Winter, Week 5 Meeting - Part I

Understanding (§31)

We pointed out that understanding, like findingness, is a moment of dasein’s disclosedness, the ‘there’ where entities can show up intelligibly to dasein. Like findingness, understanding is a structural moment of being-in which discloses the ‘who’ and world of dasein simultaneously (or “equiprimordially”). Specifically, understanding discloses possibilities in terms of which entities are intelligible to dasein. Heidegger says that this sort of disclosedness has the structure of projection. In understanding, dasein ‘projects entities onto their possibilities.’ We also pointed out that understanding is a broader phenomenon than cognition or knowledge, and involves a practical competence or skill in everyday dealings with oneself, others and intraworldly entities. Finally, we discussed how understanding operates on the ontological level (disclosing the kind of being that characterizes dasein, equipment or things, in general) and on the ontic level (disclosing particular ways to be dasein, equipment or things).

Understanding discloses dasein’s being in terms of that for-the-sake-of-which dasein exists, dasein’s ability-to-be [Seinkönnen, MR: “potentiality-for-being”]. To say that dasein exists is to say that dasein is able to understand itself as whoever it is, for instance as an American, as a carpenter, as someone devoted to justice. We noticed that Heidegger does not say which sorts of things are supposed to count as ‘for-the-sake-of’s.

Understanding discloses the being of equipment in terms of the worldly structure of significance, letting the ready-to-hand show up intelligibly in terms of its usefulness and its relation to the surrounding equipmental totality, or context of co-equipment. Understanding discloses how entities can, and should, be used. For instance, books, in the world of working at the library, are disclosed in terms of the roles they play in shelving, browsing and borrowing, along with the other books, shelves, floors, call numbers, co-workers, the boss, and so on.

Finally, understanding discloses the being of things (present-at-hand entities), for example, in terms of the theoretical laws explaining how they can possibly behave. Physical law, for example, says that it’s possible for entities with mass to gravitate toward entities with greater mass.

We wondered whether the possibilities upon which we project entities are dasein-independent, since they seem to belong to the entities themselves – particularly for present-at-hand entities. What is possible and impossible for such entities is determined by the laws of nature, and it would seem that these hold regardless of whether there are cases of dasein around (for example, by the law of gravity it is impossible for the chalk to fall upwards). But the laws of nature, and the possibilities and impossibilities that they afford, are ways of making entities intelligible, and so require that there is an entity that makes intelligible: dasein. So while the chalk certainly wouldn't fall upwards in the absence of dasein, this wouldn’t ‘show up’ as an impossibility (since there would be no understanding dasein for them to show up to). We will discuss this kind of issue further when we read §43 on reality.

We also flagged the fact that understanding is always finding (and vice versa), and so that projection is always thrown. Among other things, this means that dasein is always thrown into a range of available possibilities upon which it can project entities (including itself). For example, because we are thrown into 20^th-century America, we can't understand ourselves as Samurai warriors, and we don't discover cicadas as edible.

Further, the entities themselves constrain the possibilities in terms of which they can be made intelligible – and this means that projection is not 'free-floating' but is beholden to entities and can get them right or wrong. Thus Nate could grasp the chalk as edible, but if he did so he would be getting the chalk wrong, and he gets the chalk right when he projects it onto its specific usability by writing on the blackboard with it.

This led us to discuss why Heidegger says that dasein tends to understand itself in terms of its world (and therefore misunderstand itself). We began to address this by discussing falling.

Winter, Week 5 Meeting - Part II

Falling (§38)

Falling is a movement that belongs to thrownness – it is dasein's falling away from itself into the world and absorption in entities. This ‘away from’ is not a failure to be dasein, but is part of what it takes to be dasein. Kate suggested that we understand falling as like a drag on thrownness that connects dasein up with the world of entities. Note that the characterisation of being-in thus far has been primarily at the existential-ontological level, illuminating the being of dasein by showing how it discloses being. But being is always the being of entities, and dasein is the entity that discloses being (it is ontico-ontological). Falling is supposed to account for the fact that (i) dasein always takes place as an entity in each case, and (ii) its understanding of being is always the understanding of the being of entities.

Thus Heidegger says that falling “is used to signify that Dasein is proximally and for the most part alongside the ‘world’ of its concern” (SZ 175). This ‘alongside’ is an ‘absorption in …’. So falling involves being swept up in intraworldly entities. This begins to explain what it means to say that dasein falls away from itself. We recalled Heidegger's previous discussions of dasein's tendency to misunderstand itself as being just like the intraworldly entities that it deals with in the everyday world. In this misunderstanding, dasein loses its grip on the way in which it is different from other entities. So in being fallingly absorbed in its dealings with intraworldly entities, dasein misunderstands itself and in this sense falls away from itself.

We also noticed that in being absorbed in concernful dealings with entities, we typically discover them in the way that das Man does. This is because we are thrown, and so fall, into das Man. Human life wouldn't work if we came to it as blank slates and had to confront and discover entities by ourselves with nothing to go on. We always start from our tradition's ways of finding and understanding entities. For reasons that we will come to later (namely, death), das Man tends to cover over the way in which dasein is different from other entities. Thus das Man embodies and exacerbates dasein's fallen tendency to misunderstand, and so fall away from, itself.

Since falling is an existentiale, it must characterise dasein regardless of whether it is authentic or inauthentic. So the standard interpretation of falling as equivalent to both inauthenticity and everydayness cannot be correct. We found it difficult to discuss falling in a way that remained neutral between authentic and inauthentic falling, in part because Heidegger almost always talks about falling in its inauthentic mode, and never discusses authentic falling at length. This makes it hard to see what falling itself, and authentic falling, are. What is it to be authentically absorbed in the world of concern? or to be authentically determined by das Man?

Winter, Week 5 Meeting - Part III

Authenticity and Inauthenticity (§38)

We know that both authentic and inauthentic cases of dasein fall, and that authentic dasein is not outside of or above everydayness. To help us understand this, Jim likened fallen everydayness to a basketball game. Any human life whatsoever happens on the court; to stop playing would be, according to this metaphor, to cease to exist (to be dasein) entirely. So both authentic and inauthentic cases of dasein are playing basketball (fall into everydayness), and the difference between them will consist in how they do so (authenticity as an existentiell modification of everydayness). We suggested that inauthentic dasein might be thought of as playing basketball without knowing or caring about what it takes to win, while authentic dasein would be playing to win.

Heidegger will discuss authenticity (but not authentic falling) in more detail in the opening chapters of Division II. By way of anticipation, we suggested that authenticity involves some kind of struggling against das Man-ish ways of disclosing. But since this struggle cannot culminate in stepping outside of das Man and everydayness, it must rather result in something like taking responsibility for the ways in which one discloses. Heidegger will further elaborate this in terms of crisis moments in which we confront our finitude: Angst, death, and conscience.

In contrast, inauthenticity involves an unquestioning absorption in entities and going along with das Man and its disclosedness (idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity). But we noted that this need not look like an unreflective or passive life – as Heidegger says, falling drives dasein to “exaggerated ‘self-dissection’” (SZ178). Thus inauthenticity can include even the philosopher who spends his/her life writing and thinking about human nature.

Winter, Week 5 Meeting - Part IV

Idle Talk, Curiosity, Ambiguity (§35-37)

We concluded by connecting our discussion of falling and its in/authentic modes back to dasein’s everyday disclosedness in idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity. Even in philosophising, we may be engaged in nothing more than idle talk – just passing along philosophical catchphrases without fully appropriating what they make manifest. And since most of us are stuck in such everyday disclosedness, we’re pretty much all inauthentic. As much as we would like to consider ourselves authentic, on Heidegger’s account authenticity is exceedingly hard and rare.

Winter, Week 5 Meeting, Part V

Conclusion

We didn’t talk about the section on discourse and language (§34), and we didn’t talk much about interpretation (§32) and assertion (§33). But now that we have most of the structural components of dasein’s being on the table, we will be going on to discuss the unity of these in ‘care’ via a discussion of the limit-experience of anxiety (§39-42).