In what manner space is, and whether a Being in general can be attributed to it, remains undecided.
—Martin Heidegger, “Art and Space”1
Heidegger’s early thinking, as we have already seen, gives priority to the idea of situatedness. Rather than seeing the basic questions of philosophy as concerned with the uncovering of some basic principle or principles that underlie the being of each individual thing, Heidegger takes philosophy to be essentially concerned with the disclosing of that within which things can be the things that they are, within which they can stand in relation to other things, within which we find ourselves. The philosophical task, as Heidegger conceives it, then, turns out to be a matter of the uncovering of a certain place—although a place that is essentially unitary, dynamic, and constantly unfolding. Yet while Heidegger employs, even in his early thinking, a range of topological and sometimes even spatial ideas and images in the attempt to articulate the place at issue here—especially the idea of the “there”—he does not make the topological character of what is at issue explicit, and the ideas of place and space that appear implicated here receive very little direct attention as such. This is itself indicative of a basic difficulty inherent in Heidegger’s project here: as the history of Western philosophy over much of the last two thousand years demonstrates, place has often been seen as a derivative and secondary concept, one that is properly to be understood in terms of space, while space itself is understood, particularly within the frame of modern thought, in terms of measurable extension; consequently, any analysis that gives priority to place (whether explicitly or not) would seem also to give priority to space understood as tied to such measurable extension, but, as becomes especially clear in Being and Time, such a notion would seem completely inadequate to understanding the situatedness that is the starting point for Heidegger’s inquiry. How, then, to understand the topology that is at issue here?
The passage of Heidegger’s thinking from at least 1919 and through much of the 1920s can be read as an attempt to articulate the essential situatedness against which the question of being has to be understood, and yet to articulate that situatedness in a way that does not make it dependent upon some notion of measurable, homogenized, spatial extension. Already the dynamic character of situatedness as such, something captured in Heidegger’s early talk of happening and “event” (Ereignis) may be taken to indicate that the situatedness at issue here is in some essential way temporal. Moreover, that situatedness is also a situatedness in which we are ourselves caught up, and within the Western philosophical tradition, especially in the work of Christian thinkers such as Plotinus and Augustine, there is an important way of thinking that understands self and time to be bound together (an idea also present, significantly, in Schelling, and in whom can also be found an argument for the priority of time over space).2 One can thus see a movement in Heidegger’s early thinking that begins with what is fundamentally a question of topology, but in which that topology is increasingly interpreted in terms of temporality. Consequently, Heidegger declares at the very beginning of Being and Time that the aim of the work “is the Interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being”3—situatedness must be viewed, it seems, as fundamentally determined by, as “grounded in,” temporality.
The prioritization of temporality in Being and Time means that spatiality cannot have a fundamental role in the structure of being-there, and inasmuch as it is temporality alone that is taken as determinative, so the same would seem to apply to the notion of place. Indeed, Heidegger’s project in Being and Time would seem to be to show the way in which place and space are both, in a certain sense, dependent on time. Yet spatiality constantly intrudes into Heidegger’s account, and Heidegger’s explicit attempt to provide an argument for the secondary or “derivative” character of spatiality is a conspicuous failure—as Heidegger himself later admits.4 In this respect, although the Heideggerian prioritization of temporality arises, in part, out of his recognition of the inadequacy of the traditional conception of spatiality in the understanding of situatedness (something Heidegger specifically criticizes in terms of the Cartesian ontology), it is most obviously in relation to spatiality that the attempted prioritization of temporality turns out to be problematic—and this is indeed a reflection of the ineliminability of spatiality, in some sense (although in just what sense remains to be determined), within the structure of topology. In this respect, when we come to Being and Time, even though place is still not directly taken up there, two key elements of place, namely space and time, do appear as central points of focus. The analysis of the topological character of Being and Time that is the task of this chapter will thus be largely directed at an investigation of Heidegger’s treatment of these two concepts and their relation, but especially at the concept of spatiality.
Being and Time contains many elements of the preliminary analysis that we have already encountered in his earlier thinking. It begins with the question of being, but very quickly moves to demonstrate the way in which that question is already implicated with the question of the being of that mode of being that is being-there and with the character of its being as being-in-the-world. From a topological perspective, it is notable, however, that the substantive analysis of the division 1 of Being and Time begins with the problem of how to understand the notion of “being-in” (In-Sein) that is brought to the fore in the idea of being-there as a being “in” the world (and which already seems to be present in the very idea of “situatedness”). Indeed, in this respect, the fundamental orientation of Being and Time would seem, from the start, to be directed at the articulation of what is an essentially topological structure—the structure of just that mode of being that is constituted in terms of its “there.” Such a topological orientation should be no surprise given the path along which Heidegger’s thinking has already come. Yet in focusing on the “in” as a key element within that structure, it would also appear that Heidegger is taking up, right from the start, a concept that is indeed essentially spatial.
The idea of “being-in” is a notion we first understand in terms of the idea of “being-in something” as one thing is contained in something else. Heidegger notes, in section 12 of Being and Time, in which the issue of the nature of “being-in” is first broached, that the phrase “being in something”:
designates the kind of Being which an entity has when it is “in” another one, as the water is “in” the glass, or the garment is “in” the cupboard. By this “in” we mean the relationship of Being which two entities have to each other with regard to their location in that space. Both water and glass, garment and cupboard, are “in” space and “at” a location, and both in the same way. This relationship of Being can be expanded: for instance, the bench is in the lecture-room, the lecture-room is in the university, the university is in the city, and so on, until we can say that the bench is in “world-space.”5
Heidegger’s words here echo comments that appear in the text of a lecture course he gave in the summer semester of 1925 in which he also looks to examine the character of “being-in”:
When we then try to give intuitive demonstration to this “in,” more accurately to the “something-in-something,” we give examples like the water “in” the glass, the clothes “in” the closet, the desks “in” the classroom. By this we mean that one is spatially contained in another and refer to the relationship of being with regard to place and space of two entities which are themselves extended in space. Thus both the first (water) and the second (glass), wherein the first is, are “in” space; both have their place. Both are only “in” space and have no in-being . . . the desk in the classroom, the classroom in the university building, the building in the city of Marburg, Marburg in Hessen, in Germany, in Europe, on Earth, in a solar system, in worldspace, in the world.6
It is worth noting, in both these passages, the appearance of a notion of place as referring to the location of a thing in space (“Both water and glass, garment and cupboard, are ‘in’ space and ‘at’ a location, and both in the same way”; “Thus both the first (water) and the second (glass), wherein the first is, are ‘in’ space; both have their place”)—and this is indicative of the tendency, already noted, for Heidegger to talk of place for almost the whole of his early period, in ways that take it to be a matter of the spatial location of a thing. Moreover, the conception of “being-in” that Heidegger introduces here and that treats it as a matter of spatial containment appears very close to the concept of “being-in-a-place” that Aristotle explores in his discussion of topos in the Physics—although Heidegger nowhere makes this connection explicit7—a concept that was also a focus for much premodern discussion of space and place. Before we consider Heidegger’s own account of this idea of containment, then, and his criticisms of it, it is worth reacquainting ourselves with some of the “history of place” that stands as the background to Heidegger’s discussion.
Aristotle’s treatment of topos is tied to the idea of topos as that which is the answer to the question “where”—consequently topos figures as one of the Aristotelian Kategoriai (which constitute both the different ways in which things can be spoken and certain basic ways in which things can be).8 Here it seems as if Aristotle assumes an understanding of topos that would match the understanding of place as location, such that each thing has its own place within a world of such places, rather than as that open region within which things appear. Yet although Aristotle does indeed treat place in a way that seems to assimilate it to a notion of location, and his treating being-at-a-place as one of the nonsubstantial Kategoriai would also seem to indicate that place is only accidental to the being of the thing, he nevertheless also takes it to be a central concept in philosophical analysis, writing in Physics 4 of the importance of arriving at an understanding of place9 and reiterating the Archtyan maxim that to be is to be somewhere.10 Indeed, Heidegger himself recognizes the significance of the Aristotelian, and, more generally, the Greek understanding of place, as that which supports the being of the thing—“the place [Platz] pertains to the being itself. . . . every being has its place [Ort]. . . . The place [Ort] is constitutive of the presence of the being.”11 Notably, however, while the sense of place at issue is clearly more than the sense associated with mere location within a realm of spatial extension, still the way in which place might function as the open realm of gathered disclosure is not yet apparent. Place thus appears as a problematic notion, and appears to be recognized as such by Heidegger himself as he repeats Aristotle’s own comment that “it is something great and very difficult to grasp place for what it is.”12
In his own discussion in Physics 4, Aristotle criticizes and rejects a number of alternative accounts of the nature of topos as form, matter, and extension in order to arrive at his own characterization of the notion as “the first unchangeable limit of that which surrounds.”13 The “place” or topos of a thing is thus understood to be the inner surface of the body (where “body” here means simply the thing in its physical extendedness) within which that thing is enclosed—on this account the “place” of a rosebud contained within a glass paperweight is the inner surface of the glass that surrounds the enclosed flower. The implication of this account is that to be “in place” is always to be contained within an enclosing body, and Aristotle states this explicitly: “a body is in place,” he says, “if, and only if, there is a body outside it which surrounds it.”14 Since Aristotle rejects the concept of void, almost everything is necessarily enclosed within something else. The only exception is the universe as a whole, which is literally “no-place” and which is therefore not contained within anything at all—a claim that gave rise to extended discussions among ancient and medieval writers concerning the possibility of something extending beyond the bounds of the universe. The Aristotelian characterization of place that understands the notion by means of the idea of containment within an enclosing body is echoed by Heidegger, not only in section 12, but also in section 21 of Being and Time, where he writes of the contrast between being-there and “a way of Being in space which we call ‘insideness’ [Inwendigkeit].”15 “Insideness” is elucidated by reference to the way in which “an entity which is itself extended is closed round [umschlossen] by the extended boundaries of something that is likewise extended.”16 Here, particularly in the notion of being “closed around by . . . boundaries,” there seems a clear echo of Aristotle’s “unchangeable limit of that which surrounds.”
In fact, while the Aristotelian characterization of topos certainly seems to play a part in Heidegger’s thinking, it is not so much an Aristotelian as a Cartesian view of space that appears to dominate Heidegger’s discussion. And Descartes’s understanding of space, although historically continuous with that to be found in Aristotle and also dependent upon a concept of containment, is quite distinct from that which Aristotle proposes in the Physics and is in part developed in opposition to it. In The Principles of Philosophy, Descartes writes of the notions of “l’éspace” (space) and “le lieu” (which would seem to correspond to “place”) that:
the extension in length, breadth and depth which constitutes a space is exactly the same as that which constitutes a body. . . . The terms “place” and “space,” then, do not signify anything different from the body which is said to be in a place. . . . The difference between the terms “place” and “space” is that the former designates more explicitly the position, as opposed to the size or shape, while it is the size or shape that we are concentrating on when we talk of space.17
Whereas Aristotle treats topos as tied to the bounding inner surface of a container, Descartes takes “l’éspace” to be identical with the area or volume enclosed within the container and “le lieu” to be just a matter of the container’s position, with both notions tied to the concept of an extended body. From the idea of space as tied to a particular body, it is easy to arrive at a more generalized notion of space as the extended realm within which all bodies can be contained. Albert Einstein talks in just this way of the development of the modern idea of space: the idea of an “independent (absolute) space, unlimited in extent, in which all material objects are contained” is arrived at by “natural extension” from the concept of the particular space that exists within any particular enclosing body.18
This Cartesian view of space is continuous with the Aristotelian in that it derives from a concept of space (and of place) that is tied to containment. But the Cartesian view is much more dependent on ideas deriving from the Greek atomists and Stoics than from Aristotle. Indeed, the Cartesian view of space is clearly descended from the idea of kenon or void that was especially important in providing the basis for a notion of space as undifferentiated and unlimited extension in writers from Philoponous to Giordano Bruno. The Cartesian view is also indebted to Platonic ideas of space. Plato’s view of space—the view presented in the famous discussion of chora in the Timaeus—is explicitly criticized by Aristotle in the Physics. Aristotle takes it to be a view that reduces space or place to matter understood as pure extension.19 The Platonic account of the Chora is notoriously obscure, but it involves a concept of the Chora—or Receptacle—as opening up a space into which qualities can be received so that particular things can come into being. The Receptacle is thus the “Nurse of Becoming.”20 The concept of space or place that is involved in this account—of space as the receptive and nurturing opening or “womb” in which things come to be—is one that is amenable to a more geometrical or mathematical account than the Aristotelian. And this is not surprising since Aristotle’s concern, at least in the Physics,21 is with place as it plays a role in change, especially motion, which he defines “in its most general and primary sense” as change of place,22 while Plato is interested in the role of chora in generation, viewing the process of generation as itself governed by geometrical principles and forms. The space or place that is the chora is indeed a space of pure, featureless extension. For this reason, the Platonic account of space or place in the Timaeus can be seen as an ancestor to modern conceptions of space in a way that the Aristotelian notion cannot.23 Thus, although, in Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger claims (perhaps somewhat ambiguously, given the difficulty in establishing exactly how either place or “topos” should be understood) that “The Greeks have no word for ‘space’ ...for they do not experience the spatial according to extensiobut instead according to place (topos),”24 still he writes elsewhere that “Platonic philosophy—that is, the interpretation of Being as idea—prepared the transfiguration of place (topos) and of chora, the essence of which we have barely grasped, into ‘space’ as defined by extension.”25
While Descartes distinguishes between “l’éspace” (space) and “le lieu” (place), using two distinct terms to do so, still it is clearly the notion of space that is the dominant term in his thinking. Only within an allencompassing absolute space can the idea of place as simple position make sense. The move to a concept of space as tied to extension, and to measurable extension, and to a notion of place as a matter of position is thus directly connected with Descartes’s development of the system of coordinate geometry in which space can indeed be presented as a realm of pure extension within which both the shape and size of bodies, and their locations can be simply plotted. The connection between the move toward a conception of space as pure extension and the mathematical understanding of the spatial are thus brought clearly into prominence in Descartes.
There is a great deal of the history of philosophy, then, behind these few comments with which Heidegger first introduces the problem of the nature of “being-in.” When we return to those comments, and what follows, we find Heidegger giving his own elaboration of what is at stake in this “history of space” by looking to the way in which the understanding of space in terms of measurable extension brings with it a certain conception of the entities that are found “in” that space. Of things that have the character of “Being-in-something”—things that have the character of existing (or “being-contained”) “in” space—Heidegger claims that they also possess a characteristic sameness: “All entities whose Being ‘in’ one another can thus be described have the same kind of Being—that of being-present-athand [Vorhanden]—as Things occurring ‘within’ the world.”26 We might say that grasping things as spatial in this sense—as having the character of “being-contained”—is to grasp those things as “objects” and so as “objective” (for this reason I will refer to the notion of space at issue here as “objective spatiality”).27
The sense in which things-present-at-hand are “within” the world is just the sense in which one thing may be contained within another and in which all things may be said to be contained within the space of the world or, better, of the physical universe. And insofar as things are so contained, they may also be said to be located within the framework of a space that does not give priority to any one location or region within it, but in which all locations, as with all “things,” are the same inasmuch as they stand within the same unitary, but also undifferentiated, “space.” Being-in space, in this sense of being-contained or being-in-a-location, is thus a characteristic feature of the leveled-out mode of being that is being-present-athand (Vorhandensein). Moreover, Heidegger claims that being “in” space in this way—being merely present-at-hand—implies no real “encounter” between the things that are thereby “in” that space:
when two things are present-at-hand together alongside one another, we are accustomed to express this by saying something like “The table stands ‘by’ [‘bei’] the door or “The chair ‘touches’ [‘berührt’] the wall.” Taken strictly, “touching” is never what we are talking about in such cases, not because accurate re-examination will always eventually establish that there is a space between the chair and the wall, but because in principle the chair can never touch the wall, even if the space between them should be equal to zero. If the chair could touch the wall, this would presuppose that the wall is the sort of thing “for” which a chair would be encounterable. . . When two entities are present-at-hand within the world, and furthermore are worldless in themselves, they can never touch each other nor can either of them “be” “alongside” the other.28
The things that are merely present-at-hand and so are simply “contained” “in” an extended space are thus not things that are properly “in” the world in virtue of themselves alone. The clear implication here is that the being “in” the world of such things must depend on something else that is “in” the world in a different way, that is not worldless, but “has” a world in virtue of itself. Indeed, Heidegger says just this: “An entity present-at-hand within the world can be touched by another entity only if by its very nature the latter entity has Being-in as it own kind of Being— only if, with its Being-There [Da-sein], something like the world is revealed to it.”29
Being-there has a world in a way that merely present-at-hand things such as tables and chairs do not. And although Heidegger acknowledges that being-there can itself be understood as “present-at-hand” in the way in which tables and chairs are present-at-hand—as mere entities “in” space— he also makes clear that this is not a mode of being that properly belongs to being-there as such. Thus he comments that “even entities which are not worldless—Dasein itself for example—are present at hand ‘in’ the world, or, more exactly, can with some right and within certain limits be taken as merely present-at-hand. To do this, one must completely disregard or just not see the existential state of Being-in.” That is, to view beingthere as present-at-hand one must ignore or not see the way in which it has a “being-in” that is proper to it that is not the “being-in” associated with objective spatiality. Indeed, that being-there cannot be properly understood on the basis of spatiality viewed in terms of mere location, measurement, or extension is already evident as far back, for instance, as the lectures of 1919. There Heidegger denied that the concept of space as measurable extension was relevant to the sort of situatedness with which he was concerned:
In the course of a hike through the woods I come for the first time to Freiburg and ask, upon entering the city, “Which is the shortest way to the cathedral?” This spatial orientation has nothing to do with geometrical orientation as such. The distance to the cathedral is not a quantitative interval; proximity and distance are not a “how much”; the most convenient and shortest way is also not something quantitative, not merely extension as such.30
The relation between things understood in terms of “nearness” and “farness” is not to be understood on the basis of that which is measurable and quantifiable—on the basis, that is, of objective spatiality alone. Such a spatiality allows of no “nearness” or “farness” since within it all places are nothing more than “locations” that are related to one another by the same numerically given measures; all locations are the “same” because all stand within the “same” extended, quantitative frame. Within a space understood in this way, there can indeed be no proper relatedness. Consequently, the sense of “being-in” that is of most interest for the analysis in Being and Time and that is taken as proper to being-there is not to be understood in terms of “being-contained” in something or “being-in-alocation.” As Heidegger writes, “Being-in . . . is a state of Dasein’s Being; it is an existentiale. So one cannot think of it as the Being-present-at-hand of some corporeal Thing (such as a human body) ‘in’ an entity which is present-at-hand,”31 and elsewhere he comments, “Dasein takes space in [nimmt . . . Raum ein]; this is to be understood literally. It is by no means just present-at-hand in a bit of space which its body fills up.”32
As the considerations adduced above already indicate, the discussion of “being-in” that occurs in section 12 leads fairly quickly to the conclusion that what is at stake in the idea of “being-in” as this relates to being-there is not a matter of spatial “containment” or “location” in the sense associated with objective spatiality. The question, however, is how to characterize the alternative mode of “being-in” that seems implied here. Heidegger’s discussion of this matter, however, is highly condensed and summary in character, and he moves almost immediately from the claim that the beingin of being-there is not to be understood in terms of the spatiality of the present-at-hand to the claim that it is rather a matter of the being-in associated with that “within which” one lives or “resides.” In a passage, some of the main elements of which reappear some twenty-seven years later (in “Building Dwelling Thinking”),33 Heidegger looks to the etymology of the German “in” as providing an indication of the direction in which an adequate understanding of “being-in” must move. He writes:
“In” is derived from “innan”—“to reside,” “habitare,” “to dwell” [sich aufhalten]. “An” signifies “I am accustomed,” “I am familiar with,” “I look after something.” It has the signification of “colo” in the senses of “habito” and “diligo.” The entity to which Being-in in this signification belongs is one which we have characterized as that entity which in each case I myself am [bin]. The expression “bin” is connected with “bei,” and so “ich bin” [I am] means in its turn “I reside” or “dwell alongside” the world, as that which is familiar to me in such and such a way. “Being” [Sein], as the infinitive of “ich bin” (that is to say when it is understood as an existentiale), signifies “to reside alongside . . . ,” “to be familiar with. . . .” “Being-in” is thus the formal existential expression for the Being of Dasein, which has Being-in-the-world as its essential state.34
The “being-in” that is characteristic of the being of Dasein is thus distinguished from the being-in of mere spatial location or containment and is instead characterized as a “being-in” that is tied to “residing” or “dwelling.” Such dwelling is taken to involve familiarity and a sense of “looking after” or “taking care” that presages Heidegger’s discussion of care (Sorge) later in Being and Time as determinative of the structure of beingin-the-world. In fact, even here dwelling is understood, not as something in which Dasein may or may not engage, but as characterizing Dasein’s very being—for Dasein to “be” is for Dasein to dwell. In fact, the etymology that Heidegger draws on here, while it introduces, but does not develop, the idea of dwelling, nevertheless seems to refer us back to the idea we encountered in Heidegger’s earliest thinking, namely, the way in which our situatedness in the world is indeed something that cannot be separated from what we are and what is closest to us, from that which is most familiar and with which we are already engaged.
Having noted this, however, it also has to be said that it is all too easy to suppose that this passage tells us more than it actually does and to read it in a way that is already laden with an analysis that has still to be provided. It certainly tells us very little about the concepts to which it draws attention, and we still need to inquire into what it means to “be familiar with” and to “look after,” what it means to “reside” and to “dwell.” The concept of dwelling, in particular, will become a key concept in later Heidegger, and although one may well view Heidegger’s connecting of dwelling with familiarity and “looking after” in this passage as given further elaboration through the analysis of care and temporality that appears later, still Being and Time gives little or no attention to an explicit analysis of dwelling as such, and the concept remains somewhat in the background. Nevertheless, putting the connection with care to one side, the idea of dwelling does appear elsewhere in Being and Time in ways that help to provide some sense of what Heidegger has in mind when he uses the notion even in his early thinking. Dwelling appears, for instance, in Being and Time, section 36, as an important contrastive notion in the discussion of curiosity:
curiosity is characterized by a specific way of not tarrying alongside what is closest. Consequently it does not seek the leisure of tarrying observantly, but rather seeks restlessness and the excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters. In not tarrying curiosity is concerned with the constant possibility of distraction. Curiosity has nothing to do with observing entities and marvelling at them— ϑαυµαζειν. To be amazed to the point of not understanding is something in which it has no interest. Rather it concerns itself with a kind of knowing but just in order to have known. But this not tarrying in the environment with which one concerns oneself, and this distraction by new possibilities, are constitutive items for curiosity; and upon these is founded the third essential characteristic of this phenomenon, which we call the character of “never dwelling anywhere” [Aufenthaltslosigkeit]. Curiosity is everywhere and nowhere. This mode of Being-in-theworld reveals a new kind of Being of everyday Dasein—a kind in which Dasein is constantly uprooting itself.35
In taking the characteristic feature of curiosity as “never dwelling anywhere” and as thereby revealing a kind of being in which being-there is “constantly uprooting itself,” is “everywhere and nowhere” and continually seeks “restlessness and the excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters,” Heidegger implicitly draws on the spatial and topological connotations associated with dwelling—of dwelling as always tied to a certain space and place. If curiosity is “everywhere and nowhere,” dwelling is surely a “being-somewhere”; if curiosity is a continual “uprooting,” then dwelling is surely a “putting down of roots”; and as curiosity involves distraction and novelty, the relation to things that is associated with dwelling is surely a relation of attentiveness and of familiarity—of “homeliness” we might say. We might even add that while curiosity remains removed from things, never properly attached to them, in dwelling we stay close to things and are connected to them.
In these respects dwelling involves what is, to use a form of words especially significant in the Heideggerian context, a “bringing-close,” a nearing, of what is otherwise apart from us.36 The idea of such “nearing” turns out to be a central notion in Heidegger’s later analysis of the existential spatiality that he claims is proper to being-there. “Nearing” is not just an overcoming of a purely objective spatial distance but also a “picking out” or a “bringing into salience” that overcomes the distance of inattention or “not-seeing.” In this respect, it might be thought of as analogous with the cinematic technique in which a particular object or detail in a scene is brought forcefully to the attention of the viewer by a sudden zooming shot that bridges the distance between camera and thing seen. The cinematic technique is, indeed, a way of making evident through exaggeration and extremity of technique a phenomenon that we are already quite familiar with in terms of our ability to pick out and attend to particular things in the vast array of things presented to us in experience—it is an exaggerated presentation of a mundane form of intentionality. It is also a simplified way of picking up on what is essentially involved in the sort of situatedness that was the focus for the discussion in the last chapter—the way in which such situatedness always involves an orientation to one’s surroundings that consists in a particular configuration of those surroundings so that certain features emerge as more salient than others. The cinematic illustration is limited, however, in that it is indeed visual and homes in on one part of a certain visual field, whereas the “nearing” at issue here is not primarily visual at all, nor is it a matter of bringing close a part of some sensory field, whether visual or otherwise. Instead, the nearing at issue here involves the interplay of all our senses and typically focuses on things or aspects of things, on events or particular features of events. The cinematic example may also suggest that it is we who bring things close through some act of choice or decision—as the camera brings things close to it through the adjustment of its lens—for Heidegger, however, the nearing at issue here arises out of the way being-there already finds itself in a particular situation. The nearing of things thus occurs through the interplay between elements within being-there’s existential situatedness.
Being-in appears, on the face of it, to be a spatial notion. But the relation of spatial containment that is usually taken to be at issue in “beingin” cannot be appropriate to the way being-there is in the world. Being-there is “in” the world, not through some relation of physical containment, but rather through “dwelling.” It might seem, then, the obvious conclusion to draw here is that there are two senses of “being-in,” one that is spatial and one that is not, and that only the latter sense is relevant to understanding the character of being-there as “in” the world. This is indeed the interpretation that, at least initially, Hubert Dreyfus seems to propose. Dreyfus distinguishes between two senses of “in”: what he terms a spatial sense (“in the box”) and an existential sense (“in the army,” “in love”). The first use expresses inclusion, the second conveys involvement.37 The sense of “being-in” that is characteristic of being-there can be seen, suggests Dreyfus, as a sense of “being-in” as “inhabiting,” and he goes on:
When we inhabit something it is no longer an object for us but becomes part of us and pervades our relation to other objects in the world. Both Heidegger and Michael Polanyi call this way of being-in “dwelling.” Polanyi points out that we dwell in our language; we feel at home in it and relate to objects and other people through it. Heidegger says the same for the world. Dwelling is Dasein’s basic way of being-inthe-world.38
Dreyfus refers to the sense of “being-in” associated with inclusion or containment as the “objective, ‘literal’ sense of ‘in.’”39 This seems to suggest a contrast between spatiality, understood as a matter of containment or inclusion, and the dwelling associated with involvement that treats the latter as strictly speaking nonspatial. Dreyfus also writes, however, that although “Dasein is not in the world in the same way that an occurrent thing is in physical space,” still this “is not to say that Dasein has no spatiality.”40 There is, then, a spatiality that Dreyfus takes to belong to being-there that is not identical with the spatiality of the physical, but is rather a form of spatiality that is “existential.” The closeness of dwelling, the idea of dwelling as a putting down of roots and of a “being-somewhere,” the connection of dwelling with “homeliness,” are all suggestive of connections with spatiality. Consequently, we may well take the view that two distinct senses of spatiality are what is needed here, corresponding to the two senses of “being-in,” rather than a spatial and a nonspatial sense of “being-in”— conceptions of spatiality that can be distinguished by reference to the notions of “inclusion” (or containment) and “involvement” (as in Dreyfus), or in talk of objective versus “existential” spatiality, or perhaps even by reference to a contrast between space, as tied to measurable extension, and space as tied to place, to that in which one dwells.
The idea that Heidegger does indeed distinguish between two senses of spatiality—the objective spatiality tied to extension and “containment,” and the existential spatiality that is proper to being-there’s own being-inthe-world and is tied to “involvement”—seems incontrovertible. Not only is the acceptance of such a distinction as present in Heidegger’s text widespread within the current literature, but it also finds solid support in the way Heidegger himself approaches these matters, in Being and Time, as well as in his earlier thinking. Indeed, to repeat something of what I indicated in the introductory comments to this chapter above, we can summarize the underlying considerations here quite simply: if what is at issue is a certain sort of situatedness (a certain sort of “being in”) that is associated with “being-there,” then no conception of space as objective will be adequate to the understanding of that situatedness—objective space allows only for standardized “locations,” not for situatedness as such; the result is that we cannot treat situatedness as based in the spatiality of measurable extendedness, and yet, since situatedness also has a spatiality of its own, we must distinguish between space understood in “objective” terms and an alternative conception of space, the nature of which still remains somewhat obscure, which we can refer to as “existential.” Inasmuch as the question of situatedness and of the “there” that is at issue here can be understood as a question about the nature of a certain sort of “place,” so the way spatiality arises as a problem here relates directly to the way in which, in spite of the traditional assimilation of place to space, no conception of space as objective can be adequate to the understanding of place—just as space, in this sense, does not allow for situatedness, it also does not allow for place properly understood. It seems, then, that we must distinguish between objective space, taken on its own, and the space associated with situatedness, the space associated with place.41
Yet although the distinction between objective and existential spatiality is one that seems clearly present in Heidegger and seems, indeed, to be required by the character of his argument, still the distinction also presents some serious difficulties. To a large extent, these difficulties are indicated by tensions and obscurities in the way Heidegger himself talks about spatiality. In this respect, Heidegger often seems to be pulled in two different directions: on the one hand, he recognizes the inevitability of spatiality as part of the structure of being-there and so insists on being-there as having spatiality proper to it, while, on the other, he constantly seeks to deemphasize the role of spatiality and to stress that it cannot be a primary notion in the analysis of being-there. This tension comes out at many places in his discussion, but it is particularly clear in his comments on the concept of world. Thus he writes that:
We shall seek the worldhood of the environment (environmentality) by going through an ontological Interpretation of those entities within-the-environment which are closest to us. The expression “environment” [Umwelt] contains in the “environ” [um] a suggestion of spatiality. Yet the “around” [Umherum] which is constitutive for the environment does not have a primarily spatial meaning. Instead the spatial character, which incontestably belongs to any environment, can be clarified only in terms of the structure of worldhood.42
Here it is not any one form of spatiality that is at issue, but, so it would seem, spatiality as such. Even the “aroundness” of environmentality, which itself seems to refer us back to the “in” of situatedness, appears not to be primarily spatial at all. Yet at the same time as Heidegger insists on “aroundness” as not primarily spatial, he also tells us that the interpretation to be attempted is aimed at “those entities . . . closest to us.” While one can only assume (and there are of course good reasons for doing so) that the closeness at issue here must also be such that it “does not have a primarily spatial meaning,” it is noteworthy that Heidegger here argues against the spatial understanding of “aroundness” in a way that nevertheless leaves the spatiality of “closeness” beside it and unremarked upon.
Although, in this passage, Heidegger seems to suggest that environmentality is not spatial at all, such that one might conclude that perhaps beingthere is not spatial either, he does, of course, talk elsewhere of a spatiality that is proper to being-there. Yet even Heidegger’s acknowledgment of being-there’s spatiality is always given with the qualification that such spatiality is not primary, but is itself possible “only on the basis of Beingin-the-world in general.”43 In this respect, being-there seems to have a “spatiality” of its own, and yet it also appears ambiguous as to whether the “spatiality” that belongs to it (the “in” as well as the “around”) is really a form of spatiality at all. Indeed, the ambiguity here also seems to affect the sense in which the spatiality proper to being-there is indeed “not primary”: as a mode of being, it is derivative of, and therefore secondary to, worldhood; but, inasmuch as Heidegger also seems to claim that it is not primarily spatial, so it would also seem to be derivative, as spatial, from the spatiality associated with containment. Some of the difficulty here is also apparent in the way Dreyfus presents the distinction between “inclusion” and “involvement.” It is not at all clear, for instance, how far Dreyfus intends that distinction to be taken as properly a distinction between different modes of spatiality. Although he repeats Heidegger’s own pronouncement that being-there does indeed have a spatiality of its own, at the same time, Dreyfus also writes that the sense of “in” that is associated with containment is the “objective,” “literal” sense. The seeming implication is thus that the “in” of involvement and so also, one assumes, the spatiality associated with it, is not “literal,” not “objective.” Is the “in” of involvement then, only metaphorical? Is the spatiality associated with involvement and so the spatiality that belongs to being-there similarly metaphorical? Here it starts to look as if it really is the case that the sense in which the spatiality proper to being-there is a mode of spatiality is, in one sense, derivative of the literal, objective spatiality associated with “inclusion,” while in another sense, it is also derivative of worldhood. The upshot would seem to be, however, that it is not properly a mode of spatiality at all.
That there is a real difficulty here can also be seen when we reflect back on the way in which the notion of containment is itself taken up in the Aristotelian account of topos. As we saw in the discussion above, although topos looks as if it is a notion tied to the location of a thing, such that each thing has its own location within the larger system of locations or “places” that is the world, the topos of a thing is also inextricably bound up with the being of the thing. As I noted above, Heidegger himself acknowledges this point, just as he also insists that the Greek concept of topos cannot be construed in terms of the modern concept of space as measurable extension. Yet while the Aristotelian notion of topos, in particular, is quite clearly a notion that involves the idea of one thing being “contained” in another (what Dreyfus refers to as “inclusion”), in Being and Time, Heidegger seems quite unequivocal in taking such a notion of containment as designating the mode of being-in that is associated with objective spatiality and so with measurable extension—the mode of being that we saw him explicitly refer to above as the “way of Being in space which we call ‘insideness’ [Inwendigkeit]”44 and that stands in contrast to the being-in proper to being-there. Once again, there seems a deep ambiguity in Heidegger’s treatment of the concepts of spatiality, including the notion of containment, at issue here.
Dreyfus himself comments that Heidegger’s thinking about spatiality is fundamentally confused,45 but he views that confusion as arising elsewhere than in relation to the distinction between objective and existential spatiality as such. Yet although the distinction between objective and existential spatiality may seem, initially, to be plausible, even persuasive, the considerations set out above suggest that the distinction is itself problematic, and, if that is so, then the confusion in Heidegger’s thinking about spatiality must be present at the most basic level—at the level that concerns the very notion of spatiality as such. Indeed, Heidegger’s account seems to be faced with a dilemma that Heidegger himself seems never to recognize or satisfactorily resolve.
If, on the one hand, we treat containment and involvement as each giving rise to, or being associated with, distinct modes of spatiality, then it seems inevitable to ask after the relation between the modes as well as after that in virtue of which both containment and involvement are indeed separate modes of spatiality as such. The difficulty will be to answer that question without presupposing a more basic concept of spatiality that encompasses both containment and involvement.46 This is not because of any “essentialist” assumption concerning spatiality, but simply because the forms of spatiality that are supposedly being claimed as distinct here also seem inextricably entangled—as is evident from the importance of the concept of “containment,” as well as notions of “aroundness,” “closeness,” “situatedness,” and so on, irrespective of the form of spatiality that is supposedly at issue. We may well postulate distinct senses that belong to these associated concepts corresponding to the different senses of spatiality, but the question is whether or not it is, in fact, possible to distinguish different senses for all of these terms that retain the conceptual connections that must obtain between them, and yet do so in a way that limits those connections within the bounds of each supposedly distinct mode of spatiality. On the basis of the considerations set out above, this seems unlikely—indeed, one might say that, in this respect, space resists the attempt to separate it out into different conceptual spaces. Perhaps this should also be seen as a reflection of the way in which both objective and existential spatiality, however they may be distinguished, must nevertheless continue to relate to a space that is, in some sense, the “same” (as the space in which I now move is the “same” space that is also laid out before me in the form of the map by means of which I guide those movements).47 Inasmuch as they do relate to such a space, they cannot be wholly independent of one another.
If, on the other hand, we treat one or the other of containment or involvement as the primary mode of spatiality (perhaps as the only “literal” or “objective” sense, in the way Dreyfus suggests), then we face the difficulty of having to deny that the other is a mode of spatiality except as a secondary and derivative mode. But this would have the problematic consequence that it will not be possible to speak, for instance, of beingthere as having a spatiality “of its own”—for if it is the case that the primary sense of spatiality is that of containment, while the sense of spatiality associated with being-there is that of involvement, then the spatiality of being-there would only be understandable on the basis of the primary sense associated with the spatiality of containment from which it derives, and so on the basis of something that is not proper to being-there at all. Indeed, such a conclusion may even be seen as reinforced by the claim concerning the ontologically derivative status of the spatiality of being-there in relation to worldhood. The difficulty that would follow, however, is that we would then have to acknowledge that, strictly speaking, being-there does not have a spatiality that is proper to it, that what appears as a mode of spatiality, namely existential spatiality, is only improperly characterized in that way, and that, if being-there is to be given an adequate account in terms proper to it, we must expunge from that account all spatial references and connotations. Although this seems a thoroughly problematic outcome and one that Heidegger never actually embraces, it seems, in many respects, to be closest to the path Heidegger’s account actually follows.
It often seems to be assumed that the problem of spatiality, while no doubt important, does not lie at the heart of the problematic of Being and Time. Yet the dilemma that seems to attend Heidegger’s treatment of spatiality appears to bring with it some quite drastic consequences for the project of fundamental ontology that Being and Time attempts. Indeed, not only is the issue of Heidegger’s understanding of spatiality at issue here, but his understanding of the entire ontological structure, beginning with the structure of worldhood from which existential spatiality is supposed to be derived, also comes into question along with the very notion of derivation as such. Thus, if spatiality may have appeared to be peripheral, it now turns out to be absolutely central. But that should not be surprising since the way spatiality arises as a problem here is directly related to the way in which the project of fundamental ontology, as Heidegger pursues it in Being and Time, is essentially concerned with the articulation of a topological structure—with the fundamentally “situated” or “placed” character of being. Although such situatedness or “placing” is not to be understood in terms merely of spatial location, it nevertheless stands in an essential relation to the question of space and spatiality. Before we go further in exploring the issues at stake here, especially those concerning the derivative status of spatiality, including existential spatiality, we need first, however, to give some closer consideration to Heidegger’s account of the structure of spatiality as it pertains, in his account, to the being of being-there.
Although, as we have already briefly seen in the discussion above, Heidegger accepts that there is a mode of spatiality that belongs to being-there, he also claims that such existential spatiality “can be clarified only in terms of the structure of worldhood”48 and “is possible only on the basis of Beingin-the-world in general.”49 Thus the investigation of the nature of “beingin,” which might seem initially to lead to the idea of spatiality, and so might be thought to lead on to the understanding of “being-in-the-world” as a matter of “being-in-space,” actually leads Heidegger to the grounding of spatiality in the structure of worldhood. Consequently Heidegger concludes his discussion of “being-in” in section 12, after having considered being-there in its epistemic relation to its world as a secondary mode of “being-in-the-world,” by indicating the need to turn to a closer investigation of “Being-in-the-world” itself—“Thus Being-in-the-world, as a basic state, must be Interpreted beforehand”50—and this leads Heidegger directly to an analysis of world itself. It is in the analysis of world, and the environmentality that belongs to it (which occupies division 1, chapter 2, sections 14-24), that Heidegger provides his account of the spatiality proper to being-there.
The starting point for the analysis of worldhood is the account of equipmentality—of “availability” or “readiness-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit).51 That aspect of the world that is closest to us is the structure of equipment, of things ready for use, that immediately surrounds us, and this structure is one that is essentially ordered in terms of what such things are for—it is ordered teleologically. As Heidegger tells us in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (lectures given in 1927):
We say that an equipmental contexture environs us. Each individual piece of equipment is by its nature equipment-for—for traveling, for writing, for flying. Each one has its immanent reference to that for which it is what it is. It is always something for, pointing to a for-which. The specific structure of equipment is constituted by a contexture of the what-for, in-order-to. Each particular equipmental thing has as such a specific reference to another particular equipmental thing. We can formulate this reference even more clearly. Every entity that we uncover as equipment has with it a specific functionality, Bewandtnis [an in-order-to-ness, a way of being functionally deployed].52
Heidegger thus understands things ready-to-hand as being ordered in relation to one another in a way that reflects their ordering within such a teleological or “referential” totality. Each thing thus has a “place” (Platz) within a “region” (Gegend)—the hammer has a place on the workbench or the tool-belt and a place where it belongs when being used (in my hand and positioned so as to enable, for instance, the driving home of a nail)— and in being so located it is also located with respect to other things—with respect to saw, drill, the box of nails, the timber. The region is the set of places that are implicated with one another by particular forms of involvement and activity in the world, and our grasp of those activities and of our concernful involvement with things is itself a grasp of a region—a grasp of the ordering of things and places—a grasp that Heidegger calls “circumspection” (Umsicht—almost literally a “seeing-around”). Moreover, not only do things such as the hammer and the nails have a “place,” but places themselves are ordered in relation to this equipmental structure: “Thus the sun, whose light and warmth are in everyday use, has its own places— sunrise, midday, sunset, midnight. . . . The house has its sunny side and its shady side; the way in which it is divided up into rooms [Räume] is oriented to these, and so is the arrangement within them.”53 Even those things and places associated with life and death, the cemetery, for instance, are ordered within this structure. Thus, just as we found the present-athand to be associated with a certain form of spatiality—that of homogeneous, measurable extension—so too does there seem to be a distinctive form of spatiality associated with the ready-to-hand—a heterogeneous, but ordered spatiality of places and regions in which proximity and distance are based on relations in the context of activity or task, on relations given in terms of an essentially teleological structure (the structure of the “toward which” and “in order to”).54
Existential spatiality, the spatiality that belongs to being-there as such, is clearly closely tied to the spatiality of the ready-to-hand, what we might call “equipmental spatiality,” but equipmental spatiality is not alone sufficient for existential spatiality. The structure of equipmentality establishes, and indeed consists in, an ordering of things and thereby establishes a certain structure of relations in which things are brought into proximity with one another. However, that structure, although it consists in certain places and regions, does not, as such, establish anything as proximate to “being-there”—indeed, that structure does not itself bring any particular “there” with it. The structure of equipmentality is thus an ordering of things, but it does not place being-there in any particular situation within that ordering, while the “places” and “regions” that figure within it are places only in the sense of locations—locations for certain items of equipment, locations for certain activities or tasks, locations that direct activities in certain ways. In being an ordering of things and places that is not, of itself, tied to any particular “there,” equipmental spatiality also has an essentially “public” or “intersubjective” character.
Although items of equipment can be crafted to individual needs and preferences, still even the most personalized item fits within a larger equipmental structure that is, at least in principle, accessible to all. Indeed, although Heidegger does not even allude to such an argument, it seems likely that the very possibility of something functioning equipmentally presupposes its being publicly accessible in its equipmental character. The reasons for this are analogous to those at work in Wittgenstein’s so-called private language argument. Just as what makes an utterance meaningful is not some private entity to which it refers, but the way it connects up with other utterances (the role it plays in a larger system of utterances), so what makes some particular thing into a piece of equipment is not the way it relates to some “private’ intention” or “purpose,” but rather the way it connects up with other such things as part of a larger equipmental structure. Moreover, such a structure, like the system of utterances, will always be an intersubjective, publicly accessible structure, simply because it is a systematic structure. A set of elements constitutes a system by virtue of the connections that obtain between the elements of the system themselves. Thus, to take a linguistic example (and language provides a key illustration here, though not a unique one), “apple” refers to apples, not because I choose that it so refer, but because of the way the reference is determined by the word itself as the word is in turn determined as just that word “apple” by the system of language to which it belongs—a system of language that is given in the ongoing practice of linguistic usage.55 Systematicity thus resides in the elements that make up the system rather than in any act or intention associated with such systematicity. In this sense systematicity is always “public,” inasmuch as the system is itself “public.” In discussions of language and especially in discussions of the “private language argument” and the problem of rule-following with which it is associated, this point is developed through consideration of the role of intersubjectivity in the possibility of meaning. Without the constant interplay between individuals, in which each adjusts to the other’s linguistic behavior and in which each is sensitive to being corrected by the other, there can be no way in which to maintain any consistency of usage and therefore also consistency of meaning over time; consequently a language that was wholly based in an individual’s “private” assigning of meanings to expressions in a way isolated from any broader “public” practice would not be capable of functioning as a language at all because there would be no way in which one could prevent those assignments shifting in ways that could not be kept track of by the individual concerned.
Of course, in terms of the equipmental structure that interests Heidegger, the public character of the equipmental “system” is also determined by the need for items of equipment to have a character that will allow them to function in certain specific ways. Thus no matter how intent we may be on assigning the equipmental character, for example, of “hammer” to a piece of string, the string will remain incapable of taking on that particular character. Items of equipment are oriented to particular uses and tasks to which they must themselves be adequate. Moreover, even though particular items of equipment may be crafted for individual use (perhaps my hammer is custom-made in weight, shape, and so forth to fit, not only my specific type of work, but also the contours of my hand and the strength of my arm), still those items are always available to be taken up by others with more or less facility. Tools that may be designed only to be able to be employed by one person in particular and that are made so through being keyed to a particular code, perhaps to a fingerprint, retinal image, or whatever, do not count against the point at issue here. It is not that such tools are properly “private” as such, but that they are simply “made private” through being “locked” away from the use of others— moreover, it is precisely because they could be used by others that such locking is required. The equipmental structure of the world is thus a necessarily public structure both in virtue of its systematic ordering and in virtue of the need for items of equipment to be geared to particular equipmental tasks. The space of equipment is thus also a necessarily public mode of spatiality, and thus it also directs attention to the way in which beingthere is as much a being-with others (Mitsein, Mitdasein) as it is a beingamidst or being-alongside things (Sein bei).56
Heidegger’s discussion of being-with others takes up an entire chapter of its own (division 1, chapter 4, sections 25-27), but what is particularly relevant to the present discussion is the way in which the character of being-there as always a “being-with” is itself closely tied to the way being-there finds itself engaged with things, places, and regions—the equipmentality of the world is always “public,” but the public character of the world, that is, its intersubjectivity, is in turn tied to its spatiality as that is given in and through the ordering of things, places, and regions (indeed, this is so even in the case of language, which has its own spatialized, embodied form in utterance and text). The connection between spatiality and the intersubjective or “social” can be clearly seen in Heidegger’s initial descriptions of the way in which our being-with-others (Mitsein) is already evident in our involvement with things as ready-to-hand. So, for instance:
When . . . we walk along the edge of a field but “outside” it, the field shows itself as belonging to such-and-such a person, and decently kept up by him; the book we have used was bought at So-and-so’s shop and given by such-and-such a person, and so forth. The boat anchored at the shore is assigned in its Being-in-itself to an acquaintance who undertakes voyages with it; but even if it is a “boat which is strange to us,” it is still indicative of Others.57
Indeed, these comments echo earlier comments prior to Being and Time— for instance, in the 1923 lectures on facticity, from which I quoted in chapter 2 above, Heidegger writes “The dining-table at home is not a round top on a stand but a piece of furniture in a particular place, which itself has particular places at which particular others are seated everyday. The empty place directly appresents co-Dasein to me in terms of the absence of others.”58 Although the encounter with things is always within a framework in which others are also implied, the encounter with others is also an encounter with things. Indeed, one might say, in general, that it is only within the externality of space, as worked out in and through the things and places with which being-there is involved—the book, the table, the boat, the shop, the field, the shore—that we encounter other persons at all. And so, not only does the idea of things as ready-to-hand refer to an ordering of things and places and to a system of social interconnectedness, but it also indicates the way in which that social realm and our interactions within it are organized in space and, conversely (but significantly, given the derivative character of spatiality for Heidegger), the way in which the spatial also takes on a certain ordering in virtue of the social.59 The realm of our involvement with others is thus a realm that is defined and marked out through our involvement with things and places, and so, while our involvement with things as ready-to-hand is also an involvement with others, our involvement with others is also an involvement with things. To be involved with others is, in this respect, to be engaged within the organized structure of equipmentality—involvement with others is organized and oriented through this equipmental structure, which is also a social structure. And to the extent that the ordering of the world of equipment is something laid out “in space,” so too the ordering of the social is a spatial ordering.
The spatial ordering of social life is not a merely contingent fact about being-there. Although the point is not made in any explicit fashion, Heidegger offers ample evidence for the claim that social being is necessarily spatial being. Essential to the grasp of properly social life is a grasp of the very concept of otherness, and to grasp this is to grasp the very possibility of an existence that is both similar to my own existence and yet nevertheless different from it. It is only through the location of others in space, and so also in relation to the things and places with which I am myself located in that space, that I can grasp others as existing both outside and yet alongside myself, as having a view on the world that is like my own and yet a view that is not my own. In space I separate myself off from the things and from those other persons that I encounter within the world. The externality made possible by space is thus also the externality that is implied in the very idea of the other—an externality given special emphasis by Bergson, in particular (though also, more recently, by Levinas). Since the realm of others is indeed a realm that is, in a certain sense, “external to” me, so it is also a realm that takes on a concrete form through the ordering of space and the ordering of things and places in space. Indeed, in the establishing of a form of social life is also established a form of space.60 The idea of the social as essentially constituted in space is a notion that has taken on a highly developed form in much twentieth-century thinking about social life that is exemplified in the work of Foucault and also, though in a different and more developed fashion, of Lefebvre.61 Admittedly the idea can be seen as a way of taking up certain materialist strains of thought, as are to be found, for instance, in Marx, but Marx does not provide the framework within which the tight conceptual connection between spatiality and sociality can be grasped so readily. Indeed, one might take Marx to be largely insensitive to, or even uninterested in, the ontological implications and nature of this connection. Through Heidegger we can see much more clearly how and why it is that human life might necessarily be social life, and why social life is always spatialized. Society is itself established and constituted through the organization of space, and so is the sociality of being-there expressed in spatialized form, although, it is the spatiality that consists in the ordering of things and places given through the structure of world.
Heidegger’s account of being-there as always social—of being-there as always “being-with”—indicates the way in which Heidegger takes issue with the predominantly solipsistic underpinning of many traditional ways of thinking of human being—especially those ways of understanding that are taken to have their origins in the internally centerd thinking exemplified in Descartes’s Meditations. Just as being-there does not first find itself apart from the world, but finds itself only in and through the world, both self and world being given together, neither does being-there first find itself apart from others, but is instead always already there among others. Indeed, the way in which being-there is both a “being-with” others and a “being-alongside” things and places is indicated by the way in which these two modes of its being are themselves always entangled in the ways indicated above—in ways that are fundamentally geared to spatiality. Indeed, one can view the realm of spatiality, in a way that contrasts significantly with Heidegger’s own emphasis on the absence of any “relatedness” with the space of mere “containment,” as just that realm that makes for mutual differentiation between entities that nevertheless also stand in a mutual relation to one another. Without spatiality there can be no such differentiation or relatedness. Moreover, inasmuch as being-there’s essentially social mode of being also implies that the meaningful character of the world is always a character articulated through that which is public and intersubjective—inasmuch as being-there understands its own being, as well as the being of others, of things, and of its world, in terms of possibilities, then those possibilities must themselves be drawn from the realm of the public and the intersubjective. Indeed, at this point the considerations that we saw to apply in the case of equipmentality, as well as in the case of language, and that indicate the necessarily spatialized character of the equipmental, must also apply to the structures on which understanding itself draws—and this is just what is evident, in fact, in the way the public character of the equipmental can be seen to be analogous to the public character of language. What is evident now, however, is that the public, intersubjective character of being-there as both a being-with and a being-alongside (and even as “being-understanding,” which is essentially what is taken up in Heidegger’s notion of “existence”—see the discussion in section 3.4 below) is, in addition, intimately and inextricably tied to being-there as “being-spatial”—although it is clear that, for Heidegger, such “spatiality” turns out to be grounded, at least in terms of the analysis of Being and Time, in something other than the spatial as such.
The way in which equipmental spatiality is a necessary element in beingthere’s being-in-the-world, while also being necessarily public, may be viewed, and seems to be so viewed by Heidegger, as itself bringing with it a tendency for being-there to understand itself in terms of the form of generalized anonymity that comes with being one among many—being one of the “they” (das Man). The possibility of such an “alienated”, or what Heidegger terms “inauthentic” (uneigentlich), form of understanding62 is at its most obvious in our use of systems of mass communication, transport, and entertainment—“In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next”63—but it is a possibility that resides in all our activity insofar as such activity takes place within the realm of the ready-to-hand, which is also essentially the realm of the anonymous “they.” Moreover, recognition of this point also enables us to see the way in which the structure of equipmental space, in its public, spatial character, is itself capable of being rendered in terms that bring it very close to a leveled-out “objective” space—the sort of space, understood as a framework of multiple locations, to which Heidegger directs our attention in his preliminary discussion of the nature of being-in and the notion of “insideness.” Thus we can already see how it is that the realm of the ready-to-hand may lend itself to appropriation in terms of the present-at-hand—the realm of equipment, considered aside from Dasein’s involvement in it, can readily be transformed into an anonymous, mappable structure, available to all and belonging to none, almost identical with a mode of objective space. The way in which equipmental spatiality can be viewed in this way, may itself provide a reason for supposing that spatiality cannot be the primary notion in understanding the proper nature of being-there—it certainly provides Heidegger with a reason for taking equipmental spatiality as a secondary concept.
Being-there finds itself “in” space, not through a grasp of objective spatiality, according to Heidegger, but rather through its active involvement in a complex and ordered structure of things, places, regions—and other persons. Indeed, it is being-there’s involvement in such a structure, through its involvement in particular activities and tasks, that allows particular things, places, and regions, and thereby also, it would seem, particular persons, to become salient—my involvement in the task of fixing a chair brings chair, wood, nails, glue, hammer, and the rest into view in a way that fits with that task; it also brings into view the others with, in relation to, and for whom that task is performed. This is what I described earlier in talking of dwelling as associated with a “bringing-close” or “nearing” of things. In being situated we are also oriented in such a way that our surroundings configure themselves so as to bring certain elements into salience while others remain in the background. Thus, in working with hammer and nails to make a timber joint, what is brought close through my oriented activity is the joining of timber and the movement of nail into wood—brought closer even than the feel of wooden hammer handle in hand, of air in lungs, and of feet on ground. The specific spatiality that is at issue here is characterized by Heidegger in terms of the notions of “Ent-fernung,” translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as “deseverance,” and “Ausrichtung,” which they translate as “directionality”— Dreyfus suggests the terms “dis-tance” for “Ent-fernung” and “orientation” for “Ausrichtung,” and I shall employ these latter terms in the subsequent discussion here.64 “Dis-tance” refers to the way in which specific things take on a certain relation to us from out of the larger structure in which they are situated—finding a word I need to check in my reading, I glance over at the bookshelf to find the dictionary, but discover I cannot quite reach it from my chair, and so it is brought close, even before I take it from the shelf, in a specific way that also allows its distance from me to be apparent. “Orientation” refers to the way in which, in being involved in a certain task, I find myself already situated in certain ways with respect to the things and places around me—in working at my desk, I have the computer in front of me, bookshelf to one side, a pad of paper to the right, a desklamp to the left, and so on. The dis-tance and orientation that are characteristic of being-there thus capture the way in which being-there is situated with respect to the ordering of things in the world as that ordering is focused around a particular “there” and so with respect to a particular configuration of that “there,” a particular “nearing” of things in a specific activity or task.
Notice that both dis-tance and orientation are themselves directly related to the equipmental structure associated with the ready-to-hand. Consequently, inasmuch as being-there always finds itself engaged with things, so it always finds itself enmeshed with some equipmental structure, and so, given the configuration of things, places, and regions within that structure, being-there always finds itself oriented in a particular way with certain things, places, and regions standing out as salient for it. In this respect, the way being-there finds itself “in” the world is always on the basis of the interplay between equipmental spatiality and the more specific mode of existential spatiality associated with dis-tance and orientation. Thus, in finding myself seated at the dinner table, I already find myself situated within a certain region—to which belong cutlery, plates, chair, table, kitchen, and so forth—such that certain things and places “automatically” configure themselves in a certain way through my particular positioning within that structure—through my being seated for dinner. Of course, sometimes that engagement will falter or break down (I find I don’t have a knife, there is something wrong with the food, perhaps there is a fire alarm), but while that engagement may be interrupted, it can always be reconfigured (a knife is brought from the kitchen, a decision is made to go out to a restaurant, responding to the threat of fire becomes the primary task—suddenly what is salient is the fire escape, the fire extinguisher, and the smell of smoke). The crucial point for the moment is the way in which the spatiality at issue here is constituted through both the active engagement that proceeds from my own being-there as itself a constant “being-engaged” as articulated spatially in terms of dis-tance and orientation and the field of engagement that is already laid out in advance through the equipmental configuration of things, places, and regions.
The structure of existential spatiality is crucially determined by the structure of activity, task, and purpose. Not only does this determine the ordering of things and places within the equipmental field—so that a hammer is situated in relation to nails and so on—but it also determines how that field will itself be configured in relation to a particular instance of being-there’s engagement within it. Standing in the dining room with a paint brush, a tin of paint, and the furniture covered in protective sheets, a different set of things and places come to salience than when I am sitting at the table with spoon in hand and a plate of soup before me. Moreover, the way in which these different modes of engagement arise as different— so that, for instance, I do not try to eat the paint or paint with the soup— is not determined by the way these items stand in terms of the objective spatial relations they may have to one another, but rather through the way they are related temporally in terms of the activities, tasks, and ends that allow them to appear as the sorts of things they are—as soup for eating and paint for painting and so forth. Of course, this means that their appearing in this way is determined, not primarily by their equipmental relations as such, for those relations do not appear independently of the involvement of being-there, but rather through the way in which being-there relates to things in dis-tance and orientation, that is, through being-there’s own existential spatiality. Thus Heidegger claims that “Space is not in the subject, nor is the world in space. Space is rather ‘in’ the world, insofar as space has been disclosed by that Being-in-the-world which is constitutive for Dasein.”65 Space is thus disclosed through the way in which being-there has an essential capacity to “give space” or “make room” (Raum geben, Einräumen), which is also a matter of letting entities within-the-world “be encountered in the way which is constitutive for Being-in-the-world,” in “freeing the ready-to-hand for its spatiality.”66
It is to this point that Dreyfus directs his claim concerning the “fundamentally confused” character of Heidegger’s analysis of spatiality: Dreyfus claims that Heidegger fails to distinguish “public space in which entities show up for human beings, from the centered spatiality of each individual human being.”67 More specifically, Dreyfus claims:
Heidegger fails to distinguish the general opening up of space as the field of presence (dis-stance) that is the condition for things being near and far, from Dasein’s pragmatic bringing things near by taking them up and using them. Such pragmatic bringing near as Heidegger uses the term can only be near to me, it is not a dimension of public space.68
Dreyfus argues that the establishing of things as ordered within a spatial field in which they show up as near or far actually depends, as we have already seen in the discussion above, on the ordering of the public structure of equipmentality. Moreover, as Dreyfus reads him, Heidegger seems to remain unclear on this point, treating dis-tance as apparently a matter both of the field of presence given in equipmentality and of being-there’s own capacity to “bring things near” through its active engagement in the world. As Dreyfus points out, this seems to threaten an incipient subjectivism in Heidegger’s account since dis-tance appears to be something established by the being-there’s individual activity rather than being already given in the public space of equipmentality. Moreover, if dis-tance and the field of spatiality is dependent on each individual being-there, then they must be primarily subjective structures, and their relation to the public realm would seem problematic.69
Yet although there is an important point to Dreyfus’s criticism here, there is also a respect in which it does not get matters quite right. Yoko Arisaka takes issue with Dreyfus on the grounds that Dreyfus’s emphasis on the need for existential spatiality to be understood in its publicness and not as something merely tied to individual activity threatens to turn existential spatiality into something indistinguishable from the leveled-out spatiality associated with merely occurrent entities (“world-space”).70 In fact, the problem at issue here is not one that affects Dreyfus’s reading as such, but rather a point about the nature of spatiality—spatiality has a necessarily public character, and one of the difficulties in Heidegger’s position is how to take account of that publicness. Moreover, when we consider the character of equipmental space, the problem is particularly acute since although the public space of equipmentality is supposedly a space ordered by places and regions in a way that the space of the merely occurrent is not, it is also a space that, in its public character, seems difficult to distinguish from the “objective” space in which entities can be arrayed in relation to one another (a requirement of their being ordered as part of a single region) in such a way that also makes them accessible from a multiplicity of positions within that space (the latter being a requirement of their publicness). The issue of the relation between objective spatiality and equipmental space is one to which I shall return (see sec. 3.6 below), but even if we leave aside the specific question as to how equipmental space stands in relation to objective space, there is still an issue to be explored regarding Dreyfus’s claim that the Heideggerian account of spatiality is prone to subjectivism in virtue of its emphasis on dis-tance and orientation as structures tied to individual being-there.
As we have already seen, the structure of equipmentality does not itself determine any particular “positioning,” any particular “there,” within it— rather, given a certain positioning, the space of equipment emerges in relation to that “there” in a way that is already determined by the equipmental structure itself. The situation is somewhat analogous to the employment of a map. The map sets out a particular configuration of a public space, and yet it does not specify any particular position in the space thus mapped from which that configuration appears. To use the map, that is, for the configuration of space it represents to become apparent, one must occupy a position in the mapped space which can then be related back to the map itself so that the space, already set out in the map, becomes evident in one’s surroundings. In the case of equipmental space, it is through beingthere’s having a certain positioning within that space that the ordering of equipmentality becomes salient to it in its activity. The structure of equipmentality is thus prior to any particular individual being-there since it is indeed a public structure, but it always emerges into salience in the particular activity of individual being-there. Its being public is not a matter of its standing in some relation to some generalized form of being-there, as if equipment was always already taken up by a “public” mode of being that was constantly engaged—being-there, in its generality, is no more capable of concrete engagement than the concept of being-there is capable of using a hammer. Without being-there in general, of course, there is no equipmentality—a workbench, for instance, with all its various tools in “place,” but removed from the context of the being-there (in the sense of the human community) with whom it belongs, no longer carries any equipmental ordering. Yet for an equipmental structure to stand in proper relation to the being-there with whom it belongs is just for there to be a community of individuals who are themselves engaged within that equipmental structure. The opening up of what Dreyfus calls “the field of presence” thus has to be understood as based in both the prior, generalized equipmental ordering, given in terms of things, places, and regions (equipmental spatiality) and in the particular realization of that ordering through being-there’s individual engagement within that ordering in terms of distance and orientation (existential spatiality).
The way in which both equipmental and existential spatiality are required here is not, in itself, a source of subjectivism in Heidegger’s account. Indeed, as a general point, the involvement of what might be termed a “subjective” element within some larger structure need not itself determine that structure as subjective or as subjectively grounded.71 A structure that comprises both subjective and objective elements, for instance, may turn out to be one in which both elements are reciprocally determined within that structure, in which case the structure as a whole can neither be construed as objective nor as subjective, or it might be a structure in which the determining role is taken by the objective element, in which case the structure would be construed as “objective.” The real question concerns the priority, if any, assigned to the elements within the structure and so, in this case, whether or not existential spatiality is given priority over the equipmental. The claim, then, that there is an incipient subjectivism in Heidegger’s account just in virtue of the way Heidegger treats the public spatiality of the world, articulated in terms of equipmentality, as requiring both equipmental and existential spatiality cannot be right. Nonetheless, Dreyfus in correct in asserting that there is a problem concerning the way Heidegger understands the relation between equipmental, public space and the existential space belonging to individual being-there. Part of the problem involves exactly how equipmental and existential spatiality are supposed to relate, as well as the difficulty, noted above, of the relation to objective spatiality (and here we will indeed have cause to return to some of Dreyfus’s concerns, particularly as these relate to the role of embodiment in sec. 3.6 below), but what is also at issue is the way in which Heidegger appears to assign priority to existential over equipmental spatiality, and so to the “subjective” element over the “intersubjective,” by arguing that the former is dependent on the latter. It is this prioritization that is the real source of difficulty. Indeed, it seems that in Heidegger we can discern a sequence of prioritizations and dependence relations: the spatiality of “involvement” is prioritized, in the being of being-there, over the spatiality of “containment”; within the structure of the spatiality of involvement, analyzed into equipmental and existential spatiality, the existential is prioritized over the equipmental; and finally, as we shall see in more detail shortly, Heidegger argues for the prioritization of temporality even with respect to existential spatiality, and, within the structure of temporality, for the prioritization of what he calls “originary temporality” over other such modes.72
The overall priority of temporality is already indicated by Heidegger’s comment at the very beginning of Being and Time that the aim of the work is to interpret time as the horizon for being, but Heidegger also attempts to provide a specific argument for the supposedly “derivative” character of spatiality, including existential spatiality, in relation to temporality. The need for such an argument arises out of Heidegger’s explicit recognition that the emergence of a mode of spatiality, “existential spatiality”, as indeed belonging to being-there as such, and so appearing as a basic attribute of being-there, threatens to limit the existential-temporal analysis that is Heidegger’s aim, such that “this entity which we call ‘Dasein,’ must be considered as ‘temporal’ and ‘spatial’ co-ordinately.”73 The specific argument that Heidegger provides for the prioritization of temporality over spatiality in section 70 is brief and highly condensed. Yet, in essence, it follows the same general line of argument that runs throughout Being and Time and that is particularly evident in the way Heidegger analyses the “involvement” of being-there in its world through the idea of care and his explication of the meaning of care itself in temporality: only temporality can provide the necessary unity and directionality that allows things, persons, places, and spaces to appear as significant, as meaningful, as mattering to us. Understanding the supposedly derivative (that is the “founded”) character of spatiality within the structure of Being and Time thus requires that we give some attention to care and its analysis in terms of temporality; more generally, however, it requires that we examine more closely the way in which temporality is given priority over the various elements within the structure of being-there, including spatiality, and the way Heidegger understands the notion of priority (and the associated concept of “derivation” or “foundation”) as such.
In the accounts of equipmental and existential spatiality, and of beingwith-others, Heidegger provides an analysis of both the “where” and the “who” of being-there. Moreover, as we have seen in the discussion above, these two aspects are connected since the way in which being-there with others is tied up with the way it encounters things, places, and regions in the space of the world. Nevertheless, the spatiality of the world and the spatiality that is proper to being-there is not the spatiality merely of the objective, the measurable, or the extended, but is rather tied to the ordering that comes from task and activity. Yet understanding the “where” and the “who” of being-there does not mean, according to Heidegger, that we have thereby arrived at a fundamental understanding of the “how” of being-there’s being-in. The structures that determine being-there as “there,” such that the world, both as a world of spatially ordered things and places and a world of others, can emerge into view, still need to be exhibited. The way in which being-there is there in its world, in its there, is what Heidegger refers to as “care” (Sorge). In the analysis of care (which encompasses, not only the section specifically titled “Care as the Being of Dasein,” division 1, chapter 6, secs. 39-44, but also the preceding discussion in chapter 5, secs. 28-43), Heidegger provides what he regards as the real articulation of the sense of “being-in” as involvement that was already presaged in the initial discussion of “being-in” in terms of “dwelling” and of dwelling as connoting familiarity and a sense of “looking after” or “taking care.”
Given that the analysis of care is supposed to provide an account, in fundamental existential-ontological terms, of the structure of involvement, and thus of the “there” of being-there, so that account must be of special significance for the inquiry into the topological character of Heidegger’s thinking. Indeed, when one looks to the discussion of care with a topologically oriented gaze, one soon notices (as is the case throughout so much of Being and Time) the way in which ideas and images of space and place emerge in important ways throughout that discussion. Indeed, the way in which the issues at stake here are introduced is specifically in terms of a set of topological notions associated with the idea of the “there.” Thus Heidegger writes that:
The entity which is essentially constituted by Being-in-the-world is itself in every case its “there.” According to a familiar signification of the word, the “there” points to a “here” and a “yonder.” . . . “Here” and “yonder” are possible only in a “there”— that is to say, only if there is an entity which has made a disclosure of spatiality as the Being of the “there.” This entity carries in its ownmost Being the character of not being closed off. By reason of this disclosedness, this entity [Dasein], together with the Being-there [Da-sein] of the world, is “there” for itself. . . . By its very nature Dasein brings its “there” along with it. If it lacks its “there,” it is not factically the entity which is essentially Dasein; indeed, it is not this entity at all. Dasein is its disclosedness.74
This passage makes clear the focus of the Heideggerian problematic on the “there,” but it also highlights the way in which spatiality remains at issue in the discussion of the “there”—the “there” is the disclosure of a form of spatiality. The way in which spatiality appears here (and reappears throughout the discussion of the various structural elements at issue) is indicative of the fact that if Heidegger is indeed to arrive at a purely temporal interpretation of the “there,” and even after the analysis of the “there” in terms of the structure of care, he will still need to deal with the apparent residue of spatiality that seems to be inextricably a part of it. Indeed, it is his explicit acknowledgment of this point in section 70 that leads to his attempt to demonstrate the derivative character of spatiality.
What is at issue in the discussion of care is thus the unity of being-there in its “there.” In exhibiting that unity, being-there is also itself exhibited (in division 1, chapter 6, sec. 44) as essentially “disclosedness” or “revealedness” (Erschlossenheit): “disclosedness is that basic character of Dasein according to which it is its ‘there.’ Disclosedness is constituted by state-ofmind [affectedness], understanding, and discourse, and pertains equiprimordially to the world, to Being-in, and to the Self.”75 We may say that being-there is that mode of situatedness that allows things, places, and persons to be uncovered as what they are, and, as such, being-there is also shown to stand in an essential relation to truth, understood, in what Heidegger claims is the most primordial sense, as just such “uncoveredness” or “unconcealedness” (Entdecktheit, Unverborgenheit).76 Significantly, exhibiting the character of being-there as a mode of disclosedness does not depend on the specific details of Heidegger’s analysis of the unity of beingthere in terms of care. In this respect, the fact that the discussion of disclosedness appears at the conclusion of the discussion of care is indicative only of the way disclosedness is tied to the unity of being-there. Indeed, in the development of Heidegger’s thinking after Being and Time, the concept of disclosedness comes to occupy a central role, although the way in which it is articulated calls upon a somewhat different framework and employs a rather different vocabulary than that set out in the analysis of the care structure in Being and Time.
The idea of the unity of being-there as fundamentally constituted in terms of care as such is not made explicit by Heidegger until after the completion (in division 1, chapter 5) of the analysis of the elements that make up the “there” and that are referred to, with one exception, in the passage just quoted. Nevertheless, care is not something in addition to those elements, but is rather that which is articulated through them. As the two primary elements in the structure of care, “understanding” (Verstehen) and “affectedness” (Befindlichkeit—translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as “state-of-mind” and by Stambaugh as “attunement”) together constitute the basic structure of the “there.”77 Understanding refers to the way in which the being of being-there is always given in terms of being-there’s “projecting” (Entwurf) of its potentialities for being,78 and as such understanding must itself be seen as having a certain priority within the structure of being-there’s being since it is at the heart of the idea of “existence”—for being-there to exist is just for it to understand itself in terms of its possibilities for being.79 Understanding is always accompanied by a mode of affectedness. Affectedness, which is also linked to the notion of “mood” or “attunement” (Stimmung), refers to being-there’s finding itself already situated in the world in some determinate way.80 It is in terms of the notion of affectedness that the concept of facticity makes its appearance in the framework of Being and Time. Understanding and affectedness are linked in that every projecting of possibility always arises on the basis of a situation in which being-there already finds itself in some determinate way. The structure of the “there” is given articulation through what Heidegger calls “discourse” (Rede)—discourse is that by which the world is differentiated, and the elements so differentiated are interrelated (hammers distinguished from nails, nails seen in terms of the way they can be used to fix timber, timber seen as cuts of oak, beech, or whatever). Although the discursive articulation of the world is not something that pertains only to linguistic items—discourse is the articulation of the world as such81—it is in language that discourse gets expressed.82 There is also a fourth element here, falling (Verfallen), although it sometimes seems to stand in a somewhat equivocal relation to the other three and is noticeably absent from the list that appears in Heidegger’s characterization of disclosedness I quoted above.83 “Falling” names being-there’s inevitable proneness to understanding itself inauthentically—in terms, for instance, of the anonymous “they.” This complex of elements taken together is what Heidegger calls “care” and which manifests itself in relation to things as “concern,” “Besorge,” and to others as “solicitude,” “Fürsorge.”84 “Care” is thus the name Heidegger gives to the structure of being-in-the-world understood as unified through the idea of being-there as that very being whose being matters to it—about which it cares.
In this latter respect, the account of being-there in terms of care returns us directly to Heidegger’s initial characterization of being-there as that entity for which, “in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it.”85 Already, in that initial introduction of being-there, Heidegger says of being-there that it “always understands itself in terms of its existence—in terms of a possibility of itself.”86 In the discussion of care, Heidegger explicates the way in which being-there’s being is an issue for it in terms of the way in which being-there is always “ahead of itself”:
Dasein is an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue. The phrase “is an issue” has been made plain in the state-of-being of understanding—of understanding as self-projective Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. This potentiality is that for the sake of which any Dasein is as it is. In each case Dasein has already compared itself, in its Being, with a possibility of itself . . . ontologically, Being towards one’s ownmost potentiality-for-Being means that in each case Dasein is already ahead of itself in its Being. Dasein is always “beyond itself,” not as a way of behaving towards other entities which it is not, but as Being for the potentialityfor-Being which it is itself. This structure, which belongs to the essential “is an issue,” we shall denote as Dasein’s “Being-ahead-of-itself.”87
Being there thus understands itself in terms of the projecting (Entwurf) of its own potentialities for being, and such “projecting” is at the heart of the idea of “understanding” as part of being-there’s existential constitution. But this projecting, this “being-ahead-of-itself,” is also an “already-beingin-the-world” (being-there’s factical situatedness in which the world presents itself through affectedness) and a “being-amidst” (being-there’s situatedness within the equipmental articulation of the public world). The single unitary structure of care, and of the being of being-there, is thus summarized as “ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within the world)”88—and it is noteworthy that, even in this summary characterization of care, we continue to find (in the “in” and the “alongside”) connotations of space and place. Although the character of being-there as projecting understanding has a certain priority in the structure of care, understanding cannot be separated from the way being-there already finds itself in terms of its “affectedness,” as well as from the way its existence is structured in terms of discourse, and from its own tendency to falling. Yet the unity of care that is at issue here is not fully exhibited simply in the analysis of understanding, affectedness, discourse, and falling, for the question is how these elements are nevertheless unified as such. Care is the “formal existential totality of Dasein’s ontological structural whole,”89 but in what does the unity of this totality consist?
The answer, of course, is that the unity of care is to be found in temporality,90 and the entire complex structure of care, and so also of the “there” and of “disclosedness,” can thus be viewed as the articulation of beingthere’s fundamentally temporal mode of being (Heidegger’s argument for this is complex and takes up most of division 2, especially chapters 1-4, sections 46-71). Crucial to the relation between care and temporality is the idea of care as an articulation of the being of being-there as essentially constituted in terms of being-there’s own projective understanding of itself— its “being-ahead-of-itself.” Being-there understands itself primarily in terms of what it can be, but is not yet. Already, then, in the very character of being-there’s projective understanding, there is an obviously temporal orientation—one that is significantly futural. Yet in being “ahead-of-itself” in this way, being-there comes up against the possibility of its own end, namely, its own death. Yet death is not simply a possibility like others, it is that which constitutes the limit of being-there as such and so the possibility that is the limit of all being-there’s possibilities. Moreover, death is being-there’s “ownmost” possibility in the sense that being-there’s death belongs to it alone—no one else can die our death for us. Heidegger thus characterizes being-there as “being-toward-death” (Sein zum Tode). Death is not, however, some event that still has to happen to being-there and to which being-there stands in a relation—it belongs to the very being of being-there, it is the “ownmost, nonrelational possibility” of being-there that cannot be outstripped.91 The way in which being-there understands itself as being-toward-death Heidegger calls “anticipation.” In anticipation (which is also associated with the mode of affectedness proper to it, namely, anxiety), being-there is forced to face up to the fact of its own being as belonging to it and thus to recognize the way in which it is already given over to a certain set of possibilities (the way it is itself “thrown”) that it must take up as its own (for which it is itself responsible or “guilty”). The entire structure is one that Heidegger refers to as “anticipatory resoluteness,” and it is in such resoluteness that being-there is itself disclosed in the determinacy and possibility of its “there” as articulated in its own particular “situation.”92
The structure of anticipatory resoluteness underpins the structure of care—the way in which being-there’s being is at issue for it is through anticipatory resoluteness, through the way in which its possibilities are shown as its own through its being-toward-death—but the structure of anticipatory resoluteness is also fundamentally temporal. In anticipating its “ownmost, distinctive possibility,” as being-toward-death, anticipatory resoluteness lets that possibility “come toward it” (zukommen) and as such is essentially futural (the German word for “future” is “Zukunft,” which Heidegger hyphenates as “Zu-kunft” to indicate the connection with “zukommen.”)93 Yet in understanding itself as already given over to certain determinate possibilities—it is constituted by “affectedness” and so also as “thrown”—and in taking up those possibilities as its own, being-there understands itself in terms of “having-been” (Gewesen) and so in terms of the past.94 Of course, since “having-been” depends on being-there’s grasp of itself in its possibilities, and so in terms of itself as “coming toward,” so Heidegger writes that “‘having been’ arises, in a certain way, from the future.”95 As disclosive, anticipatory resoluteness allows the disclosure of being-there’s own “situation” in such a way that being-there can be concerned with what is around it environmentally and so can act upon what is present to it. In this way, anticipatory resoluteness also makes things present and, in so doing, constitutes the present (Gegenwart).96 Falling is not omitted from this structure since falling finds its own basis in “making present.”97 Thus, writes Heidegger, “Temporality makes possible the unity of existence, facticity, and falling, and in this way constitutes primordially the totality of the structure of care.”98
It is notable that the temporality that is at issue here, what Heidegger calls “originary temporality” (ursprüngliche Zeitlichkeit), and which is unified in terms of the “temporalizing” of temporality in the three “ecstases” of the future, the “having been,” and the present, is not itself a structure that is temporal in the usual sense. Although the three ecstases carry within them notions of “before” and “after” (this is important since it is out of the unity of the ecstases, that is, out of originary temporality, that Heidegger derives the “ordinary” temporality that understands temporality as the succession of past, present, and future), they are not themselves successive: “Temporalizing does not signify that ecstases come in a ‘succession.’ The future is not later than having been, and having been is not earlier than the present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in the process of having been.”99 To understand the ecstases as indeed successive would be to treat care as something occurring “in time” and being-there as something present-at-hand.100 Originary temporality is thus a more fundamental sense of temporality than is given in the notion of temporal succession, which means that temporal succession must indeed be a derivative of originary temporality. Originary temporality is that in which the entire structure of care and the “there”—the entire structure of “situatedness”—has its proper unity and “ground.”
In essence, originary temporality is, as the meaning of care, the meaning of disclosedness—that which makes disclosedeness possible as its origin and unity. But in this respect, the character of originary temporality is directly tied to its character as the meaning of the “there”—as the meaning, we might say, of situatedness. This is something also indicated by the way the concept of “situation” emerges in the discussion of anticipatory resoluteness, but it comes out too in Heidegger’s emphasis on the way in which authentic temporality is essentially finite.101 The originary future does not extend endlessly ahead of us, but is rather, as Heidegger says, “closed off”102 inasmuch as it is always turned in toward “having been” and “making present” (in this it also reflects the character of being-towarddeath as not a relating to some event in the future, but an essential feature of our being as such). The finitude of originary temporality is, in this respect, directly tied to the way in which originary temporality is the opening up, the “making possible,” of the “there” of being-there—as such it is constitutive of the “there.” The “there” is an essentially topological concept, as are the notions of “situation” and situatedness also, and so we may say that, in the account of originary temporality as the meaning of care, Heidegger presents an understanding, an “interpretation,” of place as time. Yet acknowledging the finitude of originary temporality itself and its character as constitutive of the “there,” we may also say that originary temporality itself constitutes a certain “there,” a certain topos, a certain “place”—one might thus also say that, in the account of temporality as the meaning of care, Heidegger provides an understanding of time as “place.” Significantly, while Heidegger never comes close to saying that in Being and Time, this is almost exactly the reading he himself gives some fifteen years later. In his lectures on Parmenides in the winter semester of 1942-1943, he tells us that:
In Being and Time, time is experienced and named as fore-word for the word “of” Being. . . . “Time” understood in the Greek manner, χρóυος [chronos], corresponds in essence to τóΠος [topos], which we erroneously translate as “space.” TóΠος is place [Ort], and specifically that place to which something appertains, for example, fire and flame and air up, water and earth below. Just as τóΠος orders the appurtenance of a being to its dwelling place, so χρóυος regulates the appurtenance of the appearing and disappearing to their destined “then” and “where.” Therefore time is called µαχρóς [machros], “broad,” in view of its capacity, indeterminable by man and always given the stamp of the current time, to release beings into appearance or hold them back.103
In juxtaposing time with place here, what is raised is the question as to whether time can itself properly function as that which provides the meaning of place, or whether, perhaps, the understanding of time that is at issue in the articulation of the “there,” with all its associations to care, disclosedness, and situation, does not itself already draw upon a notion of place or of topos. Indeed, I would suggest that it is precisely this problem that underlies Heidegger’s difficulties with the role of spatiality in the structure of being-there and the constant intrusion of spatial ideas and images into the analysis of that structure. We must, then, go back to the discussion of spatiality, and to Heidegger’s attempted derivation of existential spatiality from originary temporality.
If Heidegger’s account of the unity of care, and so also of disclosedness and the “there,” in temporality is to be successful, then it is necessary, as I noted above, that the entire structure at issue be shown to be unified in this way—there must be no “residual” element that falls outside of the unifying power of time. This means that what we may call “ordinary” temporality, the temporality associated with being-there’s ordinary experience of time in terms of the passing of time and of temporal succession, must be shown to derive from originary temporality.104 Indeed, Heidegger argues that it can be so derived, and he attempts to show how time as ordinarily understood, namely, as a series of “present moments,” a series of “nows,” can itself be seen as arising from the character of originary temporality as the unity of coming-toward, having been, and making present, and, more particularly, from the “leveling down” of that structure into a series of sequential elements that essentially gives priority to “making present” (and thereby treats the past and future as merely the present that is gone by and the present that is to come).105 The analysis of the derivation of ordinary temporality from originary temporality is the focus of the very final chapter of Being and Time in its published form (division 2, chapter 6, secs. 78-82),106 and clearly it occupies an important place in the overall analysis. Yet it is not only ordinary temporality that must be shown to be a derivative of originary temporality if the analysis attempted in Being and Time—namely the interpretation of being as time—is to be successful; since Heidegger acknowledges that spatiality is itself a feature of being-there’s mode of being, so too must spatiality also be shown to be so derived.
Heidegger explicitly addresses the issue concerning spatiality in one brief and highly condensed section (sec. 70), titled “The Temporality of the Spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein” (Die Zeitlichkeit der daseinsmäßigen Räumlichkeit), close to the very end of the discussion, in division 2, chapter 4, in which he sets out the temporal interpretation of the various elements of the care structure and of being-in-the-world as a whole. There he notes that:
Though the expression “temporality” does not signify what one understands by “time” when one talks about “space and time,” nevertheless spatiality seems to make up another basic attribute of Dasein corresponding to temporality. Thus with Dasein’s spatiality, existential-temporal analysis seems to come to a limit, so that this entity which we call “Dasein,” must be considered as “temporal” “and also” as spatial co-ordinately. Has our existential-temporal analysis of Dasein thus been brought to a halt by that phenomenon with which we have become acquainted as the spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein, and which we have pointed out as belonging to Being-in-the-world?107
In response to this possibility, Heidegger reiterates the point that what is at issue is not whether or not being-there exists “in” space or even “in” time. Being-there is not to be understood in the manner of some presentat-hand entity. Being-there is “in” the world through its involvement, and such involvement has to be understood in terms of what Heidegger terms “care.”
Existential spatiality is thus to be derived from the structure of care, and thence from temporality. Such “derivation,” which is, of course, a form of “grounding,” has a particular character, however, and so Heidegger notes that although “Dasein’s specific spatiality must be grounded in temporality [in der Zeitlichkeit gründen],” nevertheless “the demonstration that this spatiality is existentially possible only through temporality, cannot aim either at deducing [deduzieren] space from time or at dissolving it into pure time.”108 “Grounding,” or the derivation that comes from “grounding,” as it applies to spatiality cannot be the same as “deduction” or “dissolution into,” and by this is meant, presumably, that the grounding at issue is not a matter of the “reduction” of space to time (much the same point arose in Heidegger’s comments on the notion of “analytic” to which I referred in sec. 2.4 above).109 Grounding spatiality in temporality is, according to Heidegger, a matter of showing that spatiality is existentially possible only through temporality (“daß diese Räumlichkeit existenzial nur durch die Zeitlichkeit möglich ist”).110 The reference to “existential” here has a specific sense in the language of Being and Time. It refers to the way in which beingthere’s being is determined by understanding and so by the potentialities for being that belong to it. Indeed, although Heidegger does not put matters thus here, talk of “existential possibility” is elsewhere taken to be what is involved in the idea of “meaning”—in which case the derivation of spatiality from temporality would also mean exhibiting temporality as the “meaning” of time. This is a point to which we shall return.
The derivative character of spatiality is, as Heidegger puts it, “indicated briefly” as follows:
Dasein’s making room for itself is constituted by directionality [orientation] and deseverance [dis-tance]. How is anything of this sort existentially possible on the basis of Dasein’s temporality? . . . To Dasein’s making room for itself belongs the selfdirective discovery of something like a region. By this expression what we have in mind in the first instance is the “whither” for the possible belonging-somewhere of equipment which is ready to hand environmentally and which can be placed. Whenever one comes across equipment, handles it, or moves it around or out of the way, some region has already been discovered. Concernful being-in-the-world is directional—self-directive. Belonging-somewhere has an essential relationship to involvement. It always Determines itself factically in terms of the involvementcontext of the equipment with which one concerns oneself. Relationships of involvement are intelligible only within the horizon of a world that has already been disclosed. Their horizonal character, moreover, is what first makes possible the specific horizon of the “whither” of belonging-somewhere regionally. The selfdirective discovery of a region is grounded in an ecstatically retentive awaiting of the “hither” and “thither” that are possible. Making room for oneself is a directional awaiting of a region, and as such it is equiprimordially a bringing-close (desevering) of the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand. Out of the region that has been discovered beforehand, concern comes back deseverently to that which is closest. Both bringing-close and the estimating and measurement of distances within that which has been de-severed and is present-at-hand within-the-world, are grounded in a making-present belonging to the unity of that temporality in which directionality too becomes possible. . . . Only on the basis of its ecstatic-horizonal temporality is it possible for Dasein to break into space.111
The argument here proceeds, first, on the basis of an assertion of the dependence of equipmental spatiality (being-there’s “making room” for itself in the discovery of a region, and the relation and placement of equipment within that region) on existential spatiality (orientation and dis-tance). But it is then argued that the directionality that belongs to existential spatiality itself depends on the unitary structure of temporality that is constitutive of a world. It is temporality that provides what might be termed the “teleological” horizon within which being-there is able to relate itself to specific entities as near and far and to orient itself to the regional ordering of equipment. Moreover, the spatiality of “nearness” (“bringing close”) as well as of measurable distance are both made possible through the way in which presence is temporally determined.
The idea that the “directionality” belonging to existential spatiality arises out of temporality follows almost directly from the temporal analysis of the care-structure: the being of being-there is determined by its possibilities for being as given in understanding, which are themselves disclosed to being-there through its being already disposed toward the world in affectedness, and on the basis of which being-there finds itself amidst things and persons in the world; this structure is itself unified as the structure of the coming-toward (future), having been (past), and making present (present); temporality is thus that which determines being-there in its there, and which allows being-there to find itself in space inasmuch as temporality brings with it a fundamental directness and orientation that is based in its own orientation toward its possibilities for being (existence) as these are already given to it (its facticity) and as they are articulated in the world that surrounds it (as articulated in discourse and as prone to falling). In the simplest terms possible, one might say that Heidegger’s argument for the derivative character of spatiality is based in the idea that orientation is first and foremost a matter of being oriented toward that which one can be—toward a possibility of one’s own—which is always an orientation that calls upon temporality. Thus I orient myself spatially in the workshop through grasping the structure of the workshop in terms of its “towardwhich” as that which is meaningful to me112—in terms of what each tool is for, and in terms of the end that the workshop as a whole serves (being-a-carpenter, being-a-metalworker, being-a-“do-it-yourselfer,” or whatever)—and this orientation is, in Heidegger’s terms, fundamentally temporal (though not in the sense associated with “succession”) through being always directed toward what can be, but is not yet (and so is indeed “teleological”). If I lack the necessary orientation such that I cannot grasp the structure of the workshop, then neither can I pick out particular items within the workshop in ways appropriate to those items, nor can I orient myself properly to the workshop as a whole.
The idea that is at issue here can be summarized as the claim that spatial orientation is impossible without temporal orientation. Joseph Fell puts this point succinctly, although in a way that also indicates the way place, and not merely space, is implicated, when he writes that “Dasein is a locale within which beings are revealed and identified. This locale is fundamentally temporal. . . . Dasein is place and place is orientation.”113 Although the claim that orientation is dependent on time will turn out to be insufficient to establish the derivative character of space in the way Heidegger claims, it is nevertheless an idea that is, in itself, eminently plausible. Indeed, elsewhere I have argued that the structure of space and place necessarily implicates time through consideration, in the simplest and most basic case, of the character of the dimensionality that belongs to space as itself opened up as dimensional through movement.114 The necessary connection between space, place, and time is a theme to which I shall return, but here, of course, Heidegger is not merely asserting that space requires temporality, since this could be so, and yet time might require spatiality also, and if that were to be the case, then the project of Being and Time would be compromised just as surely as if spatiality were independent of time. Heidegger is committed to arguing that spatiality is dependent on originary temporality, and so a “derivative” of it, without it being the case that originary temporality is similarly dependent on spatiality. The same point applies, of course, to all of the claims regarding derivation that appear throughout Being and Time. In every case, the derivation or dependence at issue must be asymmetrical—it must always lead us back to the unity of originary temporality, and only there. Thus William Blattner makes a very similar point to mine regarding the necessary asymmetrical character of derivation in relation to Heidegger’s argument concerning the derivation of ordinary from originary temporality, distinguishing between two senses of derivation or dependence, namely, “simple dependence” in which two elements or structures mutually depend upon one another, and a form of asymmetrical or hierarchical dependence in which one element or structure explains the other.115 A question thus emerges here about the nature of derivation in Being and Time, in relation both to the derivative status accorded to spatiality, in particular, and to the argument of Being and Time as a whole. Before we go on to consider the adequacy of Heidegger’s argument for the derivative character of existential spatiality, it will thus be useful to investigate the concept of derivation itself.
Although some form of derivation does indeed play an important role in Being and Time, Heidegger nowhere offers a clear and explicit statement of what it is to derive one thing from another, and he refers to the structure whereby one thing is “grounded” in another on the basis of an exhibition of its “conditions of possibility” in terms that remain somewhat obscure.116 In this respect, the idea of “ground” that we saw is so central to Heidegger’s thinking, and is indeed central to Being and Time, is nevertheless also an idea that Heidegger does not articulate in any especially clear fashion. There is, moreover, no single term that Heidegger employs here: at various points he talks about one thing being “primary” (primäre), of having “precedence” or “priority” (Vorrang—literally, “fore-rank”) in relation to another; of one thing being “derived from” (abgeleitet), “descended-from” (abkünftig), “arising out of” (entspringt aus) another; of one thing being “founded” (fundiert), or “grounded” (gegründet) in another; of one thing being “only possible through” (nur möglich durch) another; or of one thing being “constituted” (konstituiert) by or in relation to something else (and this list is by no means exhaustive). In the discussion of the derivative character of spatiality, Heidegger talks specifically of temporality as the foundation (Fundierung) and ground (Grund) for spatiality, as well as of spatiality as “existentially possible” only though temporality.117
Nevertheless, in spite of the lack of any explicit attention on Heidegger’s part to distinguishing between these terms, it does seem as if some distinctions can be made. This is most obviously so in respect of the notion of “primacy” or “priority.” While that from which something is derived, or in which it is “founded,” will itself be “prior” or “primary” in respect of that which is so “derived” or “founded,” not all cases of primacy will involve derivation or foundation. Thus, the future is primary with respect to the other temporal ecstases within the structure of originary temporality,118 and so too is understanding prior within the structure of care, it is not the case that any relation of derivation or foundation applies—having been and making present are not derivable or founded in the coming toward, and affectedness, discourse, and falling are not derived from or founded in understanding. Talk specifically of “derivation” (as associated with “ableiten”), or “descent-from” (abkünftig) is also less common in Being and Time than, for instance, talk of “grounding” or “foundation,” and is used specifically in reference to the relation between modes of time as they are “derivatives of” originary temporality.119 This might be a reason to suppose that the notion of “derivation” (inasmuch as this is more closely tied to terms such as “ableiten” and “abkünftig”) is itself a more restricted notion, as used in Being and Time, than that of “grounding” or “foundation,” even though it may be viewed as a form of “grounding” or “foundation.”120 Although there is nothing explicit to confirm this from Heidegger himself, the latter view might seem to be supported by the need, already noted above, for derivation as it operates in Being and Time to be hierarchical in character since this seems to be indicative of a specific form of grounding or foundation. Indeed, in spite of Heidegger’s lack of attention to the matter, we can discern a number of distinctions that are relevant to understanding the nature of derivation and foundation both in general and as they apply in Being and Time in particular.
If we think of “derivation” and “foundation” as entailing forms of dependence between certain entities or structures (and there will be many different types of dependence that fall within these general forms—causal, explanatory, and so on), then we can immediately distinguish, along the lines suggested above, between dependence that is mutual or “reciprocal” (Blattner’s “simple” dependence) and dependence that is asymmetrical or hierarchical. The hermeneutic circle, which I used in chapter 1 to illustrate the idea of unity that is at issue in much of Heidegger’s thinking, also exemplifies the first of these forms of dependence. In its simplest formulation, in terms of the relation between whole and parts as these figure within textual interpretation, the understanding of a text as a whole depends on understanding each part of the text, while the understanding of each part of the text depends on the understanding of the whole. In the hermeneutic circle, then, we find a relation of mutual dependence between the whole and the parts—in addition, since understanding each of the parts is necessary for understanding the whole, and since understanding each of the parts is dependent on that holistic understanding, so we also have a relation of mutual dependence between the parts (the understanding of each part of the text is, indirectly, dependent on understanding every other part).121 Perhaps the clearest example of hierarchical dependence, by contrast, is that of simple causal dependence. If the icing-up of the road causes the car to crash, then the relation between the two events that are the icing-up and the crashing can be seen as hierarchically related to one another—the crashing of the car is dependent on the icing-up of the road, but the icing-up of the road is not dependent on the crashing of the car. This example also indicates the way in which explanation often (though not always) involves relations of hierarchical dependence. Thus I may explain my purchase of a new computer by my need to have a better machine on which to carry out my research, but my purchase of a new computer does not, as such, explain my need to carry out research (which is not to say that we cannot imagine a case in which it did, but only that in this hypothetical case it does not).
One might try to explicate the relations of mutual and hierarchical dependence using the notion of necessary conditionality: if X is hierarchically dependent on Y, then Y will be necessary for X, but X will not be necessary for Y; if X is mutually dependent on Y, then X will be necessary for Y, and Y will also be necessary for X. In the case of the mutual dependence of parts on whole in the hermeneutic circle, then, the understanding of the parts is necessary for understanding the whole, and the understanding of the whole is necessary for understanding the parts; in the case of the hierarchical dependence exemplified in the causal relation between particular events, the one event, the icing-up of the road, is a necessary condition for the other event, the crashing of the car (notice that the relation of necessary conditionality is applied here only to those particular events). This may look like a simple and obvious way to characterize the two forms of dependence, but, in fact, it does very little to clarify matters and may actually lead to confusion. Indeed, one can already see difficulties beginning to emerge when one tries to extend the analysis to the explanatory example used above.
My need to do research may explain my computer purchase, but it does not do so through being a necessary condition for it (at least not without circumscribing the description of that purchase in some particular way)— given certain background conditions, my need to do research is the sufficient condition for my purchase of the computer. Perhaps, then, we need only to bring a notion of sufficient conditionality into the analysis. Certainly, the nature of conditionality is such that, if X is necessary for Y, then Y will also be sufficient for X, and, consequently, we can view the idea of mutual dependence as already including a notion of sufficiency within it. The situation is less simple, however, when it comes to hierarchical dependence. Although Heidegger seems to view the hierarchical dependence that is involved in his account as very much like the hierarchical dependence involved in teleological explanation of the sort illustrated by the example of the computer purchase (indeed Blattner terms his version of hierarchical dependence “explanatory dependence”), its characterization in terms of sufficient conditionality alone is problematic since Heidegger aims to exhibit a certain uniqueness in the dependence of the structure of beingthere on temporality—temporality is unique in being that on which beingthere is grounded, and so, whether or not it is sufficient, it is certainly necessary for being-there. We might be tempted, then, to characterize hierarchical dependence as applying only in those cases where one element is both a necessary and sufficient condition for another (thereby ruling out as hierarchical cases of explanatory dependence such as that used above). In such a case, however, the elements that are supposedly related as hierarchically dependent, one on the other, will always be found in combination, and so any attempt to exhibit such dependence will itself crucially depend on finding a way to distinguish between the elements that picks out the right sort of conditionality such that it will indeed yield the hierarchical dependence that is in question. Talk of conditionality as such, then, or of necessity and sufficiency, will be much less important than getting clear on the exact respect in which conditionality is supposed to hold, and, as we shall see, this is certainly true of the way Heidegger approaches matters in Being and Time.
The distinction between mutual and hierarchical dependence is evident in the existing Heideggerian literature—for instance, it is a distinction whose essential form is noted, as we saw above, by William Blattner. Moreover, there is also a form of mutual dependence that Heidegger himself makes explicit in Being and Time and that has already appeared in some of the passages quoted from Heidegger in the discussion so far, namely, the notion of “equiprimordiality” or “equioriginality” (Gleichursprünglichkeit— I will use the term “equiprimordiality” since this is the translation established by Macquarrie and Robinson).122 Although the idea occurs at many points throughout Being and Time (the index to Being and Time compiled by Hildegard Feick lists thirty occurrences),123 Heidegger gives only one brief discussion of the notion as such. He writes:
If we inquire about Being-in as our theme, we cannot indeed consent to nullify the primordial character of this phenomenon by deriving [Ableitung] it from others— that is to say, by an inappropriate analysis, in the sense of a dissolving or a breaking up. But the fact that something primordial is underivable [Unableitbarkeit] does not rule out the possibility that a multiplicity of characteristics may be constitutive for it. The phenomenon of the equiprimordiality [Ursprünglichkeit] of constitutive items has often been disregarded in ontology, because of a methodological tendency to derive everything and anything from some simply “primal ground.”124
Here what is at issue is the fact that “being-in” may be analyzed in terms of certain elements that are constitutive for it without those elements being taken as somehow more primordial or originary than “being-in” as such and without any suggestion that those elements are themselves to be viewed as more or less primordial in relation to each other. Elsewhere Heidegger uses “equiprimordiality” to describe the relation between, for instance, being-there’s self-understanding of its own being and its understanding of being other than its own,125 between “freeing a totality of involvements” and “letting something be involved at a region,”126 between being-in-the-world, being-with, and “Dasein-with,”127 and also, significantly, between the three ecstases of temporality. What these various uses indicate is that, at least as Heidegger sees it, the equiprimordiality of certain elements does not imply anything about whether the structure that they comprise is dependent, as a whole, on something else (“freeing a totality of involvements” and “letting something be involved at a region” may be equiprimordial, but they both seem to be dependent, according to Being and Time, on temporality, while there is nothing more primordial than the unity of the three ecstases of temporality).128 Initially, then, if we are to keep to Heidegger’s presentation, the equiprimordiality of the elements that are constitutive of a structure must instead be understood in terms of the way those elements, taken only in respect to one another, are equally basic to that structure—are equally primordial or originary in their relatedness.
The holding of such mutual dependence seems to apply to each of the structures that is exhibited at each stage of Heidegger’s analysis of beingthere. It certainly applies to the structure of care and to the structure of originary temporality. The equiprimordiality of constitutive elements does not, however, rule out the possibility that there may nevertheless exist some form of priority between those elements, and this is clearly exemplified with respect to the ecstases of temporality.129 The future, having been, and the present each seem to depend upon one another, and the entire structure of originary temporality is constituted in terms of their interrelation, and yet, as I noted above, the first of these elements, the future, is clearly prior in relation to the others. As Heidegger writes:
The future has a priority [eine Vorrang hat] in the ecstatical unity of primordial and authentic [ursprünglichen und eigentlichen] temporality . . . temporality does not first arise through a cumulative sequence of the ecstases, but in each case temporalizes itself in their equiprimordiality [Gleichursprünglichkeit]. But within this equiprimordiality, the modes of temporalizing are different. . . . The primary phenomenon [primäre Phänomen] of primordial and authentic temporality is the future. The priority of the future will vary according to the ways in which the temporalizing of inauthentic temporality itself is modified, but it will still come to the fore [zum Vorschein kommen] even in the derivative [abkünftigen] kind of “time.”130
This passage is noteworthy, not only because of what it shows about the relation of equiprimordiality, but in confirming the point, already made above, that priority need not imply derivation—the priority of the future does not mean that the other ecstases are somehow derived from it. Yet at the same time as he asserts the ordered, and yet underived, character of the elements of originary temporality, Heidegger also refers to another “time” that is derived from such originary temporality. The relation between “derivative” time, which it seems must refer to “ordinary” temporality, and originary temporality would seem to be a relation of dependence, yet it seems clear that it must be a relation of hierarchical, rather than mutual, dependence. Indeed, in general it would seem, given Heidegger’s stated intention of advancing a temporal “interpretation” of being-there, that although the “internal” relation between the elements of the various structures that are exhibited in the course of Heidegger’s analysis, from existential spatiality through to originary temporality, is one of mutual dependence (expressed by Heidegger in terms of “equiprimordiality”), the relation between those structures as such is one of hierarchical dependence. The picture one gets, then, is a series of structures made up of mutually dependent elements, each structure being, in turn, hierarchically dependent on another such structure, until the analysis finally arrives at originary temporality.
One of the key questions here must be whether such a combination of mutual and hierarchical dependence is actually consistent—whether Heidegger is right to suppose that a structure of mutually dependent, that is, equiprimordial, elements can stand in a relation of hierarchical dependence to another structure. Before moving on to this question, however, which will also involve closer examination of the way in which Heidegger himself understands the hierarchical dependence at issue here, it is worth clarifying the relation between the notions of mutual and hierarchical dependence, and the ideas of derivation and grounding (or “foundation”). Although there is a sense in which mutual dependence will allow for a sense of derivation, in that any element will be able to be “derived” from the other elements, it is probably more useful to distinguish between the sense of “derivation” that applies here and what is surely the stronger sense of derivation that seems to apply in the case of hierarchical dependence (a difference that is reflected in talk of elements as “derivative”—a way of speaking that does not seem appropriate to apply to elements that are mutually, rather than hierarchically dependent). This seems all the more important if we are to maintain a distinction between the sense of “dependence,” but surely not “derivation,” that it seems must obtain between equiprimordial elements (such as that which obtains between the ecstases of originary temporality) and the sense of “dependence” that would appear to obtain in the case of hierarchically dependent elements or structures. From here on, I will thus use “derivation” to refer only to the dependence at issue in hierarchical dependence; I will, however, take “grounding” and “foundation” as more general terms that can apply to instances of both mutual and hierarchical dependence.131 This latter point is important since it allows for the possibility that, even should the idea of hierarchical dependence be abandoned, this need not entail the abandonment of the idea of ground—and certainly, as should already be evident from the way this notion has entered into the discussion so far, the latter idea is a central one in Heidegger’s thinking, well beyond the analysis advanced in Being and Time.
In the discussion of the nature of mutual and hierarchical dependence as these relate to the notion of conditionality, we reached the conclusion that conditionality was not, as such, of much help in elucidating the nature of the dependence that is at issue in Heidegger’s discussion of the various structures of being-there and their relation. What is much more important is the exact respect in which the conditionality or dependence in question is supposed to hold. While this may not be entirely clear in the case of mutual dependence (although here, in fact, the notion of mutual necessary conditionality is probably adequate), there can be no doubt that in those instances in Being and Time where some form of hierarchical dependence is at issue, the relevant respect in which one thing is said to be dependent on another is in terms of meaning: X is thus hierarchically dependent on Y inasmuch as Y is the meaning of X, or, in terms that Heidegger also employs, inasmuch as Y provides the conditions under which X is meaningful or “intelligible.” Indeed, this is just what would seem to be indicated by Heidegger’s own characterization of the project of Being and Time as a matter of uncovering “the meaning [Sinn] of Being.” Not only does Heidegger characterize the aim of Being and Time as a whole in terms of this idea of meaning, but he also uses that idea at a number of points in his analysis in relation to specific structures that emerge as in question within that analysis, including the analysis of the care structure— temporality, in fact, is to be exhibited as the “ontological meaning” of care.132
Heidegger writes that, in asking after meaning, “we are asking what makes possible the totality of the articulated structural whole of care, in the unity of its articulation as we have unfolded it.”133 This comment connects up with Heidegger’s earlier explication of meaning (Sinn) in the discussion of understanding. There he writes that: “Meaning is that wherein the intelligibility [Verständlichkeit] of something maintains itself. . . . Meaning is the “upon-which” of a projection in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something.”134 To ask after meaning, in this sense, is to ask after the “conditions of possibility” in which intelligibility finds its ground or origin—and here the Kantian “transcendental” elements in Heidegger’s approach are clearly evident (as is the associated notion of the Kantian idea of “analytic”). Moreover, the way in which “projection” enters the picture here should also indicate the way in which this account of “meaning” is tied back to Heidegger’s account of “existence.” Existence is the mode of being proper to being-there, and it is a mode of being in which the entity, namely beingthere, understands its being in terms of its own possibilities for being.135 Indeed, understanding is itself characterized in terms of the projection of such possibilities.136 The idea that the inquiry into “meaning” is a matter of the inquiry into the “upon-which” of a projection thus entails, within the framework of Being and Time, that the question of meaning is fundamentally “existential,” and that the inquiry into meaning is an inquiry into the existential conditions of the possibility of intelligibility. Talk of “existential conditions of possibility” immediately suggests a connection with the way in which Heidegger talks of the derivation of spatiality as a matter of exhibiting the “existential possibility” of spatiality in temporality (although it is perhaps noteworthy that Heidegger does not refer to such derivation in terms of exhibiting the “meaning” of spatiality). If what is at issue is the “meaning” of care, however, then understanding the meaning of care, understanding the conditions of its intelligibility, will be a matter of articulating that single unified concept (the “upon-which” of its projection) that enables us to explain the unity of care in its own differentiated, yet unified structure. In Heidegger’s account, it is temporality that functions as the meaning of care in this sense, and thus the task of exhibiting the unity in which the possibility of care resides means exhibiting the intrinsic unity of temporality as such.
It is significant that Heidegger talks about the inquiry into meaning, and the grounding that it aims at achieving, in terms of a question of unity— in the case of the meaning of care, “what makes possible the totality of the articulated structural whole of care, in the unity of its articulation.” I have already noted, in the discussion in section 2.4 above, the way in which the ideas of unity and ground belong together, and unity is certainly a central and explicit theme throughout Being and Time. Heidegger says, in the opening sentence of chapter 6, on “Care as the Being of Dasein,” that “Being-in-the-world is a structure which is primordially and constantly whole,”137 and the focus on unity is referred to repeatedly, both in that chapter and elsewhere, seeming constantly to drive the argument of Being and Time forward. The preoccupation with meaning is thus also a preoccupation with the explanation or articulation of unity—itself a version of the question of ground—and the question of the meaning of being can thus itself be understood as a question concerning the unity of being. That unity is indeed an issue here can be seen to derive from a number of considerations, but it is a theme already evident in the idea of situatedness that was encountered at the very start of this investigation. The disclosedness or “presencing” of things in their situatedness, and our own involvement in such situatedness, is indeed a gathering together of what is otherwise differentiated and separated. For there to be disclosedness, then, for there to be situatedness or a “there,” is just for there to be a certain sort of unifying occurrence in which differentiation is also evident. This focus on unity can be discerned, not only in the originary idea of “disclosive situatedness” as such, but also in Heidegger’s oft-repeated story concerning his supposed awakening to philosophy through the gift of Brentano’s book on the equivocity of being in Aristotle.138 Whether or not we take this story to be biographically accurate, what it indicates is the way in which the problem of unity, and significantly, as is very clear in the Aristotelian context, the problem of the irreducible complexity of that unity, is indeed a central theme throughout Heidegger’s thinking. Being and Time aims to articulate the unity of being, understood through the idea of meaning as the condition of “existential possibility,” and so to exhibit the possibility of being in its “there.”
It is quite clear that the inquiry into meaning or unity is taken by Heidegger as establishing a hierarchical dependence between the elements or structures at issue—the inquiry into meaning or unity is supposed to exhibit temporality as the foundational structure for being-there as whole, and so as being that on which the other structures of being-there are dependent as unitary and meaningful, but in a way that does not permit any mutuality in the dependence at issue. This must be so in the case of existential spatiality and originary temporality, but it must also be true in the case of the care structure as well—indeed, as we have seen, Heidegger talks of the relation between temporality and care precisely in terms of the one as the “meaning” of the other. Already it should be evident that there is a certain tension here, since it suggests that the dependence at issue in the case of existential spatiality and ordinary temporality will be identical in its general character to the dependence that must also obtain between temporality and care. Indeed, this is just what was indicated in the picture I suggested above of being-there as constituted, in terms of the analysis of Being and Time, of a set of what may be termed “vertical” and “horizontal” dependencies—as a series of structures, each separately constituted in terms of a set of mutually dependent elements, that are themselves hierarchically dependent. But if it is the same general form of dependence that applies in all these cases, then it is hard to see why we should not regard the care structure as “derivative” in much the same way as are existential spatiality and ordinary temporality. More seriously, perhaps, it is hard to see why we should not also regard the structure of being-there in its entirety as similarly derivative. Indeed, if exhibiting the meaning or unity of one thing in something else is a matter of exhibiting a hierarchical dependence between the things at issue, then is not the entire project of Being and Time committed to a demonstration of a hierarchical dependence (with the implication of derivation that goes with this) between being-there and originary temporality, and, ultimately, between being and time?
The problem here seems largely to be a reflection of what we noted above, namely, the lack of clarity in the way in which notions of dependence, derivation, and so forth appear in Being and Time. While on the one hand it seems that one might expect certain differences in the nature of the dependencies and derivations to which Heidegger seems committed, there is very little explicit indication of what those differences might be or how they might be configured. Thus, one might expect Heidegger to view the relation between originary temporality and care somewhat differently from the way he views the relation between originary temporality and ordinary temporality, and certainly care is never referred to as a “derivative” (abgeleitete, abkünftige) structure in the way that ordinary temporality is so characterized, but the matter is never even addressed, let alone clarified. When it comes to spatiality, the title of the section in which the argument for the “derivative” character of spatiality appears (“The Temporality of the Spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein”) and its appearance immediately following Heidegger’s temporal interpretation of the various elements of care might lead one to suppose that the account of the temporality of spatiality is exactly parallel to the accounts he advances of the temporality of understanding, affectedness, and so on. Yet not only does Heidegger’s talk of temporality as the “meaning” of care not seem to be replicated by any direct reference to temporality as the “meaning” of existential spatiality (although he does talk, as I noted above, of temporality as providing the “existential possibility” of spatiality, and this does suggest a connection back to the way Heidegger understands “meaning”), but the language of “ground” and “foundation” is much more prominent in the discussion of spatiality as it relates to temporality than it is in the discussion of the relation between temporality and the care structure (although it is not absent from the latter either). Moreover, one would expect the account of spatiality as “derivative” to be more closely related to the account of the derivative status of ordinary temporality— especially since there also seems to be a tendency on Heidegger’s part to associate spatiality with “being-amidst” and “making present,” and thence also with “falling.” Indeed, Heidegger claims that the way in which spatial ideas and images appear to dominate language and conceptuality, something he acknowledges as evident in his own analysis, is itself a product of the tendency toward falling.139 While care, along with originary temporality, is itself essentially “falling” (since this is one of its essential modes), neither care nor temporality are taken to be associated with “falling” in the way that spatiality and ordinary temporality are so associated.
In his introduction to the chapter in which temporal analysis of the care structure is set out, Heidegger writes:
Our preparatory analysis has made accessible a multiplicity of phenomena; and no matter how much we may concentrate on the foundational structural totality of care, these must not be allowed to vanish from our phenomenological purview. Far from excluding such a multiplicity, the primordial totality of Dasein’s constitution as articulated demands it. The primordiality [Ursprünglichkeit] of a state of being does not coincide with the simplicity and uniqueness of an ultimate structural element. The ontological source of Dasein’s Being is not “inferior” to what springs from it, but towers above it in power from the outset; in the field of ontology, any “springing-from” [Entspringen] is degeneration. If we penetrate to the “source” ontologically, we do not come to things which are ontically obvious for the “common understanding,” but the questionable character of everything opens up for us.140
The idea that the inquiry into the primordial totality of being-there requires that we retain a sense of the differentiated structure of being-there is a crucial point here that should not be overlooked—it is a point that I have already remarked upon in terms of the idea that what is at issue in the question of the unity of care, and so too in the question of the unity of being-there, is the unification of the structure of care and of being-there in all of its complexity. The dependence of the unity of care or of beingthere on originary temporality cannot, then, be such as to do away with its complexity or multiplicity—the unity that interests Heidegger is never the simple unity of singularity or homogeneity, but always presupposes the multiple, the heterogeneous, the differentiated. This is precisely what is reflected in Heidegger’s employment of the notion of mutual dependence in terms of the “equiprimordiality of constitutive elements.” In the above passage, however, Heidegger seems to insist both that the attempt to understand the foundational unity of care in temporality should not be taken to impugn the structural multiplicity of care and also that what is originary or “primordial” in the structure of being-there “towers above” what “derives” or “springs forth” from it, and that anything that does so “derive” is “degeneration”—although he emphasizes mutual dependence on the one hand, he also seems to refer us to a notion of hierarchical dependence on the other. Moreover, that notion of hierarchical dependence seems to be expressed in very strong terms—what is hierarchically dependent is also, in ontological terms, a degeneration from that on which it depends.
The tension between mutual and hierarchical dependence is particularly evident when we consider the way in which equiprimordial elements are supposed, in virtue of their mutual dependence, to be “constitutive” of the structure to which they belong—the mutual dependence of those elements provides an articulation of the “internal” unity of that structure. This clearly applies in the case of originary temporality—its unity does not consist in the unity of a single, simple element, but is rather a matter of the “temporalizing” of the temporal ecstases as they belong together. Yet this does not apply in the case of originary temporality alone. At each level of Heidegger’s analysis at which a structure of equiprimordial elements is exhibited, at the level of equipmental and existential spatiality, at the level of being-with-others, at the level of care, we find structures that are constituted by the mutual dependence that obtains between the elements that make them up—and since each element is necessary for every other, so each element is also sufficient for every other, thus entailing a very strong sense in which those structures are “made up of” those equiprimordial elements. Drawing on the notion of unity, we may say that the unity of a structure that is constituted of equiprimordial elements must consist in the articulation of the mutual dependence between those elements as such. This immediately creates a difficulty for any claim to the effect that the unity of a structure made up of elements that are mutually dependent in this way is itself hierarchically dependent on (“grounded in,” “explained by”) some other structure. The difficulty is as follows: any structure that is constituted by a set of equiprimordial elements must find its proper unity in the articulated dependence that obtains between those equiprimordial elements—to exhibit the structure, and so to exhibit its unity, is just to exhibit that articulation—but in that case, no reference to any other structure can be relevant to explaining the proper unity of the original structure at issue here; consequently, if a structure exhibits mutual dependence, then it is, by that very fact, a structure that cannot be hierarchically dependent on another structure, at least not in terms of its own unity or “constitution.”
It may well be possible that a particular structure, while constituted in terms of a set of equiprimordial elements, is itself part of a larger structure and so stands in a relation to other structures within that larger, more encompassing whole. A question can then be put concerning the nature of the relation between the original structure and any one of the other structures within which it is located, or, indeed, about the relation between the original structure and the larger whole to which it belongs. It may be that in some cases that relation will obtain as one of hierarchical dependence, but this will only be so where the form or mode of dependence involved in that relation is distinct from the form or mode that obtains among the equiprimordial elements that make up that original structure. So one might suppose, for instance, that a functioning human body is made up of a set of core elements that are equiprimordial in terms of their interrelation with one another and in terms of their role in the continued functioning of that body. However, their mutual functional dependence has no bearing on what we might take to be the hierarchical causal dependence that obtains between that body and the set of physical causes that brought it into existence, or between that body and other bodies as they might constitute part of a social, cultural, or symbolic system. For a structure of mutually dependent elements to be hierarchically dependent on another structure requires that the mode of hierarchical dependence is of a different kind to the mutual dependence that also obtains. The difficulty in Being and Time is that it is the same kind of dependence that is at issue in terms of the mutual dependence between the elements in, for instance, the structure of care, and in the hierarchical dependence between care and originary temporality. Indeed, if that were not so, then not only would the unity of originary temporality not operate to account for the unity of understanding, affectedness, discourse, and falling in care, but neither, ironically, would it be possible for Heidegger to arrive at the account of originary temporality on the basis of the account of the care structure—if they are to be hierarchically dependent, then care and temporality must constitute distinct unities, but then it will not be possible to take the structure of care as providing any necessary clue to the structure of temporality.
The ideas of mutual and hierarchical dependence thus turn out, at least in terms of the way they apply to Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time, to be in tension with one another. We have just seen the way in which that tension arises with respect to the way in which the unity, or “meaning,” of the various structures that emerge in Heidegger’s analysis cannot be explicated in terms of both mutually and hierarchically dependent structures. Yet there can be no choice here—it is not as if, acknowledging the difficulty, Heidegger could choose to abandon the idea of mutual dependence at work in the notion of equiprimordiality and choose instead to treat the entire analysis as one that exhibits a series of hierarchical dependencies. To begin with, this would result in an unacceptable simplification of the self-evidently complex structure that is being-there. However, it would also lead to exactly the position that Heidegger rules out according to which “the primordial totality of Dasein’s constitution” would “coincide with the simplicity and uniqueness of an ultimate structural element.” Indeed, on such an account it is hard to see how beingthere could be understood as anything other than simple originary temporality in the self-sameness of its pure “temporalization.” Once we accept the complexity of the structure of being-there and accept the necessity of maintaining a sense of that multiplicity, then we are forced to understand the unity of that structure—“the primordial totality of its constitution”—as obtaining in and through the articulation of the elements that make up that unity in their equiprimordiality, that is, in their mutual dependence.
Although any unity may be taken to require that some elements within that unity will have a certain primacy within the unified structure as a whole, such priority cannot be based on a relation of hierarchical dependence. If originary temporality plays a role in the unity of being-there, it cannot be as something apart from the structure of being-there as a whole, which means that it cannot stand in a relation of hierarchical dependence to that unity—nor indeed to the other structures that are also a fundamental part of it. What is at issue in talk of unity here is precisely the unity of an entity or structure, not as it might be imposed from without, but of the entity or structure as such—of the unity that belongs to the entity as such. In this respect, we may say that the real unity of a thing is to be found in the internal articulation of the elements that make it up and in their interrelation, rather than in anything that “imposes” unity from “outside” (this is just what is expressed in the idea of equiprimordiality). Indeed, any attempt to provide a principle of unity for some thing (whether “entity” or “structure”) that stands outside of that thing would fail to address the unity of the thing in itself, or in Heideggerian terms, in its own being. It is just this point that appears in Aristotle, for instance, when he says that things that are one “by nature” (paradigmatically living things) are more properly unitary than those things that are one “by art” (things that are “made”),141 and it relates directly to the point I made about the nature of unity at the end of chapter 2—that the sort of unity that is properly at issue in Heidegger”s thinking, though it may sometimes be obscured, is just the sort of unity exemplified by dynamic, complex structures whose unity is always self-unifying. What this means, however, when read back into the account of the relation between, for instance, care and originary temporality, is that exhibiting the relations that make for unity cannot, strictly speaking, be a matter of showing how one thing is unified by another, nor of how one thing provides the condition of intelligibility for another, but rather of showing how a single, differentiated entity or structure, and therefore a structure of equiprimordial or mutally dependent elements, is nonetheless itself unified, and this unity must be exhibited through showing the exact character of the relations between the equiprimordial elements. Reflecting on the way in which what is at issue here is indeed the character of being-there as “primordially and constantly whole,” it is hard to see how matters could be otherwise.
Indeed, if we take seriously Heidegger’s talk of “meaning” and “interpretation” as it appears in relation to the task of exhibiting the conditions of possibility, and so the unity, that is at issue here, then an obvious conclusion to draw is that the nature of that unity, and so of the dependence between the elements in which that unity is based, must be one of mutual dependence of exactly the sort exemplified in the example I used above of hermeneutic circularity. In the case of textual interpretation, one exhibits the conditions of meaningfulness of the text through an articulation of what might be called the “internal unity” of the text—by showing how the text works together as a whole. Of course, the way this is done may be characterized in terms of finding some principle of unity that unifies the text, as one might interpret Shakespeare’s Othello as a play about the destructive effects of jealousy, but any such “principle” must properly belong to the text as such (and so must be related to the elements of that text—indeed it will only appear in the text as articulated through those concrete elements) or else risk being simply an “arbitrary” imposition. Moreover, while any principle that unifies in this way can be said to have a certain priority as that which enables the text to be understood “in its intelligibility,” such priority will consist in the way in which that principle stands centrally within the structure of the text, and so in a relation to the text as a whole—it will not imply that the entire text can be “derived” from that principle, nor need it imply that the principle will be the only explanatory element at work in the text (indeed, any interesting text will almost always have a multiplicity of elements or principles that are constitutive for it). If the concept of jealousy is central to Othello, for instance, then we would expect it to be able to be worked out in relation to the key scenes, characters, and so on as they occur throughout the play, and not only with respect to a few scenes or some part of the work. In the case of the project of Being and Time, we can say that what Heidegger attempts in that work is indeed an “interpretation” of being, or particularly, given the truncated character of the work, of the being of the “there” that moves successively to uncover the structure of the “there” in a more originary and basic fashion. However, what is thereby uncovered is not anything other than the “there” as such, and the progressive uncovering of elements within the “there” does not entail the discovery of separate elements as such, but rather involves uncovering the internal articulation of the “there” in its unity, while the priority accorded to care and to temporality rests in the way in which those elements can be shown to stand in a central relation to the other elements of the structure.
Such an “interpretive” or “hermeneutic” account of what is involved in exhibiting the unity, meaning, or grounds of possibility of a structure is one that I have elsewhere developed as the basis for understanding the nature of so-called transcendental argument.142 Indeed, it seems that most of the problems that are supposed to accrue to transcendental modes of proceeding derive from treating transcendental argument as based in the demonstration of a form of hierarchical rather than mutual dependence. In this respect, it is interesting to note the close similarity between a common criticism of transcendental modes of proceeding and a problem that also seems to affect Heidegger’s position. Stephan Körner famously argues that transcendental arguments cannot succeed since they need to demonstrate, not only that a certain structure is necessary for the possibility of some other entity or structure (and so to demonstrate a form of hierarchical dependence), but also that the structure is uniquely required in this way.143 In similar fashion, Heidegger’s argument for the hierarchical dependence of the structures of being-there on originary temporality will be of no avail if that dependence is not unique to originary temporality—if, for instance, some other structure, say a mode of spatiality, is also necessary along with originary temporality. It seems that there is no way that Heidegger can rule this out, and so no way that he can demonstrate what we may call the unique hierarchical dependence of being-there on originary temporality. The problem does not arise, however, if transcendental “argument” is understood in the interpretive fashion I suggest here—in terms, that is, of mutual, rather than hierarchical dependence— since then the task is not one of demonstrating some unique form of dependence, but rather of exhibiting the interrelatedness, and so the unity, of a single, complex, and differentiated structure (moreover, given the nature of interpretative indeterminacy, there can be no unique way of exhibiting such interrelatedness).
Although Heidegger appears to have some sense of the way in which transcendental modes of proceeding do indeed involve a notion of mutual dependence, what we have seen in the discussion here is that he nevertheless retains a notion of hierarchical dependence—at least in Being and Time. One of the reasons for this, in Heidegger’s case, is the need to prevent what appears to be the problematic intrusion of spatiality—which constantly pulls in the direction of objective spatiality, “containment,” the present, and the present-at-hand—into the structure of being-there in a way that threatens to disrupt its unity, not only through turning it into some spatio-temporal “composite,” but also through dispersing it into the leveled-out space of the present. The reliance on a notion of hierarchical dependence also seems tied up with what Stephan Käufer calls the desire for “systematicity,”144 namely, the desire to achieve an account that will be as encompassing and powerful as possible through the complete unification of the domain in question, in this case, being-there, through a demonstration of the dependence of the entirety of that domain on a certain fundamental element within it. The desire for systematicity and the need for the exclusion of spatiality are clearly not unrelated here. Heidegger’s move away from talk of the transcendental in his later thinking can, in this respect, be construed as arising out of an assumption that the transcendental is indeed tied to this sort of systematic enterprise and so also to the idea of hierarchical dependence (as we shall see in chapter 4 below, however, it is also tied up with the way Heidegger understands the transcendental in terms of a preoccupation with “transcendence”—although this too is not unconnected with the notion of hierarchical derivation). Of course, what I have also suggested, if only implicitly, is that the transcendental can be understood in a way that does not require such hierarchical dependence. Similarly, while Heidegger’s use of the notion of meaning here would seem to be tied up with the idea of hierarchical dependence (exemplified in the way he characterizes the issue of meaning through the idea of exhibiting the conditions of meaningfulness), my own account of interpretive articulation in terms of the articulation of relations of mutual dependence suggests a way of thinking in terms of meaning that does not give rise to the problems that appear in Being and Time. Thus the shift away from meaning that one finds in Heidegger’s later work (and associated with this, the shift away from the hermeneutical, including the shift away from talk even of the hermeneutic circle)145 can be seen as largely a result of Heidegger’s having associated the methodology of the hermeneutical, along with that of phenomenology and the transcendental, with the idea of hierarchical dependence. My account here can be taken as showing that there is a way of understanding all these notions that need not require such a problematic association.
If Heidegger is to establish the interpretation of being-there in terms of temporality at which he aims, then it seems that what he needs to do is to establish the hierarchical dependence of the entire differentiated structure of being-there on temporality. Heidegger is driven to this by the need to exhibit the unity of being-there in temporality, and yet trying to do this turns out not to be compatible with the multiplicity that also attaches to being-there and the mutual dependence that obtains among the multiple elements that make it up. The problem of deriving the existential spatiality proper to being-there thus turns out to be a particular instance of a more general problem of derivation in the analysis of Being and Time as a whole. However, at the same time, it is clear that the way spatiality stands as a problem for that analysis is also one of the reasons for Heidegger’s employment of a notion of hierarchical, as well as mutual, dependence within the framework of his analysis. These considerations, while absolutely central, deal with the problem of “derivation” in a relatively general fashion, however, and it is important to draw the discussion of Being and Time directly back to the consideration of spatiality and so also of place and topology, as such. In this respect, it will be important to look once again at the specific argument Heidegger advances for the derivative character of spatiality (and in passing to also briefly consider the argument for the derivative character of ordinary temporality) and thereby explore in more detail the way in which spatiality emerges within the structure of being-there, particularly inasmuch as it disrupts the supposed priority of temporality.
Heidegger’s analysis of the idea of “being-in” already gives rise to a distinction between two modes of spatiality corresponding to the ideas of “containment” and “involvement.” Containment seems to be tied to a mode of spatiality that is extended, measurable, and tied to the notion of “objectivity”—a mode of “objective” spatiality. Involvement is tied to being-there as it “dwells” and so to a mode of spatiality that is orientated, directed, and that is directly related to being-there’s own active engagement in the world. It is the latter of these two modes of spatiality—the spatiality of “involvement”—that Heidegger tells us is proper to beingthere. Moreover, “involvement,” since it is tied to the notions of “dwelling” and “world,” clearly points toward a more fundamental analysis. The derivative or dependent character of spatiality is thus presaged close to the very beginning of Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time in the very distinction between containment and involvement. As that analysis develops, it becomes clear that there are, in fact, a number of dependence relations that obtain with respect to spatiality as it stands within the structure of being-there: one is the dependence of existential spatiality on care and so on temporality; another is the dependence of equipmental spatiality on existential spatiality; another, though it has not so far been properly addressed, is the dependence of objective spatiality on the spatiality of world. There is no “originary” spatiality that underpins this, however, since it is temporality that is the originary foundational structure here. In discussing the way Heidegger attempts to derive existential spatiality from temporality, I noted that what drives this argument is the idea that spatiality is a matter of orientation, but that orientation is essentially temporal. Indeed, the priority of temporality as orientation seems to be essentially what drives the entire structure of dependence relations. But the claim that temporality is what determines orientation is only partly correct—spatiality itself has a part to play here also, and in a way that cannot be derived from temporality.
In the discussion of equipmental and existential spatiality in section 3.3, I noted the way in which the “opening up” of spatiality involves both equipmental spatiality, as articulated through the prior, public ordering given in terms of things, places, and regions, and the existential spatiality that is involved in being-there’s individual engagement within that ordering in terms of dis-tance and orientation. I also noted that part of the problem in Heidegger’s own approach here is that he asserts a priority of the latter over the former, seeming to make equipmental spatiality dependent on existential spatiality. The dependence at issue can be understood as a matter of equipmental space only becoming properly equipmental inasmuch as it is related to being-there in its particular, individual activity; in addition, of course, the very ordering of equipmentality is dependent on the teleological ordering given in task and activity that is, in turn, related to being-there’s own existential possibilities. Thus the ordering of a carpentry shop, for instance, is partly determined by the way in which the shop is geared to a way of being for being-there that is tied to a range of activities centered around woodworking, although such an equipmental ordering is realized only in and through being-there’s own actual engagement within that region of activity. Yet if orientation is what is at issue here, and the claim is that such orientation arises through beingthere’s own being-directed-toward some possibility of its being (its being a carpenter, for instance), then neither can the ordering of equipmental spatiality nor the orientation of existential spatiality be explained independently of spatiality as such.
Part of what misleads us here, and part of what seems to mislead Heidegger, is actually tied to a feature that is central to Heidegger’s own account of being-there, namely, the priority of the “toward which” (which is itself tied, of course, to the priority of understanding within the structure of care and of the future within the structure of temporality). In being engaged in some activity, we are typically always ahead of ourselves—it is the “toward which,” the end to which we are directed, that always comes first. In Heidegger’s analysis this feature of the phenomenology of activity is elevated to become the determinative consideration in the analysis of being-there’s spatiality. Yet what this hides, or at least leads us to overlook, is the way in which our activity, and our orientation to things and places within that activity, is not merely determined by the end to which we are directed, but also by the structure of the spatiality in which that activity is situated. Thus, my being oriented toward the tools around me in the carpentry shop—the hammer, chisel, saw, drill, and so forth—is not only a matter of understanding what they are for, but also of understanding the spaces that they occupy, their own spatial configuration, and their relation to my body and its capacities. Being oriented to the hammer is a matter of knowing that it relates to me through the way the shaft fits to my hand and to the action of my arm, in terms of how the swing of the hammer and the impact of the head exert a certain directed force. Knowing how to pick up a hammer and use it certainly depends on knowing what the hammer is to be used for and on having a use to which it is to be put, but knowing how to pick up a hammer also depends on knowing the space occupied by both hammer and one’s own body—one picks up the hammer thus and so, one swings it in this way, one lets the hammer do the work ...and so on. The orientation at issue here clearly is not independent of temporality, but neither is it explicable purely in terms of temporality. Moreover, without the sort of basic spatial orientation at issue here, no grasp of the temporal orientation involved in the structure of the “toward which” in task and activity can be possible. Fully to grasp the hammer as able to be used for hammering, for the joining of timber, for the making of a chair, or the building of a house, and so for a certain possibility of being-there, is also to grasp the way in which that hammer relates spatially to the one who wields the hammer and to the things around it—it is to understand both its spatial and its temporal “fit.” Neither one of these can be explained in terms of the other, and yet each is indeed mutually dependent on the other.
The question of orientation that emerges here gives a special prominence to the issue of embodiment and is indicative of the way in which spatial orientation is always a matter of bodily orientation. Significantly, the place of the body in the analysis of Being and Time has long been recognized as a point of difficulty for Heidegger’s analysis. Yet although Heidegger has sometimes been accused of neglecting or ignoring the body, it is quite clear that he recognizes its importance—he writes, for instance, that “[beingthere’s] bodily nature hides a whole problematic of its own, though we shall not treat it here,”146 while in the lectures on logic given in 1928-1929 (in which Heidegger’s thinking still remains largely within the frame of Being and Time), he seems to view being-there’s bodily nature as essential to its thrownness: “Dasein is thrown, factical, thoroughly amidst nature through its bodiliness.”147
The reason for the absence of an account of embodiment in Being and Time should be transparently clear once one understands the problematic of situatedness with which that work grapples. The problem of the body is directly tied to the problem of being-there’s spatiality. Heidegger writes that “Dasein does not fill up a bit of space as a Real Thing or item of equipment would, so that the boundaries dividing it from the surrounding space would themselves just define that space spatially. Dasein takes space in. ...It is by no means just present-at-hand at a position in space which its body fills up”;148 and again, “Neither may Dasein’s spatiality be interpreted as an imperfection which adheres to existence by reason of the fatal ‘linkage of the spirit to a body.’ On the contrary, because Dasein is ‘spiritual’ [geistig], and only because of this, it can be spatial in a way that remains essentially impossible for any extended corporeal Thing.”149 The structure of hierarchical dependence that is central to the analysis of Being and Time and which points inexorably toward temporality seems to allow of only two possibilities in the analysis of being-there’s embodiment: either being-there’s having a body is a matter of its extended spatiality, which would mean that the being of being-there as embodied was no different from the being of present-at-hand objects, or else it must be understood as essentially determined by its being-in-the-world and so by its being-ascare and as temporal. Although Heidegger appears to recognize that there must be more to the analysis of the body than this contrast would suggest, there is surely little doubt that only the second of these options can be acceptable within the framework of Being and Time. Indeed, as the second of the two passages quoted above indicates, the being of being-there as embodied and as spatial is determined by its being as “spiritual” (the German “geistig” carries connotations of both spirit and mind), which in this case must surely mean, as “temporal.”
If there is any sense in which the bodily being of being-there is spatial, then, it is in a sense that is secondary to temporality in much the same way as the various modes of spatiality are also secondary. For this reason, Heidegger is unable to give any central place in his analysis to embodiment—indeed, since he has already committed himself to the dependent character of extended spatiality from almost the beginning of his analysis, the body as such simply falls outside the frame of Heidegger’s discussion.150 Steven Crowell claims that Heidegger gives little attention to the body since his interest is in the structure of being-there in its unity as it is prior to the traditional distinction between body and mind;151 Søren Overgaard argues that the body is problematic for Heidegger because of the way it threatens the unity of being-there.152 Both these claims are correct, but they fail to make explicit the crucial point here, namely, that the body is secondary in the structure of being-there, while also presenting a problem for the unity of being-there, precisely because of the way it threatens to make being-there into something spatial. The real danger to unity, within the framework of Being and Time, is thus spatiality. Not only does the intrusion of spatiality threaten a bifurcation between the “bodily” and the “mental/spiritual,” but spatiality also threatens the loss of any sense of the “there” in the stretched-out dimensionality of pure extendedness. Yet at the same time, this indicates the extent to which Heidegger himself remains in the grip of the understanding of spatiality and embodiment associated with traditional metaphysics, according to which embodiment is itself tied to the spatiality of objective extension and according to which “the body” is indeed something that can, in some sense, be set against the “mentality” or “spirituality” of being-there. For Being and Time properly to rethink the metaphysical understanding of being and of the relation of being to situatedness, it is necessary to rethink the structure of spatiality as such, and, although Heidegger may be said to reconceptualize spatiality in terms of existentiality and temporality, this constitutes less a rethinking of spatiality as such than its abandonment to the realm of the derivative and the secondary.
The problem that Heidegger’s analysis faces, however, is that, as is already evident, there seem to be important features of being-there’s beingin-the-world that cannot be explained independently of spatiality as such. Indeed, it turns out that orientation in space, and so to the things and places in one’s environment, or within a spatial region, itself depends on the way spatiality is articulated in and through one’s own body. This is a point made quite clearly by Kant, and, indeed, in this respect Kant proves himself often to be more attentive to issues of embodiment and spatiality than the early Heidegger. Kant argues in a number of places, in both his pre-Critical and his Critical writings, that orientation requires a grasp of differences that are represented in space and in one’s own body. Thus Kant writes that:
To orientate oneself, in the proper sense of the word, means to use a given direction—and we divide the horizon into four of these—in order to find the others, and in particular that of sunrise. If I see the sun in the sky and know that it is now midday, I know how to find south, west, north, and east. For this purpose, however, I must necessarily be able to feel a difference within my own subject, namely that between my right and left hands. I call this a feeling because these two sides display no perceptible difference as far as external intuition is concerned.153
Heidegger, of course, is well aware of Kant’s emphasis on orientation as tied to embodiment.154 Yet he takes this to be a remnant of Kant’s subjectivism, arguing that such orientation presupposes being-there’s prior beingin-a-world, and so being already involved in an equipmental context (although it is in his consideration of just this issue that Heidegger is led to remark on the way in which being-there’s “bodily nature hides a whole problematic of its own”).155 It thus appears that what Heidegger calls beingthere’s own bodily “spatialization” is not a matter of being-there having a body, but of being-there’s being-in-the-world: “The directionality which belongs to dis-tance is founded upon Being-in-the-world. Left and right are not something ‘subjective’ for which the subject has a ‘feeling’; they are directions of one’s directedness into a world that is ready-to-hand already.”156 This is a point on which Dreyfus comments, noting that:
Heidegger . . . seems to hold that orientation is a result of the fact that not all equipment is accessible at the same time. I can turn to one thing or another but not both at once. These incompatible fields of action group simultaneously accessible things together in opposed regions called right/left, and also front/back. But still without the body there could be no account of why there are these regions. We would not be able to understand, for example, why the accessibility of right and left is not symmetrical, or why we must always “face” things in order to cope with them. On Heidegger’s account these would just remain unexplained asymmetries in the practical field. This is not inconsistent, but it is unsatisfying.157
Dreyfus’s criticism is strengthened, however, once one understands that the point of Kant’s comment about the “feeling of a difference in my own subject” has not to do with any mere subjectivism, but rather with the way in which the grasp of space is fundamentally tied to the body.
Orientation depends on a grasp of simultaneously presented regions of space and of an ordering among those regions. Contrary to Heidegger’s assumption, however, such ordering cannot be given in the regions themselves, and this is evident in the fact that the orientation of these regions in terms of “left/right,” “front/back” will vary depending on individual location—the pure ordering as such must thus be an ordering derived from the located individual, and more particularly, from the way the individual body is itself positioned “in” space, and so with respect to its surroundings. Such ordering is, in the first-person terms Kant employs, an ordering “in my own subject.” Consequently, my grasp of the different regions of space around me depends on my grasp of the directions given in and through the different parts of my own body—left side, right side, upper, lower. The ordering of the space the body is “in” is thus also an ordering of the space “of” the body, and the former is grasped through and by means of the latter. Thus Kant talks elsewhere of the way in which “no matter how well I know the order of the divisions of the horizon, I can only determine the regions in accordance with them if I am aware of whether the order progresses toward the right or the left hand.”158
It is not merely that without reference to the body we could not explain the “asymmetries in the practical field” that go with the ordering of equipmental space in terms of “left/right,” “front/back,” but that without the body there can be no such ordering—and this is so for the simple reason that the ordering at issue here is precisely an ordering of space in relation to the body. Inasmuch as this ordering of space is itself a prerequisite of orientation as such, then embodiment is also a prerequisite for orientation—it is also, one might say, a prerequisite for being-in-the-world, although the dependence here is certain to be mutual (in this respect, it is worth noting the way in which, once again, Heidegger’s commitment to hierarchical dependence plays a large part in the difficulties that arise here). The role played by the body is not something that can in any way be “derived from” the structure of equipmentality—nor from the structure of care or of originary temporality. And inasmuch as spatiality and embodiment are here seen to be tied together, so too does the underivability of spatiality also become evident. Indeed, the role of the body here is itself indicative, not of “corporeality” as some feature of our existence that could be set over against our “spirituality,” but rather of “corporeality” as itself indicative of our fundamental spatiality—to be embodied is to exist in space. Moreover, such fundamental spatiality, although it may conflict with the absolute centrality of the temporal, need not imply any lack of unity in the being of being-there. Although fundamental, spatiality is essentially bound to temporality—something reflected in Heidegger’s later talk of “time-space”159—and the unity of being-there is given, not through its determination by temporality alone, but through the complex and integral interplay between a number of key elements.
Yet if spatiality is indeed a fundamental element in the constitution of being-there, there is still a question as to what mode (or modes) of spatiality is at issue: is it the space of objectivity or something more like a notion of “existential” spatiality? Talk of the latter may be thought problematic since the notion of the existential seems to contain an ineliminable reference to the mode of being of being-there as founded in understanding, rather than in spatiality as such. Moreover, one might also suggest that bodily spatiality should itself be understood as a matter of location in an extended, and hence, objective space, and that such a subjective, or, perhaps better, embodied space must itself be explicated in terms of the objective space that might be claimed to underlie it. The possibility of such an inference is part of what leads to Heidegger’s emphasis on existential spatiality as given through being-in-the-world, and so through the existential structure of being-there, rather than in any way determined by the body. Such an inference itself depends, however, on the assumption that spatiality is indeed to be understood as fundamentally objective spatiality, and there seems no independent consideration that would require such an assumption. Indeed, for the very reasons that make the idea of spatiality, understood in terms of an extended, measurable mode of dimensionality, inadequate to an understanding of place, so too must objective spatiality be inadequate to an understanding of embodiment or the spatiality with which it is bound up. Yet such an inference also depends on ignoring the way in which the bodily space that is at issue here is not a space that belongs to being-there merely in virtue of its being some “bit of space which its body fills up,”160 but is instead a space that belongs to being-there in its bodily activity. Bodily space is always the space of action, and as such it cannot be construed in terms of objective space alone, and nor should it be construed as identical with the extent of the body as “physical.”161 It is this that underlies Heidegger’s much later comment, in the 1969 Le Thor Seminar, that:
We need to grasp the difference between “lived-body” and “body.” For instance, when we step on a scale, we do not weigh our “lived-body” but merely the weight of our “body.” Or further, the limit of the “lived-body” is not the limit of the “body.” The limit of the body is the skin. The limit of the “lived-body” is more difficult to determine. It is not “world,” but it is perhaps just as little “environment.”162
This does not imply, moreover, that bodily spatiality is, after all, a derivative of temporality—the active body is the body as given in its activity, and therefore as temporal, but its temporality, while thereby necessary for its spatiality, does not determine or explain that spatiality.163 Heidegger is thus quite correct in claiming that objective spatiality does not exhibit the kind of directionality that is a necessary element in the spatiality of beingthere, but mistaken in assuming that this means that such directionality must be derived from temporality alone—the body has a directionality of its own that is given in its essential spatiality.
Recognition of the basic character of bodily spatiality does not mean, however, that objective spatiality is thereby shown to be irrelevant to understanding the structure of the spatiality proper to being-there. The idea of bodily space is of a mode of spatiality that is centered on the body (we may wish to call it a “subjective” space since we might also view it as centered on “the subject,” but it is actually the body, indeed, the active body, rather than any abstract notion of “subjectivity” that is central here164); the idea of objective space is the idea of a space centered, not on the body, nor on any one thing, but rather on things or objects as they stand apart from any particular “body.” Thus, while bodily space is always structured in terms of the relation to a body, and so has a clear center and directionality (minimally, the directionality of up/down, left/right, front/back, near/far), objective space lacks such a center, being instead made up of a multiplicity of equally “ranked” positions and has no such directionality, with relations between positions characterizable only in terms of a uniform metric. Objective space is thus characteristically public—centered neither on the “subject” nor on the body—and the public character of objective space—understood as the mode of spatiality that is centered on the multiplicity of things or objects—is itself a central element in the spatiality proper to equipment.
Heidegger, of course, presents equipmental spatiality as distinct from the spatiality of objectivity. Equipmental spatiality has an ordering, a directionality, that is based in task and activity, and as such it would seem to be quite distinct from the extended multiplicity of position that is given in objective spatiality. Yet there is a problem concealed in Heidegger’s treatment of equipmental spatiality that has already emerged in the discussion in section 3.3 above. Dreyfus criticizes Heidegger’s account of spatiality for failing to distinguish “public space in which entities show up for human beings, from the centered spatiality of each individual human being.”165 The way Dreyfus articulates this criticism is in terms of the way Heidegger makes the nearing of things that occurs in dis-tance dependent on beingthere rather than on the structure of equipmental space as such. In discussing Dreyfus’s criticism, I noted that Dreyfus’s account appears to misunderstand the way in which Heidegger’s account must take spatiality as dependent on both the prior, generalized equipmental ordering given in equipmental spatiality and the particular realization of that ordering through being-there’s individual engagement within that ordering in terms of existential spatiality—the real problem arises because of Heidegger’s prioritization within that overall structure of the dependence of equipmental spatiality on the existential. As it turns out, this prioritization, which seems to take the form of an implicit, but nevertheless somewhat opaque, hierarchical dependence, arises not only from the way in which existential spatiality “opens up” the field of spatiality through dis-tance and orientation, but also from the way in which the ordering of the equipmental, although not directly tied to any individual projection of possibilities, is nevertheless itself dependent on the general character of being-there as being in and through its projection of possibilities. The “toward-which” or “in-order-to” of the equipmental must thus be derivative of the “beingahead-of-itself” of existentiality. At this point Dreyfus’s criticism, particularly when formulated in the general terms Dreyfus first uses, comes back into the picture since it now seems as if Heidegger really does have a problem, not merely in distinguishing the “public space in which entities show up” from the “spatiality of each individual human being,” but in explaining how one can be possible on the basis of the other—since that, in essence, is what the emphasis on the priority of existential spatiality actually amounts to.
The situation is complicated, however, by the problem that also emerged in section 3.3 above concerning the relation between equipmental and objective space—a problem that is really about how the public space of the equipmental should itself be understood. On the one hand, Heidegger wants to distinguish equipmental space from the space of objectivity, and yet, on the other hand, equipmental space must also be a public, intersubjective space that is also, therefore, distinct from the individually centered spatiality of the existential. Not only is there a problem about how to explain equipmental, or, more generally, public space, on the basis of individual, existential space, but there is also a problem as to exactly what sort of space is actually in question when we look to explain equipmental space in this way. The idea of equipmental space turns out, in fact, to stand awkwardly between the public space of objectivity and the centered space of the individual. Although this point is perhaps not entirely clear in his discussion in Being-in-the-World (although it is a point of focus, as I noted above, for Arisaka’s criticism of Dreyfus), Dreyfus does seem to give it some recognition in discussion elsewhere. In an essay on the concept of equipment in Being and Time, he suggests that the being of equipment in that work “hovers ambiguously between that of craftsmanship and technology”166—in spatial or topological terms, between that of the “localized” and the “de-localized”—and that “[b]y highlighting the interrelationship between all items of equipment and by defining equipment by its position in this referential totality, Being and Time denies localness.”167 The problem that is presented by equipmental spatiality is that it has to be a space that allows for two sorts of spatial relationship: first a relationship between a multiplicity of items; second a relationship between those items and a multiplicity of individuals. The first is necessary for the very structure of equipmentality as constituted in terms of an array of items; the second is necessary for the possibility of equipmentality as an essentially public, intersubjective structure. Both these features of the space at issue suggest that, in its general form, it must be structured in a way analogous to objective spatiality. Indeed, a space that is not “objective” would seem to lack the publicness as well as the multiple positionality that are necessary for equipmental space. Yet equipmental spatiality is also supposed to have an ordering that is based in the teleology of the “toward-which” and “inorder-to,” and such an ordering would seem incompatible with objective spatiality—objective spatiality is not an ordered space; it has no directionality, no here and there, no near and far. Indeed, the “a directional” character of objective space is essential to its public character—objective space is just that space that is accessible from any and every location within it—and in this respect, the problem of objective spatiality that has emerged here is identical with the problem of how the public and the intersubjective can be made explicable within the framework of Being and Time.
If equipmental spatiality turns out to be more like a form of objective spatiality, then the question of how equipmental space can be dependent on individual “existential” space will be identical with the question how objective spatiality can be shown to be dependent on existential space. Of course, part of what has come into question in the discussion so far has been not only the nature of equipmental space as such, but also the nature of existential space, and what has become evident is the way in which existential, or at least, individual, space is actually underpinned by bodily space.168 Consequently, what originally appears in Heidegger’s analysis as a question of the relation between an equipmental space that is already understood as ordered and directional, albeit as also intersubjective, and an existential space that is determined by a similar ordering and directionality, albeit individually centered and based in temporality now appears as much closer to a question concerning the relation between two forms of spatiality, one of which is tied to the multiple positioning of things or objects, and so is essentially a form of objective spatiality, and the other of which is tied to the unique centering of the body, and so is identical with what I have termed “bodily” spatiality. The difficulty in making sense of Heidegger’s account of spatiality and the difficulty in deriving the intersubjective space of equipmentality from the individually centered space of the existential is thus underlaid by the opacity and inadequacy of Heidegger’s account of both equipmental and existential spatiality as such, as well as by Heidegger’s failure to understand the relation between the different modes of spatiality.
Objective space, though having no directionality of its own, can nevertheless be grasped, and indeed can only be grasped, as we saw in the discussion above, through the way in which it is related to a particular bodily space. Objective space is rendered directional, or better, orientation within objective space becomes possible, only through its relatedness to the body as it is both objectively located and also actively engaged (indeed, this general idea was already adumbrated in the emphasis, in sec. 3.3 above, on the way the opening up of space requires both the equipmental and the existential). Objective space is thus made accessible—is “opened up”— through bodily space, and yet what is thereby made accessible is not a space that is only the space of the body, but rather a space that is, indeed, objective. In this respect, we may choose to regard both objective and bodily spatiality as having no independent status of their own, but as each being mutually dependent on the other and as together giving rise to spatiality in the full sense (the fact that objective space has no directionality while bodily space lacks real intersubjectivity should be taken as indicative of just the mutuality at issue here). Equipmental spatiality appears to have an awkward position in relation to the structure of spatiality that has come into view here since equipmental spatiality is actually an attempt to reify a mode of spatiality that comprises elements of both objective and bodily space and yet is also supposed to be distinct from each.
In fact, equipmental spatiality can be nothing other than the idea of objective spatiality as it is given through a directionality that enables that objective space to be related back to a particular bodily space. In this respect, it is worth returning to the example of map-based orientation that was used in the discussion of the relation between equipmental and existential space in section 3.3 above. Although different spaces may require modes of map-like representation, and no map can ever capture every aspect of the space it maps, nevertheless any and every space is also a mappable space. A map is always a representation, or, we might say, an articulation, of a space in terms that make that space accessible and navigable to anybody who can be located within it, and so its mappability is also indicative of the way in which spatiality always carries a certain necessary “publicness” with it—a publicness that consists in the way in which both “objective” and “bodily” space are always interconnected and mutually dependent. Thus, when I look around the workshop before me, I can see the various tools arrayed in their places and with respect to the tasks to be performed. I can draw a plan of the workshop, both in terms of the way the tools are physically located with respect to each other, or, though it will be more complicated, in terms of their task-based interrelation—a map that can be considered “objective.” Yet just as the equipmental array does not emerge as equipment except insofar as the tools concerned are equipmentally employed in relation to a specific task, so no map functions as a representation or articulation of space unless someone can take the map, locate themselves within it, and thereby orient themselves to the features around them through the way those features then relate to parts of their body.169 The space given in the map is, strictly speaking, not an independent mode of spatiality (though sometimes mappable space is thought of as an “allocentric” space170), rather the map represents a particular space, which may well be an objective space, in a form that enables a connection to bodily space. An analogous point holds for equipmental space, which is properly not an independent mode of spatiality, but rather an objective space as it is understood and articulated in relation to certain modes of activity, and, hence, to bodily space.
While it is somewhat to one side of the main discussion here, it is also worth noting that this latter point does not rely on any assumption to the effect that a mappable space is also thereby an objective space, although it is indeed often assumed that mappability and objectivity are coextensive terms. Although I think there is an important sense in which every mapping of space is itself an objective representation of space, not every mapped space is an objective space. If we draw up a schematic map of bodily space, for instance, in terms of an array of regions corresponding to up/down, left/right, front/back, near/far, then the map that is so produced will itself be “objective,” and yet the space that it represents will not itself be an objective, but a bodily space—that is, a space that takes a body as its directional center. In general I would say that all representation is “objective” in that it re-presents in terms that do not themselves depend on any particular “subjective” position within the represented space, although any such representation always requires some subjective position in order to become accessible. The key point at issue in the discussion here is the interdependence of notions of objective and bodily spatiality, and the idea of equipmental space as not a sui generis concept of space at all, but rather an objective space in which things are configured in relation to one another, as well as in respect to a certain bodily space, and thence to a certain order of activity.
Heidegger treats, not only equipmental space, but also objective space, as secondary to existential space, or, more generally, to the existentialontological structure of being-there. Indeed, in more specific terms, Heidegger presents objective space, and so the space of measurement, as coming into view through the breakdown in being-there’s active engagement with its world that “releases” items of equipment from their equipmental context, allowing them to appear as detached “objects” within an “objective” space. When we grasp an item of equipment as merely an object, possessed of certain abstract properties, we grasp it as merely “present-at-hand,” stripped of its readiness-for-use, appearing within a “leveled”-out homogenous space:
In the “physical” assertion that “the hammer is heavy” we overlook not only the tool-character of the entity we encounter, but also something that belongs to any ready-to-hand equipment: its place. Its place becomes a matter of indifference. This does not mean that what is present-at-hand loses its “location” altogether. But its place becomes a “spatio-temporal” position, a “world-point,” which is in no-way distinguished from any other. This implies not only that the multiplicity of places of equipment ready-to-hand within the confines of the environment becomes modified to a pure multiplicity of positions, but that the entities of the environment are altogether released from such confinement [entschränkt]. The aggregate of the presentat-hand becomes the theme.171
This passage indicates the close relation between equipmental and objective space such that the one can be transformed into the other and can, in certain respects, be taken as itself illustrating something of what is at issue in the analysis set out above—in particular the way in which equipmental space can itself be understood as containing a mode of objective space within it. But, in this respect, inasmuch as it also presupposes the idea of the dependence of objective space on being-there’s existential character, so it also exhibits some of the difficulty in the very idea of objective space as a dependent concept. If we “overlook” the tool-character of the hammer, we can only do so because we already have access to the idea of the hammer as something other than a tool. The present-at-hand, and the spatiality associated with it, is thus not generated or derived from the ready-to-hand, but must be already given along with it—objective spatiality is indeed already a part of the idea of the equipmental.
Moreover, just as a grasp of spatiality, both bodily and objective, is necessary for engagement with things as tools, so, in this respect, is the present-at-hand itself necessary for the possibility of the ready-to-hand— using things as tools also means being able to grasp them as objects (though this need not mean grasping them in both modes at one and the same time, nor need it imply a capacity to articulate conceptually the different modes at issue here). Notice that this means that the idea of a hierarchical dependence between the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand, or between the practical and theoretical, must turn out to be just as illfounded as the other forms of hierarchical dependence that figure throughout Being and Time. At the same time, however, this does not reestablish the present-at-hand, or the “theoretical,” as independent of the ready-tohand—there will still be a dependence here, but a mutual dependence, and thus a dependence that does not allow either term to be treated apart from the other to which it is bound. Indeed, this point is an especially important one since often the attempt to demonstrate the hierarchical dependence of the theoretical on the practical is itself a response to the tendency to assume the reverse—to assume that the practical is hierarchically dependent on some form of the “theoretical.” The problem is not the assertion of dependence as such, however, but the failure to recognize the mutuality of that dependence. Of course, even in the case of mutual dependence there may still be some form of prioritization possible (analogous to that which Heidegger continues to hold, even after Being and Time, with respect to temporality), but it cannot be one based in derivation or hierarchical dependence, and it must be established, if at all, through the detailed analysis of the particular connections that obtain between the elements at issue. One element may thereby be shown to be “prior” to others in the sense that it occupies a more central position (exhibits more connections with other elements) within the overall structure, but it will remain embedded in the dependence relations that are constitutive of that structure.
There is, however, a commonly accepted account of Heidegger’s position as presented in Being and Time according to which one of its basic tenets is the primacy of practical engagement or “coping” over the theoretical, the prepositional, and the epistemic—which often seems to carry the hallmarks of a primacy based in some form of hierarchical dependence.172 The very idea of a clear distinction between the practical and the theoretical, however, is something with respect to which we have reason to be suspicious. Such a distinction is tied to a particular conception of theory that is itself open to challenge on grounds that Heidegger himself suggests in Being and Time. There he emphasizes a form of mutual dependence as obtaining between “practice” and “theory” such that not only does “practice” have a “theoretical” attitude proper to it, but so too does “theory” have its own “practice”:
Holding back from the use of equipment is so far from sheer “theory” that the kind of circumspection which “tarries” and considers, remains wholly in the grip of the ready-to-hand equipment with which one is concerned. “Practical” dealings have their own kind of sight (“theory”), theoretical research is not without a praxis of its own.173
As Joseph Rouse points out, however, Heidegger seems to have a very narrow conception of the nature of the “praxis” at issue here.174 Moreover, Heidegger also holds that there is a radical changeover in the shift from our practical engagement to the “theoretical” and “detached” scientific attitude that is fundamentally geared to a certain mathematical mode of projection of the world—a mode of projection particularly evident in the mathematical-geometrical understanding of space. Yet one can recognize such a distinct mode of scientific understanding without any commitment to a general distinction of theory from practice (that distinction may be viewed as always a distinction that is sensitive to its context of application) or of the “detached” from the “engaged” and without abandoning the recognition that whatever is designated as “theoretical” always carries its own mode of “practice” with it (and vice versa). The point of emphasizing the priority of practice, or of what may be better understood as “engaged activity,” should not be that there are two distinct modes of being in the world, one of which stands apart from, but as in some sense prior to, or the basis for, the other; the crucial point is rather that even the theoretical, which may attempt to present itself as based in a disengaged relation between “subject” and “object,” is always already constituted in terms of a prior engagement between (a prior “belonging-together” of) the one who theorizes and that which provokes such theorization. Not even in the theoretical attitude do we find ourselves cut off from the world; it is rather that in the theoretical attitude both we and the world emerge in a different light, within a different “project.”
This I take to be the real point of Heidegger’s analysis even in Being and Time—not that the practical and the theoretical, or the detached and the engaged, constitute two separate and distinct ways of being-there, but that being-there is itself such as to support different possible modes of disclosure, and that those modes are always underlain by a more basic gatheredness of being-there and world. What I would add here, and what Heidegger seems not to make clear, is that, for the most part, these different modes of disclosure are themselves in constant interplay. There is no purely “detached” mode of world-disclosure and perhaps not even, at least for beings that are capable of a theoretical grasp at all, any purely “practical” mode either. Indeed, in this respect, those cases that are often cited as examples of pure immersion in the practical and the engaged—being “in the zone” as is said in sports175—actually constitute another mode of projection, and one in which, even if we accept that it involves no “theorization” in the activity, the activity is nevertheless embedded within a context from which “theorization” (in the form of rules, conventions, strategies, and so forth) is not absent.176
The difficulty in making sense of the supposed dependence of the objective on the nonobjective, on what we may term the “engaged,” is a quite general one and arises as a direct consequence of the nature of the concepts at issue here. There is certainly a common tendency to treat objectivity, in whatever mode it is considered, as arising out of some process of disengagement, detachment, abstraction, or formalization.177 Yet such processes cannot give rise to a notion of objectivity since they themselves already depend upon, and are themselves expressions of, the very notion at issue. Disengagement, detachment, abstraction, and formalization all presuppose a preexisting capacity for objective understanding that cannot itself be construed as reducible to, or derivable from, the understanding associated with engagement or attachment, with the concrete or the material as such. Objectivity is, in this respect, a distinct and sui generis concept. The “leveling” out of the array of places and regions through some form of disengagement from equipmental involvement, while it may capture an aspect of the phenomenology involved in our thinking about engagement and objectivity, is not itself possible without an independent and prior grasp of that leveled-out space as such, but that means that we cannot view such an objective space as explained by, or as hierarchically dependent on, the space of engagement. Instead, the two modes of spatiality at issue are always given together as part of a single spatiality—to grasp space as such is, indeed, to grasp it in both its engaged and objective aspects—and it is the way in which these two are given together, the way in which they are “equiprimordial,” to use Heidegger’s term, that gives rise to the impression that we can get one from the other since the one already presupposes the other, and vice versa.178
The idea of objective spatiality may be understood in terms of a multiplicity of locations in which no one location has priority over any other— as a simultaneity of “heres.” Heidegger understands ordinary temporality in a similar fashion in terms of a multiplicity of temporal locations in which no single location has priority over any other—as a succession of “nows.” If there is a difficulty in demonstrating the dependence of the objective on the engaged in relation to spatiality, then a similar difficulty can be expected to arise with respect to time also. Indeed, a very similar problem does arise with respect to Heidegger’s attempt to show ordinary temporality as dependent on originary temporality. The problem, as William Blattner presents it, is that the sequentiality of ordinary temporality cannot be derived from originary temporality, which, as we have already seen, is not itself sequential. Blattner develops his own argument to this conclusion in considerable detail,179 but the main point is that although originary temporality does carry within it a notion of ordering between future, past, and present, it does not carry an ordering that would explain the public sequentiality of ordinary temporality as it applies to events in general, and such sequentiality is itself a core element in Heidegger’s account of ordinary temporality, and indeed, in our ordinary experience of time.180
Originary temporality carries nothing within it that would explain the sequential ordering of the entire range of diverse tasks and activities in which we are involved. This is evident even when we reflect on quite mundane tasks and the way events are ordered within that task: in making a chair, the task of making the chair as such may stand as that which is “ahead” of any particular task within the work undertaken, and it may also determine a general ordering of those tasks (the components of the chair, legs, seat, back, and so on will need to be constructed before the chair as a whole can be assembled), but there will always be many different ways in which the sequence of events that are involved in that making could be laid out (perhaps one works on the legs first or one might plane the timber for the seat). The mere fact that any “projection” of a certain set of possibilities presupposes, as the means by which those possibilities are achieved, a set of stages in the process of attempting to realize those possibilities (x is directed toward y, y is directed toward z, and so on) does not entail that any particular series of such stages must be gone through. But that means that no particular sequence is actually determined by the projection of some possibility or set of possibilities, and so nothing is determined in its sequentiality as such. Put more directly: the fact that what I am doing is making a chair does not explain why I plane the timber for the seat before shaping the timber for the legs, and so does not explain that particular sequence in which planing the seat and shaping the legs both stand. One might argue that the particular way in which tasks are sequentially related arises because of the way in which different projective possibilities overlap and need to be fitted in relation to one another, but the notion of fitting together here already presupposes the idea that they have to be fitted together sequentially, and so does not serve to explain the sequentiality as such. More fundamentally, we may say that the idea of a pure series of “nows” that need have no intrinsic relation to one another, an idea which is at the heart of ordinary temporality, is just the idea of objective time, but this notion cannot be derived from time understood as the temporalizing of future, having been, and the present. Just as sequentiality appears to constitute an independent feature of temporality that cannot be derived from originary temporality (even though it may be required for it in the sense that originary temporality necessarily works itself out in terms of ordinary temporality), so ordinary temporality is an independent mode of temporality that cannot be derived from any other such mode. In the most general terms, the leveled-out, nondirectional character of the objective cannot be derived from the centralized, directional character of the “engaged.” Situatedness, however, and so the “there” of being, always encompasses both the objective and the engaged— and this is so with respect to both the spatial and the temporal. This does not mean that our situatedness in the world is, after all, a matter of our objective spatial locatedness. Rather our situatedness is constituted in such a way that it encompasses both an objective and an embodied spatiality. As will become clearer in the discussion in subsequent chapters, both these modes of spatiality turn out to be necessary elements in the structure of situatedness, or better of place, but neither taken on its own is sufficient on which to base an understanding of place as such.181
Heidegger is right that one can only gain access to the objective, and so to the disengagement that goes with it, through the directional and the engaged, but he is wrong in thinking, as he did in Being and Time, that this means that the one is “derived from,” or hierarchically dependent upon, the other. The opening up that is the opening up of the “there” is an opening in situatedness of that which goes beyond the particularity of the situation—which is why it is indeed an opening up of “world.” The relation between the elements that are constitutive of that situatedness, and so of the “there” and the world into which it opens, is thus one of mutual, not hierarchical, dependence—of the gathering of a multiplicity of elements into a single heterogeneous, though nonetheless unified, structure. It is just this structure that is at issue in the notion of place or topos—a structure that is both temporal and spatial, that encompasses the objective and the “engaged,” the finite and, in a certain sense, the infinite. The analysis that Heidegger provides in Being and Time is an attempt to gain insight into the structure of the happening of the “there” that is also a happening of world—it is an attempt to exhibit the proper “ground” of that happening. But the analysis is compromised by Heidegger’s adoption of a particular conception of what it is to ground that takes such grounding to consist in the exhibiting of a transcendental structure of possibility (a structure of “meaning”) understood in terms of the uncovering of a hierarchical structure of dependence leading back to an originary unity—that of originary time. If the notion of hierarchical dependence is perhaps the single most pervasive and problematic element in the analysis of Being and Time, then the shift away from that notion, and toward a clearer focus on dependence in mutuality, will be one of the main keys to Heidegger’s thinking as it develops subsequently.
The problematic character of the attempt to ground in terms of exhibiting a structure of hierarchical dependence comes out in a particularly critical way when it comes to the account of spatiality since, on the one hand, it is spatiality that appears to pose the greatest threat to the unity of the “there,” and so exhibiting the derivative character of spatiality turns out to be crucial, and yet, on the other hand, it also seems clear that spatiality must belong in a fundamental way to the structure of the “there” that runs counter to any such “derivation.” Moreover, the problematic status of spatiality within the analysis of Being and Time is also closely bound up with the problem of showing how it is possible to explain the opening up of a public, intersubjective world on the basis of the projective activity of individual being-there. The problem here concerns what Dreyfus refers to as the “incipient subjectivism” that seems to afflict Heidegger’s account of spatiality, although William Blattner also sees this as emerging in respect of Heidegger’s account of time and as leading to his abandonment of the position set out in Being and Time.182 In fact, the problem is a deep-seated one that, in its more general form, preoccupies Heidegger in the years after 1927—a problem that he comes to view as centered around the notion of transcendence and that leads to a shift away from the focus on being-there as that is understood in Being and Time and to a shift in the articulation of many key concepts in Heidegger’s thinking, including that of world. This problem is not specific to either spatiality or temporality alone, but concerns the proper understanding of the relation between human being and the world, and of the nature of world, and disclosedness, as such. Indeed, one of the results of Being and Time (although it is also its starting point) can be seen as the exhibiting of the way in which the problem of being is inextricably bound up with the question of world and with the problematic character of the relation between the world and the human. It is, essentially, the problem of the finitude of being—of the happening of being and of world as always a happening in and through the specificity of the “there.”
Yet although temporality and spatiality must both be seen to be at issue here, the way in which spatiality is implicated is, once again, of particular importance. If what is at issue is essentially a question of situatedness, of place, then place cannot be thought apart from space, just as it cannot be thought apart from time, and yet space, much more than time, seems to bring with it a mode of thinking that itself tends toward the directionless, the extended, the placeless. Thinking the proper relation between human being and the world, thinking the fundamental nature of the “there,” means rethinking the relation between place and space, and the nature of space as such. Being and Time does not itself succeed in such a re-thinking, and, as we have already seen, one of the prime reasons for its failure is its reliance on an inappropriate conception of what it is to “ground,” and particularly, its reliance on a notion of hierarchical dependence. The notion of ground is itself a notion that has topological connotations, but if one takes those connotations seriously, then one cannot think of grounding in hierarchical terms, but only in terms of the relations of mutuality that are themselves characteristic of relations within and between places. Here also is an indication of the centrality of ideas of place and space in the problem with which Heidegger is engaged. The question of being, then, which is also the question of place, requires us to address the relation between human beings and the world, and to do so in a way that also addresses the question of the nature of ground. In Heidegger’s thinking after Being and Time, these issues—of ground, of the human relation to world, and of place—become central points of focus, and it is to that later thinking that I now turn.