Episode 1: Heidegger's Project in Being and Time

[Music] ONASIS Foundation presents Apply Digger, Hi-Digger's Thinking in Being and Time Explained, a podcast series with Professor and Philosopher Simon Creechley. Episode 1, Hi-Digger's project in Being and Time. Martin Hi-Digger, who lived from 1889 to 1976, was the most important, the most influential, and the most infamous philosopher in the continental tradition in the 20th century. Being in Time, which was first published in 1927, was his Magnum Opus. There's no way of understanding what took place in philosophy, particularly in what we call continental philosophy after Hi-Digger, without coming to terms with Being and Time. Where the Hi-Digger's influences felt, positively, in thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Molliponti, Hannah Iront, Gardemer, Foucault, and Derrida, or negatively in figures like Rudolf Karnat, Adorno, Habermas, Delurs, and others. Where the positive or negative, Hi-Digger casts a very long shadow over philosophy right down to the present day. Furthermore, unlike many Anglo-American philosophers, Hi-Digger has exerted a huge influence outside philosophy. In areas as diverse as architecture, contemporary art, social theory, political theory, psychotherapy, psychiatry, theology, and indeed, in the world, of business. So the purpose of these, these shows of these episodes is to try and explain Hi-Digger's projects in being in time, paragraph by paragraph. So let's begin. Being in time is a work of considerable length, 437 pages, in the German original, and of legendary difficulty. The difficulty is caused by the fact that Hi-Digger sets himself the task of what he calls a destruction of the history of philosophy, a destruction of the philosophical tradition. We'll see some of the implications of this destruction in future episodes. But the initial consequence is that Hi-Digger refuses to avail himself of the standard terminology of philosophy, particularly modern philosophy, with his talk of epistemology, subjectivity, consciousness, mind, representation, objectivity, and the rest. Hi-Digger has the audacity to go back to the drawing board and invent a new philosophical vocabulary. For example, he thinks that all conceptions are subject as a person, as consciousness, or indeed as a mind-brain-unicy. Our hostages to a tradition of thinking, whose presuppositions have not been thought through radically enough. So Hi-Digger is a thinker, a radical thinker, in the sense in which he's a thinker who tries to dig down the limits of our lived experience of the world, rather than accepting the authority of tradition. And that's what makes his work often difficult to understand, particularly in translation. Hi-Digger doesn't use the standard philosophical language, but rather tries to invent a language of his own. So, Hi-Digger won't talk about the subject, consciousness, mind, or indeed body. Hi-Digger's name for the human being is what he calls "dazine." And that term, "dazine," can be variously translated, but is usually rendered as being there. The basic and very simple idea is that the human being is first and foremost not an isolated being, not an isolated subject, or self cut off from a realm of objects that it wishes to know about. Rather, we're beings who are always already in the world, outside and alongside a world from which, for the most part, we do not distinguish ourselves. We'll come back to this point, repeatedly. It's hugely important that for Hi-Digger, we're always already outside in the world. And we do not for the most part distinguish ourselves from the world. "Dazine," as Hi-Digger says, is being in the world. And what goes for "dazine," being there, also goes for many of Hi-Digger's other concepts. Sometimes this makes being in time very tough read, which is not helped by the fact that more than any other modern philosopher exploits the linguistic possibilities of his native language, in his case, German. Although John McCory, a Nebward Robinson, in their 1962 Blackwell English translation of "Being in Time," reduced one of the classics of modern philosophical translation, in my view. "Being in Sometimes" feels like waiting through a conceptual mud of baroque and unfamiliar concepts. But that's fine. And that's what we're going to try and work through and work against. We're going to try and bring out Hi-Digger's basic thoughts in a way that is that we can make sense of and use in our day-to-day lives. That said, that Hi-Digger's text is superficially difficult, kind of unpleasant to read in translation. That said, the basic idea of "Being in Time" is extremely simple. The book is called "Being in Time," the thesis of the book is "Being in Time." "Being in Time." That is, what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporarily in the stretch between birth and death. "Being is Time." And "Time" is finite. "Fine" it comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be a human being and what Hi-Digger will call an authentic human being then it's essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death. What Hi-Digger calls "Being Towards Death." Crudely stated, the thinkers like St. Paul, St. Augustine, Luther, and Kiegergard thinkers who are very much on Hi-Digger's mind in this period and in "Being in Time." The thinkers like that it's through the relation to God that the self finds itself. It's through the relation to God that the self finds itself. And the way this often works in someone like, uh, say, Augustine. Here's, Augustine will ask the question, "Who am I in relation?" "Who am I, oh God?" It's the question of the self. It's a question that's opened in relationship to the experience of divine perfection which usually means finding myself imperfect and sinful. Now, Hi-Digger raises the question of the self and what the self is but without reference to God. So, if Hi-Digger the self can only become what it truly is through a confrontation with death by making a meaning out of our finitude. If our being is finite, if our being is finite, then what it means to be human consists in grasping this finitude. In, as Hi-Digger will say in being in Time, quoting Nietzsche, in becoming who one is. Becoming who one is. And I want to show how this insight into our finitude is deepened in Hi-Digger's thoughts. In relationship to ultimately to his concepts of conscience which we'll get to in later episodes and then towards the end the idea of ecstatic temporality. But the thing to say at the beginning is that Hi-Digger's thoughts is a very simple thought which is a very simple thought which is a very simple thought which is in a sense difficult to grasp because of its simplicity. His thought is that we are a throne-open clearing of finitude. A throne-open clearing of finite existence without ground, without metaphysics, without any basis we're a purely finite stretch of time. And whatever it means to be us has to be understood in relationship to that. So let's press on a little bit and look at the project of being in Time. As Hi-Digger makes clear from the opening page of being in Time, which is an untitled page which begins with a quotation from Plato, from Placos late dialogue, the sophist. As Plato makes clear from this, sorry, as Hi-Digger makes clear from the untitled opening page of being in Time. What's a stake in the book? Is the question of the meaning of being. The question of the meaning of being. This is the question that Aristotle raised in an untitled manuscript written two and a half thousand years ago, which became known at a later date as the metaphysics. Aristotle didn't use that term that was just the way in which the book was cataloged in a library at a later date. The metaphysics name which comes after physics. But what Aristotle says in this lectures, again, two and a half millennia and counting ago, Aristotle there was a science or a form of knowledge that investigates what he calls being as such, being as such without any regard to any specific namely the being of living things, what we now call biology, or the being of the natural world, physics. Metaphysics is the area of inquiry that Aristotle himself calls he uses this word, he calls it first philosophy, philosophy protein, which comes before anything else. It is the most abstract universal and undefinable area of philosophy. But it is also the most fundamental area of philosophy. Now, with admirable arrogance, Pidegger was still relatively young when you wrote this book, was writing this book being in time. It's the question of the meaning of being the Heidegger sets himself the task of inquiring into in being in time. He begins with a series of rhetorical questions. He says, "Do we have an answer to the question of the meaning of being?" "Not at all," he answers. "Do we even experience any perplexity about this question?" "Not at all," Pidegger repeats. Therefore, the first and most important task of Pidegger's book, being in time, is to recover our perplexity for this question of questions, this question of being, this question which we might know, for example, as Hamlet's question to be or not to be. That is the question. So, the task in being in time couldn't be bigger, the frame for being in time couldn't be bigger. A key word in being in time, in the early paragraphs of being in time, is the following word. It is access, the question of access. So, given that the question that Haidegger is trying to raise is the question of the meaning of being, the question that that raises is what is our access to the question of the meaning of being. Although Haidegger will try to access the question of being in different ways, in his laser work, he'll do that through more historical meditations. Indeed, in his work, he continues to experiment with different forms of writing. In being in time, access to the question of the meaning of being is given through that being who can raise such a question. Right? Access to the question of the meaning of being is given through that being who can raise such a question. That is the question of the meaning of being is a question for the being whose being is in question. Whose being is in question? Well, that's where we come in. Haidegger, what defines the human being is this capacity to be perplexed by the deepest and most enigmatic of questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there? Why is there being? And what does it mean? So the task of being in time is reawakening in us a taste for perplexity, a taste for questioning. Questioning as a movement into perplexity. And questioning, as Haidegger will say, much later on in his writings, is the piety of thinking. Now, if we turn to the first line of being in time, I'm going to be moving through the text now. As closely as I can, but I know you're listening to this and not necessarily reading along, so I'm not going to assume that you have the book in your hands. But if you just kind of imagine the opening of the book, this is paragraph 9, where the existential analytic of d'Azine of ours really begins. The first line of the text is the first line of the text is the following. We are ourselves the entities to be analyzed. And this is the key to the first concept that is introduced in being in time. The concept of "mineness", "mineness". In German, that's the word "ye mein Eichh age". And this is how the book begins. If I am the being for whom being is a question to be or not to be, then the question of being is mine to be? It's mine to be one way or another. So in what then? Does the being of being human consist in so far as that the book begins? The question of being is mine to be? It's mine to be one way consists in so far as that is my being. Harika's answer is existence. Existence. Therefore, the question of the meaning of being this big question that he frames the book with is to be accessed by way of what Harika calls an existential analytic. An existential analytic. An analysis of our existence. But what sort of thing is human existence? What can we say about it? Well, obviously, human existence is defined by time. We're creatures with a past who move through a present and who have available to them a series of possibilities who have available to them at a sense again. It is obviously defined by time. We are creatures with a past who move through a present and who have available to them a series of possibilities or what Harika calls in the first paragraphs of being in time ways to be, namely ways to be human is existence is to say that the being of being human is defined by time, by past, by present, and by ways to be by future. Now, Harika's point here is wonderfully, wonderfully simple. Although the language that he uses to describe it is rather rebabative. But the point is simple. The human being is not definable by a what. The human being is not definable by a what like a table or a chair. But rather by a who by a who that is shaped by existence in time. What it means to be human is to exist with a certain past, a personal, cultural history and by an open series of possibilities that I can seize hold of or not. So my existence is temporal. It's shaped by my personal, cultural history what Harika is going to call later on in being in time thrownness I'm thrown into the world and in my thrownness into that world a series of possibilities opens up for me, which I can grab hold of or not. And this brings me to an important point. If the being of being human is defined by mindless, by the fact that it is mine, then my being is not a matter of indifference to me. A table or a chair cannot recite Hamlet's soliloquy or undergo the experience of self questioning and self doubt that such words express. You can try this for yourselves at home if you like. Ask whichever object is around you a table, a chair, a bed or whatever, whether experiences Hamlet's question to be or not to be. Ask them and you'll hear nothing in reply. But we can! We can ask this question. "Does I is always mine to be one way or another?" We can choose ourselves and win ourselves or not and thus lose ourselves. So, if what it means to be human is to exist to exist in time shaped by past, present and future, then that being is mine to be. We can choose ourselves and win ourselves. Alternatively, we can lose ourselves. And this idea of choosing ourselves or losing ourselves is the kernel of Heidegger's idea of authenticity, which is one of the, the most disgusting elements that came out of Heidegger's being in time, the idea of authenticity, which more accurately expresses what is proper to the human being, what is its own. So, we shouldn't think of authenticity so much as a good or as something which is morally superior, but really what is proper to us, what is our own. And for Heidegger, we have two dominant modes of being human, authenticity and inauthenticity. Furthermore, He will say, we're still here on the first paragraphs of being in time, we have to make a choice. We have a choice to make between these two modes. The choice is whether to be oneself or not to be oneself, to be author of oneself and self-authorizing or not. Heidegger insists, as he will do throughout being in time, that inauthenticity does not signify a lower or lesser being. Alternatively, authenticity does not mean a higher state of being. Rather, Heidegger insists that this distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity is not a moral distinction, or what philosophers would call a normative distinction. And let's just say that some philosophers have had doubts about that move in Heidegger's thinking. Notably, a philosopher like Theodore, a Dauner, who detects that there is a jargon of authenticity in Heidegger's work. But let's just say that's a a moot point and a move on. Now, we begin with this idea of mindness. Existence is mine to be, choose myself, or lose myself. Authenticity and inauthenticity. Now, regardless of these twin modes of authenticity and inauthenticity, Heidegger insists, early in being in time, that the human being must first be presented in its undifferentiated character. We must first present have access to the human being in an undifferentiated way, an undifferentiated way, prior to any choice to be authentic or not. In words that soon become like a mantra in being in time. Heidegger seeks to describe the human being as it is presented, as he says, proximally and for the most part. The German there is zuneist, wunzumist, proximally and for the most part, which can also be translated, perhaps better translated, as most closely and mostly. So Heidegger seeks to describe the human being as it is presented most closely and mostly. Then the question is, well, how are we presented most closely and mostly? The next move that Heidegger makes is, devastating, although he makes it in a very kind of straightforward way. He claims that the way in which the human being is presented most closely and mostly is in terms of the obviousness of every dayness, in terms of every day existence. And the character of this every dayness of this every dayness is averageness. Now, we should just take a moment to think about the radicality of this move. Heidegger in being in time is doing philosophy. He insists that philosophy begins and, in a sense, ends with average every dayness. As a lovely phrase from paragraph 9, I think, of being in time, where he says that average every dayness is that out of which all existence arises and into which all existence goes. So we begin with average every dayness and we end up with average every dayness. Now, what subtly devastates us what subtly devastating about that move is that philosophy might begin from average every dayness. This is what Plato describes in the middle of the republic as the cave, the cave where we're in this average every day existence, where we see shadows and illusions. But the task of philosophy is to leave the cave to the truth of the forms and then to return later on to the cave to be killed. But Heidegger wants to stay in the cave and to see the cave differently. We begin thinking and we end thinking within the framework of average every dayness. So philosophy is not some otherworldly speculation as to whether the external world exists or whether human beings are really human beings, are the human beings and not robots or whatever the kind of pseudo-questions that philosophers, most part, amuse themselves. Rather, philosophy begins with the description of human beings in their average every day existence. And this description of everyday existence is what Heidegger calls phenomenology. There's a very kind of technical way of understanding phenomenology, which I won't bore you with, a very simple way of understanding phenomenology, is that phenomenology is the description of existence, the description of average every day existence. As it shows itself and as what shows itself can be transformed into language. So phenomenology is the letting us see of that which shows itself and language is what lets us see that which shows itself. Now, we begin from average every day existence. On that basis, Heidegger seeks to derive certain common structures from that every dayness. And these common structures of what Heidegger calls existential. So Heidegger's program in being in time begins with the thesis which he will, the proposition that he will say over and over again, "Dazine is being in the world." "Dazine is being in the world." And the task that he sets himself is to deduce the common structures of our being in the world. And these common structures, these shared structures, what Heidegger would call the April-Rise structures of existence, so what he calls the existential. Now, but the key thing to hang on to here before we get move on further is that "Dazine is being in the world." There is no distinction between us and the world. Us and the world are a unity. And what defines the human being, what defines "Dazine" is the transcendence that it has with regard to the world. We are the Heidegger first and foremost transcendent beings. Our relationship to that which is ecstatic, has a dimension of ecstasy, and we'll come back to that in later episodes. But we should note here the difficulty of the task that Heidegger has set himself. What he's trying to describe, what he wants philosophy to describe, is the way in which human existence shows up most closely and mostly, in the way that is most obvious. But this is fiendishly difficult to describe. Nothing is closer to me than myself. Nothing is closer to me than myself, in my average everyday indifferent existence. But how do I describe this? How do I describe this closeness of myself to myself? Heidegger was fond of quoting from Augustin, from Augustin's confessions. When Augustin writes, "Assuredly, I labor here, and I labor within myself. I become to myself a land of trouble and inordinate sweat, a land of trouble and inordinate sweat." Heidegger is trying to do, and when you're moving through these pages of being in time, you can feel that you're often sweating through these pages. But it's to bring out the labor here, it's to bring out the character of the obviousness of average everyday existence and to stay with that. So, when you're reading being in time, you can see I'm talking here about paragraphs 9 to 13, the first two chapters of being in time proper. And it can be a pretty unpleasant, bruising experience. I tried to give you an overview of the shape of Heidegger's thought. But there's a couple of things I need to mention. Heidegger makes a distinction between categories and existential. Now, categories in philosophy are kind of meta-concepts, the idea begins with Aristotle. Metaconscepts which are used to divide up our experience of things in the world. Now, for Heidegger, categories are ways in which we can understand things which are not us. As Heidegger will say entities which are not design. The distinction is going to make in terms of categories is distinction between the ready to hand and the present at hand. This will say a word about that distinction. I'll make it clearer in the next episode, but just to kind of flag it now. The ready to hand is really the handy. It's really the way in terms of our average everyday existence we use things, where things are available to us. They're going to say a lot more about this. The present at hand is the way in which those things show up when we look at them theoretically, when we look at them with philosophers' spectacles. And Heidegger's view is that the fundamental category by which we have an experience of the world is hand in us, the ready to hand. And on that basis is built the present at hand, the theoretical way of viewing things. And He thinks that's the kind of error of philosophy that we'll come back to. So, categories describe things which are not design. Design, the structure of design, is explained in terms of concepts that Heidegger calls "existentials". And these "existentials" which are appropriate Heidegger thinks for entities like us who are described with a who and not a what, who have personal pronouns, and not like tables and chairs. These existential structures, Heidegger thinks, are prior to everything that we can find in anthropology, psychology, biology, or now in some like neuroscience. And therefore, this is now a movie on a tiny bit in Heidegger's argument. For Heidegger to get a sense of our existential embeddedness in the world and to be able to describe that, we have to leave to one side all traditional ideas of the subject, of consciousness, spirit, person, man, life, all of these terms. How do we put to one side? If we introduce any of those terms, we are giving ourselves a kind of metaphysical basis by which to understand what it means to be human. And Heidegger wants to understand our humanness not in metaphysical terms but in terms of our existential experience. So again, coming back to a point I made earlier, Heidegger thinks that the vocabulary that we've inherited from philosophy gets in the way. And the philosophical task is one of destroying that terminology by finding a new language, and that new language is a language that tries to invent in being in time. One more thing, just at the end of this episode, we're going to move on to the next episode soon, which will be on the concept of world. If we go on to the next chapter of being in time, this is chapter 2, paragraph 12, it's called "Being in the World in General as the basic state of design". Heidegger did not have a gift for titles, but the good thing about that title is that it's absolutely accurate. What he's trying to argue for in this chapter is that being in the world is a basic state or a fundamental constitution of design. And the essential thing is that being in the world is understood as a whole, as a unitary phenomenon. That he will say over and over again, "Dazan is being in the world is a unitary phenomenon". But it can be broken up analytically. It can be broken up in terms of analytical distinctions. And that's what Heidegger's going to try and do in the next chapters of being in time. In chapter 3, he talks about the "in the world" part of being in the world, and he talks about the structure of world and the concept that he calls "worldhood". Then he says in the next chapter, we need to talk about the "who" of "dazan". If "dazan" is defined by having a "who" character rather than a "what" character, then really "who" is "dazan" in the manner of average every dayness. He does that in chapter 4 in relationship to being with others, and that's a very interesting chapter. Then he looks forward to the next chapter, which is chapter 5, which is really where things get going in being in time. Where he asks the question, "What does it mean to be in at all?" "What does it mean to be in the world at all?" And that's going to take us into a discussion of the central concept of being in time, which is the idea of "throne projection". And that's how it's drawn into the world and how it's in the capacity to project out of that "throneless". The other way Heidi expresses that is that "dazan" exists factically. Having said that, let me make another little term in a logical distinction, a bit of housekeeping before we finish. Heidi makes a distinction in chapter 2 of being in time. Between a kind of factual understanding that human beings can have of themselves, and the factuality of objective things in the world, the factuality of tables, chairs, the fact that the microphone I'm speaking into the table, and I've got my papers on these are facts. But also we have facts. There's a factual character that we have. And this factual character that we have is what Heidi calls "facticity", that we exist factically. We didn't just come into existence this morning. We didn't just come into existence when we decided to. We are thrown into existence. We arrive here in the world with all sorts of baggage, linguistic baggage, cultural baggage, personal baggage, all that stuff. That's the kind of network of our facticity, of our lived existential lives that we need to be able to make sense of. And Heidi got insistent being in time, and indeed earlier, that what we need is a harmonutics of facticity. Sounds very sexy. A harmonutics of facticity, a way of interpreting our everyday being in the world. And our everyday being in the world for Heidi Ger is first and foremost experienced as dispersal, as being split up, as being dispersed, split up, spread out amongst things in the world. And we are for Heidi Ger, a kind of temporal movement of dispersal. And the way we are in the world, Heidi Ger says, "It's going to make this point more clearly in the next chapter." "It's characterized by what he calls concern, concern." But this concern is not concern as worry. It's concern as kind of being occupied with or being busy with. So the way in which I'm dispersed in the world is in the way in which I'm occupied by things in the world. I'm looking at my phone, I'm looking at the street, I'm looking where to go, I'm looking for the signs that will take me to the subway or whatever it might be. So I am concerned, I'm preoccupied by the world, I'm concerned by it, and my existence is out there in a dispersed way. The key thing about that insight, which again sounds very kind of banal, is the first and foremost or approximately and for the most part, most closely and mostly. The human being is not independently of its world. The human being is dispersed out there in the world, as Heidi Ger will say, "Always already." And that's what has to be described. So that there's a phrase in being in time, which let me tell you a story by way of conclusion. It might be a more interesting way of doing this. I remember I knew a student when I was an undergraduate at the University of Essex in England in the early 1980s. And this student was a graduate student and she seemed very clever to me, and that's very impressed. And she was working on Heidi Ger. And I asked her, "So what is it about Heidi Ger that really, you know, really think is so powerful, so important?" And she said, "It could be summarized in the following passage. I'm going to read it to you." Her name was Fiona. She said, "This passage, this is actually page 89 of the translation of being in time. I'll read it to you." Heidi Ger writes, "When does I direct itself towards something and grasps it? It does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximately encapsulated. But it's primary kind of being is such that it is always outside, alongside entities, which it encounters, which belong to a world already discovered." So, why is that so important? It's important because our fundamental orientation, our fundamental direction of our being in the world is to be out there always already amongst and alongside things. We do not first discover ourselves by turning inward, by asking ourselves the question, you know, "How can I really know whether the table that I'm leaning on is really existent or not? How can I really know that the person I meet in the street is a human being or a robot or whatever?" These are secondary questions. Our first relationship to the world is one of being out there alongside it. The word that Heidi Ger uses to describe that is the word fascination. The word in German is "benomenheit" that we are "benombed" by the world. We are "benombed" in the way in which we are. We are taken by the world. We move with the world. We flow with the world's flow. That's where we first find ourselves. So, this, again, seems kind of like an instant move. It's a really important move because what Heidi Ger is saying is that if we think of ourselves as human beings, as kind of locked up in a cabinet, a cabinet of consciousness, as Heidi Ger says, encapsulated in a cabinet of consciousness, looking out at a world that is foreign and alien, then we are fundamentally misdescribing our existential being in the world. The thing for Heidi Ger is not to do what philosophers normally do. He says this is also a little bit earlier in the same section of being in time. This is page 88. He says, "proximalling, this being already alongside is not just a fixed staring at something that is purely present at hand. Being in the world is concerned is fascinated by the world in which it is concerned. If knowing is the possible as a way of determining the nature of the present hand by observing it, then there must first be a deficiency in having to do with the world concernedfully. I don't know what kind of sense that passage makes to you. But the key inference to draw from that is that the way in which philosophy normally proceeds is by a fixed staring at things. And that fixed staring at things, which is usually how philosophers use examples, usually medium-sized dry goods like tables and chairs and microphones and glasses and pens and such like, that we can on the basis of that fixed staring at things, we can then apparently deduce the question of, what is the case and indeed, who am I? Hariga says this fundamentally misses the point. The way in which the world first and foremost shows up is not through a perception of it, but is through a concern for absorption in it, a fascination with it. So that means, it's the implication of this line of thought, that knowledge of the world, the way in which that's normally understood, that the area of philosophy that's called epistemology that's concerned with how a subject can know a world of objects. Hariga is not saying that that's false, he's saying it's secondary. It's secondary to our lived experience of being in the world, and that's what has to be described first. So that's what he's going to try and do in being in time. And the first step on that adventure is to try and get clear the question of world. And to ask the question, what is the world and how does the world show up? And that's going to be the topic of our next episode. See you next time.