes its point of departure from a singular Dasein uniquely my own' can 'arrive at an adequate sense of the communal?32 But there is simply no such point of departure in Heidegger's work. Ross Mandel suggests that many of the defects of Heidegger's view 'arise from the fact that Dasein is identified with the self of each of us and the understanding which reveals ourselves and things within the world.' He suggests that 'the transcendental structures are largely centered about the individual.. . there persists a sense of numerically distinct worlds with no visible means of coordination.'33 On the contrary. Dasein is not identified with the person or the individual in Mandel's conception of this. Heidegger's universe of existential discourse has only one world, and we are all Dasein as being-in-the-world, even if that world changes historically with time. Heidegger distinguishes but also connects Dasein's self and the self which says 'I,' and no numerically distinct worlds need to be coordinated. Heidegger himself, though, realized that the distinction and the connection was far from clear in the early work.34
Heidegger introduces his notion of authenticity in the midst of the discussion of the nature of Dasein. He comments:
Since Dasein is always essentially its possibility, it can in its very being 'choose' itself to win itself; or it can lose itself, i.e., never and only 'seem' to win. It can only have lost itself and still not have won itself in so far as it is in its essence something possibly authentic, i.e., something of its own.
(42)
When Dasein 'chooses' itself, it is authentic and makes its being its own.35 Dasein is authentic precisely when it 'chooses' its 'ownmost' being and makes an issue of what it is to be. The scare quotation marks which Heidegger puts around 'choose' ('wahlen') in the text should be carefully noted since he is warning us that his notion of 'choice' is not the ordinary one. In questioning what it is to be, we 'possibilize' an understanding of being (268) and open ourselves up to new possibilities of the being of what-is, which for Heidegger amounts to 'choosing' ourselves as Dasein.36
When Heidegger introduces his notion of authenticity and inauthenticity he warns us not to jump to any conclusions hinging on the ordinary use of the words or on popular conceptions.37 Authentic Dasein is 'essentially' or 'intrinsically' Dasein. but, as he immediately adds, inauthentic Dasein does not have any 'lower" or 'less' being (43). Inauthentic Dasein is not somehow defective or 'not really' Dasein (176). Most of us are inauthentic Dasein for all our lives. And even inauthentic Dasein makes an issue of being, but it does so in a particular way (44).
Inauthentic Dasein does not so much question being as question what-is in order to see if things fit its presupposed understanding of what they are, the understanding anyone has. Heidegger personifies this common understanding of things as 'das Man,' or, as we shall translate it 'the Anyone.'38 Heidegger's German term is the indefinite or impersonal pronoun used in German constructions similar to our English 'one eats with a fork, not one's fingers' or 'one shouldn't judge a book by its cover.'
When we are under the domination or the Anyone, we do what one does' or 'what anyone does' according to the current understanding of things, their nature and their purposes, that we share with others. Even the person who realizes that being is an issue in the deeper sense will be inauthentic, as Heidegger says, 'when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment' (43). When we are absorbed in our day to day routine, when things demand our attention, we take the particular common understanding of being for granted and are not authentically Dasein. Heidegger thinks that 'the Anyone' is a structure of Dasein's being as existence.39
Given this brief sketch of Heidegger's notion of authenticity and inauthenticity, we can see why in works following Being and Time Heidegger took pains to try to correct a widespread misreading of his view. He specifically denied that the terms indicated some 'moral' or 'anthropological' distinction (LH 212/333). A particular view about right or wrong behavior or views about how different groups of people behave presuppose a particular conception of what it is to be human and an understanding of being in general. This more basic phenomenon, its origin and nature, is the subject of Heidegger's analysis. He does not condemn inauthenticity as something 'wrong' or something we should avoid,40 but rather shows that it is inescapable. Inauthenticity is not some 'bad and deplorable ontic property' which 'perhaps more advanced stages of human culture might be able to rid themselves' (176). Unless a particular understanding of being is taken for granted, we would have not culture but chaos.
Heidegger describes inauthentic existence as 'fallen' into or 'addicted to' a particular understanding of being.41 Given our own cultural concerns and Heidegger's negative remarks about the phenomenon, it was easy for us to 'fall' into a moralistic reading of the notion, as if it encouraged us to exhort others to escape a sheep-minded conformity to social standards. But, in fact, Heidegger is not moralistically condemning falling but arguing for its necessity in cultural existence. The notion concerns not so much our personal lives or the particular things we do as the understanding of being which they manifest. It plays an important role in an ontological investigation, not a sociological critique of the annoying behavior of our fellow humans. For example, in his Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time Heidegger mentions 'falling' in connection with Husserl's 'assumption of the tradition of Descartes and the problematic of reason stemming from him' (HCT 129f./179f.). Every one, including philosophers, has a difficult time breaking away from old ways of looking at things. At its worst, falling levels off the ways things can show themselves into a bland and banal sameness such that we cannot imagine any other way of understanding them. One of the dangers of the current epoch of being, Heidegger thinks, is the entrenchment of banality.42
If Heidegger seems sometimes to be exhorting the reader to be authentic, one has to remember that Being and Time is an ontological investigation and authenticity is an ontological concept. The goal of the published portion was to achieve a thorough grasp of the nature of the entity that is asking the question of being. Beyond that, as Heidegger reminds us again and again throughout the book, our ultimate aim is to uncover what makes an understanding of being possible. He is not advising us how we ought to live our personal lives - a matter for ethics - but rather inviting us to follow his phenomenological investigation of the 'meaning' of being in general. Only if we have an adequate grasp of Dasein's being in its modes of authenticity and inauthenticity will we be ready to proceed with this task, or at least so Heidegger thought when he wrote the published portion of Being and Time.
The Anyone, as the personification of a particular 'existentiell' understanding of what it is to be, does promote conformity, but for Heidegger it is a conformity of ontological rather than ethical significance. In making an issue of 'averageness' or conformity to the given understanding of being, rather than being itself, the Anyone levels off the more subtle facets of any understanding of being.
In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore ... Overnight everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known.
(127)
Authenticity, in contrast, reaches down into the 'primordial' roots of Dasein's being beneath the leveled surface of the Anyone.
Heidegger thinks that this surface is especially hard to penetrate today in our age of mass media and mass production, and therefore authenticity is increasingly difficult to achieve. The understanding of being which takes things as mere 'stuff' to be manipulated and used for the satisfaction of our needs (which themselves are also determined by this very understanding) becomes more and more pervasive, spreading from Western culture across the Earth. Practices and attitudes which still linger from an earlier understanding of being, for example, the 'respect for the Earth' movement, or other attempts to break with the current technological understanding of being, quickly become publicized and commercialized and so acquire their own prescriptions for 'what one does' in the technological world. In the second half of the twentieth century we can see the process at work in regard to particular roles such as beatnik, hippie, punk, rapper, skinhead, and other such supposed nonconformists.
Given the common interpretation of Heidegger, it is worth emphasizing further that the contrast he makes is not between doing 'what one does' and doing something unique or nonconformist. Neither is he contrasting being 'other-directed' and being autonomous. For him, the 'autonomous' person may be following a role prescribed by the Anyone just as much as the 'other-directed' person. The 'nonconformist' may march to the tune of a different drummer, but the Anyone still orchestrates all the parts of this symphony of roles, goals, and standards.
I should also stress that understanding what authentic Dasein is, however, differs from being authentic. Exhorting someone to 'Be authentic!' makes as much sense, or as little, as exhorting them to be another Plato or Nietzsche. Nor should one expect to be able to tell when someone is authentic by the way they behave. The difference in existence may not be visible in the personal life of any particular Dasein. 'When busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment,' when in social situations of any sort, we all tend to do 'what one does.' Nietzsche is cited by Heidegger as an example of authentic Dasein, someone who has made an issue of being, but yet, as is well known, Nietzsche's new conceptualization of the being of what-is as will to power found scant manifestation in his own sickly, shy personal life and his public persona fitted the model of the 'Herr Professor' of the age.
In denying that authenticity indicates a moral distinction, Heidegger can legitimately claim that he is trying to analyze a relationship that has hitherto been concealed from philosophy. From Plato on down, philosophers have always given advice on how we ought to live our lives. The advice has been given from a particular perspective on what it is to be human. But Heidegger is trying to explain how such perspectives emerge in the first place: what we humans must be like for this to happen, what the world must be like, and so forth. For the emergence of such perspectives, death and timeliness are necessary aspects of the being of Dasein, as we will see in the following chapters, not features of personhood which refer us to the interiority of an isolated consciousness or unique features of a personality.
Over two decades ago James Demske argued in his book on Heidegger's conception of death that 'my being is unique and specific to me alone' and that I can succeed or fail at the task of being who I really am. If I succeed, Demske argues. I am authentic; if I fail and let other people determine who I am, then I am inauthentic.43 However, I am arguing that seeing myself as such a unique 'given' which I must discover and to which I must live up is in fact an escape from Dasein's ownmost being, which is not a 'given' but a question. More recently, John Caputo in his 1990 book Demythologizing Heidegger claims that we each have our own essential being and that freedom means the freedom 'to seize upon one's essential possibility, to find one's essence, to forge one's fate for oneself.' Even though Caputo acknowledges that this individual fate is in some way bound up with the destiny of a community or culture, the implication is that each person's essence is still unique, personal, and voluntarily chosen and that owning up to our future non-actuality frees us to seize this fate.44
Before I begin discussing the issues in Division Two of Being and Time, I should justify drawing on Heidegger's later works to illuminate his analysis there. Forty years after Heidegger wrote his 'Letter on Humanism,' we still find that, as Heidegger said then, 'it is everywhere supposed that the attempt in Being and Time ended in a blind alley' (LH 222/343). Years ago commentators such as James Collins and Otto Poggeler concluded that Heidegger could find no way to proceed from the 'existential analytic' of Being and Time to his projected analysis of the 'meaning of being.'45 The view is still popular today and frequently invoked to explain Heidegger's attraction to the Nazi ideology.46 Many commentators argue or simply assume that Heidegger had to change his early conception of human nature in order to escape the 'subjectivism' and 'voluntarism' which set up a roadblock on the path of his early thinking.47
Heidegger does speak of a 'turn' or 'reversal' which occurred in his thought some years after the publication of Being and Time (LH 208/328).48 Certainly the works that follow this book exhibit a change of focus and vocabulary. Heidegger no longer concentrates on examining everyday human activity or exploring the aspects of Dasein that he analyzed in Being and Time such as being-with others, death, resoluteness, guilt, conscience, and timeliness. Though these notions are at least touched upon tangentially in his later works, he increasingly focuses on being and its history, and his pronouncements become increasingly idiosyncratic and obscure.
Commenting on Heidegger's 1962 essay 'Time and Being,' Peter McCormick says: 'Now much of this defies critical understanding. We seem to be lost in what Pöggeler calls Heidegger's Topologie des Seins, wandering in some imaginary country mapped in inexhaustible detail by a philosophical Tolkein.49 I think the only way that we can begin to find our way through the thicket of dense jargon and obscure remarks is to take our bearings from the map sketched out in Heidegger's early work. Only then can we determine whether Heidegger is a philosophical Tolkein or a Columbus - or simply a cartographer of Western history who needed to develop his own symbol system to chart the territory he surveyed.
Heidegger himself has claimed that the 'turn' which his thought underwent in the years following the publication of Being and Time was in fact prepared for in that work and was the working out of the answer to the question of the meaning of being which it posed. He says:
The thinking of the turn is a change in my thought. But this change is not a consequence of altering the standpoint, much less of abandoning the fundamental issue of Being and Time. The thinking of the turn results from the fact that I stayed with the matter for thought, 'Being and Time,' by inquiring into the perspective which already in Being and Time (p. 39) was designated as 'Time and Being'.
(LR xvi/xvii)
According to the original outline of Being and Time, the section designated 'Time and Being' was to have appeared as Division Three of Part One. Heidegger indicated that there, after Division Two's explication of timeliness as the 'meaning' of human existence, he would examine 'time as the transcendental horizon for the question of being' (39f.). We would have gotten to the final layer explaining how being can 'be' and how Dasein can have an understanding of it.
The published text, however, breaks off with Division Two. In the 'Letter on Humanism,' Heidegger tells us that Division Three of Being and Time was withheld from publication because 'the thinking failed in the adequate saying of this turning and did not succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics' (LH 208/328). Even though Heidegger himself describes Basic Problems in Phenomenology as a 'new elaboration' of the subject of the unpublished Division Three, it and other works based on lecture courses given around the time he published Being and Time, such as Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time and Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, break off just as he reaches the same general issue despite each course's repeatedly announced intention to complete the analysis. His remarks as well as the truncated character of each of these projects arc taken as an admission of the failure of his own thinking on the subject of the relationship of being and time. The admission supposedly indicates that Heidegger had to change his approach radically in order to give adequate treatment to the question of being or, more specifically, to the claim that Temporality is the meaning of being.
In light of such an interpretation of the development of Heidegger's thought, his own remarks about the consistency of his standpoint are taken as an attempt to gloss over important changes in his thought in order to avoid admitting that he had been 'so far afield' in his earlier work.50 Rather than thinking that Heidegger's remarks about his own work must be 'taken with a grain of salt'51 or believing that he has 'reworked his thought, indeed to an almost scandalous extent,'13252 I want to take seriously the author's comments about what he was trying to say and show how his writings bear him out. He may not have been perfectly clear about what he was trying to say at the time he wrote these early books and the 'Saying' may have been somewhat inept, but his work can be seen as a unified whole.
Heidegger s comments about the consistency of his work indicate that the turn m his thought was projected and prepared for by the published portion of Being and Time. Although Heidegger does acknowledge that he was 'not capable of a sufficient development of the theme designated in the title "'Time and Being'" at the time he published the truncated torso of Being and Time and that the essay published later with that title can no longer be regarded as a continuation of his earlier work, he still insists that the basic question being addressed remains the same (TB 83/91), and that, if anything, the 'fundamental flaw' in the book was that he 'ventured too far too early' (OWL 7/93). He may have set up a project more ambitious than he could complete or at least complete fast enough to avoid misinterpretation. However, I want to show not only that the question of both the 1927 book and the 1962 essay indeed is the same, which is not obvious, but also that the answer in both works remains within the framework established in Being and Time.
If Heidegger was 'not capable* of adequately letting the subject matter of 'Time and Being' show itself, this was not because his preliminary analysis of human being sidetracked him or even derailed him from his original project of finding the meaning of being. Rather, as he suggests in his letter to Professor Richardson, 'a good number of years are needed before the thinking through of so decisive a matter can find its way into the clear' (LR xvi/xvii). If the 1962 essay 'Time and Being' cannot be simply tacked on to the text of Being and Time, this is not because of a change of mind but rather because of a change of method and a change of language to one not so easily accommodating the metaphysical misreading that has plagued that early work.
It was not just Heidegger's thinking that 'failed' in the 'adequate saying' of Being and Time. Adequate saying requires adequate listening. In 'The Letter on Humanism,' where he admits that 'the thinking' (note, he does not just say 'my thinking' ) failed, he also comments:
... in order to make the attempt at thinking recognizable and at the same time understandable for existing philosophy, it could at first be expressed only within the horizon of that current philosophy and its use of familiar terms.
In the meantime I have learned to see that these terms were bound to mislead immediately and inevitably into error. For the terms and the conceptual language corresponding to them were not rethought by readers out of the particular matter to be thought; rather the matter was conceived according to the established terminology and its customary meaning.
(LH 235/357)
The customary meaning of the current philosophical vocabulary had been established by 2500 years of metaphysical thinking, some of the latest episodes of which were Husserl's phenomenology and the tradition of existentialism. By using such terms as 'self,' 'choice,' 'death,' 'guilt,' and 'conscience,' Heidegger seemed to be offering another particular understanding of what it is to be, specifically the existentialist one emphasizing subjectivity and personal choice. Indeed, he was prompted to write the 'Letter on Humanism,' from which many of the above quotations come, in order to dissociate himself from the existentialism of Sartre, with whom he had been indiscriminately lumped by many people.53 Perhaps in order to avoid such misunderstanding as well as to express his insights more adequately, Heidegger's use of language becomes more and more inventive and idiosyncratic until his later philosophy may seem to preclude any understanding at all.
Heidegger himself should have been the first to see that there are good philosophical reasons why his own thinking may have been unfortunately affected by the heritage of significance attached to terms borrowed from the traditional philosophical vocabulary. But I also think that he is not being disingenuous when he says that he was trying 'to say something wholly different' with this traditional vocabulary (N4 141/194). Once we understand both the early and later vocabularies, especially such notions as 'death,' the 'timeliness' of Dasein, and the 'Temporality' of being, we will be able to see how the later essay 'Time and Being' can be regarded as the missing section of Being and Time, at least in content if not form.
If the 'turn' in Heidegger's thought is to be called a 'reversal,' we should keep in mind what is being 'reversed.' It is not a reversal or retraction of a particular claim or position. Rather, as Heidegger suggests in the above quotation from his letter to Professor Richardson, the turn or reversal is a change in perspective within the analysis of two issues: time and being. In the published portion of Part One of Being and lime we looked at the relationship between Dasein and being from the perspective of Dasein, and then, in the projected Division Three, we were going to look at the relationship from the perspective of being. Part Two would have applied this perspective to the history of Western philosophy. For Heidegger, the horizon of Time forms the background context for both perspectives, and the 'turn' was 'in play within the matter itself' that was - and was supposed to be - considered in the book. Rejecting the common assumption about the path of his thinking, Heidegger insists that 'the question of Being and Time is decisively fulfilled in the thinking of the turn' (LR xviii/xix).
Again and again throughout his early stage-setting work, Heidegger reminds us that the existential analysis of the being of Dasein is only preparatory for posing the question of the meaning of being. Years later he could still assert in retrospect that the real and only question of Being and Time was the meaning of being (Way 275/ 378). There are fewer reminders in that unfinished torso that the analytic of Dasein cannot be complete, nor the being of Dasein fully understood, until we have addressed this issue, Still, they are there. Note, for example, Heidegger's warning at the end of Section 35 on 'Dasein as Understanding,' in which he argues that Dasein's understanding cannot be simply equated with cognitive thought but rather is the 'projection' of the possibilities of existence in our 'stand toward' being:
The existential meaning of this understanding of being cannot be satisfactorily clarified within the limits of this investigation except on the basis of the Temporal interpretation of being.
(147)
The adjectival reference to the Temporality of being reminds us of the proposed content of the missing section 'Time and Being.'
The last sentences of the published portion of Being and Time conclude its discussion of the timeliness which makes Dasein's being possible, but they also pose the rhetorical questions which would have led into that missing section:
How is this disclosive understanding of being at all possible for Dasein? ... The existential-ontological constitution of Dasein's totality is grounded in timeliness. Hence the eestatical projection of being must be made possible by some primordial way in which ecstatic timeliness times itself. How is this mode of the timing of timeliness to be interpreted? Is there a way which leads from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself manifest itself as the horizon of being?
(437)
The time which is the horizon of being is not just the time of Dasein's being but the Time of being in general. Indeed, I shall show that Dasein's authentic timeliness and the Time of being are grounded in the same basic phenomenon when viewed from the perspectives before and after the 'turn.'
Placed in the midst of the published portion of Being and Time, these warnings support Heidegger's retrospective claim that his original project was not trapped by a 'subjective' notion of Dasein which made being the 'willed' product of human thought. Justifying his claim that the proposed section 'Time and Being' would have 'turned' the 'whole' around, Heidegger later argues:
One need only observe the simple fact that in Being and Time the problem is set up outside the sphere of subjectivism - that the entire anthropological problematic is kept at a distance, that the normative issue is emphatically and solely the experience of Da-scin with a constant view to the question of being - for it to become strikingly clear that the 'being' into which Being and Time inquires cannot remain something which the human subject posits. Rather being, stamped as presence by its time-character, approaches Dasein. Consequently, even in the initial steps of the question of being in Being and Time thought is called to a change whose movement corresponds to the turn.
(LR xviii/xix)
With notions like 'existence' left underdeveloped, we might conclude that Dasein's being is a matter of subjectivity or attitude, as if the 'standing out' toward being is just our consciousness of things 'outside' of us or our attitude about them. Only later are we explicitly told that this 'standing out' is a matter of 'standing open' for the 'openness' of being (Way 271f./374). The openness of being is the disclosure of being through the way things invite our dealings with them. Such openness makes possible our understanding of being, our 'standing open' for its changing manifestations.
Becausc Heidegger did not carry off the turn in the format of that early investigation, he expresses dissatisfaction in other works with the account of the relation between being and human being given in Being and Time. Looking at Dasein's relationship to being only from the point of view of Dasein gives an 'inadequate' conception of the relation as a whole (OWA 87/74). It does not capture how Dasein's understanding of being changes in response to the Temporal revelation of being.
What is at issue in the 'turn' of Being and Time is what I will call the 'phenomenological turn.' It is required both by the phenomenon under investigation in the published parts of Being and Time and by the method of investigation, that is, the hermeneutic phenomenology which uncovers deeper and deeper layers of Dasein's being. In the process of making the turn, however, Heidegger comes up against the limits of this initial method and its language. The phenomenological turn ultimately involves a turn away from phenomenology. In his later works he no longer tries to provide a transcendental excavation of the phenomenon of being, perhaps because he sees the structure and aim of his earlier argument, with its attempt to get to the bottom of things, as a holdover from metaphysical thinking, even if its content was an attempt to say something 'wholly different.'
For Heidegger the completion of the analysis of Dasein and of its relationship to being is not important just for its own sake, that is, for the sake of providing a complete representation of Dasein and its relationship to being, nor for correcting or complementing current views. Rather, he says that his completed analysis concerns a 'turn' in which 'what is at stake is a transformation in man's being itself.' In this sort of turn 'man comes into question in the deepest and broadest, in the authentically fundamental perspective: man in relation to being' (LR xx/xxi).
The 'turn' to which Heidegger refers here is not the phenomenological turn; it is the turn which is the transformation of man's being. This turn is, for example, the subject of Heidegger's lecture 'The Turning' given in 1949. Some of the confusion surrounding the notion of a turn in Heidegger's thought is caused by his use of the same word for both the change in perspective in his analysis and the change in the relationship between man and being, The former turn is carried out in his comprehensive analysis of Dasein and being, but the latter turn is something that has not taken place yet. This turn is 'the turn about of the forgetfulness of being into the truth of being' (QCT 44/42). This turn is a turn which happens or comes to pass in our understanding of being. The other turn is a matter for thought as interpretation or analysis; it involves no special kind of happening. However, Heidegger thinks that the turn which happens can only be 'thought out of the turn' which is no special kind of happening but rather is the change of perspective involved in carrying out the investigation into Dasein and being.
This other turn can be called, following Heidegger's Kierkegaard-inspired use of the term, the 'leap' of thought. Nothing foreign to the analysis of Being and Time, this turn is the extreme - the 'outermost'? - case of the moment of insight that authenticity holds 'ready to leap.' And the analysis of Being and Time, including its projected but not accomplished phenomenological turn, was supposed to prepare us for such a leap. Heidegger's own thinking cannot by itself accomplish this sort of turn, but even as early as this first, major book he saw his work as helping to prepare for it.
Indeed, Heidegger suggested in the second part of the Introduction to Being and Time that the interpretation of Dasein as temporal and historical would necessarily lead us into the question of the historicality of being. We would be obliged, he thought, to make the turn toward being. Furthermore, this section of the Introduction set the task of investigating the history of the question of being not just for the sake of providing a complete, accurate representation of Dasein or being, or the relationship between them. Heidegger suggested that the investigation also prepares us for positively 'appropriating' our past and brings us into 'the fullest possession of the most proper possibilities of such an inquiry' into being (21).54 This possibility is precisely the transformation of our understanding of being and, with it, the transformation of our Dasein. To ask how does it stand with being means nothing less than to repeat the beginning of our historical-spiritual Dasein in order to transform it in another beginning' (IM 39/29). This turn of thought, which we will examine in Section 7.4,55 is the turn away from the traditional, metaphysical understanding of being and, Heidegger hopes, a turn toward a new beginning for Western thinking which would be as radical as that of the Greeks.
1 Charles Guignon's otherwise excellent Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Haekett Publishing. 1983) illustrates this misunderstanding. See p. 219 and p. 208. In later acknowledging the inappropriateness of the term 'fundamental ontology,' Heidegger indicates that he never sought, as Guignon apparently thinks, 'a secure foundation for the regional sciences' or 'a basis for arriving at a final answer to the question of being.' The existential analytic was never supposed to reveal the 'timeless, immutable structures' that Guignon argues arc necessary to 'lay a firm foundation for ontology' and hence to justify Heidegger in his attempt to provide such a final answer.
2 See Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity, trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Chapter 2, section 'The Orthodox Position,' pp. 31—43, especially pp. 39 and 41.
3 One could think of these steps as a series of transcendental arguments in a Kantian style, but I should stress both that I simplify the text by fitting it into this pattern and that I am using the term 'transcendental' in a simple, rather loose way. Although in some sense each of the structures unearthed at each level serves as the condition of the possibility of the next structures of the next level and a useful order is imposed on the text by sorting the different structures in this way, they come as a 'package deal' and the initial claim doesn't have the a priori character that Kant's arguments assume.
4 I lake "existentiell' understanding to be a particular, culturally shared understanding ot' being, not a unique personal understanding of oneself, as Heidegger's notion is usually interpreted; it is my understanding of what-is as stuff to be manipulated, not just my understanding of myself as a teacher or middle-aged. The notion is posited in Being and Time but not really explained. Later, in arguing that Kant's notion of 'world' signifies "the existence of man in the historical community,' he refers to 'this existentiell concept of world' (ER 77/ 76). He also says that the concept of existentiell understanding only becomes explicit with Schelling (EP 71/477), and he argues that 'the existentiell is merely the intensification of the role of anthropology within metaphysics in its completion' (EP 73/479). All three claims suggest that the cultural reading is valid. (We will discuss the significance of the last remark in Chapter 7 of this book.) [The unfinished Chapter 7 has not been included in the present edition but is available online at: http://www.scu.edu/philosophy/CWhite.htm - Editor's note.]
5 Heidegger's phrase is 'Sein-bei.' The German preposition 'bei' means 'at,' 'by,' or 'alongside.' Since it also means 'at the home of' like the French 'chez,' following Hubert Dreyfus's suggestion I translate 'Sein-bei' as 'being-at-home-with' in order to capture Heidegger's notion of familiar dealings with things.
6 Heidegger's terms are 'Verstehen,' 'Befindlichkeit,' and 'Rede.' 'Befindlichkeit,' the term here translated as 'situatedness,' should not be translated as 'state-of-mind' as Macquarrie and Robinson have it. Besides the fact that Heidegger specifically says that 'Befindlichkeit' is prior to cognition (136) and the word 'mind' suggests otherwise, 'state-of-mind' suggests a subjective feeling determined by introspection, not a way of pre-reflectively encountering things within the world.
7 Division One explores these subjects in the following steps. Chapter I discusses the basic nature of Dasein and distinguishes Heidegger's approach from that of anthropology and other social sciences. Chapters 2 and 3 explore Dasein as being-in-the-world. Chapter 4 analyzes Dasein's being-with and bcing-itself. Chapter 5 examines understanding, situatedness, and discourse.
8 See John Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
9 See Being and Time, pp. 16-17 and 43—44, for Heidegger's justification for basing the existential analytic on a description of Dasein's 'everydayness' or average, 'undifferentiated' mode of being.
10 Sec 'Heidegger's Texts and Translations' for a discussion of the translation of 'das Seiende
11 See p. 67 of the Macquarrie and Robinson translation oi Being and Time.
12 'sein überhaupt' might also be rendered being "above all' except that this might suggest a highest entity or superior status.
13 'Ways of being' translates Heidegger's term 'Seinsart.' 'Mode of being' would perhaps be a less cumbersome translation, but perhaps it carries too much philosophical baggage.
14 I use the term 'commonality' with reservations. It suggests a common property or character, and, while this is how the being of what-is has been understood in the history of philosophy. Heidegger's aim is to bring this assumption into question.
15 Heidegger announces, 'Das Seiende, dessen Analyse zur Aufgabe steht, sined wit je selbst.'
16 For example, in lecture notes from a class in the summer semester of 1927 Heidegger occasionally uses the expression 'ein Dasein' (BPP 27/36, 208/296, 210/299) and of communication between 'Daseins' (BPP 210/299, 277-79/392-96) but riot in a way that diminishes the communality of 'the entity' that we are or suggests that we become who we are (or an 'I' becomes a person) by the accumulation of individual experiences building from an impersonal but still subjective 'I' to a personal 'I.' We begin and end as 'being-in-the-world.' See discussion below.
17 Theodore Kisiel, 'The genesis of Being and Time,' Man and World, 25 (1992), p. 23. I quote from Kisiel's article for its succinct way of expressing the points I address. For his fuller account of this issue, see his The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), for example Part One, 'The Breakthrough to the Topic.' pp. 15-20.
18 Kisiel, ibid., p. 29.
19 Kisiel suggests that Being and Time is an 'aberrant' path leading away from Heidegger's initial insights of 1919, and that, realizing its failure, Heidegger's famous 'turn' is a turn back to those earlier probings. Kisiel, ibid., pp. 33-34.
20 Heidegger. 'Nietzsche as Metaphysician,' translated by Joan Siambaugh, in Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robert Solomon (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973), p. 108.
21 The passage appears in Nietzsche's Will to Power as aphorism 585.
22 Heidegger's phrase is 'je meines.' Macquarrie and Robinson translate it as 'in each case mine,' and other translators follow their lead. This translation re-enforces the view that 'Dasein' means 'a person," that is, Dasein occurs in discrete 'cases.' I think that translating as 'always' captures a different meaning in the text since 'je' also means 'ever,' 'at all times,' as well as 'at a time," 'each' 'apiece,' and is in keeping with the discussion in the paragraphs following the introduction of the term, as I explain below.
23 Heidegger's term is 'Jemeinigkeit' or literally 'always-mincness.' I sometimes shorten the term to avoid jargon; its meaning should be clear from the surrounding discussion.
24 'Surrounding world' substitutes for Heidegger's term 'Umwelt.'
25 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, translated by Reidar Thomte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 28f. Perhaps this borrowing accounts for the obliqueness of Heidegger's comments on the subject. In Being and Time he mentions 'mineness' but does not really develop the idea. In a footnote in the book he admits that one can learn philosophically' from The Concept of Anxiety, and one thing he evidently learned was the cultural character of the personal self. See Being and Time, pp. 235 and 494.
26 Ideally, if not by the conventional rules of either German or English grammar, the 'hitnv and 'hes' should be replaced by 'its' since the personal pronoun only obscures the remark's point.
27 The phrase 'way of entity' translates Heidegger's term 'das Wesende.'
28 In his Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, composed shortly after Being and Time, Heidegger calls this sort of self 'neutral Dasein' (MFL 136-138/171-173) and the 'metaphysical self" (MFL 188-190/242-245).
29 In the cited passage in the Metaphysical Foundations of Logic Heidegger calls for a 'metaphysics of myth' before describing 'metaphysical individuation' as the 'presupposition for the primordial commerce between Dasein and Dasein' (209/270). These remarks are further confirmation of the ontological character of individuation and the collective character of Dasein. People in our society can understand a myth-oriented culture because of the similarity of basic human practices, although, of course, that understanding may be more or less accurate, more or less biased by our own worldview.
30 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 223e.
31 In this passage from his lectures in the summer of 1928 Heidegger rails against egocentric misconceptions of his notion of the 'self' evidently already plaguing Being and Time and passed along the academic grapevine disseminating his thought. He takes pains to differentiate his existential project from Kierkegaard's existentiell investigation.
32 Calvin Schrag, 'Heidegger on Repetition and Historical Understanding,' Philosophy East and West, Vol. XX, No. 3 (July 1970), p. 291.
33 Ross Mandel, 'Heidegger and Wittgenstein: A Second Kantian Revolution,' in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, edited by Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). p. 269.
34 In his marginal notes on his own copy of Sein und Zeit he reminds himself: 'schärfer klaren; Ich-sagen and Selbstsein.' (318/445*).
35 Heidegger is playing off 'eigentlich' ('authentic') and 'eigen' ("own"), and many of his points tacitly appeal to the etymological connections of the 'eigen' words he uses. I am tempted to translate all the 'eigen'-rooted words with terms related to 'proper,' that is, to use 'proper' and 'properly' instead of 'authentic' and 'authentically,' 'appropriate' instead of 'own,' and 'most proper' instead of 'ownmost' ('eigenst'). This would have the very distinct advantage of linking them all etymologically, both with each other and with 'das Ereignis' as 'Appropriation,' as they are in German.
The proposed translation would also have the advantage of emptying the words of all the meaning associated with 'authentic' as the term has been used by other philosophers, psychologists, and assorted commentators. 'Ownmost' in particular suggests the subjeetivistic and personalistic against which I am arguing. However, the usual translations of these terms are well entrenched, and I am already asking readers to re-set their minds for one key word from Being and Time, that is, to think of 'Zeitlichkeit' as 'timeliness,' not 'temporality.'
36 In Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger uses the terms 'decision' and 'will' in an even more misleading reference to this same notion of choice. For an extended discussion of the basic concept, see my analysis of resoluteness in Chapter 3, especially Section 3.3.
37 Heidegger says that the expressions 'Eigentlichkeit' and 'Uneigentlichkeif are picked for their strict literal sense; and, as noted above, 'eigen' means 'proper' or 'own,' so quite literally 'Eigentlichkeit' means 'properness,' 'own-ness.' In ordinary German 'eigentlich' means "proper,' 'true,' 'authentic,' 'essential,' or 'intrinsic.'
38 I follow Hubert Dreyfus's suggested translation.
39 Heidegger calls such a structure an 'existentiale,' as we noted in Section 1.1. Thus he puts the Anyone on a par with such dimensions of Dasein's being as understanding and situatedness.
40 A detailed example of the morally-tinged view of inauthenticity common in the scholarly literature can be found in Michael Zimmerman's book Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger's Concept of Authenticity (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981). Zimmerman describes inauthenticity as a 'greedy,' 'selfish,' 'egoism.' (Sec especially pp. 43-49.) While this may seem to be an accurate description of the Dasein immersed in the modern understanding of being, in which we see ourselves as conscious egos whose relation to things is one of dominance and manipulation, it was certainly not true of the inauthentic Dasein of the Middle Ages, when the 'ego' had not even been discovered yet. The devout, ascetic Christian of the thirteenth century, for example, may be treating what is with the respect it deserves as God's creation and still be 'inauthentic' in Heidegger's sense.
41 Heidegger's term is 'verfallen.'
42 See Chapter 7, Section 7.3 for a discussion of this danger of the technological era. [Chapter 7 is available online at: http://www.scu.edu/philosophy/CWhite.htm - Editor's note.]
43 See James Demske, Being, Man, and Death (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1970), p. 19 and p. 22.
44 See John Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, pp. 78-80. He argues that freedom means the freedom 'to seize upon one's essential possibility, to find one's essence, to forge one's fate for oneself' (80).
45 See James Collins, The Existentialists (Chicago: Regnery, 1952), p. 175, and Otto Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen, Germany: Gunther Neske, 1963), p. 176.
46 Ferry and Renault describe this 'orthodox position' in the passage cited in Section 1.1 in footnote 2.
47 Both quoted terms come from Michael E. Zimmerman, who has argued more extensively for this view. The most concise and simple statement of it is in his article 'The Foundering of Being and Time,' Philosophy Today, XIX (Summer 1975), pp. 100-107. In it Zimmerman argues that Being and Time lies half way between the metaphysical thinking of traditional philosophy and Heidegger's later, new way of thinking (102). He contends that 'Being and Time founders for two reasons. First, it was unable to completely pass beyond the subjecti vist kind of thinking which characterizes the history of metaphysics. Second, it failed to recognize from the beginning the historical nature of being and the function of Dasein to bring being to appearance' (102).
In the article Zimmerman argues that Heidegger's notion of "Jemeinigkeif and Dasein's selfhood kept him from escaping the 'subjectivist' view that we are at bottom isolated, Cartesian consciousnesses. As I try to show in this chapter, neither concept, properly understood, refers us to the subjectivity or consciousness of the individual personality.
Zimmerman's book the Eclipse of the Self provides a more extended, detailed account of both the continuity and the difference in Heidegger's early and later thought. In it he argues that Heidegger's thought manifests a gradual development, not the abrupt break of a dead end and a new direction.
48 Heidegger's term is 'Kehre.' He utilizes both its meaning of 'turn' and of 'reversal' in the sense of a turn about, and we will use both words.
49 See Peter McCormick, 'A Note on "Time and Being",' Philosophy Today, XIX (Summer 1975), p. 99.
50 John D. Caputo, 'Time and Being in Heidegger,' Modern Schoolman, L (May 1973), p. 335.
51 Zimmerman, Eclipse, p. 77.
52 John D. Caputo, 'Time and Being in Heidegger," p. 339.
53 Sartre misunderstands Heidegger's claim that 'the "essence" of Dasein lies in its existence' (42). Although Sartre does have the notion that what we are is a product of our self-understanding, he sees this in an individualistic and ahistorical way. His dictum that 'existence precedes essence' seems to presuppose the traditional notion of 'existence' as 'actuality', or what Heidegger calls 'presence-at-hand,' rather than the idea of a 'standing toward' being. In Heidegger's view of him, Sartre is one more metaphysician offering a particular understanding of what it is 'to be.' Like Kierkegaard. Sartre primarily thinks on the existentiell level, not the existential. Their philosophies are expressions of their times, not analyses of what makes these different cultural epochs possible.
54 'Appropriating' translates the term 'Aneignung' which Heidegger uses in this part of the Introduction to Being and Time. This may seem to prematurely emphasize the word's connection with Heidegger's term 'das Ereignis,' but Hans-Georg Gadamer thought that the content of Heidegger's lectures in 1919 indicated that he already had at least a sketch of the map that would lead to his famous 'Kehre' or turn. In them he referred to the 'worlding' of the world and used the expression 'es er-eignit sich.' See Theodore Kisiel's discussion of this point in The Genesis of 'Being and Time' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 16. Gadamer's remarks were made in his Heidegger's Wege (Tübingen: Mohr, 1983), p, 141 and 'Wilhelm Dilthey nach 150 Jahren,' in Dilthey and die Philosophie der Gegenwart, ed. E.W.Orth, Sonderband der Phänomenologischen Forschungen (Freiburg: Alber, 1985), p. 159.
55 [Chapter 7 is available at: http://www.seu.edu/philosophy/CWhite.htm - Editor's note.]