"BEING AND TIME"

This is my entry on the controversial German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The bulk of that controversy is unmistakably political: the fact of his membership in Hitler’s Nazi Party and the brave postwar defense of him by the remarkable Jewish political theorist and Heidegger’s erstwhile student, and alleged mistress, Hannah Arendt. We are not going to touch upon that controversy beyond what has just been said.

There is a curious indirect exchange between Heidegger and one of his milder critics Bertrand Russell. This is what Russell wrote about him in his book Wisdom of the West:

“Highly eccentric in its terminology, his philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. An interesting point in his speculations is the insistence that nothingness is something positive. As with much else in Existentialism this is a psychological observation made to pass for logic.”

And here is Heidegger’s world-historically famous indirect reply:

“Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.”

Reading this delightfully shocking one-liner, one might be surprised that among Heidegger’s major influences and role models, were two great philosophers with a great propensity for masterfully literate and supremely intelligible styles of writing: yes, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche!

Having said that, let us now move on to Heidegger’s philosophy proper. The differently-colored passage below is borrowed from Wikipedia. My original design has been to write a commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time. Hopefully, I will do just that in the foreseeable future. Meantime, I do not wish to withhold this entry from the reader, because my other purpose of drawing attention to the philosophy of this unusual man ought not to be hindered by such a trifle inconvenience.

His most interesting and influential 1927 work Sein und Zeit is based on a combination of two key insights.

The first is his observation that in the course of over two millennia of history, philosophy has attended to all the beings that can be found in the world (including the world itself), but has forgotten to ask what being is. This is his question of being, and it is his fundamental concern throughout his work. He opens Sein und Zeit with a citation from Plato’s Sophist, indicating that Western philosophy has neglected being because it was considered too obvious, unworthy of questioning. Heidegger's intuition about the question of being is thus a historical argument, which in his later work becomes a concern with the history of being, that is, the history of the “forgetting of being”, which now requires that philosophy retrace its footsteps through a Destruction of the history of philosophy. (I am much tempted to translate this as ‘deconstruction,’ rather than destruction, as it has been normally translated into English.)

His second intuition animating derives from the influence of Husserl, a philosopher largely uninterested in questions of philosophical history. Rather, Husserl argued that philosophy should only be a description of experience. (Hence the phenomenological slogan “to the things themselves.”) But for Heidegger this meant understanding that experience is always already situated in a world and in ways of being. Thus Husserl’s understanding that all consciousness is intentional is transformed in Heidegger’s philosophy, becoming the thought that all experience is grounded in care. This is the basis of his existential analytic, as he develops it in Sein und Zeit. Heidegger argues that to describe experience properly entails finding the being for whom such a description might matter. He thus conducts his description of experience with reference to Dasein, or the being for whom being is a question. In the course of his existential analytic, he argues that Dasein, who finds itself thrown into the world amidst things and with others, is thrown into its possibilities, including the possibility and inevitability of one’s own mortality. The need for Dasein to assume these possibilities, that is, the need to be responsible for one’s own existence, is the basis of Heidegger’s notions of authenticity and resoluteness, that is of those specific possibilities for Dasein that depend on escaping the vulgar temporality of calculation and of public life.

The marriage of these two observations depends on the fact that each of them is essentially concerned with time. That Dasein is thrown into an already existing world and thus into its mortal possibilities means not only that Dasein is an essentially temporal being, but also implies that the description of Dasein can only be carried out in terms inherited from the Western tradition itself. For Heidegger, philosophical terminology cannot be divorced from the history of the use of that terminology; thus genuine philosophy can hardly avoid confronting questions of language and meaning. The existential analytic of Sein und Zeit is thus only a first step in Heidegger’s philosophy, to be followed by the said Destruction of the history of philosophy, meaning, a transformation of its language and meaning, that would have made of the existential analytic only a kind of limit case…

But, curiously, Heidegger never wrote that second, follow-up part. Having asked the question, he prudently stopped short of attempting an answer.