Martin Heidegger: The Question of Being

After WWII, Heidegger shifted his philosophical lexicon from the phenomenological analysis of Dasein (Human openness) in his work, Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit, 1927) to “being itself.” Heidegger announced in 1953 that Being and Time would not be completed, but the same themes continued to be discussed in his work using a different vocabulary and style. This change from the extremely systematic and structured writing of Being and Time to the less systematic and more diverse literary writing began about 1931 to 1940 and is called, “the turn” (die Kehre) in Heidegger’s thought. Some say that Heidegger’s style became more obscure, but one could interpret his later writing as illuminations of the abstract phenomenological method and ideas in Being and Time, and a demonstration of a new way of thinking not dominated by an ideological obsession for control. And most importantly, Heidegger was aware of the circularity of ideological systems and is able to express his philosophy using different lexicons, but continue to use the same ontological divisions he defined in the past, “All proof is always only a subsequent undertaking on the basis of presuppositions. Anything can be proved, depending on what presuppositions are made”(Poetry, Language, Thought, Martin Heidegger, translated by Albert Hofstadter , Harper and Row ,1971, p. 222).

A new lexicon gives Heidegger a language clean of past meanings and now redefines, sometimes just by emphasis, pre-Socratic Greek concepts. There are also the peculiar technical terms constructed out of the German language and look odd in English like “to-be-in-being” or Sein; and  “that-which-is-in-being” or das Seiende (entities). Heidegger's analysis is of the word "being" (ὄν,) Greek for 'being' as opposed to (ὄντα) that means "things that are."

I think another reason for this shift in Heidegger’s style and vocabulary is also partly from the rise of fascism in Germany which took complete political control in 1933 after which Heidegger was under closer scrutiny of the Nazis at The University of Freiburg. Heidegger was writing in a dangerous historical period and place. Heidegger eventually became under attack by,

 “…Ernst Krieck, semi-official Nazi philosopher. For some time he [Heidegger] was under the surveillance of the Gestapo. His final humiliation came in 1944, when he was declared the most “expendable” member of the faculty and sent to the Rhine to dig trenches. Following Germany’s defeat in the Second World War, Heidegger was accused of Nazi sympathies. He was forbidden to teach and in 1946 was dismissed from his chair of philosophy. The ban was lifted in 1949”(Martin Heidegger).

Gesamtausgabe, the English translations of the complete edition of Heidegger’s written works, still isn’t finished and is estimated to be one hundred volumes. However, we can touch on some key philosophical themes, especially those developed after 1930.

I want to write a brief secondary analysis of the early Heidegger before 1931, which is his phenomenological stage when he published, Being and Time (1927). Then I want to review the later Heidegger after 1927 which is best summarized in the book,” Introduction to Metaphysics,” by Martin Heidegger (published in Germany in 1953) of a revised lecture course he gave in the summer of 1935 at the University of Freiburg. This division will not hold fast when explaining some of the issues in Being and Time, since the later Heidegger gives a clearer and more detailed exposition on certain topics.

“...there is a law of logic that says: the more comprehensive a concept is--and what could be more comprehensive that the concept of "being"?--the more indeterminate and empty is its content.”- Martin Heidegger

Human beings can ask the question of the meaning of Being which in turn implies that Being is presented to us. We can answer the question of Being by examining the form of Being that we have the most direct access—“the being which we ourselves are”(Being and Time, p. 7).

“ Da-sein, it is the site, “Da”, for the disclosure of being, “Sein.” Dasein is that being in which any being is constituted. Further, the question of Dasein’s being directs him [Heidegger] to the problem of being in general. The “universal problem of being... “refers to that which constitutes and to that which is constituted” (IEP Heidegger). Heidegger avoids using the term “consciousness” in his Dasein Analytic.

Heidegger begins his examination of the question of Being using a revised version of Husserl’s phenomenology. Heidegger was a student of Husserl and took certain concepts of phenomenology and applied them to his interest in the concept of “to be.” Heidegger applied the phenomenological descriptive method which describes and uncovers the essential structure of any examined phenomena.

The debate between Husserl's phenomenology, his student Heidegger, and the existentialists, is this issue of consciousness. I don’t think Husserl and Heidegger disagree on the structure of consciousness. Heidegger tried to avoid discussing consciousness directly since Husserl was already working on consciousness. Heidegger’s focus was on “Being” and rejected the label of existentialist. That is formally correct. However, Heidegger deals with the Being in human existence and wants to address human being without abstracting only her reasoning ability and reinforce logical prejudice as Western metaphysics has done. Those formal definitions for “appearance” and “mere appearance” go back to Kant and each philosopher uses them a little differently. Here is a good overview of the topic of phenomena: LookingAway: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno, by Rei Terada, p.19.

The phenomenological method seeks to dispense with pre-constituted meanings and reveal the genesis of all meaning structures. The phenomenological conceptual tools provided by Husserl are the Epoché (ἐποχή, epokhē ), and is understood as “the act of suspending judgment about the natural world that precedes phenomenological analysis.” Husserl used the word “intuition” to mean what is immediately present, comprehensible to sense perception, our memories, and our imaginations. Whenever we perceive the world, our first experience is our own ideas.  Husserlian phenomenology sought to systematize essences, logical forms, and explicate the intersubjective totality of meanings that members of a culture share. The other tool of analysis Husserl provides is the method of Eidetic reduction to vary the possibilities of appearance of any kind to derive essences and therefore their clear meanings. Eidetic is from Greek, εἶδος, (eidos) that which is seen, form, shape, or figure.

A particular form of Being is “ontic” and these are the everyday objects of experience and scientific investigation. However, any object can be questioned as to its meaning as a form of Being. This aspect of beings is “ontological.” Dasein has the ontic characteristic of being ontological—this means, it is a historical fact of Human beings that they are able to question the meaning of their own existence. An inquiry into entities is “ontic,” but an investigation of Being is “ontological.”

“Heidegger does not base his philosophy on consciousness as Husserl did. For him the phenomenological or theoretical attitude of consciousness, which Husserl makes the core of his doctrine, is only one possible mode of that which is more fundamental, namely, Dasein’s being. Although he agrees with Husserl that the transcendental constitution of the world cannot be unveiled by naturalistic or physical explanations, in his view it is not a descriptive analysis of consciousness that leads to this end, but the analysis of Dasein. Phenomenology for him is not a descriptive, detached analysis of consciousness. It is a method of access to being. For the Heidegger of Being and Time, philosophy is phenomenological ontology which takes its departure from the analysis of Dasein” (Philosophy as Phenomenological Ontology).

Heidegger doesn’t just want to catalog meanings and clarify essences as Husserl sought, but use the phenomenological method to discover the necessary underlying structure of all appearances and work out philosophically the question of the meaning of Being. Stated another way, “What is that ‘gives’ or ‘dispenses’ being within the range of human experience?” Not all phenomena are revealed to intuition and a method is needed to investigate the “regions of ontic phenomena” and discover the ontological principles that the philosopher reveals. Phenomenology is now transformed into ontology. Heidegger disagrees with Husserl that pure description of phenomena is possible because we necessarily interpret experience. Also, Husserl’s phenomenological Epoche isn’t appropriate, or even possible, since Dasein doesn’t merely believe in a world from some abstract theoretical point in thought as a knowing transcendental ego, but actually lives in a mode of existence he calls Being-in-the-World. Heidegger understands participation as essential in struggling with the question of Being, but the epoche establishes disinterested theoretical distance instead. The Subject is more than a theoretical knower and cannot be abstracted, as we have seen with Kant and Descartes, from the world of objects, or the non-self, without severe distortion. Ontic sciences necessarily distort Being. Western metaphysics is not truly ontological because the question of Being is ignored and substituted instead with an ontico-theological ontology.

“Being for Heidegger is always the being of entities, but he interprets such being not as the raw existence of entities but as their meaningful disclosure to human experience. Whereas entities may exist apart from whether or not human beings exist, being as the meaningful givenness of entities never "is" apart from human experience. Being is the meaning of entities. But Heidegger’s question concerns the meaning of being. This question about the meaning of being (also called the question of the "truth" or disclosure or giving/dispensation of being) concerns how it happens that the being-of-entities (not just entities, but entities in their being) is given or dispensed to human experience. That question shifts the emphasis from the relation of intentionality between human experience and the meaningful entities it encounters, to the relation of transcendence between human experience and whatever it is that makes possible the being of entities"(The Phenomenological Transformation).