Being and Time
Phenomenology
So we arrive at Being and Time. This is the book that made him famous, and for which he’s most famous today. It is, like no other of his works, philosophy on a grand scale, with grand ambitions. It sets out to make a comprehensive statement, taking up and organizing all of his earlier ideas, and even all of earlier philosophy. It has unique status in Heidegger’s corpus as a best, official statement—though of course only to this date (in spring 1927 he was 37 years old). For the book’s authority is shadowed by the way (and the extent) that he himself later renounces its core ideas and even aims. Being and Time has a curiously divided status, as Heidegger’s major work, but also as superseded, in his own view at least, by the smaller-scale books and essays of his later years.1
One of the great appeals of Being and Time is that grand ambition, by which it sets out to tell us everything that is most important. It sets out to uncover “the meaning of being,” which is what philosophy, and all of us, have so egregiously lost sight of.2 This grand ambition is reflected in its meticulous organization, and close attention to its own procedure and method. It has a fairly intricate structure, but tries painstakingly to make this structure fully clear. The Introduction—which will mostly concern us in this chapter—above all shows this intense methodicalness. To help display this important feature of the book, I’ll spend more time here than later presenting the section-by-section path of Heidegger’s discussion.
As a part of this procedural exactness, the Introduction (which has two chapters, and the book’s first eight sections) develops at some length (in its §7) the method the book will employ, in its effort to clarify the meaning of being. This method is of course phenomenology—my main topic here. But phenomenology is just the announced part of a fuller method that Heidegger uses and displays from the very start. This fuller method is also germane to the “kind of understanding” he wants for himself and us.
The overt method of the book is strikingly traditional. Despite the critique of Descartes it later makes, Being and Time, like the Meditations, claims to “begin at the beginning.” It doesn’t, to be sure, lay down any first certainties, but it does claim to pose a most basic question—about the “meaning of being”—and then to reason out the best way to address this question. It tries to set aside all prevailing doctrines, to build a way to truth that anyone can follow.
Moreover, the book presents the insights it claims as a system, and insists on the importance of grasping them in this form. Being and Time seems in this regard very much in the German (and ultimately Aristotelian) tradition. The system offers us a synoptic view, which reaches down, through a hierarchy of levels, into detailed accounts. We then control each individual thing by seeing its precise place in the system. So it is with the book’s elaborate analysis of Dasein (or human being).
In these respects the book’s epistemic aims seem quite the usual ones. As we’ll see, this appearance is somewhat misleading, and Heidegger will draw epistemic lessons that run against these points. Against the possibility of any best beginning for thinking, he will promote the “hermeneutic circle.” And against the need for system he will promote an ultimate truth that is simple and direct. Indeed, it will turn out that this really important truth is not, in a sense, theoretical at all. So the careful path to an elaborate system turns out eventually to be a device to shift us into a rather different notion and method for truth. Nevertheless, it is by this path that Heidegger believes the more novel insights are best achieved.
The book opens with this strong display of method. A preliminary page announces an overall question—about “the meaning of being”—and the Introduction (its first chapter) proceeds methodically to: (§1) defend the question as unjustly neglected today, (§2) analyze the question’s “formal structure,” and then further promote it as an indispensable question both (§3) ontologically (i.e. regarding being), because it is a precondition for the “regional ontologies” that underlie all the sciences, and (§4) ontically (i.e. regarding entities), because the inquiry into being is definitive for the entity—Dasein—each of us is, and so is presupposed not just for us as scientists (knowers), but for our practical or life decisions.
This is the official structure, but more important is an argument Heidegger weaves across these formal steps. We are asking about being, but must proceed by “interrogating”—studying, examining—entities. And since entities are rife, we need to ask whether any have priority, i.e. whether our search after being should focus on any kind of entity in particular. One naturalist answer might be to focus on whatever physics counts most basic—so perhaps on the simplest particles (or waves). But Heidegger proceeds differently. The question is of course something that a Dasein (a human being) asks, so this kind of entity is already singled out [BT g7–8]. And it’s eventually established [g13–14] as the entity to be studied, by a murky argument purporting to show “that the ontological analytic of Dasein in general is what makes up fundamental ontology.”
We must notice what’s at stake here: nothing less than a choice (if only a tentative one) between realism and idealism—although Heidegger refuses to put the point in these terms, for reasons we’ll see. (BT g14: “this priority [of Dasein over all other entities] has obviously nothing in common with a vicious subjectivizing of the totality of entities.”) In order to investigate being we can and must study Dasein first and above all, because “there is” [es gibt] being only in or by Dasein’s understanding of being.3 We investigate being by studying that understanding. It is this basic idealist orientation that turns the book’s attention to Dasein—which is where it remains, since the part of the book that was to return, after studying this special entity, to draw conclusions about being itself was never written. This idealism is with respect to being, we should bear in mind, and we must see to what extent it involves an idealism about entities as well.
Now I have been using the term “Dasein” for this special entity which each of us is. I will follow the general practice of leaving this term untranslated. (Indeed since it is now so usual in this role I will not italicize it, as I will the few other cases of Heidegger’s German that I keep.) With Dasein Heidegger co-opts a term that German philosophers had used for being or existence generally. He applies it to us—to the entities we would otherwise label “humans” or “persons” or “subjects” or “agents.” It refers to each individual one of us—each is a Dasein. It refers to us in our essential aspect, in which each of us is also typical.
It gradually emerges why this term Dasein is appropriate for this reference to us: its root or etymological sense of “being-there” should be heard to say how our intentionality gives us a “there” [Da], as a world or space of experience. This world is a field of possibilities that is the indispensable context for all our experiences. It’s only by this opening up of a world—by our being in this there—that entities can then appear (be uncovered or encountered). Although this world is not itself the “being” we are seeking, the latter will be found through it. So the examination of Dasein will focus on this world-founding role.
The Introduction’s second chapter proceeds with the same methodical care—yet again somewhat masking its arguments for important choices. Its first two sections offer orienting summaries of the overall course of (§5) Part I and (§6) Part II (not done). It then (§7) develops at length the phenomenological method Heidegger intends to use in studying Dasein, en route to the question of being. Finally (§8) it quickly outlines the book as a whole—including the large parts that were never published or even written.
I want to focus now on Heidegger’s announced method, his phenomenology, which he introduces so methodically in §7.4 Since he there offers this as only a “preliminary concept” [Vorbegriff] of the method [BT g28], we will need to fill out our account of it by looking ahead at later developments in the book. By this method, he proposes to understand first of all Dasein, i.e. oneself or the kind of entity one is, in its way of being, and then eventually being itself.
Famously, Heidegger learns the method from Husserl, but then adapts and alters it. Heidegger had read Husserl’s Logical Investigations back in 1909–10, but it was not until 1917–18, when he was turning from Catholicism-Scholasticism, that he became a convert. Husserl had arrived in Freiburg in 1916, and Heidegger began to pursue him. The relation between their respective versions of phenomenology is a very vexed issue on which there have been extremes of disagreement.5
I’ll try to show that Heidegger’s main change to Husserl’s method lies in precisely the dimension we’re interested in: he revises it to provide a different kind of understanding, a different way of knowing or having the truth. Husserl has still too Cartesian a notion of knowing. Heidegger’s new method is not a more effective way to get the understanding we’ve wanted; it carries a lesson to change what we want.
1. Studying intentionality
In studying Dasein we are studying the way it “is there,” i.e. there in a world it takes to be around about it. We are studying the way Dasein “means” or “intends” its world. To be sure, Heidegger rarely speaks of “intentionality” in Being and Time: this is part of the break he wants to make with Husserl. He gives over the term to Husserl’s sense for it, which he then has two reasons for abandoning: Husserlian intentionality is (1) a cognitive relation and (2) a relation to entities—and Heidegger wants to talk about more than these. But what he does want to treat—a non-cognitive relation, extending beyond entities to being—is still a kind of intentionality, I’ll argue: it’s another way to mean or intend. So I will keep this vocabulary in presenting Heidegger, and try to show how it can and should survive the criticisms he makes of Husserl.6
“Phenomena” are, if we use the term generically (rather than in the narrower and stricter sense I’ll come back to), what’s meant, i.e. intentional contents or meanings. A phenomenon is an intentum (intended or meant), the object of an intentio (intending or meaning). And phenomenology, in the Husserlian view Heidegger largely takes over, will begin by studying and describing these contents, as well as—inseparably—the way we mean or intend them.7
There are two important features of Heidegger’s conception of this intentionality which we should notice from the start. They are, in fact, the first two things—he numbers them—that he says about Dasein in Chapter 1 of Being and Time (§9). (They have the status of working assumptions for the analysis of Dasein, which are to be confirmed, hermeneutically, by the success of the analysis to come.)
First, he hears a strong telic point in this “intending” or “meaning.” The chief part of the way we’re “directed upon” a content, is by being “directed toward” an end. What we intend or mean first and foremost is (in each case) an end or goal—what Heidegger will call a “for which.” Thus the ordinary sense of “intend” suits it to pick out our way of meaning—though once again we must expel the implication of something cognitive or conscious. Other things have their meanings ultimately in relation to these goals. This point is at the root of Heidegger’s “pragmatism,” which I’ll present in Chapter 4.
Heidegger builds this directedness into Dasein from the start: “The ‘essence’ of this entity lies in its being-towards [Zu-sein]” [BT g42]. This term Zu-sein is mistranslated by Macquarrie and Robinson as “to-be,” which conceals its relation to the “towards-which” [das Wozu], i.e. what Dasein is being-towards. The principal towards-which is the for-which [das Worumwillen], a way for Dasein itself to be [g84]. And Heidegger mainly uses “existence” [Existenz] for this way in which Dasein is always directed towards “possible ways for it to be” [g42]. We always “stand out”—the root sense he hears in “existence”—towards these goals and roles; he will later call this our “projection.”
The second important way Heidegger conceives of this intentionality is as reflexive or self-relating. An intentionality, in being directed upon an object, is always also directed upon itself. So, principally, the end that Dasein is directed towards is intended as its own; not only is that ultimate for-which a state of itself, but Dasein aims at it as a state of itself. I aim at my ends as “mine,” and this self-relation extends to all of my other intendings as well: I mean them ultimately in relation to me. Intentionality, then, is ultimately first-personal.
This is the second thing Heidegger says about Dasein at the start of Chapter 1. “The being about which this entity is concerned in its being, is in each case mine [je meines]. … Speaking of Dasein must, due to this entity’s character of in each case mineness [Jemeinigkeit], always use a personal pronoun: ‘I am’, ‘you are’” [BT g42].8 This notion will also play a decisive role in Being and Time, for it lies at the root of the “existentialist” ideas I’ll present in Chapter 5, in particular the ideal of authenticity.
So phenomenology studies this intentionality—but how? It might be doubted, at first, that any special techniques are necessary. Why isn’t our own intentionality perfectly obvious or transparent to us, since we’re the ones doing the meaning? Why is any new method necessary? It seems we already possess the understanding phenomenology seeks, by being already aware of how and what we’re thinking about ourselves and things.
There’s something importantly right here: we are trying to understand something we already do understand. The crux will lie, as I’ve said, in how we understand it, and there are serious problems here. But the fact that we’re studying something already meant is vital to phenomenology. It entails that no novelties are to be expected. The point is to remind us of things so commonly understood that we fail to notice them adequately. BT g139: “Like any ontological interpretation whatsoever, this analytic can only, so to speak, listen in to some previously disclosed entity as regards its being.” So our learning comes with a sense that we’re recalling or remembering (Heidegger’s version of Plato’s point).
I want to stress both the paradox and the presumption of Heidegger’s claim here: that he is merely reminding us of things we all already understand—yet that his reminder goes (almost uniquely) against the grain of all our philosophical and commonsense self-reflections. What he wants to show us above all is, on the one hand, “the most obvious thing in the world”—yet it is also something we constantly misunderstand when we try to describe it. The challenge, in developing his picture, is to present it such that it can merit these two claims—so that it can indeed be something both obvious and rare (esoteric). His accounts of us will, and must, oscillate between seeming tritely obvious, and seeming outrageously strange.
But what, more particularly, are the obstacles—why do we so easily go wrong? The main problem can be simply put: it’s hard for us to pay attention to our own role in meaning what we do. We notice what we intend, our meant, but overlook (or look right through) the way we mean it.
Despite the reflexive character of Dasein’s intending—the way its goals are jemeinig—it usually lacks an adequate view of itself. In intending, a Dasein takes itself to be intending, takes its aims as its own, but it does so without—as it were—looking at itself, and noticing itself as intending. We absorb ourselves in objects, and little notice our act of meaning them. So the intentio pays attention to the intentum, and not to itself, even though it is constantly saying “I,” “me,” and “mine.”
This way we fail to notice our intending also spoils, in a way, our conception of intending’s objects. We take them as real, i.e. presume that they are as and what they are “in themselves” or in their own right, and not (at least partly) in or by our intending. We don’t regard the intentum as an intentum. This is particularly true, I think Heidegger holds, in our scientific view of things: we overlook how here too it is a certain way we mean these things that lets them appear, lets them indeed be, as we mean them.
Here we come back to the issue of Heidegger’s idealism. We’ve seen how the basic project of Being and Time—to get at being by studying Dasein—already expresses an idealism regarding being.9 But does Heidegger think that not just being but entities depend on Dasein’s understanding of being? Carman has made a powerful case that he does not—but is instead an “ontic realist” holding that objects “exist and have a determinate spatiotemporal structure independently of us and our understanding of them” [2003 157], and that (in science especially) we can and do have knowledge of these real things. And there are passages in which Heidegger seems to say just this.10
However, I think all of these passages can be read as expressing a merely “internal” realism, which is spoken within an understanding of being and leaves out the way entities depend on that understanding.11 It belongs indeed to the being of objects—which Heidegger will call “the at-hand”—that they are independent of all our experiences of them; within the framework of that understanding, they are real and independent.12 And yet, I think Heidegger insists, they can only be thus real by virtue of that background understanding. Entities are, only by virtue of being, which lies in Dasein’s understanding. Carman’s reading makes the relation between entities and being too loose or indirect: it makes being necessary not for entities to be, but only for them to be meant or interpreted (or to “appear”). “Being” is a badly misleading term if it refers to the condition for entities’ interpretability, and not the condition for what entities are.
So we typically overlook that background understanding of being, and indeed our intending generally. And because we don’t know how to attend to this intending, we tend furthermore to seize hold of ready-made theories when we do describe it—theories that usually get our intending wrong, because they reflect the same motive to ignore that background. We need to learn to look for ourselves. So Heidegger’s main words for phenomenology’s improvement on traditional philosophy are that it “lets [something] show itself from itself”; he also cites the famous slogan “to the things themselves!” [BT g27].
But how are we to pay proper attention to this intending—and overcome that constant bias away from it? The first part of a strategy comes from Husserl, who offers a technique for it, his famous epochê, which suspends our ordinary assumption that things are real. “Bracketing” this claim lets us uncover objects as intended (qua intenta), and turns us back to the act of meaning itself, showing how it supports that content or object.13 In this general sense of the epochê I think Heidegger takes it over.14
It’s important that once we thus turn back to the intentio, to the act of meaning, we suspend our natural realism there too. We must not treat this intending in the way that psychology or biology does, as occurring in the midst of the world, as one kind of thing among others. We are interested in its role allowing a world of things, as meant or intended, to be; we need to treat it, as it were, from the inside out, rather than from an outside context in. So (§10) Heidegger distinguishes his project from those in the human sciences: phenomenology won’t understand intending or meaning in the way a naturalist or scientist would, by seeing how these meanings arise in an organism.
Once we have recognized the intentional realm, and are able to pay the right kind of attention to it, our task isn’t just to describe the phenomena that show up within it. We need also, and especially, to show its structure, and in particular this structure’s deepest or grounding parts. And here we meet another general point that Heidegger shares with Husserl: he takes over a Kantian conception of this structuring, as the operation of transcendental conditions. That is, there are levels of intentionality or meaning, the lower levels serving as “conditions of the possibility” of the higher ones, the latter therefore depending on the former. What the phenomenologist needs to uncover, above all, are the possibility-conditions of the (first-order) phenomena. So he/she will employ “transcendental arguments,” i.e. inferences from the evident features of experience to what makes them possible.
These conditions lie on the side of the intending—are imposed by it (by us) upon things. These conditions are in this way a priori, not drawn from experience. Yet these a priori impositions aren’t explicit, aren’t noticed; we make them unawares. Or, if we do notice them, we mistake them as features of the intentum by itself—of the object we think about. All of these points are in Husserl, but they are ultimately Kantian ideas. So BT g31 says that within “the Kantian problematic” phenomenology’s phenomena would be the forms of intuition (space and time), which already “show themselves,” but “unthematically,” in all phenomena in the ordinary sense.
Because it studies a level in intending that is hard to see, Heidegger says that in its strict sense phenomenology “lets show itself” “something that is concealed, in contrast with what firstly and mostly shows itself, but at the same time something that belongs so essentially to [the latter] as to make up its meaning and ground” [BT g35]. We are looking for a way we mean and intend that decisively shapes all our experience without our noticing it. And we uncover it partly by inferring what it must be, for our experience to be as it is.
This inference to what our experience presupposes introduces a certain apriorism into phenomenology—or into one stage of its work. It begins empirically, by studying “appearances,” i.e. our human (acts of ) meaning; this is its “phenomenal basis.” But phenomenology then steps back to infer the a priori, structurally necessary elements in this meaning. BT g50 n. x:
Through E. Husserl we have not only understood again the meaning of all genuine philosophical “empiricism”, but also learned to handle the necessary tools. “A-priorism” is the method of every scientific philosophy that understands itself. Since it has nothing to do with construction, a priori research requires proper preparation of the phenomenal basis.15
Phenomenology must beware constructing, i.e. imposing, its own structures, and so must begin by getting the appearances right.
It is the step to the a priori, in transcendental argument, that brings us to the level of being. It reaches the level at which intentionality projects and constitutes that world of possibilities, and thereby the being of entities. This is where intentionality “discloses” being, on the basis of which entities can then be “uncovered.” This is also the step to the “existential,” as opposed to merely “existentiell” or particular. These term-pairs mark the decisive distinction between being and entities, the ontological and the ontical.
Now it is especially here, regarding this a priori level at which being is disclosed, that Heidegger comes to deny that “intentionality” is involved. He prefers to limit the term to the particular comportments that are based on that deeper structure: “It will turn out that intentionality is grounded in Dasein’s transcendence and is possible only upon this ground—that one cannot conversely explain transcendence out of intentionality” [BP 162; cf. MF 135, 168]. Being lies in that a priori structure, which is a condition of the possibility of all meanings—and of entities as well.16
But although Heidegger elects not to call this transcendental relation to being “intentional,” he still goes on to treat it as a directedness upon meaning. Indeed, it is important to his conception of phenomenology that this a priori level, though reached by transcendental argument, can be made to appear, i.e. can be experienced. It can be “brought to show itself,” and to show itself “from within,” and not just as an object of study. In these privileged experiences of insight we will notice ourselves meaning in these very ways, and that we’ve been so meaning all along.
To this point we have mainly been attending to Heidegger’s agreements with Husserl. Now let’s turn to some of the ways he adapts and alters this Husserlian method. An important precedent for these changes was his earlier effort to adapt phenomenology to handle religious experience. The inadequacy of Husserl’s method for this anticipates its inadequacy for the pragmatic and existential aspects of Dasein. Heidegger’s dissatisfaction expresses that radical critique of the prevailing notion of truth, which we saw (in Chapters 2) took root in 1919.
Biographically, we should notice as background the way Heidegger and Husserl took one another “personally,” so that doctrinal differences carried psychic weight. Although they both profit hugely from their interaction, they do so grudgingly and with a dose of ill will—which we find on both sides. Husserl felt betrayed by a most promising (and glamorous) student who failed to follow, or even to get the point of, the method he thought so vital. And Heidegger is strivingly eager to press his own originality, and indeed his greater stature. These interpersonalia give reasons to distrust their own accounts of their relationship.
Another difficulty in specifying Being and Time’s disagreements with Husserl is that the latter is a moving target: his views changed during the years of interaction with Heidegger, in part adapting to his criticisms.17 The differences I will eventually detail are more apt regarding Husserl’s earlier work, and less so for works contemporary with Being and Time or later.
My interest, however, is in Heidegger’s conception of the differ-ences regardless of its accuracy. I want to describe how he tries to “push off” from Husserl into positions he feels are his own; he may well (as other philosophers have too) overstate his own novelty.18 He thinks that Husserl’s changes in view come too late in the logic of his position; his phenomenology is doomed at its root by its subjectivism. Husserl’s efforts to adapt it to handle pragmatic and existential phenomena don’t go nearly deep enough—are artificial accretions to an unsatisfactory core.
So the central disagreement Heidegger thinks he has with Husserl is over his still-too-Cartesian conception of the intending phenomenology uncovers. Being and Time doesn’t elaborate its differences from Husserl, but expresses them indirectly in its critique of Descartes.19 For Husserl still thinks of human meaning (intending) as carried out by a kind of thinking thing, and shapes his method accordingly. The attack on Descartes’ picture of us is thus an implicit critique of Husserl. And Heidegger’s chief reason for giving up the term “intentionality” is his belief it is infused with this Cartesian, cognitive picture. I retain it because I disagree: I think we can annul this connotation by emphasis and reminders.20
Heidegger argues (first in §13) that the thinking that Descartes makes definitive of us, as minds, is instead just a “founded mode” of a prior, more encompassing way we mean and intend. Things matter to us much more widely and deeply than this. He calls this primary level of meaning, whereby “entities are” for us, our “concern.” Husserl, he thinks, neither notices nor studies this level of meaning.
Hand in hand with this different conception of how humans mean, there goes a different method of phenomenology to study it. These two sides—the thing to be studied and the method of study—shape one another. The new idea of intentionality designs the method that will study it, but Heidegger is only confident that intentionality is this way because he has already begun to use (an ancestor of ) that method. So we should think of the ontological and methodological points as evolving in tandem. But I’ll consider them in that order.
i. Phenomenology’s new phenomena
I’ll treat Heidegger’s reconception of intending (the object phenomenology studies) under three headings. He objects to three main elements in Husserl’s view of the intender as essentially a thinking thing: that it is basically theorizing, conscious, and a substance. Human intending—or rather the deep level of it we’re trying to lay bare—is none of these.
So first, Husserl makes primary our theoretical relation to the world.21 He conceives of intentionality as deeply or principally aimed to know, and its content, its world, as what it posits (as true). Intending occurs principally in our beliefs and theories about ourselves and our surroundings—it is these that lay out the structure of the world, our intentum. So Heidegger in MF 134: “Thus every directing-oneself-upon receives the character of knowing, e.g. for Husserl, who describes the basic structure of all intentional comportment as noêsis; thus all intentionality is first a cognitive intending [Meinen], upon which other modes of comportment towards entities are then built.” Values, for example, are treated as superimposed on a picture of reality already held in our beliefs: we value things only after we have located and identified them. Or indeed, values are treated as themselves beliefs—beliefs that certain things have value.
But here Husserl (like Descartes, and so many others) has begun—Heidegger claims—with what is really a special stance or condition, which we occupy only exceptionally. Proper phenomenological method requires that we begin with the way we are “firstly and mostly” [zunächst und zumeist] (Macquarrie and Robinson translate this extremely common expression “proximally and for the most part”). “At the outset of the analysis Dasein should not be interpreted in the differentiation of a determinate existing, but rather be uncovered in its undifferentiated firstly and mostly” [BT g43]. So we need to examine our “average everydayness” [durchschnittliche Alltäglichkeit].
As we’ll gradually see, Heidegger thinks there is a fundamentally different attitude or stance “at the bottom” of our intentionality—not the stance we occupy when we think objectively or theoretically. We might call it the stance of trying.22 Our primary intentio is willful and directed. It is an effortful directedness, which operates in the first person, towards ends “in each case mine.” It is this “care” or “concern”—an industrious and ever-working pragmatic orientation—that basically gives us the world, and ourselves. This is the way we mean things in our everydayness, where we live most of our lives. Phenomenology must do justice to this basic pragmatic way we mean.
Since our intentionality is principally end-directed, phenomenology must mainly map not things but ends: the network of ends and means (that are themselves ends for prior means) that gives the ultimate orientation of our intending. We interpret every thing around us in relation to this elaborate network; it determines how things matter to us, and which features are salient in them. This network gives the principal structure to our “world.” Of course the phenomenologist is interested not in the details of particular such networks, but in their broad and common structure.
A second way Husserl is still Cartesian is in holding that intentionality occurs only or principally in consciousness. Pragmatic concern or care is not mainly a conscious aiming. Of course Heidegger does not deny that we can mean things consciously, but he thinks this is only the tip of our intending, most of which runs along without the explicit awareness we usually refer to as “conscious.” Indeed there is a spectrum of cases here, and reminding ourselves of some of these will show what uncertain borders the term “consciousness” has.23
Much of our meaning occurs, to begin with, in a kind of “background” awareness, such as that we have of our feet on the floor—before we think about our feet on the floor.24 We sense our feet in their contact-points with the floor, and in their posture and kinetic potential beneath us, but we sense it (as it were) “behind” the conversation at the table, and the food, which absorb our attention. Our pragmatic intending has a figure-on-ground structure, so that what’s explicit always rests on a background left in shadows and implicitness. We attend to a few concerns by pushing many others out of our conscious attention; they run, as it were, on autopilot, subliminally.
Now, is it right to say that we are aware here of our feet at all, even “in the background”? Perhaps sometimes we’re not in the least aware, and what’s really going on is just that we would immediately be aware of our feet’s feel and posture if the feel “rose” to painfulness, or we had other reason to change their position. Consciousness is prepared, under various conditions, to pay attention here, and this is perhaps an indirect kind of awareness. We are, perhaps, “on the alert” to notice and respond to impingements on the various parts of our bodies, whose various postures and dispositions we keep track of implicitly, holding them available for immediate conscious notice and control.
So we constantly mean things “behind” our focal awareness, a penumbra that stretches even “beneath” awareness altogether. As we focus attention and make something fully present before us, we situate it against a background that is partly conscious and partly not, and which gives the context that supports the meaning we assign to that present thing.25 So I understand myself, all the while I eat and converse, as doing these with this body I am bearing through this day, and disposing in postures in which I converse and eat. We can’t adequately understand even how we consciously intend, Heidegger claims, without grasping this penumbral understanding.
We must combine this point with the previous one. This background that gives context and meaning to the figure is not, as it were, a picture of the surroundings of the figure. For the thing is principally intended pragmatically, and the background is too. It gives meaning to the thing by how it makes it matter. The background is the context of my projects, that gives practical meaning to the thing now present (to me). So I understand the posture of my legs not in an image of them, nor in any proposition, but in a practical preparedness to deploy them for various ends.
Another point here will be important later: we sometimes hold things in one of these backgrounds, and resist pressures that would otherwise bring them into focus or awareness. We know what it’s like to be avoiding thinking about something. We do this intentionally—but mean to be as little as possible aware that we do. So the act of keeping in the background itself gets carried out in the background. Heidegger’s existential story will place great weight on such cases of avoidance—cases we often call “self-deception.” In them the background is, in one way, there for us, yet we are working to ignore it.
Heidegger claims that in these ways the most important parts of our intentionality are either implicit, or actively suppressed. In his pragmatic analysis (Chapter 4 below) our world of equipment and purposes is understood by a competence or preparedness that is very largely implicit. And in his existential analysis (Chapter 5) our competence for existence itself, or for being a self, is actively suppressed.26
There’s a third way Heidegger finds Husserl too Cartesian, which reaches even deeper than the others. This is in treating the intending as carried out by a substance or thing, an ego or subject that is prior to the intending and directs it. So Descartes “substantizes” the self (as I’ll put it), inasmuch as he “takes the being of ‘Dasein’ … in the same way as the being of res extensa, as substance” [BT g98].27 And this is adopted by Husserl in his account of intentionality.
How does Heidegger “de-substantize” Dasein? Not, I think, in the way argued by some interpreters,28 who have read Dasein as not principally “in the individual,” but in the social practice, or in “talk” [Rede], as Heidegger will define this. It’s this overall practice that basically means or intends, on this reading, and not each or any single individual. Intentionality is carried out at the level of societies.
I will argue against this “social” reading of Dasein. In the sense in which the term applies to entities (we’ve seen that it can also refer to the being of those entities), I think it picks out entities that correspond to individual persons as we commonly sort them. It’s for a different reason that Heidegger denies these entities are substances, as we standardly take persons to be.
If Dasein is not something social, and comes in the same units as persons do, it seems almost unavoidable to view “a Dasein” as some kind of thing, whether a subject, a person, or an organism. How could it not be a thing or substance at all? But if we hold fast to the idea that intentionality is something first-personal—and has structure precisely and only as such—we begin to see how this might not be so.
Above all—and I think this is Heidegger’s ultimate complaint against substance—we find that intentionality has a very different temporality than substances do. We need to understand the temporal logic of intending “from within,” and not impose a logic learned in relation to (third-personally observed) persisting physical things. Intentionality, as (in each case) mine, is “present” in a way that substances are not; it also “persists” quite differently.
A substance occurs fully and discretely in each present moment that it exists. But Dasein necessarily “means” by virtue of being stretched ahead towards a future and from back in a past. What it “is” lies in these relations, and not just in what is now. Nor are these relations analyzable into memories and goals—i.e. as present representations of past and future. This is not “what it’s like” to mean, as we principally mean. It’s not the real character of that first-personal intending itself.
A substance exists fully in each moment, but of course it can also persist through a series of moments or nows—indeed it’s as persisting through change in qualities that substance is often defined. However, this kind of persistence is again very different from Dasein’s. Dasein persists by virtue of a certain self-constancy, which is achieved only in the “steadiness and standfastness” of authenticity [BT g322]. For the most part Dasein fails to persist, because it fails to stand fast towards itself, in the way we’ll eventually see. For now it suffices to have this further hint how Dasein’s temporal structure differs from a substance’s.
Finally, let’s try to make more vivid to ourselves the upshot of these three Husserl-critiques, and Heidegger’s positive conception of intentionality. As I dwell on some one thing—let’s say an apple—and make it present to my focused awareness, still at the same time all the rest of my world “is there” for me, behind and beneath this awareness. This includes the position and posture of my bodily parts, and also the geography of my vicinity, but most importantly “where I am” in the various projects in which I hold myself involved, projects that reach out through my day, and through variously larger units of my life.
My principal relation to the thing is not theoretical. I attend to the apple not to study it but to wash it or store it or eat it, and each of these dealings has its meaning only within the context of those broader projects and ends. I am situated in relation to a past and a future, towards which I stand in quite different, but not opposite, relationships. Finally, I’ve spoken throughout in the first person here, and this is appropriate to the character of this intending, as “in each case mine.” However, we must not suppose that this “I” is a substance or subject extrinsic to the intending. It is rather, we’ll see, a certain project itself, which can be either better or worse pursued.
ii. Changing phenomenology’s logos
If this is what intentionality is—if it has these features Heidegger claims—then we will need to go about studying it a different way. The changes Heidegger makes in intentionality affect what phenomenology’s methods or strategies must be, and even the very kind of grasp or truth it should expect. So here we turn to the logos of phenomenology. If intending is not principally theoretical, nor conscious, nor by a subject, how should we examine and clarify it? How can we “make show itself” this intending which is mostly willful, “in the background,” and nonsubstantial?
We should distinguish here between two ways of “showing.” There is first of all the event of insight or understanding—the condition of being in a maximal truth towards the topic (the meaning). However, the logos is not this event itself, but rather the medium (or capacity) of sharing this insight. It puts the insight into words that are able, when rightly read, to stimulate or occasion that event of truth. So these words—the logos—“show” it by producing the event. Thus phenomenology is essentially related not just to its topic—trying to figure it out—but to an audience it aims to bring into the truth about this topic. (This audience can include oneself at later times.)
Husserl’s misconception of intentionality distorts the method he adapts to it, preventing it from “showing” being in either of those ways. As we now expect, he makes the event of insight “too theoretical”; he still follows Descartes too far. BT g95: “The only genuine access to [entities of a world] lies [for Descartes] in knowing, intellectio, and indeed in the sense of mathematical physics’ knowing.” But this knowing stance can’t adequately understand even sensation—a relatively simple kind of intentionality—nor the being of what is sensed, e.g. hardness or resistance. Descartes’ mathematical formulations of these “extinguish” “the kind of being that belongs to sensory perception” [g97]. And he is still further from understanding how that sensory and intellective awareness are founded in being-in-the-world [g98].
Now of course Heidegger’s phenomenology is also (in large part) theoretical; it employs that third-personal stance of “study.” But it sees that this study’s target is itself not (chiefly) a theorizing, but an attitude deeply unlike it, so that this study must adjust in ways Husserl didn’t suspect. Meaning is crucially telic, i.e. an effort at ends that matter to it. To comprehend this mattering, phenomenology needs to occupy the intentional attitudes it studies, to understand them “from within.”29
Phenomenology must include, to supplement its study of its objects, a participation in them—taking their point of view by intending that way oneself. One occupies the stance-to-be-understood, but in a particular way: such that the stance occurs in its own kind of explicitness, quite different from one’s becoming “conscious of” it. One studies the stance in this perspicuous form, and gives a theoretical account of it. But that account is only a satisfactory “truth” about the stance, in conjunction with the special form of the stance itself.30 So BCM 61:
To awaken a mood means, after all, to let it become awake and as such precisely to let it be. If, however, we make a mood conscious, come to know about it and make the mood itself into an object of knowing, we achieve the contrary of an awakening. The mood is indeed thereby destroyed, or at least not strengthened, but weakened and altered.
This point affects also the kind of logos that can share this insight. Phenomenology can reveal intentionality only by breathing affective life back into words we have come to hear merely as theoretical concepts. It must reverse a tendency by which words lose their power to evoke the concern they are about: “in the end the business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elementary words in which Dasein expresses itself, so that they are not leveled off into incomprehensibility by the common understanding” [BT g220].
Surprisingly perhaps, what we mainly care about is not at all evident to us. At the root of all our meaning are ends that lie hidden from us. There is on the one hand an inertial drift of these ends into the background, where they are “taken for granted.” But there are also motives that actively suppress notice of these ends, so that phenomenology must work against a positive interest in concealment. Phenomenology needs to wrest these ends out of this hiddenness, by foregrounding them within our projective effort.
For this purpose, and against all those obstacles to illuminating care, Heidegger employs one characteristic device: he pays special attention to experiences of “breakdown”—to cases in which our ordinary interpretive practice breaks down or fails, in such as way as to thrust us “off the rails” of the practice; so we see it in a condition of disruption yet “from within.”31 In Chapters 4 and 5 we’ll see that the study of breakdowns is key for both the pragmatic and existential applications of the method. Here I’ll just sketch the general reasons for this use.
When we experience a breakdown, and this prompts us to study it, this theoretical attention occurs in the wake of the ordinary experience and care—as we are falling out of it. So, in the first place, there is the advantage of proximity. We are “near” the experience, it is still fresh and vivid as we regard it.
Indeed, I think we should think especially of the case and time when there’s an overlap and blending of these two attitudes—the ordinary one that is our target, and the knowing stance that regards it. While we are regarding the practice that has broken down, there are, as it were, still filaments of that telic, first-personal stance that can be “pointed to” and tasted by the third-personal theory. (This much we can do or have without breakdowns, simply by turning our attention to our attitude while we’re in it.)
But much more important than mere proximity is what the breakdown does to that experience itself, before and apart from that view of it. It jostles the intentional practice out of its ruts, and makes us feel how it is at risk. It makes the structure of the aiming explicit in its own way, in the way that belongs to care itself: we notice it by our concern. We thereby “awaken” this aiming, as we might put it. So the deeper structure of our care is highlighted, in that very attitude itself, for the theoretical stance then to observe.32
Breakdowns illuminate, then, the background aims and ends that have underlain all my more overt and obvious meanings. They make me actively concerned about ends I have been taking for granted, all the while I was straightforwardly in the attitude that has now broken down. The deep-set goals that are ordinarily missed or suppressed are “lit up” by being thus disrupted and endangered. I notice what has been important by feeling and handling it as under threat.
The theoretical stance then “pays attention” to this lit-up background. Or rather, as we’ve seen, there is a kind of intertwining of this study with remnants of the stressed concern. It is perhaps this mixed case, in which both stances participate, that is the privileged condition of truth or understanding, at which phenomenology aims. I think this fusion is what Heidegger calls “intuitive thinking.” PH 41: “We only seldom engage in this mode of intuitive [anschaulichen] thinking, which instructs about the matter, but mostly rather in foreshortened and blind thinking”—i.e. thinking that has lost that linkage with concern. I will try to clarify this hybrid, intuitive thinking in the chapters to come.
All of this concerns the privileged state of understanding and truth at which phenomenology aims. But, as we’ve seen, the discipline has a second part: the task of “sharing” this insight by way of a logos or discourse. It finds words to “make manifest” the topic, so that it shows itself to that privileged view (that knows it best). The special character of this view affects how words are picked—what they’re picked to do.
Since genuine phenomenological insight requires not just thirdbut first-personal grasp of the meaning to be understood, it needs words to induce or invite the “awakened” condition of the project or aiming it is trying to understand. (Ultimately this will mean that phenomenology must find words to help make us authentic.) The traditional aim at conceptual precision needs to be not replaced but supplemented by another, which is to induce, or enable us to find, the breakdown experiences by which our deepest aims are lit up.33
This is another main reason Heidegger rejects much of the existing philosophical vocabulary. It’s not just that its concepts carve up things wrong, but that they are only concepts (as it were). They are useless at awakening the attitudes they are trying to clarify; this is perhaps what it mainly means to say that these terms are “theoretical.” The challenge in understanding concepts is grasping their analysis (into other concepts). But our challenge with Heidegger’s words is to be affected by a certain kind of breakdown in our ordinary stance. This is harder and less certain to achieve. It poses a different risk than the usual concepts: these words can always be understood “in an empty way” [BT g36], by one’s lacking not their conceptual analysis, but the right first-hand grasp of the topic.
This is what Heidegger means when he calls his terms “formal indications” [formale Anzeige], inasmuch as “the meaning-content of these concepts does not directly mean or say what they refer to, but only gives an indication, a pointer to the fact that the understander is called upon by this conceptual context to carry out a transformation of himself in his Dasein” [BCM 297].34
It might be asked whether phenomenology doesn’t have a further task, to justify its accounts of its topics. If it is a science of phenomena, it seems it should also give proofs or arguments to substantiate its claims—should give us reasons to believe them. However, I think Heidegger believes the justification also lies in those “awakened” engagements in our first-order projects. In those breakdown moments in which the structure of our aiming is lit up, we will find (Heidegger claims) the justification for the descriptions he offers of that structure. So by showing us the way to these experiences, phenomenology shows us where and how to assess its own accounts of intentionality.
Now it might seem that Heidegger’s use of “transcendental arguments” involves a different kind of proving. Doesn’t he begin with descriptions of our experience, but then argue from them to conclusions about what our deep structure must be, to make these experiences possible? However, we’ve seen that he thinks these founding structures must also be available in experiences—and it is the latter that justify the extrapolations we make from our ordinary intending. PH 87: “There can be no disclosure or deduction of essence from essence, a priori from a priori, one from the other, but each and every one must come to demonstrative sight [ausweisenden Sicht].”
3. A method for being and truth
Now the aim of Being and Time is “to work out the question of the meaning of being and to do so concretely” [BT g1], but I have not spoken much in this chapter about being. It might seem that this is because phenomenology is a method only for the book’s preliminary project of analyzing Dasein, and not for the ultimate goal of revealing being. But in fact Heidegger insists that phenomenology is, most vitally, precisely the method for revealing being. “The phenomenological concept of phenomenon means, as what shows itself, the being of entities, its meaning, its modifications and derivatives” [g35].35
Here we meet again the decisive neo-Kantian idealism: it’s by getting at the structure or logic of our meaning and intending that we find being, itself. The latter is, so to speak, fully settled by what (and how) we mean; it is, as it is for us. Hence the outward, objective view has no use in identifying being—neither physical science nor psychology can find it, and we need a science of phenomena instead. Being lies in the very logic of our intentionality, hence at a different level, indeed at a transcendental remove from all our usual meanings. It’s a condition, a structural requirement, for every one of these meanings—something they all involve or rely on.
Heidegger puts huge stress on this difference in levels, and condemns the common tendency to overlook or understate this “ontological difference.” It is a difference, it seems, with no intermediate stages: there’s no approaching by degrees from entities to being. This shows that being isn’t reached by generalization from entities; it’s not, Heidegger often stresses, the most general genus or kind. As entities’ transcendental condition, being lies at an absolute distance from them.36 Being is the background manner of intending that allows us to mean everything else. It is a deep expectation and aspiration we bring to bear in encountering any thing, an expectation less about the thing than about the stance or attitude in which we would ideally grasp it. As we’ll see, the difference between at-handness and to-handness, the two kinds of being a physical thing can have, lies in the kind of grasp we aspire to. So, roughly, a rock, e.g., is to-hand if we mean it for use (in a wall), at-hand if we mean it for theory (in geology); its being is a function of which basic stance we bring to it.
When we see this difference in level between being and entities, and the former’s transcendental role as condition for the latter, we see why Heidegger felt the need to mark it with a break in terminology, and to deny that our relation to being is a matter of intentionality at all. And yet I think his account of it makes clear that he continues to think of it so. Being resides in our understanding of being, which is surely a relation to meaning,
i.e. intentional. Phenomenology’s challenge is to illuminate this existing understanding, in which we “mean being.”
We saw how phenomenology “shows” phenomena by inducing breakdowns that make explicit what we implicitly intended all along. This applies to the showing of being, as well. Being is given in an understanding that needs not just to be described, but itself “awakened” in each reader to an explicit state. This means awakening it as a first-personal attitude—taking it seriously and personally.
Heidegger develops the special character of his method’s aim in his treatment of “truth” (see especially BT §44).37 He presents this as principally a matter of “uncovering” or “unconcealing” (he uses a large set of related terms). This uncovering occurs at both ontical and ontological levels, both of entities and of being—and Heidegger will reserve different terms for each.
He attacks the standard interpretation of truth as correspondence or agreement.38 This correspondence is taken to run between an intentional content—a “representation,” perhaps—and the object of the claim; the first matches or mirrors the second. The intentional attitude towards this content is simply that of believing or positing or asserting it. What really matters is getting the right content for that theoretical stance.39 Heidegger’s core dissatisfaction with this prevailing view is that it locates truth principally in the content (and its relation to things), rather than in the attitude towards a content. Really truth is not a content we grasp, but a way of grasping, and especially in the most important case, of the truth about being. The change we need to make is in our stance.
Consider first the most obvious kind of case—ontical truths about things. Heidegger gives a rare example: “someone with his back turned to the wall makes the true assertion: ‘The picture on the wall is hanging askew.’ This assertion demonstrates itself when the man who makes it, turns round and perceives the picture hanging askew on the wall” [BT g217]. The assertion does, at one remove, the same thing as the experience of turning to see the picture’s skew: it’s an “uncovering” [Entdeckung] of the picture as askew. It brings explicit attention to an entity, in a way that “determines” it under a particular aspect. (The assertion, we should notice, shares or communicates this uncovering, as the original experience does not.) So, importantly, these cases involve a transition, from not-noticing to noticing; they presuppose a condition in which the entity in this aspect was quite unsuspected, or (more usually) forgotten.
This uncovering, not correspondence, is the gist of truth, Heidegger thinks.40 Truth is thus not a steady state or possession but a transition or change, an event of coming-to-notice. It is well expressed in the Greek word alêtheia, un-forgetting, which means not “never forgetting,” but that passage out of forgetting. The condition in which we do not notice or attend is primary and default. The assertion’s truth—if it is true—lies in its enabling us to notice an entity in an aspect. This uncovering is not an event in Dasein alone (not a mental event), but in Dasein’s relation to the entity, Heidegger stresses. Truth “lies—taken almost literally—in the middle ‘between’ things and the Dasein” [BP 214].
All of this so far is ontical: both assertion and experience uncover entities. But they are dependent on a truth about being that Heidegger calls “disclosure” [Erschlossenheit], which is therefore more basically true.41 What’s disclosed is a world, as a network of possibilities a Dasein knows its way with. It’s only because this is given implicitly that particular paths can then be “lit up” by an assertion, or by a direct uncovering. And the overall way this world is disclosed is being. Here we come to the ontological level: disclosure is a truth about being; it is being showing itself.
To be sure, for the most part—firstly and mostly—the world is disclosed to us only implicitly, only “in the background” in the way we’ve seen. But again there is a privileged experience in which being “shows itself” more adequately—in which our deep-set intending of being is awakened, becomes explicit. This happens in authenticity: “This authentic disclosure shows the phenomenon of the most originary truth in the mode of authenticity” [BT g221]. This is ultimate truth, the experience of insight that Heidegger (in Being and Time) most valued, pursued, and tried to convey. This way authenticity is bound up with phenomenology begins to show how the latter’s aim is not just descriptive but valuative. In uncovering the truth about being, phenomenology also shows us how to live. How Heidegger can coherently think this will be an issue for us especially in Chapter 5.
Looking ahead, this phenomenological method will be applied in three movements: pragmatic, existential, temporal. In each case the task is to illuminate a different level of our being, and this requires a somewhat different mode of understanding in each case. But the general points we’ve seen will apply in all three movements. Truth about each level of Dasein lies not in an objective view about (of ) it, but in an improved view within it. Such truth is occasioned by breakdowns in smooth functioning, in the transition into second-order assessing and coping. Truth lies in attending to those breakdowns a special way.
Summary
Being and Time is meticulously methodical. Its Introduction sets out its guiding aim—to treat “the meaning of Being”—and reasons out the one best way to pursue it. That the route to being runs through an analysis of Dasein (i.e. humans) indicates the book’s deep “idealism”: being occurs in Dasein’s understanding of it. Phenomenology, as the method to study this understanding, is therefore also the route to being. The Introduction devotes its §7 to elaborating this method, to be deployed in the rest of the book.
Heidegger learns this method from Husserl, but then adapts it; we map it by seeing what he takes over, and what he changes. Above all he keeps phenomenology’s subject-matter: intentionality,
i.e. the way we “mean” things, “intend” them. We are in a way always already familiar with this, but tend also to overlook it, as we notice the things but not our meaning them. Phenomenology looks for deep structures of this intentionality, working in all our particular experiences. It uses transcendental argument—reasoning from our observed experience to what it presupposes—to identify these structures. When they’re made explicit in the right way, we recognize them as what we’ve meant all along.
Heidegger revises Husserl’s method to suit his different conception how intentionality works. Husserl had understood it as theoretical, conscious, and carried out by a substance, but Heidegger disputes each part of this. Our primary intending is willful and directed, and the theoretical attitude is a variant still dependent on it. This willful intending works mainly “in the background,” the better to focus attention on particularly pressing concerns; indeed there are motives that actively suppress awareness of it. And finally, this intending is not carried out by an ego or self that persists as a substance through objective time; rather this intending has an intrinsic temporality very different from that of substances—and its own kind of persistence as well.
These revisions Heidegger makes to Husserl’s notion of intentionality dictate changes in the method for studying it. Its willful character—its “concern”—can’t be understood by a third-personal view upon it; phenomenology needs to occupy the intentional stances it studies. It needs to occupy them in a way that makes them explicit intrinsically, and not just to an external view. Heidegger puts great weight on “breakdowns” as giving this awareness “from within.” When some tool breaks down while we’re relying on it, we notice, by feeling, how it (and what hangs on it) has been mattering to us all along.
Along with this new method we need a new idea of truth. The prevailing conception of truth as correspondence doesn’t look deeply enough. An assertion can “correspond to the facts” only because we can experience an “uncovering” of those facts, in which we come to notice something hidden before. And such uncovering itself depends on the “disclosure” of a world, as a network of possibilities within which we can frame the facts we uncover. Uncovering has better claim to be called truth than does correspondence, but disclosure is the most basic truth of all, and the kind phenomenology pursues.
Further reading
T. Carman: Heidegger’s Analytic; Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in Being and Time. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [Treats BT with impressive rigor, and particular attention to the issues of this chapter.]
S. Crowell: Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths toward Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001. [Linked essays arguing that Heidegger’s early method is largely continuous with Husserl’s.]
See note 1 for other works by Heidegger in the period of BT.