Heidegger

The describing subject is unscrewed from the chair.

A finite being already outside itself,

toward death,

in an age that has forgotten Being.

Being and Time (Martin Heidegger, 1927)

Message

The question of the meaning of Being has been forgotten. Being is not a highest genus or a being among beings. Access to the question runs through the entity for whom Being is an issue: Dasein. Dasein is not a subject facing objects; it is being-in-the-world. Everyday Dasein is lost in das Man (“the they”): one does what one does. Anxiety discloses the nothing of the world and Dasein’s own uncanniness. Death is Dasein’s ownmost, non-relational, unsurpassable possibility. Authenticity is anticipatory resoluteness: taking over thrownness as one’s own. The meaning of Dasein’s being is temporality; the meaning of Being itself was to be shown through time (Division III was never published).

Content

Division I: preparatory analysis of Dasein—worldhood, readiness-to-hand vs presence-at-hand, Being-with, falling, care as the being of Dasein.

Division II: Dasein as a whole—being-toward-death, conscience as call, resoluteness, temporality as the ontological meaning of care, historicality.

Presentation

A technical German treatise that invents a vocabulary (Dasein, Zuhandenheit, Geworfenheit, Eigentlichkeit, das Man). Sentences are often etymological and circular by design: the language is meant to break the habit of treating Being as a thing. It is unfinished; Heidegger later called the published book a “way,” not a system.

Method

Hermeneutic phenomenology. Not Husserl’s reduction to a pure ego, but interpretation of the pre-ontological understanding already at work in everyday existence. Formal indication rather than definition. Destruction (later “deconstruction”) of the history of ontology from the Greeks through Descartes and Kant.

Summary

We already live in an understanding of Being, but it is covered over by presence-at-hand metaphysics and by public average everydayness. Phenomenology of Dasein is the way to reopen the question. To be authentic is not to find a hidden inner self; it is to take over one’s finite possibilities as one’s own in the face of death.

What shaped Heidegger

People: Franz Brentano (the question of the manifold meaning of being in Aristotle—the book that first seized him), Husserl (teacher, method, later the break), Aristotle, Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard (anxiety, existence, the individual), Nietzsche (nihilism, the history of metaphysics), Dilthey (life and historicity).

Place: Messkirch (Catholic Swabia), Freiburg, Marburg, the hut at Todtnauberg.

Formative experiences: seminary path abandoned; WWI meteorological service; assistant to Husserl; the need to publish in 1927 to secure Husserl’s chair.

Cultural events: collapse of neo-Kantianism; crisis of the sciences; Weimar instability; a Catholic-then-post-Catholic search for a more primordial thinking than both church dogma and modern subjectivism.

Quotes

“The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence.”

“Higher than actuality stands possibility.”

“Everyone is the other, and no one is himself.”

“Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.”

“We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed.”

“Being-in-the-world is always fallen.”
“In order to remain silent Dasein must have something to say.”

“The ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself.”