An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy: Heidegger
Today, I’ll introduce you to the thoughts of Heidegger. He may be regarded as a bit tough to understand at first, sometimes a philosophy outsider may get the feeling that what’s the case is too abstract to render meaningful. In fact, his thought is, yes, very deep and sophisticated, but it’s not abstract at all, precisely because it’s about how we experience the world. Heidegger exposes how we relate to the world, how we come to understand beings, and how these questions necessarily reveal the importance of finitude, or mortality in philosophy. So yes, they’re not abstract at all, indeed they can even be too concrete, because you know, maybe death is the most concrete of all experiences, so what I recommend is not trying to memorise what I’m saying, instead, try to relate to what I say through your experiences of the world as you experience it. While doing this, do not take the meaning of any word for granted, I mean, do not think that you already know what a world is, or what finitude or death is, instead try to open a door into grasping how he re-defines all these terms. Because almost every word, if not all, is a technical term which has a definite and sui generis meaning in especially Heidegger’s philosophy. So let’s try to find a balance in between. If we can really do this, maybe you may start to experience the world in a different way.
By saying that, we have already made an important point about his philosophy, because doing philosophy not by theorising, but though the experience of the world is what we call “phenomenology”. Phenomenology is a branch of study first founded by Edmund Husserl, Heidegger was a student of Husserl and Levinas was a student of Heidegger. They do not share the same understanding of phenomenology at all, and they criticise each other, but we can also say that they all claim to found the true phenomenological study. We’ll get back to this point later on. Now let’s start from the beginning and try to make an entrance first to the thought of Heidegger.
So Heidegger thinks that the first philosophy is ontology. What does it mean? It means before we lay any claim to any knowledge or ethics, first we need to lay the foundations of an ontology. So the first question of philosophy should be “what is being?” or “what is the meaning of being?” Where does it come from? Let’s give an example. Let’s say we are trying to define what human being is, and we give the definition “the human is rational animal”, the definition of Aristotle. Heidegger says when we first of all begin with such a definition, we indeed do not explicitly pose what we understand by “being”, the “is” here. What is the being of a being? First, we need to have an understanding of what “is” is, or what “being” is, in order to come up with such a definition. Heidegger says in different eras of human thought, historically, “being” has been understood in different ways. I mean, people always had an historically changing idea of what the being of a being is, although it wasn’t formulated in an explicit way. I’m not talking about what people understand with particular beings, like chair, or sky, or God, or philosophy. I’m talking about what people understand by the meaning of the being of beings. What’s the condition of possibility for beings? What reveals the meaning of beings? Let’s turn to the example, “the human is rational animal”. We have an overall understanding of what a human is, and what reason is, and what animal is, BUT we never actually openly pose the question of the meaning of “is”. The human being is a being, the animal is a being, BUT, being is not a being. What does it mean? “Being is not a being”. It means there is an ontological difference between Being and beings, the meaning of Being could be understood at a different level than the meaning of beings. So what we say is, in order to understand beings at all, we have to ask the question, what renders them intelligible? What makes them meaningful? What’s the condition of possibility of the appearance of beings as meaningful phenomena to us? What makes the appearance of phenomena possible in the first place?
When I pose the question as such, Immanuel Kant must be the one who comes to mind first. He talks about the structures of intuition and understanding as the condition of the possibility of any experience. Intuition is based on the concepts of space and time, and understanding is based on categories. So basically, when we ask the question what’s makes beings meaningful, or what opens up the field of experience of beings, we ask for the conditions of their possibility, so here Heidegger is actually talking from a Kantian language. But there’re very important differences, of course, First, Kant was posing the question as a question of epistemology, Heidegger is posing the question as a question of ontology. Plus, Kant is doing philosophy with dichotomies, opposing pairs, such as “theoretical/practical”, “subject/object” or “internality/externality”. In Heidegger, we’ll see that such dichotomies constitute what he calls “metaphysical” or “traditional” thought, and he’ll be very critical of those dichotomies and we’ll see that he’ll overcome these dichotomies. He claims that it is possible to think without considering ourselves as subjects, external to objects that stand before us. Maybe such a dichotomy doesn’t exist in the first place? Maybe there’s no inside of us, in as much as there’s no outside of us? Hopefully we’ll understand how.
So let’s go back the the question of Being. Heidegger says, although the philosophers talk about the beings, they forget the question of the being of beings after the Ancient Greeks. Actually, Aristotle asks this question, and he says we have to understand what being is qua being. Not in terms of being this or that, but being qua being. Heidegger says Aristotle fails to ask this question in a fundamental way, because he ended up with the definition that being is the most general of all. Being general doesn’t reveal how beings appear. Generality is not a fundamental way of explaining how the truth of beings reveal themselves. So starting from the Ancient Greeks, the question of the true essence of Being has fallen into oblivion (oblivion unutulma demek, ama öyle bir unutulma ki, sanki baştan beri hiç var olmamış gibi. Geçmişte kalmış gibi değil, sanki hiç ortaya çıkmamışçasına bir unutulma). And he says, with his own fundamental ontology, this question is revived again, and taken back from the oblivion, and we’ll investigate to find an answer to the question, “what is being”, with Heidegger’s philosophy.
Heidegger says, posing the fundamental ontological question, the question of Being, necessarily relates us to the existential structure he calls Dasein. In order to investigate the question of being, we have to understand the structure of intelligibility, the structure where beings reveal themselves. He says beings reveal themselves as they are in a field of clearing, “lichtung”, direct translation is “lighting”. This field of clearing is a horizon (ufuk). So beings reveal themselves within a horizon of light. So what is ontologically fundamental, what’s primordial, is this field of clearing, and it comes before the distinction between subject and object. Ontologically, this field of clearing is what makes up what we call “world”. So here’s no distinction between the self and the objects, both belong to the same structure of existence we call Dasein. So the essential existential being of Dasein is what’s called being-in-the-world. There’s no “internality of self” and the externality of it, there is this world which merges these two distinctions. Could we follow up to this point?
In a world, beings reveal themselves in a contextual manner. It means, no particular being has a meaning in itself. The meaning is produced out of a dynamic signification system, the totality of which we call the world. So, (drawing) here’s a being, and another being, and another being, in a dynamic world, they all relate to each other, and out of this signification chain, meaning is produced. So meaning of a being is not graspable in an isolated relation with that particular being. I cannot take this piece of paper in front of me, and meditate on it in order the grasp its meaning. Its meaning is produced out of a contextual relationship.
What’s important here is, according to Heidegger, to understand that this context of the world is always historical. The meanings of beings, and the totality of this chain of signification, changes in accordance with different historical eras. So it means humans do not actually construct the world. It’s not a relation where human beings, out of their internality, relate to the outer world of singular and static objects in themselves. It means actually, the human beings and objects appear in a world structure, in a particular historical situatedness. So we come to the point where Heidegger defines 3 structural elements of human existence:
Thrownness: A concerete cultural and historical situation. Dasein does not create the world. Instead, Dasein is thrown into the world.
Agency is discursive: in our activities, we’re always articulating the world as we understand it, and we interpret it. There’s not a world out there in itself to be discovered, the world is an activity of interpretation.
Understanding: Dasein always has an understanding of Being, we always have a historical thought of the world. Although it’s most of the time implicit, we always have a pre-understanding of what Being is, and it is historically produced.
Well, this last point is very important for us to understand how Heidegger criticises our era, which he defines to be technologically dominated. According to Heidegger, the current era has an understanding of being which is vastly reductive. This era we’re living in is actually the culmination of the oblivion of the question of Being. For he thinks that, in this era, the human beings came to understand themselves as the dominators of the earth. They think that every particular being is understood as “representable”, in that we can control everything, take absolute dominion over beings, we can arrange them, sort them, categorize in terms of usefulness. We understand beings in terms of their efficiency, we think that entities can be arranged, produced and fixed in the way that we want to control them. According to Heidegger, this means the oblivion of the question of Being.
Heidegger says that, when we truly pay attention to the way Being gives beings, that is, in the truth of being, we see two things:
Being gives and withdraws.
Being gives beings, and as it gives them, it also essentially withdraws them. That means, whatever is rendered meaningful, it doesn’t mean that it is absolutely present as it is. In the appearance of all beings, there is an essential concealment. So when we relate to the truth of beings, we see them as given and concealed at the same time.
When we consider things as present-at-hand, we relate to them as if they are mere presence. When we relate to things as ready-to-hand, we essentially interpret them as something. By doing this, we catch a sight of the fact that it is given and it is also concealed.
But when we forget this truth of being, we forget the fact that Being conceals. So what is forgotten is the essential concealment in the giving of being. That is:
Concealment is concealed.
When concealment is concealed, we think everything is present, everything is possible only in one way. We forget what gives the world its essential richness. So that Being gives and withdraws, is fallen into oblivion. That’s why Heidegger says that an artistic, or poetical relation to world is necessary to get rid of this technological thinking of domination.
This brings us to the end of our first introductory session to Heidegger's thought. In the next session, I'll continue with other contemporary philosophers and their relationship to Heidegger. Hence please follow me and do not hesitate to comment any questions or opinions!
