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Heidegger on Distraction and Concealment in Everyday Life

07/06/2011 By Kelly Cooper

" His [Heidegger's] aim [in Being and Time] was to study the internal relationship between being and time. Because being and time, presencing and absencing, mainifestness and nothingness lack any phenomenal or empirical properties, they seem to be 'nothing' in the merely negative sense of an 'empty vapor' (Nietzche). For Heidegger, however, presencing and absencing 'are'that which is most worthy of thinking.

What evidence, we might ask, is there for the claim that humans are really this temporal nothingness through which entities can manifest themselves and thus 'be'? To answer this question, Heidegger appealed in part to an argument taken from Kant: the best way of accounting for the possibility of our understanding of entities is to postulate that we humans simply are the temporal openness or nothingness in which entities can appear as entities. In addition to such an argument, however, Heidegger maintained that the mood of anxiety reveals the nothingness lying at the heart of human existence. While contending that anxiety is perhaps the most basic human mood, he also observed that it is such a disquieting mood that we spend most of our lives trying to keep it from overtaking us. Our unreflective absorption in the practices of everyday life — family relations, schooling, job activities, entertainment — keep us distracted enough that we manage to conceal from ourselves the weirdness of being human. Anxiety tears us out of everyday absorption in things; it reveals them to be useless in the face of the radical mortality, finitude, and nothingness at the heart of human existence.

Why is human existence weird? Because humans are not things, but the clearing in which things appear. Although we are not fixed things we define ourselves as if we were simply a more complex version of the things we encounter in the world: rational animals. Ordinarily, we identify ourselves with our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, attitudes, memories, bodies, material possessions, and so on. Such identification gives us a sense of stability and permanence, which covers up the essential groundlessness and emptiness of human existence. There is no ultimate 'reason' for our doing what we want to do. We have to postulate our own reasons for doing what we do; we invent our own identities, although those identities to a great extent are determined in advance by social practices and norms that have evolved historically. Moreover, as groundless nothingness, humans are essentially dependent and receptive, finite and moral. The mood of anxiety is so disturbing because it reveals that 'at the bottom' we are nothingness, that our existence is ultimately groundless, and that we are essentially finite and moral. In the face of such disclosures, little wonder that most people flee from the mood of anxiety.

Early Heidegger claimed, however, that if we submit resolutely to what the mood of anxiety wants to reveal to us, we become authentic (eigentlich) in the sense of 'owning' our mortal existence. As authentic, we assume responsibility for being the mortal openness authentic, we assume responsibility for being the mortal openness that we already are. Assuming such responsibility is essential to human freedom. Instead of existing in a constricted manner — as egos with firm identities — we allow the temporal openness that we are to expand. This expansion allows things and other humans to manifest themselves in more complete, complete, and novel ways, rather than as mere objects or instruments for our ends. Conversely, by fleeing from anxiety into everyday practices and distractions, we conceal the truth about our own mortal nothingness and are thus incapable of allowing things to manifest themselves primordially" (Guignon 1993:244-245).

Guignon, Charles, ed.
1993 The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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Fate and Dasein

17/05/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"Fate is that powerless superior power which puts itself in readiness for adversities—the power of projecting oneself upon one’s own Being-guilty; and of doing so reticently, with readiness for anxiety. As such, fate requires as the ontological condition for its possibility, the state of Being of care—that is to say, temporality. Only if death, guilt, conscience, freedom, and finitude reside together equiprimordially in the Being of an entity as they do in care, can that entity exist in the mode of fate; that is to say, only then can it be historical in the very depths of its existence.

Only an entity which, in its Being, is essentially futural so that it is free for its death and can let itself be thrown back upon its factical 'there' by shattering itself against death—that is to say, only an entity which, as futural, is equiprimordially in the process of having-been, can, by handing down to itself the possibility it has inherited, take over its own throwness and be in the moment of vision for 'its time'. Only authentic temporality which is at the same time finite, makes possible something like fate—that is to say, authentic historicality.

It is not necessary that in resoluteness one should explicitly know the origin of the possibilities upon which that resoluteness projects itself. It is rather in Dasein’s temporality, and there only, that there lies any possibility that the existentiell potentiality-for-Being upon which it projects itself can be gleaned explicitly from the way in which Dasein has been traditionally understood. The resoluteness which comes back to itself and hands itself down, then becomes the repetition of a possibility of existence that has come down to us. Repeating is handing down explicitly—that is to say, going back into the possibilities of the Dasein that has-been-there. The authentic repetition of a possibility of existence that has been—the possibility that Dasein may choose its hero—is grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness; for it is in resoluteness that one first chooses the choice which makes one free for the struggle of loyally following in the footsteps of that which can be repeated" (Heidegger 1962:436-437).

Heidegger, Martin

1962 Being and Time. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans. New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers.

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The Temporal Character of Dasein

13/04/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"I will not try to do justice here to the richness of Heidegger's constructive account of what he calls the 'phenomenological chronology of being.' What is of fundamental importance in it for the purposes of this discussion is the notion that being cannot be identified with the 'is' of the present tense, no matter how disguised, or with the mode of presence that corresponds to it. Instead, being is complexly articulated in the way that the system of tenses expresses, and there is no possibility of simplifying this complex ordering in favor of a single one of its modalities. The analysis of this articulation of being into its various modalities is ontology; and perhaps the most radical claim that Heidegger makes is that ontology has an essentially temporal character. This is because the distinctions it explicates among the modalities of being — between the 'is' and the 'is not' and between 'is possible' and 'not possibly' — have to be understood in temporal terms. The articulated structures of being are thus inextricably bound up with the distinctions of past, present, and future that are comprised in our own temporality as this was characterized in Being and Time. What 'is,' is thus necessarily what will or will not be. But these temporal qualifications of the articulations of being also articulate presence, which is, therefore, not just a matter of the static immediacy of the present tense. To put this point in a maximally paradoxical way, presence also compromises absence. It takes the form of the 'has been' and the 'will be' as well as of the 'is,' and the being of the entities that form part of the world of Dasein is understood in just this ecstatic mode that characterizes the temporality of Dasein. In psychological terms, we would speak here of 'memory' and 'expectation,' but it is just this psychological mode of description that Heidegger avoids because it obscures what most needs attention for the purposes of ontology. Instead, he speaks of the presence of such entities as their presence-to the entity — Dasein — which is itself temporal in the way that makes this presence possible. This presence is also declared to be the being of those entities, once it is accepted that the concept of being is complexly articulated in the manner that has been described and that corresponds to the set of temporal distinctions that Dasein itself deploys" (Guignon 1993:103-104).

Guignon, Charles, ed.
1993 The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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Plato and Coming Into Being

28/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“‘You have sought too soon to determine a particular eidos’ – these are the last critical words Parmenides has to say to Socrates. They indicate that the relation of ideas to each other, the participation of ideas in each other, which seemed unthinkable to the young Socrates, will be the genuine basis of the Platonic dialectic. All logos contains such participation of ideas in each other.

That appearances participate in ideas remains the presupposition which lies beneath the hypothesis of the ideas. It shines through clearly in the Parmenides, as in all the magnificent visions to which Socrates attains. This is confirmed just as much in the ascent to the good in the Republic, through the myth of the cave, as in the ascent to the beautiful, which Diotima represents to Socrates as the way of love. In the Parmenides, when Socrates uses the daylight analogy to illustrate how a universal (the eidos) relates to the particular, this presupposition becomes explicit. That this participation exists is, in the end, the condition for the very possibility of thinking and speaking, of the binding together of ideas and understanding. The “splendor” of the beautiful and the light of day describe methexis more truly than the relation of whole and part, in which the Eleatic dialectic entangled Socrates. In the good, as in the beautiful, as in the light, the ubiquity of participation is made known.

The signifying power of the syllable meta lends methexis the sense of being-with. We find the same sense of the syllable meta in the original text of the Parmenidean poem (fr. 9). There it is said of light and of night that neither has any share of nothing (meta m—den). In the concept of mixture, which admittedly makes a reifying interpretation easy, we encounter a problem similar to that found in “participation.” But in connection with the philosophy of ideas, something like the concept of mixture is no longer incomprehensible.

It is reported of Eudoxos16 that he used the concept of mixture to interpret the participation of the appearances in the idea and that he taught the inherence of the ideas in appearances. Similarly, the metaphor of mixture, in which the good of human life should be sought, is used in Plato’s Philebus. However, that does not mean an actual mixture of separate components, of the ‘hedone’ and of knowledge. What is meant is being-with. The number too is with the idea, with being. Thus the path of thinking always goes through differentiations of the one from the other. But that is precisely the way of logos: it expresses the being-with of one eidos and another eidos. The anamnesis takes place as dihairesis (diairesis). In the Pythagorean metaphor of mimesis, it was still unclear how number could be being itself. In the Phaedo this is immediately evident in the Socratic flight into the logoi. Precisely with that, statements become possible which also have validity for the individual, so that the sentence ‘Theaetetus flies’ must be false.

The strongest evidence for this relation between the ideas and the concrete individual, however, is the teaching of the four kinds in the Philebus. There the Platonic Socrates relies on the Pythagorean doctrine of opposites and draws the conclusions that lie in the relation of limit and unlimited. The point is that the being-mixed-together of the opposites of limit and unlimited makes a third kind of being unavoidable. So here one encounters, as the third, the concept of the metrion (metrion), the measured and limited. It could seem trivial that there must also exist the limited. But this result in the Philebus is followed by another conclusion which leads just as necessarily to a fourth basic kind of being. The third in addition to limit and unlimitedness represents the true wonder of being: coming into being, being which has become. This is not a mere application of thinking, number, and measure to the undefined and unlimited. Measure here belongs rather to being. It lies in the metrion, of which the Statesman speaks as the genuine measure that is proper to the being itself. As a concrete existent, this measured being points back to an original being, to the cause, the nous, that governs and steers everything, so that it is appropriate and corresponds with the whole – like the good, the healthy, or the beautiful” (Gadamer 2000:265-266).

Gadamer, H.. (2000). Plato as portraitist. Continental Philosophy Review, 33(3), 245-274. Retrieved February 28, 2011, from ProQuest Religion. (Document ID: 2146206361).

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Idle Talk-Dasein’s Everyday Kind of Being

26/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“The expression ‘idle talk’ ['Gerede'] is not to be used here in a ‘disparaging’ signification. Terminologically, it signifies a positive phenomenon which constitutes the kind of Being of everyday Daisen’s understanding and interpreting. For the most part, discourse is expressed by being spoken out, and has always been so expressed; it is language. But in that case understanding and interpretation already lie in what has thus been expressed. In language, as a way things have been expressed or spoken out [Ausgesprochenheit], there is hidden a way in which the understanding of Dasein has been interpreted. This way of interpreting is no more just present-at-hand than language is; on the contrary, its Being is itself of the character of Dasein. Proximally, and with certain limits, Dasein is constantly delivered over to this interpretedness, which controls and distributes the possibilities of average understanding and of the state-of-mind belonging to it. The way things have been expressed or spoken out is such that in the totality of contexts of signification into which it has been articulated, it preserves an understanding of the disclosed world and therewith, equiprimordially, an understanding of the Dasein-with of Others and of one’s own Being-in. The understanding which has thus already been ‘deposited’ in the way things have been expressed, pertains just as much to any traditional discoverednesss of entities which may have been reached, as it does to one’s own current understanding of Being and to whatever possibilities and horizons for fresh interpretation and conceptual Articulation may be available. But now we must go beyond a bare allusion to the Face of this interpretedness of Dasein, and must inquire about the existential kind of Being of that discourse which is expressed and which expresses itself. If this cannot be conceived as something present-at-hand, what is its Being, and what does this tell us in principle about Dasein’s everyday kind of Being?

Discourse which expresses itself is communication. Its tendency of Being is aimed at bringing the hearer to participate in disclosed being towards what is talked about in the discourse.

In the language which is spoken when one expresses oneself, there lies an average intelligibility; and in accordance with this intelligibility the discourse which is communicated can be understood to a considerable extent, even if the hearer does not bring himself into such a kind of Being towards what the discourse is about as to have a primordial understanding of it. We do not so much understand the entities which are talked about; we already are listening only to what is said-in-the-talk as such. What is said-in-the-talk gets understood; but what the talk is about is understood only approximately and superficially. We have the same thing in view, because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said” (Heidegger 1962:211-212).

Heidegger, Martin

1962 Being and Time. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans. New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers.

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