Heidegger Reading Group

Final Post

2008-10-27T13:58:00.004-05:00

The posts on this blog document the 'minutes' of the Heidegger Reading Group, led by Kate Withy and Nate Zuckerman at the University of Chicago during the 2007-2008 academic year.

Anyone interested in discussing Heidegger further during the 2008-2009 year at the University of Chicago should check out the Contemporary European Philosophy Workshop.

Spring, Week 9 Meeting

2008-05-30T11:46:00.004-05:00

The Final Meeting

For our final meeting, the fates (aka the Social Science division) threw a party for us, with food and beer and a live band! So we: sat out on the grass, drank beer and ate burgers and brownies and chips. We talked about: how we felt reading §83 (the last section), Heidegger's philosophical reasons for ending with questions, the hermeneutic circle, how temporality is supposed to count as an explanation of dasein's being and being in general, whether §83 takes back the project or transitions to the next Division, the incompleteness of SZ, whether ontology requires an ontic basis, the motto 'ways, not works,' the so-called 'turn' in Heidegger's thinking (from dasein to being), whether Heidegger recants the project of SZ or builds on it in his later thinking, what it means for authentic cases of dasein to be prepared to take back resolutions, whether Heidegger must be authentic to write SZ, whether we must be authentic to read it, whether SZ is therapeutically designed to make us authentic, whether the text teaches us how to read it, Strauss, the Heidegger / Carnap affair, what it means to say that "the nothing nothings," the distinction between Heidegger's 'What is Metaphysics?' (1929), Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) and Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929), congratulations to Jim on his award!, congratulations to Nathana on her award!, what we were like in high school, the tendency to treat being as a cosmic entity distinct from dasein, the fact that being or intelligibility escapes, in part, our will and choice, our fundamental passivity with respect to being, uncanniness (Kate's dissertation), transcendental arguments (Nate's dissertation), the coming (oil) apocalypse, das Man in a post-apocalyptic society, what is das Man anyway?, whether das Man understands itself as without beginning or end, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, das Man's flight from death, why dasein tends to understand being as presence-at-hand, the band's lyrics (referring to illegal immigrants and terrorists having the blues), the significance and datability of world-time – appropriate and inappropriate times for activities, the difference between world-time and 'now-time' (or 'ordinary time'), Jim's dad, the extent to which authenticity involves a radical relationship to das Man, whether Plenty Coups was sufficiently dissatisfied, the relationship between authenticity and action, how to be environmentally authentic, the crisis in women's history described in a paper that floated by on the wind.

Thanks to everyone who did the reading, came to the meetings, asked tough philosophical questions and suggested interpretations of the text. We really enjoyed getting to know you and getting to know Heidegger better as a group, and are excited about the possibility of doing something similar next year. We all seemed to have learned a lot and gained a greater appreciation for Being and Time. Good luck finishing up the year and have a fun summer!

Spring, Week 7 Meeting -- Part I

2008-05-29T14:11:00.003-05:00

Where Are We?

We started out again by looking back over Being and Time as a whole, this time in order to situate Heidegger’s discussion of temporality within the context of his overarching philosophical project. We recalled that the goal of the book is to reawaken the question of the sense of being, and we pointed out that it’s debatable whether Heidegger’s ultimate intention is to answer that question or simply to explain how the question is intelligible and important to ask, whatever its answer turns out to be.

To achieve his goal, Heidegger first has to do fundamental ontology, and his discussion of temporality is the culmination of this intermittent step in the overarching argument. Fundamental ontology shows how any ontology (any understanding and meaningfulness of being) is possible at all, by explaining the origin of this possibility in terms of the being of dasein, the entity that understands being. It consists in an existential analytic of dasein, which is an interpretation of that entity’s being in terms of the articulated and unified ontological structure which makes it intelligible as the entity it is. This interpretation is phenomenological, which is to say it looks at our everyday, pre-thematic and pre-ontological understanding of being from a certain point of view, the view provided by the two ‘guiding clues’ or ‘formal indications’ Heidegger gives at the beginning of his treatise (in I.1): (1) the essence of dasein is its existence and (2) dasein’s being, which is always an issue for it, is in-each-case-mine [jemeinig]. These clues orient the phenomenological interpretation of being-in-the-world in terms of the ‘who’ of dasein, dasein’s world, and being-in (I.2-I.5), and Heidegger’s discussion of those structural moments bring dasein’s being into the fore-structure for the existential analytic’s phenomenological interpretation, as the structure of care (I.6). Heidegger finishes fleshing out the fore-structure by explaining how dasein is a whole and exists authentically in anticipatory resoluteness (II.1-II.3). This, however, is so far just the preparation for the interpretation, not the interpretation itself. Nate summed up this first part of Heidegger’s project by suggesting that the everyday understanding of being, the starting point for the existential analytic, already situates dasein’s being within the interpretation’s ‘fore-having,’ the formal indications provide the guiding point of view, or ‘fore-sight’ for the interpretation, and finally the care-structure—‘(who)-being-in-the-world’ construed as ‘ahead-of-itself–already-being-in (a world) as being-amidst (intraworldly entities)’—provides the articulated and unified structural phenomenon, or ‘fore-conception’ to be explained and grounded in the interpretation.

Fundamental ontology’s phenomenological interpretation culminates in the temporal interpretation of dasein’s being, which was our topic to read and discuss this week (II.3-II.4). Heidegger finishes preparing to reawaken the question of the sense of being by explaining how the care structure makes sense, in its articulation and its unity, in terms of time—not just any time, but what Heidegger calls ‘originary’ temporality. Heidegger’s discussion of temporality not only explains the structure of dasein’s being in terms of some peculiar temporal phenomenon, but also explains how our ordinary conception of time, as well as the time that structures our everyday existence in the world, arise as derivatives or modifications of this more primordial sense of temporality.

Finally, looking ahead, we saw that the temporal interpretation of dasein’s being would, in turn, somehow provide the basis for reawakening the question of the sense of being (II.5-(the unpublished) Division III), by explaining that upon which [das Woraufhin] dasein always projects and understands being (being, itself; being as such; being, in general).

Spring, Week 7 Meeting -- Part II

2008-05-29T14:10:00.001-05:00

Primordial Temporality

We began with a major interpretive question, which we raised but did not resolve: Is Heidegger simply setting us up to explain what being means to dasein, the sense of being as dasein understands it? or should we understand his goal to be setting us up to explain the sense of being, itself (as such, in general), independently of the terms in which dasein might happen to understand it? One way to ask this question is to ask whether the ‘setup’ provided by fundamental ontology—explaining how being is intelligible at all to dasein by interpreting dasein’s being in terms of time—ever gets ‘discharged’ so that we are simply left with being’s intelligibility simpliciter (dasein’s understanding of it notwithstanding).

We then wondered what kind of phenomenon primordial temporality is. Jim pointed out that there are two obvious ways to understand 'time': the linear temporal sequence measured by clocks (now-time, clock time, the ordinary conception of time), and time as it is experienced in the context of our daily activities (which Heidegger calls 'world-time'). Since Heidegger is going to derive both of these from primordial temporality, this latter must be something else entirely. We suggested that if primordial temporality is supposed to ground both the time of science (and present-at-hand entities) and the time of concern (and so ready-to-hand equipment), then it cannot be an experienced phenomenon but must be part of a structural explanation of how dasein as concernful being-in-the-world is possible. This makes it theoretically analogous to the structure of self-consciousness or the constitution of the soul or psyche, since these are not experienced as such but are rather what makes any experience possible at all. Since Heidegger has argued that, considered purely as a structure, anticipatory resoluteness (authenticity) is the condition of possibility of being-in-the-world, it follows that at this level of abstraction, anticipatory resoluteness is identical to primordial temporality. That is to say, both anticipatory resoluteness and originary temporality play the same role, as the condition of possibility of dasein. (This is, for example, why Heidegger can argue that primordial temporality is finite, by virtue of the fact that authenticity is also finite as being-towards-death.) Accordingly, we went on to explore primordial temporality by considering the structure of anticipatory resoluteness.

Spring, Week 7 Meeting -- Part III

2008-05-29T14:09:00.001-05:00

Anticipatory Resoluteness

To get clear on anticipatory resoluteness, we looked at its concrete manifestation in the example of Plenty Coups – particularly as contrasted to Sitting Bull. (We did, however, entertain the possibility that Plenty Coups does not strictly count as authentic, since he is a transitional figure who makes possible a fully authentic 'Crow poet'). We compared Plenty Coups's anticipation of death with Sitting Bull's inauthentic awaiting of an external, worldly event. We noticed that in his awaiting, Sitting Bull did not authentically retrieve or repeat the past of his tradition by appropriating a possibility from it that would be appropriate to new circumstances (as Plenty Coups did), but simply took over, and clung to, the Ghost Dance. (It was not clear, however, how this fits with Heidegger's characterisation of the inauthentic past as forgetting). Sitting Bull's awaiting was thus not passive in the ordinary sense, but involved a lot of activity. (Recall that when Heidegger introduced inauthenticity, he insisted that it is not inactive, but can go along precisely with busy-ness in the world of concern). This led us to wonder about the authentic way of making-present. Heidegger describes the authentic present in terms of both the Situation (which involves resolute taking action) and the Moment of Vision (in which nothing happens). We suggested that Plenty Coups's dream vision can be understood as a Moment of Vision, because it is much like the limit-experience of Angst, and involves the far-reaching sighting of possibilities (for Crow subjectivity) characteristic of resolute, anticipatory understanding.

Spring, Week 7 Meeting -- Part IV

2008-05-29T14:07:00.002-05:00

Temporality

We then turned to Heidegger's characterisation of temporality as the finite temporalising of the ecstases. Heidegger describes temporality by saying that the future makes present in the process of having been – or, more literally translated, temporality is the beening, presenting future (SZ 326). We noted that the future (Zu-kunft) is to be understood as 'coming-towards' (zu-kommen), and that it has a priority over the present and having been (the past). We can see this priority, for example, in the fact that for a stacker, the book shows up as something-to-be-put-away (present) on the basis of a self-understanding as a stacker (the future), rather than vice versa. Heidegger also says that having been is grounded in the future – and presumably he means that our past is what it is only on the basis of how we take it up in projecting ourselves into the future.

We then went on to consider the ecstatic character of temporality. "Ecstasis" comes from the Greek, and means 'standing-out.' So when Heidegger says that temporality is ecstatic, he means that it stands out – and it does so in three 'directions' or 'ecstases' (future, having been, present). Further, temporality is "the ekstatikon pure and simple" (SZ 329), where this means that there is nothing from which temporality stands out (a self-contained substance, say). Rather, temporality just is this movement of standing out. So too for Dasein – whose essence, recall, lies in existence (ex-sistere, to stand out).

Nate pointed out (anticipating our reading for the next meeting) that each ek-stasis has a horizon, and that looking at those horizons might give us some helpful clues for making sense of how temporality is ecstatic, what it means to be an ecstasis, and how this feature of the structure of originary temporality is supposed to be apt for interpreting dasein’s being. The horizon of the future ecstasis of time is something intelligible in terms of the ‘for-the-sake-of’ relation; dasein is futural insofar as it somehow ‘comes toward’ itself in existing for-the-sake-of-itself. The horizon of the past ecstasis of time is that in the face of which dasein has been thrown; dasein is ‘beening’ (or ‘having been’) insofar as it finds itself thrown into its existence and world and finds this mattering to it, for instance through moods. The horizon of the present ecstasis of time, Heidegger says, is something intelligible in terms of the ‘in-order-to’ relation; dasein presents (or ‘makes present’) insofar as intraworldly entities show up to it intelligibly, which is to say, insofar as it deals with (or comports understandingly toward) the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand in existing. From this we concluded that the structure of these temporal ecstases will make more sense if we can figure out what sorts of things can count as (a) that for the sake of which dasein exists, (b) that in the face of which dasein finds itself thrown and (c) that which can show up to dasein as fitting into a series of in-order-to relations constitutive of dasein’s concern.

Spring, Week 5 Meeting -- Part I

2008-05-05T11:54:00.006-05:00

Introduction, Orientation

At this meeting, we were very lucky to have Professor Jonathan Lear visit as our guest speaker. (You can find out more about his work here). Prof. Lear's most recent book, Radical Hope, uses the historical example of the Crow chief, Plenty Coups, to explore the collapse of a way of life and the question of how to live with this possibility. We can read this text as an attempt to come to terms with what Heidegger means by authentic being-towards-death. Kate suggested that we can map the three chapters of Radical Hope on to the first three chapters of Division II of Being and Time in the following way (click on the table to see it full-size):

Spring, Week 5 Meeting -- Part II

2008-05-05T11:51:00.003-05:00

Jonathan Lear on Radical Hope and Being and Time

Prof. Lear began by talking about the personal and philosophical genesis of Radical Hope. With respect to Being and Time, the concern is about the lack of clarity regarding its ethical dimension: if authenticity is an ontological or existential phenomenon rather than an ethical one, how does it show up in a life? Is it consistent with being a bad person? To really understand authenticity, we need to consider Heidegger's ontology through a concrete case. Radical Hope is an attempt to do this.

Such an approach can reveal various things about what it is to understand being that are not obvious in the abstract register in which BT is written. Jonathan outlined two of these. First, in considering the breaking down of an understanding of being, we must distinguish between the demands of theoretical reason and those of practical reason. We might think that since the Crow can still remember their old ways of life, these therefore remain intelligible. So where is the breakdown? This question reveals that while the concepts in question may remain theoretically intelligible, they are not thereby practically intelligible (as items of practical reason). The breakdown takes place in our self-understanding – it is a breakdown in my ability to make sense of myself and others in terms of these concepts. This is a breakdown in my ability to move from a theoretical understanding of the past to a practical understanding of how I am to go on in the present and the future.

Second, we need to distinguish between the psychological phenomenon and the ontological phenomenon of breakdown. It is a mistake to think that the breakdown of intelligibility at issue is a psychological state that I manifest. Jonathan clarified this mistake by outlining three senses of intelligibility and its breakdown, using the example of marriage:

1. It no longer makes sense that I am (or was) married to this person. This is an issue about my relationship to another person, and it is a psychological phenomenon.

2. The idea of marriage no longer makes sense to me. This is a problem in my relationship to a concept, and is also a psychological phenomenon.

3. The intelligibility of the concept of marriage breaks down. This does not happen to me, but to the concept or way of life itself. The concept – rather than my relationship to it – breaks down. This is an ontological phenomenon, and there are many different ways of relating to it psychologically. (Jonathan gave the example of a future kalipolis, in which the Guardians abolish all intimacy and sexual reproduction. In this situation, I might be able to remember the concept of marriage, but I can no longer take this theoretical understanding and intelligibly render myself as married.)

This third case is not a psychological phenomenon, and it does not involve a breakdown in a theoretical understanding. Rather, a way of living with this concept breaks down. The suggestion is that this is what the Crow had to endure. This shows us something about what an understanding being is – namely, that it is crucial to an understanding of being that we are able to live (with) it. Accordingly, Jonathan suggested that we take the kind of breakdown in an understanding of being that Prof. Haugeland focuses on (a theoretical breakdown, exemplified by crises in the sciences) as a special case rather than as the paradigm.

Spring, Week 5 Meeting -- Part III

2008-05-05T11:48:00.003-05:00

Discussion

Jim asked: how can we judge that Plenty Coups was right and Sitting Bull was wrong? That is, how can we tell the difference between courageously redefining one's culture and betraying it? Jonathan acknowledged that this is a contested issue. But what is clear is that Sitting Bull's response does not count as courageous: doing nothing else but dance the Ghost Dance for several months in order to wipe out the white settlers. This is instead wishful optimism. But it does not follow that fighting to the death is necessarily a worse or less courageous decision than Plenty Coups'.

One philosophical question in this is: if the virtues are character formations that involve relating to possibilities, then can there be a virtuous response to a breakdown in the very field of possibilities? Is virtue possible at all in this situation? If so, then it is likely that this virtue will be courage. Courage is a way of living well with the riskiness of human life, and so a good candidate for virtuously facing up to a risk to a way of life. However, courage is traditionally associated with battle and manliness, so it needs to be thinned out. Aristotle supplies us with the framework for a thinned-out concept of courage, and Plenty Coups (via his dream) supplies us with an account of the psychological transformation required to thin out a traditional conception of courage and so meet a crisis virtuously.

Nathana asked how successful we can consider Plenty Coups to have been in securing the Crow's future, given that he considered his reservation life to be one in which nothing happened. Surely he was not the Crow poet opening up a new future for the Crow? Jonathan agreed: Plenty Coups is successful as a transitional figure (like Moses) in that he made it possible for the Crow to go on without despair until poets could arise to reinvent Crow culture and traditions.

Part of what is involved in this is a firm commitment to a transcendent goodness in the world. This commitment is what allows a people to endure transition, and it is one reason that the Crow might have decided not to go down fighting. Such a belief in transcendent goodness may be religious ('God made the world good'), but it need not be. We could also hold to a secular transcendence: we are finite, and to embrace this involves accepting that our best understanding of the good is also finite – that goodness outstrips us. (This vocabulary brings us quite close to what Heidegger means by authentic being-towards-death.) A commitment to our finitude and a transcendent goodness is manifest in the ability to endure transitional periods.

In response to a question from Josh, Jonathan pointed out that it is easy to overlook what is going on in this transitional period. From a certain perspective, it may seem that what happened to the Crow is just the stuff of history. We might think that understandings of being don't really break down, but they do change in response to challenges and so manifest various continuities and discontinuities. The Crow, then, have a past, present and a future (albeit a rather dramatic one). If this is right, there is no philosophy to be done here, only anthropology. But this picture overlooks what is important about the transitional period. In those 60-75 years, there was some important sense in which no one could say what they were doing. There was no answer to what it is to be a chief, or even to be a Crow. After this period (as we are seeing now), creative activities within Crow life begin to supply answers to these questions. Things happened during the transitional period that allowed for this creative reinvention, and the philosophical question is: how are we to understand these transitional happenings ontologically? What kind of happenings are they? This philosophical-ontological issue is very easy to overlook.

Finally, Aaron and Jim asked questions about how we can identify those aspects of a way of life or understanding of being the breakdown of which counts as death or the collapse of a way of life. Are there not cases in which something becomes impossible that nonetheless do not count as such a breakdown? Jonathan pointed out that it is not sufficient to just say that the difference here is the psychological one of how much you guide life by a particular possibility or understanding. Although it is difficult to judge some cases, we can reliably identify clear cases of discontinuity (death) and continuity (non-death). The important thing is to avoid the temptation to overlook the discontinuity in a way of life – to overlook its breakdown – and to consider it just as the passage of a culture through history.

Spring, Week 5 Meeting -- Part IV

2008-05-05T11:47:00.002-05:00

Heidegger

Although we didn't explicitly discuss the theoretical framework of Heidegger's anticipatory resoluteness (II.III), we did get clearer on what the commitment and flexibility of authenticity looks like in a human life. We also continued our exploration of what death, the breakdown of an understanding of being, amounts to. Notice that in talking about authenticity, we have employed the vocabulary of temporality: authenticity is a matter of being able to stand firmly in the present and go on into the future on the basis of (or despite) a radical break in one's past. At our next meeting, we will consider in more detail the temporality of dasein and authenticity.

Spring, Week 4 Meeting

2008-04-28T14:42:00.001-05:00

Our fourth-week meeting picked up from our first-week discussion of dasein and death. We had a looser discussion ranging over several tough questions. Here is a quick description of most of those questions:

(1) We discussed whether there can be dasein without human beings, if, as John Haugeland argues, dasein is a way of life that embodies an understanding of being. We also wondered whether there can be persons without dasein. We did not, however, come to a consensus on the answers to these questions, but instead took up another question: (2) Supposing that some person ‘survives’ the death of her way of life and comes to adopt some other way of life (we might say, ‘comes to be born into’ some other dasein), how should we conceive of what, or who, persisted ‘in between’ the death of the one and the incipient existence of the other? What makes it intuitive to ask this question is the thought that someone whose way of life is dead may nevertheless ‘subsist’—move from place to place, cook and eat, have a partner and a children (would this count as a ‘family’?), etc. If, ‘in between’ the one dasein and the other, there is no overarching context in which to make sense of the person’s activity, how are we to understand what the person is doing? Do we have to make recourse to merely physical, biological, neurological explanations? Is there a minimal, ‘dasein-like’ intelligibility to the person’s activity, even in the absence of a robust milieu in which to make sense of her? (3) We also puzzled over the appropriate ‘scope’ or level of generality for locating the phenomenon of dasein. Can something as specific as ‘fourth-year Heidegger reading group participants at the University of Chicago in 2007-2008’ count as dasein? Does something as general as ‘the Western European way of life’ have enough of a particular sense to bring anything dasein-like into view? Finally, we discussed various things that seem to count as misunderstanding being. One might, more ‘locally,’ understand the being of spatial (extended) entities in terms of location at a discrete, determine position in absolute space, rather than in terms of whatever quantum probability function (or whatever) constitutes the contemporary, accepted conception of the spatial. A different example would be understanding one’s own being in terms of the ‘anyone’ self [das Man] and one’s factical, worldly concerns, rather than in terms of one’s ownmost ability-to-be. A more egregious form of misunderstanding seems to be ‘crossing levels’ or regions of being, for example, by understanding mental phenomenon in terms appropriate to physical or neurochemical phenomenon (assuming this counts as a mistake!), or, to give a clearer example, understanding something ready-to-hand as merely present-at-hand. We did not elaborate on this question, but it was raised in connection with the description of dasein as an entity that essentially understands being—if dasein dies, is that because it embodied a fatal misunderstanding of being?

Next week we will meet with Jonathan Lear and discuss his book Radical Hope, in which he describes something very much like Heidegger’s notion of authentic existence. We hope this will give occasion to reflect on and further discuss our questions from this meeting.

Social Thought Colloquium: Richard Polt

2008-04-28T13:33:00.004-05:00

The Committee On Social Thought invites you to a Colloquium:

Speaker: Richard Polt

Title: "When Time Comes to Be: Heideggerian and Arendtian Inceptions"

Date: Monday, May 5th
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Room: Social Sciences 302 (Shils Room)

Richard Polt is Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University, Cincinatti. He is the author of Heidegger: An Introduction - which Charles Guignon described as "the best general introduction to Heidegger ever written" - as well as The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger's 'Contributions to Philosophy'; he has edited collections of essays on Being and Time and Introduction to Metaphysics; and he has co-translated the latter work. He is also an alumnus of the Committee On Social Thought, where he received his Ph.D. in 1991 under the supervision of Leszek Kolakowski.

Heidegger terminology on Wikipedia

2008-04-10T11:03:00.002-05:00

Just for kicks, I added a link in the "Heidegger on the Web" section to Wikipedia's entry on Heideggerian terminology. Given our nitpickiness in the group so far about the meaning and translation of his terms, I think you are each equipped to go into the guts of that page and start some editing wars over their proper explication. Already, for instance, I see 'present-at-hand' and 'ready-to-hand' described as "attitudes toward to things in the world [sic]." Sic indeed ...

Dreyfus on White on Heidegger on Death

2008-04-10T10:52:00.003-05:00

Browsing around the web, I found an online pdf of the Forward that Prof. Dreyfus wrote for a new book on Heidegger, Carol J. White's Time and Death: Heidegger's Analysis of Finitude. I'm linking to it because Prof. Dreyfus makes (especially in section IV of the paper) an interesting and relevant attempt to map out different possible interpretations of Heidegger's notion of death (Prof. Haugeland's included). It's worth looking at in light of our most recent meeting. You can read it here.

Post any reactions in the comments!

Spring, Week 1 Meeting -- Part I

2008-04-07T15:20:00.002-05:00

Background

We were very lucky to have Professor John Haugeland as our guest speaker at this meeting. Prof. Haugeland contributed to the renewed interest in Heidegger’s philosophy amongst English-speaking philosophers in the late 20^th century by arguing that Division II of Being and Time – with its discussion of death, conscience and guilt – is not peripheral (as many readers initially thought) but is instead central for understanding Heidegger’s claims about dasein, being and time. You can find links to some of Prof. Haugeland’s articles on Heidegger here.

We began by situating ourselves in the text: we have seen, in Division I, that dasein's being is to be grasped in its unity as care. But before we begin to draw conclusions about being from this, we need to be sure that we have all of dasein in view. Heidegger begins Division II by pointing out that we haven't considered either dasein's authenticity or its totality. II.1 analyses death, which is dasein's ‘end,’ so as to determine how dasein can be a whole.

Why analyse death? We know that death is a significant feature of human life, but we also know that the existential analytic is preparatory for working out how being can be intelligible. This means that only those phenomena that shed light on what it takes for Dasein to understand being are included in the existential analytic. So death must be connected to the understanding of being – but how?

Prof. Haugeland answers this question by interpreting death as the breakdown of an understanding of being. He holds that if Being and Time is a book about how being makes sense, then it must consider how being can fail to make sense or be misunderstood. Death is this failure. This reading is in contrast to the usual "existentialist" interpretation of II.1, which takes death as the mortality of human beings. Prof. Haugeland's interpretation requires a novel reading of several of the key concepts explored in Division I, including 'dasein' itself. (Note that in summarising the discussion, we have retained much of Prof. Haugeland's evocative and idiosyncratic language).

Spring, Week 1 Meeting -- Part II

2008-04-07T15:19:00.001-05:00

Others and Dasein

We first recalled the analysis of 'others' in I.4. The idea was to prepare to understand what it would be for dasein to die by contrasting this with something more familiar, but distinct: what it is for others to die. Others, Prof. Haugeland argued, are intraworldly entities, just like equipment – and indeed, the discussion of others in I.4 can be seen to have a structure that is neatly parallel to the discussion of the ready-to-hand in I.3. Since others, like equipment, are entities that show up within the world 'cleared' or 'opened' by dasein's disclosedness, others are not dasein. Furthermore, Prof. Haugeland argued, we should not read ‘others’ [die Anderen] as ‘every other person but me,’ since the role of ‘another’ is one that, in each case, I myself can play (particularly when my existence is public). When I call someone on the telephone, for example, my use of the phone and my ways of greeting and conversing are for the most part the same as others’ – I dial the string of numbers, I begin with “Hello,” etc. ‘Others,’ then, are people (myself included). If others are people and others are not dasein, then dasein is neither identical to, nor coextensive with, people. Thus, the death of others – the death of people – is not the death of dasein. To understand what it is for dasein to die, we need to look at phenomena different than those associated with the demise of persons (more about ‘demise’ in the next section). And this makes sense, given what we know so far of Prof. Haugeland’s understanding of ‘dasein’ – if dasein is a way of life that embodies or incorporates an understanding of being, then the death of a way of life or an understanding of being tout court would seem to be something different than the demise of some one case of dasein who understands being.

Spring, Week 1 Meeting -- Part III

2008-04-07T15:18:00.001-05:00

Death

With these distinctions in mind, we can better understand Heidegger's distinctions between perishing, demise and death. These three ‘death-like’ phenomena are distinct because they are exhibited in distinct kinds of entities. Perishing is what happens to living things; it is their ceasing to be alive. It has nothing to do with Dasein or being-towards-death. Demise applies to people, and it is a social event – the event at which your possessions pass to your heirs, at which your spouse becomes a widow/er, and so on. We can think of demise as a ‘legal death,’ as ceasing to be a person in society. Typically, such demise is concurrent with perishing. This is because it just so happens that for every person (who can demise) there is a "biological specimen" (a homo sapiens) which can perish. Nonetheless, people and homo sapiens are distinct kinds of entities, so perishing and demise are distinct ways of ending.

'Death' is the term reserved for the ending of dasein. What would it be for a way of life to end? We considered the example of the ending of the way of life of the Jewish community in pre-war Western Europe. In some sense, this becomes a "dead" way of life, where this means that Jewish weddings, brisses, celebrating Passover, and so on, end – not because someone is literally, physically preventing these events from happening, but because they no longer make sense as a way of life. Death, then, is the coming-undone or failing of a whole rich fabric of mutual intelligibility.

To make this more precise, we contrasted the examples of the coal man on a coal-powered train and the superfluous elevator operator who can no longer pursue their professions. Although there are difficulties in spelling out exactly why these don't count as the death of dasein, we can see that the elevator man experiences a breakdown in his situation with respect to entities, given his understanding of being, rather than a breakdown in his understanding of being per se. This suggests that being an elevator man doesn't quite count as a way of life (as dasein), because it is in some way insufficiently rich, complex and internally integrated.

Nikhil suggested that even when the Jewish way of life died, those who used to live it might have still found themselves (in Heidegger’s technical sense of Befindlichkeit) as Jews, might have still felt compelled to make sense of their lives in those terms. This brings out what, on the existential level, is so traumatic about the death of a way of life, where one cannot – yet cannot help but – make sense of oneself in terms of the way of life that has died.

We also considered the situation of classical physics at the beginning of the 20^th Century. In this case, the whole intelligibility of physical things came unglued – as it did with the Copernican revolution (where, as Prof. Haugeland put it, “the world got literally turned upside down”). Unlike the elevator man or the coal man, this is not a breakdown in relating to entities, but a breakdown in how the world itself works or makes sense, and how we understand our place in that world. In this breakdown, everything comes apart and we don't know how to project entities at all.

Spring, Week 1 Meeting -- Part IV

2008-04-07T15:15:00.003-05:00

Being-towards-Death

These examples of the death of dasein should make it clear that death is not an event. As Heidegger says, death is only in being-towards-death. Death, as the breakdown of a way of life, consists in realising that you can't go on living that way of life, that you can no longer project entities onto those possibilities that constitute your understanding of being. This can be contrasted to the biological event of perishing, in which there can be no such realisation of an inability to go on (or for which such realisation is irrelevant). The death of dasein happens only when the breakdown of the understanding of being is confronted – when you confront the fact that your understanding of being might be a misunderstanding.

Accordingly, being-towards-death is a matter of existing in the face of the possibility that one might have misunderstood being all along. To put it another way, it is understanding that one’s understanding of being is finite, and living one’s life in light of this understanding. One form this way of living can take is taking responsibility for the viability of one’s way of life. This does not mean that you take it as your job to ensure that the way of life continues to be viable no matter what, but rather that you take it as up to you to tell whether or not it remains viable (i.e. whether or not you can keep living it).

This is (at least a hint at) 'authentic' being-towards-death. Prof. Haugeland – and Kate and Nate – think that since the term 'authentic' usually means 'real' or 'genuine,’ this word can give the wrong impression about what Heidegger means by ‘eigentlich.’ (Not only do 'real' and 'genuine' belong to the vocabulary of the present-at-hand, but they also imply that 'inauthentic' cases of dasein are somehow fake or counterfeit.) We prefer to translate 'eigentlich' as 'owned' (picking up on its root ‘eigen,’ 'own'). (Thus uneigentlich dasein is unowned or disowned.) The vocabulary of 'ownedness' connects to the in-each-case-mineness of dasein, since it implies that someone has taken over dasein as his or her own, as ‘mine.’ This 'taking over' ("on purpose mineness") is a modification of 'in-each-case-mineness' (which applies to both owned and unowned dasein). It consists in making dasein, my way of life, my own in the sense that I take responsibility for it and won't put up with things not making sense in it, with incompatibilities or “contraries” in my understanding of being. So for dasein to be one's own 'on purpose' is for one to commit to both trying to keep one's way of life (and the understanding of being it embodies) still viable when things go awry, and recognising when things are going awry because that way of life is no longer viable.

Spring, Week 1 Meeting -- Part V

2008-04-07T15:11:00.004-05:00

The Features of Death

We ended the discussion by briefly covering some of the features of death that Heidegger discusses, with particular emphasis on how the seemingly 'personal' character of these features fits with Prof. Haugeland's interpretation of death. We saw that (being-towards-)death is 'non-relational' in the sense that each person who confronts the death of dasein, the breakdown of his or her way of life, confronts it as a breakdown for him or her, and so takes the responsibility for that upon him- or herself. This also shows how (being-towards-)death can be individualising: an individual case of dasein has to take responsibility for his or her way of life. If dasein is a way of life, then it is not the kind of thing that can take responsibility. But the people who lead that way of life can take responsibility for it, and when they do so, they are individualised as people who lead that way of life.

We did not discuss all of the features of death in detail, although we did touch on most of them. Here is the chart we had on the board summarising these (click on the chart to see it full-size):

Being-In Discussion

2008-04-07T13:55:00.009-05:00

As requested, here is Kate and Nate's discussion about being-in and the care chart.

The issue is how to construe being-in on the chart; initially, Kate and Nate differed on this. Here are the two options, with the relevant differences marked in bold in the asterisked row (click on the charts to see them full-size):

What's at stake in this?

The different ways of describing the chart's columns raise the question of how we are to understand being-in as such – that is, disclosedness itself. Option (i) is motivated by the thought that being-in as such is supposed to explain how dasein comports towards entities (in their being). Option (ii) is motivated by the thought that being-in as such addresses how dasein understands (the) being (of entities). Thus the issue is about whether we take what is important about dasein to be the fact that it relates to entities (in their being) or the fact that it relates to being (as the being of entities). Clearly, this is a question of emphasis. Although there may be philosophical consequences of reading SZ in one way rather than the other, our suspicion is that the stakes are primarily pedagogical.

Discussion

On option (i), all of the columns together show dasein as ontico-ontological. The first two show the ontological and third shows the ontic dimension of dasein. On option (ii), the third column names fallen dasein as ontico-ontological, and the first two columns show dasein as ontological. There are two related issues here: first, whether the third (right hand) column should be characterised as (i) ontic or (ii) ontico-ontological; and second, whether the third column should be characterised in terms of (i) comportment towards entities or (ii) comportment towards entities as entities. This latter also affects how we fill out the left hand columns.

Our first concern was that describing the third (right hand) column as (i) ontic / comportment towards entities might be misleading in two ways. First, it may imply that there is a 'comportment towards entities' (ontic) that can be distinguished from 'comportment towards entities as entities' (ontological). But dasein's comportment towards entities just is comportment towards entities as entities (= comporting towards entities in their being). Putting these in separate columns may thus invite the following misunderstanding: dasein has an access to entities that is distinct from its comporting towards entities in their being; its understanding of being is mysteriously tacked on to an independent (perceptual, physical) access to entities, as a soul is tacked on to an animal body.

The second way in which option (i) might be misleading lies in the way that the left hand columns are described. On option (i), being-in as such is glossed as comporting towards entities as entities. But this obscures the fact that we only get entities in the picture when being-in is fallen (the third column). Being-in as such (the first two columns) is Dasein's disclosedness (projecting possibilities, finding thrownness, articulating intelligibility), which is its openness to being.

Option (ii) attempts to avoid both of these problems, but runs into equally serious problems of its own. First, it addresses the second problem by describing being-in as openness to being rather than comportment towards entities as entities (i.e. in their being). But this risks severing dasein's openness to being from its comportment towards entities, and so implying that dasein's disclosure of being is some kind of mystical communion distinct from its everyday dealings with entities. Being is always the being of entities, so an openness to being is always an openness to entities in their being.

Option (ii) addresses the first problem by describing fallen dasein not as ontic, but as ontico-ontological. Dasein never simply relates to entities apart from its comportment towards them as entities (i.e. in their being), so is never merely ontic. Identifying the right hand column as ontico-ontological makes clear that it is a modification (via falling) of the left hand columns, rather than an addition to or substratum for them. It emphasises that the columns cannot be understood separately. The problem with this is that it might not be clear what the 'ontological' columns add to the picture, if the right hand column is in itself (ontico-)ontological.

So the problem is basically this: given that the chart is supposed to show dasein as ontico-ontological, and given that it is through falling (the right hand column) that dasein's understanding of being connects up with the ontic, do we characterise this right hand column in terms of the "whole" that is realised in it (ontico-ontological) or the "part" that is contributed by it (ontic)? Similarly for the left hand columns. In other words: given that in making a chart we have to draw lines through the insoluble unity of dasein's being, where do we put the lines? Do we take Dasein as the (ontic) entity that understands the being of entities (ontological), or as the understander of being (ontological) that grasps being through entities (ontico-ontological)?

Winter, Week 10 Meeting (Part I)

2008-03-31T15:28:00.001-05:00

I.6 : Reality (§43) and Truth (§44)

Last time we saw that dasein's being can be grasped in its unity as care: being-ahead-of-itself-already-in-(a world) as being-amidst (intraworldly-entities). Recall that the goal of BT is to raise the question of what it means to be, and that the analysis of dasein's being is designed to help us do this. We noted that BT’s initial question ‘what does it mean to be?’ gets pursued through the investigation of dasein, the entity that understands being, and therefore gets transformed into the question ‘what does it mean to be dasein?’ – or, put another way, ‘what is it to be able to understand being (at all, in general)?’. So, having established that dasein's being is care, it seems we should now be in a position to say something about being itself.

However, we noted that Heidegger concludes these sections (as he often does) with a question: have we really grasped all of dasein? The answer is no, and this shows that dasein's existence needs to be interpreted further before we can say anything more about the meaning of being.

But we are already in a position to re-think two phenomena that have traditionally been closely associated with being: reality and truth. We discussed some of Heidegger’s claims to the effect that the existential understanding of truth and reality is different from – and in fact grounds – the ways truth and reality have traditionally been understood in their connection with the phenomenon of being.

Winter, Week 10 Meeting (Part II)

2008-03-31T15:26:00.003-05:00

Reality (§43)

We discussed four questions (or “problems”) Heidegger finds associated with the traditional conception of being and reality: (1) whether entities independent of (“external to”) dasein are at all, (2) whether it’s possible to prove the (“external”) world is real, (3) whether entities and the world independent of dasein can be known as they are “in themselves,” and (4) what it truly means to be real, in the first place.

We explained the sense in which reality, according to Heidegger, has been traditionally construed in terms of the presence to the mind of a substance possessing essential and accidental properties. We pointed out the counterintuitive consequences of construing the real as essentially ‘subjective’ or mind-dependent, on the one hand (since we think that reality is distinct from and independent of our own mental representations of it), or as simply ‘objective’ in the sense of material and non-mental, on the other hand (since we are inclined to believe there are mental phenomena distinct from material phenomena). Heidegger inveighs against the traditional concept of reality because it makes it seem like the four problems above are genuine problems. The strict, ontological division of 'subjective' and 'objective', 'internal' and 'external' implies that there is a general philosophical problem of how to bridge the ontological (and epistemological) 'gap' between these, a problem whose solution constrains what we can coherently say about the meaning of being. Heidegger, in contrast, wants to reject these problems as philosophically illegitimate, and this, we concluded, is something that motivates his contrasting view of dasein as being-in-the-world. Heidegger argues that neither dasein nor ready-to-hand, intraworldly entities (nor, for that matter, present-at-hand entities) can be made intelligible on its own, independently of the intelligibility of the other, so there is no such ‘gap’ between them to be bridged. We briefly discussed two places Heidegger makes (something like) this argument: (1) in his claim that human life (existence, projection onto abilities-to-be-dasein) is intelligible if and only if the equipment with which (and the others with whom) human life is lived are also intelligible, and (2) his claim that when dasein’s possibilities cease to be intelligible in the face of Angst, the entities in one’s world also cease to be intelligible as the entities they are.

Winter, Week 10 Meeting (Part III)

2008-03-31T15:24:00.002-05:00

What depends on Dasein?

We began the second hour of our meeting by juxtaposing passages from §43 and §44 to show that there is a structural similarity between the way that reality does and does not depend on Dasein and the way that truth does and does not depend on Dasein. We read passages from SZ 212 and SZ 226.

To get clear (or perhaps less clear) on this, we discussed the popular philosophical problem of whether a tree makes a sound if it falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it. We agreed that there is some brute event taking place, and that in order to make sense of this as a noise consisting of sound waves (as physicists might) or as a meaningful sound (as hikers might), we have to have dasein (as the entity that makes sense of things) in the picture. This does not mean that there must be someone with appropriate organs around to hear the noise in order for it to happen, but rather that there must be cases of dasein (with an understanding of being) around in order for the event to be intelligible as any kind of event. This applies retrospectively: we can make sense of a tree falling in the Jurassic period as making a noise in the sense (at least) of emitting sound waves, because we do so from our perspective, as currently existing cases of dasein, and because we have at our disposal a way of making sense of things (namely, physical science) that makes human-independent occurrences intelligible for us.

Heidegger's point is that what's going on with entities doesn't depend on dasein, but that any kind of making sense of this – including making sense of an occurrence as dasein-independent – does depend on dasein.

Winter, Week 10 Meeting (Part IV)

2008-03-31T15:22:00.003-05:00

Truth (§44)

We didn't have time to discuss Heidegger's account of truth in detail. We did note that, according to Heidegger, truth is traditionally construed as a correspondence or agreement between assertions and entities (or ‘the world,’ or ‘reality’). By contrast, and for similar reasons as were involved in his repudiation of the traditional conception of reality, Heidegger argues that the traditional concept of truth as correspondence or agreement depends on the ability of dasein to discover entities and disclose being. Thus, he calls dasein's discovery of entities 'truth,' on account of the entities’ being ‘set free’ or ‘uncovered’ by dasein so that they can show up to it (rather than remaining covered up, in obscurity). Truth, for Heidegger, is a way of being: being-true, being-uncovering. But this is only part of Heidegger's account of truth, and it leaves out his argument. For further discussion of this section and the reality section, you should look at Richard Polt's Heidegger: an Introduction (pp. 80-84).

Next Quarter: Invited Speakers

2008-03-20T10:42:00.002-05:00

Next quarter we will have two guest speakers from the University of Chicago. John Haugeland will visit us first, to discuss death and dasein. Then Jonathan Lear will visit a bit later, to discuss authenticity. Prof. Lear's discussion will spring from one of his most recent books, Radical Hope, which you could read over break (it's short and compelling) if you want some background for his talk.

As of the end of winter quarter, we plan to meet again on Thursday, April 3, from 5:00-7:00 p.m. We'll try to find a room in Cobb, as usual. This will likely be our meeting with Prof. Haugeland, so prepare your thoughts about what it is to be towards death and what in the hell 'dasein' means!

Have a good break,
Kate and nate