Heidegger is a philosopher with a difference, a difference that makes him easier and harder to introduce. He sets unusual goals for philosophy, and by this change in aim he both invites and resists our understanding him. For he promises us a new kind of truth, but—inevitably—requires that we think this truth in a new and difficult way.
That Heidegger invites readers is evident in the great appeal he has had, and in particular in its unusual breadth: although his influence on (many) philosophers has been huge, he has also appealed to very many readers outside the discipline, not trained or experienced in philosophy. He is a philosopher many dip into philosophy for, whether from other academic fields, or from everyday life. He seems to say: you don’t need to know a lot of other philosophy in order to read me.
In fact Heidegger appeals to many of these readers in pointed contrast with academic philosophy: he strikes them as addressing issues crucial to their own disciplines, or to their personal and human concerns, but issues which much other philosophy seems (to them) to have lost sight of. Many readers gather this sense of importance at once from the writings, which persuade them that he has deep truths, and a rare authority in teaching them.
This holds true, I think, of both of the periods of Heidegger’s philosophy. For, like most philosophers’, his views changed through the years, and, like some others’, his views are usually divided into two main stages or phases. The first is crystallized in the magnum opus Being and Time, published in 1927. The latter is represented in no one dominant work, but in a developing series of books and (especially) essays, published from the mid-1930s on. Famously he calls his shift between these two viewpoints his “turning,” the same name he also gives to the culture-wide redemption he thinks we must hope for. Between these two phases of his thinking there are differences not only in content but in style—but both have attracted that unusual breadth of readers.
Nevertheless, Heidegger has drawn this audience despite serious obstacles or hurdles he also poses to his readers—and to us as we start into him. There are concrete and obvious ways in which his writing resists our effort to “grasp” him. Several specific challenges are, I think, fairly readily coped with. However, there is also a more fundamental and less conspicuous problem he poses, which will be an issue for us throughout.
(a) A first evident problem is his historicality. He has, of the “major philosophers”—among whom he blatantly counts himself—a quite exceptional interest in the history of philosophy. Indeed he thinks this history of philosophy matters to a degree that would surprise even most historians of philosophy. So to get to his own views we have to go through some philosophical history. He is interested especially in those major, landmarking figures in that history—the ones before him.
His view of history’s importance is reflected in his practice. Much of his own writing is interpretive: readings and analyses of these great dead figures, especially Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche. For the most part his own views emerge only eventually within these readings, coming gradually into focus as part of a diagnosis and critique of his predecessors’ views. So much of the time he presents his own position in terms of theirs, in contrast with theirs, and as part of a critique of theirs. This puts him hugely at odds with our own dominant philosophical practice, which makes history an adjunct to the main business. It also sets a hurdle in front of his readers, a scholarly task which seems at odds with the populist appeal I noted: we need to know his history of thinkers before we can know what he thinks.
If Heidegger’s many readers are not dissuaded, it is because his histories can have a distinctive attraction or power. He has a rare ability to revive the philosophies he examines: he puts life back into their concepts and claims. And he does so precisely by bringing them—and us—into better relation with philosophical issues themselves; proper history needs this attention to “the problems themselves,” he insists. A common objection to his histories will be, indeed, that they have too much of Heidegger’s own thinking in them.
(b) A second concrete challenge Heidegger poses to new readers is the elaborate new jargon he devises to state his views. The intricate and idiosyncratic terminology in which Being and Time is presented is famous, but his later works pose, in this regard, even greater difficulties. For in them the new terms have a strong poetic and allusive cast, and are far less susceptible to definition or clear explication than the earlier vocabulary. What, for example, should we make of his (late) assertion that “language is the house of being”?
Heidegger makes new terms with a vengeance. He is convinced that the terms in the current debates are all unapt and misleading, even corrupt. He eventually argues that it is the prime business of philosophy to make new words—this is how it changes our world. We observe through his career a steady casting-off of terms he once deemed adequate, and ever new coinages. So you can’t hear about Heidegger without learning some jargon.
However, there’s a second problem here, even worse, over how to translate these new terms into (in our case) English. Heidegger is famously hard to translate. And since there’s often not even a clear most-nearly-best English word to match one of his special terms, different translators render even very central terms in a confusing variety of ways. It can be very hard to connect the ideas in two of Heidegger’s later essays if one has read them in different translations.
He is especially hard to translate because of the way he “plays” with his new terms. He builds clusters of terms on shared stems, and makes a web of apparently punning connections among them. He inflects these words by marking etymologies and dialects that will mean little to us without study. Beyond this, his later writing often takes a self-consciously “poetic” character. The ways the (mere) sound of his German words connects them is important to him, and is very hard to reflect in translation.
Finally, along with all of these difficulties with his terminology there also lurks a temptation and danger: it’s easy to feel that getting a grip on this complex vocabulary is the point. It’s so hard to learn to speak his language that doing so has seemed to many readers to be enough—a high achievement. But Heidegger himself, we’ll see, stresses over and again that it is not enough.
And yet his jargon, like his historicality, also has redeeming features. Many terms have struck readers as unusually apt (one reason speaking Heideggerian is enticing). As he persuades us to his views he’ll persuade us of the need for new words—whether or not precisely his own. In addition we can artificially reduce the weight of new vocabulary for our purposes here. I will try to be frugal in how many of his terms I introduce, to make a handful as clear and vivid as I can.1
I won’t follow Heidegger’s neologies across the board—which means that I’ll keep some customary terms that he casts off. These will generally be terms of prevailing debates, for we do want to see how Heidegger speaks to these. So I’ll use terms that he disavows, such as “pragmatism,” “intentionality,” and even “truth.” In all these cases he is (I claim) still “in the neighborhood” of how these terms are debated—and we can cross the remaining ground by stipulation. I’ll try to say clearly how we need to rehear “truth,” in particular, if we’re to use it for Heidegger’s point.
(c) There’s another way Heidegger challenges his readers: he constantly stresses that the truth he has in view is extraordinarily difficult and rare (rarely achieved); I’ll call this his esotericism. He insists that this truth is not at all easily taught or conveyed, and that his words, even the new words formed for this truth, can state it only enigmatically or obscurely. He warns that the reader needs to catch or process what he says in a specific and special way, to get the point—it can’t just be read off from his sentences. In his latest book What is Called Thinking?:
World opinion today cherishes the notion that the thinking of thinkers must let itself be understood in the same manner as one reads the newspaper. That not everybody can follow the thought processes of modern theoretical physics one finds quite in order. But to learn the thinking of the thinker is essentially harder, not because this thinking is more involved but because it is simple, too simple for the fluency of common representing.
[WCT 238–39]2
And, indeed, his writing—where he comes to his gist, his key points—is very often obscure. Gilbert Ryle makes a famous early statement of this judgment, in his 1929 review of Being and Time in Mind: “But here, for the reviewer at any rate, the fog becomes too thick; and the results of the analyses of our intrinsic temporality, of the several concepts of time, historical becoming, history, and the criticisms of the theories of Dilthey and Hegel must go unexpounded” [1929 367]. So Ryle forgoes treating most of the book’s second half. And I do think he was trying to understand it.
Heidegger’s obscurity can seem willful. “Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy,” he says [CP 307]. He can strike us as simply not trying to explain himself—in not taking the fairly simple steps we expect from anyone (not to mention a philosopher) to clarify his/her meanings. He offers an egregious sparseness of concrete examples to illustrate his points, and seldom defines his terms—at least in words we already understand. He seems not to “state his points clearly.” It is easy to attribute some of this reticence to self-indulgence or arrogance.
Even this esotericism, however, is friendly and inviting in some ways. We’ve seen how WCT, in describing the difficulty of access, still gives hope to general readers: his truth is hard because it’s simple. So too in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’”: “The strangeness in this thinking of being is its simplicity. Precisely this keeps us from it” [LH (P 275)]. So it’s not at all a matter of controlling a complex system of concepts and claims, nor of knowing the right arguments to justify these claims. Such skills cultivated in philosophy courses are not germane. For “the difficulty does not lie in engaging in an unusual profundity and building involved concepts” [LH (P 261)].3
Indeed, this simple truth is supposed to be something that we have “known all along,” though somehow defectively or inadequately. So it is not something altogether novel and unfamiliar. It escapes us by its very obviousness. It is, as it were, beneath our regard rather than above it, and hence looks more accessible. So here again, even in stressing the great difficulty of his ideas, Heidegger shows an encouraging “populist” bent. He presents himself as trying to remind us, against all theory and expertise, of common truths. And this is linked with a plainness in some of his writing, a plainness and down-to-earthness even in his new vocabulary.
This idea that we might already understand his truths in a way, yet also find it extremely difficult to understand them in a certain other, really requisite way, brings us to what I have called the deeper problem of access Heidegger poses. The ultimate reason he is hard, the reason that underlies all the others, is that he wants, he preaches, a different kind of understanding than the sort or sorts we’re used to. His historicality, his jargon, and his esotericism are all consequences of this.
I will argue that this is Heidegger’s most important philosophical aim. It will be the central theme of this book, and I want to give a strong sense of it next, in section 1. In section 2 I’ll preview some of the topics about which Heidegger will pursue this new kind of truth.
1. Truth
How do we think we come to “have” truths? We discover which propositions are true, and add them to our stock of beliefs, which we then express or employ in thinking, speaking, and acting. We constantly judge and amend these beliefs when we find them in conflict with experience, or one another. So it seems that if someone is going to give us truth, it would be by giving us new beliefs, with repercussions to amend existing beliefs.
But this is very much not the way Heidegger hopes we will acquire his truth. Instead of adding to our beliefs, to our collection of truths or facts, he wants to change our relation to truths we already have. Instead of inducing us to stop believing x, y, z and to start believing a, b, c, he tries to show us a different relation to truths than that of “belief,” a different way of “having” or “being in” the truth. As I’ll say, he has a different truth-aim. So his writings are pitched to reorient our (philosophical and personal) effort to understand—jostling it out of a rut he claims it has always been in. I think this new aim is at once the most perplexing and the most exciting thing about Heidegger.
This stress on the “how” of understanding takes up a famous idea of Kierkegaard, that “truth is subjectivity.” “When the question about truth is asked subjectively, the individual’s relation is reflected upon subjectively. If only the how of this relation is in truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth” [1992 199; also 202]. What counts is the right subjective relation to the content, more than the content itself. Kierkegaard thinks that ethical and religious truths need to be grasped in this special relation; Heidegger transfers the idea to truths about being.
His focus on truth’s how is reflected in his insistence that we’re already acquainted with truth’s what. We already understand the content, just defectively or deficiently. It has been half-grasped all along; we just haven’t paid the right kind of attention to it. So when we experience these truths properly, we will recognize them as things we have always known, in a way. There will be no real surprises.
Heidegger’s eventual name for his special way of being in the truth is “thinking.” None of what we commonly do, he says, not our philosophy, not our science, not our common sense, “thinks” in this special sense. So, at the opening of WCT, he insists “we must be ready to learn thinking,” which involves admitting “that we are not yet capable of thinking” [3]. A bit later: “science itself does not think and cannot think” [8]. Nor, he makes clear, do we in our everyday lives.
In this new truth-aim Heidegger believes he makes a radical break from his predecessors—to be more different from the philosophers before him, including (finally) Nietzsche, than they were from one another.4 And this claim at radicalness itself becomes more radical as he goes on. We find him casting off a succession of labels and affinities: metaphysics, philosophy, truth, being. All of these terms philosophers—and he himself—have used to define themselves he eventually renounces, as too likely to mislead, or not quite right for what he has in mind.
Against them all, he promotes his new truth-aim with prophetic fervor. He thinks our fate as humans depends on this awakening—on Ereignis, as he eventually calls it. The one thing we need is to learn how to think “justly to essence” [WCT 157]. He thinks this should be the point of studying him, and if we don’t get it, (he tells his students) we should “destroy even the most precise notes of this lecture, better today than tomorrow” [158].
I think this new truth-aim is the deepest reason for the opposites I started with—why Heidegger is both so easy and so hard to read. He wins his readers by their feeling that what he offers, under all, is not a new theory, a new system of beliefs and arguments, but a kind of adjustment in our stance, simple if we can only catch a view (or get the knack) of it. There’s strong appeal in this promise. But this different truth-aim is also what most makes him so hard. His historicality, his jargon, and his esotericism all reflect the dif-ficulty of shifting not what but how we think. Supplying a new content for us to believe, a new set of truths and justifications, would be straightforward, compared with changing the deep habit in how we understand.
This new truth-aim also explains another striking fact about Heidegger’s reception, which I have so far kept to the side, though all are aware of it. This is the extreme division and divergence of opinion about him. His appeal, while broad, is also (as it were) patchy: there are kinds of readers to whom it definitely does not extend. He provokes extreme reactions. To some he is rather obviously the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. To others he is not a philosopher at all, but a mystifier and charlatan. I think the main roots of both judgments are the judgers’ different responses to his new truth-aim.
Heidegger is, indeed, a great polarizing figure, who more than anyone else (except Nietzsche?) is responsible for opening and widening the famous divide between “Continental” and “analytic” philosophy. He did this both in himself, and by his huge influence on two waves of French philosophy—the existential-phenomenological, and the deconstructive—each of which analytic philosophers have so often viewed as an alien other, a non-philosophy, or as a soft, unrigorous, and self-indulgent way of doing philosophy, of doing it poorly. Heidegger was so appraised and dismissed by analytics from early on.5 And he is for the most part now confined to ghetto status in the Anglo-American world.
For those taken with Heidegger, including those two waves of French responders, and his sympathetic readers in English today, I think it’s usually this aspiration towards a new kind of truth that counts most—or most deeply—in his favor. It’s responsible for Heidegger’s reception and influence in literature departments, and other academic locales outside philosophy. They sense that he wants a kind of insight closer to (or the same as) the kind one might get from literature or art. And I think even scientists, when drawn to Heidegger, are drawn by their deference to those arts, as holding truths they don’t find in science.
These non-philosophers notice how predictably philosophers hold that real truth, important truth, lies in the very sort of thing that professional philosophers do. This looks like occupational chauvinism to many, elsewhere in the humanities especially. They want (to be able to have or aspire to) another, no less truthful truth, and no less valuable. Heidegger looks refreshingly free of that chauvinism. His vital truth is not the kind achieved in technical philosophy, but has some kind of poetic component.
Likewise (and oppositely), for those hostile to Heidegger, I think it’s his aim at a new kind of truth, gathered from every aspect of his writing, including its style and mannerisms, that is the really damning offense. His claims seem not just unsupported but obscure, stated in a personal jargon that seems designed not to be clear and available for inspection. All of this suggests that he doesn’t care about the kind of truth we pursue by science, logic, and reason. And it even expresses, such readers feel, character faults: Heidegger dispenses with arguments because he lacks them, and he cultivates obscurity as a way to avoid close scrutiny.
So Heidegger provokes this polarized response, from these opposite sides. But now, as we make our way into his ideas ourselves, where shall we stand on this dispute? I of course think that he is worth introducing, and so in that all-important respect I fall on the former side. But I also think that we should resist this monolithic either/or. I think we all share in the motives and values that prompt both judgments, opposite as they are. And I would like to bring out both strengths and weaknesses. So I hope that I can help Heidegger’s devotees to notice problems, and his detractors to feel strengths. But on the whole my aim is to build a positive case that acknowledges, and responds to, the problems felt against him.
As a way to pose the challenges I will address, let me dwell a little further on these problems—the worries I think we all should have about Heidegger’s attitude towards truth. Let’s revisit some of the points we’ve noted as “obstacles” to understanding him, and view them in a more damning light: not as barriers to a (perhaps) valuable truth, but as signs or evidence that he has no such truth. I think it’s important to make these doubts and reservations explicit from the beginning, since they so dominate the general view of him. So I will say what I think these doubts are, and give a first sense how Heidegger will reply to them.
Bernard Williams [2002] has called accuracy and sincerity “the virtues of truth,” and Heidegger may seem to show little of either—this is perhaps the crux.
With respect to accuracy (proper care and method in arriving at one’s opinions): he may well seem too “loose” in his beliefs, too “speculative,” in the bad sense of jumping to them without adequate grounds. We have reason to trust in the accuracy of his thinking insofar as he gives us his reasons—reasons that therefore should not be purely private, but that we can acquire as well. But he appears, to many, not to give such grounds; real arguments look sparse in him. He has an air of resting his case on his own authority, as entitled by his own intuitions. But we don’t, perhaps, share these intuitions, and have no reason to trust them in him. His new conception of truth seems just a lure to credit such private revelations, and to cultivate a disregard for accuracy and reasons.
And regarding sincerity (saying what one really thinks): we may well suspect him of disingenuousness as well. Many judge that he mystifies in order to escape close analysis—that he himself knows he has no real case, and writes to hide this.6 So he has struck some as an outright charlatan, who means to trick or seduce us—and with this aim undermines our value of a reasoned and defendable truth. Moreover, his honesty is in question on famous biographical grounds: his unreliable recountings of his National Socialism. His philosophical procedure may look continuous with this.
Read so, there is something off-putting in his very manner—in his prophetic air, and the grand claims he implicitly makes for himself.7 I think even the analytic philosophers who take an interest in him find this air grating. He shares with Nietzsche a mien—an expressed persona—of great self-importance, as a world-historical philosopher. He engages the ideas not of any (mere) contemporaries, but of the line of great philosophers. He speaks as a prophet calling out against the main trend of the whole age. But Nietzsche is more witty and bearable in the role than Heidegger, who carries it less happily in his humorlessness.8
This runs contrary to the collegial and corporate character of academic philosophy, in which each contributes a part or a push in a great joint effort. Even the analytic thinkers who have played the largest parts, and had the greatest influence, haven’t set themselves up as world-historical in Heidegger’s way. And this difference too is really about kinds of truth. Analytics want truths that hold up under professional inspection, that are assimilated into the collective viewpoint. Any one member’s claims, even if successful, get mod-ified under that inspection, as arguments and reasons are refined in the common debate. Heidegger seems to claim a kind of truth that exempts his claims from subjection to this inspection, and that can’t be appropriated into any shared knowledge.
Heidegger’s deficit in accuracy and/or sincerity seems also to show in those unwelcome changes in procedure. He criticizes the effort to define terms, which seems to us such a crucial clarifying tool: “Academic philosophy has done its share to stunt the word, from which is to be gathered, that conceptual definitions of words, though technologically-scientifically necessary, are for themselves not suited to protect or to advance the flourishing of language, as one supposes” [WCT 139–40].
We’ve noted how he often dispenses with (anything we can recognize as) argument. Instead he says elusively that thinking is a matter of “taking a path”—a path that doesn’t reach a conclusion, as arguments do. “Thinking itself is a path. We accord with the path [Weg] only by remaining underway [unterwegs]” [WCT 168–69]. Moreover, it won’t be reason that guides us on this path: “Thinking first begins when we have experienced, that the reason that has been celebrated for centuries is the most stubborn opponent of thinking” [NW (W 199)].
I hope that by now I have articulated the crucial qualms against Heidegger, and given a sense why he is controversial. His disallegiance to the kind of truth we care about seems an ultimate and unforgiveable error in a philosopher. This book as a whole tries to give a response to these doubts, by elaborating how and why Heidegger criticizes our kind of truth, and promotes his own. I’ll very quickly sketch here his strategy.
First, he will elaborate a critique of our existing truth-aims—against the prevailing scientific and academic culture. This critique includes a diagnosis of these aims, which tries to discredit and defuse the complaints they make against him. He thinks that when we better understand why this culture dominates, and why it has these epistemic standards, we’ll lose faith in them.
This critique of science becomes most pointed in his later years. He comes to see modern science as an adjunct to modernity’s deeper “technological” stance, by which we are driven to “enframe” all things, setting them in a framework that makes them maximally useful to us, or brings them under our maximal control. Science is one form of this control; it ferrets out all the secrets of a thing it studies, and fixes it within its theoretical system. Really thinking about a thing requires, Heidegger insists, a different attitude altogether.
He is not opposed to using science for thinking, indeed he even requires it. “Science does not think in the sense in which thinkers think. Still, it does not at all follow that thinking need pay no attention to the sciences” [WCT 134]. But he is critical of a “sci-entific philosophy” [CP 26], a philosophy which is taken over by the scientific stance, by that truth-aim. “Even more shortsighted is the alignment of philosophy towards the ‘sciences’, which has become customary—and not accidentally—since the beginning of modernity. This direction of inquiry—and not just the explicit ‘science-theoretical’ kind—must be given up completely” [CP 31].
It seems pretty clear that this critique would apply to analytic philosophy. The latter is perhaps the “logistics” he predicts will be dominant in America:
In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is now counted the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield a sure use for constructing the technological world. In America and elsewhere logistics is beginning today to seize mastery over the spirit, as the authentic philosophy of the future.
[WCT 21]9
As I’ve hinted, Heidegger replaces analytic and scientific methods with an appeal to the epistemic self-evidence of the experience of (his kind of ) thinking, itself. The proof is supposed to lie in the special experience of being, Ereignis, which is claimed both necessary and sufficient to justify the claims Heidegger makes about being. “What has been seen can be demonstrated [ausweisen] only by being seen and seen again. What has been seen never lets itself be proved [beweisen] by adducing grounds and counter-grounds. Such a procedure forgets what is decisive, the looking” [WCT 233]. We will do this looking in a genuine thinking, different from science’s, that we need to “leap into.”10
These truths must be appropriated by our sharing in this experience, not by acquiring the propositions that describe or express them. Already in Being and Time Heidegger is worried that we will just learn to repeat his claims: “the answer to the question of being cannot lie in an isolated and blind proposition. The answer is not conceived in re-saying that which is asserted propositionally” [BT g19]. For such transmission is just a “mouthing” or “parroting” of the words.11 He tries to pull the rug out from under all efforts to “capture” his views in propositions.
Now all of this poses a rather obvious challenge to my task in this very book. By assignment and by inclination, I aim to make his ideas as clear as I can, in the usual ways: by trying to define his terms and to map his claims and arguments. I will try to congeal his ideas in propositions that will let others understand them—and isn’t this precisely how he says we should not pursue them? Isn’t this an effort to control and “enframe” his ideas, in a package alongside the others in this series?
Well, I hope the book isn’t just these things. Heidegger has the obvious faith, as a writer, that his sentences can be more than propositions we take over to believe. He thinks his words can occasion the experience of “looking,” and the activity of thinking. It is incumbent on any interpreter of him to have an eye on this different ambition, and to write accordingly. His ideas need to reach us alive, not as formulae or positions, but in words that can provoke the kind of looking and thinking he wants. I’ll do my best at this too.
2. Being
I’ve dwelt so long on the obstacles and problems with Heidegger’s philosophy that it may have come to seem not worth the effort. In the rest of this introduction I’ll try to restore interest by previewing some of the topics he will offer his (new kind of ) truth about. In doing so I’ll also outline the structure of this book.
Famously, there is one topic above all with which he is persistently obsessed: being [Sein]. He identified himself with this topic as few other philosophers have with a single issue. It is his constant lure to his readers, the all-important topic that they and he are always on the track of. He treats this topic with a vividness that gives it a powerful appeal.
Now the very fact that he has this favorite topic—and things to say about it—may seem at odds with my claim that he focuses on the how of truth rather than its what. Isn’t being what his truth is about, and indeed very distinctively about? It appears that being and its features are the truth-content he means to convey to us.
Yet he also insists that being is an utterly different kind of topic than we deal with anywhere else. All of our other topics are entities, but being is decidedly not. Indeed the major challenge is to learn not to treat it as an entity [ein Seiendes].12 The all-important difference between being and entities he will call the “ontological difference,” and his life-long calling is to turn our attention to it—and to being itself.
It’s this special topic that calls for a new truth-method, and even (as we’ve seen) a new truth-aim. It’s being, above all, that we require the new kind of truth about. This is already Heidegger’s view in Being and Time, where he crafts his method of phenomenology to handle the topic. I’ll develop this famous method in Chapter 3. Heidegger learns a version of this method from Edmund Husserl, but modifies it so that it can get at being. He relies here, we’ll see, on an ultimately Kantian argument, that pursues being by uncovering the “conditions of the possibility” of our experience. This will give us a good route to Being and Time’s conception of being.
But we’ll see that Heidegger progressively raises the bar here—or that being is a receding target for him. The methods of Husserl and Kant come to seem less and less adequate for it. So phenomenology ramifies, in his later works, into an ever more radical method. He discovers more and more ways of missing that ontological differ-ence between being and entities, or of failing to take adequate account of it. He eventually decides that his topic is not Sein but Seyn, or Sein “under erasure” (he writes Sein with an X through it). Or, his topic is not being “as the ground of entities,” but “being without entities” [TB (OTB 2, 6)].
From first to last, however, he stresses how we need a different kind of access to being than to entities. Adopting the topic of being is not enough—one also needs to approach it in the special way appropriate to being. We need, as it were, to adjust our eyes, or our sense of what it is to understand something. Heidegger quotes Aristotle [Met. 993b] in making the point:
“Just as bats’ eyes react to the apparent light of day, so also the perception proper to our essence reacts to what for itself … is the most apparent of all”. … The being of entities is the most apparent; and yet we ordinarily don’t see it at all—and if [we do], then only with difficulty.
[WCT 110]
Being and Time’s route to being lies through what the book famously calls “Dasein,” i.e. our human existence. Indeed, this, much more than being itself, is the topic of the book as published. It lays out a template for thinking about the overall or underlying structure of human experience, or rather of human “intentionality”— the way we “intend” both goals and meanings. This analysis, which has pragmatic, existential, and temporal parts, had enormous influence on later “existential phenomenologists,” including Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It struck and still strikes many readers as an unusually apt and helpful schema for thinking about ourselves.
This schema is both an account of how we (generally, basically) are, and of how we can be. Heidegger insists that his analysis of Dasein posits no “values”; he would not want to say that it says how we “should” be. Nevertheless, in laying out the deep structure of our directedness, he claims to uncover underlying aims. And he projects from these what their adequate (or ideal) fulfillment or achievement would be. This is authenticity, famously. I’ll try to make concrete what this condition is, and also to show why Heidegger so insists that this is not a value, and not part of an ethics or morality.
I mentioned three main elements in Being and Time’s theory of us, pragmatic, existential, and temporal. These are the three main waves of that book’s argument, and I’ll treat them in turn in my Chapters 4–6. They overlap one another, and are not reflected in the book’s part–chapter structure, but are the three stages in which Heidegger claims to dig down into us, each deeper than the one before.
The first several chapters of Being and Time introduce Heidegger’s pragmatism—by which I mean his account of us as more basically doers than knowers. He thinks that a strong philosophical tradition, owing especially to Descartes, makes us think of ourselves as fundamentally subjects or thinkers or cognizers. Even common sense makes this mistake he thinks. The error is rooted in ways that our pragmatic, “concernful,” directed intending tends to work best when it works implicitly. And it is hard to study or even to notice this stance from the very different stance of thinking, studying, knowing.
Heidegger develops this pragmatism under the general rubric of “being-in-the-world.” Here my world is (roughly) all the networks of things I “know how to do”: a field of opportunities (and dangers), a web of paths I know how, am poised and often eager, to follow (or avoid). So my world is this network of possibilities I project about myself, within and towards which I live. And my “being in” this world is the manner in which I am “towards” these possibilities—the structured way that I at once understand, feel, and express them. In laying out these structures of being-in and world Heidegger introduces an intricate new technical vocabulary, some of which has spread widely.
I’ll lay out the main structures, with a ration of that vocabulary, but here too we must remember that Heidegger demands a differ-ent way of understanding from the mere acquisition of this content in beliefs. We need to achieve insight into this being-in-the-world within the very stance itself, and not just in a theoretical perspective upon it.
The book’s second wave, its existentialism, begins in places within the pragmatic story, but reaches center stage in the opening chapters of Division II. This second story lays over the first—or, rather, under it—another set of structures, which includes such influential notions as falling, the “they-self,” being-towards-death, and authenticity. Heidegger thinks that we discover these structures when we consider certain limits or boundaries to our pragmatic directedness.
That directedness is an engagement in a host of projects, but this projecting operates under the overall constraints of death and guilt—both of which Heidegger gives fascinating new sense to. We also discover, he thinks, that for the most part persons ignore these constraints or limits, and live and aim as if they weren’t there (as if they weren’t guilty, and mortal). Indeed, the motive of not facing these constraints explains pervasive features of our ordinary living. So these deeper structures set in new perspective the pragmatism laid out before.
But again the point is not to learn to believe these things—much less just to “parrot back” Heidegger’s assertions. These truths too need to be comprehended somehow at the level in us which they concern. We acknowledge them in and by restructuring our own existential stance. We need to “become transparent” to ourselves in that stance itself. This means, in fact, that we need to become authentic.
The identification of authenticity leads Heidegger immediately down to the third level of Being and Time, for (he claims) it makes visible the temporal logic or structure of our intending, which underlies both the pragmatic and existential structures. It lets us restate the preceding analyses in ways that show the context and larger pattern in them. So our concern in our dealings has a particular temporal character, and this is its ultimate point or aim: we concern ourselves as a way to be in a certain kind of present, Heidegger thinks. By contrast authenticity turns out to be a way of stretching ourselves out beyond that present through all three “ecstases” of temporality.
By means of this account of Dasein’s temporality, Being and Time intends to clarify time, and by that in turn to treat at last its ultimate topic, being. But Heidegger never wrote this part of the book. So we will need to infer just what lessons he intended to draw from the account of our temporality for the topics of time and being. I will offer a suggestion what that book might have ended up saying about being.
What Being and Time would have so concluded is most germane to the question how his views change after that book (and in particular in the mid-1930s). For being is very much the focal topic of the later writing, and the “turning” from Being and Time, to be so decisive, must lie mainly in some change concerning it. I will treat this famous turning in Chapter 7.
One chief idea in the later work is that Western history is typi-fied by the understanding of being as “presence.” Presence is the way being shows itself to us most basically and pervasively—and it has done so since the beginnings of Greek philosophy. Heidegger tries to show that all the stages in Western philosophy are different ways of interpreting that “presence.” I’ll develop how this “history of being as presence” arises out of the ideas of Being and Time, with differences. These changes are, we may presume, what made the book uncompleteable.
There are other important themes in the later writings that have less precedent in Being and Time. Poetry now plays the same role that philosophy does, of articulating and fixing the “understanding of being” that pervades and typifies a culture in a given historical epoch. Each such epochal understanding needs to be “housed” in language, and it is poets and thinkers who give the words for it. They use language “originarily,” to inaugurate these epochs of being. The difference between the language of poetry and the language of thinking will be a large issue for us. His view of it will explain his spirit and strategy in writing in the more poetic or literary style he now adopts. I’ll discuss this network of ideas, and Heidegger’s striking new account of language, in Chapter 8.
Another new theme in Heidegger’s later writing is technology, which he claims typifies our own age. In his epic story about the history of being, this is the upshot of its long logic. The pre-Socratics’ initial uncovering of being as presence has been ever more fully realized or perfected through that history since. Technology, and our advanced scientific understanding of things, bring all entities to a fullest presence for us, in the maximal control we have over them, by having slotted each into place in a framework, practical and theoretical. This “enframing”—Gestell—thus realizes the aim built deeply into our history by that original Greek posit of presence as the basic way entities can be.
Heidegger takes Nietzsche to state the metaphysics of this culminating stage, in his ontological picture of the world as will to power. Power is above all control, by setting in order and making available—and these aims express the viewpoint of technology. Nietzsche’s ideal of the overman is of a superlative level or degree of such power. This is also an ultimate refinement of the original understanding of being as presence, so that Nietzsche expresses the culmination or completion of Western cultural history. It’s because elements of that Nietzschean metaphysic still remain in Being and Time that Heidegger works out his “turning” in relation to Nietzsche.
And yet, Heidegger further judges, this culmination exposes a decisive flaw in that basic posit of presence. It has, while bringing entities into sharper and sharper focus, hidden from us its own role as an understanding of being, and hence also being itself. Technology, as enframing, stunts a stance in us that is really essential, and gives us a world without kinds of meaning we need. Here Heidegger, most in his prophet’s hat, addresses an age he takes to be deeply nihilistic, and appeals to it to look for the way out. We require a turning, out of enframing and into a new epoch of being. A key feature of this new understanding is that it will again make room for “gods.” To outgrow our technological and scientific domination of the world we must reawaken a sense that this world has powers and meanings higher than our own, not fully accessible to us. My Chapter 9 will treat these linked topics of technology and the need for new gods.
Regarding these last ideas Heidegger again insists on the need for a special kind of appropriation. Indeed he is all the more emphatic about this in his later writings, which are often in a style that makes clear he wants us to hear him a different way. Grasping his ideas in our ordinary manner would be to enframe them, precluding the insight we need. He tries to help us to the special experiences we need. BCM 59: “Our basic task now consists in awakening a basic mood of our philosophizing.” We will need to keep this different ambition near the front of our minds as we read him—and about him.
Summary
Heidegger’s effort to aim us at a different kind of truth—and not just to convey to us a different set of truths—is crucial to his philosophical project. It explains both his unusual appeal and the several special challenges he poses to us his readers: his historicality, his elaborate and idiosyncratic terminology, and his esotericism. His revised truth-aim is also the main reason his thinking is so strongly polarizing, and viewed with such disdain by many analytic philosophers. So we appropriately center our attention on his new notion of truth, to try to make it as clear and concrete as we can, and with an eye to certain obvious worries and doubts against this epistemic change.
This new truth-aim is requisite, Heidegger claims, by virtue of what we above all need to understand: being, and not just entities. The discontinuity between being and entities, the great necessity that we think about the former, but our prevailing preoccupation with the latter, are his abiding themes. Being’s great difference from entities demands that different kind of truth about it. Heidegger pursues this truth one way in his masterwork Being and Time, and another in the writings that follow the “turning” he made from its views.
In Being and Time his method is phenomenology, which approaches being by analyzing the structure of human (Dasein’s) intentionality. This analysis uncovers three progressively deeper layers in this intentionality—pragmatic, existential, and temporal—each requiring to be “seen” in a special way quite unlike our usual theoretical grasp. The method, and those three layers of our intending, are the topics of Chapters 3–6.
Heidegger’s later writings abandon phenomenology and much of its analysis, but remain in pursuit of being, still considered to require a special kind of truth. But now the route to this truth lies principally through history, in particular the history of metaphysics. We find being there by seeing how it has been “housed” in language, and above all in the formative language of metaphysics, as well as poetry. Finding being in history, we see our own age’s basic character as technology, in which we suffer the absence of gods. Truth in history, language, and technology’s exclusion of gods are the topics of Chapters 7–9.
Further reading
H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall (eds.): A Companion to Heidegger. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2005. [An excellent collection of analytic essays treating topics across the range of Heidegger’s writing.]
H. Philipse: Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being; A Critical Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. [A critical assessment trying to address Heidegger’s thought as a whole.]