|
 Philosopher
of the Month
March
2003 - Martin Heidegger
Iain
Thomson
Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976) is widely considered one of the most original
and important philosophers of the 20th century, and, thanks to his
(failed) attempt to assume philosophical leadership of the century’s
most execrable political movement (Nazism) and his later critique
of the history of metaphysics from Anaximander to Nietzsche as inherently
nihilistic, he is also certainly the most controversial.
Heidegger
was born in Messkirch, Germany, on the outskirts of the Black Forest.
Like Nietzsche, he came from a devoutly religious lower middle-class
family. Those familiar with their philosophies may find something
strangely appropriate in the fact that Nietzsche’s father was
a Lutheran pastor while Heidegger’s was a Catholic sexton (the
caretaker of the vestments and sacred vessels: a bell-ringer and
grave-digger). From very early on, the young Martin’s intellectual
gifts marked him out for a career in the Priesthood, and, although
he eventually abandoned this path (formally at least), the education
it afforded him proved a firm foundation for his remarkable intellectual
trajectory.
Focusing
on Heidegger’s earliest philosophical work, Kisiel characterizes
the period from 1917-1927 as Heidegger’s "phenomenological
decade." After ten years spent on the proving grounds of Aristotle
and Medieval theology, Heidegger published his early magnum opus,
the brilliant but unfinished Being and Time (1927). Although
this text remains Heidegger’s most famous and influential work,
the legendary difficulties posed by its forbidding combination of
jarring philosophical originality and stylistic opacity make understanding
its major claims an arduous enterprise for even a philosophically-trained
reader. The facilitation of such an understanding is thus the primary
goal of this "philosophical snapshot."
In
Being and Time, Heidegger develops and deploys a method called
"phenomenological testimony" in order to interpret our
ordinary everyday ("ontic") experience of phenomena such
as guilt and anxiety "ontologically," that is, in terms
of what they reveal about the structural characteristics definitive
of human existence. (Ontology is the study of what is. It thus makes
perfect sense that Heidegger’s pursuit of "the question
of Being" focuses on ontology. But what is so original is the
way Heidegger uses phenomenology, the study of the way things manifest
themselves, to answer ontological questions about what those things
are.) For example, Heidegger argues that our ordinary feelings
of guilt bear phenomenological witness to the fact that as
we make the choices that determine who we are, we are always actualizing
one possible self at the expense of many others. Our guilty indebtedness
to these other possible selves is thus an ineliminable structural
feature of existence which reveals our essential ontological "finitude"
(the fact that we cannot "be all that we can be").
Using
the same methodology, Heidegger argues that our ontic feelings of
anxiety testify to the "groundlessness" of human
existence, revealing an ineradicable insecurity which Heidegger
connects to the fact that our existential trajectories - the life-projects,
roles, and identities that define who we are - have "always
already" been shaped by a past that we can never get behind
and head off into a future in which these self-defining projects
will always be incomplete, cut short by a death we can neither avoid
nor control. In Heidegger’s famous phrase we exist as a "thrown
project": thrown out of a past we cannot get behind, we project
ourselves into a future we can never get beyond. "Existence"
(from the Latin Ek-sistere, out-standing) is this
standing-out into time, a temporal suspension between natality and
mortality.
Heidegger
divides this temporal suspension into its three "existential
structures" (or "existentials" for short): affectivity,
telling and understanding. These existentials are three in number
because they characterize phenomenologically the way in which the
past, present, and future allow things to show themselves to us.
Thus the past filters the way things matter to us through
our moods (which are public, shared, and transmissible); as Wittgenstein
said in the Tractatus: "The world of the happy is quite
another than the world of the unhappy." In the present,
things are made manifest through our use of language to articulate
the meaning of our situation (and in Division II, Heidegger’s
critique of "the one" [Das Man] emphasizes that
here there is a constant temptation to "falling," that
is, to covering-over these ontological structures by interpreting
them in the publicly available terms of everyday ontic life). Finally,
the horizon of the future shapes the way things show up for
us in that the projects that define us extend into the indefinite
future, thus running ultimately up against death, the final horizon
which our projects can neither occupy nor secure. Deflected by this
impenetrable horizon, our projects come back to us subtly in an
"uncanny" feeling of not being at home in the things with
which we are most familiar.
Heidegger’s
analysis of the three temporal "ecstases" privileges futurity,
then, because it is this running out toward and rebounding back
from death that underlies the reflexive self-awareness distinguishing
the "world-constituting" existence of "Da-sein"
(human be-ing) both from the "world-poor" awareness of
the animal immersed in perceptual immediacy (Heidegger’s example
is of a frog sunning itself on a rock), and from a "worldless"
entity (like a chair) which has no awareness at all. Strictly speaking,
only human Da-sein "exists" for Heidegger (and he shows
how Cartesian intentional-content skepticism is in fact a philosophical
pseudo-problem which results from the category mistake of treating
human be-ings like "worldless" objects).
Thus
the big "fundamental ontological" pay-off toward which
Being and Time is on the way is Heidegger’s claim that
the three "existentials" map onto the three "ecstases,"
and in their unity constitute the temporal structure according to
which we make existence intelligible. (Because all three existentials
structure the way in which things show up for and come to matter
to us, Heidegger characterizes their common feature as "care.")
In other words, Heidegger’s "existential analysis"
yields a picture in which "intelligibility - which is Being
as it shows-up phenomenologically to the human beings who constitute
the place of its happening - is grounded in time. (This insight
that Being is grounded in time eventually leads to Heidegger’s
begrudging recognition that Being-in-the-world has a history. This
recognition effects the progressively more radical historicization
of ontology know as the "turn" [Kehre] which connects
Heidegger’s early to his later thinking.)
More
precisely, Being is grounded in the temporal structure of those
beings ("Da-sein") who have an understanding of Being.
With this famous reconceptualization of the self not as a subject,
consciousness, or ego but as a "Dasein," Heidegger takes
the German word for "existence" (Dasein) and interprets
it in terms of its basic semantic elements ("there" [Da]
+ "Being" [Sein]) in order to illustrate his claim
that existence is fundamentally a "being-there," that
is, a temporally-structured making intelligible of the place in
which we find ourselves. ("Dasein is its disclosedness,"
Heidegger says.) He understands this "making-intelligible"
as "truth" in its most "primordial" sense. As
shown by the Greek word for truth, A-letheia (the alpha-privative
+ Lethe,, the river of forgetting), truth is primordially
a kind of "un-concealment," a "dis-closing"
or manifestation of presence which in fact any correspondence theory
of truth must implicitly presuppose (in order even for there simply
to be something to which to correspond).
In
the second ("existentialist") division of Being and
Time, Heidegger argues in a secularized Kierkegaardian vein
that once we have used "phenomenological testimony" to
become aware of the ontological structures conditioning our "existence,"
an "authentic" life lived in ontic-ontological accord
becomes possible. Heidegger claims that in decisive instants of
resolution, we can envision ways of integrating our new-found existential
knowledge into the projects which constitute our lives, thereby
appropriating "existence" so as to make it our own.
Such "authenticity" (or "ownmostness," Eigentlichkeit)
thus characterizes an existence in which an individual’s life
projects are brought into harmony with the existential structures
which condition them, transforming that individual’s guilty
and anxious repression of their essential finitude and groundlessness
into a reverence for the possible.
Even
this thin sketch of authenticity allows one to glimpse why prominent
existential psychotherapists (Binswanger, Boss) and theologians
(Bultmann, Tillich) found inspiration in Heidegger’s thinking
of authenticity. But, in the light cast back on Being and Time
by Heidegger’s disastrous political commitment in the 1930’s,
we cannot overlook authenticity’s most glaring philosophical
deficiency: its formalism makes it ethically indiscriminate and
open to the (very real) dangers of political decisionism. As the
famous reductio alleges, there is nothing inherently contradictory
about the idea of an "authentic Nazi." If Heidegger’s
own politics make him a good candidate for this opprobrious appellation,
then, ironically, his own life bears particularly dramatic witness
to the self-deconstruction of authenticity as the cornerstone of
an existential ethics.
Heidegger
was an extremely prolific writer (the on-going publication of his
Collected Works looks to fill about seventy volumes), and
one should recognize that his work did not come to a stop with Being
and Time. He continued to develop, extend, and in some places
revolutionize his own thinking for another half century. In fact,
Heidegger’s later thinking makes for an incomparably fertile
- and troubling - philosophical terrain, but one which we will have
to reserve for the occasion of a much more careful and extended
hermeneutic reconnaissance.
A
new philosopher of the month will be featured early April 2003
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