Being and Time

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Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit, 1927) is German philosopher Martin Heidegger's most important work. Although written quickly, and despite the fact that Heidegger never completed the project outlined in the introduction, the book has profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, particularly existentialism, hermeneutics and deconstruction.

Contents

[edit] Heidegger's original project

Being and Time was originally intended to consist of two major parts, each part consisting of three divisions.[1] Heidegger was forced to prepare the book for publication when he had completed only the first two divisions of part one. Some have argued that there are indications that the second division of Being and Time shows some signs of haste.[2] The other divisions of Being and Time (particularly the divisions on time and being, Kant, and Aristotle) were in many respects addressed in one form or another in Heidegger's other works. As published, Being and Time consists of the lengthy and important two-part introduction, followed by Division One, the "Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein," and Division Two, "Dasein and Temporality."

[edit] Introductory summary

[edit] Being

On the first page of Being and Time, Heidegger describes the project in the following way: "our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the sense of being and to do so concretely."[3] Heidegger claims that traditional ontology has prejudicially overlooked this question, dismissing it as overly general, undefinable, or obvious.[4]

Instead Heidegger proposes to understand being itself, as distinguished from any specific entities (beings).[5] "'Being' is not something like a being."[6] Being, Heidegger claims, is "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood."[7] Heidegger is seeking to identify the criteria or conditions by which any specific entity can be at all.[8]

If we grasp being, we will clarify the meaning of being, or "sense" of being ("Sinn des Seins"), where by "sense" Heidegger means that "in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something."[9] According to Heidegger, as this sense of being precedes any notions of how or in what manner any particular being or beings exist, it is pre-conceptual, non-propositional, and hence pre-scientific.[10] Thus, in Heidegger's view, fundamental ontology would be an explanation of the understanding preceding any other way of knowing, such as the use of logic, theory, specific ontology[11] or act of reflective thought. At the same time, there is no access to being other than via beings themselves—hence pursuing the question of being inevitably means asking about a being with regard to its being.[12] Heidegger argues that a true understanding of being can only proceed by referring to particular beings, and that the best method of pursuing being must inevitably, he says, involve a kind of hermeneutic circle, that is (as he explains in his critique of prior work in the field of hermeneutics), it must rely upon repetitive yet progressive acts of interpretation. "The methodological sense of phenomenological description is interpretation."[13]

[edit] Dasein

Thus the question Heidegger asks in the introduction to Being and Time is: what is the being that will give access to the question of the meaning of being? Heidegger's answer is that it can only be that being for whom the question of being is important, the being for whom being matters.[14] As this answer already indicates, the being for whom being is a question is not a what, but a who. Heidegger calls this being Dasein (an ordinary German word meaning, roughly, "(human) existence" or, more literally, "being-there"), and the method pursued in Being and Time consists in the attempt to delimit the characteristics of Dasein, in order thereby hopefully to approach being itself. Dasein is not "man," but is nothing other than "man"—it is this distinction that enables Heidegger to claim that Being and Time is something other than philosophical anthropology.

Heidegger's account of Dasein passes through a dissection of the experiences of Angst and mortality, and then through an analysis of the structure of "care" as such. From there he raises the problem of "authenticity," that is, the potentiality or otherwise for mortal Dasein to exist fully enough that it might actually understand being. Heidegger is clear throughout the book that nothing makes certain that Dasein is capable of this understanding.

[edit] Time

Finally, this question of the authenticity of individual Dasein cannot be separated from the "historicality" of Dasein. On the one hand, Dasein, as mortal, is "stretched along" between birth and death, and thrown into its world, that is, thrown into its possibilities, possibilities which Dasein is charged with the task of assuming. On the other hand, Dasein's access to this world and these possibilities is always via a history and a tradition—this is the question of "world historicality," and among its consequences is Heidegger's argument that Dasein's potential for authenticity lies in the possibility of choosing a "hero."

Thus, more generally, the outcome of the progression of Heidegger's argument is the thought that the being of Dasein is time. Nevertheless, Heidegger concludes his work with a set of enigmatic questions foreshadowing the necessity of a destruction (that is, a transformation) of the history of philosophy in relation to temporality—these were the questions to be taken up in the never completed continuation of his project:

The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Dasein is grounded in temporality. Accordingly, a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?[15]

[edit] Phenomenology in Heidegger and Husserl

Although Heidegger describes his method in Being and Time as phenomenological, the question of its relation to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl is complex. The fact that Heidegger believes that ontology includes an irreducible hermeneutic (interpretative) aspect, for example, might be thought to run counter to Husserl's claim that phenomenological description is capable of a form of scientific positivity. On the other hand, however, several aspects of the approach and method of Being and Time seem to relate more directly to Husserl's work.

The central Husserlian concept of the directedness of all thought—intentionality—for example, while scarcely mentioned in Being and Time, has been identified by some with Heidegger's central notion of "Sorge" (Cura, care or concern). But for Heidegger, theoretical knowledge represents only one kind of intentional behaviour, and he asserts that it is grounded in more fundamental modes of behaviour and forms of practical engagement with the surrounding world. Whereas a theoretical understanding of things grasps them according to "presence," for example, this may conceal that our first experience of a being may be in terms of its being "ready-to-hand." Thus, for instance, when someone reaches for a tool such as a hammer, their understanding of what a hammer is is not determined by a theoretical understanding of its presence, but by the fact that it is something we need at the moment we wish to do hammering. Only a later understanding might come to contemplate a hammer as an object. There is thus a sense in which this kind of argument, although very different from Husserlian phenomenology, nevertheless resembles it, to the extent that what is involved is a kind of suspension of the everyday understanding of what it means to experience beings in the world.

[edit] Hermeneutics

The total understanding of being results from an explication of the implicit knowledge of being that inheres in Dasein. Philosophy thus becomes a form of interpretation. But, since there is no external reference point outside being from which to begin this interpretation, the question becomes to know in which way to proceed with this interpretation. This is the problem of the "hermeneutic circle," and the necessity for the interpretation of the meaning of being to proceed in stages: this is why Heidegger's technique in Being and Time is sometimes referred to as hermeneutical phenomenology. Heidegger has chosen this approach also to overcome the philosophical idea of a subject. While Kant asked the epistemological question: "How does the transcendental subject recognize the world?" Heidegger claims that the problem is not to understand the subject's faculty of cognition. This is because the worldly agent Dasein is always and has always been inside a concrete world, that he does not recognize but can understand. The world is made up of meaningful relations between single beings; that is, there is sense in it. Now because sense is something that always exists between two or more things, there is not such one special thing that determines the sense of all others. Because we have no absolute starting point in our inquiry, we must chose to start somewhere, see how far we get, and then return to our starting point and review our prior work.

Heidegger, as explained above, has chosen Dasein as his starting point. Being and Time now is made up of two parts, to accomplish this task: the first part tries to understand what it is like to be Dasein. The main concept of this phenomenological question is described under the term being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein). After this first step Heidegger now tries to show how this being-in-the-world of Dasein affects the understanding of the world itself. As it shows during the analysis, the understanding of the world is only possible by time (Zeitlichkeit). Now that Heidegger has worked at time and it's the dimensions (Ekstasen), he closes the hermeneutic circle by reinterpreting the being-in-the-world under the terms of time.

Being and Time contains Heidegger's statement of this project and his interpretation of Dasein and its temporal horizon, but since Heidegger never composed the second half of the book, it does not follow this interpretation of Dasein with a complete working out of the meaning of being. This ambitious task is taken up in a different way in his later works.

This interpretative aspect of Heidegger's project had a profound influence on the hermeneutic approach of his student Hans-Georg Gadamer.

[edit] Destruction of metaphysics

As part of his ontological project, Heidegger undertakes a reinterpretation of previous Western philosophy. He wants to explain why and how theoretical knowledge came to seem like the most fundamental relation to being. This explanation takes the form of a destructuring (Destruktion) of the philosophical tradition, an interpretative strategy that reveals the fundamental experience of being at the base of previous philosophies that had become entrenched and hidden within the theoretical attitude of the metaphysics of presence. This Destruktion is not simply a negative operation but rather a positive transformation, or recovery.

In Being and Time Heidegger briefly undertakes a destructuring of the philosophy of Descartes, but the second volume, which was intended to be a Destruktion of Western philosophy in all its stages, was never written. In later works Heidegger uses this approach to interpret the philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Plato, among others.

This technique exerted a profound influence on Jacques Derrida's deconstructive approach, although there are important differences between the two methods.

[edit] Translations

There are two versions of Being and Time translated into English. The groundbreaking translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson was published in 1962 by SCM Press. The re-translation, by Joan Stambaugh, was published in 1996 by the State University of New York Press. The Stambaugh version follows conventions for translating Heideggerian terminology which arose in the years following the Macquarrie and Robinson version. While Stambaugh strives for greater fidelity to the original, this comes, perhaps, at the price of decreased readability. Both versions include the German pagination in the margins, and it is usual to cite this pagination, thus avoiding confusion between the two editions of the text.

[edit] Related work

Being and Time is the towering achievement of Heidegger's early career, but there are other important works from this period:

  • The publication in 1992 of the early lecture course, Platon: Sophistes (Plato's Sophist, 1924), made clear the way in which Heidegger's reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics was crucial to the formulation of the thought expressed in Being and Time.
  • The lecture course, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, 1925), was something like an early version of Being and Time.
  • The lecture courses immediately following the publication of Being and Time, such as Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 1927), and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1929), elaborated some elements of the destruction of metaphysics which Heidegger intended to pursue in the unwritten second part of Being and Time.
  • Heidegger's inaugural lecture upon his return to Freiburg, "Was ist Metaphysik?" ("What Is Metaphysics?", 1929), was an important and influential clarification of what Heidegger meant by being, non-being, and nothingness.

Although Heidegger never completed the project outlined in Being and Time, later works explicitly addressed the themes and concepts of Being and Time. Most important among the works which do so are the following:

  • Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Contributions to Philosophy [From Enowning], composed 1936–38, published 1989), perhaps Heidegger's most systematic attempt at reckoning with the legacy of Being and Time.
  • "Zeit und Sein" ("Time and Being"), a lecture delivered at the University of Freiburg on January 31, 1962. This was Heidegger's most direct confrontation with Being and Time. It was followed by a seminar on the lecture, which took place at Todtnauberg on September 11–13, 1962, a summary of which was written by Alfred Guzzoni. Both the lecture and the summary of the seminar are included in Zur Sache des Denkens (1969; translated as On Time and Being [New York: Harper & Row, 1972]).

[edit] Influence

Being and Time influenced many philosophers and writers, among them Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, and Bernard Stiegler. More specifically, several important philosophical works were directly influenced by Being and Time, although in very different ways in each case. Most notable among the works influenced by Being and Time are the following:

[edit] References

  1. ^ Sein und Zeit, pp. 39-40.
  2. ^ William D. Blattner, Heidegger's Temporal Idealism, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
  3. ^ "Die konkrete Ausarbeitung der Frage nach dem Sinn von “Sein” ist die Absicht der folgenden Abhandlung." Sein und Zeit, p. 1.
  4. ^ Ibid., pp. 2-4.
  5. ^ In other words, being is distinguished from beings such as physical objects or even, as Heidegger explains in his discussion of the "worldhood of the World," that entire collection of things that constitutes the physical universe. To preserve Heidegger's distinction, translators usually render "Sein" as "being", the gerund of "to be", and "Seiend" (singlular) and "Seiendes" (plural) as the verb-derived noun "a being" and "beings," and occasionally, perhaps preferably, as "an entity" and "entities"."
  6. ^ "'Sein' ist nicht so etwas wie Seiendes." Sein und Zeit, p. 4.
  7. ^ "...das Sein, das, was Seiendes als Seiendes bestimmt, das, woraufhin Seiendes, mag es wie immer erörtert werden, je schon verstanden ist," ibid., p. 6.
  8. ^ In English, using the word "existence" instead of "being" might seem more natural and less confusing, but Heidegger, who stresses the importance of the origins of words, uses his understanding of grammar to assist in his investigation of "being," and he reserves the word "existence" to describe that defining type of being that Dasein (human consciousness) has.
  9. ^ "aus dem her etwas als etwas verständlich wird," Sein und Zeit, p. 151.
  10. ^ Ibid., pp. 8–9.
  11. ^ Ibid., p. 12.
  12. ^ Ibid., p. 7.
  13. ^ "der methodische Sinn der Phänomenologischen Deskription ist Auslegung," ibid., p. 37.
  14. ^ Ibid., p. 12.
  15. ^ Ibid., p. 437.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Primary literature

  • Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, in Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, volume 2, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1977, XIV, 586p.
  • Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962).
  • Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).

[edit] Secondary literature

  • Robert Bernasconi, "'The Double Concept of Philosophy' and the Place of Ethics in Being and Time," Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993).
  • William D. Blattner, Heidegger's Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
  • Jacques Derrida, "Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time," Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
  • Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: MIT Press, 1990).
  • Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1993, expanded edn.), ch. 1.
  • Magda King, A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time, edited by John Llewelyn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).
  • Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
  • William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), ch. 3–4.
  • Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Decision of Existence," The Birth to Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).