HEIDEGGER'S

BEING AND TIME

 Critical Essays on the Classics
Series Editor: Steven M. Cahn

The volumes in this series offer insightful and accessible essays that shed light
on the classics of philosophy. Each of the distinguished editors has selected out­
standing work in recent scholarship to provide today's readers with a deepened
understanding of the most timely issues raised in these important texts.

Plato's Republic: Critical Essays

edited by Richard Kraut
Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito: Critical Essays
edited by Rachana Kamtekar
Aristotle's Ethics: Critical Essays
edited by Nancy Sherman
Descartes's Meditations: Critical Essays
edited by Vere Chappell
The Rationalists: Critical Essays on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz
edited by Derk Pereboom
The Empiricists: Critical Essays on Locke, Berkeley, and Hume
edited by Margaret Atherton
The Social Contract Theorists: Critical Essays on Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau
edited by Christopher Morris
Mill's On Liberty: Critical Essays
edited by Gerald Dworkin
Mill's Utilitarianism: Critical Essays
edited by David Lyons
Mill's The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays
edited by Maria H. Morales
Kant's Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays
edited by Paul Guyer
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Critical Essays
edited by Patricia Kitcher
Kant's Critique of the Power ofJudgment : Critical Essays
edited by Paul Guyer
Heidegger's Being and Time: Critical Essays
edited by Richard Polt
The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and Sartre
edited by Charles Guignon
HEIDEGGER'S
BEING AND TIME
Critical Essays

Edited by
Richard Polt

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Heidegger's Being and time : critical essays/ edited by Richard Polt.
p. cm. - (Critical essays on the classics)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-7425-4241-9
1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. Sein und Zeit. 2. Ontology. 3. Space and time.
I. Polt, Richard F. H., 1964- II. Series.
B3279.H48S46613 2005
1II-<lc22
2005005337

Printed in the United States of America

@ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
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 Contents

Acknowledgments vu
Introduction 1
1 Why Reawaken the Question of Being? 15
Jean Grondin
2 The Temporality of T hinking: Heidegger's Method, from
Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger's Encounter with Hegel 33
Karin de Boer
3 The Constitution of Our Being 47
Graeme Nicholson
4 Heidegger's Anti-Dualism: Beyond Mind and Matter 75
Charles Guignon
5 The Genesis of Theory, from The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger,
Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory 89
William McNeill
6 Being-with, Dasein-with, and the "They" as the Basic Concept of
Unfreedom, from Martin Heidegger: Phiinomenologie der Freiheit 105
Gunter Figal
7 Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time 117
Steven Crowell

V
vi Contents

8 Can There Be a Better Source of Meaning than Everyday

Practices? Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time
in the Light of Division II 141
Hubert L. Dreyfus
9 Genuine Timeliness, from Heidegger's Concept of Truth 155
Daniel 0. Dahlstrom
10 Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being
and Time, from Martin Heidegger and the Problem of
Historical Meaning 169
Jeffrey Andrew Barash
11 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 189
Theodore Kisiel
12 Being and Time in Retrospect: Heidegger's Self-Critique 215
Dieter Thoma

Selected Bibliography 235

Index 239
About the Contributors 245
 Acknowledgments

"WHY REAWAKEN THE QUESTION OF BEING?" is reprinted and translated

with permission ofthe publisher from Jean Grondin, "Pourquoi reveiller
la question de l'etre?" in Heidegger: L'enigme de l'etre, ed. Jean-Fran�ois Mattei
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004): 43-69.
"The Temporality of Thinking: Heidegger's Method" is reprinted with per­
mission of the publisher from Karin de Boer, Thinking in the Light of Time:
Heidegger's Encounter with Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2000):66-69, 105-13.
"The Constitution of Our Being" is reprinted with permission of the pub­
lisher from Graeme Nicholson, "The Constitution of Our Being;' American
Philosophical Quarterly 36, vol. 3 (July 1999): 165-85.
"Heidegger's Anti-Dualism: Beyond Mind and Matter" is printed with per­
mission of the author, Charles Guignon.
"The Genesis of Theory" is reprinted with permission of the publisher from
William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of
Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999):56-71.
"Being-with, Dasein-with, and the 'They' as the Basic Concept of Un­
freedom" is reprinted and translated with permission of the publisher from
Gunter Figal, Martin Heidegger: Phiinomenologie der Freiheit (Weinheim: Beltz
Athenaum,2000): 141-53.
"Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time" is reprinted with
permission of the publisher from Steven Crowell, "Subjectivity: Locating the
First Person in Being and Time;' Inquiry 44 (2001): 433-54.

vii
viii Acknowledgments

"Can There Be a Better Source of Meaning Than Everyday Practices? Rein­

terpreting Division I of Being and Time in the Light of Division II" is printed
by permission of the author, Hubert L. Dreyfus.
"Genuine Timeliness" is from Daniel 0. Dahlstrom, Heidegger's Concept
of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 325-38. @1994
Passagen Verlag, Ges.m.b.H., Wien; English translation @2001 Cambridge
University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
"Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being and Time" is
reprinted with permission of the publisher from Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Martin
Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2003): 162-76, 177-82.
"The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930" is reprinted and translated with
permission of the publisher from Theodore Kisiel, "Das Versagen von Sein und
Zeit. 1927-1930," in Martin Heidegger, "Sein und Zeit," ed. Thomas Rentsch
(Berlin: Akademie, 2001): 253-79.
"Being and Time in Retrospect: Heidegger's Self-Critique" is reprinted and
translated with permission of the publisher from Dieter Thoma, "Sein und Zeit
im Riickblick: Heideggers Selbstkritik;' in Martin Heidegger, "Sein und Zeit,"
ed. Thomas Rentsch (Berlin: Akademie, 2001): 281-98.
 Introduction

ARTIN HEIDEGGER'S Being and Time (1927) is indisputably one of the

M greatest works of philosophy published in the past hundred years. But
the meaning and implications of the book remain the object of lively con­
troversy, as does its author. Heidegger is the most discussed thinker of the
twentieth century, and we can expect the discussion to grow in both quantity
and quality. Since Heidegger's death in 1976, the ongoing publication of the
Gesamtausgabe, or collected edition of his writings, has made dozens of his
lecture courses and private manuscripts available. Along with newly published
letters, these texts offer many opportunities to refine our judgments about his
masterwork.
The combined mass of primary and secondary texts exceeds the reading
capacity of any student of Heidegger. Where to begin, then? Being and Time
remains the essential entry point to Heidegger's thought; it is the most thor­
ough presentation of his earlier philosophy (before 1930), and even from
his later perspective, Heidegger considered it a necessary path.1 As for the
secondary literature, this anthology offers a sampling of outstanding recent
studies; some suggestions for further research are found in the bibliogra­
phy. The dozen authors in this volume represent diverse nationalities, gen­
erations, and interpretive approaches, but all offer dear and independent­
minded readings of major themes in Being and Time. Their topics include
general methodological and ontological questions, particular issues in Hei­
degger's text, and the relations between Being and Time and Heidegger's later
thought.
2 Introduction

A Survey of Being and Time

The topic of Heidegger's book is Being (das Sein)-the basis for our under­
standing of entities (das Seiende) as such (SZ 6). Being allows us to make sense
of what there is-to deal with and investigate all that we encounter, recognizing
it as something rather than nothing. Being takes various forms: the Being of
equipment, for example, is what it means to be equipment, or the basis for
our understanding of useful entities; the Being of nature is what it means to
be nature; and so on. But all the varieties of Being cohere, Heidegger assumes,
so that we can ask what it means to be in general. Because it is not itself an
entity, Being is a difficult, elusive topic: we cannot pick it up, perceive it through
the senses, or subject it to experiments. However, we must already have some
understanding of Being; otherwise, entities would make no sense to us. The
trick to thinking of Being is to pay attention to the background intelligibility
of entities-a phenomenon so fundamental and familiar that we ordinarily
overlook it.
Heidegger wishes not only to put Being into words but also to investigate
how it is possible for us to understand it in the first place. The thesis of Being
and Time is that the horizon of Being-the context that allows us to under­
stand Being-is time (SZ 1). "Time" here means our own temporality, by
which we are drawn into the future, the past, and the present. The claim that
time is the horizon for Being means that our temporality makes Being un­
derstandable, and thus makes it possible for entities as such to make sense to
us.
To support this thesis, Heidegger must explicate our own sort of Being­
what it means to be human. He refers to us as Dasein, literally "Being there."
We are the entities who inhabit a "there:' and even are the "there" (SZ 133). In
other words, what is distinctive about us is that we operate in an open area, an
illuminated field, in which beings can appear. (Earlier modern philosophy
referred to this as our consciousness. Heidegger does not, partly to avoid tra­
ditional riddles about the relation between the subjective mind and external
objects, and partly to point to a deeper field of meaning that makes conscious­
ness possible.) 2
Heidegger never completed Being and Time as originally planned. He pub­
lished the first two divisions of Part 1, which interpret the Being of Dasein,
but he was dissatisfied with the crucial third division, which would interpret
Being itself within the horizon of time. This division was never published, nor
was Part 2, which would have deconstructed the philosophical tradition on
the basis of Heidegger's interpretation of Being. (Many of his later writings,
however, are devoted to critical readings of the tradition.)
 Introduction 3

Division I of Being and Time as we have it begins with our ordinary activity.
We do not normally contemplate entities, but are busy using and producing
them. This everyday productive activity is a clue to Dasein's basic constitution:
we find ourselves pursuing projects in particular situations; we are actively
involved with the entities we encounter, including other people; we are not es­
sentially neutral and disinterested spectators but are so engaged in the world ( as
a field of meanings and purposes) that our very Being can be called "Being-in­
the-world." Furthermore, our everyday behavior is not distinctively individual
but manifests an anonymous, average way of existing that Heidegger calls das
Man, "the one" or "the 'they:" In this way, Heidegger undercuts Descartes's
influential view of the proper starting point for philosophy; instead of under­
standing ourselves by looking to the "I think;' we have to begin with "one
acts." By avoiding the intellectualist bias of Cartesianism, we can recognize
that moods disclose our world, that we understand things in terms of what we
can do and how we can be, that our grasp of things is never independent of
language, and that we are normally absorbed in a web of concerns and commit­
ments. This absorption is not the last word: we can be shocked out of it by the
disruptive experience of anxiety, in which the meaning of our existence seems
to drain away. But anxiety does not leave us with meaninglessness; it can give
us a clearer insight into the essentially meaningful and engaged character of
our Being as "care." Heidegger ends Division I with a discussion of reality and
truth, tracing the traditional notion of truth-as a correspondence between
theoretical judgments and objects-back to a deeper phenomenon of truth
as Dasein's disclosedness (its way of being the "there") and the accompanying
unconcealment of entities (SZ 220--21).
Division II explores further extraordinary experiences which, like anxiety,
urge us to come to grips with our own Being. By facing my mortality, I can
recognize that my Being is individual: no one else can relieve me of the task
of living with the constant possibility of nonexistence. By owning up to my
"guilt" (indebtedness and responsibility), I can recognize that my Being is
my own: I must take over who I already am as I become who I am going
to be. Death and guilt make "authenticity'' possible, that is, a decisive and
dear-sighted way of being oneself. Heidegger is now ready to interpret the
Being of Dasein as temporality, which involves three temporal "ecstases": we
are drawn into the future as we project possible ways to be, we are drawn into
the past because we have been thrown into a particular situation, and we are
drawn into the present as we become absorbed in dealing with the entities that
surround us. Delving more deeply into temporality, Heidegger concludes that
we are essentially historical: we are members of a community that continually
draws on its heritage in order to work out its destiny. This temporal, historical
4 Introduction

happening of Dasein cannot be reduced to the superficial interpretation of

time as a neutral timeline-the framework in which objects present themselves
in a series of instants. Time, for Heidegger, is the marrow of our existence and
the home of all truth; it is an incomparable gift that presents us with the
inexhaustible challenge of being ourselves and attending to Being.
Even in its unfinished state, Being and Time is breathtaking in its depth
and scope. It revives the ancient and medieval question of Being, challenges
early modern philosophy, and draws on late modern trends such as the ex­
istential philosophy of Kierkegaard and Jaspers, Nietzsche's life-philosophy,
and Husserl's phenomenology. But Being and Time is never a mishmash of
received concepts; Heidegger's intellect and passion give it originality, unity,
and direction.
Initially Being and Time was seen primarily through the prisms of exis­
tentialism and phenomenology, but with time it contributed to new philo­
sophical trends such as hermeneutics and postmodemism. Some came to see
Heidegger's thought as a world unto itself that had to be accepted on its own
terms. As laudable as it is to try to understand a philosopher as he under­
stood himself, the devotion of some pious Heideggerians has led to a jargon­
ridden, esoteric discourse. In contrast, the past quarter century has seen the
rise of "analytic" Heidegger interpretations that focus on precise reformula­
tions of Heidegger's claims and arguments, often relating them to issues in
contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. As Heidegger's most systematic
work, Being and Time lends itself to such readings and rewards them; how­
ever, they run the risk of taking Heidegger's claims out of context. Today
a balanced approach to interpreting Heidegger is gaining ground; this approach
respects the need to combine an extensive study of his writings in the context
of the Western philosophical tradition with independent reflection that takes
Heidegger's thought as food for our own. Heidegger himself would surely ap­
prove of this attitude, which is evident in the critical essays in this volume.

Chapters in This Anthology

In the chapter that opens this collection, Jean Grondin asks, "Why Reawaken
the Question of Being?" The question of Being is the driving force behind all
of Heidegger's writings, but what drives Heidegger to ask it? And what exactly
does it mean? Although the opening pages of Being and Time focus precisely on
this point, Grondin finds that they do not provide an unambiguous solution. Is
the question of "the meaning of Being" simply an attempt to clarify the concept
expressed by the word "Being"? Or is it a more radical inquiry, a search for the
ultimate significance of Being as a primal event? What gives the question of
 Introduction 5

Being its priority over every other question? Heidegger argues that the question
is "ontologically'' prior (§3) because some understanding of what it means to
be is presupposed by all scientific inquiries into particular beings. But he also
argues (§4) that the question is "ontically" prior for us as Dasein because our
own Being is always at stake for us, always an issue about which we have to care.
Grondin shows that the connection between these two types of priority lies in
the fact that every understanding of Being is determined by Dasein's care for its
own temporal Being. This care, however, usually takes the form of fleeing from
the troubling burden of our Being-hence the traditional metaphysical ideal
of a timeless, permanently present entity. Referring to recently published texts,
Grondin argues that for Heidegger the task of bringing us back to the question
of Being was in a broad sense religious. The question of Being attempts to
recover the disquiet of the human condition as a fragile and fallible sojourn
within the inexplicable unfolding of meaning and truth-a disquiet that is
ordinarily anesthetized by the scientific and technological mind-set of our age.
In Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger's Encounter with Hege� Karin de
Boer considers two philosophers who try to do justice in their very ways of
thinking to temporality and historicity. Our selection from this book analyzes
the method of Being and Time on the basis of clues provided in The Basic
Problems of Phenomenology, a lecture course from 1927 that takes steps toward
the analysis of Temporality ( Temporalitat, or time as the horizon for Being)
that Heidegger had promised to carry out in Part 1, Division III of Being and
Time. According to Basic Problems, the three ecstases of time open "horizonal
schemata" in which beings can become intelligible-including the schema of
praesens, which provides the meaning of Being as presence. (For further de­
tails, see Theodore Kisiel's chapter in this volume.) De Boer carefully explains
how Being and Time tries to think beyond praesens, incorporating pastness and
futurity in its approach to Being. In traditional metaphysical thinking, the past
takes the form of the a priori, understood as what is always and necessarily
present; the future takes the form of a telos, a goal that is to be made present.
Thus both past and future are traditionally understood on the basis of praesens.
In contrast, Heidegger develops a new sense of the a priori as conditions that
have "always already" been in place and thus have never simply been present. 3
Similarly, possibility in Heidegger is not what is not yet present, but a guiding,
illuminating "projection" that cannot be exhausted by presence. According to
de Boer, Being and Time never fully explains how these concepts apply to its
own procedure-not even in the methodological (§7). Perhaps a philosophical
method cannot be fully explained in advance of its results because the findings
of the philosophy condition the method; because Being and Time remained in­
complete, then, its method had to remain partly obscure. De Boer's elucidation
of Heidegger's method, then, is not only a valuable prolegomenon to Being
6 Introduction

and Time but also a step toward seeing how the book might have been com­
pleted.
Being and Time is dearly a study of Dasein that is for the sake of studying
Being as such. But the precise nature of this project can be difficult to grasp,
as all the book's readers know. What exactly is the relation between Dasein
and human beings? What exactly does it mean to call the ontology of Dasein
"fundamental ontology''? When Heidegger writes that he is interpreting our
"Being;' our '"essence"' (in quotation marks), and our "constitution;' do these
terms have the same meaning? What are the relations among the basic concepts
he uses to characterize us, such as existence, Being-in-the-world, and care? And
why does "existence" seem to have two meanings, broad and narrow? In "The
Constitution of Our Being;' Graeme Nicholson patiently sorts out these issues.
His interpretation focuses on Dasein's Seinkonnen, or "ability to be;' as a "self­
surpassing" that reaches out into possibilities. For Heidegger, in order properly
to understand the Being of any entities we must first understand the self­
surpassing character of understanding itself: understanding is never simply a
present "state of mind;' but is always a futural ability-to-grasp. This orientation
to possibilities, argues Nicholson, cannot be reduced to the facts about our
brain that are studied by naturalistic philosophers of mind. These philosophers
assume that human beings are a special case of the physical universe; instead,
from a Heideggerian perspective, the ontology assumed by modern physics is a
special case of the understanding of Being that is involved in Dasein's ability to
be. Heidegger, then, carries out a contemporary version of Socrates' turn away
from "the things in the sky and below the earth" (Plato Apology 23d) toward
the human world as the irreducible starting point of philosophy.
Charles Guignon's "Heidegger's Anti-Dualism: Beyond Mind and Matter"
shows how Being and Time's conception of Dasein challenges a dichotomy that
pervades not only modern philosophy but also many commonsense modern
assumptions about ourselves, our bodies, and our relation to the surround­
ing world. We often assume that action must be understood in terms of a
distinction between two realms of being: inner, intending mind and outer, in­
herently meaningless physical occurrences. The dichotomy goes back at least
to Descartes, who distinguished between two essentially different types of sub­
stance: thinking things and extended things. Guignon argues that Heidegger
shows us a way beyond this substance dualism: for Heidegger, intentions and
other so-called mental phenomena can be defined and realized only when they
are expressed in a course of action in a meaningful world. Such expression
involves projecting possibilities and being attuned to the way in which we have
been thrown into a context. Here "projection" and "attunement" are neither
purely mental nor purely physical; rather, they both emerge from and help
constitute a shared domain of sense. Such phenomena are best described in
 Introduction 7

terms of what Guignon calls an "event ontology." Citing the Zollikon semi­
nars that Heidegger conducted in his old age, Guignon shows that Heidegger's
opposition to substance dualism continued to bear fruit long after Being and
Time. In these conversations with psychiatrists, Heidegger tirelessly expounds a
nondualistic understanding of the body and behavior. A blush, for example, is
neither simply a physiological process nor an inner, subjective state ofmind; it is
one way in which human beings can happen as embodied, engaged participants
in the world. In his concluding pages, Guignon takes this insight further and
suggests that a Heideggerian approach may help us overcome the dichotomy
between facts and values, "is" and "ought": understanding Being-in-the-world
can help us understand what it would mean to exist authentically and even to
live virtuously.
William McNeill's The Glance of the Eye traces the theme of the Augenblick,
the "moment of vision" or "glance of the eye;' in Heidegger's thought as it
evolves in dialogue with ancient philosophy, and Aristotle in particular. For
Aristotle, the highest type of"seeing" is theoria, the contemplative insight into
universal truths. But for Heidegger, theory depends on a more basic "see­
ing" that pervades our engaged activities in the world and that can reach a
peak of acuity at certain authentic, decisive moments. In Aristotelian terms, it
would seem that for Heidegger, theoria is subordinate to practice-that is, both
techne (the understanding and know-how required by poiesis, or production)
and phronesis (the practical wisdom required by praxis, or action). 4 However,
according to McNeill in our excerpt, "The Genesis of Theory;' a simple
inversion of the classical hierarchy would be inadequate as an interpreta­
tion of Heidegger. Theory and practice are both made possible by a deeper
phenomenon-the temporal structure of care. Furthermore, argues McNeill
(in implicit opposition to many interpreters), Heidegger's initial accounts of
how theory emerges from productive activity tell us "nothing ... concerning
the ontological genesis of cognition or theoretical comportment:' Practice pre­
cedes theory chronologically, but Heidegger's description of this sequence is
not yet an account of how theory is rooted in Dasein's Being. (Such an account
is provided in SZ §69b, which McNeill interprets after the excerpt printed here.)
McNeill's analyses have the merit of focusing on crucial claims of Division I
while retaining the intricacy and subtlety of their connections to the rest of
Being and Time and to the ancient tradition, which Heidegger studied with
extraordinary attention. 5
"Being-with, Dasein-with, and the 'They' as the Basic Concept of Unfree­
dom" is taken from Gunter Figal's larger interpretation of Heidegger's thought
as a "phenomenology of freedom." Here Figal elucidates Heidegger's difficult
concepts of Mitsein, Mitdasein, and das Man. The main difficulty ofthe notions
lies in their ambiguity: Heidegger's rather confusing terminology allows us to
8 Introduction

read his discussion either as a positive account of the ineluctably social basis
of meaning, or as an attack on everyday inauthenticity-perhaps especially
in its modern form. Figal insists that Heidegger is not merely propounding a
cultural critique, but is providing a phenomenology of how the self and others
become "explicit" and "inexplicit" in our behavior (Verhalten) and speech. My
behavior involves other people in an inexplicit way, even if no others are cur­
rently present, because my understanding of what I am doing and the things
I am encountering always implicitly refers to other actors and users: I am in­
eluctably "Being-with" others. Here Figal points out that even when we are
actually present with others, it is precisely by remaining somewhat inexplicit,
or holding ourselves "in reserve;' that we enable each other to act: we refrain
from inappropriate behavior, we let others have opportunities to participate in
the current activity, and in this way we enter into work or play. All "Dasein­
with" involves this phenomenon of "holding in reserve." As for the process of
becoming explicit, or manifesting oneself as an individual, it too depends on
a certain "otherness:' As we can see from the use of phrases such as "I myself"
(which implies "rather than anyone else"), selfhood is not isolation: it requires
a contrast to others, who I must assume can be compared to me. For Figal, the
"they'' is Being-with as the context in which one can become explicitly "one­
self:' In this sense, the "they" makes all my behavior possible. Why, then, is the
"they" the "basic concept of unfreedom"? Because neither Heidegger nor Figal
is a behaviorist. We are not reducible to our behavior, even though we must
continually make ourselves manifest by behaving in the world. More basic than
behavior is disclosedness, and that is where we must seek genuine freedom and
authentic selfhood. Authenticity is not a way of acting that is independent of
others-that would be impossible-but a free way of being disclosed. (Readers
might consider whether the distinction between behavior and disclosedness
risks reinstating the sort of dualism that is criticized by Guignon.)
Heidegger's critique of the Cartesian notion of the subject and his view that
the everyday self is "inauthentic" are sometimes interpreted as a dissolution of
the first-person perspective altogether. {Such readings are often influenced by
Heidegger's own later views; see Dieter Thoma's article in this volume.) To the
contrary, argues Steven Crowell in "Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in
Being and Time;' the "!"-properly understood-is fundamental to meaning
and human action as Being and Time portrays them. Drawing on speech-act
theory, Crowell claims that Heidegger's account of conscience satisfactorily
explains how we can successfully use the word "l." (Readers may wish to com­
pare this aspect of Crowell's chapter to Figal's account of "saying 'I myself."')
The call of my conscience unmistakably singles me out as irreducible to my
given milieu, my activities, and the things with which I normally deal. If there
were no possibility of encountering the "I," no potentially responsible self, the
 Introduction 9

intelligibility of the world would collapse; thus, argues Crowell, the first-person
perspective is required for intentionality ( the meaningful "aboutness" of our
acts and thoughts). Taking some speculative steps beyond Being and Time, but
drawing on the 1929 essay "On the Essence of Ground;' Crowell then interprets
conscience as calling for articulate justifications of one's choices. This reading
shows how there can be a place for reason in Heidegger's ontology of Dasein.
Heidegger is consistently antirationalist: he rejects the definition of man as the
rational animal, and insists on a distinction between philosophical thought and
reasoning. But to be antirationalist is not to be antirational: Heidegger acknowl­
edges that we have reason, and never objects to its use within proper limits. 6
Crowell's reflections bring out the possible connections between Heidegger and
Kant, who, after all, also tried to establish the limits of reason. Heideggerian
conscience may provide an ontological basis for a broadly Kantian ethics, in
which one takes responsibility by seeking to articulate the grounds for one's
actions.
In his Being-in-the-World (1991), Hubert L. Dreyfus interprets skillful ev­
eryday coping, which Heidegger describes in Division I, as the basis of all
intelligibility. Dreyfus's influential reading has done much to bring Heidegger
into Anglo-American philosophy by building bridges to Wittgenstein, pragma­
tism, and debates on artificial intelligence. 7 The original edition of Dreyfus's
commentary focused almost exclusively on Division I, but a new edition that is
in preparation integrates Heidegger's explorations of authenticity in Division
II. Like Crowell, Dreyfus now acknowledges that we cannot fully account for
intelligibility on the basis of inauthentic everydayness; he reads Division II as
passing beyond skillful coping to a level of action that can "disclose new worlds."
His chapter in this volume-"Can There Be a Better Source of Meaning Than
Everyday Practices? Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in the Light
of Division II"-explains his general orientation. Using his phenomenology
of skill acquisition, Dreyfus shows that risk and anxiety are necessary if we are
ever to pass beyond the mere application of standards and take responsibil­
ity for developing our own abilities. Those outstanding individuals who have
become masters of a cultural practice are the very people who are not easily
satisfied but remain acutely aware of the inadequacy of all facile rules. Dreyfus
suggests, then, that the encounters with guilt and death that stand at the center
of Division II can be interpreted in terms of the synergy between dissatisfac­
tion and ability. Our guilt, in Dreyfus's reading, is our indebtedness to norms
that we cannot fully articulate and justify. Recognizing guilt undermines our
complacency and brings us closer to achieving what Aristotle calls phronesis, or
practical wisdom. Death goes still deeper: for Dreyfus, it is the lack of grounds
not only for our shared norms, but for our very identity and that of our culture.
Confronting death thus makes it possible to be born again, as in the Christian
10 Introduction

idea that one's life and world can be transformed in the glance of an eye. World
transformers can change das Man itself-although in order to do so, they must
draw on the resources of established common sense. Dreyfus leaves us with a
goal that contrasts dramatically with Crowell's broadly Kantian ideal: rather
than articulating the grounds for what we do, we can aspire to transform what
we do out of a sense ofits ultimate groundlessness. Such transformation cannot
be based on an ultimate rule or standard but grows out of a long confrontation
with the contingent intricacies of the world.
Daniel 0. Dahlstrom's "Genuine Timeliness;' from his Heidegger's Concept
of Truth, lays out the main features of Heidegger's crucial interpretation ofDa­
sein in terms of temporality. For Heidegger, the meaning of the Being ofDasein
(or "the sense of the being of being-here," as Dahlstrom prefers) is to be found
in temporality (or "timeliness"). But what is the sense of "sense"? Dahlstrom
compares sense to the background of a picture or the accompaniment to a
melody: the background and accompaniment do not normally seize our atten­
tion, but they provide the context that allows the picture or melody to stand out
fully and effectively. Similarly, Dasein's timeliness is the normally unnoticed
context against which our thoughts and actions stand out. But timeliness does
more than that, as Dahlstrom points out: it makes all particular thoughts and
actions possible in the first place, by virtue of the primordial "standing out" or
"reaching out" that Heidegger calls ecstasis. Our Being reaches out ecstatically
into the future, the past, and the present in an integrated way, so that time is
not simply a linear sequence of "nows": at every present moment, we are ap­
propriating who we have been for the sake of who we are to be. Our timeliness
is limited by death-but this does not simply mean that we will run out of
time someday. It means that it is always possibly impossible for us to be here;
everything we do is done in the shadow of this fragility. Along with this fragile
timeliness comes truth, the disclosing of timeliness as the meaning of "being­
here:' In this way, Heidegger's analysis of time undermines what Dahlstrom
calls "the logical prejudice;' that is, the assumption that truth is to be under­
stood solely as a property of correct assertions or propositions corresponding
to something present in some sense. If truth is understood in this way, then
logic, as a study of inferential relations among propositions, necessarily takes
the lead in philosophical analysis (as many philosophers would insist). But if
propositional truth depends on a deeper disclosure and unconcealment that
take place along with ecstatic timeliness, then logic must play a subordinate
role in the analysis of truth.
In "Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being and Time;'
an excerpt from Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning,
Jeffrey Andrew Barash investigates the thoughts on historicity (Geschicht­
lichkeit) with which the completed portion of Being and Time culminates.
 Introduction 11

Heidegger dearly intends to put forward a radically historical conception of

Dasein (his later thought goes farther and concentrates on the "history of
Being" itself). Yet this emphasis on history might seem to conflict with his
attempt to establish universally applicable truths about the Being of Dasein.
It might also be surprising to find historicity stressed by the same philoso­
pher who, earlier in Being and Time, seemed to display unease with the power
of cultural norms and of the anonymous "they:' Heidegger rejects the long­
standing historicist tradition in German thought, which looks to the evolving
continuity of one's own culture as a sufficient source of meaning. His own
position develops in dialogue with earlier "critical theorists of history" such
as Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm Windelband, and Heidegger's teacher Heinrich
Rickert, who all tried in various ways to find stable forms or values within his­
tory. Like other members of the World War I generation, Heidegger is deeply
suspicious of cultural stability and seeks truth in the individual who can sense
the groundlessness of the tradition. This authentic realization does not, how­
ever, put the individual outside history. Instead, it is the source of an authentic
historicity that faces finitude courageously. History, then, is more than the
events and values studied by historians; it is our very way of existing-whether
we do so authentically, or whether we evade finitude and allow ourselves to
be absorbed in the entities that surround us. An insight into the historicity
of existence can undermine the tacit sense of Being as enduring presence that
is taken for granted, according to Heidegger, even by supposedly historicist
thinkers.
Theodore Kisiel's "The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930" provides
an invaluable overview of Heidegger's plans for the pivotal Part 1, Division
III, and traces the process of frustration and disillusionment that would lead
Heidegger to recast his thought in striking new terms. In his landmark study
The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time',s Kisiel has traced the composi­
tion of Heidegger's masterwork; the present chapter on its de-composition is
a counterpart to Kisiel's Genesis and a compendium of his book in progress on
this theme. Division III, "Time and Being," was to turn from the "temporality''
(Zeitlichkeit) ofDasein to "Temporality" (Temporalitiit)-time as the horizon
of Being. It would seem that in this delicate maneuver, Heidegger would have
to avoid theoretically objectifying time and Being, as if we could observe them
at a distance-for time and Being are intimately involved in our existence,
making possible not only our theories but our relation to any thing or topic
whatsoever. Yet in the lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
(delivered in the summer semester 1927, immediately after the publication
of Being and Time) Heidegger proposes a philosophical "objectification" of
Being and tries to develop a theory of Temporality as a system of "horizonal
schemata" that would explain the basic modes of Being. This may have been
12 Introduction

Heidegger's second attempt to work out Division III, for as Kisiel tantalizingly
reports, an unpublished 200-page document probably dating from 1926-1927
contains extensive notes in preparation for this crucial project. But Heidegger
clearly came to see his attempts at Division III as dead ends. In The Metaphysical
Foundations of Logic (summer semester 1928), he no longer thinks of philos­
ophy as an objectifying science and speaks of "metontology" as a new way of
thinking that would recognize the ineluctable situatedness of the thinker within
beings as a whole. His next lecture course, Introduction to Philosophy (winter
semester 1928-1929), opposes philosophy both to science and to worldviews,
presenting philosophy as a provocation that inspires one to come to grips with
one's own concrete existence. The entire language of"horizon" has now nearly
faded away. Instead of beginning with Dasein's own Being and delimiting the
general meaning of Being on that basis, Heidegger will decide by 1936 that
we must begin with the "appropriating event" of Being itself and understand
Dasein as a possibility that is required if that event is to take place.
The most influential interpreter of Being and Time has been, appropriately
enough, Heidegger himself. As Kisiel shows, having nearly (but not quite) suc­
ceeded in formulating his philosophical position in Being and Time, Heidegger
almost immediately began to critique and reinterpret this position. His self­
interpretation is extremely valuable, but as Dieter Thoma argues in "Being
and Time in Retrospect: Heidegger's Self-Critique;' we must not assume that
Heidegger should have the last word on his own work. Does the older Heidegger
rightly state the goal of Being and Time? Does he explain in what respects
the book failed to reach its goal, and how it should have proceeded? These
questions are complicated by Heidegger's defense of Being and Time against
external attacks. As his thought evolves and he tries to protect Being and Time
against misunderstandings, Heidegger asserts that certain aspects of the book
were "thought otherwise" than they were actually presented. What worries
Heidegger in particular is a residual subjectivism that seems to linger in his
masterwork. From the perspective of his later thought, Dasein must be un­
derstood as dependent on Being, not as an autonomous subject, but it may
well seem that Being and Time offers us a way to rehabilitate and clarify the
phenomenon of subjectivity rather than an escape from subjectivity altogether
( compare Steven Crowell's article in this volume). In a dramatic move, the later
Heidegger attempts to distance his thought not only from subjectivity but from
humanity itself, presenting Dasein not as the essence of man but as a possibility
for man. Yet he continues to insist that he is being true to the project he pub­
lished in 1927. In order to test this claim, Thoma considers a striking line in
Being and Time that speaks of the moment ofvision as "a rapture which is held
in resoluteness" (SZ 338). Here "rapture" suggests a centrifugal process that
draws Dasein into the meaning of a situation, whereas "resoluteness" suggests a
 Introduction 13

centripetal process of gathering meaning toward a quasi-subject; Heidegger's

line implies a dynamic tension. However, Thoma shows that according to
Heidegger's later explanations, both "rapture" and "resoluteness" mean "in­
sistence" (Instiindigkeit); the tension, then, has disappeared. Thoma concludes
that Heidegger's self-interpretation does not do justice to his original inten­
tions.
In closing, some comments on translation. Four of the chapters in this vol­
ume have been translated from the original languages. (I thank Julia Davis for
her help in translating the chapter by Gilnter Figal, Daniel Dwyer for translating
the chapter by Dieter Thoma, and Jean Grondin and Theodore Kisiel for help
with their own work.) All the other authors have also, of course, had to make
their own decisions about how to translate key concepts of Being and Time
into English. Two complete translations of the book are available as models for
such an effort. The 1962 version by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
is meticulous and often felicitous, but there are cases where its terminology
is awkward or inappropriate. Joan Stambaugh's version, published in 1996, is
widely acknowledged to be more graceful, but it too has come in for its share
of criticism. 9 In this volume, Nicholson's chapter and the translation of Figal's
chapter use Stambaugh's terminology; others use Macquarrie and Robinson;
still others have rendered Heidegger in their own terms. Some prefer "Being,"
others "being" (see Nicholson, p. 50). Heidegger's Dasein has been left un­
translated (as "Dasein" or "Dasein"), hyphenated as "Da-sein," or Anglicized
as "being-here" (Dahlstrom). The multiplicity of translations does not point
to the inadequacy of any interpreter-in fact, it should remind us that genuine
interpreting must remain open to different facets of the phenomena and com­
peting conceptions of them. As for the challenging task of tracking this welter
of expressions, it will be made easier by our index, where all the essential terms
that are translated in more than one way are listed and cross-referenced in all
their German and English versions.

Notes

1. "Author's Preface to the Seventh German Edition" ( 1953 ), in Being and Time, trans.
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 17; Being
and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996),
xvii. My further references to Being and Time will cite it as "SZ" and use the pagination
of Sein und Zeit (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953). This pagination is identical in the
later Niemeyer editions; it is provided in both English translations and in Sein und Zeit,
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977).
2. For example, see Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols-Conversations-Letters,
ed. Medard Boss, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 2001), 225-26.
14 Introduction

3. For an exploration of this theme in Heidegger in relation to ancient philosophy,

see Thomas Sheehan, "Das Gewesen," in From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and
Desire: Essays in Honor of William ]. Richardson, S.]., ed. Babette Babich (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1995).
4. For interpretations that stress Heidegger's subordination of theory to "practice"
or "skillful coping;' see Mark Okrent, Heidegger's Pragmatism: Understanding, Being,
and the Critique ofMetaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988} and Hubert L.
Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time," Division
I (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
5. See especially Heidegger, Plato's "Sophist," trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre
Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), introductory part, on Aristo­
tle's account of the "intellectual virtues," or the fundamental ways of unconcealing.
6. On reason, one should also consult Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of
Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984} (the lecture
course on which "The Essence of Reasons" was based), as well as the 1955-1956 lecture
series The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1991).
7. For collections ofessays influenced by Dreyfus, see Heidegger: A Critical Reader, ed.
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Heidegger, Authenticity,
and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, vol. 1, ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff
Malpas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000); Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays
in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, vol. 2, ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2000). For a criticism of the so-called analytic Heideggerian approach that
is characteristic of a number of these essays, see Robert C. Scharff, "Rorty and Analytic
Heideggerian Epistemology-and Heidegger;' Man and World 25, no. 3-4 (Oct. 1992}:
483-504.
8. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis ofHeidegger's "Being and Time" (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993).
9. See Thomas Sheehan, "'Let a Hundred Translations Bloom!' A Modest Proposal
about Being and Time," Man andWorld30,no. 2 (April 1997):227-38;TimothyO'Hagan
and Giles Pearson, "The 'Alarming Task' of Understanding Being and Time:' Inter­
national Studies in Philosophy 33, no. 2 (2001}: 131-37; Theodore Kisiel, "The New
Translation of Sein und Zeit: A Grammatological Lexicographer's Commentary;' in
Kisiel, Heidegger's Way of Thought, ed. Alfred Denker and Marion Heinz (New York:
Continuum, 2002).
 1
Why Reawaken the Question of Being?
Jean Grondin

A Question That Is Doubly Fundamental for Heidegger

According to Heidegger, the question of Being is the absolutely fundamental

question of philosophy, but also of existence itself. No one before Heidegger
had truly defended this very strong thesis, but it has the advantage of link­
ing the most primordial question of philosophy to the question that man
is for himself, as soon as he finds himself confronted with the question of
Being and its meaning. However, Heidegger's more complete and rather mis­
chievous thesis is that the question of Being is one before which both man and
philosophy tend to flee, for it is a destabilizing question, a question that tends
to dissolve every certitude.
The oblivion of Being thus constitutes the point of departure of this anam­
netic thinking (and all the great philosophies since Parmenides and Plato
are philosophies of anamnesis, of recollection). The author of Being and
Time (SZ) 1 seems to impute this oblivion to an inauthentic form of exis­
tence, but it is an oblivion that has dominated Western thought so exten­
sively that the later Heidegger will eventually see it as the effect of a historical
destiny, the destiny of metaphysics. But whether it be in the form of an ex­
plicit repetition of the question of Being in SZ, or in the form of Andenken
("thoughtful recollection") in his later philosophy, Heidegger's goal is always
to call thought and existence back to their essential question, the question of
Being.

15
16 Jean Grondin

The Readers' Irritation

The readers of SZ themselves have been disconcerted by the breadth and

simplicity of this thesis. They have rather been fascinated by the power of
Heidegger's reflections on time, death, anxiety, and the "they." Proceeding from
these radical experiences of finitude, Heidegger's thought seemed to many
of them to be largely antimetaphysical, so they did not immediately see the
necessity of taking up again the question of Being posed by Aristotle. Most
phenomenologists who have wished to extend Heidegger's philosophical
efforts have expressly challenged the priority that he bestows anew to the theme
of Being. This is particularly evident in Levinas, who asked quite early whether
ontology was truly the fundamental discipline of philosophy-a critique of
Heidegger that in fact took aim at the ontological ambition of the entire
tradition, an ambition that was totalizing and, in Levinas' eyes, totalitarian.
Levinas was followed by Derrida, whose thought of deconstruction was also,
if not above all, a destruction of the question of Being. If Heidegger teaches
us so very well to decode the language of metaphysics, does he not oblige us
to deconstruct the question of Being itself-and the dream of a finally full
presence of meaning or of the truth of Being (as aletheia or Ereignis), which
Heidegger never gave up? 2 Jean-Luc Marion inherits this distancing when he
speaks of Heidegger's "construction" of the question of Being. The author of
God Without Being (1982) also tries to promote a "phenomenology without
Being;' founded on the idea of givenness, which he judges to be even more
primordial than that of Being. This is all as if the very last Heidegger ( the
Heidegger of the es gibt and of its giving without reason) were turned against
the Heidegger who had maintained the still all-too-metaphysical priority of
the question of Being.
This critique of the priority of ontology in French phenomenology echoed
an analogous suspicion that had long been formulated in Germany, even if its
inspirations were often quite different. In some articles published in the late
twenties, which are important since they were one of the first philosophical re­
actions to SZ, Georg Misch claimed to fear a relapse into metaphysics-that is,
for Misch, a step back in comparison to Dilthey's historicism-in Heidegger's
resurrection of the question of Being. Heidegger's most prominent student
in Germany, Hans-Georg Gadamer, still spoke, it is true, of an "ontological
turn" in hermeneutics, but he did not propose to revive the question of Being
per se, but to emphasize the essentially linguistic nature of our experience
of the world ("there is no understanding of Being without language"). So
what inspired Gadamer was not the primacy of the question of Being, but the
Heideggerian analysis of understanding and language. Summing up a rather
widespread feeling, Klaus Held has spoken of a question whose evidence does
 Why Reawaken the Question of Being? 17

not impose itself on the phenomenological gaze-for Being is never given as

such in intuition-and which testifies only to the somewhat peculiar attrac­
tion that the thought of the Stagirite (if not Scholasticism) always exerted on
Heidegger. And these were the most gentle critiques! Need we mention the
more malicious and polemical ones? One thinks, of course, of Adorno, whose
virulent and vitriolic pamphlets never ceased to stigmatize the jargon of the
question ofBeing-a futile, crypto-mystical question that would betray, in his
eyes, a flight from social reality, and that had not sufficiently meditated on
Hegel's teaching thatBeing is equivalent to the uttermost void and the absence
of thought. For his part, Ernst Tugendhat, an ex-student of Heidegger known
for his rejection of the Heideggerian concept of truth, appealed to analytic
philosophy in declaring that the question ofBeing had no object and remained
without any real philosophical pertinence. 3
A singular paradox: for all that the question of Being seemed primordial
to Heidegger, it has seemed superfluous to the majority of his heirs-after a
first, rather "philontological" wave that is somewhat forgotten today (Sartre, 4
Jaspers, Marcel, etc.). Is the question ofBeing essential to phenomenology and
philosophy, or is it not? Is it, still more fundamentally, the most urgent question
of human existence?

The Vigilance of a Question Is More Important

Than the Answer

These criticisms did nothing but confirm in Heidegger's eyes that the oblivion
of Being was endemic, even among his closest students. Exasperated, he asked
in a letter to Hermann Morchen: Dear friend, "can you name for me a single
study that has truly taken up my question of the meaning of Being as a question,
that has considered it critically, either in order to affirm it or in order to reject
it?" 5
For this, first of all, is the question of Being for Heidegger-the irresistible
urgency of a question. Nur dies, "this only;' one would like to add, borrowing
a phrase from Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (1947)6 which faintly echoes
the last sighs of Plotinus's Enneads: monon pros monon (alone toward the
One). Heidegger encountered this question at the very start of his path, in
the textbooks of his professor of dogmatic theology, Carl Braig, but also in
Duns Scotus. He never ceased turning the question over, in every sense, in his
life's work-which gravitates around a single unfinished book but which, with
time, has taken on titanic proportions: 102 volumes are planned in the Collected
Edition (GA), which Heidegger says in a draft of a preface presents only "ways,
not works;' whose sole aim is "to incite [readers] to pose this question in an
ever more questioning waY:' 7
18 Jean Grondin

As if it were more imperative to deepen the question itself, Heidegger always

deferred the response to it. This "differance" first became dramatically apparent
when the third part of SZ failed to appear-"Time and Being;' where Heidegger
had promised that the question of the meaning of Being would be "concretely
answered" (SZ 19).
We have recently learned that Heidegger decided that the last writings to ap­
pear in the collected edition would be the "black notebooks" (schwarze Hefte)
to which he consigned his most personal, and no doubt most revealing, reflec­
tions. We may have to wait a few decades for the completion of this edition
before we can know the source of the unease that tormented Heidegger as he
stirred up the question of Being. One can suspect, with Gadamer, that the un­
ease was in large part religious. 8 The title of the hundredth projected volume
of the GA already gives us a little glimpse of its contents: Vigiliae. This Latin
title also reveals that, for Heidegger at his most secret, the space of thinking
was perhaps not exclusively occupied by the Greeks and the Germans.
Striking evidence for this point can be found in a short autobiographical
text from 1937-1938 titled "My Path Up to Now;' which slipped into GA
66.

And who would want to deny that this entire path up to now was accompanied
silently [ verschwiegen] by a confrontation with Christianity-a confrontation
that was not and is not a "problem" taken up at random, but the preservation of
the ownmost origin-of the family house, of the homeland and of my youth­
and at the same time a painful detachment from it. Only someone who was so
deeply rooted in an actually lived Catholic world can suspect something of the
necessities that affected the path of my questioning up to now like subterranean
seismic tremors. 9

Heidegger himself spoke very little in public about these subterranean

tremors, which he preferred to keep quiet ( verschweigen), and it would be
presumptuous indeed to wish to speak on his behalf. But one can at least try to
understand in what way these origins could have led him to revive the question
of Being.

The Formal Justification of the Question of Being in SZ

Why must the question of Being be revived at any cost? Although Heidegger
seems to presuppose everywhere that it is the guiding question of philosophy as
well as of our existence and our destiny, only occasionally does he try explicitly
to justify this priority. Yet he does so in detailed fashion in his magisterial
introduction to SZ, titled precisely "The Necessity, Structure, and Priority of
 Why Reawaken the Question of Being? 19

the Question of Being:' This text would deserve a rigorous commentary. We

will only recall its lessons and its main "arguments" before returning to the
question that concerns us-why repeat the question ofBeing?-which is not,
perhaps, completely resolved by this text, which remains somewhat protreptic
and general.
If Heidegger speaks of a necessity, structure, and priority of the question of
Being, it is because these were hardly self-evident at the time. The period was
still dominated by neo-Kantianism, although its authority had begun to ebb
away in the l 920s-years marked philosophically by a powerful reception of
Kierkegaard's thought, manifest in the work ofJaspers but also, and above all, in
the dialectical theology ofBarth and Bultmann. In what already amounted to a
seismic tremor, the priority of the fundamental unrest of existence had already
supplanted the epistemological and logical horizon that still predominated in
the heart of neo-Kantianism-but also, Heidegger will discreetly maintain, in
the heart of Husserlian phenomenology itself (whose most important textual
manifestations were the Logical Investigations and the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy). Heidegger knew this
"existentialist" wave well, and he allies himself to it in his own way in the
introduction to SZ; but as if he had misgivings about it and its superficial
nature (as Kisiel rightly insists), he takes more inspiration from Scholasticism
and the predominant transcendental philosophy in his attempt to justify the
necessity of expressly taking up the question ofBeing.
We must revive the question of Being, writes Heidegger, because its disap­
pearance seems to be supported by three prejudices inherited from Scholasti­
cism that deserve to be considered more deeply: I)Being is the most universal
concept, 2) it is indefinable, and 3) it is so obvious that everyone understands
it spontaneously. Here Heidegger follows the classical logic of definition (defi­
nitio fit per genus proximum et differentiam specificam)-it is hard to say if he is
doing so ironically or as seriously as can be, for it is a logic that he will end up
deconstructing-and appeals to authors who were hardly part of the curricu­
lum in the day of neo-Kantianism or Kierkegaardian existentialism: Aristotle,
Thomas Aquinas, Hegel, but also Pascal. However, Heidegger does not truly
refute these prejudices (in fact, he shares them); he is content to list them in
order to "recall" the reasons why the question ofBeing may seem superfluous.
Wherein lies the "necessity for explicitly restating the question of Being" (the
title of §1)? It actually derives from the third prejudice, which takes Being to
be a self-evident notion. This self-evidence may be only apparent, Heidegger
suggests, for what we understand by this notion is far from being evident. It
seems that it is precisely on this not-so-evident evidence that Heidegger founds
the "necessity" of taking up the question of Being again: "The very fact that
we already live in an understanding of Being and that the meaning of Being is
20 Jean Grondin

still veiled in darkness proves that it is necessary in principle to raise this question
again:' 10 A strong but somewhat hasty conclusion, for what Heidegger says
about Being here holds for many of our concepts, if not all. In fact, we all
live within a certain understanding of friendship, of meaning, of happiness,
and so forth, whose sense is also somewhat veiled in darkness, but this does
not demonstrate the urgency of an explicit philosophical investigation of these
notions. Why distinguish the theme of Being here amidst so many others? The
question thus remains intact: why should we renew the question of Being at all
costs?
What militates in favor ofthis necessity, as Heidegger will concede a few pages
later, is above all the question's "venerable origin" and "the lack of a definite
answer" to it ( SZ 8-9). But this does no more than suggest the necessity oftaking
up the question of Being, inasmuch as the venerability of a tradition can itself
be subjected to a destruction. One cannot, therefore, speak of anything more
than a weak necessity, although Heidegger's considerations on the structure
and priority of the question of Being will reinforce it.
In presenting the "formal structure" ( §2) of the question ofBeing, Heidegger
claims to rely on the structure that is common to all questions and that includes
three constitutive moments. Here he takes up some trains ofthought that he had
presented in his teaching. In a course in 1923-1924 he had even distinguished no
less than a dozen structural moments of every question! More significant is the
fact that he had already expounded this structure without explicit reference to
the question ofBeing. 11 In fact, the theme of questioning is quite longstanding
in Heidegger's work. He dedicated one of his first lectures-to my knowledge,
his very first lecture-to this theme: "Question and Judgment:' Delivered in one
of Rickert's seminars on July 10, 1915, this lecture was published only recently.
It bears witness to the fact that reflection on the logical structure of questioning
was one of the points of departure for Heidegger's entire inquiry. Very early on,
the philosopher asked himself whether classical propositional logic was capable
of grasping what the uncertainty of a question had in view. This meaning can
be fully comprehended only on the basis of the very act of questioning, that
is, only if one is seized by the question oneself. 12 This will also be true of
the question of Being, as we will see: it cannot be comprehended unless one
passes through the Being of Dasein, which will be introduced formally in SZ as
the entity characterized, among other things, by its capacity to pose questions
(SZ 7).
In every question, claims SZ, one can distinguish three moments:

(a) "that which is asked about;' a Gefragtes; in this case-we intimate it,
but without knowing anymore what we are putting into question-the
Gefragtes is Being.
 Why Reawaken the Question of Being? 21

(b) "that which is interrogated;' a Befragtes, that is, that to which our ques­
tion is addressed; we will soon learn that this is Dasein and its under­
standing of Being;
(c) finally, there is "that which is to be found out by the asking," an Erfragtes:
what is being asked, what one wishes to know when one poses the
question, the meaning or point of the question-in short, the question
behind the question.

What is one trying to know when one poses the question ofBeing? Heidegger
answers: the meaning ofBeing. A mysterious formula, but it will receive a rather
prosaic sense in §2: the point is not, we are assured, to bring to light the meaning
of existence, but solely to elucidate what is comprised in the notion of Being by
bringing it to conceptual clarity (SZ 6). Although Being is the object of a vague
and immediate understanding, as § 1 proposed, we do not yet have any dear
concept of it (SZ 8). One could get the impression that Heidegger is presenting
himself here as an analytic philosopher who is quite simply trying to clarify
what one ordinarily understands by the concept of Being.
If this is the point of the question ofBeing, one would like to know the point
of it all! Even after we have elucidated the formal structure of the question of
Being, the meaning of our question-why should we revive the question of
Being?-remains. Is it simply a matter of clarifying the meaning of the word
"Being"? Ifso, what is the point? Following Heidegger's terminology: what then
is the Erfragtes of the Erfragtes, the meaning of the question of the meaning of
Being? One thing is certain: §2, devoted to the formal structure of the question
of Being, does not really respond to this question.
Nevertheless, it has done so indirectly by making it dear-at the end of §2,
and in the spirit of the 1915 lecture-that in this question, the Being of the
questioner is itself affected by the question. 13 Very well, but how? One divines
that the question is pressing for Dasein itself-ifit is true, as we soon learn, that
Dasein is the being (one would have to say "entity" to reproduce the German,
but here the ambiguous English expression "being;' like the French etre, is
better) for whom its own Being is an issue in this Being itself. Heidegger speaks
here of the ontical priority of the question of Being, but he will not make this
his theme until §4. As if further to defer any attack on this priority, which is
the most primordial of all, Heidegger first treats the "ontological" priority of
the question of Being (§3).
What Heidegger calls the ontological priority amounts to a scientific priority
of the theme of Being. Heidegger's analysis takes an almost transcendental turn
here, which at the time benefited from a blinding self-evidence, but to which
Heidegger gives a more ontological inflection. Neo-Kantianism itself took the
fact of science as its starting point and attempted to reconstruct its logical and
22 Jean Grondin

subjective conditions of possibility. One will see that a similar line of argument
leads Heidegger to emphasize the so-called ontological priority of the question
of Being.
Every science, he explains, is interested in a certain region of entities. Here
it makes use of fundamental concepts, which most often are drawn from pre­
scientific experience, but which are not themselves any sort of entity or ontical
thing. Rather, says Heidegger, they are concerned with the Being of this or that
area of entities. The founding concepts of mathematics, of physics, or of the
human sciences necessarily call for ontological reflection: "But since every such
area is itself obtained from the domain of entities themselves, this preliminary
research, from which the basic concepts are drawn, signifies nothing else than an
interpretation of those entities with regard to their basic state ofBeing" (SZ 10).
However, it is not incumbent on the sciences themselves to proceed with
this ontological clarification, but on philosophy, understood as the "productive
logic" ofthe sciences. SZ thus attributes an ambitious ontological and scientific
priority to philosophy. It is philosophy's task to elaborate the specific ontologies
on which the sciences of entities are based. Husserl spoke here of regional
ontologies.
But what interests Heidegger in §3, before these regional ontologies them­
selves, is the priority of the question of Being. For every ontological explication,
such as the explication that philosophy is supposed to carry out for the positive
sciences, ought to have first elucidated the meaning of Being. This clarification
of the meaning of Being is consequently the first task of an ontology that wishes
to be fundamental.

Ontological inquiry is indeed more primordial, as over against the ontical inquiry
of the positive sciences. But it remains itself naive and opaque if in its researches
into the Being of entities it fails to discuss the meaning of Being in general. And
the ontological task of a genealogy of the different possible ways of Being (which
is not to be constructed deductively) is precisely of such a sort as to require that
we first come to an understanding of "what we really mean by this expression
'Being."'

The question of Being aims therefore at ascertaining the a priori conditions not
only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities as entities of such
and such a type, and, in so doing, already operate with an understanding ofBeing,
but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the
ontical sciences and which provide their foundations. Basically, all ontology, no
matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it has at its disposal,
remains blind and perverted from its ownmost aim, if it has not first adequately
clarified the meaning of Being, and conceived this clarification as its fundamental
task. [ SZ 11]
 Why Reawaken the Question of Being? 23

Even if Heidegger claims to distrust a genealogical derivation, he is obviously

defending the ontological priority ofthe question ofBeing by way of a reduction
to ever more elementary levels of reflection. Prior to the ontical sciences there
are ontologies that support them, but before these ontologies and founding
them, a fundamental ontology should have cleared up the meaning of Being.

Ontical sciences their task: the exploration of a domain of entities

Ontologies their task: the elucidation of the fundamental
concepts that circumscribe the mode of Being of
these entities
Fundamental ontology its task: the clarification of the meaning of Being
as the "a priori condition of these ontologies"

The ontological priority ofthe question ofBeing in §3 points to this last level
of reflection, which stands out as the most fundamental level in the philosoph­
ical order of reasons. Heidegger takes pains anew to specify what we should
attempt on this level-namely, a clarification, once and for all, of "what we
really mean by this expression 'Being:" 14 If Heidegger reminds us of an an­
alytic philosopher when he resorts to such formulas to defend the necessity
of an inquiry into the meaning of Being, he presents himself somewhat like a
transcendental thinker in §3 when he seeks to base the priority of the question
of Being on the fact that it allows us to delimit the conditions of possibility of
every inspection of an object and every scientific enterprise.
However, the reflections Heidegger devotes to the ontical priority of the
question of Being in §4 demonstrate that the first fact for him may not be,
as it is for the neo-Kantians, the fact of science, but rather the fact of a being
that is overwhelmed by the care of its Being. "Ontical priority" means that the
question ( of the meaning) ofBeing is not only prior in the hierarchy of types of
knowledge, but is also prior for a very distinctive entity called Dasein which is
ontically distinguished "by the fact that in its very Being, thatBeing is an issue for
it;' according to the celebrated formula that Heidegger had already often used
in his lecture courses. 15 This formula, ofcourse, has in view the care that every
individual is for himself, the care that will eventually sum up the entire Being
of Dasein in §41. It is a disquiet that not only properly characterizes Dasein,
but also pursues it in the most intimate recesses of its Being-as is confirmed
by the fact that one of Dasein's greatest burdens will be to relieve itself of this
burden, and thus to evade the all-too-vertiginous question that it is for itself.
Hence Dasein's flight in the face ofthe question of its ownBeing. Dasein is thus
most often there in the mode of being absent from itself. Heidegger sometimes
speaks in this sense of a Wegsein, a Being-elsewhere, Being-far-from-itself-in
short, a Dasein that is running away or that is not completely "there."
24 Jean Grondin

Dasein's oblivion of itself unmistakably derives from a flight in the face of

its temporality or its mortality. This is a flight into inauthenticity, Heidegger
believes, for it closes its eyes to the condition of every Dasein, the condition that
provides the starting point for determining all of Dasein's projects. Authentic
Dasein-a Dasein that is authentically there, instead of being elsewhere­
would be an entschlossenes Dasein (a resolute or decided Dasein, we say, but
the term ent-schlossen in its Heideggerian sense means above all "un-locked").
Such Dasein would be resolutely open to its own Being. This, according to
Heidegger, is the privileged form of self-consciousness.

What Is the Connection between the Two Types of Priority?

In §4, this ontical priority of the question of the Being of Dasein is movingly
and dramatically depicted, but one could ask what it has to do, after all, with
the Seinsfrage which was in question in the opening sections. Until now, one
may very well have had the feeling that it was simply a matter of conceptually
clarifying what we understand by the term "Being" (§2) or of clarifying the
ontological conditions of scientific procedure ( §3 ). So let us ask directly: can we
fully identify the question of the meaning of Being in general with the question
of the burden that Dasein is for itself ? Are they truly the same question? Isn't
Heidegger confusing Aristotle and Kierkegaard?
Here it is appropriate to distinguish the perspective of SZ from that of
Heidegger's later thought. The later Heidegger will be somewhat inclined to
attenuate the question of Dasein's care for its Being, preferring to accentuate
the event of Being itself, within whose opening Da-sein holds itself. The "Letter
on 'Humanism"' will say in 1946 that the "there" of Dasein in SZ seeks only to
indicate this clearing of Being.16 The notion of care has now been reinterpreted
somewhat to mean care for Being.
However, SZ could not be more explicit on this point: the ontical priority does
not appear until §4 (thus rather late, and after the ontological priority), but this
priority is clearly the priority of the care that Dasein's own Being constitutes
for every Dasein. For each Dasein, its Being is itself an issue-Dasein's own
Being-possible (Seinkonnen), which is awaiting disclosure (Ent-schlossenheit
in the Heideggerian sense). So we must ask regarding SZ: what connection is
Heidegger trying to establish between the question of the care of Dasein and
the question of the meaning of Being?
Heidegger never states it in such clear-cut terms, but the nature of the con­
nection that he is trying to establish leaves little room for doubt. Even if it is
not discussed until §4, Heidegger clearly begins with Dasein as a being that
is pursued by the care for its own Being-as confirmed by his early lectures
 Why Reawaken the Question of Being? 25

on the hermeneutics of facticity. Death so deeply gnaws on Dasein in its Be­

ing that the sum moribundus (I am to die) incarnates its most intimate cer­
tainty, well before the cogito, according to a lecture course of 1925. 17 I am
"here;' but-curses!-only for a time. This too is meant by the title Being and
Time.
But what is the link between this care, or this anxiety, and the more general
question of Being as it has been posed in the venerable Aristotelian tradition?
The connection consists in that, according to Heidegger, every understanding
of Being will prove to be determined by this care for Dasein's temporal Being.
Heidegger finds the most eloquent indication of this in the tendency to con­
ceive of true Being in an "atemporal" way, as permanent presence. Heidegger
develops penetrating historical analyses to show to what extent this reading of
Being as permanence in presence has sustained the entire history of ontology,
from Parmenides' eternally present Being, passing through the ever-identical
Idea of Plato, the substance of Aristotle, the ipsum esse subsistens of the me­
dieval God, up to the cogito that is set up as an unshakable foundation by the
moderns.
On what is this singular privilege of permanence in the understanding of Be­
ing ultimately based, insinuates Heidegger, if not on a denial of the temporality
of Dasein? To reawaken the question of Being is to bring to light this forgot­
ten, repressed relation between Being and atemporality, and to ask whether
the connection between true Being and time cannot be thought still more
originally. 18

What Is the Fundamental Experience for Heidegger?

We have spoken of a formal justification in order to characterize the way in

which Heidegger "argues;' in the introduction to SZ, in favor of the priority of
the question ofBeing. It is a formal and a bit ceremonious justification that does
not say everything, for the fundamental question can still be asked: why is it
vital to resuscitate the question ofBeing? In order to bring to light the meaning
of a polysemic word? In order to establish a fundamental ontology which could
found regional ontologies, which in turn would found the positive sciences?
Or in order to rethink the Being of man on the basis of the limit-experiences
of death, of anxiety, and of the resulting call of conscience?
A little of all ofthat, no doubt-but what is Heidegger's truly first motivation?
The text of Besinnung spoke of a silent confrontation with Christianity that
accompanied the thinker's entire trajectory. Considerations of space prevent
us from reopening the complex dossier that is the question of the religious in
Heidegger. It has already been the subject of an abundant secondary literature,
26 Jean Grondin

even before the publication of GA 60, which collects some lecture courses on
the phenomenology of religious experience-indispensable, no doubt, but still
rather elliptical. 19 We will simply try to sketch out the broadest features of the
connection that there may be between this experience and our sole subject
here, the justification of the question of Being.
Very early on, Heidegger was struck by an experience of Being as emergence
(physis), presence (Anwesenheit), manifestation (aletheia), pure advent or event
(Ereignis). But according to Heidegger, this experience is one that offers itself
distinctively to man and even needs man, for without man this opening, this
fulguration of Being would not take place. However, man does not control this
fulguration. He is there (hence the term Da-sein), he belongs to it, for he himself
is a sudden emergence, a rest-less unfolding in the opening of the present. This is
Heidegger's fundamental experience. He recalls it in an interview with Richard
Wisser in 1969: "the fundamental thought of my thinking is precisely that
Being, or the manifestation of Being, needs human beings and that, vice versa,
human beings are only human beings if they are standing in the manifestation
of Being:' 20
It is also clear that what is at stake here is an understanding ofBeing as "time;'
but not as clock time. The time ofBeing-which the third division of SZ tried,
yet still failed, to distinguish from the time of Dasein-would be attuned to
Being as pure self-extending and self-unfolding, as simple advent or event. This
is what the term "essence" ( Wesen) comes to indicate in Heidegger, understood
in a verbal sense and connoting a certain processual character. For wesen can
also be a verb in German, which admittedly is very archaic in the indicative ( es
west), but whose form can still be heard quite clearly in certain compound verbs
( verwesen, to decompose) or in the past participle of the verb "to be" (gewesen).
Heidegger greatly loves this "archaism" (much like the archaism of spelling Sein,
Being, in the obsolete form Seyn); it helps us recall that before our fixation on
entities, there is and has always been a temporal "self-unfolding" of Being, an
"essential happening" ofBeing that is neither a delimited thing nor an idea, but
a surging in which we take part during the time of a sojourn imparted byBeing.
Heidegger freely acknowledges that the emergence ofBeing is necessarily also
the revelation of something, and thus of an entity that arises within presence
and offers itself to a gaze. 21 This is how things come to pass. But the thinking
he calls metaphysics is a thinking that is restricted too exclusively to the entities
that present themselves in this way and that can be captured and grasped. The
danger (another great Heideggerian leitmotif) is that now, entities tend to be
grasped solely on the basis of this dominating gaze that is brought to bear upon
them. This is what came about when Plato understood Being as eidos. Without
realizing it, he placed entities in the perspective of a "supervision" from which
 Why Reawaken the Question ofBeing? 27

the metaphysical will to explanation and control was born; the subjectivism of
modernity was only the final avatar of this will.
If the fundamental experience for Heidegger is that of Being as a free unfold­
ing, experienced as the "wonder of wonders;' Heidegger also felt quite early
on that a somewhat technical understanding of entities had gained strength on
the trail of Platonism, which was taken up by epistemology ("Being cannot be
understood except on the basis of its Idea, and thus, in principle, on the basis of
the subjugating gaze that is brought to bear on it"). This technical understand­
ing tended to erase the mystery and initial surging of Being, without abolishing
it. One will object, no doubt, that Heidegger became interested in technology
only later on. But this is not quite true. Ever since SZ, he asked himself whether
the objectifying perspective of Vorhandenheit, which conceives of the thing as
a res extensa, was the only way of envisaging the presence of Being. Still more
fundamentally, his appeal to the early Christian experience of time ("the day
of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night" 22) was already an attempt to dis­
rupt the countable, reassuring time of clocks. In each case, the basic question
remains the same: is the technical or objectifying relation to Being the only and
truly fundamental relation? Does it not stem from an oblivion, or from the
covering-up of a still more original experience? Heidegger has nothing against
technology or against Platonism; he simply thinks that the construction of a
Being that is immediately subjected to a rationalizing point of view may tend
to obscure the experience of the gratuitous gift of Being, including our own,
which emerges without a why.
Hence the basically quite simple Heideggerian idea of an oblivion of Be­
ing that has supposedly marked all metaphysics. The issue here is not some
thesis about a theme that has unfortunately been forgotten in the textbooks
of metaphysics, but a judgment about the technical conception of Being (as
Vorhandenheit,Gegenstand, or Bestand) that still bewitches our age. This con­
ception has its reasons and its successes, but it tends to reduce Being to the
order of the producible, thus disguising the more ancient unavailability of Be­
ing. If this Being says nothing to us-even post-Heideggerian philosophy, as
we saw, understands nothing of it-this is because one can make nothing of
it. Precisely, Heidegger replies; but this experience might remind us that not
everything belongs to the order of making and calculation.
The catastrophe of this technical intelligence, for Heidegger, is that it cuts
off all its connections to a higher order. It is this order, this measure (Mass)
that is finally indicated by the theme of Being and its oblivion. In a world
where everything ultimately depends on man, there is no more place where
the divine can be-or it cannot appear except to respond to a human need
for reassurance or explanation. It is now nothing more than a manmade idol,
28 Jean Grondin

deprived of all its divine greatness. To think Being-says Heidegger in the most
personal manuscripts that have appeared so far-amounts to thinking the
distress of the divinity of the gods ( die Not der Gottschaft der Gotter) 23 , that is,
thinking of a god that would once again be divine. According to Heidegger, the
most vivid symptom of this desolation is that it isn't even experienced as such
in a world where everything works, because everything is "under control." He
speaks, then, of the distress of the lack of distress, or of an oblivion of oblivion.
One often repeats that our age is one of the disenchantment of the world.
Heidegger speaks instead, following Holderlin, of a Gottesverlassenheit, an
"abandonment" of the gods, which means not only that the gods are no longer
sought by us, but also that they are the ones who have abandoned us, in a sense:
that is, they have abandoned us to our own technological idols, they are no
longer here to keep our desire for control in check. Here Heidegger's thought
is less theophanic than one might think: a common German expression says
of a person who seems to have lost his mind that he has been von alien guten
Geistern verlassen, "abandoned by all the good spirits:' In French one would
say that he has lost sa bonne etoile, his lucky star.
Nevertheless, the idea of an oblivion of Being surely springs from a distress
that one could call religious, in the broadest and most indefinite sense of the
word. Heidegger's intent is assuredly not to offer solutions or palliatives for this
affliction. At the point where we are, "only a god can save us now;' Heidegger
cries with Cicero. 24 To the contrary, he hopes to fan the flames of our affliction,
by crying out, in the desert of the absence of distress, that the human condition
lies prey to a dereliction that technical responses, the only ones that have been
accepted in this day and age, can never remedy. One feels it in this heartfelt cry:

Question Be-ing! And in its silence, as the inception of the word, the god answers.
You may scour all that is, but nowhere does the trace of the god appear.

The formula is so daring that one asks if one has read it correctly. The reign of
entities would be the reign of the absence of the god, so that only by way of the
silence of Being could a god once again address us? And this is where language
would originate? Far from being an isolated statement, this formula is one
that Heidegger ritually reiterates in all his manuscripts of the late thirties.25
Its meaning is dear: in a world where the will to master entities has ended
by driving out every experience of the imponderable, only another thinking
(Andenken) of Being may be able to safeguard the hope of the divinity of the
divine. This vigil, perhaps, has everything to do with the reawakening of the
question of Being.

-translated by Richard Polt in consultation with the author

 Why Reawaken the Question of Being? 29

Notes

1. SZ refers to Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York: Harper & Row, 1962), which will be cited by the pagination of the later German
editions, provided in the margins of the translation.
2. ''And yet, are not the thought of the meaning or truth of Being, the determination
of differance as the ontico-ontological difference, difference thought within the horizon
of the question of Being, still intrametaphysical effects of differance?" Jacques Derrida,
"Differance;' in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982), 22.
3. Georg Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phiinomenologie (Bonn: Cohen, 1930); 3rd
ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlichen Buchgesellschaft, 1967); see also his lectures of
the same period, published under the title Der Aufbau der Logik auf dem Boden der
Philosophie des Lebens (Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 1994); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth
and Method (1960), revised trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New
York: Continuum, 2000); Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966), trans. E. B.
Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1983); Ernst Tugendhat, "Heideggers Seinsfrage;' in
Tugendhat, Philosophische Aufsiitze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 108-35;
Klaus Held, "Heidegger und das Prinzip der Phanomenologie;' in A. Gethmann-Siefert
and 0. Poggeler (eds.), Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1989), 111-39.
4. Of course, Sartre speaks of Being and ontology in the title of his masterwork; but
in the dichotomy Being and Nothingness, "being" primarily means the being that is not
man-that is, being in itself, which is totally uninteresting. This being mainly serves as a
negative backdrop that brings "nothingness;' or the freedom of our existence, into sharp
profile. Sartre's existentialism, as is confirmed by his definition of it, is "a doctrine which
makes human life possible and, in addition, declares that every truth and every action
implies a human setting and a human subjectivity": "The Humanism ofExistentialism,"
in Essays in Existentialism, ed. Wade Baskin (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990),
32. So one cannot speak of a real priority of the question of Being in Sartre, or of any
great interest bestowed upon its historical development.
5. Letter of November 6, 1969, cited in Hermann Morchen, Adorno und Heidegger
(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 637.
6. Heidegger, "The Thinker as Poet;' in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert
Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 4.
7. GA 1, Fruhe Schriften, 437. GA will refer to volumes of Heidegger's Gesamtaus­
gabe, published in Frankfurt am Main by Vittorio Klostermann.
8. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Being Spirit God," in Heidegger's Ways, trans. John
Stanley (Albany: SUNY, 1994), 182. The reference to the black notebooks is found
in the most recent prospectuses for the GA from Klostermann.
9. GA 66, Besinnung, 415.
10. SZ 4 (my emphasis).
11. GA 17, Einfuhrung in die phiinomenologische Forschung, 73. The application to
the question of Being will come about in 1925: GA 20, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des
30 Jean Grondin

Zeitbegriffs, 194f.; the German pagination is also provided in History of the Concept
of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1985).
12. Heidegger, "Frage und Urteil;' in Martin Heidegger and Heinrich Rickert, Briefe
1912 bis 1933 und andereDokumente (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2002), 80-90.
On this point see p. 88.
13. SZ 8; cf. GA 20, 200.
14. SZ 11. One will notice that in this text, the term "Being" is sometimes found
without quotation marks, and sometimes with them. Ernst Tugendhat has protested
that in either case the question takes on a completely different meaning in German:
Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. Paul Stern (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1986), 147. Asking about the meaning of a word in quotation marks simply
means inquiring into its signification (which a dictionary or a conceptual clarification
could provide), but when one asks about the meaning ofsomething without quotation
marks, one wishes to know its finality: what is the meaning ofmonochromatic art, of
antiglobalization, and so on? It may not be by chance that Heidegger leaves out the quo­
tation marks (as he often does). When he uses them, it seems fair to say that he is trying
to get clear about the meaning ofthe word "Being." But without quotation marks, the
question about the meaning of Being becomes more ambiguous, because it now seems
to exceed the limits of a semantic clarification. But what does it mean now? Difficult to
say in a footnote, but I think that Heidegger always had in view a meaning ofBeing
that would in a certain way transcend the space oflanguage that we hold over it-but
that opens up this very space. One can intimate this in the projected third division
of SZ, where he explicitly distinguishes the question of the temporality (Zeitlichkeit)
of Dasein from the Temporality (Temporalitiit) ofBeing itself. Is there not, Heidegger
now seems to ask himself, a Temporality proper to Being itself (as pure emergence)
that precedes all the projects of Dasein? But how can we speak ofthis Temporality of
Being itself without passing through Dasein? This is surely the source ofthe failure of
the third division ofSZ: it did not manage to speak ofthe "time" ofBeing-ofBeing
"itself;' as it were-without resorting to the notions of horizon and schema, which
still sprang from an overly subjectivist way ofthinking. So it was necessary to speak of
Being and its Temporality in some other way. Heidegger ventures such a new way in
his later philosophy, which pursues the strategy of listening to Being as it gives it­
self within the history of Being-a bewildering strategy, perhaps, but bewilderment
is no disaster in philosophy, says Heidegger! However, we cannot envisage such lis­
tening except by virtue ofa "leap" (Sprung), Heidegger insists, which finally "jumps"
into the meaning of Being itself. T his is the task he assigns to thinking as Besinnung
(GA 66), which is also presented in "Science and Reflection;' in The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977),
180: "To venture after sense or meaning [sich aufden Sinn einlassen] [that is, the mean­
ing of Being] is the essence ofreflecting [ Besinnen] :' Here there is no question anymore
ofusing quotation marks to speak ofthe meaning ofBeing.
15. SZ 12. Cf. GA 20,405; GA 21, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, 220.
 Why Reawaken the Question of Being? 31

16. Heidegger, "Letter on 'Humanism;" in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 256.
17. GA 20,437.
18. Jean Grondin, "Le sens du titre Etre et temps;' in Grondin, !:horizon herme­
neutique de la pensee contemporaine (Paris: Vrin, 1993), 17-35.
19. GA 60, Phiinomenologie des religiosen Lebens. The German pagination is also
provided in The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer
Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
20. "Martin Heidegger in Conversation;' in Gunter Neske and Emil Kettering ( eds.),
Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, trans. Lisa Harries
(New York: Paragon House, 1990), 82. The formula is rather striking, but it is not a
great revelation, for Heidegger had often emphasized the idea of an essential solidarity
between Being and man, who are dedicated to each other (einander ubereignet). See
Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 39f.;
"Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" in Nietzsche, vol. 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the
Same, trans. D. F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), 231; etc.
21. Essential happening (wesen in the verbal sense) now becomes the essence (or
concept) that is fixed by a gaze, losing some of its character of arising. This duality is
clearly marked in the title of Heidegger's essay "On the Essence and Concept of Physis
in Aristotle's Physics B, 1" (in Pathmarks).
22. I Thess. 5:2. Cf. Mark 13:33, Matt. 24:42; GA 60, 102, 124, 150.
23. GA 66, 255f.
24. "'Only a God Can Save Us': Der Spiegefs Interview with Martin Heidegger
(1966)," in Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). Cf. Cicero,Ad Familiares XVI, Epistle 12 (apropos
of the civil war): nisi qui deus . .. subvenerit, salvi esse nequeamus.
25. GA 66, 353: "Frage das Seyn! Und in <lessen Stille, als dem Anfang des Wortes,
antwortet der Gott. Alles Seiende mogt ihr durchstreifen, nirgends zeigt sich die Spur
des Gottes." There are nearly identical formulas in GA 69, Die Geschichte des Seyns, 31,
105, 211, 214, 221. See also "Building Dwelling Thinking," in Poetry, Language, Thought,
150: "Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. In hope they hold up
to the divinities what is unhoped for. They wait for intimations of their coming and do
not mistake the signs of their absence....In the very depth of misfortune they wait for
the weal that has been withdrawn."
 2
The Temporality of Thinking: Heidegger's
Method, from Thinking in the Light of
Time: Heidegger's Encounter with Hegel
Karin de Boer

Inauthentic and Authentic Thinking

A T THE END OF GA 24 1 Heidegger argues that metaphysics has always based

itself, albeit unknowingly, on the same horizon that has guided the usual
antic involvement, that is to say, Praesens. This is evidenced by the meaning of
ousia as Anwesenheit, but equally by Kant's concept of being ( 449). With this
Heidegger has arrived at ( that is to say, returned to) his own starting point.

Reference to the fact that the Greeks understood being on the basis of Present,
that is, of Praesens, is a confirmation not to be overestimated of our interpretation
of time as that which makes possible the understanding of being, yet it is not its
foundation. At the same time, however, it bears witness to the fact that in our
own interpretation of being we are attempting nothing other than to repeat the
problems of ancient philosophy, so as to let them radicalize themselves in this
repeating movement. ( 449)

It is striking that Heidegger here tones down his great inspiration of 1923,
which motivated the entire interpretation, into a confirmation of the same
interpretation. However, he does not make clear what he means by the "rad­
icalization" of philosophy. Only near the end of the text does he indicate the
essential difference between the thematization of beings that occurs in the
positive sciences and the thematization of beings in ontology, although both
possibilities are grounded in temporality.

33
34 Karin de Boer

Thus, with the factic existence of Dasein two essential and fundamental ways of
thematization ( Vergegensti:indlichung) are given, both of which are ... despite their
fundamental difference, apparently interrelated ( 456) .... Our question aims at the
thematization ofbeing as such, that is, at the second essential way of thematization,
in which philosophy is to constitute itself as science ( 458).

We see that Heidegger here still takes the term "thematization" in a neutral,
formal sense: it is a thematization of the being of beings that may or may not
be objectifying. 2 Insofar as the positive sciences explicitly thematize beings,
they share a common ground with the straightforward direction of everyday
apprehension (456) and hence (although Heidegger does not say this here)
their understanding is as much guided by Praesens as is the everyday involve­
ment with beings. However, the being of beings, which the positive sciences
must always implicitly intend, can not be encountered from this prevailing
perspective (457). How, then, can the being of beings itself be thematized? On
this Heidegger remarks only that the perspective from which "being" can be
thematized is opposite to the prevailing direction.

[T]he projective preconception ofbeing onto the horizon ofits understandability . .. is

delivered up to uncertainty and stands continually in danger ofbeing reversed. For
this thematization of being must necessarily move in the direction of a projective
preconception that runs counter to the everyday comportment to beings. (459)

IfDasein is guided by Praesens both in its involvement with beings and in the
positive sciences, and if ontology unknowingly takes on this perspective, the
projective preconception that enacts a countering movement should consist in
drawing back from this narrow, one-sided perspective. This would allow it to
do justice to the proper character of ecstatic Future and Past. 3
Heidegger does not consider this further in GA 24-the movement stops,
and only the temporal significance of the a priori for the phenomenological
method is briefly mentioned again (46 If). On the basis of the above, I would
like to present Heidegger's line of thought as follows.
Only when Praesens has been disclosed can anything appear as meaningful
within that openness. Beings can only be encountered once the being of beings
has been understood, but itself remains in the background. To allow beings to
be encountered, ecstatic Present opens up a realm within which being can be
understood as presence. This is also the case when thinking, from within the
given horizon of Praesens, turns explicitly to the being of beings. In the way
philosophy understands being, Praesens becomes so predominant that being­
the essential as such-can merely be understood as final cause, ultimate ground,
or in any case as that which cannot be affected by accidental and concomitant
changes. 4 This means that being not only shows forth, but also withdraws
 The Temporality of Thinking 35

from the way in which it presents itself. Heidegger considers this withdrawing
movement to first enact the history of thinking.
If thinking is to modify itself so as to accord with its authentic possibilities,
it should attempt to turn from beings to their being in a more radical way
than metaphysics ever could. This thinking will have to modify the horizon of
Praesens in such a way that the primordial threefoldness of Future, Past, and
Present is given its due. This occurs at the existentielllevel in Dasein's authentic
modification of its primordial openness, in which Dasein outstretches itself
toward its thrownness (opened up by Past) and proper possibilities (opened
up by Future). This means at the level of ontology that Past and Future open
up a realm within which the absentia! as such is allowed to occur. In the light
of this threefold Temporality, being itself will no longer appear as constant
presence but as a presence which is pervaded to the core by absence-just as
Dasein may permit the imminent possibility of death in its life.
To put it more concretely, Heidegger will no longer answer the question of
"what something is" in terms of a prior ground or essence that also constitutes
the ideal of all actual realizations. Heidegger tries to allow the "what" or the
essential to show forth as the whole of the counter-striving ways in which a
certain formal structure or possibility usually enacts itself and possibly might
enact itself. Thus, for instance, the movement of human life can be understood
against the background of a prior arche and a future telos that withdraw from
life as it enacts itself, but, as absent, still play a part in it. The telos will then
no longer appear as a possibility that is given at the outset and increasingly
realizes itself. The very idea of a possible complete realization of the essential
rests in a predominance of Present, which Heidegger sees as the ground for
every fallenness.
The fact that thinking is finite and situated thus ultimately means not so
much (or not only) that it is actually part of a concrete history, but primarily
that it is guided by a temporal horizon that it has not itself brought about.
Only on the ground of "forgetting" this horizon can something like the history
of Western philosophy occur. Insofar as Temporality has in itself the tendency
to increasingly confine itself to Present, philosophy has no power over the
course of its own history. On the other hand, Heidegger will always emphasize
that thinking has the possibility of freeing itself from the confined temporal
perspective of the tradition. This does not, however, deny the finitude of that
thinking. Freedom, whether it concerns the thematization of beings or of being,
is always a thrown freedom. 5
Now that we have clarified how the threefold ecstatic-horiwnal time consti­
tutes the final condition of possibility of the understanding of being, the answer
to the question concerning the meaning of being has in fact also been given.
After all, meaning means nothing other than the toward-which or upon-which
36 Karin de Boer

(Woraujhin) of the projective preconception (BT 151)-that is, the horizon

from within which something is understandable. The unity of the horizonal
schemes of time constitutes the meaning of being. This meaning turns out to
consist not only of Praesens: if ecstatic Future and Past can extend themselves
in such a way that they open up the absentia! that essentially belongs to being,
they shed a different light on being.
Heidegger's remark that the idea of being is not simple or unifold (einfach)
(196) refers to the primordial temporal horizon within which the being of
beings can be understood and explicated in a variable manner. The primordial
temporal meaning of being, which constantly threatens to confine itself to mere
presence, grounds distinctions such as those between essence and existence or
a priori and a posteriori. Hence, the different meanings of being thematized
by Aristotle can only arise from within a projective preconception in which
Present already decisively dominates the temporal horizon.
On the basis of what has been said up to now about temporality, I will
now attempt to elucidate how all Heidegger's analyses are guided by a mode of
temporality in which Present does not gain dominance over the other temporal
ecstases.

The Temporal Threefoldness of Heidegger's Method

The relation between the different moments of the being of Dasein and the
formal concepts which bring that being to light must now be further specified.
In order to thematize the being of Dasein, formal indications are required.
To this end, Heidegger takes a concept from everyday experience and deprives
it of its ontic content in such a way that only a formal structure remains. This
formal structure is then no longer only taken as the condition of possibility of
the everyday phenomenon from which it was derived, but rather serves as the
starting point for revealing the different possible modifications of that essential
structure. After this step has been taken, the analysis relates exclusively to the
being of beings.
The concepts are thus made suitable for ontological interpretation by a for­
malization of the ontic meaning and a deformalization of the obtained formal
meaning at the ontological level. Within this deformalization Heidegger always
(though not always explicitly) distinguishes an indifferent-inauthentic and an
authentic modification, which indicate the essential possibilities of Dasein.
A distinction must therefore be made between the ontic or "common" phe­
nomenon from which the analysis starts out and the inauthentic modification
of a formal structure that belongs to the being of Dasein. Thus, for example,
there is a difference between the usual meaning of the concept "guilt" and
 The Temporality of Thinking 37

the turning away from the always already being-guilty, which is an essential
moment of the being of Dasein. 6
Once a formal-indicative concept has been obtained, the being ofbeings can
be further delimited. Such a concept refers to a primordial or formal structure
in such a way that the inauthentic and the authentic modification of that
structure can also be brought forth. The entire concept of a phenomenon thus
comprises ( 1) the formal or primordial structure, (2) its indifferent-inauthentic
modification (the "initially and mostly"), and (3) its authentic modification
(the "possibly"). The being of beings, that is to say, the "essential," is nothing
but the possible modifications in which that formal structure deformalizes
itself. Although the order in which Heidegger thematizes the different moments
can vary, this threefold structure gives the core of all his analyses.
We still have to answer the question as to how Heidegger understands the dif­
ference between this methodical threefoldness and the threefold that grounds
the traditional concept of development. We have seen how Heidegger tries to
understand the facticity of human life by means of a formal structure that
grounds this facticity. Once this structure has been "seen;' its most authentic
modification can also be delimited. This is a possibility that belongs to factic­
ity only as possibility, but as such nevertheless constitutes one of its essential
directions. What essentially belongs to facticity is thus understood by conjoin­
ing it with a preceding condition of possibility and an authentic modification
thereof.
Because Heidegger attempts to show how the indifferent-inauthentic mod­
ification of what Dasein essentially and possibly is always threatens to become
the only tendency that determines facticity, both the formal structure and its
authentic modification must lie beyond the realm of presence: what "precedes"
is always already past and the "future" is only given as a possibility to come.
The only, but decisive difference between Heidegger's methodical principle
and, for example, that of Hegel, consists in the fact that Heidegger tries to
reveal the formal structure and its authentic modification as that which retreats
from the domain dominated by presence. From the metaphysical perspective,
by contrast, the preceding origin (arche, ground, essence, idea) will always
appear as that which is most present and real, and thus-sooner or later-also
guarantees its own adequate actualization.
While the authentic mode of care pertains to the way in which factically
existing Dasein bends itself back to the facticity of its own being, philosophy
should bend itself back to the origin of everything that is or appears. If this
preceding origin is understood as an origin which has never taken place and
is always already past, then this is made possible by ecstatic Past. Heidegger
tries to let his method be guided by Temporality in such a way that this Past
delimits a realm within which being appears as an origin that itself does not
38 Karin de Boer

belong to the realm of beings. 7 We could say that philosophy has always done
this, but has never been sufficiently able to distinguish the proper character of
the "preceding" from that which appears from within a horizon of Praesens.
Past is then overshadowed by Present.
Just as Past opens up the preceding formal structure that constitutes one of
the moments of being, ecstatic Future opens up the realm of the possible. T he
modification in which the preceding formal structure is possibly given its full
due equally does not belong to the realm of presence.
Ecstatic Present appears to play a twofold role. As we know, it opens up
the horizon of Praesens that allows beings to appear at all. Present sheds light
on beings as they initially and mostly appear. The phenomenologist is able
to understand this mode of appearance as the indifferent-inauthentic mode
of a structure that itself does not appear from within Present alone. From
Heidegger's perspective this temporal ecstasis remains embedded between the
other two ecstases. T hus, Past and Future may delimit a horizon that allows be­
ing or the essential to appear as a presence that is radically pervaded by absence.
Against this background the dynamic of human life may appear as itself.
It is difficult to give actual meaning to these abstract remarks. Temporality
( Temporalitiit), as the purest mode of temporality itself, can hardly be thema­
tized. This "time" may be said to primordially outstretch itself in a threefold
way, such that the being of beings can be understood as (1) formal, preced­
ing structure that (2) initially and mostly deformalizes itself by turning away
from itself, but (3) has the possibility of coming into its own. It is important
to emphasize, however, that this primordial threefold perspective has always
already-that is to say, as soon as Dasein occurs-begun to confine itself.
Hence, philosophy has never been able to do justice to the radical absence that
constitutes the core of being itself.
The temporal horizon of the preontological understanding of being modi­
fies itself in both everyday ontic involvement and metaphysics-that is, initially
and mostly-into Praesens. Heidegger tries to resist this predominance of
Present by going along with a primordial temporal projective preconception
of being. This three-fold projective preconception never actually occurred in
history, and even for Heidegger himself it is a possibility that in a certain sense
is impossible. Nonetheless, it is this possibility that guides his attempt to over­
come the metaphysical projective preconception of being.
Everything that Heidegger tries to say about temporality, both concerning
Dasein and concerning the deconstruction of metaphysics, in my view only
gains full significance when it becomes dear how his own analyses are guided
by a threefold Temporality. We know that this Temporality is a mode of the
temporality that is revealed in Being and Time as the fundamental structure
of the being of Dasein. In phenomenological ontology as a possible mode
of existence, this temporality ultimately enacts itself as a projective, opening
 The Temporality of Thinking 39

movement that allows the being of beings to occur in accordance with its
essential threefoldness. Only from within such a temporal horizon might justice
be done to the radical difference between beings and being.
Now that Heidegger's method has been interpreted against the background
of his concept of temporality, his suggestion that the character of the a priori
must be modified becomes more meaningful. Hints about the character of
this modification are to be found, for instance, at the end of GA 24 and in
GA 20. Here he remarks that the a priori has traditionally been understood
as that which was always already there (GA 20: 190). T he concept refers to
the "preceding," yet it has nothing to do with the time within which all events
succeed one another. According to Heidegger, however, the fact that the a priori
is not related to this time does not mean that it is above or beyond time. On
the contrary; when the temporal meaning of the a priori is taken seriously,
the concept pertains to what is "earlier" and thus makes beings possible with
respect to their "what" and "how" (GA 24: 461-62). Heidegger, then, takes
the a priori to no longer pertain to essence, but rather to the whole of the
formal structure and its different modifications. T hese constitute the being of,
for instance, Dasein, and are "earlier" than the concrete individual. 8 Heidegger
thus modifies the a priori in such a way that the "preceding" origin is no
longer understood as that which was always already there and persists amidst
all change, but rather as a condition of possibility, divided within and against
itself, that withdraws from the reach of presence. Insofar as every essential
structure can only be revealed from within Temporality, this primordial time
must therefore itself precede even every a priori.

Time is earlier than any possible "earlier" of whatever sort, because it is the basic
precondition for an "earlier" as such. And because time as the source of all en­
ablings (Ermoglichungen) is the earliest, all possibilities have, with regard to their
enabling function, as such the character of the "earlier," that is to say, they are a
priori. (GA 24: 463, cf. BT 419)

In 1925/1926, Heidegger calls the mode of ontology that attempts to enact

itself in accordance with this earliest Temporality "phenomenological chronol­
ogy" (GA 21: 199). Precisely because he traces back the apriorical structure of
Dasein to temporality, his philosophy differs from what is usually understood
by transcendental philosophy.

Deconstruction, Reduction, and Construction

What has been said up to now about the temporal character of Heidegger's
method was, in my view, to have been elaborated in Time and Being and the
third part of GA 24. In the introduction of GA 24 Heidegger gives a brief sketch
of the themes of this part.
40 Karin de Boer

First, when the question concerning the possibility of ontology is at stake,

it is necessary to thematize Dasein; this being constitutes the ontic (and not
the only or final) condition of possibility of ontology. 9 The outcome of the
analytic of Dasein would subsequently have constituted the starting point for
Heidegger's reflection on the method of ontology. In the second chapter this
would have taken shape as a "development of the methodical structures of
ontological-transcendental differentiation." 10 Much of what I have said up to
now about Heidegger's method would probably have been elaborated in this
chapter. Third, the three basic aspects of the phenomenological method­
reduction, construction, and deconstruction-would have been thematized
(GA 24: 28f). In the fourth chapter Heidegger would finally have been able to
delimit more concretely the concept of philosophy. Here he would also have
been able to come back to the confinement of the temporal perspective of
metaphysics, with which the first part of GA 24 begins (cf. 32).
Heidegger remarks in the introduction of GA 24 that deconstruction, reduc­
tion, and construction constitute a unity and must be grounded as a unity, but
he does not indicate the character of that ground (31 ). On the basis of what has
been said up to now, these three moments of the method can be understood
as grounded in primordial Temporality. This places Heidegger's method in a
rather broader perspective. From that perspective it will also be possible to
summarize the aspects of Heidegger's method discussed hitherto.
In the introduction of GA 24 Heidegger characterizes philosophy as the
mode of knowing that thematizes being (28, cf. 458). Since initially only beings
appear, the investigation must start out from beings, in order to then change
the perspective in such a way that the being of beings can be thematized. This
"leading back of the investigative vision" from beings to their being Heidegger
calls phenomenological reduction. Thus, he here explicitly adopts Husserl's
terminology, while at the same time distancing himself from Husserl's concep­
tion of the meaning of that reduction (28-29). I would like to add here that
the "reduction" of beings to their being is, like every mode of thematization,
made possible by ecstatic Present.
According to Heidegger, the movement that leads thinking away from be­
ings, which occurs in reduction, cannot be accomplished without a projective,
opening movement that leads thinking to being in a positive way. Being must
"each time be brought to view in a free, projective preconception." This is the
phenomenological construction. II The phenomenologist can both explicitly
assume and modify the temporal horizon that makes it possible to understand
being. This projecting or constructing movement can be conceived as a mode
of being-ahead-of-oneself. Thus, the phenomenological construction is itself
grounded in ecstatic Future, although again Heidegger does not yet say that in
the introduction of GA 24.
 The Temporality of Thinking 41

The projective preconception of being can only become a free projective

preconception when thinking critically reflects on the metaphysical presup­
positions that thwart the disclosure of the things themselves. Heidegger con­
stantly traces these presuppositions back to an inadequate concept of being.
This moment of the analysis is called deconstruction.12 This dismantling en­
tails a retrieval of the positive possibilities inhering in traditional philosophy.
We recognize here the moment of retrieving repetition; being the authentic
relation to Dasein's situated facticity, this moment is grounded in Past.
We can see how Heidegger as it were allows the thematization of being
to arise out of a deconstruction of the traditional temporal horizon on the
one hand and a constructing modification of this horizon on the other. This
deconstructing-constructing dynamic ensures that the turn from beings to
their being is enacted appropriately. In an authentic thematization of being,
reduction will thus remain conjoined with the moments ofdeconstruction and
construction, which are made possible by Past and Future. Heidegger clearly
understands Husserl's phenomenology as a mode of philosophy in which the
moment of reduction prevails to such an extent that the traditional under­
standing of being cannot be modified in an authentic way. In such a reduction
Present has gained the upper hand. Heidegger argues that this has been the
case throughout the entire history ofphilosophy.
If we now consider more closely the moment of reduction, we again en­
counter the temporal threefoldness within that reduction-namely, as the dis­
tinction between the formal structure ofa phenomenon on the one hand and its
different modifications on the other. I have shown how the threefold distinction
between the formal structure, its indifferent-inauthentic mode and its authen­
tic mode, is grounded in temporality as Temporality. If reduction enacts itself
in an appropriate way, these moments of being will not appear as constantly
present. In Being and Time and GA 24 Heidegger gives no direct indications
about this. As far as I know, he only thematizes the temporal meaning of this
methodical threefold in his interpretation ofHegel's PhenomenologyofSpirit. 13
This is not yet the end ofthe story, however. The formal structure that shows
forth in reduction as one of the moments of being, is itself structured in a
threefold way, at least insofar as the being of Dasein is concerned. Care as for­
mal structure has the moments ahead-of-itself, being-already-in, and being­
with. These moments are distinguished with regard to the temporality
(Zeitlichkeit) that constitutes the final a priori ofhuman existence. This three­
fold temporal structure of care can modify itself in an inauthentic and an
authentic way. A distinction therefore has to be made between the temporal
threefoldness ofcare as such and the way in which this structure enacts or defor­
malizes itself. This deformalization pertains to the threefoldness which consists
in (I) the formal structure itself, (2) its inauthentic modification, and (3) its
42 Karin de Boer

authentic modification. This threefoldness constitutes the core of Heidegger's

method and is grounded in time as Temporality.
I will try to summarize the above. As far as I can see, temporality plays
a central part in Heidegger's analysis in three respects. First, with regard to
the analytic of Dasein, this time constitutes the a priori of care as such. T his
structure modifies itself in human life in an inauthentic or an authentic way,
depending on the extent to which Present has become predominant.
Second, the being of Dasein can be thematized in an inauthentic or an
authentic way in philosophy, according to the modification of temporality that
grounds philosophy itself. In a phronetic thinking 14 this reduction will remain
embedded within the deconstructive and the constructive movement.
Third, it is temporality as Temporality that allows being to be understood and
thematized at all. An authentic modification ofTemporality permits the formal
structure of care and its different modifications to show forth respectively
as (1) the preceding origin that recedes from the realm of presence, (2) the
tendency that initially and mostly gains the upper hand, and ( 3) the tendency
in which that preceding structure is possibly given its due.
It is quite understandable that these different modes of temporality are
difficult to distinguish. After all, the Temporality that grounds every under­
standing of being is itself a specific modification of temporality. One could
say that care as fundamental structure of Dasein modifies itself in authentic
ontology in such a way that Past and Future are allowed to reach further into
the absential than in all other modifications of temporality. Philosophy is itself
a mode oflife; it is the mode in which life explicitly comprehends itself. Thus,
when Heidegger in turn tries to comprehend the character and the different
possibilities of that self-conception, thinking takes on a vertiginous reflexivity.
It does indeed seem hardly possible to explain these matters.
Yet the principle is simple. What Heidegger calls temporality is ultimately
nothing more than a kind of construction that makes it possible to gain insight
into the proper dynamic-divided in and against itself-oflife, thinking, and
the history of thinking. It is therefore meaningless to ask whether there is such
a thing as primordial time. The character of the temproality that concerns
Heidegger is in itself such that Present constantly threatens to break away from
its juncture with the other temporal ecstases. This temporality is not brought
about by human beings. It can, however, be modified in such a way that ecstatic
Present no longer overshadows the other ecstases. It is not up to the thinker
to let that happen. At most he can try not to thwart the primordial unfolding
of threefold temporality. This compliance does, however, demand an active
and constant resistance against Present, which inevitably prevails whenever
anything is spoken or written.
 The Temporality of Thinking 43

The detours that Heidegger takes in order to reveal this dynamic can be un­
derstood as indications of something which is seldom ifever directly thematized.
The detour in GA 24 is no more successful in reaching its aim than the analytic
ofDasein in Being and Time. At the end of GA 24 it seems that Heidegger wishes
to testify to this failure. He suggests here that his method has begun to thwart
the course of his thinking.

Precisely when a method is genuine and provides access to the matters at issue,
the progress and the increasing originality of the disclosure which is due to this
very method will themselves be the cause of its obsolescence. (GA 24: 467)

This remark might relate to the phenomenological request that any inter­
pretation should be in line with concrete experiences ofDasein. I have pointed
out that this perspective almost inevitably takes the movement of life to be one
of increasing actualization. Must Heidegger, in order to avoid that, also radi­
calize his own methodical principle? CanDasein still be the starting point for a
deconstruction of metaphysics? It may be that the whole idea of a method has
to be relinquished, because the distinction between method and subject matter
is based on the practice of the positive sciences. After all, the understanding of
being and being as it is understood can never occur without one another. They
even seem to be indistinguishable, as Heidegger suggests in 1930.

Is, then, the relation between being and the understanding of being so elemen­
tary that what is true of being is true of the understanding of being as well, that
being is identical with its disclosure? (GA 31: 124)

Notes

1. This chapter refers to the following volumes of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe (GA),

published in Frankfurt am Main by Vittorio Klostermann: GA 20, Prolegomena zur
Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, composed 1925 (published 1979), translated by Theodore
Kisiel as History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1985); GA 21, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, 1925-1926 (1976); GA 24, Die
Grundprobleme der Phiinomenologie, 1927 (1975), translated by Albert Hofstadter as
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982);
GA 31, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit: Einleitung in die Philosophie, 1930 (1982),
translated by Ted Sadler as The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philo­
sophy (London: Continuum, 2002). BT refers to Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh
(Albany: SUNY, 1996). All of these texts are cited by their German pagination, which
is also provided in the translations. Translations in this chapter from GA 24 are based
on the Hofstadter translation, but have been modified.
44 Karin de Boer

2. It is therefore misleading of A. Hofstadter to translate Vergegenstiindlichung

as "objectification" (see 398, 456 of the German pagination), when it is crucial for
Heidegger to distinguish between an objectifying and a nonobjectifying mode of ex­
plicit elucidation or thematization.
3. See F.Dastur, Heidegger et la question du temps (Paris: PUF, 1990): "Therefore,
temporal ontology is not a 'theory' in the traditional sense ... for the objectification of
being that it requires does not have the meaning of a making present" (108).
4. Thus, projective preconception "takes the direction toward thought, comprehen­
sion, soul, mind, spirit, subject, without understanding the necessity of a primordial
and preliminary ontological preparation of especially these areas-that is, the necessity
of being serious about this work" (GA 24: 459).
5. In Being and Time Heidegger indicates the character of this freedom as follows:
"Temporality (Zeitlichkeit) already holds itself ecstatically in the horizons of its ecstases
and, accomplishing itself, comes back to the beings encountered in the 'there' (das Da).
With the factical existence ofDasein, innerworldly beings are also already encountered.
That such beings are discovered along with the 'there' ofDasein's own existence is not
something that Dasein can choose. Only what it discovers and discloses at times, in
which direction, to what extent, and in what way, is a matter of its freedom, although
always within the limits of its thrownness" (BT 366, tr. m.). That certainly does not
apply to the involvement with innerworldly beings alone.
6. Heidegger formalizes the usual meaning of "guilt" in such a way that only the
determination "being-the-ground of a nothingness" remains (BT 283, tr. m.). This
formal indication can then be given another, second meaning and come to pertain to
the being of Dasein as such: being thrown and radically finite, Dasein essentially falls
short, and must take upon itself the responsibility for what it has not itself brought
forth. This existential being-guilty then has an inauthentic and an authentic mode,
insofar asDasein itself initially and mostly turns away from the "not" which pervades its
being, yet has the possibility of facing up to its essential finitude. The first interpretive
movement (the formalization) serves as preparation for gaining access to the being
of Dasein, that is to say, to an existential structure. The existential analysis proper
subsequently understands this structure in relation to its inauthentic and its authentic
modification.
7. In Being and Time Heidegger calls the formal, preceding structure an "a priori
perfect" (BT 85). In a later note he adds to this: "It is not something ontically past, but
rather what is always earlier, what we are referred back to in the question of beings as
such."
8. Since there is a further distinction within the apriorical structure of Dasein
between the formal "what" and its possible modifications, this formal structure is
again, in comparison with those modifications, the "earlier," and as such disclosed by
Past. Heidegger does not thematize this here. Cf. however: "The primordial structural
whole of care (Sorge) is an existential a priori which as such lies 'before: and therefore
always already in every factic 'relation' and 'position' of Dasein" (BT 193, tr. m.). In
the existential analysis these factic possibilities can be delimited on the basis of the
 The Temporality of Thinking 45

inauthentic and authentic modifications of that formal structure. See for the a priori
also BT 41, 65.
9. GA 24: 26; cf. BT 11-13 and: "The concept of philosophy, as well as that of the
nonphilosophical sciences, can be expounded only on the basis ofa properly understood
concept ofDasein" (GA 24: 455).
10. GA 24: 27. The outline of the course indicates that this elaboration corresponds
to the thematization of "the apriority of being and the possibility and structure of a
priori knowledge" (33).
11. GA 24: 29-30. See for the term "phenomenological construction": BT 375, 376.
Cf. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem ofMetaphysics, trans. Richard Taft, 5th ed. ( Bloom­
ington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 163. This construction is distinguished from
arbitrary constructions (BT 303).
12. "It is for this reason that all philosophical explanation, even when it is most
radical and beginning all over again, is pervaded by traditional concepts and thus by
traditional horizons and perspectives. ... It is for this reason that a deconstruction, that
is, a critical dismantling of the traditional concepts-which initially must necessarily
be employed-with regard to the sources from which they were drawn, necessarily
belongs to the conceptual interpretation of being and its structures" (GA 24: 31).
13. See Karin de Boer, Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger's Encounter with Hegel
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 273-77.
14. "Heidegger suggests ...that, in contrast to the prevailing theoretical philosophy,
it should be possible for thinking to accord with the phronesis that guides acting and yet,
unlike phronesis but like the prevailing philosophy, to explicitly focus on the archai of
being as such. This thinking, which withdraws itself from metaphysics, will be guided
from within its factic situation by an ultimate possibility that is not to be actualized,
but rather to be kept open. It will be concerned with principles and ends on which
causality and chronology have no hold, but which nevertheless, as 'already' and 'not
yet; underlie everything that happens within this domain": de Boer, Thinking in the
Light of Time, 22.
 3
The Constitution of Our Being
Graeme Nicholson

B EING AND TIME (SZ) 1 did not have the limited aim of a philosophical
anthropology-it was written as the introduction to a universal ontological
inquiry, a study of "the question of being," die Frage nach dem Sein. But the
study was to be opened up through a study of human existence, das Sein
des Da-seins. A study of our own particular way of being was to constitute a
"fundamental ontology": examining being initially in our own case, grasping
it from the inside, so to speak, we would gain an insight into being itself, an
insight that would then permit a broadening of scope, a subsequent treatment
of being quite universally. Ontology begins at home.
There were plenty of precedents for the route Heidegger established for his
inquiry, and he himself mentions a number of them. On page 12 he mentions
Aristotle's De Anima, a study of the soul that had great impact upon general
ontology, with roots as far back as Parmenides and with influence extending
to Thomas Aquinas and beyond. Another example is the Aristotelian Rhetoric
treated in Sections 29 and 30. As Heidegger says, "the ontic-ontological priority
ofDa-sein was already seen early on" (p. 12 ). But the greatest prototype for such
a self-broadening inquiry, taking its start from the human being, is one that
Heidegger never mentions himself, the combined thought ofSocrates and Plato.
It is clear from the Apology and the Phaedo that Socrates had turned away from
inquiries into nature such as those of Empedocles and Anaxagoras, turning
his attention to himself and his fellow citizens. 2 As Cicero said, "Socrates was
the first to call philosophy down from the sky and establish her in the towns
and introduce her into homes and force her to investigate life, ethics, good and
evil." 3 It was then from this human self-examination, Socrates' "care for the
soul;' that Plato proceeded toward a universal philosophy, and what marked his

47
48 Graeme Nicholson

philosophy off from that of the pre-Socratics was just that it got this particular
start. So I think we can invoke Socrates and Plato together as the prototype for
a route that begins by examining das Sein des Da-seins and then proceeds to a
general ontological interrogation-in Plato's case, that became the theory of
ideas; in Heidegger's case it was the question of being as introduced through the
ontology of Da-sein. And the precedents in the modern period of philosophy
are even more obvious and more numerous, from Descartes on, whose "First
Philosophy" started with the cogito. What is of course essential for such a
pathway is that the initial turn toward the human being, toward Da-sein, be
made in the right way.
It seems that the pathway followed by Socrates, Plato and Heidegger is exactly
the opposite from that which is followed in today's philosophy of mind. Today's
philosophy of mind (or some of it, anyway) seems to just apply the sciences
of nature and the sciences of life to our mental life, bringing in data from
physiology, psychology and other sciences.4 Such philosophers appear to think
that the human mind will only yield up its secrets to one who has made this
long detour through so many sciences, accumulating all their immense detail.
Without much exaggeration, we could say that this modern philosophy of
mind is the heir of pre-Socratic philosophy, Democritus and Empedocles, for
instance, who undertook to study the causes of all the events in the cosmos,
and then determined the specific nature and function of the human soul as a
special case. But, as I have said, Socrates turned away from that program so as
to "know himself;' and Plato took his start from Socrates. Now let us see how
Heidegger begins.
Section 2 lays out the agenda of SZ (p. 7): it is to be "the explication of a
being (Da-sein) with regard to its being." That the topic of the book is das Sein
des Da-seins is reiterated in the introductory chapters (pp. 13, 14, 17, 38, 41
and 42), and at the beginning of almost every later chapter (pp. 53, 114, 130,
180-81, 231, 236, 267, 301, 334, 372, 404.) The present paper will not come
close to exhausting the many subtle nuances of the term "Da-sein:' Here at the
start, I shall just mention one point: that the term has a double value. There are
passages in which the term coincides so closely with the term Mensch, "human
being:' that the two words can alternate in Heidegger's prose {pp. 11, 14 and
57). This is the usage that Heidegger is assuming when he writes that Da-sein
is "the entity that we ourselves are" (p. 7). On the other hand, Da-sein is not
a normal predicate term or a name for our human species. It is never marked
as a plural: a common mistake in English-language Heidegger-commentary is
the impossible expression "several Da-seins:' Heidegger tells us that "the term
Da-sein [is] a pure expression of being" (p. 12). The second component of
the word is not a normal German noun but a gerund, the nominalized form
of the infinitive sein (= "to be"). Even when the word is used by Heidegger
 The Constitution of Our Being 49

"ontically," then, to designate a being, Seiendes, the one we ourselves are, it has
an ontological value as well. Thus it is impossible to substitute the term Mensch
for it in most passages of SZ. For a thorough treatment, which offers by far
the best orientation to the problems raised by this term, one should consult
the recent book by Raffoul. 5 He refutes both the "humanistic" reading of the
text, that would simply identify Da-sein as a human being, and the more recent
exaggerated anti-humanistic reading, which alleged that Da-sein had simply
nothing to do with the self, the subject or the human being.
Instead of the topic of Da-sein, it is a closely related topic that I shall be
discussing here, the being of Da-sein. Of course, I'll need to use the term
"Da-sein" when I am quoting Heidegger or referring to his text, but when I am
writing on my own behalf instead, I'll use personal pronouns such as "I;' "you"
and "we," not nouns like Mensch or Da-sein. I feel justified in my preference
by the way in which Heidegger himself introduced the term "Da-sein" for the
very first time in the book in Section 2; "The entity [Seiendes] that each one
of us is and that has among its possibilities the raising of the question of being
we shall fix terminologically as Da-sein" (p. 7). Heidegger's theme in the book,
strictly stated, is not Da-sein but the being of Da-sein, i.e., our being. 6 Given
this thematic focus, it is inevitable that a certain circularity enters into the
argument, modifying its foundational character. The "fundamental ontology"
of Da-sein must already incorporate part of the study of being for which it was
to serve as a preparation. But according to Heidegger, that is a benign and a
welcome circularity. 7
SZ lays before us the being of Da-sein through several distinct movements
of thought, and here I shall retrace three of them. We shall see that existence is
the "essence" ofDa-sein, that being-in-the-world is the constitution ofDa-sein,
and that care is the being of Da-sein. In following each of the movements, my
intent is not at all to separate them from one another, but rather to bring to the
fore the diversity and differentiation that belongs to our being, demonstrating
in the case of our own being why philosophy has always returned to the theme
of the manifoldness of being. After a study of each of the three, we shall see the
way in which they are intertwined with one another to constitute a tapestry
that is inwardly complex. And indeed, each one of the three elements is already
complex in itself. Here let me point in a preliminary way to the complexity of
the first of these themes, existence.
In the course of an important chapter on SZ,8 Poggeler calls attention to a
double meaning of the term "existence:' narrow and wide. "Heidegger charac­
terizes existence in the wider sense as the totality of factical existence" (Path,
p. 41; Denkweg, p. 56). In many passages of the book, accordingly, Heidegger
will speak of existential structures, aspects of our being that he interprets in the
light of existence. He employs the term "existentials" or "existentialia" for these
50 Graeme Nicholson

structures: Existenzialien, differentiated from categories, which are the deter­

minations of the being of whatever is not Da-sein ( SZ, pp. 44-45). For example,
we see from the titles of Sections 49, 50, 52 and 53, that they are treating "exis­
tential" phenomena, and that their analyses and concepts are "existential"-the
existential analysis of conscience, the existential concept of science, and so on.
But Poggeler points out that there is also a narrower sense of "existence;' or
rather a narrower scope of the term: "[Da-sein] is characterized equiprimor­
dially by 'existentiality' as well as facticity. It is existence in the narrower sense
of the word, the self-projecting potentiality-for-being" (ibid.). Here existence
is limited by facticity, polarized against it, whereas, according to the broader
sense of existence, facticity would be one more existential structure. Heidegger
himself, in fact, called attention to this double scope of the term "existence." 9
One of the points I'll want to make, however, is that this duality of existence,
narrow and broad, is no mere equivocation on a word. This will concern us in
the next two sections of the paper.
My aim overall will be to show the great success of Heidegger in treating
the constitution of our being. Thanks to the publication of some of his lec­
ture courses from the early 1920s, and thanks to the appearance of Kisiel's
genetic study, 10 we can now study the successive drafts in which Heidegger
sought to find "words to articulate the peculiarly inchoate and purportedly
'ineffable' immediacy of the human situation, Heidegger's lifelong topic."11
For his concerns during all those years were being adumbrated under different
names, "Life;' the "Primal Something;' "factical life" or "facticity." 1 2 It was
only in the final drafting of SZ that Heidegger resolved his terminology in
designating the subject of his study as existence. 13 This enabled him now to
express the theme of the being of Da-sein in relation to the question of being as
such.
In the continuing cycle of the assimilation of, and resistance to, Heidegger's
philosophy, the last ten or fifteen years have brought a new and powerful resis­
tance to the fore. Now we see the frank rejection of the entire topic of being.
Caputo has come to regard "Being" as a mere myth; 14 from the theological
side, Marion claims that "Being" is an idol from which Christians should free
themselves; 15 for both critics, Being (N. B. spelled by both of them with a
capital "B") is a remote, antihuman metaphysical postulate. It is, then, encour­
aging that at the same time we find books such as that by Joanna Hodge, 16
which grasps the human and ethical character of Heidegger's thinking of being
(which, of course, she always spells with a small "b").
Through Heidegger's reflections, we can come to understand that we are
not just a self-possessed ego with its career to sustain. We acquire access to
something deeper, and a language for expressing it-the promptings of our
pre-personality, not just our self, but our being.
 The Constitution of Our Being 51

I. Existence: The "Essence" ofDa-sein

Sections 4 and 9 of SZ lay down the determination of the being of Da-sein as

existence, a point that remains in force throughout the whole of the work that
follows. Sections 1 to 3 offer many preliminary remarks on being, but Section 4
is concerned to show existence as the constitution of our being (p. 13): it is that
form of being to which we, as Da-sein, always stand in relation (p. 12); we
always understand ourselves in terms of our existence (p. 12); a concern about
existence is woven into our existence itself (p. 12). Much of my exposition will
focus on the double point, (a) that we have a concern about our existence,
(b) one that is already woven into our existence. "We come to terms with the
question of existence only through existence itself" (p. 12). Heidegger calls a
deeply motivated concern ofthis sort, and the kind ofunderstanding it includes,
existenziell, which we can translate in today's English as an existential concern
and an existential understanding. What then is meant by this term "existence"?
The central pointer that is offered in Section 4 is a link with possibility. "Da-sein
always understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms of its possibility to
be itself or not to be itself" (p. 12). That will be at the heart of the following
exposition, but first we must take a look at Section 9.
In Section 9 we read "The 'essence' of Da-sein lies in its existence" (p. 42).
Thus we can expect that whatever is most characteristic of Da-sein will be
marked by existence, e.g., experiences such as death, conscience and language.
On the other hand, the quotation marks over the term "essence" are enough to
warn us that Heidegger is not employing this term in a traditional scholastic
sense or in any standard modern sense. And if we remember that in authors like
Aquinas there was a definite polar relationship between essentia and existentia,
that means-given the quotation marks-that Heidegger is not speaking of
either existence or essence in a neo-scholastic way. He is also taking his distance
from other modern uses of "essence;' thus by-passing any statements as to the
"whatness" or quiddity of Da-sein, as he stresses on this page (p. 42): "the
term Da-sein which we use to designate this being does not express its 'what'
as in the case of 'table; 'house; 'tree:" Heidegger is certainly stretching the
word "essence" here in a manner that would be worth pursuing, but now it is
a different question that I shall pursue: given that existence is in some sense or
other the essence of Da-sein, how are we to understand existence?
Heidegger guides the reader by way ofa lexical orientation on page 42. He will
discuss the being of Da-sein under the heading of existence, he says, i.e., under
the heading of what he calls in German Existenz. But this title "does not and
cannot have the ontological meaning ofthe traditional expression of existentia."
With this Latin word, Heidegger intends an ontological notion that comes down
to us from the scholastic period and the early modern period of philosophy,
52 Graeme Nicholson

and it signifies "a kind of being [Sein] which is essentially inappropriate to

characterize the being [Seiendes] which has the character of Da-sein:' From
this point on in the text of SZ, the Latin word is almost entirely avoided.17
"We can avoid confusion by always using the interpretive expression objective
presence [ Vorhandenheit] for the term existentia, and by attributing existence
[Existenz] as a determination of being only to Da-sein:'
Although this point is fairly well-known to Heidegger's readers, I do not think
everyone has grasped all of its linguistic and logical consequences. Existenz
is the basic element in the ontology of Da-sein with no application to any
other subject. But what was called existentia in Scholasticism, and what was
called "existence" in the different languages of post-medieval philosophy, is
to be interpreted in the sense of Vorhandenheit, "objective presence," a notion
that has nothing in common with Existenz and that should not be applied to
Da-sein at all. To do so is to bring about an ontological distortion (SZ, p. 55).
In Heidegger's view, our modern ordinary language use is quite continuous
with traditional metaphysics, and the common usage of modern English and
German is continuous in this respect as well with the usage of scholastic and
post-scholastic philosophy. Our supposed "intuitive" ideas about existence,
and being in general, are by no means "natural" or "immediate" or "unhis­
torical:' They are actually the deposits of traditional ontology and traditional
logic, and it is for that reason that we still tend to think that "existence" means
being objectively present, vorhanden. But the usage of ordinary language is by
no means authoritative for philosophy, in Heidegger's view.
Moreover, Heidegger's critical examination of Vorhandenheitis not confined
to traditional metaphysics and logic, but applies as well to modern philosophy
and to modern logic too, with its quantificational calculus. For what is called
logic is in fact an offshoot of metaphysics, a point well expressed in the title
of Heidegger's 1928 lecture course The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. The
sense of the existential quantifier in modern logic is still determined by tradi­
tional logic and traditional metaphysics-"existence" is still our way ofasserting
that something or other, no matter what, just happens to be around or available
rather than not being around or not being available. That is Vorhandenheit.
So Heidegger has not taken his own term "existence" from ordinary language.
In its everyday use, the term "exist" is applied to subjects of great variety (and
this is also true of the German noun Existenz and verb existieren)-to animal
species if they are not extinct, and to letters and documents if they haven't been
destroyed. The existence ofheavenly bodies and tiny particles can be established
with certain methods, and we continue to debate the existence of God. In
Heidegger's view, our modern ordinary-language use is quite continuous with
traditional metaphysics. But, in his work, this is all subjected to an ontological
critique.
 The Constitution of Our Being 53

I began by calling attention to the link Heidegger is establishing between ex­

istence (our existence, that is) and possibility. Now is the time to follow that up.
In SZ, Sections 4 and 9 both underline the key status of possibility within
existence. "Da-sein always understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms
of its possibility to be itself or not to be itself" (Sec. 4, p. 12). "The characteris­
tics to be found in this being are thus not objectively present 'attributes' of an
objectively present being which has such and such an 'outward appearance: but
rather possible ways for it to be and only this" (Sec.9, p. 42). That is the reason
why the term "Da-sein" does not express a "What" as in the cases oftable, house
and tree-the term expresses only being. And now we see that this beingis in fact
possibility. The possibility in question resolves itselfinto one great alternative­
to be myself or not to be myself-which is expressed philosophically as the
alternative between authenticity and inauthenticity (p. 43). ''And because
Da-sein is always essentially its possibility, it can 'choose' itself in its being,
it can win itself, it can lose itself. .. " (p. 42). ''As a being, Da-sein always de­
fines itself in terms of a possibility which it is and somehow understands in
its being. That is the formal meaning of the constitution of the existence of
Da-sein" (p. 43).
While authenticity is closely intertwined with existence in SZ, it is by no
means the same thing, and neither is what Heidegger calls the "mineness" of
Da-sein's being, its Jemeinigkeit. This mineness-that being is in every case
my own-is the basis of the possibility for our being ourselves or not being
ourselves, but it is not the same thing as existence. Heidegger opens Section 9 by
identifying two aspects ofour being. ( 1) The "essence" ofDa-sein is its existence.
(2) This being is in each case my own. The separation of these two points is
articulated again in the first paragraph on p. 43, and again at the opening of
Section 12. Heidegger's differentiation between Existenz, on the one hand, and
Jemeinigkeit on the other, proved to be of great importance historically. The
current of Existenzphilosophiewas running strongly in the 1920s in Germany,
fed by the reception of Kierkegaard and the influence of Jaspers. Undoubtedly
Heidegger was seeking to connect SZ to that current (a point made very clear in
Kisiel's book), but we have to see that Heidegger's account ofthe constitution of
Da-sein's being differs from theirs over just this point. The category of existence
in Kierkegaard and Jaspers was tightly linked to the category of individuality,
and defined over against the universal. 18 Their existentialism was turning the
tables against a philosophy of "the system," primarily Hegel's, but in principle
against all metaphysics that saw the individual as the mere instance of a type,
an essence, a universal. Asserting that it is only the individual that exists, they
imbued this existing individual with a passion and an inwardness that were
certainly novel in comparison to traditional metaphysics. While Heidegger
does recognize the individuality of Da-sein in his doctrine that being is in
54 Graeme Nicholson

every case my own, his idea of existence does not derive its content from this
Jemeinigkeit. Therefore, it is not determined through opposition to the universal
or the system. Hence, a discussion of mineness, singleness and individuality
can be left to one side in the exposition of existence. The factor of existence
is neither the authenticity that I may choose, nor the mineness of being that
makes possible the alternative of authenticity and inauthenticity, being myself
or not being myself. Rather, it is the very circumstance of having the alternative,
having the possibility.
The doctrine of existential possibility must be understood in connection
with Heidegger's treatment of understanding in SZ, Section 31. Understand­
ing is that disclosure whereby we first become open to a possibility. When we
understand a possibility, in Heidegger's view, we are projedingit. Existentially,
we do not merely entertain a possibility-when we disclose it by way of un­
derstanding, we are going for it. We are by no means open to everything, for
"Da-sein has already got itself into definite possibilities" (p. 144), which, of
course also means: got itself excluded from other ones. The possibilities to
which we are open (that we project) are possible ways for us to be. This is
the Seinkonnen that Heidegger speaks of throughout Section 31: the published
translations render this term "potentiality for being," but I prefer a simpler
rendering which I think is ontologically less prejudicial: the ability to be. If you
are setting out to become a forester, you are projecting this as your possibility,
and this is your ability to be a forester, your Forsterseinkonnen. The ability to
be is no "free-floating" possibility that hovers before you; existential possibility
is inseparable from the projection of it, from the anticipation of it. It is the
anticipation. The ability to be, possibility with its feet on the ground, is the
union of an anticipated possibility with the very anticipation.
Sections 4 and 9 identified existence as the very alternative or the very pos­
sibility of being yourself or not being yourself. That is the possibility that is
most of all your own (eigenstes, "ownmost;' "most of all your own"). Given the
analysis in the preceding paragraph, then, we can say that this ability to be is
the being of Da-sein. "Da-sein is always its possibility. It does not 'have' that
possibility only as a mere attribute of something objectively present" (p. 12).
Therefore, through existing we are always concerned about our own ability to
be, even as we continue perpetually to project it. To that extent, our ability to be
(existence) is divided off from us, separated from our current Now. What can I
be? What can I learn? What might I achieve? How shall I die? With whom shall
I live? To what cause shall I commit myself? What can I know? What must I do?
What may I hope? These are the urgent matters disclosed to us all in the kind of
understanding that Heidegger calls existenziell-matters of our existence, das
Sein des Da-seins. They are developed at length in the two opening chapters of
the Second Division of SZ, on our being-toward-death and conscience.
 The Constitution of Our Being 55

But our projected ability to be is not absolutely divided off from our current
being. Even my current being is the ability to be. This connection between
that which is projected and that which projects will be Heidegger's subject in
Chapters 3 to 6 in the Second Division of the book, where he treats existential
temporality. Our present being is the ekstatic opening-out-to our futural ability
to be that now concerns us. And so it too is an ability to be. That is what
Heidegger means in saying that the "essence" of Da-sein lies in its existence.
The movement toward a future ability to be constitutes our current ability to be.
This can introduce us to the narrower scope of existence, which is presented
normatively in Section 41. Heidegger's analysis of existence in the narrow sense
ties it to the projective understanding of possibility. It means that "Da-sein is
always already ahead of itself [ ihm selbst vorweg] in its being. Da-sein is always
already 'beyond itself' [ 'uber sich hinaus'], not as a way of behaving toward
beings which it is not, but as being toward the ability to be [ Seinkonnen] which
it itself is" (pp. 191-192). We surpass ourselves, and in that way we are always
becoming unhooked from that which we are at present.
Here I would like to show one implication that must arise from Heideg­
ger's analysis, though the text does not contain it: our existence must bring
with it our self-interpretation. In Section 32, "Understanding and Interpre­
tation:' Verstehen und Auslegung, Heidegger stresses that understanding must
express itself in interpretation: Verstehen projects a "fore-structure" by which
a possibility arises for some phenomenon, while Auslegung completes the un­
derstanding by grasping this phenomenon as something. The "as-structure" of
interpretation is the fulfillment of the "fore-structure" of understanding. Yet
Heidegger himself acknowledges at the end of the first paragraph that his study
of interpretation in Section 32 is confined to cases of "inauthentic" under­
standing, with a focus on entities present in the world, especially as interpreted
through perception, which grasps this implement as a hammer. But Verste­
hen in its primordial form is Da-sein's self-understanding-no doubt on that
score in Section 31. Since Heidegger has linked our existence so tightly to the
projective, anticipatory character of Verstehen, he must recognize (and I am
sure did recognize) that existence itself incorporates the "as-structure" of in­
terpretation. To exist means to exist as a woman or as a man, as a clown or
as a sage, as an American or as an Italian, as a believer or as an unbeliever.
Self-interpretation helps to constitute existence, our human way of being. We
are impelled to express ourselves outwardly, to appear in the open domain
of public interpretations. And this reveals the inadequacy of an ontology of
life for the interpretation of ourselves, Da-sein. If we are alive, that signifies
that our organs and tissues are functional rather than dysfunctional. Life is a
category in which immanence and self-relation are predominant-it signifies
a certain reference of the whole organism to the part and of the part to the
56 Graeme Nicholson

whole. But when we exist, we are not merely alive but, in addition, thrust out
upon a stage of action where every one of our possible deeds has significance.
It is just as mistaken to comprehend ourselves under the category of Life as
under that of Vorhandenheit. I am not relying on ordinary language in making
these distinctions, for there is a common locution these days in which one
says of a person whose life is utterly lacking in prospects or delights, "She isn't
really livin�she's just existing." This locution retains the everyday sense of
existence as mere Vorhandenheit, not the sense of Heidegger's ontology, and it
expresses our true and fulfilled ontological mode as "living." Heidegger would
have expressed the point by reversing the two words.
One consequence of noting the need for self-interpretation is that we gain
insight into the unity of being. If it is true that self-interpretation is a necessary
aspect of human existence, if it is true that to exist means to exist as a woman, or
a man, or a clown, etc., then we are authorized to make an appropriate exegesis
of the word "is" when it serves as a copula, i.e., when it is used to predicate.
Thus if I say "Frances is a woman" or "Giorgio is an Italian;' I must take the
trouble to understand these words in accord with the ontology of existence. To
be a woman or an Italian is, strictly, to exist as a woman or as an Italian. We can
reach some unity in the interpretation of being when we understand in what
way being in the sense of existence sustains the predicating gerunds such as
"being a woman" or "being an Italian:' 19 Philosophical interpretation warns us
against assuming that the predicating "is" means the same thing no matter what
the subject is, that Frances is a woman in the same way that my desk is wooden.
At this point we can confront the question of Heidegger's use of this word,
"existence." Heidegger wanted to express a special ontological constitution
of Da-sein, by virtue of which Da-sein always projects a possibility, and
particularly the two-fold possibility of being authentic or inauthentic. Self­
projection-to be "in advance of itself "-is central to Da-sein's being. But why
did Heidegger want to give the name of "existence" to this? What is there in
this word that makes it the suitable expression for this constitution of being?
The word "exist" stems from the Latin existo or exsisto, a complex verb formed
from the prefix ex, "out;' and sisto, "stand, be placed." Sisto itself arose from
the verb sto, "stand, be placed;' by the reduplication system found in certain
Greek and Latin verbs. Thus, the original sense of the verb was "stand out,
stand forth;' a sense which philologists have called the local sense of the word.
This local sense is apparent not through fanciful etymologizing, but through a
reading of classical Latin texts. In Cicero and other texts from that period, exsisto
means "come forth;' "come into view;' "rise from the dead;' "emerge;' "come
forward:'20 And the verb exsto, which in the perfect tense is not different from
exsisto, could also mean "protrude, project, stand out." Later evidence makes it
apparent that the sense "be, exist" arose after these senses. The original sense,
 The Constitution of Our Being 57

"stand out, protrude" developed through "emerge, become visible" to "exist:'

"be:' at the end of the process. Heidegger himself refers to this early sense of
the Latin word in lectures of 1927. "In this projection, the Da-sein has already
stepped out beyond itself, ex-sistere, it is in a world. Consequently it is never
anything like a subjective inner sphere." 21 My reading of Heidegger, then, is
that he is resisting the ordinary-language sense of "existence" and the logical
sense of "existence" because of their roots in metaphysical Vorhandenheit, a
structure which is not applicable to us. Likewise, he resists Kierkegaard's and
Jaspers's bond of existence to the category of individuality for philosophical
reasons. He does not think that self-projection, in the existential sense of self­
displacement into the possible, can be expounded by way of the category of
singularity or individuality. Singular entities, as such, need not be involved in
self-projection. And, the other way around, there is no need to insist on our
singularity in connection with our self-projection. Self-projection can occur in
the form of being-with, Mitsein. Rather than follow Kierkegaard and Jaspers,
then, Heidegger is reviving the ancient sense of the word "exist."

II. Care: The Being of Da-sein

But the ontology ofDa-sein is not exhausted by the study of existence. Heidegger
opens Section 39 by raising the question of the whole of our being, indicating
clearly that existence does not fulfill that role. Rather, he says, we can grasp that
whole byway of the phenomenon of care (die Sorge). I shall not expound care
at the same length as existence-instead, I offer a few comments in point form.

(i) The term "care:' like others in the book, has a double value: subjectively,
care is an orientation to ourselves, and to everything that is, whereby
we are connected to them: it is a variant of intentionality. But, onto­
logically, care has a triadic constitution. "The fundamental ontological
characteristics of this being are existentiality, facticity and falling prey''
(p. 191), and here Heidegger claims that this triad constitutes the being
of Da-sein. This claim is really the pivot of the whole book, because
this triadwill be reinterpreted in Sections 65 and following as the sub­
structure of our temporality, the prototype for the existential future,
the existential past, and the existential present.
(ii) It is in connection with care that existence appears in its narrow
scope. Existence, or existentiality, 22 is limited here mainly through be­
ing brought into a polarizationwith facticity. In Section 41, Heidegger
reviews his treatment of understanding-as-projection and his account
of existence-as-possibility. Projective understanding is that disclosure
58 Graeme Nicholson

whereby we are open to possibility. Then he reviews a second mode

of disclosure, attunement (Befindlichkeit), that had been presented in
Section 29. Attunement is our already being in a world, that disclosure
whereby we are open to what we already are, and indeed to what all
things are. Ontologically interpreted, it is the structure of already being
something, which stands as it were over against the possibility of our
being, and it is what Heidegger calls our facticity. The third element in
our being is the "falling-prey:' Verfallen, whereby we are drawn to beings
rather than to being, and whereby we are drawn away from authentic­
ity. lt too is expressed in our ways of disclosing that which is. A fuller
account of this third structure would take us too far afield, however, so
I shall bracket it, just as I bracketed Jemeinigkeit earlier on. Existence is
our being-ahead-of-self. In the structure of care, it is unified especially
with our already-being-in-a-world, an interpenetration which makes it
certain that, in my projection of possibility, there are some possibilities
that are open to me while others are not. "Existing is always factual.
Existentiality is essentially determined by facticity" (p. 192).
(iii) This facticity of Da-sein is the very "That-ness" of its being, something
which has often been intended by commonplace, non-Heideggerian
expressions of "existence"-to be a fact, to be a datum, to occur. But
Heidegger's own philosophy has displaced existence into the futural
Sich-vorweg-sein. We are leaning forward. In our factical existence, ex­
istence itself(our ability to be) is withdrawn from presence, and to that
degree alien. The lectures of the early 1920s had not yet established this
polarity between existence and facticity. Rather, they tended to use the
term "facticity" for the whole problematic of life and being, as in the
series entitled "Hermeneutics of Facticity:'23 SZ took a key step for­
ward by differentiating the two and establishing a definite relationship
between them.
(iv) Facticity should not be confused with Vorhandenheit. "[W]e may not
attribute to Da-sein its own kind of 'objective presence: ... [T]he fac­
tuality of the fact of one's own Da-sein is ontologically totally different
from the factual occurrence of a kind of stone. The factuality of the fact
Da-sein, as the way in which every Da-sein actually is, we call its fac­
ticity'' (pp.55-56). Nevertheless, there is some ontological coincidence
between facticity and Vorhandenheit: to be a given, a datum, a fact, the
sheer "Thatness" of being. Not only does this express something we
commonly think we intuit under the term "exist"-some readings of
Heidegger have given undue prominence to it, i.e., to facticity, and to its
related structure, thrownness. Perhaps we are seeing here an influence
from Sartre, who can at times identify existence with facticity.
 The Constitution of Our Being 59

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means

that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only
afterwards defines himself. If man as the existentialist conceives him is
indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be
something, and he himself will have made what he will be. 24
What is specific to Heidegger's ontologyofDa-sein, on the other hand,
is just that existence is differentiated from facticity. Moreover, it is not
subordinated to it in the structure of being. Indeed, existence has a cer­
tain primacyover it, and that is what justifies using the term "existence"
in the broad sense to signify our being as a whole. The substantive point
is that in our case there is never a facticitywithout a possibility, without
self-projection, i.e., without existence in the narrow sense. Human be­
ings do not just occur or turn up. Since our "essence" is to exist ( ex-sist),
we always undertake anew our having to be.
( v) Let us pause over the point that is expressed in the very title of
Chapter 6 of the First Division, that "care is the being of Da-sein:' We
certainlyhave to ask how that fits with the earlier claim that existence
is the "essence" of Da-sein. I suspect that Heidegger's readers have not
paused sufficiently over the very phrase "the being of Da-sein;' which
is a far-from-normal phrase, and hard to interpret. In fact, this is
Heidegger's most notable innovation with the word "being": to employ
it in these genitive phrases, the being of Da-sein (das Sein desDa-seins),
the being of beings, our being. They are hard to understand because
we cannot take the phrases in any customary way. We cannot interpret
the being of Da-sein as the essence of Da-sein, for instance, because
that phrase was already consigned to quotation marks: Da-sein has no
"Whatness" or quiddity. And we have been told that we cannot construe
it as the existence of Da-sein in the common sense of existentia or
Vorhandenheit.
Where existence is the "essence" of Da-sein, we have seen that that means
that we are concerned about our futural ability to be-it matters to us, and
we anticipate it. And the term "being" can at times signify this existence that
we care about. But what Heidegger is saying in Chapter 6 is that, in a more
complete and total sense, "being" signifies the very concern or care itself. In
this connection, though, the being ofDa-sein is not the object of an existenziell
understanding but an existenzial one ( see pp. 16 and 192); it is a structure that
remains undisclosed to Da-sein's own existenziell understanding. It is ontolog­
ical interpretation that asserts that the being of Da-sein is care, and this is an
ontological or philosophical application of the term "being:' In its everyday
life, Da-sein does not focus on its own constitutive care, but on its ability to be.
60 Graeme Nicholson

We could also express the present contrast through a reference to intention­

ality. Heidegger's variant of intentionality is distinct in two ways. First, it is not
any exterior objects of cognition or reference which constitute our primary
intentional objects; what comes first is our own existence, the ability to be,
about which we care primordially. Second, it is not in the first instance mind
or consciousness that is intentional (as in Husserl), nor in the first instance
phrases of language (as in Chisholm). Rather the very being ofDa-sein, as care,
is always intentionally opened up to that about which we care. Our mental and
linguistic intentionalities are just the consequence of the ontological structure.
If we are all imbued with the existenziell understanding of our own existence,
whereas it is only our existenzial ontology that interprets human being as care,
nevertheless the latter is certainly motivated by the former. The futural ability
to be about which we care is what first establishes care as the being ofDa-sein.
We can put this point in Socratic terms: it is the care for the soul that first
establishes care within the soul.

III. Being-in-the-World: The Constitution of Da-sein

Chapter II of Division One lays out what Heidegger calls the "fundamen­
tal constitution" ( Grundverfassung) of Da-sein, to be further investigated in
Chapters III to V. He identifies it as "being-in-the-world;' and he resolves it
into three elements: the world in its worldhood, the "Who" that is in the world,
and the very relation of being-in. We may think of this as the proper and tech­
nical sense of "constitution" in the tradition of phenomenology, though I have
been using the term in this paper in a broader sense, as Heidegger himself often
does throughout SZ (see pp. 12-13 for one example of many). Heidegger often
refers to this as Da-sein's Seinsverfassung, the constitution of its being, and so
for that reason too it is incumbent on us to examine how his point fits with
our two preceding studies. My account will be even more brief than II.
Being-in-the-world is introduced through an exegesis of the term "being;'
approached through an etymological analysis of bin as in ich bin (akin to our
word "be"). Bin, he says, is related to bei, so that in origin it means "I dwell,
I linger over;' an idea that he proceeds to fill out as dwelling in or with the
world. Thus sein should be read as the infinitive of bin in this sense. Heidegger
points out that all the elements of this constitution should be understood
existentially: thus "being-in" is not mere containment but an "existential" rela­
tionship (p. 54); the world is not just the collection of all things but an existential
structure (p. 64). So the constitution is certainly grasped in connection with the
Existenz that was introduced earlier. And yet there is a reciprocal relation be­
tween Da-sein's "essence" (Existenz) and its constitution (being-in-the-world);
 The Constitution of Our Being 61

Heidegger does not just assimilate this structure to existence, or subordinate

it to existence. Da-sein's existence "must be seen and understood a priori as
grounded upon that constitution of being which we call being-in-the-world"
(p. 53). One ontological question, then, is how existence is connected to being­
in-the-world. To put it formally, how is Da-sein's "essence" connected to its
"constitution"? Is it because we exist that we are in the world? Or is it because
we are in the world that we exist? Could both be true?

lV. Being and Its Variations

Now I propose to pull together these three elements in the constitution of our
being, to see how our "essence" (existence) comes together with our "constitu­
tion" (being-in-the-world) and our "being" (care). I'll do this by looking at one
short paragraph that comes very early in SZ, the second paragraph in Section 4.
Here Heidegger uses the word Sein, "being;' repeatedly. All three of our themes
are under discussion here, but without being named or differentiated. We shall
see all three of them as variations of being. In each locution where Heidegger
speaks of being, we shall see that one of them is intended. T hus the paragraph
as a whole offers an outline for the constitution of our being.
In introducing Section 4, Heidegger has been saying that the question of
being is of concern to us, and this will confirm "the ontic primacy of the question
of being" (such is the title of Section 4), which means here the import of this
question for the life we lead. The paragraph begins, "Da-sein is a being that
does not simply occur among other beings:' 25 Differentiating Da-sein from
other beings or entities, other things that are, Heidegger says that it does not
merely "occur among them" (nicht nur vorkommt). The negative of the word
vorkommen is a subtle foretaste of the way Da-sein is different, for it is not
merely present, vorhanden, among other things. Now we can specify the contrast
further in the light of the later pages we have already reviewed. While other
entities occur within the world, Da-sein does not "occur" like them because
its constitution is being-in-the-world in Heidegger's emphatic sense, dwelling,
lingering over. This first sentence, then, has set aside any Vorhandenheit of Da­
sein, thus making room for Existenz. Implicitly, it has invoked the constitution
of Da-sein, being-in-the-world. This contrast with other entities does not at
all hinder Da-sein's being something that is, Seiendes; rather, it brings to the
fore the point that Da-sein is a different kind of entity, the point clarified in
the next sentence.

Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its being, this very being is
of concern to it. 26
62 Graeme Nicholson

To be ontically distinguished is to be a different kind of being, and we see that

the distinction lies in the circumstance that its being concerns it, ihm geht es
um dieses Sein. We are by no means indifferent to our being, it matters to us. In
the exposition, I'll refer to the circumstance that our being matters to us as our
non-indifference to our being. Now we must take note of another occurrence
of the word "being" in this sentence. Heidegger spoke of the ontic distinction
of Da-sein, and yet the true import of this distinction is communicated only
subtly in the three words of the present sentence that I shall now italicize:
" ...ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its being, this very being is of
concern to it:' Heidegger has said with this phrase that the concern we have
for our being arises by virtue of our being. What differentiates us, therefore,
is not a characteristic or property that attaches to our species like the relative
hairlessness of our bodies, something ontic.It is an ontological distinction, one
that pertains to our way of being. To be concerned about our being is fated
and ordained for anyone whose being is of our kind.We shall see in a moment
that the same will hold for our relationship to being and our understanding of
being-they are not implemented merely by ourselves, but by our very being.
So while other things just occur, vorkommen, by virtue of their way of being,
ours by contrast thrusts us into a concern with this being.
Now in this contrast, it cannot be our existence alone which is salient. Our
existence is that character of our being whereby we are ahead of ourselves, out
in advance of ourselves. This cannot be the ground for any fate or ordination.
T he salient factor can only be our facticity and our falling-prey, in their unity
with our existence. It is this triad which brings it about that our being concerns
us, the triad that constitutes the structure of care.
But in this "concern" that we have about our being, what is it, precisely,
that we are concerned about? Examining the sentence closely, we discover here
a demonstrative "this;' dieses Sein, which the translation rendered "this very
being." So at first glance, the antecedent of dieses would be that being, Sein,
that preceded it in the sentence, and which we have tentatively identified, not
as existence, but as care, the unity of existence, facticity and falling-prey. T he
grammar might thus lead us to think that what is of concern to us is care. Is
it, then, that we care about care? We shall see that this is not the case. What
concerns us in this way, what matters to us, is specifically our existence. At work
in this sentence, then, are two meanings of "being:' first of all care, and then
existence.
In the next sentence, Heidegger draws an inference.
Thus it is constitutive of the being ofDa-sein to have, in its very being, a relation
of being to this being. 27

This sentence is drawing a conclusion ("Thus it is constitutive ... "" ...gehort

aber dann . .."), namely, that we have a relationship to our being. It is inferred
 The Constitution of Our Being 63

from our non-indifference to our being. And that is the reason why we can
say, as we did just above, that it is our existence that concerns us, or to which
we are not indifferent; for just a few lines further down on p. 12 Heidegger
says that being to which Da-sein is related is existence, the first mention of
existence in the book: "We shall call the very being to which Da-sein can relate
in one way or another, and somehow always does relate, existence." So we
have a relationship to that which matters to us, our existence. 28 Our being­
toward-death, for instance, is a relationship to death, one which may take on
different forms-expecting it, hiding it from ourselves, anticipating it, and so
on-forms that are analyzed in the chapter on death. We are involved in other
relationships to existence as well, i.e., relationships to existential possibility, for
what matters to us most of all is how we shall exercise our choices, how we shall
define our place in the world, how we shall understand our past life. Concern
about existence establishes the relationship to existence.
Heidegger adds in the same sentence that the relationship to existence is
constitutive of our being, i.e., it belongs to our Seinsverfassung. If we interpret
this literally, we might suppose that it is by virtue of our being-in-the-world
(our "constitution" in the strict sense) that we have the relationship to existence.
But a misunderstanding could arise on that basis: to suppose that being-in­
the-world puts us in relation to any number of things, things outside ourselves,
everything that is zuhanden and vorhanden, also contexts of meaning, also
in relation to the world itself, and also in relation to being or existence. We
must take every precaution against turning being or existence into that kind of
relatum, for that would interpret our relationship to existence as some kind of
empirical discovery. Thus, it is unlikely that being-in-the-world is what puts
us in relation to our existence. Here we can note two further points.

(i) This relationship is called not only a Verhi:iltnis but a Seinsverhi:iltnis, a

"relationship of being." So the relationship to being into which our very
being or constitution has placed us cannot merely be the result of our
being-in-the-world, the effect of a cause. It itself is one vital expression
of our being. That can only mean an expression of our existence; it is an
existential relationship. The relationship to being (existence) is no mere
fact with which we must reckon. It is, instead, a possibility for us, a part
of our ability to be, by virtue of which we are ahead of ourselves, sich
vorweg. Yet, still, we can continue to ask whether it is our constitution in
the strict sense, our being-in-the-world, that puts us into this existential
relationship to existence.
(ii) If it is the constitution of our being that brings with it our relationship
to being, this must be understood as a two-way relationship. For we note
that Heidegger has once again added the three little words, in seinem
Sein, "in its very being." Because of their parallelism with the words
64 Graeme Nicholson

of the previous sentence, we should take these three words, not as an

exclusive reference to existence, but rather to the unity of existence,
facticity and falling-prey. Thus, it is not through our adopting some
particular relationship to being or existence that we first enter into
a relationship to being; not, for example, by our having made some
decisions about death (perhaps evading it, perhaps anticipating it) that
we enter into a relationship to death. We were, rather, cast into that
relationship just by virtue of our being. Our being has established our
existential relationship to being (existence) in advance of any of our
attitudes or decisions. This leads us to clarify what the Seinsverfassung
(constitution) is by virtue of which we have a relationship to being.
Heidegger introduced it again with the demonstrative adjective, zu dieser
Seinsverfassung, implying that this constitution was already indicated
either in the preceding sentence or in the two preceding sentences. What
we have read is that to care about our existence is given to us as soon as we
are-we can never just occur in the world. That is the constitution of our
being. I do not think we can identify the present constitution as, strictly
and solely, our being-in-the-world. Instead, this constitution is our care;
or rather it is the temporality of Da-sein that will ultimately forge the
unity and meaning of Da-sein's essential care, i.e., the temporality that
is the constitution of care. So it is by virtue of our existential temporality
that we are cast into the existential relationship to our existence.

Having derived our relationship to being from our non-indifference to it,

Heidegger now undertakes a further derivation: of our understanding of being.
And this in turn means that Da-sein understands itself in its being in some way
and with some explicitness. It is proper to this being that it be disclosed to itself
with and through its being. Understanding of being is itself a determination of the
being of Da-sein. 29

Here and in many other texts Heidegger identifies two elements that are un­
derstood together: we understand ourselves, and we understand ourselves in
our being. Here this is inferred from the foregoing account of the relationship
to being, which was a component in our constitution. The Seinsverstiindnis
is inferred from the Seinsverhiiltnis, a part of the Seinsverfassung. Our being
concerns us; hence we have a relationship to it; hence we understand it.
Heidegger has already said-with the three little words-that our concern
for being derived from our being. So did our relationship to it. The same point
applies to our understanding of it: "It is proper to this being that it be disclosed
to itself with and through its being" -not only "with;' but also "through:'
And this is further emphasized in the italicized sentence that identifies our
 The Constitution of Our Being 65

Seinsverstiindnis as a determination of our being, eine Seinsbestimmtheit. It is an

aspect of our being that we are ontological, endowed with the understanding
(logos) of being ( tou ontos). "The ontic distinction of Dasein lies in the fact
that it is ontological:'30 The wording of this claim continues to undergird
the running emphasis that our concern for being, our relationship to it and
understanding of it are to be understood not only as endowments of ourselves
or our species, but as expressions of our being. By italicising the last word ist,
Heidegger is playing on the double possibility of a German word to function
both as adjective and adverb. The ontological character, then, attaches not only
to us but to our way of being: we are ontological, but it is also true that we are,
ontologically.
It is especially ourselves in our existence that we understand in this
Seinsverstiindnis. And the wording of the last four sentences makes it plain
that according to Heidegger our self-understanding is a function of our under­
standing of being. We are not disclosed to ourselves except "with and through
our being:' We are disclosed as existing, for this understanding follows from
our relationship to being qua existence. Both our self-understanding and our
understanding of being are qualified heavily here: " ... in some way and with
some explicitness." That is how the present text recognizes a distinction that
surfaces regularly in SZ and other texts of the 1920s. There could be an explicit
doctrine of the self and an explicit doctrine of being, both developed with accu­
rate reasoning and sharp concepts, and defended against doubt or antagonism.
That would be a philosophical understanding, or what Heidegger calls in SZ an
ontological interpretation. But what is under discussion here is something far
less developed than that, something that is shadowy and vague by comparison,
but which nevertheless is present universally in human beings, affording the
foundation for the ontological doctrines that philosophers develop. This is the
pre-ontological understanding of being, vorontologisches Seinsverstiindnis.
Two further possibilities are given to us along with the pre-ontological under­
standing ofbeing. One is that it should become ontological, as in a philosophical
analysis such as SZ itself or the present paper. This possibility is pointed out in
the paragraph that follows the one I have been quoting. The other possibility
is the derivation of all knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, from the
pre-ontological understanding of being. True, Heidegger has shown up to the
present point only that we possess such an understanding of our own being,
our own way of being, existence. But the next point, so vital for building up
our system of scientific knowledge, is that we also possess an understanding
of the being of all things in addition to our own being. The understanding of
being is not egocentrically confined (SZ, p. 13). There is a difference between
our own being and that of other things, yet we also have an understanding
of the being of things in the world, so there is a differentiation within our
66 Graeme Nicholson

understanding of being. This is determined by our being-in-the-world. The

differentiation within the Seinsverstiindnis is not empirically grounded, as if,
by bumping into different kinds of things, we formed an understanding of them
and then of their being; rather, it is an a priori division that lies at the ground
of the possibility of experience. The disposition to science is inscribed in our
constitution.

V. Summary

Let us take a retrospective view of the last four sections. I have been showing
that SZ offers a plurality of senses of the term "being;' das Sein, even when we
confine our attention to our own way of being, das Sein das Da-seins. Sein may
be existence (ability to be), or being-in-the-world, or care, and each of these
has its own distinct constitution. I believe the analysis shows that it would be
futile to proceed by abstraction to formulate an overarching sense of "being;'
Sinn von Sein, that would be generic for the variants we identified. In Section 4,
nevertheless, I sought to show that the three variants are not isolated from
each other, that they are intertwined to form the genuine constitution of our
being, one concrete Sinn von Sein rather than an abstract one. We could give
expression to it by a series of add-ons: (a) our being is being-in-the-world; yet,
by the intertwining, we can now add (b) that to be human means to be able-to­
be-in-the-world, In-der-Welt-Seinkonnen; going further, we add (c) that being
human means to be concerned about your ability-to-be-in-the-world-uns geht
es um das In-der-Welt-Seinkonnen. Our existing in the form of care puts us in a
relationship to our own being, and prompts our understanding of it. But while
we focus on our existing ability-to-be in the pre-ontological understanding of
being that we all have, this latter does not encompass the being of Da-sein as
care. That our own being is care is occluded in pre-ontological awareness, and
only a philosophical interpretation will reveal it. That implies that Da-sein's
temporality is never fully encompassed in pre-ontological awareness.
Now the ontology of Da-sein was to serve as the fundamental ontology, the
guideline for every other ontological inquiry. That does not mean that entities
of other groups-animal, vegetable and mineral-will have to exhibit care,
existence, or being-in-the-world. Quite the contrary! It does mean, though,
that we should not expect to find simple or generic formulations of being when
we turn to these other domains. That there are manifold senses of "being" is
one of the deepest truths of all philosophy. But we might hope that, in these
domains too, some of the variants will allow themselves to be woven together.
The fundamental character of the ontology of Da-sein also implies that
inquiry into the being of other things will always take its start from Da-sein's
pre-ontological understanding of being. I'll conclude by developing that point.
 The Constitution of Our Being 67

VI. Anthropology and Philosophy of Mind

The inquiry into our own being was undertaken with a view to the question of
being generally: what is it to be? And the inquiry has led to our pre-ontological
understanding of being. By virtue of our constitution as being-in-the-world,
this understanding is not solipsistically confined to ourselves, but "implies the
understanding of something like 'world' and the understanding of the being of
beings accessible within the world" (p. 13). The pre-optological understanding
of being becomes the grounding for the ontologies of specific domains of re­
ality which become disclosed by the special sciences. Section 3 mentions a few
of the domains: history, nature, space, life, human being,31 language, and a bit
later it mentions a few divisions of science (not quite overlapping): mathemat­
ics, physics, biology, the humanities, theology. The fundamental concepts of a
science (its Grundbegriffe) constitute the ontology appropriate to the domain
it researches. Section 4 clarifies the ultimate root of these regional ontologies:
"Ontologies which have beings unlike Da-sein as their theme are accordingly
founded and motivated in the ontic structure of Da-sein itself. This struc­
ture includes in itself the determination of a pre-ontological understanding of
being" (p. 13).
Physics is the science most often mentioned by Heidegger. It becomes con­
stituted as a specific domain of inquiry when its objects are delineated in
general through fundamental concepts such as matter, energy, motion, space
and time. The initial delineation of this domain, with these fundamental struc­
tures, occurred, of course, in pre-scientific experience. But different values or
interpretations can be assigned to these fundamental structures, and thereby
arise the different versions ofphysics throughout history. Without some under­
standing of being there could be no science, and here that means: without an
understanding of what it is to be a physical thing there could be no physics. The
values accorded to those fundamental structures (matter, etc.) determine what
it is to be a physical object, and that constitutes the ontology for the domain
that is researched by physics, the domain that Heidegger generally calls nature.
Section 69 (b) describes how modern mathematical physics came to be con­
stituted around the time of Galileo. Modern physics arose through a revision
of the understanding of being that guided research on nature. For instance,
Galileo's science depended upon a "mathematical projection of nature" that
projected a priori a universal continuum of space whereby any body could in
principle occupy any location (pp. 361-64).
Heidegger has pointed to a number of distinct regional ontologies, not just
the physicist's mathematical projection of nature, and what is of interest in
the present context is that one of these encompasses the domain he calls "hu­
man being;' Da-sein. An analytic of Da-sein has served us as a "fundamental
68 Graeme Nicholson

ontology" for the purpose of raising the general question of being. But after­
wards there will need to be a second study of Da-sein, no longer as a laboratory
for fundamental ontology, but rather as one specific domain of that which is. It
will be an "anthropology" (see Section 5, p. 17, and Sec. 10, pp. 46-50) which
will contain, first, an "ontological foundation" (p. 17) that outlines what it is
to be human, and then a detailed study of such phenomena as "body, soul and
spirit" (p. 48), a human science that will intersect with psychology and biology
(pp. 49-50), and, I would add, with physiology and other medical sciences, and
the philosophy of mind. In the course of its analytic of Da-sein, the fundamen­
tal ontology will have presented already some of the materials for an eventual
anthropology-especially its ontological part-but only in fragmentary form
and not in the order that would be required for anthropological theory (p. 17).
Earlier I pointed out that SZhad to contain some parts of the study of being for
which it was to serve as the preparation, implying thereby some circularity in
Heidegger's overall project. The anthropology that is already contained in SZ
counts as a further circularity that modifies the official foundationalism of its
method. This is the consequence of granting that, in an antic respect, Da-sein
is the human being. It is not some other entity. The same Da-sein is the subject
of a fundamental ontology and then of an anthropology.
Let us then look at a few of these details in the text. Could they be re-worked
into the format of a psychology or a philosophy of mind? We could pursue
Heidegger's treatment of the emotions, e.g., fear and anxiety (Sections 30, 40
and 68, B), which could certainly be brought into connection with other kinds
of psychology. But it will be more germane to this paper to pursue topics in
the text that are connected with our "understanding" ( Verstehen) and therefore
our existence, ek-sistence, our Seinkonnen, being out in advance of self. These
topics lend themselves to a treatment in connection with the philosophy of
mind. There are many places where the structure of existence is very given
concrete interpretations: the existential structure of Da-sein's death is actually
being-toward-death (Section 50); the authentic response to anxiety is readiness­
for-anxiety (Section 60); the existential form of conscience is wanting-to-have­
a-conscience (Section 54). And now the case that I'll look at in detail: to hear
is to-be-able-to-hear (Horenkonnen, Section 34).
On pages 163-65, Heidegger is treating hearing as one expression of
our understanding, and he intends the latter in his technical sense, being­
ahead-of-self. Indeed he makes the claim (perhaps too strong) that "hearing
even constitutes the primary and authentic openness of Da-sein for its own­
most ability to be (eigenstes Seinkonnen)" (p. 163). That is expressed when he
calls it Horenkonnen, ability to hear. Section 34 introduces hearing in connec­
tion with discourse and language, speech and utterance, so his initial interest
is how we hear and understand one another in discourse. What he emphasizes
 The Constitution of Our Being 69

especially is that hearing is ex-sistent or self-surpassing, in being the ground

for our paying heed to what is said, hearkening to it. This leads him to take
issue with other psychological accounts, which we might assign, actually, to
the philosophy of mind. He notes that since hearkening (Horchen) is rooted in
the ability to hear (Horenkonnen), it is "more primordial than what the psy­
chologist 'initially' defines as hearing, the sensing of tones and the perception
of sounds" (p. 163). A further transcendence achieved by the hearer is to be
brought into contact with that with which the discourse was concerned: "we are
already together with the other beforehand, with the being which the discourse
is about" (p. 164). In this treatment of the hearing of discourse, Heidegger
pictures us as being together in a human world (a Mitwelt, a shared world),
so that Da-sein's ability-to-be-in-the-world can be expressed as the ability-to­
hear-[each other]-in-the-shared-world. More than that, we are all motivated
to understand one another this way; we have the concern to be able to hear in
the world. Notice that we can substitute "hear" for "be:'
Another opportunity for connecting this to the philosophy of mind ap­
pears when Heidegger generalizes his treatment of hearing, going beyond the
initial context of discourse, and looks at hearing in relation to our being-in­
an-environing-world.
Hearkening, too, has the mode of being of a hearing that understands. "Initially"
we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the mo­
torcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker
tapping, the crackling fire (p. 163).

And we are concerned to be able to hear things, and different situations ac­
tually become expressed in different ways. The woodpecker tapping can be
discerned by the experienced forester, though not the tyro, whose concern is to
become capable of this. An enemy column on the march can be detected by an
experienced sergeant, not by a raw recruit. Whereas the hearing of discourse
expressed our being together with others, some of these modes express our cir­
cumspective concern with the environment. In all cases, though, hearing has
the existential structure expressed by Horenkonnen. It is always the anticipation
of a further hearing; the sergeant listens for more dues. The character of hearing
as the existing ability to hear is also expressed in the connection between what
we hear and what we do. If I can hear the wagons, I know that it is time to
leave.
There is a similar point to be made about seeing-it too is a Sehenkonnen
(Heidegger uses this term on p. 346). To begin with a simple example, an
optometrist might ask you what letters you see on his chart. Your likely reply:
"I can see A on the top line:' "Can." That does not mean an ocular potentiality on
your part, as if we were ascribing it to you before you entered the optometrist's
70 Graeme Nicholson

office, so that, if you were to enter the office, you would see the letter A. No, this
expresses the act of seeing itself as "can see." Many more examples can illustrate
our concern-for-being-able-to-see-in-the-world: "The ships have arrived. Can
you see them?" "Yes." I can quote a sort of gallows ballad by the country singer
Johnny Cash, "25 Minutes to Go," in which the hero is counting down the
minutes remaining to him. With just three more minutes to go, he is taking
leave of his world:
I can see the mountains,
I can see the sky.
But the moment of death approaches, and with just one minute left to go, he
wails
I can see the buzzards,
I can hear the crows.
At this point I may observe that an existential treatment does not lead us to
resolve perception or sensation into its separate channels, seeing, hearing, etc. If
I can hear the car without seeing it, there is a latent or merely signified portion of
my understanding, a portion that very definitely belongs to the understanding.
Indeed, even a figure that is seen is actually a fusion of the latent and manifest
profiles, like the street facade of a house, where the signified or latent depth
of the object has not been brought to view. There is certainly more here than
we can now explore-but my present point is that what Sehenkonnen and
Horenkonnen are capable ofalways outruns the measurable stimulations of the
moment.
It follows from these observations that, in an existential analysis, there is no
place for what are often called "mental events:' It is not only that we cannot
reduce our hearing of discourse, or our spotting ships in the harbor, to an
auditory or visual mental state-more than that, it is that the ontology of
existence cannot accommodate such states or events at all. I have no wish to
deny the physical events of stimulation that accompany our bodily exposure to
the persons and things in the world. But the "mental events, states, processes"
that we call seeing, sensing, believing, etc., are extraneous to any account of
human experience. To express the matter roughly, philosophers and others
have come to believe in such events or states only because they are thought to
be the direct effects of the physical stimulation of our organs, so that, in their
absence, one might not be able to explain how it is that we hear woodpeckers
or people speaking.
But this brings us to an important confrontation between the existential
account of seeing, hearing, etc., and the physicalist or materialist tradition in
recent English-language philosophy of mind. And I shall make the case that this
 The Constitution of Our Being 71

tradition has been led to its "mental events and states" because of its adopting
a different fundamental ontology from the one we have explored here. Let me
refer to one of the seminal papers in this tradition, that of Smart. 32 We read
that there is a psychic event: seeing a yellowish-orange after-image (p. 169).
Smart maintains that this sensation is not merely caused by a brain process,
or associated with it in some other way, but is the very same thing, identical
with it, just as a lightning-bolt is not merely caused by a discharge of ions
in the atmosphere but is the very same thing. Now Smart's identity-theory
is hardly the last word in the modern philosophy of mind, but I pick it out
because of its way ofspeaking about psychic events, a form of discourse that is
retained even by Smart's critics. What if, instead ofdiscussing this "after-image"
case in Smart's physicalistic lexicon, we spoke of it in Heidegger's existential
terms? Here a critical confrontation can be followed between the physicalist
philosophy of mind and an anthropology of existential inspiration.
Following the ontology ofexistence, we would approach the case supposed by
Smart, not as a so-called mental event, but as being able to see (Sehenkonnen).
Suppose a psychologist asks a subject "Do you see a yellowish-orange after­
image?" T he subject will likely reply, "Yes, I can see it:' "Can." To see is to be
able to see. This expresses the seeing itself as the ability to see. It is basically
wrong to bring this experience under the category of events. The main phys­
icalist distortion enters in when we identify the experience as a mental event.
Seeing, ability to see, Sehenkonnen, is not an event at all. Our current seeing
is constituted by the projection of a further seeing in the coming moments,
constituted therefore by possibility. This is true even of that seeing which fo­
cuses on unreal objects such as a yellowish after-image. Even here, to see that
object is to fix it, thus to seek to fix it, i.e., to anticipate a further seeing which
will focus now on the left side of the object, and then on its right side. This
exercise can only be understood in terms of the self-surpassing that informs
existence.
I believe that this physicalism arose through the influence of a different
fundamental ontology. Whereas Heidegger, like Socrates, begins from our­
selves and our being, the contemporary philosophers of mind are often like
Democritus, beginning from a survey ofnature as a whole, from physics, chem­
istry, biology and psychology. The philosophy of mind proceeds from nature,
with all its laws, toward the human being, by way of the human body which
expresses all of nature's laws. But this inquiry too has opted for a fundamental
ontology: that of physics. Not only do these philosophers take from physics,
chemistry and biology an account oflight, sound, stimulation, the neuron, and
so on; not only do they regard physics as being the fundamental science within
the array of natural sciences; they also treat the regional ontology of nature,
i.e., the ontology appropriate to physics, as if it could also be the grounding or
72 Graeme Nicholson

fundamental ontology for all other inquiries. The ontological notions appro­
priate to physics, especially causality and the physical interpretations of time
and space, are made into a fundamental ontology even within philosophy.
The key problem in this philosophy of mind is that, on the one hand, there is
the neuron, the stimulus, etc., and on the other hand there is the sensation, the
belief, etc. What is the correlation between the bodily states or events and the
mental states or events? These philosophers approach the problem against
the background of physics, whose Grundbegriffe they are content to treat as
fundamental for all ontology.
Such philosophy may suppose that it is getting by with no particular un­
derstanding of being at all, but it is easy to show that the bodily and mental
phenomena treated by this philosophy are described and understood under
categories drawn from the physical domain: causality, and a certain interpreta­
tion of time that is assumed in the category of "event" and "state" (mental event
and bodily event, mental state and bodily state). But nobody has ever shown
that the Grundbegriffe of physics are able to furnish a fundamental ontology.

Notes

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1996). Like Stambaugh, I'll treat "Da-sein" as an English
word, not italicized unless I'm quoting a German context, and, like Stambaugh, I'll
hyphenate it, in accord with Heidegger's own suggestion ( op. cit., p. xiv). Page references
will be to the German text of 1927, as in the margins of the translation.
2. The key texts are Apology l 9b-24a and Phaedo 96a-100a.
3. Tusculanae disputationes, 5, 4, 10.
4. These philosophers' work has been widely disseminated and repeatedly anthol­
ogized. Later, I shall refer to some of the materials in the anthology edited by David M.
Rosenthal, The Nature of Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). My com­
ments in the text could not be applied to those philosophers who work from Artificial
Intelligence or mathematics.
5. Fran1yois Raffoul, Heidegger and the Subject(Atlantic Highlands, N .J.: Humanities
Press, 1998). Raffoul has assembled all the relevant Heideggerian texts, from the 1920s
and later, treating them in much more detail than such earlier works, excellent in their
way, as Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991) and
Frederick Olafson, Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1987). Raffoul's main target, however, is the "continental" current of an "anti­
humanistic" reading of Heidegger.
6. On the absolutely crucial difference between an entity and its being ( or between
a being and its being), see my article "The Ontological Difference;' American Philo­
sophical Quarterly 33 (1996): 357-74.
7. sz, pp. 152-53, 314-15.
 The Constitution of Our Being 73

8. Otto Poggeler, Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and
Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1987). Original publica­
tion, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1963).
9. Author's marginal note to SZ, p. 316.
10. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: The University of California Press, 1993).See also the essay by Kisiel "Heidegger
(1920-21) on Becoming a Christian: A Conceptual Picture-Show" in Kisiel, T.and John
Van Buren, Reading Heidegger From the Start (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 175-92.
11. Kisiel, in Kisiel and Van Buren, Reading Heidegger From the Start, p. 178.
12. Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 21-25, 32-35, 123-37, 153-56.
13. Kisiel, Genesis, pp. 394-97.
14. John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1993).
15. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. T. A. Carlson (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1991).
16. Joanna Hodge, Heidegger and Ethics (London: Routledge, 1995), Chapters 1 and
6. One must not overlook, however, her stern criticism of Heidegger's political thought
and practice in the intervening chapters.
17. The exception: Sections 19-21 which offer an exposition of Descartes with many
quotations in Latin.
18. S. Kierkegaard: "This paradox, that the single individual is higher than the uni­
versal ... " " ...to exist as the individual is the most terrifying thing of all ... " Fear and
Trembling, trans.A. Hannay (London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 84 and p. 102. Or: "Ex­
istence separates, and holds the various moments of existence discretely apart ... ""But
if he is a human being, then he is also an existing individual;' Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, trans. D. F. Swenson and W. Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1968), p. 107 and p. 109; the entire thesis of pp. 99-103 is that a system of existence is
impossible.
K. Jaspers: "Existenz, as the possibility of decision derivable from no universal
validity, is an origin in time, is the individual as historicity:' Reason and Existenz, trans.
Wm. Earle (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), p. 62.
19. Details on the predicating gerund appear in my paper "The Ontological Differ­
ence," alluded to above.
20. I'm indebted to The Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) for
specific references to texts of Cicero, Caesar and Lucretius, and to the Thesaurus Linguae
Latinae (Leipzig: Teubner, 1953) for further references to authors of the classical and
post-classical periods.
21. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 170 (pp. 241-42 of the original German text).
22. This phenomenological term was first introduced on p. 13, but, beginning in
Section 39, it is often used instead of the simpler "existence" when the narrower scope
of the term is under discussion.
23. Heidegger refers back to these lectures in SZ, footnote 1, p. 72 (the note appears
on p.401 ofthe Stambaugh translation, as Note 1 of Chapter III). See also Kisiel, Genesis,
pp. 26-35.
74 Graeme Nicholson

24. "Existentialism is a Humanism;' translated by B. Frechtman, in Existentialism

and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), p. 15. This doctrine is
not only found in such popular texts. See, e.g.," Le cogito prereflexifet l'etre du percipere"
in L'etre et le neant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 16-23.
25. Das Dasein ist ein Seiendes, das nicht nur unter anderem Seienden vorkommt (SZ,
p. 12).
26. Es ist vielmehr dadurch ontisch ausgezeichnet, daft es diesem Seienden in seinem
Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht.
27. Zu dieser Seinsverfassung des Daseins gehort aber dann, daft es in seinem Sein zu
diesem Sein ein Seinsverhiiltnis hat.
28. Whether there really are no other beings that are concerned about their being is
a biological question that is incidental here, because our present concern is the positive
expression of the being of Da-sein, not a negative characterization of whatever is not
Da-sein.
29. Und dies wiederum besagt: Dasein versteht sich in irgendeiner Weise und
Ausdrucklichkeit in seinem Sein. Diesem Seienden eignet, daft mit und durch sein Sein
dieses ihm selbst erschlossen ist. Seinsverstiindnis ist selbst eine Seinsbestimmtheit des
Daseins.
30. Die ontische Auszeichnung des Daseins liegt darin, daft es ontologisch ist.
31. So Stambaugh translates Da-sein in this context, and, as we shall see, it is the
right translation.
32. J. J.C. Smart, "Sensations and Brain Processes," in Rosenthal, ed., The Nature of
Mind, pp. 169-76.
 4
Heidegger's Anti-Dualism: Beyond
Mind and Matter
Charles Guignon

"To think is to confine yourself to a single thought;' Heidegger said. 1 In his

case, the single thought dominating his life was the question of being, the
question that traditionally is understood to ask: What is it for beings of various
sorts to be what they are? The question of being can seem hopelessly abstruse
until we see its relevance for the dominant ways ofthinking in the philosophical
tradition. In Heidegger's view, many of the intractable puzzles that run through
philosophy first arise because we uncritically buy into a particular conception
of what things are. We assume that anything that exists-whether it be a rock,
a tool, a human being, an artwork, a number or a text-must be regarded as
a substance of some sort. On the traditional view, "substance" refers to that
which "lies under" the attributes something has, that which endures through
changes of properties. In modem times, under the influence of Descartes, we
have been inclined to suppose that there are two basic kinds of substance,
mind and matter, where these are understood to refer to basic types of stuff
(the nonphysical and the physical). Everything that exists, we assume, must be
either material, or mental, or some combination of the two.
Substance dualism provides the basis for some of our most fundamental as­
sumptions about what it takes to make sense of human phenomena. It seems to
be crucial, for example, in explaining human agency. The standard conception
of action holds that we need to make a distinction between "outer" behavior­
the movement of a physical substance-and the "inner" intentions, purposes,

75
76 Charles Guignon

beliefs and desires that cause the behavior. The physical event ( e.g., the move­
ment of my vocal chords when I speak) is seen as only an external sign of the
inner intention (e.g., conveying information) that animates the behavior and
makes it into an action. This account of human agency leads to a split between
outer and inner, the physical and the mental, which is so deeply ingrained in our
thinking that even strictly physicalist accounts of human phenomena assume
we must be able to identify some physical correlate of the mental-namely,
events in the brain-if we are to account for human agency.
Substance dualism is also reinforced by one of the most basic assumptions
of modern science: the distinction between what is objective, actually "out
there" in the physical universe, and what is merely subjective, existing only in
our minds. Modern science is built on the assumption that we can abstract
out from experience those features of things we project into them given our
interests and dispositions, in order to be able to identify the characteristics
of reality as it is in itself. For the early scientists, the truly objective features
of a thing were those that are quantifiable-properties such as mass, velocity
and space-time position. In contrast, such features of experienced reality as
function, meaningfulness, aesthetic value and moral goodness were seen as
purely subjective, projections of our minds onto things rather than properties
of the things themselves.
The ability to draw a clear distinction between "what is really out there
in the world" and "what is only in here, in the mind" is rightly regarded as
a cornerstone of rationality. But, as is well known, the subjective/objective
distinction also tends to support the idea that all values and meanings are
ultimately subjective, creations of our own minds, with no basis in objective
reality. The distinction between facts "out there" and purely subjective values
leads to some counter-intuitive consequences. It seems to imply, for example,
that if a child is hit by a car, then something bad has happened not out there in the
street, but rather "in here;' in our minds. Such counter-intuitive results suggest
that there is a deep gap between our concrete experience of things in actual life
and the theoretical framework we use to make sense of that experience.
Most attempts to show the relevance of Heidegger's thought for contempo­
rary philosophical problems have tended to focus on his critique of mentalism
and, in particular, his attack on representationalist accounts of the mind. Inter­
pretations of this sort are useful in showing how Heidegger's picture of human
existence undercuts specific assumptions about the mental, but they run the
risk of making it look like his views are consistent with a philosophical natural­
ism that tries to account for everything in purely physicalist terms. In order to
appreciate the full impact of Heidegger's thought, then, we need to see that his
conception of our everyday ways ofbeing-in-the-world puts in question not just
the mental, but the very idea of substance itself, including physical substance.
 Heidegger's Anti-Dualism: Beyond Mind and Matter 77

To get a sense of how Heidegger undermines the substance ontology, it

will be helpful to see his attempt to answer the question of being as moving
toward a picture of the human as an event rather than as a substance of any
sort. 2 Starting with a phenomenological description of our "average everyday"
ways of being as agents in the world, Heidegger tries to lead us to see that the
concepts of mental and physical substance generally have no crucial role to
play in making sense of what shows up in our lives. His claim is not that the
mental and physical do not exist, but that what we encounter "proximally and
for the most part" in our ordinary lives need not be thought of in terms of
the substance ontology. In Heidegger's view, our ability to encounter anything,
including substances of various sorts, is derivative from and dependent upon a
way of encountering things in which the idea of substance simply does not arise.
Thus, the account of everydayness aims at deflating the notion of substance.
The idea of substance turns out to be the product of some fairly high-level
theorizing with nothing crucial to contribute to making sense of our lives and
our world. As I hope to show, when the distinction between inner and outer
is undermined, it becomes possible to see the fact/value distinction as having
no general significance beyond the rather specialized concerns of the natural
sciences. On the view of human existence that emerges from Heidegger's event
ontology, we can see that understanding what we are has implications for our
beliefs about how we ought to live.

Heidegger holds that the reason why traditional philosophy has tended to
conceive of human beings as things or objects of some sort is that this is the
way entities show up when we adopt a stance of pure theoretical reflection.
To avoid slipping into the presuppositions of the tradition, then, Heidegger
proposes we bracket the conceptions that arise from focusing on what shows
up in the theoretical attitude, and start afresh by looking at the way things
show up in the midst of everyday activities in familiar contexts. The goal is
to see how far we can go in making sense of human phenomena without
imposing concepts drawn from traditional theories. The description of human
existence (or Dasein, the German word Heidegger uses to refer to the human)
gives us a picture of a human being not as a thing or object, but rather as an
event, the unfolding realization of a life as a whole. Dasein is described as the
entity for whom its being-that is, its life as a whole-is at issue for it (32).
We are beings who care about what we are. In living out our lives, Heidegger
says, what we are--our identity as humans-is always in question or at stake
for us.
78 Charles Guignon

Because we care about our lives, we are always taking some concrete stand
on who we are. By taking a stand as a teacher, for example, I give a coherent
shape and direction to one important dimension of my life. The specific stand
I take in turn gives me some general sense of who I am: as Heidegger says,
"It is peculiar to this entity that with and through its being, this being is
disclosed to it. Understanding ofbeing is itself a definite characteristic ofDasein's
being:' 3 As agents who have mastered some set of roles and lifestyles in the
world, we all have a "vague, average understanding" of what it is to be (25).
Given my understanding of myself as a teacher, I understand a great deal about
how school systems work, how I should relate to students and other teachers,
how classrooms are to be used, and so forth. It is important to see that when
Heidegger speaks of"understanding;' he is referring not so much to a cognitive
state as to the tacit know-how we pick up and embody as we become initiated
into the forms of life of our world. This background sense of how things count
in everyday life provides the basis for trying to give an explicit account of what
things are all about.
In taking a stand on our lives, we exist as a "happening" or "movement"
of a particular sort. Human existence is characterized as a "becoming" or
"emergence-into-being;' the ongoing flow of a life course "between birth and
death" (276). When we conceive of a human as an event in this way, we will
see that there are two primary aspects or dimensions that define the structure
of a life. The first of these is called situatedness, and it embraces all that has
come before and is currently defining one's situation in the world. The second
dimension is called projection, and it refers to the futural dimension of a life
happening, the way Dasein in its actions is constantly pressing forward toward
the realization or definition of its identity. Each of these aspects of human
existence should be examined in turn.
To say that we find ourselves "situated" is to say that we are always thrown into
a world, already under way in realizing specific roles and styles of comportment
made accessible by the surrounding cultural context. On Heidegger's view, our
thrownness or facticity is something that becomes manifest through the various
moods that come over us. We always find ourselves in some mood or other­
where even the bland grayness of humdrum existence counts as a mood-and
these moods reveal our basic way of being situated in the world.
Heidegger's discussion of moods shows how his conception of Dasein can
bypass the inner/outer dichotomy. The German word for mood, Stimmung, is
also the word for "tuning;' as in "tuning a piano;' and so it conveys a sense of
being tuned in to things in a particular way. At any time, we are attuned to the
world through our affective orientation-as fearful, blast\ irritable, upbeat, or
some other way. Our moods give us a fix on things, and they thereby make
it possible for entities in the world to stand out as mattering to us in some
 Heidegger's Anti-Dualism: Beyond Mind and Matter 79

determinate way. It would be wrong, however, to think of these moods as

inner or subjective. "We must dismiss the psychology of feelings, experiences
and consciousness;' Heidegger says, and instead think of a mood as "like an
atmosphere in which we first immerse ourselves in each case and which then
attunes us through and through." 4 Speaking of the mood of grief, Heidegger
says, "It is not at all 'inside' in some interiority, only to appear in the flash of
an eye; but for this reason it is not at all outside either. Attunement is not some
being that appears in the soul as an experience, but the way of our being there
with one another" (FCM 66). Because moods define how things can count for
us, they provide the mode of access through which we first gain our sense of
where we stand and how things are going. "Attunements are the 'how' [Wie]
according to which one is in such and such a way" (FCM 66).
The second structural component of our lives is projection. In our practical
involvements, we are constantly driving forward into the future, underway in
accomplishing things. We are always "ahead-of-ourselves" in the sense that, in
each of our actions, we are taking a step toward realizing particular possibilities
that define our identity as agents of a particular sort: as a parent, a teacher, a
coward, and so forth. Heidegger says that this notion of projection is familiar to
us from such everyday experiences as "planning in the sense of the anticipatory
regulating of human comportment" (FCM 362). In his own use of the term
"projection;' however, he is trying to get at something more fundamental than
conscious goal-setting and planning. '"Projection' does not refer to some se­
quence of actions or to some process we might piece together from individual
phases;' he writes; "rather it is what refers to the unity of an action, but of
an originary and properly unique kind of action" (FCM 363). This originary
action is the defining feature ofDasein's being: it's taking a stand in the sense
of giving shape to its life as a totality. To say that we exist as projections into the
future is to say that we are always composing our life-stories in the things we
do, and that we are therefore ultimately responsible for the Gestalt or overall
shape our lives ultimately have. T his movement toward our own completion
(Ergiinzung [FCM 363]) is called "being-toward-death;' where "death" refers
not to one's demise, but to the fact that we are finite beings and therefore always
stand before the possibility of having no more possibilities.
It is because we exist as a forward-directed thrust toward our completion that
Heidegger describes the temporality peculiar to human existence as "bringing
itself to fruition" (sich zeitigen). As an unfolding life story, Dasein is constantly
making decisions about which possibilities it will follow through on and which
it will let slide. Taking a stand as a teacher and a parent, for example, I find
myself faced with a number of decisions about how to develop a personal
style, balance roles, and prioritize goals. It may be the case that many of these
decisions are made by simply drifting into certain patterns of action or by doing
80 Charles Guignon

what seems unavoidable. But even when I act without any thought, I am doing
things that define my identity-my bein�as a person of a particular sort, and
in this sense I am, in all my actions, choosing what my life amounts to as a
whole.
To be human, then, is to be a thrown projection. We find ourselves thrown into
a particular situation, with a determinate range of public self-interpretations
available to us, and we are always taking up this thrownness in our under­
takings as we live out our lives. To say that we exist as thrown projections is
to say that, for the most part, we just are what we do. I am what I make of
myself in taking a stand on the possibilities made available in my world. On
this account, there are no "essences" or fixed "facts" about humans that de­
termine what they must be or how they should act. T his is what Heidegger
means when he says, "The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence" (67). Since
the traits we are born with are defined and given a specific shape by the ways
we take them over in existing, there is nothing that compels us to be one way
rather than another. Whether I realize it or not, my identity is something I am
creating through my actions. Because we are all "answerable" or "responsible"
for what our lives add up to, Heidegger says that Dasein is always "in each case
.
mme."

Hubert Dreyfus's commentary on Division I of Being and Time has shown

in detail how Heidegger portrays human existence as inextricably bound up
with a public lifeworld. 5 On the account of being-in-the-world found in Being
and Time, to be human is to be enmeshed in a familiar lifeworld-the world
of theater, for example, or the academic world-in such a way that, under
normal conditions, there is no way to draw a dear distinction between a "self "
component and a "world" component. We can get an idea of how Heidegger
conceives of this "unified phenomenon" of being-in-the-world if we consider
what it is like to actually be caught up in a specific situation. Imagine a case
where you have done something socially inappropriate-perhaps worn the
wrong attire to a formal function. This situation has a particular significance:
it is what we all recognize as an embarrassing situation. Realizing that you are
improperly dressed, and feeling the critical gaze of others, you feel awkward
and uncomfortable. Being in this situation is part of your thrownness at the
moment; it determines what you can and cannot do in this context. Yet, at
the same time, the significance of the situation is something you shape and
determine through your actions. You can worsen the situation by making a big
deal out of it, or you can defuse it by treating it lightly.
 Heidegger's Anti-Dualism: Beyond Mind and Matter 81

This example shows that there is such a tight reciprocal interdependence

between self and situation in ordinary contexts that what is given in such cases
is an irreducible whole, not a mere coupling of two distinct items. Heidegger's
claim is that, when everything is running its course in familiar situations, the
distinction between self and world presupposed by the tradition simply does
not show up. To use Heidegger's example, in hammering boards together in a
workshop, what presents itselfis a unified flow ofagency that pours through the
hammering into the carpentry project while forming the worker as someone
who is building something in this context. On this account, it is only when there
has been a breakdown in the smooth flow of practical dealings that a hammer
can show up as some "thing" out there to be reckoned with.
The everyday practical world we find around us is always a shared, social
world. As we are engaged in our everyday activities, we act according to the
norms and conventions of the public in such a way that there is no sharp
distinction to be made between ourselves and others in these contexts. It is
through the medium ofthe common world that we first find ourselves as agents
of a particular sort. Even working alone in a cubicle involves being attuned to
the patterns and regularities that make possible the coordination of public life.
It follows that for the most part we exist not so much as "centers of experience
and action" as instances of the "they" or "anyone." We do what anyone would
do in ordinary contexts because we have been socialized into the practices of
our historical culture. Growing up into the public world, we come to master
a public language, with its inbuilt way of sorting things out, and we become
initiated into these standardized ways of responding and acting in our world.
Through this enculturation, we become place-holders and representatives of
the forms oflife laid out by the they.
We are now in a position to understand how Heidegger transforms our view
of what is involved in making sense of human action. As we noted earlier, the
standard view of action holds that human agency is intelligible only if it is
seen as causally grounded in mental intentions. Action is conceived as physi­
cal movement prompted or accompanied by a sort of mental commentary. In
contrast, Heidegger's description ofDasein as an unfolding event suggests that
broad areas of our active lives can be made intelligible without recourse to an
ongoing mental accompaniment. When we see what is involved in ordinary
being-in-the-world, we can see that our undertakings make sense and are intel­
ligible as actions not because of their relation to mental causes, but because of
the way they figure into the shared practices and patterns ofintelligible behavior
of our culture. I understand the smile of a passing acquaintance, for example,
not by trying to divine what is going on in her head, but by understanding
the place of such gestures in our world. In such cases, questions about the
inner thoughts and intentions of the agent usually have no point. Almost
82 Charles Guignon

anything, or nothing in particular, might be going through her mind as she

walks by.
Heidegger is suspicious of any attempt to drive in a wedge between gestures
and the inner mental items that purportedly cause them. He says, for exam­
ple, that blushing "is a gesture insofar as the blushing person relates to fellow
humans:' 6 For large parts ofour lives, what we do is intelligible as action because
of the way it bodies forth a shared understanding of what things are all about,
not because of the inner processes that might accompany our movements. The
mistake, Heidegger says, is to "misconstrue everything as an expression of in­
ner psychic states-instead of seeing the body-phenomenon in its interhuman
relatedness." 7 When someone blushes in response to a situation, we encounter
this response as meaningful because we understand its role in our shared social
practices. Given our understanding of our familiar cultural world, we see the
blushing person as someone who is embarrassed because her action is undig­
nified according to current social standards, not because she has dishonored
her clan or sinned before God. In gaining access to the meaning of gestures of
this sort, the distinction between inner and outer simply has no role to play.
Even in the case of more complex actions, our ability to understand what
people do is rooted not so much in grasping their mental states as in seeing how
the action fits into the overall pattern of their lives in their entirety. When a
coworker steps forward and takes charge in a crisis, we usually understand this
person's action not by trying to guess what she is thinking, but by recognizing
how this sort of action flows quite naturally out of the character traits that
define her identity as a person of a particular sort. Her actions manifest her
being as a confident, take-charge sort of person. And these character traits are
themselves not usually encountered as outer expressions of something inner.
On the contrary, the beaming self-confidence we encounter in this person is
something that is constituted by her concrete ways of acting in this and similar
situations over the course of her life.
Seen from this standpoint, the confident person's being is something that
comes to be defined and realized in what she does: this is what Heidegger means
when he says, "being-a-self is, in each case, only in its process of realization." 8
This person exudes confidence in her actions-she "bodies it forth" in her ways
of being present in the world-and this is generally so regardless of what might
be going on in her mind at any time. Her ways of acting, we might say, "let­
confidence-be" as her mode of presence in the world-they don't just point to
some underlying mental state. Of course, there are cases when someone's mode
of behavior is deceptive, cases where a person's actions are not at all indicative
of what they really are. But Heidegger would say that dissonances of this sort
are possible only against a broad background in which, proximally and for the
most part, people just are what they do.
 Heidegger's Anti-Dualism: Beyond Mind and Matter 83

On this conception ofour being as agents, it is not just others whom we know
by their actions. Even our own being as humans ofa particular sort is something
we discover, in most cases, not by introspection, but by grasping the meanings
our actions have in the public world. It should be obvious that many of the
traits I regard as most fundamental to my identity are not things I discover
through inward-turning. I find out whether I am a warm and loving person or
a witty person not by self-reflection, but through seeing how my ways of acting
go over in public. Even my own feelings are often accessible only in terms of
their place within the public world. For example, I know that what I am feeling
in a particular situation is shame by grasping the public imports that define
the meaning of the situation. If I were to depend entirely on introspection in
such a situation, I might discover a burning, dysphoric sensation. But I could
know that this sensation is the experience of shame-rather than, say, spite­
only because I grasp the meaning of the situation and my place in it. Thus,
Heidegger says that "even one's own Dasein becomes something that it can
itself proximally 'come across' only when it looks away from 'experiences' and
the 'center of its actions; or does not yet 'see' them at all. Dasein finds 'itself'
proximally in what it does" (155 ).
In laying out this picture of human existence, Heidegger is not claiming that
there are no mental events or that the mental is never important in understand­
ing others or ourselves. Rather, his aim is to deflate the uncritical assumption
that any attempt to understand humans must take recourse to the mental.
Given the view ofbeing-in-the-world as our most basic way ofbeing, the men­
tal comes to be seen as something that shows up only through the medium of
our shared practices and interactions as agents in the world. Instead of being
something that is central to any understanding ofthe human, the mental comes
to be seen as something derivative, a phenomenon that may appear on the scene
under certain conditions but is not necessarily crucial to making sense of the
human.
One risk of developing an anti-mentalist ontology of this sort is that one
might conclude from this critique that only physical substance is needed to
make sense of what we encounter in the world. But it is important to see that
Heidegger's critique ofsubstance ontology cuts against the idea of the physical
as well as the mental. According to his description of the everyday, practical
lifeworld, what we discover in our ordinary practical dealings is not a collection
of material objects occupying positions in a space-time coordinate system, but
contexts of equipment whose own way of being is more like an event than
a substance. The phenomenological description of activity in a workshop is
supposed to show that what we encounter around us in such dealings is ready­
to-hand equipment that "comes to hand" in our ways of handling the context
and doing things. What is "given" in such cases is an ongoing flux of activity
84 Charles Guignon

in which the being of equipmental entities is defined by the specific ways they
flow into our practical dealings within the context. We encounter a hammer,
for example, in its function of hammering, and this functionality is not just a
property we ascribe to a pre-given material thing, but instead is "ontologically
definitive" for the being of the hammer (116).
The upshot of this account, as Dreyfus has shown, is a conception of the
world as an unfolding field of relations that gains its significance and structure
from the undertakings of those who are at home there. Given this picture of the
worldhood of the world, the idea that the world consists "at first" of present­
at-hand physical things is seen as an "illusion" (421) that arises only when
there is a breakdown in our ordinary ways of being-in-the-world. Heidegger's
characterization of being-in-the-world undercuts the idea that we need to draw
a distinction between the inner and the outer in making sense of either human
phenomena or the familiar world in which we live. The twin ideas of a mental
and physical substance begin to look like high-level abstractions, the result of
imposing ideas derived from detached theorizing onto life rather than ideas
that actually arise within the course of life itself.

Earlier I suggested that Heidegger's critique of substance dualism might help

us resolve some of the puzzles built into the subjective/objective distinction in
moral philosophy. As we saw, this distinction provides the basis for thinking
that there is a sharp distinction between objective facts, on the one hand, and
subjective values, on the other. Of course, the fact/value distinction is usually
framed not in terms of the notion of substance, but as a point about the nature
of knowledge. But the issue is often described in terms of a distinction between
what is "in here;' in our minds, and what is "out there" in the world, and this
seems to presuppose a distinction very much like that presupposed by substance
dualism. It would seem, then, that Heidegger's attempt to describe human
existence in a way that undercuts this opposition would carry implications for
the traditional way of distinguishing facts and values.
We can start to see how Heidegger would deal with the subjective/objective
distinction by looking at his description of the worldhood of the world. In his
view, our most basic way of encountering the world is as a field of significance
in which entities show up as counting or mattering in specific ways in our un­
dertakings. What we encounter in hammering in a workshop is not a material
object we then invest with a use-value. Instead, when we are fully absorbed in
an everyday activity of this sort, what initially shows up for us is an unfold­
ing flow of functional relationships-an equipmental totality-in which the
 Heidegger's Anti-Dualism: Beyond Mind and Matter 85

"ontological definition" of the hammer is determined by the way it is ready-to­

hand in building something. Heidegger calls this holistic web of interrelations
that defines a lifeworld "significance" (120). What is "out there" in the world in
our most basic ways of being, on this account, is a field of significance relations
organized around the projects we are undertaking as agents in the world.
Heidegger takes great pains to show that this context of equipment should
not be regarded as something constructed or constituted by our minds. In
terms of his description of being-in-the-world, we ourselves, as agents in­
volved in these contexts, gain our own identity, and so become the humans we
are, through the medium of the world in which we find ourselves. In work­
ing in the woodshop, I can understand myself as a home craftsman or an
amateur, but not as a priest saying Mass. What this shows is that our own
being as agents is something that is defined and realized only through our
concrete ways of being involved in specific situations. Moreover, as we have
seen, our identities are made possible by the sets of interlocking and contrast­
ing roles that are laid out and sustained within our historical culture. Only
because of this web of relations can I be a teacher in relation to students or a
parent in relation to children and other parents. It follows that my concrete
ways of being as an agent are defined by the coordinated practices and forms
of life of the public world. This is why Heidegger says that "the they itself
articulates the referential context of significance" that makes up worldhood
(167).
Given this description of being-in-the-world, it would be wrong to suppose
that meanings and values only arise "in here;' in our minds. For we ourselves
are always already "outside" as participants in a shared we-world. Heidegger
calls our attention to the etymology of the word "existence"-literally, "stand­
ing outside" -in order to drive home the point that being human is never a
matter of being "in here," encapsulated in a subjective container, but is "always
already outside;' caught up in the midst of things in a shared world. What is
"bedrock;' on this description, is the meaning- and value-laden world we find
around us in everyday life. This familiar lifeworld is said to be more primordial
than the world posited by the natural sciences-where the term "more pri­
mordial" means that the objective world is derivative from and parasitic on the
lifeworld-whereas the "objective" world lacks the resources for accounting
for the possibility of the lifeworld.
Heidegger's description of human existence also has implications for our
understanding of what constitutes the most completely realized form of life
for humans, a way of life described as "authentic:' 9 This conception of an ideal
life is best understood by contrasting it with an inauthentic existence. Earlier
we saw that, in average everydayness, we generally live as participants in the
they, doing what one does as anyone would do such things. This tendency to
86 Charles Guignon

fall into step is not something accidental or unfortunate; on the contrary, it

first lets us be social beings with some grasp of what is possible in our world.
But Heidegger holds that this way of being a "they-self" can have pernicious
consequences. When we live as place-holders in the public world, we tend to
simply drift into socially defined slots, enacting the different roles we have to
play according to socially approved norms, and trusting we are living well so
long as we do what one does. The result is that our lives tend to be fragmented
and disjointed, a series of disconnected episodes with no underlying unity or
continuity. We then forget that the possibilities we are assuming in our lives
are just that: possibilities, not necessities or actualities. Living as a they-self, we
abrogate all responsibility for our lives and throw ourselves into the busy-ness
of rituals and chores, as if doing what "one" does could guarantee that we are
living properly.
Such a life, in Heidegger's terms, is "inauthentic:' The German word for
authentic, eigentlich, comes from the stem meaning "own;' so an inauthentic
life is one that is "unowned;' not really one's own. Why such a way of life is
unowned becomes clear only through facing up to one's own finitude--one's
being-toward-death. When we confront the fact that we are finite beings, that
we constantly face the possibility of no more possibilities, we can come to see
our own lives in a new way. Instead of drifting into possibilities and doing what
one does, we can begin to live in a way that is characterized by a lucid sense
that each of our actions is constituting our life stories as a whole, "from birth
to death;' and that we alone are responsible for what our lives amount to as a
totality.
Using a vocabulary Heidegger does not use, we might say that being authentic
points to certain character traits or virtues that contribute to achieving the
fullest realization of our ability-to-be as humans. These include such traits
as steadiness, integrity, clear-sightedness, intensity, and a unifying focus that
imparts continuity, cumulativeness and purpose to one's life. The idea that
such a life is worth pursuing is not, strictly speaking, entailed by Heidegger's
description of Dasein. A person might understand Heidegger's overall account
of human existence and still continue to be inauthentic without being guilty
of an error in logic. But, logical entailment aside, I think one can say that the
connection Heidegger makes between what human existence is and what it
ought to be is one that reflects the connections we actually do make in our
forms of practical reasoning. 10 Here, insight into facts about human existence
does seem to provide rational motivation for accepting evaluative judgments
about how we ought to live.
The conception of authentic existence has one further consequence for our
understanding of the evaluative dimension of life. In Heidegger's view, when
we recognize that all our possibilities of self-interpretation are drawn from
 Heidegger's Anti-Dualism: Beyond Mind and Matter 87

the historical culture in which we find ourselves, we will also gain a deeper
sense of our belongingness in and indebtedness to that historical context. We
experience the shared background into which we are thrown as a heritage we
need to take up and carry forward in the actions that make up our own lives.
A crucial component of authentic existence, then, is seeing one's own life story
as implicated in and contributing to the wider story of what Heidegger calls
the sending or destiny of a historical people. And to see this is to recognize that
authentic existence involves taking a stand on the concrete situation defined
by one's social world in order to realize the goals definitive of one's historical
culture. Authentic existence is a way of acting, not a way of thinking.
To conclude: I have tried to show how Heidegger's conception of human
existence as an event seems to collapse the distinction between subjective and
objective. In place of the traditional picture of subjects confronting a world of
brute, meaningless objects, we get a picture of life as an unfolding "happening"
that is enmeshed in a meaningful lifeworld and woven into a shared history. T he
ultimate justification for embracing this view depends, I suspect, on Heidegger's
ability to make good on his claim that his characterization of the world is "more
primordial" than the one we get from science and detached theorizing-a claim
I have not addressed here. But even without this justification, we can see how
Heidegger's critique of the substance ontology liberates us from the assumption
that the only way to answer the question of being is in terms of the substance
ontology. 11

Notes

1. "The Thinker as Poet," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter

(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 4.
2. In his lectures of 1919, Heidegger proposed that we think of the situations char­
acteristic of human life as "events" (Ereignisse), where the notion of an event is to be
distinguished from that of a process ( Vorgang). The description of a life situation sug­
gests that events and processes have different structures. A process is an occurrence
in the space-time coordinate system in which a cause brings about an outcome (ef­
fect). An event, in contrast, has both a meaning for someone and a complex narrative
structure in which an undertaking is brought to fruition through a coherent, inter­
connected flow of events. See "Uber das Wesen der Universitat und des akademischen
Studiums;' in Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 56/57 (Frankfurt
am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987), 205-6, translated as "On the Nature of the
University and Academic Study" in Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted
Sadler (London: Continuum, 2000), 173-74.
3. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row,
1962), 32. Hereafter cited in parentheses. Where Macquarrie and Robinson translate
the noun Sein as "Being;' I use the lower case "b" in all quotations.
88 Charles Guignon

4. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. W.

McNeil! and N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 67. Henceforth
cited parenthetically in the text as FCM.
5. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being
and Time," Division I (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991).
6. Medard Boss, ed., Zollikoner Seminare: Protokolle, Gesprache, Briefe (Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann, 1987), 118, quoted in Fred Dallmayr, Between Freiburg and
Frankfurt: Toward a Critical Ontology (Amherst: The University ofMassachusetts Press,
1991), 235. An English translation of the text Dallmayr cites is found in Zollikon
Seminars: Protocols-Conversations-Letters, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 91.
7. Ibid.
8. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), 139, my emphasis.
9. Though the discussion ofauthenticity in Being and Time is not limited to working
out a conception of an ideal way oflife, Heidegger does say that there is "a factical ideal
of Dasein" underlying his ontological interpretation of Dasein (358). Presumably, this
ideal can be discussed and evaluated on its own terms. See my "Becoming a Self: The Role
of Authenticity in Being and Time," in The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, ed. C. Guignon (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield,
2004): 119-32.
10. Robert Brandom argues against "the dogma of formalism" and in favor of con­
struing practical reasoning as involving "material inferences" in Making It Explicit:
Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni­
versity Press, 1994), 97-105.
11. My thanks to Steve Crowell and Richard Polt for help in formulating some of
the ideas found in this chapter.
 5
The Genesis of Theory, from
The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger,
Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory
William McNeill

T HIS CHAPTER EXAMINES THE PROBLEMATIC origins of the separation be­

tween the theoretical comportment of science-but also of philosophy it­
self, insofar as the latter (from Descartes, through the speculative metaphysics of
German Idealism, to Husserlian phenomenology) 1 itself becomes "scientific;'
severed from the immediacies of human praxis--and so-called "practical;' cir­
cumspective involvement as traced in Heidegger's Being and Time (1927). To
this end, we shall attempt to follow two different accounts of the genesis of
theoretical comportment. T he first appears to be merely a reworking of the
story of "natural genesis" that we find in Aristotle. The second concerns what
Heidegger himself terms the "existential genesis" of theoretical comportment,
a genesis which, as we shall examine, has its ultimate roots in the ecstatic tem­
porality of Dasein, or, more precisely, in the Temporality of being itself. 2 In
addition to raising hermeneutic concerns about the "scientific" and thema­
tizing aspirations of Being and Time itself (aspirations that Heidegger would
subsequently acknowledge as inappropriate), the present chapter also leads us
to examine Heidegger's early understanding of science as a thematizing objec­
tification of beings. Finally, this context provides the opportunity for an initial
orientation regarding the place of praxis in Being and Time.

89
90 William McNeill

The Natural Genesis of Theory

One account of the genesis of the foundation of philosophical and scientific

knowledge in the sense of theoretical contemplation is presented in§ 13 of Being
and Time, where Heidegger argues that knowledge in the sense of cognition
represents a founded mode of being-in-the-world. Heidegger also refers to the
cognitive knowledge (Erkennen) of world as an "existential 'modality' ofbeing­
in" (SZ 59). 3 Cognitive knowledge of world is here to be understood broadly as
the cognitive apprehending of intraworldly beings in their being, although the
clear distinction between world as constitutive of Dasein's being and "world"
in the sense of intraworldly beings will be made only in the following section.
Such knowledge, Heidegger goes on to point out, can develop autonomously
once it has emerged; it can become the specific undertaking of science, and
assume authority over Dasein's being-in-the-world (SZ 62).
Cognitive knowledge, in other words, although it is a form of theoretical
comportment, is not yet science; for one thing, it has yet to establish its own
procedure in terms of method, which would first grant it the requisite auton­
omy, distance, and independence from involvement with other beings in the
world, that is, from "praxis" in a broad sense. Heidegger's phenomenological
account, however, seeks to question the nature of the severing that would take
place at that very moment when theoretical comportment in the form of sci­
ence would establish its autonomy from such involvements. His reflections on
cognitive knowledge and its genesis are introduced, he explains, because cogni­
tive knowledge of the world is mostly or even exclusively taken to represent the
phenomenon of being-in. This is the case not merely in the epistemological ap­
proach of Erkenntnistheorie; rather, quite generally for the most part "practical
comportment is understood as' nontheoretical' or'atheoretical' comportment"
(SZ 59). Dasein's understanding of itself as being-in-the-world, Heidegger ar­
gues, is misled by its according such priority to cognitive knowledge.
Heidegger's interpretation of the genesis of cognitive knowledge is op­
posed to those models that seek to understand cognition as arising out of
the "transcendence" of an independently existing subject with respect to an
object. It aims, in effect, at attaining a more originary, phenomenologically
more adequate understanding of transcendence itself. It does so by arguing
that Dasein's modes of being, as ways of being-in-the-world, are ontologically
prior to any "transcendent" relation toward either a "subject" or an "object:'
For one thing, the way in which a being manifests itself to us in its phenomenal
appearing is determined in part by the manner of our comportment toward
it, that is, by a particular mode of our being in each specific case. A being or
"object" appears quite differently to us depending on whether we are involved
 The Genesis of Theory 91

with it in a process of producing something, or merely contemplating it free

from any involvement. Different again are the ways in which we encounter and
relate to another human being. This indicates that there is no such thing as
an object per se or an object in general, independent of its appearing. And the
same goes for the notion of a "subject." We as "subjects" appear very differently
to ourselves-we have a very different relation toward ourselves-depending
on whether we are actively involved in or given over to some task of making,
engaged in a relationship with other human beings, or merely reflecting on
ourselves by way of philosophical or scientific contemplation. Dasein in its
metaphysical "neutrality'' 4 is ontologically prior to any subject or object, in­
deed to any being or entity whatsoever, because it first constitutes the site of
our possible relationality toward any entity: the way in which Dasein exists co­
determines the way in which an entity is given to and for us; it co-determines
the kind of being that an entity has in each particular case. The being ofDasein,
that is, being-in-the-world, determines at least in part both what an entity is
for us (its whatness or essentia) and the way in which it is or appears in any
given instance (its existentia). Cognitive knowing, as one possible ontic relating
toward beings, is ontologically founded in being-in-the-world, in which be­
ings are first uncovered. And if there is indeed something like a transcendence
implied in every relationality toward something, then such transcendence,
Heidegger argues, demands to be understood not in terms of a "subject:' but in
terms of our ontologically prior being-in-the-world, that is, in terms ofDasein
as a "clearing" (Lichtung) or site of disclosure. Furthermore, these reflections
suggest that the world is not simply "nature" in the Kantian sense of the totality
of beings existing before us, as though they were independent objects given
for our cognition (SZ 60). Rather world must belong to transcendence itself;
indeed, Heidegger will later interpret it as the "horizon" of transcendence.
The analysis of cognitive knowing as a founded mode of being-in-the-world
is thus intended to point toward the unitary phenomenon of world and of
Dasein's transcendence as ontologically prior to any distinction between "the­
ory" and "praxis" -understanding the latter now in the broad sense of doing
and making, as opposed to theoretical contemplation. How does Heidegger's
initial, extremely condensed account of the genesis of cognitive knowledge
unfold?
Knowledge in its cognitive mode is said to have its prior grounding in our al­
ready being alongside or in the presence of ( bet) the world, which does not sim­
ply mean a "fixed staring" at something purely present-at-hand. Being-in-the­
world is initially a kind of concern, where concern ( Besorgen) does not refer to
the economic or "practical" activities of Dasein, but is employed as an ontolog­
ical term to designate a particular way of being-in-the-world (SZ 57). Broadly
92 William McNeill

speaking, Besorgen refers to any mode of comportment concerned primar­

ily with "things:' In its concernful existence, Dasein, according to Heidegger,
is "captivated by the world of its concern" (SZ 61). And this kind of captiva­
tion belongs intrinsically to our involvement. In order for cognitive knowledge
to be possible as a "contemplative determining of what is present-at-hand;'
there must first be what Heidegger refers to as a "deficiency" of our concern­
ful involvement. In our holding back from our involvement in producing and
manipulating things, concern transposes itself into the sole remaining mode
of being-in, a mere tarrying alongside (Verweilen bei). It is on the basisof this
kind of ontological relation to world, Heidegger explains, that we can then en­
counter intraworldly beings simply in their pure look (Aussehen) or eidos, and
explicitly view or look at them as such. Such mere looking at beings (Hinsehen)
is a mode of being-in-the-world; indeed, it remains a mode of concern, albeit
a "deficient" one. Moreover, as a looking at, it always entails a particular way
of taking up an orientation toward something, a "setting our sights upon"
whatever is present-at-hand. This directionality or orientation of vision occurs
prior to our encountering beings as this or that; it takes over a "viewpoint"
( Gesichtspunkt) in advance from the beings it encounters (SZ 61). We see be­
ings always already in this or that respect.
Dasein's vision must thus be oriented in advance in terms of the particular
"viewpoint" it looks at and the perspective it adopts toward things. In the case of
merely looking at things, our seeing must have a prior directive to contemplate
those beings solely in terms of their outward appearance or eidos, and not,
for example, in terms of the end that these beings are to serve in a process of
making. In "merely looking" at a hammer with respect to its form or shape,
its purpose remains irrelevant. The way in which we see particular beings is
in general dependent upon the end at which our seeing aims in advance. In
the specific case of making or producing something, the end or perspective in
terms of which we see things is the final product or work itself, the ergon as telos
of the productive process. Yet as telos, our vision of the work to be produced is
also arche, in the sense that such vision orients and regulates the entire activity
of production in advance. In techne, that is, in the specific knowledge that
guides the involved process of making or producing something, this end or
purpose must also be taken up into, or taken account of in, our prior "seeing."
For Plato and Aristotle, this antecedent seeing, this prior "vision;' is of course
the nonsensible eidos or idea sighted in the soul of the craftsman, the idea
contemplated by the "eye of the soul:' The thrust of Heidegger's argument in
§ 13 seems to be that because that activity which appears to be a nonproductive,
disinvolved contemplation of things nevertheless still contemplates objects in
terms of their eidos, such contemplation remains derivative, dependent upon
the kind of knowing pertaining to productive comportment. It appears to take
 The Genesis of Theory 93

as its model a key moment of productive knowledge or techne: the antecedent

sighting ( theorein) of the eidos. Furthermore, the question arises as to whether
this allegedly "disinvolved" contemplation is really as disinvolved as it tends
to claim. Is it not also guided in advance by a specific end, a certain purpose
and ideal? Its end is precisely that prescribed and made possible by the kind of
seeing intrinsic to techne: the releasing or freeing (Freigabe) of an entity into
an independent self-subsistence, a lying present-at-hand before us. The pure
contemplation of things would thus be merely a mode ofconcern, the extraction
of the theoretical moment within techne, and in its essence no different from the
latter. What we think of as "theoretical" contemplation, cognitive knowledge,
would in essence be no different from productive comportment.
Heidegger proceeds to outline, very concisely, how such pure contem­
plation of something can in turn establish itself as an independent or au­
tonomous way of being-in-the-world. Looking at things can become an in­
dependent way of dwelling alongside beings in the world. In such dwelling,
which is a holding back from manipulation or utilization, there occurs an
apprehending of what is present-at-hand. Such apprehending occurs by way
of addressing and discussing something as something. It is a way of inter­
preting things that allows us to determine them as this or that, and the re­
sulting interpretations can be retained and preserved in sets of assertions. In
short, science becomes possible as one particular development of theoretical
apprehending.
It seems clear that Heidegger is here presenting us with a concise account
of the genesis of theoretical comportment. It is not so easy, however, to assess
what status this account is intended to have; in particular, what its implications
are for the Aristotelian distinctions between theoria, praxis, and poiesis. One
temptation would be to read the passage as an attempt to reverse the prioritizing
of "theory" over "praxis:' Theory would merely be a founded mode of praxis.
Such a reading might indeed seem to be suggested by the closing paragraph of
§12, where Heidegger indicates that the traditional "priority" of the cognitive
mode of knowledge has led to practical comportment being understood as
nontheoretical, that is, still in terms of theory as primary. Heidegger's account
might thus be seen as undermining such primacy by instituting a reversal.
However, this reading would not only leave intact the same oppositional struc­
ture; it would also overlook Heidegger's insistence that concern (Besorgen)
is not equivalent to "practical" activity, even if we take the term "practical"
in a broad sense that encompasses both doing and making. Theoretical con­
templation is also a mode of concern. Furthermore, the exemplary mode of
concern discussed here is certainly not praxis in the narrow (ethico-political)
sense understood by Aristotle, namely, that of doing as opposed to making, but
Herstellen, "producing," Hantieren, "manipulating" or "handling" things, "and
94 William McNeill

so on" (SZ 61). In Aristotle's terms, the know-how pertaining to such modes
of comportment is techne, not the phronesis of praxis. What seems dear from
these considerations is that Heidegger, while emphasizing the way in which
theoretical contemplation emerges within the context of a worldly involve­
ment with things, and specifically with producing or making, is not indicating
any ontological order of founding with respect to these two modes. The ini­
tial goal is to make both forms of comportment visible as modes of worldly
concern.
Given these preliminary considerations, what does Heidegger's account of
cognitive knowledge as a founded mode ultimately tell us? It tells us nothing.
Nothing, that is, concerning the ontological genesis of cognition or theoretical
comportment. What it provides is merely an account of the onticgenesis of cog­
nitive knowledge. If cognitive knowledge is grounded in concern in the broad
sense of a worldly comportment with things, then such concern must, as prior
to any differentiation into particular modes, first be understood by the analytic
in terms of being-in-the-world as the a priori, existential-ontological consti­
tution of Dasein. It demands to be understood in terms ofDasein's being as a
transcendence that first makes possible all such comportment. Thus Heidegger,
pointing to what is implicit in even the most provisional thematizing of the
phenomenon of cognition, reminds us that "Cognitive knowledge is a mode
of being ofDasein as being-in-the-world, it has its ontic founding in this onto­
logical constitution" (SZ 61, emphasis added).
If, therefore, cognitive knowledge of world is announced in the title of§ 13 as
a "founded mode;' then the founding at issue is ontic, and, as the title indicates,
merely intended to "exemplify" or provide an illustration ofDasein's being-in.
Indeed, so little does this account clarify the ontological genesis of cognitive or
theoretical knowledge that it seems to accord entirely with Aristotle's account of
the genesis of knowledge as presented in Book I of the Metaphysic�to accord,
in other words, with that account of the genesis of theoretical comportment
which Heidegger in the 1924/ 1925 Sophist course described as arising from
the "natural" or everyday understanding and interpretive tendency inherent in
Greek existence (GA 19, 65ff.): theoretical contemplation began when human
beings had leisure (scholazein, diagoge), when the necessities of life had been
fulfilled (Met., 981 b21f., 982 b24f.). Just as Heidegger in the Sophist course
translates diagoge as (among other things) Verweilen, "tarrying" (GA 19, 68),
so too in § 13 of Being and Time the word Verweilen characterizes freedom from
involvement in producing and manipulating things.
Ontologically, Heidegger's account here clarifies nothing. At most, it serves
to point toward the ontological dimension of being-in-the-world or originary
transcendence in terms of which the ontological problematic of the genesis
of theoria can first be raised in a phenomenologically appropriate manner. In
 The Genesis of Theory 95

particular, we should note that the account has given no indication as to why
precisely contemplation of the eidos came to serve as the exemplary model
for a thinking associated with leisure or tarrying alongside things. Heidegger
points more explicitly to this question in a later note added to his text, precisely
where the account might seem to offer an explanation of how a contempla­
tive looking at something in terms of its eidos can arise. This marginal note
reads:

Looking away from ... does not in itself give rise to looking at.... Looking at ...
has its own origin and has such looking away as its consequence; contemplation
[Betrachten] has its own origination. The look at the eidos demands something
else. (SZ 61 n. a) 5

What this "something else" is whereby contemplation originates is an

existential-ontological question that cannot yet be raised in this preliminary
context of the analytic of Dasein. Yet our remarks on the genesis of theoretical
knowledge in the Sophist course already suggest that the answer has to do not
only with the fact that the primacy of vision in Greek thought is indicative of a
desire for enduring presence, but-and perhaps more importantly-that it has
just as much to do with the possibility of independence (Eigensti:indigkeit) and
self-subsistence, in particular, with the possibility of establishing a freedom
and independence from immediate involvement and from all the absorption
and captivation that such involvement entails.

Dispersions of Vision: Theory, Praxis, Techne

Our account thus far suggests that both theoretical contemplation and making
or producing are to be understood as modes of a particular comportment of
Dasein which Heidegger names Besorgen. Besorgen, or "concern;' does not
therefore refer to "praxis" in the loose sense (doing and/or making), as opposed
to "theory:' Nor does it refer exclusively to making or poiesis. 6 It does, however,
as we noted, refer to a broad sense of comportment that is primarily concerned
with "things." But what exactly does the term "things" include? The possible
objects of Besorgen are not just any entities regarded in whatever way.
Heidegger addresses this issue in a provisional manner in §15 of Being and
Time when discussing which beings we should consider in attempting to make
visible Dasein's everyday being-in-the-world. The beings we encounter within
the world are generally "things." Yet Heidegger warns that if we understand
things to be defined by their substantiality, materiality, or the extrinsic value
they have, we may be led astray ontologically. Such ontological determinations
only conceal our preontological understanding of these seemingly most
96 William McNeill

proximate beings of our everyday concern. At this point Heidegger notes that
the Greeks indeed had an appropriate term for "things":

The Greeks had an appropriate term for "things": pragmata, that is to say, that
which one has to do with in one's concernful dealings (praxis). But ontologically,
the specifically "pragmatic" character of the pragmata is precisely what the Greeks
left in obscurity; they thought of them "proximally" as "mere things." We shall
call those beings which we encounter in concern equipment [Zeug]. (SZ 68)

Praxis is here translated as besorgender Umgang, "concernful dealings:' But does

this mean that we should equate Besorgen with praxis in the narrow Aristotelian
sense? Clearly not, for Aristotle's more narrow conception of praxis belongs to
the realm of ethico-political affairs, concerned primarily with human beings
and not with "things." Yet perhaps it does indeed fall under the more general,
less "technical" sense of praxis that was prevalent in Greek thought, and which
is also found in Aristotle. Praxis in this more general sense could include doing
(in the ethico-political sense), making, or even contemplating: in this sense,
any human activity is a praxis. "Things" or pragmata, Heidegger would later
note in another context, can indeed refer to this more encompassing sense of
"praxis taken in a truly wide sense, neither in the narrow meaning of practical
use (cf. chresthai), nor in the sense of praxis as moral action: praxis is all doing,
undertaking, and sustaining, which also includes poiesis:' 7
Yet why does Heidegger say that pragmata, referring to the "objects" ofpraxis,
is an "appropriate term" for "things"? The reason is presumably that such be­
ings demand to be understood ontologically from out ofpraxis itself (and this
means in terms of their properly worldly character), and not as independently
subsisting entities, initially devoid of any worldly character. However this, it
seems, is precisely what the Greeks did not accomplish. 8 They left the "prag­
matic" or praxis-like character of these things ontologically obscure. And this,
by implication, because they failed to achieve a sufficiently originary, onto­
logical understanding of praxis in all its moments. As is now well-known in
the light of the publication of the Marburg lecture courses from the period of
Being and Time, this inadequate interpretation of the ontological character of
"things," and by implication of praxis itself, occurred, on Heidegger's reading,
due to the ascendancy of a "technical" way of thinking about things, one that,
deriving from the experience of craftsmanship, came to understand "things" in
terms of the theoria deriving from techne, while (most rigorously in Aristotle)
reserving praxis and its specific kind of knowledge (phronesis) for the realm of
human ethico-political affairs. 9 This derivation is corroborated by a marginal
note that Heidegger subsequently added to the expression "mere things":

Why? eidos--morphe-hule! coming from techne, thus an "artisan" [ kunstlerische]

interpretation! if morphe not [interpreted] as eidos, [then as] idea!
 The Genesis of Theory 97

If the objects of praxis or concernful activity were understood as "mere things;'

this occurred, on Heidegger's account, because they were viewed essentially as
though they were material ( hule) to be worked upon by a craftsman. Material,
as a natural resource of techne, came to be regarded as mere material, yet to
be given shape and form (morphe) by the craftsman who in advance sights
the eidos or visible look of the thing to be produced. Things thus come to be
seen as "mere" things: the thing is only fully a thing when it has achieved its
telos ( the stamp of its eidos) as the completion of its form. Taken in itself, the
thing is deficient with regard to its proper form, yet to be bestowed by human
intervention.
But of course, this telos or end is not, properly speaking, the ultimate end of
the material product or "thing." Once produced, the product is there to be acted
upon again; it once more becomes subservient to human praxis. As Aristotle
notes, the end of poiesis is praxis (Nie. Eth. 1139 bl). Subservient to the end
of human praxis, the product is ontologically incomplete or underdetermined
when considered independently of such praxis. For every human product is
made for something; it finds its end in the realm of human affairs. In its very
being, a product of human making is something that exists for some further
human activity. Its way of being is constituted by an "in order to ... " Taken
in itself, however, it can be viewed as a mere thing to be acted upon. This view of
the object of praxis, the pragma, as a "mere" thing results from a technical inter­
pretation or way of thinking that views things in respect of their self-subsistence
as something present-at-hand. 10 Yet this also implies that the praxislpoiesis
distinction itself, when applied in too absolute a manner, lies at the root of a
reductive understanding of "things." It is only because the praxis-like dimen­
sion of the making or producing, and indeed also of the theoria inherent in
techne, is overlooked or eclipsed that the "thing" can be seen as having in itself
no worldly or praxis-like character, and that this very seeing or theorein can like­
wise disregard its own embeddedness in human praxis, become "unworldly:'
A more originary interpretation of praxis-but also, presumably, of theo­
ria and techne-is thus called for, one that remains attentive to the properly
worldly character of all involvements. And this entails an interpretation of
what, in general, being-in-the-world (or "Dasein") means. The phenomenon
of concern, or Besorgen, will thus have to be understood in terms of its ontolog­
ical rootedness in being-in-the-world, in transcendence, in Dasein's originary
being as care and as temporality. In Being and Time, Heidegger initially seeks
to resist a merely technical-theoretical interpretation of things by focusing on
things as equipment, in their readiness-to-hand, intrinsically constituted by an
"in order to" or purpose and thus, in their being, referred to the ontological
realm of Dasein, of the being that we ourselves in each case are. Such readiness­
to-hand (Zuhandenheit), as the analysis clarifies, and not presence-at-hand
(Vorhandenheit), constitutes the manner of being that such "things" properly
98 William McNeill

have in themselves (SZ 71, 75). This of course might be taken as a merely
"subjective" interpretation of the being of independent entities, whose proper
independence science would respect more carefully via the supposed neutrality
ofits theoretical vision that observes and contemplates things as self-subsistent
in their "objective" presence-at-hand. Yet such an objection presupposes hu­
man praxis to be a realm of merely subjective activity, belonging to and under
the control of individual human beings as subjects, and subsequently extended
ontologically to include other things within it. In this perspective readiness-to­
hand appears as a mere "aspect" ascribed by human "cognition" to things that
already exist independently of any relation to us (SZ 71). Being and Time, by
contrast, opens itselfto the possibility that "human activity" or praxis, properly
understood, is not merely human at all in the modern subjectivist sense, but a
kind of activity that demands to be understood more originarily in terms of the
worldly disclosure of being that occurs in each case as a mode ofbeing-in-the­
world, or Dasein. The primacy of this disclosive relation to world is indicated
in §16 when Heidegger shows that the being of things in their readiness-to­
hand presupposes a certain "nonthematic" presence ofworld, a presence which,
from the perspective of the supposedly pure presence-at-hand disclosed by the
theoretical gaze, is rather an absence or withdrawal of world. The proper be­
ing of equipment, its readiness-to-hand, is graspable "only on the basis of the
phenomenon of world" (SZ 75-76).
This nonthematic presence of world in its absence belongs intrinsically to
our "circumspective" concern with and absorption in our worldly involvements
with things. It occurs in and amid the circumspection (Umsicht) that guides
our understanding of our involvement with things. For all understanding,
Heidegger will emphasize, is intrinsically constituted by "seeing" (Sicht) as
a primary manner of access to beings in their being. Likewise, all Dasein's
seeing or sighting of things in their being is intrinsically an understanding.
But not all seeing is theoretical or thematic. We have already noted Heidegger's
argument that concern in the sense of equipmental involvement cannot be
thought adequately in terms of theoretical or cognitive knowledge. In §15 he
underlines the point in the following way:

Just looking at the particular qualities of the "outward appearance" of things,

however sharply we look, is incapable of discovering anything ready-to-hand.
The gaze of the merely "theoretical" look at things is deprived of any understand­
ing of readiness-to-hand. Yet our dealing with things by manipulating them and
using them is not blind; it has its own kind of vision, by which our manipulation
is guided and imparted its specific thingly character. 11 Our dealing with equip­
ment subordinates itself to the manifold assignments of the "in order to:' The
vision [ Sicht] with which it thus accommodates itself is circumspection [Umsicht].
(SZ 69)
 The Genesis of Theory 99

Circumspection, the seeing specific to equipmental involvements, should not,

therefore, be analysed on the basis of theorein, or starting from a theoretical
perspective on things, but must be seen phenomenologically, in its own right.
Theoretical and circumspective seeing, although both are ways of seeing as well
as modes of concern in the sense indicated, should not be confused with one
another. Yet nor, Heidegger continues, may they be understood by imposing
the traditional, yet ill-defined opposition of "theory" and "praxis":

"Practical" comportment is not "atheoretical" in the sense of being sightless, and

its difference from theoretical comportment is not simply due to the fact that in
theoretical comportment one contemplates, while in practical comportment one
acts, and that action must apply theoretical cognition [Erkennen] if it is not to
remain blind; for just as contemplation is originarily a kind of concern, so too
action has its vision. Theoretical comportment is a noncircumspective merely
looking at things. But the fact that this looking is noncircumspective does not
mean that it follows no rules: it constructs a canon for itself in the form of method.
(SZ 69)

As we have noted, the fact that Dasein's theoretical comportment is noncir­

cumspective does not preclude the possibility that it is a (ontically) founded
or derivative mode of circumspective concern. Contemplation, as noncircum­
spective, remains a kind ofconcern. Heidegger therefore seeks to emphasize that
one should not view "theoretical" and "practical" comportment as mutually
exclusive ways of being that reciprocally supplement one another. Theoreti­
cal comportment is itself a form of acting, of comportment, just as practical
comportment (or "action" in a broad sense) is also a seeing, indeed one that
does not first need "theory" to inform it. Is not the kind of interpretation that
posits "theory" and "practice" as existing independently of one another and
then subsequently entering into a relation of hierarchy or supplementarity
itself already the result of a theoretical perspective?
Heidegger's point, then, is not that there is no difference between theoretical
and circumspective comportment, between "theory" and "practice:' Quite to
the contrary. His point is simply that this difference must be understood in
terms of its unitary ground, as a distinction between different modes of ( con­
cernful) being-in-the-world, different ways of uncovering beings within the
world. Another way of putting this, in more temporal terms, is to say that the
difference between these different modes of comportment is not a difference
that simply obtains within the horizon of an already existing presence. Rather,
such difference occurs as a disclosive, intrinsically differential and finite hap­
pening in which the disclosure of world itself is at play. But what exactly is
"world"? What is the strange presence-in-absence of world that marks the very
difference or differentiation between circumspective and theoretical seeing?
100 William McNeil!

Before approaching the answers to such questions, we must attempt to clar­

ify further what is being asked. Heidegger indicates that the difference be­
tween these different modes ofconcern, namely, theoretical and circumspective
comportment, is to be understood phenomenologically in terms of dispersion
( Zerstreuung):

With Dasein's facticity, its being-in-the-world has in each case already dispersed
or even split itself into particular ways of being-in (SZ 56-57).

Our dealings have already dispersed themselves into a multiplicity of ways of

concern. The kind ofdealing that is closest to us is, as we have shown, not a merely
cognitive apprehending, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things
and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of" cognition" [ Erkenntnis]. ( SZ 67)

Circumspection and theoretical contemplation are dispersed, already differen­

tiated ways of concern. This dispersion is not only factical, but also historical,
that is, it occurs as the concrete enactment of certain interpretations of the
being of beings. From the point of view of the analytic, however, the difficulty
remains of how to access Dasein's being prior to such dispersion. In terms of
what can we recognize such dispersion as dispersion? The analytic of Dasein
aims to uncover the originary being of Dasein which, far from being reducible
to any of these dispersed modes, would constitute the ground on which they
could first be understood as such. These dispersed modes of Dasein's being,
as ways of concern, of Besorgen (but also of "solicitude;' Fursorge) that unfold
factically as specific ways of relating to beings, will be understood more origi­
narily on the ground ofDasein's being as care (Sorge). But in what sense does
"care" constitute a "ground" of being-in-the-world? And in what sense is such
a ground to be conceived as "unitary"?
It is important to understand that this is not an instance of positing the One
as the ground of the Many in a manner which we find throughout the history
of philosophy. Ground and its unity here, in the analytic of Dasein, are not
opposed to or set over against dispersion; and such dispersion is not posited as
something that could or should be overcome. Traditionally, ground is under­
stood philosophically as that which already is, that which is most constantly
present, that which already underlies a possible multiplicity of ( temporally or
contingently dependent) determinations: in Aristotle, it is to ti en einai, "that
which already is (has been) in being"; it is primary ousia or "substance"; and
the same understanding of being is employed in Aristotle's understanding of
the "soul" (psuche) 12 -notwithstanding the fact that the human soul is also
an arche of praxis, an arche determined as hou heneka, an "origin" that can
freely relate to and anticipate itself, its own being, as its end. This end of the
human soul, of human being as such, itself tends-with the ascendency of
 The Genesis of Theory 101

theoretical contemplation-to be understood as an already existing, already

present ground (nous), a ground that "always" already endures and needs
only the act of theoretical contemplation to come into its own (authentic)
being, into its ownmost ergon, its ownmost self-enactment and end (en-ergeia,
entelecheia), its ownmost self-presence. The being of the "self" thus tends to
be understood already in Aristotle, and henceforth in the history of philoso­
phy, as an already present ground. The understanding of the soul in Aristotle
is of course not at all identical to the determination of the self in modern
subjectivity: The Aristotelian "soul" comes into its ownmost being not by a
reflective intuiting ofitself as the ground of thinking, as in Descartes-a think­
ing that then relates all worldly beings back to itself as their unitary ground
whose temporal self-oblivion and fallibility is made good by the Christian
Creator-God-but rather by its contemplation of the divine presence of the
world itself. And yet there is a certain sameness and continuity here from
Aristotle to modernity in the determination of true being by way of theoria.
By contrast to this traditional understanding of ground, the analytic of
Dasein does not conceive of the unitary ground of Dasein's being-its being­
a-self as being-in-the-world-as an already existing or already present, a priori
ground that transcends temporal determination or is attained contemplatively
in transcending the temporal and finite. Rather, the unitary ground of Dasein's
being, as transcendence, is itselfshown to be intrinsically temporal, factical, and
historical. In other words, transcendence, as the originary ground of Dasein's
being, is not a transcendence of (in the sense of exceeding or going beyond)
dispersion, but a transcendence already in dispersion. Transcendence and dis­
persion, ground and multiplicity, are not mutually exclusive, precisely when
Dasein's being is seen as praxis and not conceived in a theoretical or specula­
tive manner. But praxis in this sense is to be conceived in a broad sense, more
originarily than in the narrow Aristotelian sense of ethico-political praxis that
tends to oppose such praxis to theoria (as well as to poiesis). Theoretical con­
templation, as a mode of dispersion, is already a praxis: a kind of concern,
grounded in Dasein's own being as care. And here we can already discern the
overall thrust of the analytic of Dasein compared to Aristotle's understanding
of human existence, namely, to problematize the privileging of theoria and of
presence in the Greek understanding of existence by giving priority to the fini­
tude ofDasein's existence as praxis, yet in a manner that does not simply oppose
this level of praxis to theoria, but interprets its intrinsic temporality in a more
radical sense than that allowed by merely contrasting it with the theoretical
disclosure of time and presence in terms of the "now" (nun) and the "eternal"
(aei). The authentic disclosure of the presence pertaining to Dasein's existence
will be granted by the Augenblick, the glance of the eye of a finite temporality,
and not of a theoretical transcendence.
102 William McNeill

How, then, can we access Dasein's being as an originary and unitary ground
of all its dispersed modes of comportment, including theoretical and circum­
spective? It should now be clear that what is entailed in this task is not to access
Dasein's being prior to its dispersion, as we expressed it above. The task, rather,
is to access it-to let it be seen beyond, or even in, its self-concealment-in
and amid such dispersion, in the finite temporality of this very dispersion.
Dasein's transcendence in dispersion is unitary in the manner of its tempo­
ralizing, and not as a prior, already existing ground. In already being dis­
persed into (being "alongside" [ bei] and involved in) one possibility ofconcern,
Dasein is also presented (as already being in-the-world) with other possibilities,
which it holds "present;' and it maintains itself in an openness (ahead of itself)
for other possibilities of its being that have yet to emerge. This already being
presented with and holding itself open for other possibilities (other possible
modes of comportment and dispersion) is not closed off by Dasein's existing in
dispersion, but as a primordial or originary way of being, is already maintained
as such in and throughout all factical existing.
Yet what manner of access is appropriate to this originary and unitary phe­
nomenon of Dasein's being as care? What kind of phenomenological "seeing"
will disclose Dasein's being as such even in its dispersion? What is required,
according to Heidegger, is a "unitary phenomenological look" at Dasein's be­
ing as a whole, a "complete look through" the whole of Dasein's being in all its
structural (ultimately temporal) moments. And this can be neither the kind of
theoretical or circumspective looking that remain directed toward beings (as
present-at-hand or in their readiness-to-hand) but not toward being; nor can it
be an "immanent perceiving of experiences:' which likewise remains oriented
toward that which is merely present. It must, rather, be a seeing intrinsic to "one
ofthe most far-reachingand most originarypossibilities ofdisclosure," a mode of
disclosure lying in Dasein itself (albeit for the most part dormant), namely, the
fundamental attunement of Angst which discloses being-in-the-world as such
(SZ 180-82). The seeing intrinsic to this manner of disclosure will subsequently
be interpreted as the phenomenon of the Augenblick. Yet is not the disclosure
granted by the Augenblick, which grounds and informs the entire analytic of
Dasein, itself in a certain tension with the proposed phenomenological nature
of the investigation? For phenomenology, Heidegger has indicated, is "pri­
marily a concept of method" (SZ 27). And as such it is science (Wissenschaft):
"science of the being of beings-ontology " (SZ 37). Its task is to make being as
such, and initially the being ofDasein, explicit or thematic. Yet are the scientific
and thematizing aspirations of such phenomenology ultimately appropriate to
disclosing the being of Dasein? Are they not remnants of the theoretical desire,
itself already in dispersion, and requiring the construction of method in order
to guide it?
 The Genesis of Theory 103

For the moment, we shall merely leave these as questions. The present section
has served to indicate the centrality of the unitary problem of transcendence
and world for understanding the status of theoretical comportment in Being
and Time. The issue of the temporal finitude of Dasein's being, as a being-in­
dispersion, will prove crucial to the problem of accounting thematically for the
ontological genesis of theoretical comportment.

Notes

1. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche represent the most notable rebellions against this
scientific-speculative aspiration of philosophy, although in ways that, from a
Heideggerian perspective, do not adequately fathom the historical determination of
metaphysics. On Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, see William McNeill, The Glance of
the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany: SUNY, 1999), part 3.
2. The existential genesis of theory is not discussed in this selection. See McNeill,
The Glance of the Eye, 72-80.
3. SZ will refer to Sein und Zeit (Halle: Niemeyer, 1927). Where reference is made to
marginalia, I have used Sein und Zeit, 15th ed. (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1979). Translations
from Sein und Zeit are my own.
4. On the metaphysical neutrality ofDasein, see Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foun­
dations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984),
l 36ff. For a discussion of this neutrality, see Jacques Derrida, "Geschlecht: Sexual Dif­
ference, Ontological Difference," trans. R. Berezdivin, in A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy
Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). See also our remarks in "Care
for the Self: Originary Ethics in Heidegger and Foucault;' Philosophy Today 42, no. 1/4
(1998): 53-64.
5. The German Betrachten may be translated as either "contemplation" or "obser­
vation." For our purposes here, the two may be taken as equivalent, and as referring to
"theoretical" seeing. In part 2 of The Glance of the Eye, we show that such "theory" is
still understood in too general a sense that has yet to be more historically specified.
6. Jacques Taminiaux is overly restrictive in aligning Dasein's everyday comport­
ment and understanding with poiesis as opposed to praxis, and in suggesting that
Dasein's circumspective seeing "has no eye for Dasein itself" (n'a pas d'yeux pour le
Dasein lui-meme). See Jacques Taminiaux, Lectures de l'ontologie fondamentale
(Grenoble: Millon, 1989), 157. Cf. Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project ofFundamental
Ontology, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: SUNY, 1991), 118. A complete blindness to
one's own being would be just as phenomenologically incomprehensible as a complete
severing of poiesis from praxis.
7. What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry
Regnery, 1968), 70. This point is noted by Robert Bernasconi in "The Fate of the
Distinction between Praxis and Poiesis;' in Heidegger in Question (Atlantic Highlands,
N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993), 7. The same point is made by Heidegger in Introduction to
104 William McNeill

Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000}, 61. Cf. also Einfuhrung in die phiinomenologische Forschung, Gesamtausgabe,
vol. 17 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994}, 45.
8. Heidegger does not clarify precisely who these "Greeks" are, but it should be
evident-as we shall explain in a moment-that Plato and Aristotle are intended pri­
marily.
9. On the derivation of this "technical" understanding of things, see in particular
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1982), 106ff. See also Taminiaux's commentary in Heidegger and the
Project of Fundamental Ontology, 83ff.
10. T he nature of this reduction of the thing would later be considered in greater
detail by Heidegger, and specifically in the context of techne, in "The Origin of the
Work of Art" (1936}, in Off the Beaten Track, ed. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See part 1 of the essay, "The Thing
and the Work."
11. Here we follow the first edition. Later editions have Sicherheit, "security;' in place
of Dinghaftigkeit, "thingly character."
12. See DeAnima, 412aff.
 6
Being-with, Dasein-with, and the
"They" as the Basic Concept of
Unfreedom, from Martin Heidegger:
Phanomenologie der Freiheit
Gunter Figal

Being-with and Dasein-with

Given that Heidegger is initially concerned with the inexplicitness of being­

with-one-another, it should come as no surprise that he begins his analysis
with the question of how others are "also encountered" in Dasein's everyday
association with useful things.

The "description" of the surrounding world nearest to us, for example, the work­
world of the handworker, showed that together with the useful things found
in work, others are "also encountered" for whom the "work" is to be done. In
the kind of being of these things at hand, that is, in their relevance, there lies an
essential reference to possible wearers for whom they should be "cut to the figure."
Similarly, the producer or "supplier" is encountered in the material used as one
who "serves" well or badly. The field, for example, along which we walk "outside"
shows itself as belonging to such and such a person who keeps it in good order,
the book which we use is bought at such and such a place, given by such and such
a person, and so on. 1

Here it first seems as though others are simply "appresented" through useful
things, which are what is primarily discovered, and thus as though the funda­
mental difference between beings that do not have Dasein's way of being and

105
106 Gunter Figal

being-with is becoming blurred. 2 Heidegger himself anticipates this and states

the following objection:

But our characterization of encountering the others is, then, after all, oriented
towards one's own Da-sein. Does not it, too, start with the distinction and isolation
of the "I;' so that a transition from the isolated subject to the others must then be
sought? (SZ 118, BT 111, translation modified)

But for Heidegger this supposition is a misunderstanding, and as he continues,

In order to avoid this misunderstanding, we must observe in what sense we

are talking about "the others." "The others" does not mean everybody else but
me-those from whom the "I" distinguishes itself. They are, rather, those from
whom one mostly does not distinguish oneself, those among whom one is, too.
This being-there-too with them does not have the ontological character of being
objectively present "with" them within a world. The "with" is of the character of
Da-sein, the "also" means the sameness of being as circumspect, heedful being­
in-the-world. (SZ 118, BT 111)

We can easily understand what Heidegger means here if we avoid the term
"relevance" and, in keeping with the examples he cites, simply say that every
production of something takes place with a view toward its possible use. As a
norm, such use is use by others. It is true that all behavior is "for the sake of"
one's own Dasein in the sense that one wants to be one's receptivity for the
openness of beings in a definite way; but a series of activities can still only be
performed because there are others for whom those activities are meaningful.
Others are in turn defined by their activities, so that Dasein as being-with is
"essentially for the sake of others" (SZ 123, BT 116). One is oneself an other,
insofar as one makes possible through one's own actions the actions of others.
Talk of "others" makes sense only from the first-person perspective, and this
perspective characterizes everyone with whom one is.
Accordingly, "being-with" means, for one, that each of us in our everyday
taking care is referred by others and their taking care to the totality of useful
things in which we operate-and when we use the term "reference" here, this
implies that others remain "initially and for the most part" inexplicit. For
instance, the supplier of materials does not generally call attention to himself
per se. Now of course this does not mean that others are altogether disregarded;
instead, they remain inexplicit from the standpoint of taking care as long as
taking care remains unproblematic. Yet "being-with" does not just mean being
referred to one's own work by those who deliver the material for it or who
assign the job to get done. It also means that those things that do not belong
to one's "workworld" can be grasped as useful things. Heidegger indicates this
 Being-with, Dasein-with, and the "They" 107

with another example of how others are "also encountered" with useful things:
"The boat anchored at the shore refers in its being-in-itself to an acquaintance
who undertakes his voyages with it; but even as a 'boat strange to us; it points
to others" ( SZ 118, BT 111, translation modified). The reference here does not
consist in how, say, we explicitly occupy ourselves with the owner or user of the
boat, but in how others' possible association with it makes the boat intelligible
in its handiness; we do not have to deal with something ourselves to know it is
a useful thing, for there are always already others who are able to deal with it
in this manner.
Although we can say that others are initially and for the most part inexplicit,
we must also say that they have been freed:

The world of Da-sein thus frees beings which are not only completely different
from tools and things, but which themselves in accordance with their kind of being
as Da-sein are themselves "in" the world as being-in-the-world in which they are
at the same time encountered. These beings are neither objectively present nor at
hand, but they are like the very Da-sein which frees them-they are there, too, and
there with it. So, if one wanted to identify the world in general with innerworldly
beings, one would have to say the "world" is also Da-sein. (SZ 118, BT 111)

The freeing of others can initially be understood by analogy to the freeing of

useful things, and like this type of freeing, the freeing ofothers can be interpreted
both "ontically" and "ontologically." If we reserve the term "relevance" for
beings such as useful things, we cannot say of others that they are "relevant" and
leave it at that, if only because freeing is to be thought of here as reciprocal. Yet
the matter does admit comparison. For it is only on the basis ofthe inexplicitness
of others that we are capable of concentrating on an activity, and since such
inexplicitness does not come about by way of an interpretation that discovers
a disposition, it is perhaps best to say that others essentially "hold themselves
in reserve" and that we leave them in this reserve. In their holding themselves
in reserve, others are "Dasein-with:' Contrary to Heidegger's formulation,
Dasein-with is never, strictly speaking, "innerworldly'' but only "in the world";
being-with-one-another in the world then means primarily to reciprocally let
one another behave.
We can again clarify what it means to let one another behave by way of an
example. Contexts of action are frequently compared to games or are illustrated
in reference to them. 3 For instance, chess players do not act together in the
sense that they explicitly occupy themselves with each other by, say, making
their moves a topic of conversation and critically or approvingly commenting
on them. Naturally, they may do so, but whenever they do they are not actually
playing. In the playing ofthe game itself, in the concentration on their individual
108 Gunter Figal

moves, they nevertheless behave toward each other, primarily by letting each
other have their turn. I do not mean simply that chess players do not normally
hinder each other from moving their pieces on the board, but that above all
they let each other have their turn by giving each other the chance to develop
their own strategy, in that each player's own move itself opens up further
moves. Chess players reciprocally refer to the constellation of pieces by drawing
the attention of their partner through their own moves toward an ever new
constellation, and by holding their own personality in reserve, each invites the
other to deal with this new constellation. Seen in this way, what makes the game
possible is the opening up and keeping open of possibilities for action. Part of
such keeping open is that one restricts oneself in the game to being a player:
one acts only within the framework of the current game, and it is only on the
basis of this holding in reserve that one can act at all. Of course, a game can
be compared to everyday contexts of action only to a certain extent, because a
game, unlike such everyday contexts, has standardized rules of play; in other
words, it is clearly fixed which type of actions belong to the game and which
do not. But even everyday contexts of action are unproblematic only when
they have similar restrictions. To be sure, these restrictions are such that they
cannot in every case-perhaps only in a few cases-be given as rules that can
be formulated unambiguously. But it is true of all everyday contexts of action
that we can behave in them only in a particular way, and insofar as we do this we
always also hold ourselves in reserve. From this point of view, everyday action
can never be grasped only as the explicit coordination of various actions in the
service of a common goal, but instead always includes an openness for each
other-an openness that consists in the fact that in many ways we do not relate
to each other.
Now if the above interpretation is accurate, when Heidegger grasps our
behaving toward each other as "concern" (Fursorge), this cannot simply
mean "acting on each other's behalf." Like "taking care" (Besorgen), the term
"concern" includes "deficient modes" 4 such as "being without-one-another,
passing-one-another-by, not-mattering-to-one another" (SZ 121, BT 114). It
is important to note, however, that the deficient modes of concern have a dif­
ferent status than those of taking care. The former play an essential part in
the everydayness of Dasein, for "these modes of being show the characteris­
tics of inconspicuousness and obviousness" (SZ 121, BT 114). Even though
"Dasein initially, and for the most part, lives in the deficient modes of concern"
(SZ 121, BT 144), it would be a mistake to interpret these modes as complete
indifference and then to oppose them to explicit forms of associating with each
other in which we are "affected" by or "interested" in each other. Heidegger's
point is precisely that he interprets even what might appear superficially to be
 Being-with, Dasein-with, and the "They" 109

indifference as a kind ofconcern; "caring" for each other for the most part does
not mean explicitly occupying ourselves with each other.
That this is the case may be seen precisely in the two "extreme possibilities"
of concern (SZ 122, BT 115). The first of these possibilities consists in putting
oneself in the place of someone else in taking care and so "leaping in" for him;
the one who is thereby cast "out of his place" "steps back so that afterwards,
when the matter has been attended to, he can take it over as something finished
and available or disburden himselfofit completely" (SZ 122, BT 114). However,
this "concern that leaps in" is not an explicit relation to others, even when the
one who is displaced is thereby made "dependent and dominated" (SZ 122,
BT 114), for this kind of concern is carried out precisely in dealing with the
things that are to be taken care of. Put differently, we can only do something
for someone else by letting his holding himself in reserve refer us to the activity
in question. Naturally, the one who is displaced can react to the one who
does this with distrust and resistance. But such a reaction is always only the
articulation of one's own lack of explicitness for him who has taken one's own
place. Whoever brings himself explicitly into play lets it be understood that he
was not explicitly in play before.
But the concern that "leaps ahead" and is the contrasting possibility to
"leaping in" also does not explicitly occupy itself with an other. To be sure,
such concern touches on "the existence of the other" (SZ 122, BT 115), but
in a way that when one "leaps ahead;' the other can "become ... free" for
his existence (SZ 122, BT 115). How in particular this is to be understood can
be clarified only through an interpretation of "authentic existence:' Without
anticipating this interpretation, we can illustrate what Heidegger has in mind
with a sentence from the 1925-1926 course Logic: The Question of Truth. For
instance, the hearers of a lecture are never something one "takes care of":
"Communication and directing towards the seeing ofa matter is never a taking­
care, insofar as the seeing of the matter cannot actually be produced by the
lecture, but can instead only be awakened, released:' 5 Basically Heidegger is
only making a pithy comment here about the art of Socratic dialogue. Even
if at first glance this dialogical art consists in adapting oneself to another and
taking into account his possibilities for understanding, it is still not explicitly
occupied with him. We cannot lead someone else to an insight if we do not
always also look away from him, and by concentrating on the matter, open
up for him the possibility of achieving his own relationship to it. This type of
"concern" is essentially "considerateness" and "tolerance" (SZ 123, BT 115),
that is, it consists in letting others behave.
Nonetheless, the foregoing interpretation of the freeing of Dasein-with still
remains "antic." Although this freeing can be understood by analogy to the
110 Gunter Figal

freeing of useful things, it does not depend on someone's factically being left to
his reservedness. Instead, others must also be freed precisely when we explicitly
occupy ourselves with them; that such occupation is at all possible implies that
we must have already been involved with them as possible partners in action,
or more accurately, that we must have always already been involved. We are
"with them" insofar as we are opened up for them, and they are "there with" us
insofar as they themselves are at all possible partners in action for us. Openness
for each other is the presupposition for being able to act with each other or
letting oneself be referred to one's own action by others, and thus first of all for
explicitly relating oneself to them.

"Self" and the "They"

What it means to relate to others explicitly is admittedly not yet clear. Because
our dealings that take care are always characterized by the inexplicitness of
others and because every action with each other is impossible without this
inexplicitness, we might easily presume that we become explicit for each other
only when we speak with or about one another. For only in discourse do we
possess the possibility of determining how others behave and of comparing
that to our own behavior, so that the question of how the context of "I" -
statements is to be thought can also be adequately addressed only by taking into
consideration discourse about each other, whether such discourse is outwardly
articulated or remains unspoken. If we interpret "I" -statements as articulations
of attentiveness toward something, then these statements, on the one hand,
stand in connection with dealings that are initially not articulated linguistically,
and insofar as such dealing is made possible in part by others, these statements
also stand in connection with others. On the other hand, because others are also
able to form "I" -statements, these statements always also stand in the context
of other "I" -statements, and only when we take this context into account can
we understand why Heidegger claims that the "who" of everyday Dasein is not
"I myself." "Self" is a term that does not express self-reference, but rather the
context of "I" -statements. It belongs to the self-evident intelligibility of the self
to be in this context.
This thesis, which may right away strike us as surprising, can be clarified
initially by a brief observation about the everyday use of the word "self:' "Self;'
in grammatical terms, is a "demonstrative pronoun." However, this is mislead­
ing, because the term is in fact used not in a deictic sense but contrastively. In
the sentence "Peter himself broke the vase;' we are made to understand that it
was no one other than Peter-like, for example, the dog, as Peter had claimed.
Along with "I," the word "self" also has this function, so that the statement
 Being-with, Dasein-with, and the "They" 111

"I myself am of the conviction that p" means something different than "I am
of the conviction that p:' Whoever says "I myself" not only expresses his at­
tentiveness toward something, he sets himself off against others and their way
of behaving. Moreover, he sometimes also makes it dear that he is explicitly
laying claim to certain attributes or ways of behaving as his own; from this per­
spective we can explain why the capacity to develop such attributes and ways
of behaving, as well as how they then constitute a person, is designated as "the
self:' 6 In any case, the point I want to emphasize is that it is only in the context
of saying "I myself" that talk of"the others" receives its full sense. However, to
claim that saying "I myself" always sets me off against others is certainly not to
imply that an unmistakable difference exists between "me myself" and others.
Ifsuch a difference existed, saying "I myself" would not at all be necessary. The
utterance of the sentence, "I myself broke the vase," is meaningful only if it is
not dear who it was. The same is true when someone says "he himself" is ofthe
conviction that p; he is not merely contrasting his position with someone who
asserted that q, instead he means that he is not simply repeating the assertion
that p.
Accordingly, the presupposition operative in "I myself"-statements is that
there is fundamentally no way ofbehaving that can be accomplished by only one
alone. Furthermore, ways of behaving do not become explicit as long as they
are accomplished undisturbed, and with any such disturbance, what first draws
attention is not how we are behaving, but what is making the disturbance­
thus what is lacking or faulty about the useful thing. Ways of behaving are first
encountered as the ways ofbehaving ofothers, for the others" are what they do"
(SZ 126, BT 118); that is, with their definite ways of behaving, others also come
into view as "these definite ones:' They are always "these definite ones" insofar
as what they do admits comparison with our own doing, and this comparability
also allows us to distinguish ourselves from each other. The common pursuit of
the same or similar things is, as Heidegger says, characterized by "distantiality":

In taking care of the things which one has taken hold of, for, and against others,
there is constant care as to the way one differs from them, whether this difference
is to be equalized, whether one's own Da-sein has lagged behind others and wants
to catch up in relation to them, whether Da-sein in its priority over others is intent
on suppressing them. Being-with-one-another is, unknown to itself, disquieted
by the care about this distance. Existentially expressed, being-with-one-another
has the character of distantiality. The more inconspicuous this kind of being is
to everyday Da-sein itself, all the more stubbornly and primordially does it work
itself out. (SZ 126, BT 118)

The relations to others Heidegger has in mind here are what we ordinarily know
as "competitiveness;' "ambition," "oppression" and the like. So it seems strange
112 Gunter Figal

when he claims that disquiet about the distance from others is "concealed" in
Dasein. He cannot mean that we know nothing in an everyday way about
competition, ambition, and oppression. In addition, Heidegger mentions in
a different context that we can do or want to do something "purely out of
ambition." 7 What he must mean, then, is that being-with-one-another is char­
acterized by "distantiality" even when one is supposedly concerned about unity
or agreement with others. For then one is trying to eliminate one's differences
from the others, so that even here in being-with-one-another a "being-against­
one-another" is at play (SZ 175, BT 163). Insofar as all behavior that is explicitly
accomplished by "oneself" is marked by others, Heidegger can speak of the
"domination of others" (SZ 126, BT 119). This domination does not consist in
the fact that we are always subjected to the influence or enforcing of a decision
by others; it can be manifest even in our own dominion over others. Instead
the critical point here is that all behavior explicitly accomplished by "oneself"
is a behavior in otherness. Otherness in this sense does not mean becoming
other, or "alter-ation:' 8 For the concept of becoming other implies that one
does not primarily experience oneself in being-with-one-another-and that it
is not primarily in being-with-one-another that one experiences oneself-but
that instead one can also be the "pure Ego of my pure cogitations;' 9 and one
becomes an empirical "I" only when one comes into community with others.
Aside from the fact that it is difficult to think such a "becoming" at all, otherness
and the way it comes to expression in saying "I myself" is possible only under the
presupposition of being-with and Dasein-with. "Otherness" designates solely
the way in which one's own behavior is explicitly determined as one's own.
As the colloquial use of the phrase "I myself" attests, this explicitness is not
tied to definite others. Whoever says "he himself" has done such and such
does not necessarily set himself apart from definite others; possibly he does
not even know who might otherwise be responsible for the deed in question.
The same holds true when someone wants to be better than others; he does
not have to think about definite persons, and if he should ever happen to do
so, what takes priority for him is what they do and how they do it. The others
retain a certain inexplicitness in coming into view only in accordance with
what they do. Because saying "I myself" is never determined only by definite
others but is determined by an otherness that is ultimately uncontrollable in
its singular possibilities, the openness of Dasein-with comes to appear in ex­
plicit being-with-one-another. Now being-with-one-another, as the medium
in which one achieves one's own explicit definiteness, is what Heidegger calls
the "they:' The "they" is characterized by "inconspicuousness" and "unascer­
tainability" (SZ 126, BT 119), and in this it unfolds "its genuine dictatorship"
( SZ 126, BT 119). This dictatorship consists in how "they'' give the answer
beforehand-or 'dictate' -which activities are deemed worthwhile and how
the performance of these activities is to be evaluated. Seen in this way, "they"
 Being-with, Dasein-with, and the "They" 113

articulate meaningfulness, which, as Heidegger expressly makes dear, is tied

to discourse (GA 20, 275). Once again, the "they" as obvious or self-evident
has somehow always already been pronounced and as such is the "obvious
intelligibility of me myself:'
Whoever "himself " wants to be better than others because of that already
oriented toward what "they" in a certain respect do and say. What "they" do
and say is "average": "The they maintains itself factically in the averageness of
what is proper, what is allowed, and what is not. Of what is granted success and
what is not" (SZ 127, BT 119). The "care of averageness" (SZ 127, BT 119) can
be understood in terms of the fact that one's own behavior becomes explicit in
relation to others' behavior; it is ultimately care for this explicitness, for no one
can set himself apart from others, and by so doing explicitly be "he himself;' if
others' behavior does not thereby remain comparable with his own behavior.
Whoever wants to be better than others-or at least as good as them-must
in principle also see what they do as achievable. The presupposition that the
everyday being of others only comes into view as doing enables Heidegger
to also speak of the "leveling down of all possibilities of being" in relation to
averageness (SZ 127, BT 119). The differing possibilities of behavior must be
leveled out according to the measure of comparability.
In view of the misunderstandings that have repeatedly sprung up around
Heidegger's conception of "they;' I first want to emphasize that his analysis is
not intended as "cultural criticism." Heidegger does not enter into a critique of
the anonymity of mass society. The references to public transportation and the
news media are solely illustrations of the comparability ofbehavior that charac­
terizes the "they": "every one is like the next" (SZ 126, BT 127) as a user of trains,
cars and planes, as a television viewer and newspaper reader. But this is not be­
cause of modern means of transportation or modern information technology.
The comparability of behavior is also the precondition for public appearance
or standing, and what Aristotle describes as the politikos bias can, at least in
part, be reformulated in terms of Heidegger's conception of the "they;' to the
extent that the "political life" is concerned only with honor ( time). One could
also see Hegel's conception of a self-consciousness that is dependent on others
as an attempt to bring into view the structure that is at issue for Heidegger.
It should be noted that what is not being asserted by these references is that
Hegel's conception of self-consciousness and Aristotle's analysis of honor are
the same as Heidegger's conception of the "theY:' The working out ofa structure
in a philosophical theory is so bound to the fundamental concepts of that theory
that an attempt to bring Heidegger and Hegel into dialogue would first require
developing Hegel's fundamental concepts. That is not my intention here. Suffice
it to say that it makes a vast difference whether the talk is of self-consciousness,
as in Hegel, or whether, as in Heidegger, it concerns how one's own behavior
becomes explicit in relation to others' behavior. Like Hegel's conception of
114 Gunter Figal

self-consciousness, Heidegger's conception of "everyday being a self" is

certainly a philosophical conception, and as such it is to be distinguished from
critical diagnoses of culture or society in that it lays claim to being plausible in
itself and not only with respect to particular historical conditions.
But even when the philosophical import-or more accurately, the "daseins­
analytical" import-of Heidegger's elucidation of the "they" is taken seriously,
this elucidation has often been misunderstood. One such misunderstanding
consists in interpreting the "they" as a mode of determination by outside forces
and opposing this mode to the mode of self-determination. That the "who" of
everyday Dasein is the "they" then means: "I allow what I respectively do and
intend and how I understand myself to be determined by what one (the they)
regards as good, and I do not determine it myself." 10 To be sure, this interpre­
tation takes up a distinction that is fundamental for further developments in
Being and Time, namely the distinction between the "self of everyday Dasein;'
the "they-self;' and the" authentic self, the self that has explicitly grasped itself"
(SZ 129, BT 121). But what this interpretation leaves out of consideration is
the point of this distinction. This consists in the fact that there is talk of a
"self" of everyday Dasein at all. If this "self" is nothing other than what is
expressed in saying "I myself:' as has been shown, then being in the "they" is
precisely not a "letting oneself be determined," but rather the everyday way
of self-determination. From this it admittedly follows that even the "authentic
self" can now no longer consist in acting deliberately, that is, from a reasoned
choice. 11 Indeed, for Heidegger the "they" renders in advance "every judgment
and decision" and thereby takes "the responsibility of Dasein away from it"
(SZ 127, BT 119); it is by letting oneself be "disburdened" in this way (SZ 127,
BT 120) that one is characterized by "dependency" (SZ 128, BT 120). However,
this means that all decisions and judgments are made everyday in the way of
saying "I myself" and in this are determined by the structure designated as the
"they"; to the extent that saying "I myself" is a comparing oneself to others and
thus a setting oneself apart from them, it expresses a reliance on others that we
can call "not standing on one's own" or "dependency" ( Unselbstiindigkeit). This
dependency is disburdening in that in everydayness, it always provides possi­
bilities for comparison as one makes judgments and decisions. Besides, it is not
enough to refer to the deliberateness of action, for deliberation alone is still not
a criterion for "independence" over and against the "they:' Actions motivated
by envy or ambition can also be highly deliberate. Furthermore, every process
of deliberation that guides action is in one way or another related to others. In­
sofar as actions are justified by the grounds given for them, these grounds-in
order to be accepted at all-must take into account what "they" say, that is, they
must abide by the comparability ofactions. Ifwe determine the independence of
those acting in terms of the process of deliberation that informed their actions,
then we have at best succeeded in arriving at a pragmatically conceived concept
 Being-with, Dasein-with, and the "They" 115

of independence and must disregard the structural dependency through which

one is bound to an other in saying "I myself' "Independence" can then only
mean that someone does not primarily do what he does from an orientation
toward others, and in this sense someone, even if he acts out of ambition,
would be called "independent;' just as long as he is not totally obsessed by his
ambition. In such an obsession, the determination by outside forces consists
in the fact that "something is happening in me:'12 and is, seen in this way, the
same thing as the Platonic-Aristotelian kata to pathos zen (living according to
passion). Yet the pathe occupy a completely different place for Heidegger than
they do for Aristotle, and besides, Heidegger's concept of independence is not
intended pragmatically.
Until this point it has admittedly remained unclear why Heidegger's con­
ception of the "they" is to be conceived as the basic concept of unfreedom. In
order to answer this question, it may seem obvious to return to the interpreta­
tion of the "they" as determination by outside forces. But in the framework of
this interpretation, one could not even define "unfreedom" in the Aristotelian
sense, for Aristotle does not hesitate to call behavior "free" even if it is strongly
determined by affect. If we designate the conception of the "they" as the basic
concept of unfreedom, we are not in addition saying that the "they" is as such
identical with "unfreedom:' If we suppose that "authentic being a self" is "be­
ing free;' then if we were to identify the "they" with "unfreedom;' "authentic
being a self" and the "they" would be cast as rigid alternatives. That Heidegger
is not asserting this is made clear when he says: "Authentic being one's self is
not based on an exceptional state of the subject, a state detached from the they,
but is an existentiell modification of the they as an essential existential" ( SZ 130,
BT 122). Accordingly, even in authentic being a self one is determined by the
structure of the "they;' and if that were not the case, as "authentic self" one
would have had to stop being this definite one among others. Moreover, if the
"they" were identical with unfreedom, then as this definite one among others,
one would always be unfree. However, we are unfree only if we are exclusively
oriented by the structure of the "they" and want to be nothing but a definite
one among others. What is foreclosed through this is how one "authentically"
is, and "authentically'' one is characterized by disdosedness. The dosing off
of disdosedness presupposes disdosedness; it is the dominance of the appear­
ance of disdosedness rather than disdosedness itself. Yet the appearance of
disdosedness is behavior, and if we want to grasp how the dominance of ap­
pearance can at all come about, we must first investigate the relation between
disdosedness and behavior. This relation is the difference of freedom. The
"they" is an appearance of this freedom insofar as ways of behaving are made
familiar within it. Without the "they'' there is no behavior.

-translated by Julia Davis and Richard Polt

116 Gunter Figal

Notes

1. Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1996),
111 (German page 117). Henceforth cited as "SZ" followed by the German pagination,
and "BT" followed by the English pagination.
2. Thus Michael Theunissen writes, "Encounter in Being and Time hardly means:
We encounter each other, but almost entirely: Inner-worldly beings encounter a Dasein
that lets itself be encountered": The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl,
Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, trans. Christopher Macann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1984), 181.
3. As a classic text on this point, see Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
4. On this term cf. Klaus Hartmann, "The Logic of Deficient and Eminent Modes
in Heidegger," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 5 (May 1974): 118-34.
5. Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 21 (Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 222.
6. On this use of the expression see esp. G. H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society from
the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).
7. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 245.
8. On this concept cf. Theunissen, The Other, 89.
9. Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences, Collected
Works, vol. 1, trans. Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl (_T,he Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1980), 100.
10. Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. Paul Stern
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 206.
11. Cf. Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, 215-17, 265.
12. Cf. Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, 250.
 7
Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person
in Being and Time
Steven Crowell

This must be constantly borne in mind, namely, that the subjective problem
is not something about an objective issue, but is the subjectivity itself.
-Kierkegaard

of philosophy of mind to provide an account of in­

I T 1s THE CHIEF TASK
tentionality. What this amounts to can be variously formulated: How is
it possible that consciousness is consciousness 'of' something? How can our
mental states have 'content'? What accounts for the 'as-structure' of our ex­
perience? And so on. How one formulates the question is already the outline
of an answer, and so debates in philosophy of mind are inseparable from de­
cisions about broader questions of philosophy. One such decision concerns
the ontology of, as Heidegger puts it, "the entity which is intentional."' John
Haugeland has usefully distinguished between 'right-wing' (or individualist)
and 'left-wing' (or socialist) theories of this entity. 2 Individualist positions,
broadly Cartesian in orientation, tend to link the question of intentionality
quite closely to aspects of the first-person stance. For such theories, content
is either 'in the head; and then some plausible account of how such content
can deliver the world as it purports to do must be given; or else 'meaning just
ain't in the head; in which case the task is to explain the relation between so­
called 'wide' and 'narrow' content, or why I sometimes seem authoritatively to
know what I am thinking about (first-person authority). 3 Socialist positions,
in contrast, emphasize the activities of the entity who is intentional, arguing
that the 'as-structure' of experience is tied to the normativity inherent in social

117
118 Steven Crowell

practices and has little or nothing to do with the 'mental' in the Cartesian (and
broadly psychological) sense stressed by the individualists. For these theorists,
first-person authority is either denied outright (Wittgensteinian behaviorism),
or else relegated to a non-explanatory role. 4
If I am allowed an unconscionably gross simplification, I would say that
the fundamental issue separating positions in philosophy of mind concerns
the place of the first-person in an account of intentionality. In any case, this
simplification guides this chapter, for the issue has played an important role
in assessing the phenomenological accounts of intentionality given by Husserl
and Heidegger. It is often held that the first-person perspective, so crucial
for Husserl, occupies no significant place in Being and Time. 5 I shall argue
the contrary, that first-person authority plays a decisive role in Heidegger's
account of intentionality. This will prove to be a somewhat peculiar notion of
'first-person authority,' but I will defend it by offering a 'phenomenological
interpretation' (in Heidegger's sense) of Being and Time in which I show, first,
that there is an account of first-person authority in that text and, second,
that it is not a mere afterthought but is indispensable for clarifying the 'ontic
transcendence' whereby we grasp something as something. More specifically,
I will argue that Heidegger's phenomenology of conscience ( Gewissen) is an
account of first-person self-awareness-or the 'subjectivity of the subject' 6-
and that the sort of first-person authority embedded in this account constitutes
the origin of reason. By reason here I mean, minimally, the ability to think and
act not merely in accord with norms, but in light of them. The thesis is that
for Heidegger, first-person authority is what transforms (factic) 'grounds' into
(normative) 'reasons' (Grunde) and explains how it is that Dasein dwells in a
world and does not merely function in an environment. 7

Two Conceptions of First-Person Authority

Let us begin by noting why it is commonly held that there is no significant

treatment of the first-person ( or 'subjectivity') in Being and Time. One reason
is that Heidegger's text is frequently understood as a complete rejection of
all things Husserlian. As Heidegger wrote to Jaspers in 1926, "If the treatise
has been written 'against' anyone, then it has been written against Husserl:' 8
Now consider David Carr's claim that Husserl's "phenomenology is not just
about experiences, or even about experiences and their objects, but about the
first-person standpoint itself.... It is about what it means to be conscious or
to be a conscious being, to be a subject, a self, or an ego." 9 If this is essentially
correct (as I take it to be), it might seem that in rejecting Husserl Heidegger must
lose all interest in "the first-person standpoint itself." Such an impression can
 Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time 119

only be enhanced if one considers why Husserl is interested in the first-person

stance in the first place-namely, because it apparently possesses authority
with regard to its contents (intentional experiences), on the one hand, and
with regard to its self-awareness (as transcendental ego), on the other. Neither
conception of first-person authority seems present in Heidegger's text.
On the matter of Husserl's interest in Erlebnisse, for instance, Hubert Dreyfus
has argued that Heidegger's account of Dasein as a kind of'comportment'­
skillful coping in the world-renders any appeal to 'conscious experiences'
otiose in an explanation of intentionality. The mental-in the traditional sense
of consciousness as psychological subjectivity-becomes a rather minor mod­
ification of 'mindless coping' according to explicit or tacit norms of social
or 'background' practices. These practices suffice to explain how things can
show up 'as' the things they are. Hence, "we are not to think of Dasein as a
conscious subject" since any such traditional conception must, according to
Dreyfus, reintroduce what Heidegger specifically rejects: the Cartesian 'cabi­
net of consciousness' with its 'mental representations' that are supposed to be
foundational for our access to the world. 10
Similarly, on the question of the authority of first-person self-awareness,
Heidegger is apparently quite dear that little is to be gained ontologically from
such self-awareness. First, though it is true that the "question of the 'who' [ of
Dasein] answers itself in terms of the 'I' itself, the 'subject; the 'Self"' (BT
150/114), Heidegger is quick to point out that this gives us nothing more than
a mere "formal reflective awareness of the 'I'" (BT 151/115). And it seems
obvious, as Dreyfus argues, that "such self-referential consciousness is not
the subject-matter of Being and Time," since "according to Heidegger such
consciousness is a special mode of revealing and a derivative one at that." 11 As
Heidegger puts it in Basic Problems ofPhenomenology, a deliberate, reflective"!­
awareness" is "only a mode of self-apprehension, but not the mode of primary
self-disclosure:' This latter is a self-awareness mediated by social practices:
Dasein "never finds itself otherwise than in the things themselves"; it does not
"need a special kind of observation" because when "Dasein gives itself over
immediately and passionately to the world, its own self is reflected back to it
from things."12 Even if formal-reflective I-awareness has some sort of authority,
it is hard to see how it could be of much philosophical interest.
These arguments are compelling, but to say that the first-person stance does
not have its traditional significance in Heidegger's text is not to say that it has
no significance at all. It is not impossible that explicit criticism of the Cartesian
tradition coexists with an implicit existential reinterpretation of aspects of that
tradition, such that there is a recognizable role for first-person authority, but
one that is identified neither with privileged access to the content of my mental
states as foundational for intentionality nor with a formal-reflective I-awareness
120 Steven Crowell

supposedly definitive of who I am as 'transcendental' ego. This, at any rate, is

what I hope to show in what follows.
In presenting Heidegger's existential reinterpretation I shall not focus on the
first sense of first-person authority, concerning a special warrant regarding the
content of my mental states, but on the second sense, concerning the peculiar
character of first-person self-awareness. A reinterpretation of the first would
indeed be possible. It would start by demonstrating that Husserl's concept of
first-person warrant does not commit him to representationalism or 'inter­
nalism: and that Heidegger was aware of this. The latter's remarks about the
'cabinet of consciousness' are directed specifically at Nicolai Hartmann and
not at the phenomenologists. 13 Thus, if it turned out that there were a philo­
sophically interesting sense in which reference to consciousness had to figure in
an account of intentionality, 14 this would not by itself be an argument against
Heidegger's position, since he is not committed to the view that any appeal to
first-person consciousness must involve one in the dead-end of a 'worldless'
subject. Nevertheless, because Heidegger is practically silent on any role that
first-person warrant might play in the account of intentionality, 15 the whole ar­
gument would require lengthy reconstructions. It is quite different with respect
to the second sense of 'first-person authority; however. For Being and Time is
explicit about what an existential reinterpretation of first-person self-awareness
should look like, and it also suggests (though not nearly as explicitly) just why
such a reinterpretation is crucial to the account of intentionality. So to this I
now turn.

A Gap in the Account of Self-Awareness in Being and Time

Division I

For all its usefulness, Heidegger's account of ontologically primordial self­

awareness as a reflection back from the things with which I am practically
absorbed cannot be considered an adequate account of self-awareness. Nor did
Heidegger intend it as such. This is because the 'I' who is reflected back in
this way is "the 'who' of everyday Dasein:' and this, as Heidegger says, "just is
not the 'I myself '" (BT 150/114). Thus Dasein, as "I myself:' must be capable
of another-and ontologically no less authoritative-mode of self-awareness,
one not subject to Heidegger's objections against the merely formal character of
reflective I-consciousness. The trick is to say what such a form of self-awareness
can be.
An approach can be made by recognizing that the everyday mode of self­
awareness in which "Dasein understands itself proximally and for the most
part in terms of its world" (BT 156/120) is not a genuine first-person mode of
 Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time 121

self-awareness. As Heidegger argues, "the self of everyday Dasein is the one­

self' (BT 167/129), and it becomes evident from his description of the one-self
that it understands (is aware of) itself wholly in third-person terms-a fact
that has implications for his account of intentionality.
Central to that account is Heidegger's claim that things show up 'as' some­
thing originally within the context of our practical dealings with them. It is
because everyday Dasein engages in goal-directed actions that things show up
'as' fit for the task, useful 'in order to' drive nails, and so on; only so can they be
assigned some non-arbitrary 'significance: About this 'assignment; Heidegger
emphasizes two things. First, it is holistic: "Taken strictly, there 'is' no such thing
as a tool. To any tool there always belongs a totality of equipment" (BT 97/68),
since to be a hammer or a pen is to be defined in instrumental relation to
other things such as nails or paper. Second, the structure (intelligibility) of
this equipmental totality derives from Dasein's own 'practical identity; which
Heidegger terms the Worumwillen: an "ability to be for the sake of which" I
myself am (BT 119/86). This concept is meant to account for the non-arbitrary
attribution of goal-directedness to my activity-that is, it is to serve the role of
establishing an intention, without which no specific 'assignment' of functions
to things could be made. Heidegger's innovation here is to locate this intention
not 'in the head' but in practices themselves, as 'ways for me to be' in the world.
One cannot simply identify this practical identity or 'for the sake of' with social
role (mother, professor, mail carrier), since not all goal-directed actions be­
long to socially and institutionally defined practices. Nevertheless, it can serve
its function in the account of intentionality only because it, like social role, is
necessarily typical. Only because my behavior is understood (not only by the
other but by I myself) as a type does it have the relation to specific norms ofthe
type that render it 'intentional' behavior-that is, assessable in terms of success
or failure. 16 Heidegger expresses this fact with the claim that everyday Dasein
is governed by "publicness;' that it "concerns itself as such with averageness:'
and that it is "diffident" (abstiindig), careful that it not distinguish itself from
others (BT 126-27, 164-65). For this reason Heidegger designates the self of
everyday Dasein the 'one-self:
Heidegger's account of the one-self, then, describes my practical identity
as a specific form of anonymity: engaged in the world, I am aware of myself
only as 'another' or as 'anyone'-that is, in third-person terms. As typical, my
practices belong within what Heidegger calls a 'totality of involvements; and
because it is in terms of such practices that I am "reflected back to [myself]
from things," I myself make sense only within that same totality. I am a persona
(mask). To the extent that my practical identity is typical-and there can be no
other kind-there is essentially no difference between the way things come by
their 'as-structure' and the way I come by mine. It is true that Heidegger signals
122 Steven Crowell

a difference between our awareness of things, of others, and of myself-namely,

as besorgen, fursorgen, and selbst-sorgen-but Division I does not account for
these different phenomenological features of our experience, and because it
does not, a gap opens up in its account of intentionality.
The gap appears because Heidegger holds that in order for something to be
assigned a definite significance ( an 'in order to') in the totality of involvements
the latter must "itself [go] back ultimately to a 'towards which' in which there
is no further involvement" (BT 116/84)-that is it must be anchored in some­
thing 'autotelic; something that does not receive its 'assignment' of significance
from something else but "has assigned itself to an 'in order to"' (BT 119/86).
Without such a being it would be impossible to say whether something was
functioning well as a heater or poorly as an air conditioner; it takes on a def­
inite meaning in light of that 'for the sake of which' I am using it. But what
or who am 'I' here? If I, in turn, am assigned 'my' significance instrumentally,
then the totality of involvements is once again underdetermined and the in­
tentionality of experience has not been explained. For this reason, Heidegger
identifies "Dasein's very being" as "the sole authentic 'for the sake of which"' (BT
117/84 )-that is as "a 'towards which' in which there is no further involvement."
And yet, nothing in his account of the Umwillen or significance of the one-self
allows us to see why it has no further involvement, why it is not just another
instrumentality. For as typical, any 'for the sake of' can also be understood in­
strumentally: I can be a professor in order to make a living, be a college student
in order to avoid the draft, be a father in order to carry on the family line, and
so on.
Heidegger is right that the totality of involvements must be anchored in a
being "in which there is no further involvement" -that is in a being for whom
things matter, a being "for which, in its being, that very being is essentially an
issue" (BT 117/84). But such a being must be capable of a mode of self-awareness
other than the one that characterizes its practical identity. In addition to its
everyday ( third-person) mode of self-awareness, Heidegger owes us an account
of Dasein's first-person awareness of 'I myself; an account of the subjectivity
that belongs to, but remains invisible in, the one-self. Without it, his account of
intentionality remains incomplete. And if third-person self-awareness is nec­
essarily typical, it is not unreasonable to expect that first-person self-awareness
will be radically indexical.
Is there such an account to be found in Being and Time? In approaching this
question I will begin by considering certain peculiarities of first-person self­
reference ( saying 'I') that any theory must account for. The idea is to take these
features of first-person self-reference as indicators of the nature of first-person
self-awareness and then see whether anything in Being and Time addresses what
is distinctive about that nature. 17
 Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time 123

First, the proper use of 'I' infallibly picks out the entity it purports to refer
to-both in the sense that it cannot fail to refer, and in the sense that it cannot
fail to pick out exactly what it purports to pick out. By contrast, in using a
proper name or definite description to refer to the same thing, I could always
fail in either way. But since the one-self is aware of itself precisely in so far as
"it does not distinguish itself from others;' when it says 'I' both the definiteness
and infallibility of its self-reference remain unaccounted for. It is always prone
to a 'failure of reference' or an 'error of misidentification:
Second, if we distinguish a subjective from an objective use of 'I; we note
a crucial aspect of first-person self-reference. An objective use of 'I' (as in "I
am bleeding" or "I am six feet tall") presupposes that I have established certain
properties as true of an object in the world and that I have identified myself
with that object. Thus I could be in error if the object in question turns out
in fact not to be me. The subjective use of 'I' (as in "I believe that Heidegger
wrote Being and Time" or "I feel anxious") involves no such presupposition. 18
The possession of identificatory knowledge is neither a necessary nor sufficient
condition for successful use of 'I' in these cases. As Castaneda observes, "there is
no third-person special characteristic that one has to think that one possesses in
order to think of oneself as l." 19 In short, such self-identification is immediate,
non-criteria!, and non-inferential.
This point will prove crucial for establishing the place of first-person self­
awareness in Being and Time, since it shows that even though self-identification
of the one-self is neither immediate nor non-criterial-that is, the awareness
of myself"reflected back from things" is always as something (father, professor,
etc.) and thus mediated by criteria belonging to these types or roles-this does
not mean that, should such criteria be unavailable, I could not intelligibly refer
to, or identify, myself.
Finally, use of 'I' to designate 'I myself' requires that I "dispense with every
type of third-person reference:' 20 That is, I have not mastered the use of 'I'
unless I understand that it does not, as Zahavi puts it, merely "single a specific
person out in a given context"-the person who is speaking-but demands also
that I be "aware that it is [I myself] who is referred to:' And this sort of self­
awareness cannot be captured in any third-person terms, since "no matter how
detailed a third-person description I give of a person, this description cannot
entail that I am that person:' 21 Hence, the way 'I' refers cannot be reduced to
any form of the way third-person terms pick out entities in the world. If it could
be so reduced it would be impossible to understand the surprise exhibited (to
use Nozick's example) by Oedipus when he discovers that he is the very entity
to whom he was (successfully) referring all along in third-person terms.
Before showing that Heidegger provides an account of first-person self­
awareness that does justice to these peculiarities of self-reference, it may be
124 Steven Crowell

useful to identify two solutions to the problem which he rejects. The first is
Husserl's theory that saying 'I' ultimately refers to a unique transcendental
ego that eludes all type-concepts, including natural kind concepts. Because
the 'I' is identifiable prior to all 'worldly' predicates, Husserl takes it to pick
out an unworldly entity in a sense that supposedly avoids the paradox of a
'piece of the world' constituting the world as a whole. Though the situation is
complicated,22 it is clear that Heidegger wants to avoid positing anything like
an ego as the referent of'I.' Whatever tensions there may be between first- and
third-person self-reference will be explained, instead, as existential modalities
of Jemeinigkeit.
The second rejected approach is that of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus.
There the peculiarities of immediate, non-criteriological, non-inferential self­
reference do not reflect an entity in or beyond the world, but the 'limit' of the
world itself. On this view, there is nothing of which I am aware when I am
aware of myself in first-person perspective, and the whole issue of 'subjectiv­
ity' becomes a philosophical non-starter. Some have held that this is precisely
Heidegger's approach to the issue.23 Rather than argue against this interpre­
tation, however, I will try to establish that there is an account of first-person
self-awareness in Being and Time by considering the relation between Division
I and Division II of that text.
About this strategy the following should be emphasized straightaway: First,
though Division II offers an account of'authentic' being-a-self to complete Di­
vision I's exploration of the everyday one-self, it would be a mistake to equate
first-person self-awareness with authenticity. As Heidegger tells us, "authentic
existence" is "only a modified way in which such everydayness is seized upon"
(BT 224/179). The authentic self's awareness ofitself is thus not free of the ma­
chinery of third-person description that supports the one-self, as is required by
our analysis of first-person self-reference; it too is "reflected back to itself from
things:' Second, since "the 'one' itself articulates the referential context of signif­
icance" (BT 167/129)-and so, as Dreyfus argues, all intelligibility is everyday
intelligibility because the one ultimately "makes ... significance and intelligi­
bility possible"24-it must be the case that Dasein's first-person self-awareness,
like Wittgenstein's 'I; is not a mode of intelligibility at all. Does this not reduce
the very notion to incoherence? Ifbeing-in-the-world were equivalent to acting
in the world this conclusion would follow, but Heidegger's position is more
complicated. While both the one-self and the authentic self are'actors; there is
a condition in which Dasein no longer acts, the condition of the collapse ofthe
one-self. Here we find both the place and the importance of first-person self­
awareness in Being and Time. In this putatively negative phenomenon, where
the care-structure is not yet the resolute committed authentic self engaged in
the world, there lies a positive phenomenological content-not some further
 Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time 125

content descriptive of myself that more richly answers the question of who I
am, but my very subjectivity.

The Collapse of the One-Self as First-Person Self-Awareness

I shall pursue the familiar details of the care-structure-existentiality, facticity,

and discourse-only so far as is necessary to see how the breakdown of the
one-self can yield a positive grasp of subjectivity. Heidegger associates facticity
with Befindlichkeit and argues that the "primary discovery of the world" is a
function "of 'bare mood;'' thanks to which the world is there as mattering
to us in some way or another (BT 137-38, 176-77). Existentiality, in turn, is
associated with Verstehen-not the thematic understanding of this or that item
in the world, but the self-understanding Dasein exhibits as it "presses ahead"
into that "ability to be for the sake of which it itself is" (BT 119/86). Finally,
'discourse' (Rede) is "the articulation of intelligibility" (BT 161, 203-4), that is
the ontological ground of communication. Now the salient point here is that
since the 'one' articulates "the referential context of significance"-the world­
as such, the one-self cannot be identified with some limited set of possibilities.
All possible ways in which the world can matter, all possible self-understandings
or 'for-the-sake-ofs; and all possible discursive communications belong to the
one-self-as public, conforming, normalized third-person Selfhood. A genuine
first-person self-awareness would thus seem to be strictly impossible.
And so it would be, if self-awareness were necessarily linked to 'possibility' in
Heidegger's sense. But this is not the case, as can be seen from Heidegger's ac­
count of the breakdown of the one-self. This modification of the care-structure
has special methodological significance, as Heidegger says, because it is "what
Dasein, from its own standpoint, demands as the only ontico-ontological way of
access to itself " (BT 226/182). And this, I shall argue, is equivalent to providing
phenomenological access to 'subjectivity' as the condition of possibility for au­
thentic selfhood-a condition that has more in common with what Kierkegaard
identified as 'inwardness' than it does the Cartesian stream of Erlebnisse that
we share with higher animals.
First, if everyday Dasein's moods are that whereby the world matters to it,
it is in Angst that the world is given in such a way that it no longer matters
at all. Entities in the world no longer speak to me (the pure 'that it is' is
all that remains); the world is uncanny (unheimlich); my involvements with
others 'recede' until I grasp myself as the solus ipse (BT 186-89, 231-33). This
does not mean that I find myself alone; rather, I discover my subjectivity, a
dimension of my being that is extrinsic to every 'totality of involvements:
Only now does it become ontologically apparent (though still only negatively)
126 Steven Crowell

how I can be a 'toward which' that 'has no further involvement: Second, if all
mood has its self-understanding, then the understanding belonging to Angst
must stand in stark contrast to all those 'for-the-sake-ofs' in which the world
matters to me in some way. If things in the world lose all significance, this is
because the practical self-understandings that support them have all collapsed.
In anxiety I can no longer "press forward into possibilities:' can no longer
cope in terms of some ability to be. But if that is so, how can I be aware of
myself, since I am no longer "reflected back to myself from things"? Such a state
Heidegger calls 'death' -in which I exist as "the possibility of the impossibility
of being there" (BT 294/250). The "impossibility of being there" does not refer
to demise, to my absence from the realm of the living; rather, it indicates that
my self-awareness, or self-understanding, is not dependent on any one of my
abilities to be or on all of them taken together. There is a way that I am which is
not an ability to be. Since 'understanding' my 'finitude' in this sense contrasts
with all possible concrete 'for-the-sake-ofs: it is a form ofinwardness, altogether
invisible ('unintelligible') from the standpoint of the one-self. In Heidegger's
terms, death is unrepresentable, my 'ownmost' possibility.
Finally, Heidegger identifies the third moment of the care-structure in
breakdown-discourse-with conscience ( Gewissen), emphasizing its break
with the one-self by noting that conscience discourses exclusively in the mode
of "keeping silent." However, where the analyses of Angst and death yield in­
sights mainly into what the first-person is not, Heidegger's analysis of the two
sides of conscience-"what is talked about" and "what is said" (BT 317/272)­
elucidates the positive role of first-person self-awareness. By "what is talked
about" Heidegger means that "to which the appeal is made"; by "what is said"
he means what conscience "gives to understand" about that to which the ap­
peal is made. Analyzing the first, Heidegger provides an existential ontological
account of the peculiarities of first-person self-reference; analyzing the second,
he shows the philosophical significance of subjectivity. I shall examine each in
turn.

First-Person Self-Awareness in the Call of Conscience:

Radical Indexicality

T hat to which the call of conscience is addressed is 'Dasein itself: Now, since
Dasein is not an entity with properties, the 'itself ' (Dasein's Jemeinigkeit) must
be understood as involving modalized possibilities for being itself. To mark this
modalization Heidegger distinguishes between the one-self and the 'Self: The
phenomenon of conscience belongs to the breakdown of the one-self: "And
because only the Self of the one-self gets appealed to and brought to hear,
 Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time 127

the 'one' collapses" (BT 317/272). What Heidegger here misleadingly calls the
'Self' is, I believe, more properly thought as the subjectivity, or first-person
self-awareness, of Dasein. 25
In the language Heidegger uses to describe this Self or subject, it is easy to
recognize the peculiarities of first-person self-reference we identified above.
First, according to Heidegger, my awareness of myself as the one addressed
in the call dispenses with all third-person identifying descriptions: "Not to
what Dasein counts for, can do, or concerns itself with in being with one
another publicly, nor to what it has taken hold of, set about, or let itself be
carried along with;' but only the "Self of the one-self gets appealed to" (BT
317/272). Thus, in grasping my Self (as 'subject'), I do so in an immediate, non­
criterial, and non-inferential way. I am not, in other words, aware of myself as
anything; nevertheless, I can 'identify' myself. Dasein therefore 'knows' itself to
be irreducible to any definite description, no matter how detailed-including
the comprehensive narrative of its own life. The first-person cannot be absorbed
into its own history. 26
Second, the lack of such identifying descriptions does not make the iden­
tification less, but rather more, certain. Conscience, as a kind of first-person
self-reference, infallibly picks out its referent. As Heidegger writes, even though
"the call passes over what Dasein, proximally and for the most part, under­
stands itself as:' nevertheless "the Self has been reached, unequivocally and
unmistakably" (BT 319/274). The call is 'unequivocal'-it always picks out just
the thing it aims at-because it is non-criterial: first-person self-reference is a
pure indexical, not based on any potentially misfiring definite description or
ostention. And it is 'unmistakable'-cannot fail to refer-because the call is
immediate and non-inferential. In hearing the call I am addressed in such a
way that the question of whether there is anyone to whom the call is addressed
makes no sense.
This 'unmistakability' is the key to the analysis of conscience and shows the
existential origin of Wittgenstein's idea that the subject is the limit of the world.
Heidegger notes that "when the caller reaches him to whom the appeal is made,
it does so with a cold assurance which is uncanny but by no means obvious"
(BT 322/277). Why is it futile to argue with this 'cold assurance' of conscience,
to appeal to mitigating circumstances, to try to hide? If we had only Division
I to go on the answer would by no means be 'obvious: since from the public
point of view I am exclusively what I do, and those public descriptions can
always be misapplied, even by myself. I can always 'fail to recognize' myself in
them or be in error about whether they apply to me. In Division II, however, the
reason for this 'cold assurance' with which I am identified in the call becomes
clear: "when Dasein has been individualized down to itself in its uncanniness,
it is for itself something that simply cannot be mistaken for anything else"
128 Steven Crowell

(BT 322/277). For itself-that is, from the first-person point of view-Dasein
is "radically" deprived "of the possibility of misunderstanding itself" because
it is not "reflected back from things" but rather directly confronts the mineness
of Existenz as such.
Thus when Heidegger writes that "the call is precisely something which we
ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor
have we ever done so:' "we ourselves" is used in the sense ofthe one-self. The call
is neither an intentional act of expectation, desire, or belief, nor a 'performance'
by the 'agent' in the world; rather, 'It' calls, "against our expectations and even
against our will" (BT 320/275). Yet it "does not come from someone else who is
with me in the world" either. The 'It' who calls is "from me and yet from beyond
me and over me" (BT 320/275). Heidegger resolves this paradox by appealing
to the modalized structure of Existenz: it is "Dasein, which finds itself [sich
befindet] in the very depths of its uncanniness," who is "the caller of the call
of conscience" (BT 321/276). By worldly criteria, such a caller is "nothing at
all" (BT 321/276), and yet "the call comes from that entity which in each case I
myselfam" (BT 323/278). In conscience we learn what it means to say'I myself
Here we locate the place ofthe first-person in Being and Time. It is neither the
one-self (who says 'I' but not as 'I myself'), nor the authentic Self (a 'modifica­
tion' of the one-self), but the hidden condition of both. The uncanny "nothing
at all" revealed in breakdown and voiced as conscience is Dasein's "basic kind of
being in the world, even though in an everyday way it has been covered up" (BT
322/277). Thus even though the call "to the Self in the one-self does not force it
inwards upon itself, so that it can close itself off from the 'exterior world"' (BT
318/273), this is not because subjectivity is always somehow 'part' of that world
or totality of significance. Rather, it is because this image of subjectivity-an
'interior' space of representations cut off from the 'external' world-is not sub­
jective enough. Such an interior psychological space is merely a peculiar part of
the world in Heidegger's sense, whereas subjectivity, conscience as Kierkegaar­
dian inwardness, is the hidden condition of the world as a space of meaning.
Admittedly, we have not yet discovered what it is about conscience that makes
it such a condition, but the second aspect of Heidegger's analysis-his account
of "what is said" in the call-provides just that, and with it the philosophical
significance of first-person authority in Being and Time becomes apparent.

Conscience: the Origin of Reason

Heidegger's great achievement in Being and Time is to have demonstrated that

care is prior to reason-that homo cura is more fundamental than the animal
rationale. But the account of intentionality offered in Division I contains, as
 Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time 129

we saw, a gap: the analysis of practical, goal-oriented action supplies a neces­

sary but not a sufficient condition for the intelligibility (world) upon which
intentionality depends. A further condition on intentionality is provided by
Division H's account of subjectivity as inwardness, conscience as first-person
self-awareness. But why is conscience a necessary condition of intelligibility?
The thesis I would like to explore is that it is because intelligibility involves
something like the capacity for 'reason' in the sense of an ability to act in light
of norms, and that conscience is the origin of this capacity. 27
Support for this identification can be gleaned from the word-Gewissen­
itself, for it invites the sort of analysis Heidegger offered when he introduced the
notion of Gestell in "The Question Concerning Technology:' There Heidegger
explained that the Ge- prefix signifies a kind of"gathering" that "primordially
unfolds"-not a mere collection but that which delimits the "essence" or being
of what is gathered, that which makes it what it is, "enables" it.28 Accord­
ingly, Ge-wissen would signify a gathering of 'knowing'; conscience would be
what enables the various (practical and theoretical) modes of knowing in the
broadest sense, that from which episteme, phronesis, and so forth, 'primordially
unfold.' It is instructive to note that this is just the role Heidegger attributes
to nous (reason) in his Sophist lectures.29 A second consideration ties the no­
tion of conscience to that of reason. As a call, conscience is something that
is heard (gehort). Though the call is "silent;' Heidegger insists that it thereby
"loses nothing of its perceptibility" (BT 318/273). The word he uses here is
Vernehmlichkeit. To perceive in this way-vernehmen-is indeed to hear, but it
is a hearing whose acoustic dimension is subordinated to a responsiveness to
meaning, just as the Sicht (sight) of Umsicht is similarly subordinated. 30 Now
this very term-vernehmen-is the root of the German word for reason ( Ver­
nunft). This might suggest that conscience ( Gewissen) is the gathering-enablfog
of knowing and deliberating precisely as the hearing-perceiving ( vernehmen)
ofa call, or meaningful claim, the response to which ( ver-antworten) is a unique
'possibility' for being: Vernunft.
Primary support for the thesis, however, is found in Heidegger's description
of "what is said" in the call, namely, the accusation "Guilty!" As he did with
the concept of death, Heidegger formalizes the everyday notion of guilt in
such a way that "those ordinary phenomena of 'guilt' which are related to our
concernful being with others will drop ouf'-phenomena related to everyday
"reckoning" as well as to "any law or 'ought"' (BT 328/ 283). Artificial though it
seems, this formalization simply reflects the character ofthe call as that mode of
discourse which articulates the unintelligibility ofDasein when, as Angst/death,
its ordinary ties to the world break down. From this point of view, "being­
guilty" is not a "predicate for the 'I am"' (BT 326/281), contingent upon some
worldly relation; it is the fundamental condition ofsubjectivity, the first-person,
130 Steven Crowell

as such. The call 'articulates' an understanding of one's own being prior to any
sense of 'owing' or indebtedness-any sense of having, through one's actions
in the world, incurred debts or obligations-because, as Heidegger states, such
a mode of being is the condition of possibility for indebtedness and obligation
(BT 329/284). "What is said in the call" articulates the self-understanding
(self-awareness) of that being who is the ground of obligation. But in what
sense?
When am I indebted to someone? When do I owe someone something? It
cannot be simply when I take something that someone has in her possession,
or when I receive something from someone. Rather, there must be a norm of
appropriate exchange in place. Now this norm cannot simply be something that
is imposed on me from the outside-a behavior that is enforced, say, by social
(herd) conditioning in such a way that typical and normal behavior of the herd
results. This could never establish that 'I' owe someone something, but only
that there has been a failure to conform to what is typical or expected. Being­
indebted is not simply a state but something that I, from a first-person point
of view, must be 'able to be'; and this means that I must be able to recognize the
norm as normative, that is, as a claim addressed to me and not merely a pattern
descriptive of'our' normal behavior. The fact that I can be characterized from a
third-person point of view as 'owing' something is ontologically parasitical on
being capable of first-person self-awareness in Heidegger's sense.31 If one says
that this ability is made possible by 'internalization' of the social sanctions that
normalize the behavior of the herd, this can be accepted only if one also accepts
that this internalization changes everything. 32 For it signifies a being who no
longer merely conforms to norms, but who can act 'in light of' them. To act
in light of norms is to recognize them as claims to validity and so, potentially,
to measure them against an altogether different sort of standard-a 'meta­
norm' that Heidegger, following Plato, occasionally names 'the good:33 This is
the sort of first-person authority that derives from first-person self-awareness
as conscience. In Heidegger's terms, first-person authority is responsibility
( Verantwortlichkeit). Responsibility transforms a creature who is 'grounded'
by social norms into a ground of obligation-one who 'grounds' norms by
giving grounds, that is, reasons. 34
The claim that first-person authority consists in the possibility of grounding
as reason-giving is, I believe, entailed by Heidegger's (alas, obscure) descrip­
tion of 'being-guilty: Heidegger begins with Dasein's thrownness-the fact
that Dasein "has been brought into its 'there; but not of its own accord" (BT
329/284)-and identifies this as the "ground" ( Grund) ofDasein's "potentiality­
for-being" (BT 330/284). What sort of ground is that? Against the tradi­
tional notion ofa self-grounding transcendental subject, Heidegger emphasizes
Dasein's lack of "power" over this ground: Dasein is "never existent before its
 Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time 131

ground, but only from it"; and this means" never to have power over one's being
from the ground up" (BT 330/284). Many readings of thrownness-and so of
the nature of this ground-have been offered. For instance, it has been read
as Nature, as the particular social practices into which I am born, as histori­
cal situatedness, and so on. Without taking a stand on the correctness of any
particular reading, 35 they all take such a ground of Dasein to be something
that determines, conditions, or explains significant aspects of behavior (for
instance, the range of possible choices). Because they lie by definition beyond
Dasein's power, such grounds belong essentially to third-person accounts; that
is, they provide reasons for Dasein's behavior that are not (and cannot be)
Dasein's reasons. In McDowell's Sellarsian terms, the grounds espied in Da­
sein's thrownness locate Dasein within the 'realm oflaw' (whether natural or
bio-social), not the 'space of reasons.' 36 T hat is, whatever it is that provides the
ground of Dasein's "possibility for being" and brings Dasein "into its 'there"'
may indeed normalize behavior, but it is insufficient to generate the sort of obli­
gation analyzed above; it does not provide reasons-grounds-in the sense of
justifications.
However, while Dasein, as thrown, is grounded in this sense, this does not
exhaust the meaning of 'being-guilty.' Heidegger argues that Dasein is this
thrown ground only "in that it projects itself upon possibilities into which it
has been thrown" (BT 330/284); that is the 'Self' or subject as such "has to
lay the ground for itself;' as "existing" it "must take over being a ground" (BT
330/284). 37 But what can it mean to say that Dasein must "take over being a
ground"? Here too there are some usual readings, none of which can be quite
right. To say that to take over being a ground is to acknowledge my facticity­
to adopt a kind of anti-transcendental philosophical humility in the face of a
higher power, as it were-<loes not do justice to the idea of being a ground.
More promising is the idea that I "take responsibility" for my facticity, 'own'
it, make it my own through the "choice of one possibility" (BT 331/285). But
while it is true that Dasein can choose itself transparently, in full knowledge
that it thereby 'waives' the choice of other possibilities, this cannot be the whole
story. We might say that in this way Dasein commits itself to something specific
in which it finds itself thrown. But it seems that to "take over being a ground"
cannot simply be a matter of entering 'seriously' into a game, so to speak, whose
rules and norms are already established 'as' rules and norms. Ifl am right about
the kind of grounds that Dasein's thrownness provides, these do not yet suffice
to constitute genuine 'games: since games involve a sort of free-play in which
I play not only according to the rules but in light of them. To stop with the
concept of commitment (resoluteness) is to allow the first-person no role in
the constitution of the 'space of reasons: when in fact-as I believe Heidegger's
text suggests-it is essential to it.
132 Steven Crowell

On this reading, to "take over being a ground" would be to translate, as

it were, grounds as given determinants into grounds as (justifying) reasons
( Grunde). This translation occurs when, in breakdown, I grasp the givens as
mere claims, that is, as 'possibilities' opened up by Dasein's 'understanding
of being' itself. To recognize the character of grounds as possibilities is what
Heidegger calls "freedom" (BT 331/285). 38 Freedom is not essentially the ability
to choose between possibilities, but the difference between the third-person and
the first-person as such. Animals, one might say, can choose whether to run and
hide or stay and fight, but freedom consists in the gap that opens up between
any such goal-directed action in the world and the breakdown of all that-in
Angst/death-which reveals my having to "take over being a ground.'' Yet we
must be clear here: it is not the capacity for breakdown itself that is decisive,
since animals, too, can break down. When animals break down, however, they
lose themselves entirely, have 'nothing left.' Dasein can break down in this
way, as in the extremity of psychosis. But in the face of Angst/death Dasein
can also discover a hidden resource, its being-guilty, the ability to take over
being a ground. What conditions one is thus exposed as a mere claim, for
whose grounding-in the sense of measuring that claim in light of a meta­
norm-I am called to be responsible. In this way conscience is the origin of
reason.
Conscience is first-person authority as Kierkegaardian inwardness­
invisible (and hence paradoxical) to third-person accounts of identity. And
thus one might think of Abraham when Heidegger speaks, in his 1929 inaugu­
ral lecture, "What is Metaphysics?" of the "anxiety of those who are daring" as
"in secret alliance with the cheerfulness and gentleness of creative longing.''39
What looks like a collapse of everything that matters instead reveals the condi­
tion for the possibility that anything can matter at all. In this sense, "subjectivity
is the truth"-not because it is the site of an irrefragable evidence, an interior
space of certain representations, but because, apart from all practical identity,
all Umwillen, I am a being through whom obligation-that is, first of all, re­
sponsibility for reason-enters the world. This is the positive meaning of the
claim that Dasein is the "sole authentic for the sake of which;' something "in
which there is no further involvement;' an end in itself. 40

Conclusion: First-Person Authority and the Good

Let me conclude by bringing out one more bit of evidence that suggests that
conscience, as "taking over being a ground;' is the origin of reason. This comes
from the essay "Vom Wesen des Grundes;' which Heidegger contributed to
Husserl's Festschrift in 1929. There the question that Being and Time leaves
 Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time 133

unspoken is made explicit: "To what extent does there lie in transcendence the
intrinsic possibility of something like Grund [ground, reason] in general?" 41
Dasein's 'transcendence' here means the casting of"something like the 'for the
sake of' projectively before it:' ''Although it exists in the midst of beings and
embraced by them;' writes Heidegger, "Dasein as existing has always already
surpassed nature" (EG 109), and it is by means of such transcendence, or
surpassing, that "Dasein for the first time comes toward that being that it
is, and comes toward it as it 'itself"' (EG 108). As we have seen, Dasein can
come "toward that being that it is" in two ways: the way of everyday Dasein
"reflected back from things;' and the way it comes "toward it as 'it itself"' in
the collapse of the one-self. Though both of these are modes ofself-relation or
self-awareness, we have seen that only the latter suffices to explain why Dasein
is something like an 'end in itself' that can anchor the teleological 'totality of
involvements' into the intelligibility of a world. In "Vom Wesen des Grundes"
Heidegger explains this fact by interpreting Dasein's surpassing of beings in
terms ofPlato's agathon epekeina tes ousias-the good beyond beings. "Yet may
we interpret the agathon as the transcendence ofDasein?" he asks; and answers:
"the essence of the agathon lies in its sovereignty over itself [Mi:ichtigkeit seiner
selbst] as hou heneka-as the 'for the sake of' it is the source of possibility as
such" (EG 124). Only as sovereignty is self-awareness the anchor ofintelligibility,
and only the first-person ofDivision II is sovereign in the sense of"taking over
being a ground." To say that the essence of the good lies in sovereignty is to say
that the meta-norm of'the good' itself emerges, as such, only with conscience.
Sovereignty over myself is not a matter ofself-creation or 'self-fashioning'; nor
is it the essence of the good in the sense that whatever I choose is eo ipso right.
Rather, thanks to sovereignty-the ability to take over being a ground-I am
able to judge and act 'in light of' the good, in light of 'what is best'; that is,
in terms of (justificatory) reasons. This does not mean that I must 'know the
good'; it signifies only the emergence of what can be called a critical practice
in the existing of an entity that is sovereign over itself, an entity for whom the
question of what ought to be makes sense.
The essence of this critical practice is responsibility (Verantwortlichkeit).
Heideggerian 'freedom' means that "there occurs the Dasein in human beings,
such that in the essence of their existence they can be obligated to themselves;'
thereby in turn "making possible something binding, indeed obligation in gen­
eral" (EG 126). Heidegger goes on to say that reason, as "account giving;' arises
from such self-obligation, but he does not say how (EG 130-31). If we recall
that Dasein responds to the call of conscience by "taking over being a ground;'
however, we can see that such responsiveness does not simply consist in com­
mitting myself to some course of action, but in making myself accountable for
it-that is, in accounting for myself, giving reasons.
134 Steven Crowell

The possibility of everyday discourse ('communication') rests originally on

this proto-act of offering reasons. To respond to the call-and a "free-floating
call from which 'nothing ensues' is an impossible fiction when seen existen­
tially" (BT 324/279)-to 'become accountable: is to speak to the other, to
communicate. When I give reasons and communicate as the one-self, this is a
trace of my subjectivity, possible only for a creature that can be responsible, can
answer the call of conscience. For Heidegger, as for Kant, then, giving reasons is
the 'evidence' of first-person authority. Only 'I' can do it; the very notion only
makes sense for a creature that is not simply a "reflection back from things:'
a practical identity absorbed in the world.42 By opening up a space in which
I can recognize something like a 'claim: my response to the call transforms
the 'thrownness' that I share with all conforming herd-animals into a world
of meaning. In this way, intentionality, 'ontic transcendence: finds its ultimate
condition in first-person authority.43

Notes

1. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore

Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 110; Prolegomena zur Geschichte
des Zeitbegriffs, Gesamtausgabe 20, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979),
152.
2. John Haugeland, "The Intentionality All-Stars," in Having Thought ( Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 127-70, here 132, 147. Haugeland concludes his
article by acknowledging that all the positions he has examined "are alike in confronting
intentionality only from the outside-in the 'third-person; as it were," and notes that
an approach from the first-person would require "entirely different strategies and
considerations" ( 162). This chapter suggests one such consideration.
3. An example of the first would be Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (New
York: Crowell, 1975); an example of the second, Hilary Putnam, "The Meaning of
Meaning;' in Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 ( Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215-71.
4. This is the position Haugeland, "Intentionality All-Stars;' op. cit., 147, describes
as "neopragmatism," under which he includes Robert Brandom, Wilfrid Sellars, Hubert
Dreyfus, and himself. He also includes Heidegger, though in a note appended at a later
date he admits that "there is a 'pragmatist' strain at most in Division I of Being and
Time. Certainly the larger tendency of the work is profoundly non-pragmatist." See also
Mark Okrent, Heidegger's Pragmatism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).
5. For example, in Being and Nothingness Sartre makes this point in criticism of
Heidegger, while Mark Okrent, in Heidegger's Pragmatism, op. cit., makes the same
point in praise of Heidegger.
6. Heidegger uses this phrase occasionally to identify the topic of his Daseinsana­
lytik, most frequently when he is comparing it to Kant's project. See, for example, Martin
 Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time 135

Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962), 45; Sein and Zeit (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1976), 24. Henceforth,
references to Being and Time will be cited in the text with English, followed by German,
pagination. At times I have altered the translation without comment.
7. John Haugeland has introduced a first-person notion of 'commitment' as a
necessary condition on intentionality. I take my account to be compatible with his,
though if 'commitment' is understood as rendering Heidegger's Entschlossenheit, my
concern in this chapter is with a condition of commitment itself: the care structure as
it is revealed in the collapse of practical engagement in the world. See John Haugeland,
"Truth and Rule-Following;' op. cit., 305-61, esp. 339-43; and "Truth and Finitude:
Heidegger's Transcendental Existentialism;' Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity:
Essays in Honor ofHubert Dreyfus, vol. 1, ed. Mark Wrathall and JeffMalpas (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2000), 43-78.
8. Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers Briefwechsel 1920-1963, ed. Walter Biemel and
Hans Saner (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990), 71. Letter of December 16, 1926.
9. David Carr, The Paradox ofSubjectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
77.
10. Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and
T ime, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 13, 74-75, 147. Frederick A.
Olafson, Heidegger and the Philosophy ofMind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1987), 27, in contrast, argues that Heidegger does seek a "reconstructed concept of the
subject;' that is, of the "subject-entity as that for which other entities exist as such"
(32). For a critical discussion see Frederick A. Olafson, "Heidegger a la Wittgenstein,
or 'Coping' with Professor Dreyfus," Inquiry 37 (1994), 45-64; Taylor Carman, "On
Being Social: A Reply to Olafson;' Inquiry 37 ( 1994), 203-24; and Frederick A. Olafson,
"Individualism, Subjectivity, and Presence: A Reply to Taylor Carman;' Inquiry 37
(1994), 331-38.
11. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, op. cit., 57.
12. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hof­
stadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 159; Grundprobleme der
Phiinomenologie, Gesamtausgabe 24, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1975), 227.
13. See Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Subjekt und Dasein (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1974), 65.
14. See, for example, Charles Siewert, The Significance of Consciousness (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
15. About Husserl's own investigation into consciousness Heidegger notes that "a
'formal phenomenology of consciousness"' is a legitimate "phenomenological prob­
lematic in its own right" (BT 151/115), but he doesn't tell us what its relation to his
own existential analytic would be. Similarly, in History of the Concept of Time, op.
cit., 108 ( Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, 149), Heidegger admits that "this
consideration [ of consciousness as object of a science] is in fact possible."
16. My discussion in this section is greatly indebted to conversations with Mark
Okrent, whose forthcoming book on intentionality makes illuminating use of the
136 Steven Crowell

concept of "type." See also Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, op. cit., chapter 4, and
Haugeland, "The Intentionality All-Stars;' op. cit., 147-53, on conformism and
normativity.
17. I borrow this strategy from Dan Zahavi, who employs it in his exemplary book,
Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1999), chapter 1. I have also found Tomis Kapitan, "First-Person
Reference:' and James Hart, "Castaneda: A Continental Philosophical Guise;' to be
helpful here. Both are found in Hector-Neri Castaneda, The Phenomena-logic of the I:
Essays on Self-Consciousness, ed. James Hart and Tomis Kapitan (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1999).
18. Of course, I can be wrong about what I feel, but not about the fact that it is I
who feel it. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, op. cit., 5.
19. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, 7.
20. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, 8.
21. Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity, 9-10. Ernst Tugendhat , Self-Consciousness
and Self-Determination, trans. Paul Stern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986) misses
just this point when he argues that 'I' can be defined simply as the term "each of us
uses to refer to himself." T his leads him to the claim that "I cannot identify myself by
the use of the word I" since "the word I designates the ultimate reference point of
all identification, though the person referred to by it-the speaker-is not identified;
but he is referred to as identifiable from the 'he' perspective" (73). In other words, all
identification is criterial, by way of public, third-person descriptions. What is missing
is a grasp of the kind of self-awareness entailed in the very meaning of 'I: This kind
of self-'identification' is not an answer to the question "Who am I?"-as Tugendhat
supposes (209)-but rather an encounter with what generates the asymmetry between
my being the "ultimate reference point of all identification;' on the one hand, and
the "person . .. identifiable from the 'he' perspective" on the other. This first-person
self-awareness does not depend on my identifying myself in terms of any third-person
descriptions of 'who' I am.
22. The relation between the transcendental and the empirical ego in Husserl is
notoriously disputed, but for some recent discussions see Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness
and Alterity, op. cit., 138-56, and Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 112-29. For discussions that include
Heidegger's stance toward the problem, see David Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity,
op. cit., and Steven Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths To­
ward Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001),
chapters 9 and 13.
23. Like Wittgenstein, Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, op. cit.,
56-76, denies that the 'logic' of'l' has any ontological relevance, while Taylor Carman,
"On Being Social: A Reply to Olafson;' op. cit., 216, uses Wittgenstein's dictum that
"nothing in the visual field warrants the conclusion that it is seen from an eye" to gloss
Heidegger's supposed non-subjective account of the 'mineness' of everyday coping.
24. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, op. cit., 161.
 Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time 137

25. In spite of Heidegger's aversion to the language of 'subjectivity; there is even

some textual warrant for my terminological preference. For Heidegger notes that the
existential analysis of conscience "does justice to the 'objectivity' of the appeal for the
first time by leaving it its' subjectivity; which of course denies the one-self its dominion"
(BT 323/278). Conscience defines the domain of'subjectivity; but this is not an inner
space of mental representations. As Heidegger explicitly states, "neither the call, nor
the deed which has happened, nor the guilt with which one is laden, is an occurrence
with the character of something present at hand which runs its course" in the stream
of Erlebnisse (BT 337/291).
26. This point is elaborated in Steven Crowell, "Authentic Historicality," in David
Carr and Chan-Pai Cheung (eds.), Space, Time, and Culture, Contributions to Phe­
nomenology, vol. 51 (Berlin: Springer, 2004).
27. This does not mean that Heidegger provides a complete account ofreason, but he
does indicate the ontological place for such an account. Thus it is not true, as Tugendhat,
Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, op. cit., 215, states, that Heidegger's account
of resoluteness is "an attempt to banish reason from human existence and in partic­
ular from the relation of oneself to oneself." Tugendhat recognizes that "Heidegger's
concept of self-determination not only admits ofextension through a relation to reason
but also demands this extension on its own grounds" (215), but because he never con­
siders the analysis of conscience, he conceives this "extension" as coming from outside
the Heideggerian project. On the other hand, to specify such a "relation to reason" im­
manently, by employing the concept of phronesi.5-,\s does Einar 0verenget, Seeing The
Self: Heidegger on Subjectivity (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 223-31-is to ignore the fact
that this sort of 'practical' reason cannot account for its own 'rationality: Tugendhat,
in contrast, clearly recognizes that the 'autonomy' analyzed in Division II is what makes
possible the step from normativity to validity, from conformity to criticism, from un­
derstanding to reason.
28. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question
Concerning Technology and other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper &
Row, 1977), 19.
29. Martin Heidegger, Platon: Sophistes, Gesamtausgabe 19, ed. Ingeborg Schi.i:Bler
(Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1992), 143, 156-64.
30. In Being and Time Heidegger "formalizes" the notion of'sight' to signify "access
in general" (BT 187/147) and argues that everyday coping is not "blind"; it "has its
own sight." That this is not merely a matter of the physiology of the optical organ
is clear: "Dealings with equipment subordinate themselves to the manifold assignments
of the 'in order to: And the sight with which they thus accommodate themselves is
circumspection [ Umsicht]" (BT 98/69).
31. What Heidegger is getting at here reflects Korsgaard's distinction between "cri­
teria of explanatory and normative adequacy": "The difference is one of perspective. A
theory that could explain why someone does the right thing-in a way that is adequate
from a third-person perspective-could nevertheless fail to justify the action from
the agent's own, first-person perspective, and so fail to support its normative claims:'
138 Steven Crowell

Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1996), 14.
32. Nietzsche, one source for this idea, emphasizes that conscience, as internalization
of punishment, gives rise to an "uncanny illness:' But it also creates the world's first
interesting animal: "[T]he existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself,
taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic,
contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially
altered:' Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy ofMorals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Vintage, 1969), 85 (second essay, section 16).
33. See, e.g., Martin Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael
Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 184; Metaphysische An­
fangsgrunde der Logik, Gesamtausgabe 26, ed. Klaus Held (Frankfurt: Klostermann,
1978), 237; and also the essay "Yorn Wesen des Grundes;' to be discussed below.
34. The fact (which Heidegger emphasizes in his critique of rationalism) that giving
reasons at some point 'gives out' is no argument against the claim that the practice of
giving reasons-a practice that originates not with normativity as such but with nor­
mativity in relation to a creature capable of the first-person perspective-is constitutive
of 'worldhood' as the space of intelligibility.
35. I take a stand on them in Steven Crowell, "Facticity and Transcendental Phi­
losophy;' in Jeff Malpas (ed.), From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the
Transcendental (London: Routledge, 2002).
36. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1994), 71, n. 2. In this comparison I am not committing myself to the details of
McDowell's account, but only to something like this distinction. Compare Haugeland,
"Intentionality All-Stars;' op. cit., 151: "To say that biological and social categories are
'emergent' is not to say, of course, that they are incompatible with vapid materialism
or exempt from the laws of nature. Quite the contrary: it is only because conformism
is itself in some sense a 'causal' process that the emergent social pattern is nonacci­
dental in the sense required for intentionality." On the problem of'double grounding'
implied in Heidegger's discussion, see Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of
Meaning, op. cit., chapter 12.
37. The entire passage would be relevant for my argument, but I can only cite it
here without detailed commentary: "Der Nichtcharakter dieses Nicht bestimmt sich
existenzial: Selbst seiend ist das Dasein das geworfene Seiende als Selbst. Nicht durch
es selbst, sondern an es selbst entlassen aus dem Grunde, um als dieser zu sein. Das
Dasein is nicht insofern selbst der Grund seines Seins, als dieser aus eigenem Entwurf
erst entspringt, wohl aber ist es als Selbstsein das Sein des Grundes. Dieser ist immer
nur Grund eines Seienden, dessen Sein das Grundsein zu iibernehmen hat:'
38. Heidegger's position here is quite close to Kant's, well captured by Korsgaard:
''According to Kant it follows from the fact that a rational being acts 'under the idea
of freedom' ...that she acts for a reason or on a principle which she must regard as
voluntarily adopted. The point here has to do with the way a rational being must think
of her actions when she is engaged in deliberation and choice. When you make a choice,
you do not view yourself simply as impelled into it by desire or impulse. Instead, it is
 Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time 139

as if there were something over and above all of your desires, something that is you,
and that decides which if any of your desires to gratify'' (Christine Korsgaard, Creating
the Kingdom of Ends [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 57). See also
Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, op. cit., 94: "If the bidding from outside is desire,
then the point is that the reflective mind must endorse the desire before it can act on
it, it must say to itself that the desire is a reason. As Kant put it, we must make it our
maxim to act on the desire. Then although we may do what desire bids us, we do it
freely:' For Dasein, nothing is a mere 'determinant' but is always subject to the measure
of the possible.
39. Martin Heidegger, "What is Metaphysics?" trans. David Farrell Krell, in Path­
marks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 93.
40. Heidegger makes the connection explicit between Kant's notion of the person­
alitas moralis as an end-in-itself and his own concept of Dasein as ultimate 'for the
sake of which' in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, op. cit., 122-76; Grundprobleme der
Phiinomenologie, 173-251.
41. Martin Heidegger, "On the Essence of Ground;' trans. William McNeill, in
Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 125.
Henceforth cited in the text as EG.
42. This implies that the first-person is the ground of dialogical (and thus also
of dialectical) rationality, rather than the reverse. To argue this fully would take a
separate paper, but see Steven Crowell, "The Project of Ultimate Grounding and the
Appeal to Intersubjectivity in Recent Transcendental Philosophy," International Journal
of Philosophical Studies 7 (1999), 31-54.
43. This paper was first delivered at a conference on "Phenomenology in the Nordic
Countries" in Copenhagen, Denmark, and again at the third annual meeting of the
International Society for Phenomenological Studies, in Asilomar, California. I thank
the participants at both conferences for valuable criticism.
 8
Can There Be a Better Source of Meaning
than Everyday Practices? Reinterpreting
Division I of Being and Time in the Light
of Division 11
Hubert L. Dreyfus

I. Average versus Primordial Understanding

In Division I of Being and Time Heidegger says that "publicness primarily

controls every way in which the world and human beings get interpreted,
and it is always right" (165).1 This seems to follow from three basic theses:
( 1) people have skills for coping with equipment, with other people, and for
taking up public roles like student or teacher; (2) to make sense, these everyday
coping practices must conform to public norms; and (3) these public norms
are the basis of average everyday significance or intelligibility. In Heidegger
jargon: "The one articulates the referential context of significance" ( I67). That
is, norms tell us what one normally does.
For Heidegger then, as for Wittgenstein, the source of the intelligibility of the
world and of human life is our shared, everyday, public practices. But we must
beware of concluding from the basis of intelligibility in everyday practices, that,
for Heidegger, as for Wittgenstein and pragmatists such as Richard Rorty, there
is no superior source of meaning than the everyday; for Heidegger also says
that "by publicness everything gets obscured" (165), and adds that Division
I of Being and Time provides a phenomenology only of everyday average un­
derstanding and so will have to be revised in the light of the more "primordial
understanding" (212) he describes in Division II.

141
142 Hubert L. Dreyfus

But how can Heidegger account for a higher form of intelligibility than the
public, average intelligibility provided by the social norms? Like Wittgenstein
and Rorty, he rejects any of the forms of higher metaphysical intelligibility
claimed by philosophers. It looks like for Heidegger, as for Wittgenstein, there
simply couldn't be any higher intelligibility than that provided by our shared
everyday practices. As Wittgenstein says, explanations have to stop somewhere,
and then we simply have to say this is what we do. Yet Heidegger clearly holds
that there is a form of understanding of situations, on the one hand, and of
human being, on the other, that is superior to everyday understanding. What
could such a more primordial understanding be?
To get a clue, it helps to recall what we learn from Theodore Kisiel's research
into the sources of Being and Time. According to Kisiel, the book grows out of
Heidegger's work on Aristotle: Division I elaborates on techne, everyday skill,
and Division II on phronesis, practical wisdom. 2 But just what phenomena do
Aristotle and Heidegger have in mind with techne and phronesis? The way to
find out is to let these phenomena show themselves as they are in themselves, so
I will take a moment to review, in a very abbreviated way, four of the five stages
of skill acquisition. Then I'll describe what more is needed for a skilled learner
to gain practical wisdom-a mastery of his or her culture's practices. Finally,
I'll suggest that, at the end of Being and Time, Heidegger drew on Kierkegaard's
Christian understanding of being reborn, to introduce an even higher skill than
could be understood by Aristotle and the Greeks.

II. A Phenomenology of Skill Acquisition3

Stage 1: Novice
Normally, instruction begins with the instructor decomposing the task en­
vironment into context-free features that the beginner can recognize without
the desired skill. The beginner is then given rules for determining actions on
the basis of these features.
For example, the child who is learning how to behave appropriately in his
or her culture may be given the rule: "Never tell a lie:'

Stage 2: Advanced Beginner

But as the novice gains experience actually coping with real situations, he
sees that the rules don't work and learns to see meaningful additional aspects
of the situation. Instructional maxims can then refer to these new situational
aspects.
 Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in the Light of Division II 143

The policy "Never tell a lie" will get a child into fights and excluded from
important events so, with the coaching of their parents, children learn to tell
their friends when leaving their homes that they had a good time, regardless
of the truth. Thus, the child learns to replace the rule "Never lie" with the
maxim "Never lie except in situations when making everyone feel good is what
matters."

Stage 3: Competence
But there are many types of social situations, so children must learn to choose
a perspective that determines which elements of the situation will be treated as
important and which ones will be ignored.
Thus a young person learns that there are situations in which one must tell the
truth and others in which one lies. Although this is daunting, the adolescent
has to decide whether the current situation is one of building trust, giving
support, manipulating the other person for his or her own good, harming a
brutal antagonist, and so forth. If, for instance, trust is the issue, the young
person has to decide when and how to tell the truth.
Since such decisions are risky, they give rise to the anxiety that goes with free
choice. In the face of this anxiety the learner is tempted to seek the security of
standards and rules. For example, if a risk-averse young person decides that a
situation is one of trust and so tells a friend more than the friend can bear and
thereby loses the friendship, he may decide on the rule, "Never tell more truth
than is absolutely necessary." This rule may prevent new breakdowns in similar
situations, but it will also prevent further skill refinement. In this case, it will
prevent frank and flexible friendships. In general, if one seeks to follow rules
one will not get beyond competence. 4 There is no substitute for taking risks.
But this means there is no way to avoid anxious involvement. Prior to this
stage, if the rules and maxims don't work, the performer could rationalize that
he has not been given adequate guidelines. Now, however, the learner feels
responsible for his choices, and often his choice leads to confusion and failure.
Of course, sometimes things work out well, and the competent performer
experiences a kind of elation unknown to the beginner. Thus, learners at this
stage find themselves on an emotional roller coaster.
Ofcourse, not just any emotional reaction such as enthusiasm, or fear ofmak­
ing a fool of oneself, or the exultation of victory, will do. What matters is taking
responsibility for one's successful and unsuccessful choices, even brooding over
them; not just feeling good or bad about winning or losing, but replaying one's
performance in one's mind step by step. The point, however, is not to analyze
one's mistakes and insights, but just to let them sink in. Experience shows that
only then will one become an expert.
144 Hubert L. Dreyfus

As the competent performer becomes more and more emotionally involved

in his task, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to draw back and adopt the
detached rule-following stance of the beginner. While it might seem that this
involvement would interfere with rule-testing, and so would lead to irrational
decisions and inhibit further skill development, in fact just the opposite turns
out to be the case. If the detached stance of the novice and advanced beginner
is replaced by involvement, and the learner accepts the anxiety of choice, he is
set for further skill advancement.

Stage 4: Expertise
With enough experience and willingness to take risks, the learner becomes
an expert who immediately sees what sort of situation he is in and what to
do. In this way, most children grow up to be experts who have learned, among
many other things, spontaneously to tell the truth or to lie, depending upon
the situation. Most people grow up to be ethical experts responding in what is
generally recognized as the right way to a wide range ofinterpersonal situations.
But although the virtuous person does the right thing according to the stan­
dards of the one, this isn't the whole story. While most of us are ethical experts
in many domains such as truthfulness, according to Aristotle a few superior
people go beyond ethical expertise. They are admired for their phronesis or
practical wisdom. Let us call this stage mastery.

Stage 5: Mastery
We have so far seen that, if the learner stays emotionally involved and has
enough experience, he will become an expert who responds intuitively to the
current situation. That means that the average person is an expert in many
domains, from dressing to driving to ethical behavior. As long as the situation
remains stable, such expertise does not require constant learning. And, as
reflection and observation shows, most experts become satisfied with a given
level of success, and stop responding emotionally to each new experience. A
few people, however, at least in areas important to them, are never satisfied
that they have done the right thing, even if public opinion assures them it was
right. They sense that there is no one right thing to do and that they can always
improve.
Such continually anxious experts are never complacent. But, happily, if they
brood over their successes and failures, replaying them over and over in their
mind, they will reach a new level of skillful coping beyond expertise. Just as
the beginner can go on to become aware not just of context-free features but
 Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in the Light of Division II 145

also of meaningful situational aspects, the expert can progress from respond­
ing immediately to specific situations to responding immediately to the whole
meaningful context. Thus the constantly anxious expert develops a masterful
grasp of the whole unfolding activity-a grasp that the complacent expert can
never achieve. According to Heidegger, this is the higher skill Aristotle called
phronesis, practical wisdom.
Considering some examples can help us see how mastery goes beyond ex­
pertise. The average carpenter can be counted on to be an expert who will
put wood together in the standard way and hit the nails appropriately for the
kind of wood he is using. The master craftsman, however, is responsive to
the specific grain of the piece of wood he is using and to the whole situation,
both architectural and social, into which his work is to fit. 5 In team sports, the
normal expert takes account of the current location of the other players, but
there are rare players, such as Larry Bird, who are gripped by the game and are
never satisfied with doing the standard thing. They go on to develop a feel for
the whole evolving situation in the overall game. Bird thus could respond to
possibilities on the court that others couldn't see.
The same distinction between the expert and the master shows up outside
of sports. A colleague of mine, who is generally recognized to be a master
teacher, is never satisfied with her teaching. In her lectures she learns from
her interactions with the students, and after each lecture replays them in her
mind, feeling elated at the moments when things went well and she and the
students learned together, and discouraged when a long discussion led nowhere.
Colleagues are amazed to find that as she walks about the campus listening to
her Walkman she is listening not to music but to her lecture from the previous
year. But she is not giving herself rules for how to avoid mistakes and do better
next time; that sort of detachment would lead to a regression to competence.
She is simply letting the classroom interactions and the connected emotions
sink in. Her brain then takes over and does the rest outside of consciousness;
the result is that each year she is an even more masterful teacher. 6

III. How a Resolute Response to the Anxiety of Guilt Makes

Phronesis Possible

But why do some people constantly replay what they have done and let their
joy at their successes and sadness at their failures obsess them? Why aren't they
satisfied by knowing they have done what is publicly recognized as the right
thing? Heidegger can help us here. He notes in Division I that there is no right
way to act, but that the average way of acting avoids this unsettling fact by doing
146 Hubert L. Dreyfus

what everyone agrees is the right thing. Heidegger calls such "lostness in the
one" "tranquilized;' and describes it as following "rules and standards" (312).
In Division II, however, Heidegger introduces the anxiety of guilt as a positive
corrective to this tranquilized state.Ontological guilt in Being and Time does
not mean what guilt normally is taken to mean. It is not a sense of having done
something wrong but rather a structural characteristic of all human beings.
Guilt is defined as the fact that one is indebted to the norms of one's culture,
but that one can't get behind this cultural thrownness so as to make these norms
explicit and justify them.
There is no reason why our way of doing things is right; it is just what we
do. The anxious realization of the ungroundedness of the rules and standards
of the public's average understanding undermines the expert's complacency. If
a person faces the anxiety caused by his ontological guilt he can act with what
Heidegger calls resoluteness, which Heidegger defines as "self projection upon
[my] ownmost being-guilty, in which [I am] ready for anxiety'' (343).
Thus Heidegger's resolute individual deviates both from the beginner's rules
and the public's standards. In Heidegger's terms, irresolute Dasein responds
to the general situation (Lage in German), whereas resolute Dasein responds
to the concrete Situation (Situation in German).As Heidegger puts it: "for the
one ...the [concrete] Situation is essentially something that has been closed
off. The one knows only the 'general situation'" {346), while "resolute Dasein"
is in touch with the "concrete Situation of taking action" (349). We can now
see that response to the concrete Situation refers to the broader contextual
understanding ofthe unfolding situation characteristic ofthe master.Heidegger
says in his discussion of phronesis in his 1925 Sophist lectures:

[The phronimos] ... is determined by his situation in the largest sense. ... The
circumstances, the givens, the times and the people vary. The meaning of
the action ...varies as well.... It is precisely the achievement of phronesis to
disclose the [individual] as acting now in the full situation within which he
acts.7

Heidegger adds: "Our concrete interpretation of phronesis shows how actions

are constituted in it. Namely in terms of the kairos." 8 Kairos is Aristotle's term
for the decisive moment in which the phronimos grasps the whole temporally
unfolding concrete Situation. It is "ultimately an immediate overall view of the
moment from the point of view of the end of the action in question." 9
Of course the actions of the phronimos are the result of the gradual re­
finement and enlargement of what starts out as general responses to the gen­
eral situation. Mastery grows out of long, involved, anxious experience acting
within the shared cultural practices. Thus, in discussing phronesis Heidegger
 Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in the Light ofDivision II 147

quotes Aristotle's remark that "Only through much time ... is life experience
possible."10 And in Being and Time he is explicit that the intelligibility of
the (concrete) Situation disclosed by resolute action is a refinement of the
everyday:

The "world" which is available does not become another "in its content" nor
does the circle of others get exchanged for a new one; but both being toward
[equipment] understandingly and concernfully, and solicitous being with others,
are now given a definite character. [344]

Or, more dearly, given our concern with the one:

Resolution does not withdraw from "actuality" but discovers first what is factically
possible; and it does so by seizing upon it in whatever way is possible for it as its
ownmost ability-to-be in the "one." [346, my italics]

IV. From Kairos to Augenblick

Kisiel's claim that Heidegger's resoluteness is a working out of Aristotle's phe­

nomenology of practical wisdom is thus convincing.But Kisiel's plausible way
of understanding the passages in question is disputed by another group of in­
terpreters who point out that Heidegger's account of resoluteness is based on
his early interest in the account of radical transformation in St. Paul, Luther
and Kierkegaard. 11 These interpreters understandably focus not on the Greek
kairos, as the decisive moment in masterful action, but on Heidegger's use of
the Kierkegaardian term for radical transformation, the Augenblick, translated
as the "Instant."
Heidegger would agree with both parties to this dispute. He distinguishes
the phronimos's understanding of the concrete Situation revealed by guilt from
what he calls the limit-situation revealed by death.He introduces the Augenblick:
Dasein "gets brought back from its lostness by a resolution, so that both the
concrete Situation and ...the primordial 'limit-Situation' of being-towards­
death, will be disclosed as an Augenblick that has been held on to" (400).
Heidegger adds: "What we here indicate with 'Augenblick' is what Kierkegaard
was the first to really grasp in philosophy-a grasping which begins the possibility
of a completely new epoch in philosophy for the first time since Antiquity." 12
Clearly there is something crucially important that Aristotle's account of
phronesis could not capture.To understand this new level of skill introduced
by Christianity and first fully articulated by Kierkegaard, we need to return to
the phenomena and introduce a sixth stage of skill enhancement.
148 Hubert L. Dreyfus

Stage 6: World Transformer

Mastery is as good as one can get in the stages of skill acquisition in a settled
domain, but there is a further form of skill that is usually called creativity. Then
the skilled practitioner doesn't merely intuitively cope as most of us do when
we are experts in a domain, or even manifest a deep insight into the domain as
masters do; rather I have a vision of the skill domain so original that it changes
my world. Revolutionary scientists such as Galileo, leaders such as Martin
Luther King, Jr., and entrepreneurs such as Ford change their world in this way.
But there are less dramatic versions. Perhaps the clearest examples can be
found in sports. In basketball, Larry Bird never went beyond mastery and was
recognized as one of the best team players who ever played, but Michael Jordan
expressed his style of life in his play. He played basketball not as a team player
but as an individual. At first people thought that this undermined the teamwork
essential to the sport, but it worked, and that changed the way the game is now
played. 13
Outside sports, we find the same phenomenon in visionaries who see the
possibilities of new technologies. For example, Alan Kay, back in the late sixties
when computers filled whole rooms, began to develop the laptop computer with
the desktop interface. Kay is interesting because he sees our culture's normal
way of doing things not as sensible and natural, but as purely contingent. He
is thus fascinated by history. For example, when working on what he called
his "dynabook;' the latest version of which is Apple's "PowerBook;' he read
the history of books so as to loosen up what people normally take for granted
about them. He was interested in why books are the size they are, how they
came, rather late in the game, to have page numbers, etc.
Thus, world transformers somehow sense that the whole currently accepted
way of doing things is arbitrary, and have a vision that what is now being done
could be done in an entirely different way, which would even change what
counted as doing things better. They are often sensitive to the fact that people
aren't doing what they think they are doing. Rather than ignoring or covering
up or explaining away such anomalies, they hold onto and elaborate them.
Especially if these anomalies reveal other ways of doing things left over from
the past.14

V. The Greek Cultural Master vs. the Christian

World Transformer

Given the phenomenology of world disclosing, we can now see that there are
two totally different levels of skill beyond the expertise described in Division I of
Being and Time. As we have already seen, according to Heidegger, anxious, guilty
 Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in the Light of Division II 149

resoluteness-Dasein's sense of its thrownness-makes possible the mastery

exhibited by the phronimos who, because he has held onto anxiety, and so no
longer takes for granted that the standard public way of acting is "always right;'
can go on learning and master broader and broader situations. But, according
to Heidegger, the Aristotelian phronimos has not sensed the ungroundedness
of the Greek understanding of what it means to be a human being. In fact, the
Greek phronimos could, if he had taken Aristotle's ethics course, 15 learn that
what one does when one is a Greek expresses the essential rational character of
human nature. The phronimos, therefore, although admired for his wisdom, is
not fully authentic.
Besides the masterful coping of the phronimos, made possible by a grasp of the
concrete Situation in the widest sense, there is a "fully authentic" way of acting
made possible by Dasein's "primordial understanding" of its own way of being.
This fully authentic way of acting is a more complete form of resoluteness
in which Dasein not only faces the anxiety of guilt, viz., the sense that the
everyday norms of its society are thrown rather than grounded and so have no
final authority; it also faces the anxiety of the limit-situation of death, where
death, like guilt, is given a new "ontological meaning:' In Being and Time,
death does not mean an event at the end of one's life, but rather the sense that
my identity and world are ungrounded, and so can be totally transformed.
Ontological death, then, is a prerequisite for the possibility of being reborn.
Once we see that there are two phenomena, masterful response to the con­
crete Situation and radical transformation of the self and world, we can begin
to see that Heidegger is distinguishing and relating two basic experiences of
the source, nature, and intelligibility of decisive action-the Greek experience
of the kairos, arising from a sense of the ungroundedness of public norms,
that makes possible masterful coping in the world, and the Christian experience
of the Augenblick, arising from a primordial understanding of Dasein itself as
ungrounded, that makes possible a transformation of the world.
This enables Heidegger to distinguish two kinds of resoluteness. As he puts
it:

We have defined "resoluteness" as a projecting of oneself on one's ownmost being­

guilty.... Resoluteness gains its authenticity as anticipatory resoluteness. In this,
Dasein understands itself with regard to its ability-to-be, and it does so in such a
manner that it will go right under the eyes of Death in order thus to take over in
its thrownness that entity which it is itself, and to take it over wholly. [434]

In other words, the resolute phronimos merely experiences the thrownness of

everyday norms and so has the sense that they do not provide rules to be rigidly
followed nor shared standards of what is right that can guide performance.
150 Hubert L. Dreyfus

He therefore gives up a general understanding of the situation and responds

to the full concrete Situation. In anticipatory resoluteness, however, anxiety in
the face of death frees Dasein from talcing for granted even the agreed-upon
current cultural concerns. That is, in anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein has to
be ready at all times to give up its identity and its world altogether. In such an
understanding, Dasein manifests "its authenticity and its totality" {348).
This readiness makes it possible for Dasein to change history by what
Heidegger calls repetition.

Repetition makes a reciprocal rejoinder to the possibility of existence that has­

been-there....But when such a rejoinder is made to this possibility in a resolution,
it is made in an Augenblick; and as such it is at the same time a disavowal of that
which in the today, is working itself out as the "past." [ 438, my italics]

What Heidegger is suggesting here is an original account ofcultural creativity.

In an instant ofdecisive action-which, of course, can take years to be carried
out-authentic Dasein can take over marginal practices from the past and by
making them central in the current context can exhibit a new understanding
ofthe past and a new form oflife that can transform his culture's fate.
Heidegger tells us that fate "is how we designate Dasein's primordial his­
torizing, which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself
down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet
has chosen" ( 435). The most striking example of such a transformation is the
Christian experience ofJesus as a world-transformer. We are told that the Jews
followed the Law. One was guilty for one's overt acts.Jesus changed all this
when, in the Sermon on the Mount, he said that everyone who looks at a
woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. He also
said that He had fulfilled the Law and so could practice healing even on the
Sabbath. On his new account the Law is only marginal, and what really matters
is that one is guilty for one's desires. Purity, not rightness ofaction, is required,
and in that case one can't save oneself by will power, but only by throwing
oneselfon the mercy of a Savior and being reborn.
It might seem that this cannot be a such radical change from Judaism,
since the eighth commandment already enjoins one not to covet anything that
is your neighbor's, and coveting is surely a case of desire, not overt action.
But Heidegger would point out that if Jesus had not had some basis in the
tradition no one would have had a clue as to what he was talking about, so it is
important that he take up and make central a marginal practice already in the
culture.
As Heidegger puts it in Being and Time, an authentically historical individual
transforms his generation's understanding ofthe issue facing the culture and
 Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in the Light of Division II 151

thereby produces a new authentic "we." Such a history maker thus goes beyond
not only the ethical expertise of his peers, but even beyond the full Situational
understanding of the phronimos. 16
Since all intelligibility must be grounded in shared everyday practices, how­
ever, such a charismatic leader will have to change common sense. Such a world
transformer can show a new style and so be followed, as Jesus was followed by his
disciples, even though they did not fully understand the meaning of what they
were doing. But he will not be fully intelligible to the members of the culture
until his new way of coordinating the practices is articulated in a new public
language and preserved in new public institutions. So, as Heidegger says, no
matter how publicness covers up radical originality, "even resoluteness remains
dependent upon the one and its world" (345).

Conclusion

In summary, according to Division II of Being and Time, public, average, every­

day understanding is necessarily general and banal. Nonetheless, this leveled,
average understanding is necessary in the early stages of acquiring expertise
and as the background for all intelligibility. It is thus both genetically and
ontologically prior to any more primordial understanding.
Once, however, an individual has broken out of the one's reassuring every­
day rules by anxiously facing his freedom to choose without guidelines among
alternative interpretations of his situation, by repeated risky experience in the
everyday world he can become sensitive to the discriminations that constitute
expertise in the concrete local situation. Then, with further involved experi­
ence facing resolutely the anxiety of groundlessness, he can go on to become a
phronimos, a cultural master, who responds to the whole situation in a broader
and deeper way than any expert. Finally, by facing the anxiety of death in an­
ticipatory resoluteness, and so seeing that his identity and that of his culture
is ungrounded and could be radically changed, a fully authentic Dasein can
disclose an even higher kind of intelligibility. He can take up marginal possibil­
ities in his culture's past in way that enables him to change the style of a whole
generation and thereby disclose a new world. 17
All of this shows that the shared intelligibility of the one, even though it
"obscures everything;' can be deepened and even radically transformed but
can never be left behind. So the public norms described in Division I are never
abandoned, but in Division II they turn out to be the basis of two important
positive phenomena-mastery and world-transforming-understood by the
Greeks and the Christians respectively, but never dreamed of in the philosophy
of pragmatists and Wittgenstinians.
152 Hubert L. Dreyfus

Notes

1. Page references in the text refer to the standard English translation: Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans.John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962).This translation and others have occasionally been modified.
2. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis ofHeidegger's "Being and Time" (Berkeley: Univer­
sity of California Press, 1993), 9. Kisiel says: "The project of BT thus takes shape in
1921-24 against the backdrop of an unrelenting exegesis of Aristotle's texts ... from
which the ... pretheoretical models for the two Divisions of BT, the techne of poiesis for
the First and the phronesis of praxis for the Second, are derived."
3. For a more detailed account see Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, Mind
over Machine (New York: Free Press, 1988), and The Road to Mastery and Beyond
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming).
4. Patricia Benner has described this phenomenon in From Novice to Expert: Ex­
cellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice (Menlo Park, Calif.: Addison-Wesley,
1984), 164.
5. "[A] true cabinetmaker ...makes himself answer and respond above all to the
different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood-to wood as it enters
into man's dwelling with all the hidden riches of its nature. In fact, this relatedness to
wood is what maintains the whole craft." Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?
trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 14-15.The same story with more
details is presented in Heidegger's account of the "four causes" involved in the making
of a silver chalice: Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology:' in The
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York:
Harper & Row, 1977), 6-8.
6. One might object that this account has the role of involvement reversed; that
the more the beginner is emotionally committed to learning the better, while an expert
could be, and, indeed, often should be, coldly detached and rational in his practice. This
is no doubt true, but the beginner's job is to follow the rules and gain experience, and it
is merely a question of motivation whether he is involved or not. What is important is
that the novice is not emotionally involved in choosing an action, even if he is involved
in its outcome. Only at the level of competence is there an emotional investment in
the choice of action. Then emotional involvement seems to play an essential role in
switching the learner over from what one might roughly think of as a left-hemisphere
analytic approach to a right-hemisphere holistic one. That amateur and expert chess
players use different parts of the brain has been confirmed by recent MRI research.
Researchers report that:

activity is most evident in the medial temporal lobe in amateur players, which is con­
sistent with the interpretation that their mental acuity is focused on analyzing unusual
new moves during the game. In contrast, highly skilled chess grandmasters have more
y-bursts in the frontal and parietal cortices .... These marked differences in the distri­
bution of focal brain activity during chess playing point to differences in the mecha­
nisms of brain processing and functional brain organization between grandmasters and
amateurs.
 Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in the Light of Division II 153

See Ognjen Amidzic, Hartmut J. Riehle, Thorsten Fehr, Christian Wienbruch, and
Thomas Elbert, "Patterns of focal y-bursts in chess players: Grandmasters call on regions
of the brain not used so much by less skilled amateurs;' Nature 412, 9 August 2001, 603.
7. Martin Heidegger, Plato's "Sophist," trans.Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 101 (my italics). In his Sophist course,
Heidegger has not yet made a clear distinction between Lage and Situation. He uses
both terms interchangeably to refer to the concrete situation.See, for example, page 102:
"out of the constant regard toward that which I have resolved, the situation [Situation]
should become transparent. From the point of view of the proaireton, the concrete
situation [konkrete Lage] .. . is covered over."
8. Martin Heidegger, Supplements: from the Earliest Essays to "Being and Time" and
Beyond, ed. John van Buren (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 134.
9. Ibid., 134, 135.
10. Ibid., 97.
11. However, in 1924 Heidegger also uses the term Augenblickto describe the phron­
imos's instantaneous insight into the Situation: "in phronesis ...in a momentary glance
[Augenblick] I survey the concrete situation of action, out of which and in favor of
which I resolve [entschliesse] myself": Plato's "Sophist," 114. This reading is confirmed
by Basic Problems, where the Augenblick is equated with Aristotle's kairos, the moment
of appropriate skillful intervention. "Aristotle saw the phenomenon of the Augenblick,
the kairos": The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Blooming­
ton: Indiana University Press, 1982), 288. Still, Augenblick is also Luther's translation
of St. Paul's instant in which we shall be changed in a "twinkling of an eye." So John
van Buren says rather darkly and unhelpfully that "Heidegger took the movement that
concentrates itself at the extreme point ( eschaton) of the kairos to be the kairological
time that he had already discovered in the Pauline eschatology": The Young Heidegger:
Rumor ofthe Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 231.To make
sense of this we will have to stay dose to the two phenomena Heidegger is distinguishing
and relating.
12. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude, trans.William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995), 150 (translation modified). (Kisiel clearly distinguishes the Aristotelian
and Pauline meanings of Augenblick: The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time,"
437.)
13. It is important to contrast entrepreneurs, like Ford, and style-changers like
Michael Jordan with inventors such as Edison. Ford had a vision of a new form of
production that would not try to make perfect cars for the rich like Rolls and Royce,
but simple, reliable cars for everyone. His success changed the world. Edison changed
the world too, but, even when he invented the electric light bulb, he had no vision
of a new style of life it would bring about. He was just seeing what new gadgets he
could make. We thus need to distinguish Ford as a world transformer from Edison as
an innovator. In sports too there are not only style changers like Michael Jordan, who
express their way of life in their actions, but also innovators like Dick Fosbury. Unlike
Jordan, Fosbury wasn't trying to change the high jump so as to better express his sense
154 Hubert L. Dreyfus

of the sport; he was only trying to find a way to jump that felt better. He thus changed
the technique but not the point or style of the sport.
14. We can also return to our examples of mastery to see what they would be like if
they were to become world-transformers. A master craftsman, drawing on historical
practices such as the love of nature practiced by the Romantics, who treated nature as
somehow sacred, might sense that the issue for our time is saving the environment. So to
resist our current tendency to think of nature as a resource to be used and then thrown
away, he might start a movement to make only things that can be transformed and
recycled. The masterful teacher might realize that what is most important in education
is not course content, but passing on the positive way of facing the anxiety of thrownness
that makes one capable of being a phronimos, and of facing the anxiety of death that
makes one capable of being a world transformer. She might then draw on the way
scientists in their post-doctoral years become apprentices to masterful scientists to
change the ways university education is taught so as to emphasize the way teaching
assistants learn as apprentices.
15. See M. F. Burnyeat, ''Aristotle on Learning to be Good:' in Essays on Aristotle's
Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
16. The phenomenon of world disclosing is described and illustrated in Charles
Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds ( Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).
17. Heidegger sensed that such a fully authentic Dasein's anxious reinterpretation of
what his generation stands for allows him to transform the cultural understanding of
his time, but, in Being and Time, Heidegger could not yet see how radically a culture's
understanding could be transformed. Only when he had understood that the style
of a culture-its whole understanding of being-could change, could he fully grasp
what it would be like for cultural paradigms such as statesmen, works of art, gods, and
philosophers to disclose new worlds. See Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of
Art:' in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row,
1971).
 9
Genuine Timeliness, from
Heidegger's Concept of Truth
Daniel 0. Dahlstrom

ITH THE INTERPRETATION of the world's manner of being, a manner of

W being that is constituted by "not-announcing-itself:' Heidegger launches
his first salvo at the traditional conception of being, namely, the presumption
of its equivalence to presence in the sense of something persistently on hand.
T he work-world, like the implements and network of references that compose
it, is not something on hand. To the contrary, not being on hand (or being
absent in a particular sense) is constitutive of its manner of being. Nevertheless,
traditional assumptions about being can be explained, Heidegger suggests, by
the phenomenon of the "crowd" and our tendency, in being-here (Dasein), to
self-evasion. At the same time, the traditional conception of being (with which
the logical prejudice makes common cause) becomes untenable, he argues,
in the light of what basically characterizes every dimension of being-here: the
phenomenon of care. To be-here is not to run around aimlessly without origins
or prospects, nor is being-here a senseless play of presences and absences. To
be-here is to be someone thrown into the world and falling prey to it, yet for
whom what "always already and always still" matters is for her herself to be.
"T he being disclosed is that of an entity for whom what matters is this being:' 1
Yet since it is possible to be-here authentically or inauthentically, a complete
analysis of this manner of being must include a determination of the sense of
genuine (authentic) existence. In this way Heidegger attempts to insure the
desired differentiation of being-here from being merely handy or on hand.
However, there is a final and decisive step that must be taken to dises­
tablish the conceptions of being and truth-the ontology and alethiology-

155
156 Daniel 0. Dahlstrom

traditionally underlying the logical prejudice. The central ontological assump­

tion of the logical prejudice is the equation of being with the presence of things.
Being is accordingly interpreted in terms of the present. 2 Heidegger is intent
on (a) exposing the largely unreflected, temporal character of this ontologi­
cal determination and (b) challenging the hegemony of this specific temporal
determination. But he himself contends that a certain timeliness (Zeitlichkeit)
provides the horizon against which it is meaningful to speak, not only ofnature's
manner of being-on-hand or, for that matter, a tool's way of being-handy, but
even a human being's way of being-here. This temporal determination might,
of course, simply mean that "being" stands for an occurrence or presence in a
succession of nows that are on hand (either singly or in some ideal series). Yet if
it did, being-here would be reducible to being-on-hand. The central ontological
( =temporal) supposition of the logical prejudice would be corroborated and
neither the difference between perceptual or propositional truth and the al­
legedly original truth (disclosedness) of being-here nor the difference between
authentic and inauthentic ways of being-here could be upheld. For all these
reasons, Heidegger's campaign against the logical prejudice's central ontolog­
ical assumptions must include an examination of the distinctive timeliness of
human existence. More specifically, in order to establish that being-here is not
something merely on hand and cannot be adequately understood in terms of
things on hand, he must show how timeliness constitutes the sense of being­
here and how this timeliness, far from depending upon a sequence of on-hand
nows ("being-within-time": Innerzeitigkeit), gives rise to such a conception
of time. Heidegger must show, in other words, how the very notion of time
that lends credence to the equation of being with presence is derivative of the
timeliness of being-here.
But there is a further reason why Heidegger must turn to the question of time.
It should be clear by now that Heidegger is arguing that the disclosedness that
constitutes being-here is the original, existential truth. The manners of being
(that of the on hand [ vorhanden], the handy [zuhanden], others, and one's
own) disclose themselves prethematically to being-here, which is, at bottom,
this disclosure if it is anything. But the questions then arise: What is the sense
of this disclosure? What is the horiwn against which these manners of being
disclose themselves? What gives these various manners of being their sense?
What is the sense of being that this existential truth discloses? Since timeliness
is Heidegger's answer to these questions, it is necessary for him to elaborate the
content ofthis original, existential truth ifhe is to make good on his claim that
it is more basic than propositional or perceptual truths.
Conceptions of being and truth are typically anchored in a view of time.
The logical prejudice and its ontological presuppositions represent one such
anchoring, Heidegger's existential analysis another. In order to demonstrate
 Genuine Timeliness 157

that the timeliness disclosed by being-here is more fundamental than the con­
cept of time underlying the logical prejudice and its assumptions, Heidegger
must first establish what that timeliness is. He begins by taking his cues from
an analysis of the genuine manner of being-here, as he unpacks five aspects of
"genuine timeliness:'
To be-here resolutely is to hear one's conscience and project oneself onto
the possibility that is most truly one's own: one's death. Because resolutely,
genuinely being-here amounts to anticipating this possibility ( the end of one's
possibilities), it can be described as a way of coming to the potential that is
most properly one's own, and, in that sense, authentically becoming or, as it
might be put more colloquially, "genuinely coming into one's own:'" Zukunft;:'
the German equivalent to "future;' is composed of the roots "to" or "at" (zu)
and "coming" (kunft), such that the term might be read as a nominalization
of "coming to:' Heidegger plays on this etymology as he derives "the original
phenomenon of the future" from authentically, i.e., resolutely, being-here.

[B]eing resolute in anticipating [death] is a way of being toward a potential way

of being that is extraordinary and most one's own [ Sein zum eigensten ausgezeich­
neten Seinkonnen]. Something of this sort is only possible in that being-here can
come to itself at all in this possibility that is most its own, and hold out the pos­
sibility in this manner-of-allowing-itself-to-come-to-itself as a possibility (or, in
other words, in that being-here exists). Holding out that extraordinary possibility
and allowing itself to come to itself is the original phenomenon of the future.
(SZ 325)

The original phenomenon of the future thus consists in someone holding out
the possibility of her death, allowing this potential that is most her own to come
to her. In effect, she comes to be or becomes existentially who she already is
becoming existentially. What does it mean to allow this direst of possibilities
to come to us? It means not running away from death. An inkling of what is
meant can be gathered from the commonplace observation at funerals that
death puts everything into perspective, as we see it coming, inevitably, to us.
Inasmuch as a person allows herself-her genuine manner of being-here-to
come to her in this way, she anticipates it. Heidegger accordingly calls this
genuine future "anticipating" or, more literally, "running ahead" ( Vorlaufen:
SZ 336). This anticipating ("a more original way of being toward death than
a concerned expectation of it") is only possible because being-here is "always
already coming to itself;' something that cannot be said for what is merely
handy or on hand (SZ 325).
This manner of "coming-to-oneself" is the original and genuine phe­
nomenon of the future. In other words, whatever else might be said about
158 Daniel 0. Dahlstrom

the future, it is at bottom the "becoming" exemplified or, better, authenticated

by a resolute anticipation of death. By contrast, the expression of the first struc­
tural aspect of care, namely, "being ahead-of-itself:' is "the formally indifferent
term for the future" (SZ 337). In any case, however, the future as a "becoming"
is the fundamental sense of being-here. The fact that to be-here is always to
be ahead of ourselves, that we know what matters in advance of any theory
or practice (vortheoretisch und vorpraktisch), that in each case we have already
projected and, as long as we exist, continue to project ourselves unthematically
onto possibilities, that our very existing is this thrown project of being-here­
these various dimensions of understanding rest ultimately on the fact that to
be-here is to come to or "become" oneself and in this way to be preeminently
futural. 3
To be-here resolutely is to take over and disclose ourselves precisely as each
of us respectively is already (SZ 325f). "To be ahead of oneself genuinely:'
projecting oneself onto the possibility that is most properly one's own ("death"),
is to come back to the very possibility into which one has already been thrown
and in that sense already is. "Only insofar as being-here generally is-as-I-am­
having-been [als ich bin-gewesen], can it come to itself in a futural sense such
that it comes-back" (SZ 326). T he hyphenated expression "is-as-I-am-having­
been" is a clumsy way of conveying the expression bin-gewesen. Without the
hyphen, the use of gewesen, the past participle of sein, can signal something
that is over, an event or state of affairs completed in the past. It might also
signify a past event that reaches into the present ( though in some of these cases
the "imperfect" is used instead). 4 Thus, without the hyphens, "ich bin gewesen"
translates simply "I was" or "I have been." But Heidegger makes it perfectly clear
that the expression bin-gewesen does not refer to something "past" ( vergangen),
that is, something no longer on hand, or to those effects of it that remain on
hand (SZ 380). Thus, the hyphenated expression "is-as-I-am-having-been"
indicates neither something over and done with nor something still lingering
like a nasty hangover. Instead the expression signifies, as Thomas Sheehan has
aptly put it, "that which at any given moment is always prior to and beyond
our determination:' 5 It signifies not a passing that is not past-like retention
in Husserl's analysis of time-consciousness-but instead the manner in which
being-here is always "already" and, indeed, always already "foregone" ( Vorbei)
in more than one sense of the word. 6 Just as Heidegger employs the awkward
expression Gewesensein (usually translated "alreadiness" here) in contrast to
Vergangenheit (past), so, too, he speaks of "the a priori perfect:' presumably
in contrast to the normal, a posteriori uses of the perfect that are registered in
grammars (SZ 85). To be-here authentically, in other words, is to be who one
is "already," and "one can only be genuinely already [gewesen]" insofar as one
projects or anticipates that one is, indeed, in a sense already "gone" (SZ 326).
 Genuine Timeliness 159

In a way that dearly resonates with themes of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and

Nietzsche ( though without mention of these philosophers), Heidegger depicts
authentically being what one already is as something that springs from the
genuine future in the form of a "repetition" or "retrieval" ( Wiederholung). "In
anticipating, being-here retrieves or brings itself back to the potential-to-be
that is most proper to it" (SZ 339).
Being-here can thus "retrieve" itself only by virtue of the fact that, in its being,
it is "fore-gone" (in the distinctive sense indicated) and "abides" as such, i.e.,
existing as its "alreadiness" (at times, e.g., to capture the gerund gewesend,
the term "abiding" is used instead of "alreadiness").7 Coming to oneself (the
authentic sense of the future) means, at the same time, coming back to who one
already is. "Being-here is genuinely with itself, it is truly existent, if it holds itself
in this anticipating:' 8 The second structural aspect of care-"being-already­
in (a world)" -expresses the thrownness disclosed through disposition and
grounded in this original "alreadiness." Thus, our dispositions (the way that
we prethematically, even instinctively turn toward some things and away from
others) disclose our manners of being to us by bringing us back to how we
already are. The point, Heidegger cautions, is not that the manners of being
disposed (e.g., fear or anxiety) are to be deduced from timeliness but that they
are only possible on the basis of it (SZ 340-46).
In the anticipating resoluteness, being-here is ahead of itself in an authentic
way and genuinely comes back to its thrownness, its abiding mortality, in such
a way that it first finds itself in its genuine situation. Resoluteness discloses the
respective, genuine potential-to-be of being-in-the-world in a moment (Au­
genblick) that springs from genuinely coming-to-oneself and thus to who one
is already. The moment is the authentic present as the authentic encounter
with things, a way of being present to them such that they can present them­
selves. This moment is thus not so much a way of rendering something present
(Gegenwiirtigen) as it is a matter of giving full attention to what is encountered
in being-here, "genuinely attending to it" (eigentliche Gegen-wart). "In reso­
luteness, the present is not only fetched back from the dispersal into concerns
nearest at hand, but instead is held in the future and alreadiness" (SZ 338). In
this moment, a human being is first genuinely involved in (bei) his world.9
Genuine timeliness as this "retrieving-momentous anticipating" is the
existential-ontological sense of genuine care (genuinely being-here), that is,
the way in which it discloses. Five different aspects of this sense of timeliness
deserve mention. First, timeliness cannot be broken down into separate parts,
as if genuinely being who one already is, being-involved-in-the-world, or com­
ing to oneself could be on hand somehow without one another. The genuine
way of being-already (the "retrieval" or "repetition") and the genuine way of
being in the moment ("attending to" the world and letting it present itself)
160 Daniel 0. Dahlstrom

are connected with the genuine future (the "anticipating") without being fully
dependent upon it. Each "dimension" of time is dependent upon the others in
an integrated whole that makes up timeliness.
This integrated character with its reciprocal complementarity does not, how­
ever, mean that some sort of equilibrium reigns within genuine timeliness akin,
for example, to that achieved when forward and reverse chemical reactions
occur at the same rate. The "retrieval" or "repetition" characteristic of authen­
tically being who one already is springs from the manner in which being-here is
authentically ahead of itself, and authentically being-here in the situation of the
moment reveals itself only on the basis of this retrieval. These considerations
point to a second feature of genuine timeliness: the primacy enjoyed by the
future ("becoming"). "The basic phenomenon of time is the future." 10
From the primacy of the future, the third aspect of genuine timeliness fol­
lows: its finitude. In order to forestall misunderstandings that accompany this
aspect, it is necessary to point out that this "finitude" does not refer to an
end or punctuated interval in a series of elapsing nows. The genuine future
(that "coming-to-oneself" described above) is not a possibility simply not yet
on hand, that "springs forth" at some undetermined point of time within a
now-sequence or occupies its place in the like. Death, it bears recalling, is
the inevitable possibility, not of anything on hand, but of the impossibility of
being-here (SZ 262). "The original and genuine future" is being-here's man­
ner of allowing this possibility to come to it, "existing as the possibility of
nothingness, a possibility that cannot be overtaken" (SZ 330).
The fourth aspect of genuine timeliness concerns the relation of timeliness
to being-here. Genuine care is a phenomenal expression of genuine timeliness
or, in more inflated terms, timeliness is the (transcendental) condition of the
possibility of care. That is to say, genuine timeliness provides the "sense" of
genuine care; it constitutes in a concrete way the transcendence signified by
"care" and "being-in-the-world." "Sense" for Heidegger is that "upon" or "over
against which" something is projected; without this "horizon" what is projected
would not be visible or sensible (ambiguity intended), even if in the process the
horizon itself in a certain sense is not regarded (see SZ 151, 324). Seen in this
light, genuinely being-here only makes sense (sinnvoll) in view of timeliness
as the sort of "anticipating" (Vorlaufen) that "retrieves" or brings me back to
myself (wiederholend) and in the process makes my situation present to me in
the decisive "moment" or "momentously" (augenblicklich).
As far as talk of "sense" as a horizon is concerned, it is only natural
to think of the following pairs: foreground/background, figure/ground, or
melody/accompaniment. These examples are instructive but also misleading
(and no less instructive because they are misleading). In certain respects it
hardly seems possible for us to direct our attention only at the foreground of a
picture; without a ground against which a figure cuts a profile, the figure would
 Genuine Timeliness 161

never be apparent. So, too, some musical accompaniments seem to fade out,
thereby allowing the melody to stand out all the more. In corresponding fash­
ion, genuine timeliness does not merely constitute respective ways in which to
be-here is to stand out or ex-ist and thus disclose (namely, "running-ahead" or
"anticipating;' "retrieving" or "repeating;' and "involvement in the moment").
Genuine timeliness also includes the horizon for these timely constitutions of
existence, though the horizon is different in each case.11
In order to appreciate Heidegger's interpretation oftimeliness as the horizon
or sense ofbeing-here, it may be helpful to recall that being-here is intentionality
or, better, the paradigm ofintentionality, a categorial perception, viewed "from
the inside;' to use Heidegger's own trope. As a means of capturing the origi­
nally timely character of being-here, of being-in-the-world as the ground level
of intentionality, Heidegger construes the modes of timeliness-anticipating,
retrieving, and the moment-as "ecstases" (Ekstasen). This use of "ecstasis"
(from ek: out, and histemi: to place) plays on original uses of the Greek term
in the sense of displacement, literally and figuratively, as well as on modern
connotations of those figurative senses. We say, for example, that someone is
ecstatic when she is "beside herself" with joy or pleasure and so given up to the
experience that she gives little or no thought to herself or even to what she is
doing. Being ecstatic, one is on the verge of being unconscious, but precisely
because one is so focused, so intently engaged in and, in that active sense, given
up to the moment. Heidegger's appeal to these associated meanings is meant
to convey how those modes of timeliness-those ecstases-jointly constitute
the most basic level of being-here or, in other words, the prethematic pro­
cess of being-here in the sense of being outside oneself. Again, as in the case
of "being-here;' Heidegger exploits a term with an unmistakably spatial root,
while at the same time insisting on the fundamentally temporal significance of
the phenomenon so designated. The term ecstasis is used to translate Ekstase
because it is an English word, roughly synonymous with 'ecstasy,' albeit far
less common, and because Heidegger himself uses a term similar in meaning
to ecstasy-Entruckung (rapture)-as a means of elaborating the meaning of
Ekstase. "Ecstasis" seems an apt translation since it brings to mind the normal
connotations of ecstasy, but, thanks to its uncommonness, also deflects any
quick identification of the usual senses with the sense introduced by Heidegger
to convey how timeliness constitutes being-here.
With this notion of ecstasy in mind, the horizonal character of timeliness
must be understood in two respects (SZ 324ff, 365). In one respect, genuine
timeliness provides the horizon for genuine care as a whole, and thereby the
"sense" of genuine human existence. In another, closely related respect, each
mode of genuine timeliness-what Heidegger dubs the "ecstases" or, liter­
ally, ways of "standing out" from itself in "anticipating,'' "retrieving,'' and the
"moment"-has its own respective horizon. Genuine timeliness comprises the
162 Daniel 0. Dahlstrom

horiwn of care and thereby the sense of existence by integrating the horiwns
for the "ecstases" of anticipating, retrieving, and moment that respectively
constitute the genuine future, past, and present.
Yet in either of these respects, the horiwnal metaphor can be misleading. For
example, the horizon for "anticipating"-the "for-the-sake-of-oneself"-does
not merely accompany it like some neutral background. Instead the horizon
structures the genuine projection, pulling and guiding it. Yet this does not
mean that the horizon somehow obtains independently of the projection. "The
move-away [Entruckung, that is of the essence of each "ecstasis"] opens this
horizon and holds it open" (GP 378). Genuine timeliness is a projecting (i.e.,
an anticipating) from which (as already discussed) a genuine way of "already
being" (retrieving) and a genuine way of "attending to things" (in the moment)
spring. But it is always a projecting "toward something" ("for the sake ofoneself,
one's being-here") and this directionality is decisive.
Mention has already been made of the integral character of timeliness. Each
"ecstasis" of genuine timeliness "reaches" or "stands out" to the other two,
which form part of that aspect's horizon (not unlike Husserl's longitudinal and
transversal time-consciousness). Thus, for example, the nexus of anticipating
and retrieving forms part of the horizon of the moment, namely, the genuine
possibilities that being-here attends to in its situation. The anticipating or
forerunning, the retrieving or repeating, and presenting in the moment are,
in Heidegger's formulation, "ecstases of timeliness"; he labels the respective
direction or horizon of the ecstasis its "horizonal schema" (SZ 365, 329). In
view of the fact, first, that genuine timeliness constitutes the horizon ofcare and
thus the sense of human existence and, second, that each ecstasis of genuine
timeliness has a respective, leading horizon, Heidegger speaks of the "ecstatic­
horizonal" character of timeliness.
The purpose of this account of timeliness, it bears recalling, is to articulate
the sense of"being-here" and "being-in-the-world;' Heidegger's terms for what
Husserl allegedly describes "from the outside" as intentionality. Heidegger's ac­
count of ecstatic-horizonal timeliness is thus supposed to capture the concrete
transcendence that receives, in his view, only muted and inadequate elabora­
tion in the sort of theoretical and perceptual orientation that Husserl gives to
the doctrine of intentionality. In pursuit of this objective, Heidegger uses typ­
ically spatial adverbial expressions to designate the horizons (e.g., Wohin) and
nominalizations of active verbs typically ascribed to a human agent for the re­
spective ecstases (e.g., Vorlaufen). Though they appear to the reader as "mixed
metaphors:' the combinations of these two sorts of locutions are designed to
indicate a presubjective yet ecstatic unfolding (later dubbed "time-space") as
the original significance of "being." "There is, as part of the ecstasis, a pecu­
liar openness, which is given with the 'outside-itself.' That toward which each
ecstasis is, in a specific way, in itself open, we designate as the 'horizon of the
 Genuine Timeliness 163

ecstasis"' (GP 378). The horizons are thus related to the ecstases as the world is
related to the existentials making up "being-in-the-world:' More precisely, the
horizonality of ecstatic timeliness is the original significance of the "world:'
"The world is neither on hand nor handy but instead unfolds (zeitigt sich) in
timeliness. It 'is here' with the outside-itself of the ecstases. If no being-here
exists, no world is also 'here'" (SZ 365).
In this way Heidegger introduces the transcendental dimension of the anal­
ysis of timeliness. "Resting on the horizonal unity of ecstatic timeliness, the
world is transcendent" (SZ 366). For example, precisely in the "moment" that
springs from genuinely coming-to-ourselves, we bring ourselves, being-here,
face-to-face with our respective situations. On the basis of genuine timeli­
ness, we encounter others, what is handy, and what is on hand. Regarded in
this way, genuine timeliness is the condition of the possibility of genuinely
being-in-the-world, encompassing the worldliness of the work-world, being­
with-others, and being-oneselfand thereby allowing for an authentic encounter
with intraworldly entities.
Given that (a) the disclosedness of the sense of being-here is the origi­
nal truth, (b) the ecstatic-horizonal timeliness is the sense that is thereby
disclosed, and (c) timeliness in the manner elucidated thus constitutes the
care (existence) of being-in-the-world, timeliness might be labeled "the tran­
scendental truth." The word "ecstatic" accordingly indicates that timeliness is
"the original 'outside-itself' in and of itself" and precisely in this sense, as the
"woof and warp" of being-in-the-world, it can be said to be the condition of
the possibility of being-in-the-world. 12 Being-here (being-in-the-world, con­
cerned, caring about others and about oneself) is "outside-itself." The original
"outside-itself" is the timeliness by means of which it is "here" (da). It scarcely
needs to be added that Heidegger's explanation of how genuine timeliness
( wiederholend-augenblickliches Vorlaufen) constitutes the sense of genuine care
would be misunderstood from the ground up if it were conceived as a property
or determination that happens to accrue to some care that is otherwise on
hand. To be here is to care, and caring is timely through and through, that is,
ecstatically unfolding against a horizon. 13
The fifth and final point to be made about timeliness springs from its ecstatic­
horizonal character. A thing that is handy or on hand is an entity that surfaces
in time; being-here is that entity the sense of which, namely, care, is grounded
in timeliness. Since timeliness constitutes the sense of being-here and thereby
underlies any sense of being handy or on hand, it would be a category mistake
to define timeliness itself as an entity or to maintain that timeliness itself "is:'
As a means of avoiding such category mistakes and emphasizing the dynamic,
unified phenomenon of timeliness as the original "outside-itself;' Heidegger
speaks of the Zeitigung of timeliness, a term that might be translated "ripen­
ing;' "unfolding;' or even "timing:' 14 While Heidegger, perhaps ill-advisedly,
164 Daniel 0. Dahlstrom

construes timeliness transcendentally, as a condition of the possibility ofbeing­

here, he does not understand it as something that somehow obtains apart from
being-here. Instead, timeliness is the sense of being-here. Every existential is,
in the last analysis, a complex kind of timing or a matter of timing. For ex­
ample, "coming-to-oneself"-the original and genuine sense of the future-is
the timeliness that constitutes and is disclosed by the basic existential of un­
derstanding/projecting; the way we are always already disposed in the thrown­
ness of our existence is also a matter of timing, a certain kind of abiding or
"alreadiness:'
The chart below summarizes the foregoing sketch of five aspects of genuine
timeliness. On the basis of that sketch, it becomes clear how they are connected
with one another. The original timeliness has that ecstatic-horizonal charac­
ter (das ursprungliche Auj3er-sich an und fur sich selbst), above all because the
ecstases constantly complement one another, but in such a way that the future
is primus inter pares. The finitude of genuine and original timeliness is also
connected to the fundamental futurity-the "coming-to-oneself"-of timeli­
ness's ecstatic-horizonal character. Timeliness "is" not, but instead "unfolds"
(zeitigt) and its "timing" lies ontologically in advance of every sense of being
(being-here, being-with, being a world, being-handy, being-on-hand). In the
timing that constitutes the sense of being-here, of caring, what it means "to
be" is originally disclosed.

Five Aspects of Genuine Timeliness

1. The integrated character of its modes ( the retrieval, the moment, and the
anticipation are unified and inseparable-like the Trinity).
2. The primacy ofthe future: the original past (the retrieval) and present (the
moment) spring from the original future (coming-to-oneself, becoming
who one genuinely is by anticipating the possibility most one's own).
3. The finitude: the genuine future is the anticipation of death.
4. The ecstasis and horizon: genuine timeliness comprises ecstases, that is to
say, ways in which to be-here is to be "outside" or even "beside oneself"
and horizons (that on which the projection is projected), in view of which
being-here is "ecstatic"; this ecstatic-horizonal character of timeliness is
the sense of the manner ofbeing defined as "being-here" (care, existence)
and the transcendental condition of being-in-the-world (longitudinal
and transversal, respectively).
5. The unfolding: genuine time is not, but instead "unfolds" and that is
precisely what it means to be "the original 'outside-itself' in and for itself."
 Genuine Timeliness 165

Notes

I. Sein und Zeit (=SZ), 12th ed. (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1972), 325. Translations
from SZ are my own.
2. The equation of an entity's being with its presence is also meant to convey that
it is in a place and available. The ontological significance of "presence" thus embraces
all the senses of the term conveyed in the statement: "Presently present, she presents
herselfto the Queen" (="Now here, she makes herselfavailable to the Queen"). Yet the
appeal to the preeminently temporal modality ofpresence is appropriate if Heidegger
can make good on his contention that a certain timeliness explains this multilayered,
ontological significance of "presence" as well as the ontological significance of other
ways of being.
3. Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, Gesamtausgabe (=GA) 21, 413; here Hei­
degger observes that the ontic phrase "Become what you are!" (from Pindar) is only
possible if, in an ontological sense, I am what I become. Sheehan has called attention
to this observation and, in general, to the advisability of construing the future as "be­
coming"; cf. Thomas Sheehan, "Heidegger's New Aspect: On In-Sein, Zeitlichkeit, and
The Genesis of Being and Time," Research in Phenomenology25 (1995), 216f.
4. Sheehan rightly notes the novelty of what Heidegger calls "das apriorische Per­
fekt" (SZ 85) in contrast to the empirical perfects of grammar. It is worth noting,
however, that, in addition to expressing some completed event or one that, while over,
continues to be significant, the perfect can also be used to indicate something that is
only completed in the future ("Wenn Richard seine Priifung gemacht hat, fahrt er in
seine Heimat zuriick"). Cf. Dora Schulz and Heinz Griesbach, Grammatik der deutschen
Sprache (Miinchen: Hueber, 1972), 46ff.
5. Sheehan, "Heidegger's New Aspect," 317; Dylan Thomas gives expression to
something akin to what Heidegger means by "authentic alreadiness" in the first stanza
of his poem "This Side of the Truth": "This side of the truth, / You may not see, my
son, / King of your blue eyes / In the blinding country of youth, / That all is undone, /
Under the unminding skies, / Of innocence and guilt / Before you move to make /
One gesture of the heart or head, / Is gathered and spilt / Into the winding dark / Like
the dust of the dead." The Poems of Dylan Thomas, ed. Daniel Jones (New York: New
Directions, 1971), 192.
6. For the use of Vorbei in this connection, cf. Heidegger, The Concept of Time,
trans. William McNeil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 12-15. Once again, as Heidegger
grinds out his account, he is critically reworking Aristotelian and Hegelian themes.
Cf. Aristotle's to ti en einai ("the what it was and continues to be") in, for exam­
ple, Metaphysics 1029b1-1030b13, an expression that is frequently translated "essence"
or "Wesen"; cf. Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1957), 352-58; G. W. F. Hegel, "Die
objektive Logik" (1812/1813), in Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Friedrich Hogemann and
Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1978), 241: "Die Sprache hat im Zeitwort Sein
<las Wesen in der vergangenen Zeit 'gewesen' behalten; denn das Wesen ist <las vergan­
gene, aber zeitlos vergangene Sein." Heidegger is, in effect, deconstructing these senses
166 Daniel 0. Dahlstrom

of "essence" (Wesen) in favor of that of the "already" (gewesen). In this regard, see
Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, 4th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978),
26 (="On the Essence of Truth," in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998], 153): "The question of the essence of truth finds
its answer in the sentence: the essence of truth is the truth of the essence."
7. The translation "alreadiness" is suggested by Thomas Sheehan; see his "How
(Not) to Read Heidegger," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly69 (1995): 275-
94; esp. 290ff. When the term "abiding" is used in the remainder of this chapter, it is
meant as a synonym for "alreadiness;' i.e., the "a priori perfect," and not the persistence
(in one sense or the other) of something previously on hand. It should be noted that
Heidegger muddies the waters on this score somewhat in GA 24, Die Grundprobleme der
Phiinomenologie ( =GP), where he is less clear about the distinction between alreadiness
and a kind of past; cf. GP 375. (The German pagination is also provided in The Basic
Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter [Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1982]. Translations from GP are mine.) Retrieving possibilities that have come
down to us and retrieving one's authentic alreadiness by "handing oneself over to it,"
i.e., freeing oneself for it, are distinct but combined in "historicity" (Geschichtlichkeit).
For a brief but lucid review, see Sheehan, "Heidegger's New Aspect;' 220f.
8. The Concept of Time, 13; cf. ibid., 12-13: "Anticipating [or running toward:
Vorlaufen] being-gone is being-here's running approach [Anlaufen] toward its most
extreme possibility; and insofar as this 'running approach' is serious, it is thrown back,
in this running [Laufen], upon its still-being-here itself. It is being-here's manner of
coming back to its everydayness.... " (Translations mine.)
9. For a valuable reading of Augenblick, with an emphasis on its connection with
"originary praxis in its full ethical and political character;' see William McNeill, The
Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany: SUNY Press,
1999), esp. 116: "These remarks on conscience also indicate that the Augenblick or
'glance of the eye; as we have preferred to translate it, is not to be understood as a 'mo­
ment of time' in the sense of an 'instant: Rather, it refers to the unfolding disclosure of
the presencing of a situation in the duration appropriate to it." Elaborating the connec­
tion between Heidegger's concept of Augenblick and interpretation of the doctrine of
phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics, McNeill relates how the actual end of an action,
the means pursued by deliberation, the time of the deliberation, and the right moment
to act, "all depend upon what is called for by the concrete circumstances of the moment,
as disclosed in the practical aisthesis or Augenblick" (ibid., 118).
IO. The Concept of Time, 14.
11. Heidegger describes these horizons formally, i.e., irrespective of whether the
manner of being-in-the-world is authentic or not. The horizon for coming-to-oneself
(the future) is "the 'for-the-sake-of-oneself '" (das "Umwillen seiner''); the horizonal
schema for alreadiness is the "for-what" or "in-the-face-of-what" (das Wovor, as in
"what do you fear for?"); and that for rendering present is the "in order-to" ( Um-zu):
SZ 365; GP 377f.
12. SZ 329; GP 377f. As these passages demonstrate, the expression "ecstatic­
horizonal" is fraught with spatial metaphors, again raising the questionableness, later
 Genuine Timeliness 167

conceded by Heidegger, ofhis efforts to ground the spatiality of being-here in timeliness.

The ecstatic feature, it bears noting, is similar to Husserl's view of the transcendence in
time-consciousness itself; that is to say, by virtue of the retentional-primal impression
unity of abiding, every now transcends or "has a fringe." A different but related ecstatic
feature can be found in the bodiliness and motivated perception discussed in Ideas II.
13. "In the flight from [or in the face of: vor] itself, time remains time:' Heidegger,
History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985), 227.
14. SZ 328-31. As a translation of "zeitigen:' "unfold" has the advantage of being
transitive, intransitive, and reflexive, like the German word; it also captures the sense
of movement and the dually ecstatic-horizonal character of timeliness (see below). The
term has some misleading connotations as well, e.g., it might be taken in an unduly
neutral sense (as opposed to "ripen") or in literally spatial senses.
 10
Historical Meaning in the Fundamental
Ontology of Being and Time, from
Martin Heidegger and the Problem of
Historical Meaning
Jeffrey Andrew Barash

A GAINST WHAT HE PERCEIVED AS TRADITION, Heidegger insisted that, be­

cause the question of Being is oriented throughout by the possibility of
Dasein's understanding of it, "[i]f we are to formulate our question explicitly
and transparently, we must first give a proper explication of a being [ eines
Seienden]-that of the questioner [ des Fragenden]-with regard to its Being:'1
In avowedly circular reasoning, Heidegger thus affirmed that it is in the Be­
ing of Dasein that a sense of Being per se must be sought. The main point
of Heidegger's statement, however, was that Dasein could not be reduced to a
fixed metaphysical essence or to some underlying substance, nor could it be
comprehended by an unclarified ontology of human life.
As we will see more clearly, in Being and Time, Heidegger leaves open what
Dasein--the guiding thread through which the question of Being per se is to
be pursued-is. In essence, Dasein is to be determined nowhere else than in
its unspoken decisions about what it means to be. For Heidegger, no meaning,
whether in everyday existence or in the most ethereal theory, can be extracted
from Dasein's presupposition of what it means to be, however tacit.
If, in light of understanding what it means to be, there remains a margin of
indeterminacy in the way in which Dasein orients its Being, this orientation
never arises in the abstract. At several points in the introduction to Being and
Time, Heidegger states that Dasein's ways of Being are "factically" given and, as

169
170 Jeffrey Andrew Barash

such, are always decided in relation to circumstances of Dasein's concrete past

and prefigure its future choices. In this regard, he stresses that "[i]n its factical
Being, any Dasein is as it already was, and is 'what' it already was. It is its past,
whether explicitly or not....Dasein 'is' its past in the way of its own Being,
which, to put it roughly, 'historicizes' out of its future on each occasion.... Its
own past-and this always means the past of its 'generation'-is not something
that follows along after Dasein, but each time already precedes it." 2
This statement introduces a paradox. Heidegger claims to refer to the "uni­
versal sense of Being [ Sein uberhaupt]" or, as he wrote elsewhere, to philoso­
phy as "universal ontology [ universale Ontologie] ." 3 Yet, if this were the case,
how might his presupposition that Dasein is its past, from which its future
choices are projected, yield more than just a partial, perspectival viewpoint­
which would preclude any preoccupation with Being in the universal sense that
Heidegger sought to disclose?
Even earlier than Heidegger, the critical theorists of history had carefully re­
fined a century-old historicist turn away from traditional concepts of the Being
of humanity as a metaphysical substance, and had attempted to understand the
meaning of humanity in terms of choices elucidated in relation to the past. In
stipulating that humanity came to understand and determine itself in history,
none of the critical theorists was ready to embrace an ontological position. For
them, the potentialities of individual cultures and of individual perspectives
of truth expressed in them, while held together by a tissue of universally gras­
pable coherence, nonetheless precluded definitive knowledge both of the Being
of humanity and of humanity's variable, if continuous, advent in history.
How, then, does Heidegger hope to account for the Being of Dasein in the
universal sense he is claiming to investigate in Being and Time? And, once
the past is founded on a universal philosophy of Being, what becomes of the
national or cultural unities theretofore considered the individual bearers of
historical meaning, in the context of which normative values and standards of
truth emerge and are sustained from generation to generation, and on whose
mediation the very possibility of history itself depends?

***
A brief recapitulation of the theme of Dasein's Being-in-the-world, and then
what Heidegger viewed as a laying bare of the fundamental constitution of
Dasein's Being, will set in reliefthe universal claim through which he conceived
the problem of historical meaning.
Heidegger's ontology, as analyzed through Dasein's Being-in-the-world, un­
veiled what was for the times a reorientation of philosophy: abandoning the
predominant conceptions of the world as the scene of objectifications of life or
 Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being and Time 171

of values in the context of determinate societies or cultures, Heidegger made

existence in the world in its most ordinary and mundane moments the starting
point of philosophy. Philosophy of life and of worldviews, phenomenology of
universal structures of consciousness, and the traditional neo-Kantianism and
its reinterpretation in terms of symbolic forms by Ernst Cassirer all confronted
a philosophy of the most everyday and banal aspects of a world where, ac­
cording to Heidegger, the analytics of Dasein (Daseinsanalytik) had to find its
immediate theme.
What, according to Heidegger, does the ordinary, everyday character of the
world teach us ontologically? Everydayness (Alltiiglichkeit) describes a familiar,
immediate relation between Dasein and the world of people and of things before
any process of abstraction has distinguished Dasein as an observer occupied
with given objects. In this relation Heidegger discerned a basis for universal co­
herence in everydayness as such, beyond a record of single, ordinary situations
or biographies depicting everyday life: the ordinary world is given as a unity
through Dasein's tendency to forget what it means to be in the immediacy of
its preoccupations. 4
Exploring this context of everydayness, Heidegger developed the line of ar­
gumentation for which Being and Time became renowned. The sense of what
it means to be is ordinarily forgotten in an everyday environment ( Umwelt) in
which Dasein's self-understanding is spontaneously involved in and extracted
from the useful processes of a functionally interpreted world; it is neglected
under the influence of everyday collective conventionalism, conformism, and
anonymity, through which Dasein is ordinarily led to behold itself. The pre­
dominance of the style of rapport of the everyday collectivity (Mitwelt)-the
common opinion (communis opinio) that "one" has prescribed-Heidegger
termed "das Man:' 5 The very familiarity of everyday Being-in-the-world is the
obverse side of Dasein's estrangement from itself.
In the course of Being and Time, Heidegger elaborates on the possibility of a
limited transcendence of everyday Being-in-the-world. What Dasein is, decided
in terms of what it means to be, essentially hovers between two fundamental
choices: immersion in and acceptance of spontaneous forgetfulness of what
it means to be, or the attempt to recover a sense of responsibility for its own
Being from the spontaneous familiarity of an everyday world.
This dualism in Heidegger's ontology pinpoints in preliminary form the
fundamental assumptionunderlying his universal claim. In stating that"Dasein
is its past" in deciding the possibilities of its future, Heidegger is not primarily
concerned with qualitative changes in a historically evolving Dasein (in the
sense of an unfolding of cultural or world history). His statement that Dasein's
Being is not given in a fixed way must be carefully distinguished from the critical
theorists' claim that humanity determines itself historically. Far from focusing
172 Jeffrey Andrew Barash

on the critical analysis of changes in human perspective from period to period,

Heidegger presumes that, whatever the alteration in perspective, "what Dasein
is" is ontologically prefigured by the duality of possible directions its choices
must take.
In the later sections of Being and Time, the possibility of delineating
Dasein's choices is grounded in what Heidegger describes as the fundamental
constitution of Dasein's Being. The way in which he frames this fundamen­
tal constitution--comprising the tripartite structure of "existence;' "factic­
ity;' and "fallenness"--exposes the root assumption on which his universal
claim is based, and adumbrates its intention vis-a-vis the problem of historical
meaning. 6
In dealing with Dasein's existence, nowhere is Heidegger concerned with
the particularity of Dasein's perspectival view of the world in a given historical
context, and the structural differences between this perspective and that of
later generations. He relegates the specific differences constituting the objective
context of the choices of existence, whether analyzed as the advent of given
values and the remission of others or as the ebb and flow of worldviews in the
process of history, to the level of secondary, "ontic" phenomena.
More fundamental than this, for Heidegger, are the dual possibilities of on­
tological choice illuminated by existence's finitude. This finitude, manifested
in the untransferable, unavoidable eventuality of death, universally stands be­
fore the future possibilities of all existing Dasein and, underlying all specific
circumstances, constitutes the sense of what it means to be. In the face of this
future, Dasein may choose to blend into the spontaneous forgetfulness offered
by present modes of Being-in-the-world, which Heidegger traces to a tacit
collective need to forget the distinctiveness of existence-marked by personal
death-and be calmed in the face of the impending end. This is the mark,
for Heidegger, of inauthentic existence. Or it may accept authentic responsi­
bility for its existence, recognizing that its distinctiveness bears the emblem
of finitude, resolving to wrest the sense of what it means to be from ordinary
interpretation, and orienting this meaning in accord with the finitude of its
own decisions.
When dealing with facticity, nowhere does Heidegger specifically focus on
facts ( Tatsachen) themselves. 7 Rather than deal with particular factual events,
Heidegger analyzes what he views as the necessity for all Dasein to exist "facti­
cally" in a contingent world in which understanding finds its point of reference.
Because universally entangled in given perspectives limited by Dasein's own
transience, this understanding allows of no absolute starting point. 8
Fallenness, Heidegger notes, is in no way meant to be taken as a judgment of
specific moral circumstances. Dasein is fallen because its tendency to interpret
the meaning of Being in the everydayness of an immediately given world is
 Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being and Time 173

fundamental to the facticity of existence. In this mode of Being Dasein's fall

into the domination of das Man in the everyday environment and collectivity
can never be fully overcome, but only resisted. Only through the effort to
recover an individual, finite sense of what it means to be can each of us oppose
a flight from the anxiety of death as our death, favored by the anonymity and
conventionalism of tacit collective modes of seeking security and discharging
the burden of finitude in face of the exigencies of current events.
Of itself, the universal claim involved in Heidegger's vision of the funda­
mental structures of Dasein's Being does not elicit the special importance
Heidegger attributes to historical understanding, nor the grounds for his own
way of conceiving of it. But this intrinsic importance of historical understand­
ing is illuminated in the preeminent insight of Being and Time, through which
time emerges in its structural relation to the meaning of Being. Heidegger stip­
ulates that Dasein's choice of what it is is essentially drawn from its modes of
being temporal. In this qualification, the claim that Dasein is its past in deciding
its future acquires a unique significance, laying the temporal groundwork for
Heidegger's reassessment of what it means to think historically.
For Heidegger, each of the aspects of Dasein's fundamental constitution
refers primarily to a mode of temporal Being. As he asserts in an elaborate line
of argumentation, which cannot be recapitulated in detail here, existence is
primarily oriented toward the future, facticity toward the past, and fallenness
toward the present. The three modes of temporal Being-or ekstases--are al­
ways given in a unity; they owe the style of their unification to Dasein's choices
concerning what it means to be. 9 As inauthentic, Dasein confronts the future as
a mere chronological waiting for events (gewiirtigen); a simple expectation of a
foreseeable future exactly modeled on the present, in which the eventuality of
death is tacitly shunned. In this mode the past, too, is overlaid with the veneer
of current events, a mere retention of occurrences in which the finite sense of
past Dasein, and of the Dasein that retains it, escapes notice in the immediacy
of present preoccupations.
In its authentic modes of temporalization, Dasein strives for transcendence
of spontaneous presence of everyday Being-in-the-world. Temporal ekstases
are unified, not on the basis of a current expectation of events to be retained at
a later point, where a sense of what it means to be remains hidden in the face
of pressing actuality (Wirklichkeit); the authentic unity of temporal modes, as
Heidegger saw it, reveals this hidden meaning of Being as the explicit foun­
dation of a choice. Placed primarily in the perspective of future anticipation
(Vorlaufen) of death, this choice pierces through the veil of everyday actuality
and illuminates possibilities ontologically specific to finite Dasein. The past,
more than a mere former presence, or weighty precedent of present actual­
ity, discloses itself for choice in a repetition ( Wiederholung) of possibilities it
174 Jeffrey Andrew Barash

bears. These possibilities (Moglichkeiten), projected as an "anticipatory repe­

tition [ vorlaufende Wiederholung] ," unify the temporal ekstases as the decisive
moment (Augenblick) when authentic choice is projected.
Dasein's dual possibilities of temporalizing, and of Being, had direct ram­
ifications for the problem of historical meaning. The major nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century conceptions of history, from Hegel to the critical the­
orists, conceived of it in close relation to the objective development of national
cultures in world history. The sequential order of history as an objectively
unfolding process comprised a collective experience, founded in the past and
lending coherence to present cultural development.
Heidegger's thinking about history started from a different premise.
Heidegger did not interpret Dasein's historical Being-or "historicity
[ Geschichtlichkeit] "-primarily in relation to the network of cumulative ex­
perience of the past, mediated by a sequential, objective coherence of culture. 10
Any possible sense of this network was traced back to what Heidegger viewed
as the more primary source of historical meaning and coherence (Zusammen­
hang) in Dasein's choice of a mode of temporalization in the projection of
possibilities.
By rooting the source of Dasein's historicity in a choice of temporal modes,
Heidegger underlined an important proviso: historical theorists and historians
had generally sought to induce historical meaning from the processes of his­
torical development, assuming the spontaneous coherence of these processes
in what objective analysis had proved to have once been actual. Reliance on
objective standards, however, and on an overarching coherence of the historical
process grounding their continuity, disregarded the essential moment of the
modes of Being of Dasein.
As Heidegger makes clear in Being and Time, objective reality for Dasein is
not the only source of past meaning, but corresponds to one mode of Being
as appropriated by Dasein from a world of events, neglectful of the finitude of
interpretation grounded in a sense of Being as Being toward death. The quest
for objectivity and objective coherence misplaces this finitude, but is not able to
overcome it. For Heidegger, it overlooks the authentic sense of the past, which
is not revealed for any possible observer, but is grounded in Dasein's own choice
of a finite sense of what it means to be. 11
Beyond a call to decision, Heidegger's approach to historical meaning has
essential bearing on the way in which the past is revealed. Neglect of Dasein's
sense of Being issues from subservience to the weight of what has become ac­
tual, and veils the richness of original possibility that the authentic moments of
the past embodied. This original possibility is intended by Dasein's authentic
projection of a meaning of Being in its modes of temporalization. Only such
projection can free the past, as Heidegger viewed it, from its embalmment in
 Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being and Time 175

the traditions of the present, for which a past moment of choice is forgot­
ten in its primordiality and is confidently taken as an objective acquisition.
The projection of authentic possibilities identifies an authentic past primar­
ily in view of what can be retrieved for resolute repetition in the authentic
future. 12
Heidegger's philosophy thus retracted the authentic ground of history from
historical concatenations, such as the objective development of national cul­
tures or world history. This should not be taken to signify, however, that
Dasein's authenticity is restricted to an isolated framework of action in which
the individual has no ties to a larger collectivity. As a counterpart to the inau­
thentic collectivity characterized by das Man, Heidegger envisions the locus of
authentic possibilities as implicit in "the people [das Volk]:' which comprises
the authentic community of individuals prepared to take upon themselves the
responsibility for choice in light of the finitude of existence.
Das Volk, like das Man, remains empirically intangible. Das Volk is a com­
munity of authenticity, which has no necessary, direct counterpart in the
political or cultural world. In the terse passages dealing with collective au­
thenticity, Heidegger recounts that Dasein's authentic choice, projected in
a singular fate (Schicksal), interweaves itself into the destiny ( Geschick) of a
people. The coincident interweaving of fates finds its locus in the generation
( Generation):

Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any
more than Being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of
several subjects. Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our being with
one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities.
Only in communicating and in struggling (Kampf) does the power of destiny
become free. Dasein's fateful destiny in and with its "generation" goes to make up
the full authentic historicizing of Dasein. 13

From the standpoint of the problem of historical meaning (and in regard to

the theme of Being and Time as a whole), Heidegger's elucidation of das Volk
leaves undeniable gaps. Collective inauthenticity receives detailed description
throughout the work, but the possibility of authentic community is described
only in its last sections and in vague terms.
In dealing with the theme of the generation, which fills out the nexus between
the authentic individual and the community of das Volk, Heidegger explicitly
draws onDilthey's use ofthelatter concept in"Uber dasStudium derGeschichte
der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft, und dem Staat" ( On the
study of the history of the sciences of man, society, and state). 14 Although he
much admired Dilthey's essay, Heidegger's treatment of communal authenticity
176 Jeffrey Andrew Barash

is sketchy, perhaps due to the vacuum left by his distance from pre-World War I
historical theory, within which Dilthey's thought had come to expression.
In applying the concept of generation, Dilthey sought a specifically historical
unit of time. He considered the purely quantitative account of temporality in
hours, minutes, and seconds to be inappropriate for this purpose, choosing
instead a range of time that "reaches from the demarcation line of birth to that
of old age:' 15 In Dilthey's thought, the concept of generation represented the
individual life span and, given a certain flexibility of interpretation, might be
seen to anticipate Heidegger's notion of Being-toward-death.
Yet, in envisaging the life unity of the generation, Dilthey evidently did not
claim to encompass an ontological unity. In descriptive and inductive terms,
he attempted to account for a principle of unity interweaving the lives of con­
temporary individuals. His conviction that the basis of such a principle lay in
empirical reality had led him to reject the nominalistic conclusions of Heinrich
Rickert, for whom the distance between meaning and reality itself precluded
any possibility that a "generation" or "worldview [Weltanschauung]" might
serve as the real, extraindividual context providing for meaning's preservation
and transmission. For Rickert, the spirit of Goethe's generation, of the Italian
Renaissance, or of any other such cultural unity might be applied as value re­
lations only to certain great individuals. It would be erroneous to claim that
the distinctive spirit of a generation or of an age might in any real sense refer
to more than a few great individuals.
Dilthey's epistemology, which considered that meaning infused reality with­
out ever exhausting its empirical plenitude, attributed the spirit of a generation
to more than an atomistic collection of individuals, a conclusion Heidegger
readily accepted. For Dilthey, the convictions of a generation or the spirit of
an age did not touch all individuals in the same way; there nonetheless existed
links between contemporary individuals, arising from the depths of a common
past, through which an ideal meaning of life emerged in the limitless plenitude
of a real present context. In this sense, "a generation then forms an interrelation
of appearances into a whole, subject to explanatory studY:' 16
It would be an oversimplification to see in Heidegger's use of the term "gen­
eration" an extrapolation from Dilthey's insights, as Heidegger's comments
might lead readers of Being and Time to believe. Unlike Dilthey-and in com­
plete contradistinction to the Baden neo-Kantians-Heidegger is not referring
to a generation as an "interrelation of appearances;' 17 but to the ontological
preconditions universally underlying appearances. With ontological constructs
such as das Man or the generations articulated in das Volk, Heidegger is refer­
ring to the conditions of possibility of interrelation between individual and
community concealed beneath the empirical flux of appearances.
 Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being and Time 177

Heidegger's notion of generation, as of communal authenticity in general,

remains undeniably vague. A year after the publication of Being and Time,
Karl Mannheim wrote a study of the concept of generation in which both
Dilthey and Heidegger were analyzed. Dilthey's achievement, as Mannheim
noted, was to have clearly expressed the idea of a qualitative cohesion ( Verbun­
denheit) of specific styles of life interpretation among contemporaries, which
could not simply be attributed to their quantitatively considered chronology.
Given the vagueness of Heidegger's application of the notion of generation,
is it any wonder that Mannheim, who was by no means unsympathetic to
Heidegger's work, wrote that Heidegger "deepens precisely this problem of
qualitative cohesion"? 18
The distance of his thought from pre-World War I critical theories of history
becomes clearest not only in its ontological theme, but in how Heidegger defines
this ontology, notwithstanding its claim to universality. Given his attempt to
conceive of a community interfused with authentic purpose, the thrust of
Heidegger's analysis nonetheless focuses preponderantly on the fallenness of
Dasein into an alienated ( entfremdete), objectified world of inauthenticity. This
aspect of his thinking would hardly seem to be free of the influence of historical
circumstances: Heidegger's notion of authentic community remains sketchy to
the extent that Being and Time itself emphasizes doubt in the collective world
so often characteristic of his own generation. To that extent, it is informed
by the factual circumstances of the times, in which the sense of worthiness
of culture came into question in a manner that had been uncommon among
members of the prewar generation. In this situation, is it any surprise that, for
Heidegger, the dimensions of communal authenticity could inspire only the
sparsest examination? 19
For this reason, the claim that Heidegger's philosophy denies objectivity in
history misses an important point. It is misleading to claim that, for Heidegger,
the "real world of objective Being is dissolved:' 20 The significant point is not
an alleged dissolution of real Being; it lies rather in the manner of interpreting
the historical world.
World history, heretofore taken as the objective totality of developing na­
tional cultures, represented, for Hegel, the invincible progression of the con­
sciousness of freedom; for Ranke, the opaque habitat of Divine thoughts;
for Rickert, the repository of ethereal transcendent values; and for Dilthey,
the unique realm of crystallization of the human spirit. Not one of these
thinkers questioned world history as a primary source of normative values and
meaning.
For the Heidegger of Being and Time, by contrast, the objective coherence of
world history exists, yet is reinterpreted in a way that denies its primary role as a
178 Jeffrey Andrew Barash

source of Dasein's authenticity. It is ultimately rooted in the temporal mode of

existence that, under the hidden auspices of das Man, dissimulates the finitude
of Dasein in an acquired, objectified actuality:

The transcendence of the world has a temporal foundation; and by reason of this,
the world-historical is, in every case, already "objectively" there in the histori­
cizing of existing Being-in-the-world, without being grasped historiologically. And
because factical Dasein, in falling, is absorbed in that with which it concerns itself,
it understands its history world-historically in the first instance....

Blind for possibilities, it [ das Man] cannot repeat what has been, but only retains
and receives the "actual" that is left over, the world-historical that has been, the
leavings, and the information about them that is present at hand. 21

Once authentic historical meaning is displaced from objective world his­

tory and the nations or cultures composing it to Dasein, and to the unity of
authentic Dasein achieved in a generation and in das Volk, there arises the prob­
lem of normative standards and values whose emergence and sustenance had
previously been tied to an objective cultural context. Indeed, for the critical
theorists of the previous generation, the objective historical process provided
philosophers with material through which normative truths and the sense of
human existence itself could be established. Let us therefore turn to Heidegger's
reconsideration of the problem of normative truth, by way of his reformulation
of the relation between philosophical truth and history.

***
The critical theorists-especially Windelband, Rickert, and Dilthey­
attempted to establish broad principles of historical understanding in the hu­
manistic disciplines, independent both of law-constructing methods of the
natural sciences and of abstract speculation of metaphysical philosophy. His­
torical thinking, conceived as the study of the meaning of human existence
through the comprehension of what humanity had been, proposed that elu­
cidation of normative truths in human affairs had to depend on inductive
comprehension of the development of human culture and of norms that had
actually been manifested in it. The cardinal significance of historical methods
in the humanistic disciplines presupposed a spontaneous coherence of the cul­
tural world, where norms emerged and were refined in a continuous, unified
process of development.
Heidegger's philosophy disagreed, not only with the principles of histori­
cal understanding that had been proposed as an autonomous method for the
 Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being and Time 179

humanistic disciplines, but, above all, with the larger assumption that culture
and world-historical development were primary sources of coherence (Zusam­
menhang). The appreciation of cultures as unique individualities constituting
the epochs of world history and of human understanding as intertwined with
the development ofnorms and values ofa given culture, universal in implication
but particular in concrete expression, found no significant echo in Heidegger's
thought.
In view of this, it is hardly surprising that Heidegger failed to acknowledge
the significance of the advent of the qualitative change in human historical
understanding that arose with the modern appreciation for cultural diver­
sity and the modern insight into the uniquely historical character of human
existence. For thinkers like Windelband, Rickert, Dilthey, and Troeltsch, this
insight had to be counted as one of the greatest theoretical fruits nurtured and
sustained by the development of Western culture, liberating theoretical norms
from the dogmatism of metaphysics. If, in his early writings, Heidegger had
attributed a certain importance to that qualitative change in understanding, in
Being and Time, this theme is entirely eclipsed. Evidently, he took this change
as no salient development at all: his concern is with the unrecorded history
of the forgetfulness of the ontology founded in the Being of Dasein and lying
beneath the ontic level of culture and of individual diversity that is its dynamic
principle.
Heidegger's retrieval of ontology was not tantamount to a resurrection of
metaphysics in any traditional sense, precisely because it tried to open ontology
to Dasein's fluid temporalization of Being. In this role, transferring the ground
of coherence of human existence from the objective realm of culture and world
history into the temporalizing modes ofDasein's understanding ofBeing meant
redefining the aim of historical thinking and of the possibility of its grasp of
truth.
This redefinition brings to the fore the confrontation with the problem of
historical meaning that Heidegger subtly undertakes at the end of his section
on temporality and historicity. Here, and in his course lectures of the period,
the significance of Heidegger's attempt to root the sense of historical thinking
in the fundamental ontology of Dasein finds its clearest relation to the issue of
philosophical truth. Heidegger's thought on this matter is closely interwoven
with his explicit rebuttal of the predominant ways in which historical theory
had been articulated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His cri­
tique of the historians' specialized endeavor and of critical theories of historical
knowledge calls into question the larger assumptions of previous styles of his­
torical understanding, and leads directly to the theme of history and normative
truth that concerns us most closely.
180 Jeffrey Andrew Barash

In the 1928 course lecture series "Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie"

(Fundamental problems of phenomenology), Heidegger situated the special
role of historical thinking in relation to philosophical knowledge:

The history of philosophy is not a mere appendage to the philosophical teaching

firm providing an opportunity to find oneself a comfortable and easy theme
for the State examination. Nor is it there to enable one to look around and see
how things once were. Rather, historical-philosophical knowledge constitutes a
unity in itself, in which the specific kind of historical knowledge in philosophy,
in accord with its topics, is distinct from every other kind of scientific historical
knowledge. 22

In Being and Time, it is obvious that Heidegger's concerns lie elsewhere than
with these "other kinds of scientific, historical knowledge" claiming autonomy
from philosophy. He rebuffs critical theories of history for their justification
of the quest for historical meaning as it had been conceived in the historical
sciences.Most explicitly, his comments touch on Heinrich Rickert's "logic with
which the concepts ofhistoriological presentation are formed" and on Simmel's
"'epistemological' clarification" of historical matters; they anticipate his later,
more detailed and explicit criticism ofDilthey's theory, orienting itself "toward
the side of the object." 23 In opposition to these theories' quest for general
validity (Allgemeingultigkeit) of historical meaning in the historical sciences,
Heidegger counters that the place ( Ort) of the historical problematic "is not
to be sought in historiology [Historie] as the science of history:' 24 Against
any claim of an autonomous science of history, he asserts that all historical
concepts presuppose an ontological interpretation of Dasein's temporalizing
modes, concretely expressed in its historicity: "But since the basic concepts
of the historiological sciences-whether they pertain to the objects of these
sciences or to the way in which these are treated-are concepts of existence,
the theory of the human sciences presupposes an existential interpretation that
has as its theme the historicity of Dasein:' 25
In the last section of the chapter on temporality and historicity, Heideg­
ger investigates the contemporary claim to establish autonomous historical
principles of understanding. His analysis proceeds by discussing the views of
the late nineteenth-century figure Count Yorck von Wartenburg, who had re­
mained beyond the pale of the academic institutions of his period. During
the 1920s, after his death, when Yorck's correspondence with Wilhelm Dilthey
was published for the first time, his letters caused a stir among the German
intelligentsia, especially for the path of historical understanding he proposed
as an alternative to the predominant critical ideas of his period. 26 Heidegger
deftly cites passages from this extraordinary correspondence, often including
Yorck's criticisms of Dilthey. [ ... ]
 Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being and Time 181

Despite his admiration for him, Heidegger was convinced that Yorck had
failed to penetrate to the ontological basis underlying a philosophy of life.
Yorck's preliminary aim, as Heidegger indicated, lay in distinguishing between
natural and historical styles of being. In this spirit, Yorck had made his cele­
brated separation between the "ontic" and the "historical"-between nature
that "is" and the historical that "lives."Yorck's attempt to base a philosophy of
history on this separation was taken by Heidegger as a sign of entanglement in
the same presuppositions that ensnared the historians he criticized: the tradi­
tional neglect of the meaning of Being. This neglect obscured the ontological
unity which is more fundamental than any distinction between nature and
history, both of which Heidegger deemed "ontic" to the extent that this unity
was not investigated.
Heidegger's criticism ofYorck's separating the ontic from the historical, by
highlighting the broad conception of understanding ( Verstehen) in Heidegger's
philosophy, brings us closer to the problem of a relation between philosoph­
ical truth and its historicity. Yorck's thinking on this matter bore a marked
resemblance to Dilthey's theory of interpretation, in which the relation main­
tained by consciousness that understands ( versteht) other conscious life had to
be sharply distinguished from any relation maintained by consciousness in its
explanation (Erklaren) of natural objects. Understanding of conscious life by
other conscious life provided, for Dilthey and Yorck, a potential intimacy of
apprehension that natural topics of explanation, because of their dissimilarity
to consciousness, could never reveal.
Heidegger's ontology calls into question the distinction between understand­
ing ( Verstehen) and explanation (Erklaren), which Heidegger views as a mere
construct of the sciences. 27 For Heidegger, history and nature are both made
possible by the fundamental unity constituted by Dasein's modes of synthesiz­
ing time. As Heidegger points out in the concluding chapter of Being and Time
( which follows the chapter on temporality and historicity), this synthesis of time
does not have its roots in the abstract chronology of world time. Rather, world
time-which Dasein attentively interprets in the movement of the planets-is
itself made possible by Dasein's finite projection of a meaning of Being. With­
out a projection of the meaning of Being in the structural unity of existence,
facticity, and fallenness, the unification of temporal ekstases in any possible ap­
prehension would have no coherence, and could be the source of no meaning.
Nowhere is the primordial unity of apprehension of nature and history in
Dasein better illustrated than in the historicity of the most basic concepts of the
natural and historical disciplines. For Heidegger, this historicity is rooted, not
in a world time beyond Dasein, but in the temporalizing modes through which
a world is approached and made meaningful. That the basic concepts of both
the natural and humanistic disciplines are subject to historical modification
182 Jeffrey Andrew Barash

through scientific revolutions attests to their unity in the temporalizing modes

of Dasein's historicity. 28 The Dasein-centeredness of this unity underscores the
limited value of a distinction between inner understanding ( Verstehen) and
explanation (Erkliiren) of external natural objects.
Heidegger's exclusive application of the word understanding (Verstehen)­
and his renunciation of the concept of explanation (Erkliiren) 29 -underlined
a critical point about historicity and temporality in the ontology of Dasein.
Natural and historical objects belong to the same synthetic structure of tem­
poralizing and of Being, and access to them is afforded only by the finite aim
toward Being that Dasein projects. On this basis alone, Heidegger allows for
the primary historicity of normative truths serving as the criteria for all that
Dasein understands.
Is not this fundamental grounding of the sciences in Dasein's historicity
tantamount to an embrace of relativism? If, for Heidegger, the historicity of
Dasein and of the finite possibilities of understanding is undeniable, the univer­
sal claim of ontology nonetheless provides finitude with an affirmative aim. 30
As we have seen, Dasein's historicity moves within the structural boundaries
delimited by the fundamental constitution of its Being and its modes of tempo­
ralization. Finitude is not a mere limit to Dasein's understanding but a mode of
access to other finite Dasein and to the world it composes. In stark contrast to
the absolute ground of truth that had been the legacy of traditional ontology,
Heidegger is thus able to specify that" [ o ]ntology needs only a finite being:'31
For Heidegger, relativism and skepticism have their source, not in a frank
acknowledgment of the historicity of human existence, but in an impossible
epistemological demand: "The theories of relativism and skepticism originate
in a partly justified opposition against a distorted absolutism and dogmatism of
the concept of truth:>32 Insofar as the historical sciences had employed this im­
possible epistemological demand as a theoretical buttress, it becomes clear why
Heidegger in Being and Time can regard them as the source of "historicism." 33
From Heidegger's perspective, the foundation of normative truths on the
finitude of Dasein does not represent a surrender to relativism. On the con­
trary, this foundation leads, for Heidegger, to an interpretation of truth that
genuinely transcends the temporal horizons of specific epochs and the barriers
of given cultures. Beneath the criteria of truth characteristic of past epochs
or foreign cultures, the existential analytic displays the universal claim of the
criteria of finitude in its focus on the persistent motives governing Dasein's
quest for truth's absolute, ahistorical ground. In these motives, Heidegger dis­
cerns the tacit reiteration of Seinsvergessenheit ( the forgetfulness of Being)
amid the diversity of the criteria of truth predominant in Western intellectual
traditions, from the emergence of Western metaphysics to the development of
modern thought. From the vantage point provided by the broad articulation of
 Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being and Time 183

Western intellectual traditions, the debate surrounding historicism and rela­

tivism and the related quest for stable theoretical criteria emerge in a wholly new
light.
Heidegger's notion ofthe motives underlying the predominant Western ideas
of truth informs his attempt to adumbrate, on the ground of Seinsvergessenheit,
a transhistorical unity of Western intellectual traditions, leading up to the
quest for theoretical truth capable of surmounting historicism and relativism.
From the standpoint of Being and Time, the transhistorical unity of Western
traditions finds its source in an age-old presupposition. Rather than think that
the finite Being of Dasein, through which the question of Being emerges, is
essentially implicated in the understanding of Being per se, these traditions
presuppose that Dasein, as all Being revealed through it, is insofar as it can
be transposed into terms foreign to its finitude-into abiding presence and
subsistence (Vorhandensein). This "diversion from finitude [Wegsehen von der
Endlichkeit] " 34 was not only expressed in the determination of Being in terms
of the abiding idea or permanence of substance of Plato and Aristotle (and
their respective medieval successors); it left its mark on the great formative
influences of modernity, despite all further innovations. In each case, from the
Cartesian cogito to the Kantian "I think" (ich denke), to the Hegelian Spirit
( Geist), to name only the most fateful of these influences, the finite meaning
of Dasein "each time my own [jemeiniges]" disappeared before conceptual
structures in which consideration of finitude had been tacitly preempted.35
Each time, rather than Being in terms of the finite Being of Dasein, all Being
per se, including that of Dasein, had been posited in relation to criteria of
truth residing in what remained continually present and capable of becoming
a permanent acquisition of thought. Ephemerality, contingency, and finitude,
rather than being viewed as essential criteria of truth, were thus excluded from
its definition.
According to Heidegger's well-known thesis, the motives for this exclusion,
far from a disinterested search, have their seat in Dasein's forgetfulness, spring­
ing from an unspoken quest to surmount the limits of its finite Being. For­
getfulness, as an essential moment in the uncovering of the truth of Being,
constitutes for Heidegger a subtle opacity at the heart of the normative criteria
that have determined Western metaphysics since antiquity.
Heidegger's claim about the unity of Western intellectual traditions applies
not only to traditional metaphysics but also to an essential criterion of truth
characteristic of modern intellectual traditions purporting to overcome the
dogmatism ofmetaphysics. The basis of Heidegger's claim and its general impli­
cations for the human sciences become dearer when we ( once again) consider
his thought in relation to the aims of what he himself took to be the most rad­
ical critical reflection on the foundations of the human sciences-the thought
184 Jeffrey Andrew Barash

of Dilthey. Precisely because Dilthey, among all the critical philosophers, most
nearly anticipated Heidegger's position in Being and Time, this point ofcontrast
between Dilthey and Heidegger sets in relief Heidegger's appraisal of the hu­
man sciences-and the broader debate over historicism, relativism, and stable
objective standards.
Like Heidegger, Dilthey had abolished recourse to an absolute starting point
outside of history; truth was bounded by impenetrable limits that no finite
being could surpass. Along with other critical philosophers, Dilthey concluded
that the impenetrability of these limits precluded any possible overall vision of
history claiming an ontological foundation, and that the decisive break with
the dogmatism of traditional metaphysics lay precisely in the emergence of
critical awareness of these limits.
Heidegger's considerations emerged from a very different vantage point.
Beyond the limits that historical contingency necessarily imposed on truth,
Heidegger emphasizes, above all, an opacity that deepens through Dasein's
everyday tendency to avoid the implications ofits own finitude. Indeed, because
Dasein is continually tempted to interpret itself in terms of a communal and
instrumental world that encourages it to forget the meaning of its finitude, its
understanding is partial and the hidden basis of its own ideations disguised.
Nowhere is this more evident than in what might be described, from
Heidegger's standpoint, as the chief "noncritical" presupposition ofthe critical
philosophies-the normative ideal of truth embodied in the criterion of"gen­
eral validity [Allgemeingiiltigkeit];' which provided Dilthey and other critical
philosophers the standard of objective truth par excellence in the historical
methodology of the human sciences. For Heidegger, the criterion of "general
validity" assumes that only what may be leveled down to an abiding acquisi­
tion, uniformly subject to verification, may be taken as true. From Heidegger's
standpoint, this idea of the uniform objectivity of norms of truth implies that
the primordial source of historical meaning is not Dasein, but the omnipresent
coherence (Zusammenhang) of a historical process outside of human finitude
and-in the guise of permanence of an acquisition-capable of offering a
measure of compensation for the contingency of finite perception. For this rea­
son, the criterion of"general validity"-encouraged by das Man's diversion of
Dasein from its finitude-is in Heidegger's words nowhere "less applicable than
in the human historical sciences."36
All claims about the essentially historical character of humanity notwith­
standing, Heidegger believed that modern historical methodologies depended
on a notion of historical meaning that neglected the radical implications of
human historicity. Rooted in the idea of a spontaneous coherence of his­
tory and the uniformity imposed by the criterion of "general validity," this
modern methodology masks the true character of the historicity of human
 Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being and Time 185

understanding, whose universality arises in its orientation of a plurality of

finite choices (authentic and inauthentic) through which Dasein decides the
meaning of its finite Being and illuminates a truth specific to that decision. In
this manner, he displaced the primordial source of the contingency of truth
from the level of perspectival worldviews and values to the facticity of Dasein.
From Heidegger's standpoint, reflection on the foundation of the human
sciences in the critical philosophies of history thus did not break with, but
profoundly extended the predominant conception of truth that had charac­
terized Western metaphysical traditions. Despite their explicit renunciation of
metaphysical assumptions, modern critical theories of truth obscured their
deep roots in the metaphysical tradition stemming from ancient philosophy
and Christian theology: they unwittingly appropriated from this tradition at­
tributes of truth derived from the traditional "ontologies of presence:'
For Heidegger, these ontologies presuppose that Being manifests itself as
an abiding presence in the midst of change. In critical theory as in the West­
ern metaphysical tradition in general, the characterization of truth illustrates
Dasein's tacit choice of a mode of Being, in which the consequences of its fini­
tude are obscured but never overcome. Seinsvergessenheit, as the forgetfulness
of the finite Being of Dasein in the disclosure of a meaning of Being, serves as a
metahistorical leitmotiv linking in a silent unity the motives of a long tradition
of reflection stretching back to antiquity.

Notes

1. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 12th ed. (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1972 ), 7. I have modified
Macquarrie and Robinson's English translation, Being and Time (New York: Harper &
Row, 1962) where I have deemed it necessary.
2. Ibid., 20.
3. Ibid., 15; Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phiinomenologie, Gesamtausgabe,
24: 16. The German pagination is also provided in The Basic Problems ofPhenomenology,
trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
4. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 41-110, and Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs,
Gesamtausgabe, 20:201-15. The German pagination is also provided in History of the
Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1985).
5. In Heidegger's estimation, Dasein and its fellows find themselves in a publicly
defined structure of roles in relation to a world of things they commonly dispose
of. This collective environment reaches beyond a functional preoccupation with the
environment to encompass a public style of interpretation that unavoidably saturates
collective existence per se: "We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take
pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise
186 Jeffrey Andrew Barash

we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they shrink back; we find shocking what they
find shocking. The 'they,' which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as
the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness." Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 127.
6. Ibid., 301-31.
7. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 21:233. This lecture series, "Logik: Die Frage nach
der Wahrheit,'' was originally presented in the winter of 1925-1926. [The passage in
question reads: "Dasein has factically fallen prey to its world; this fallenness into the
world belongs to the facticity [ Faktizitat] of Dasein. I understand by facticity a specific
determination ofDasein's Being; the expression is not meant in an indifferent sense that
would be equivalent to the factuality [ Tatsachlichkeit] ofjust any present-at-hand entity.
Dasein, according to its sense, is never present-at-hand, and thus is never something
like a fact [Tatsache]. Nevertheless, it is in a specific sense a fact [Faktum], and this
specific [phenomenon] we designate as facticitY:' -Ed.]
8. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 348.
9. Ibid., 310--52. For a discussion of the aporias implicit in Heidegger's notion
of time in relation to historicity and intratemporality in Being and Time, see Paul
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 60-96.
10. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson have translated Heidegger's
"Geschichtlichkeit" as"historicality" and his"Historizitat'' as"historicity." Because" His­
torizitat'' rarely appears in the text, and the word historicality is by no means clear in
English, I have translated Heidegger's "Geschichtlichkeit'' as "historicity" instead. Cf.
David Couzens Hoy, "History, Historicity, and Historiography in Being and Time," in
M. Murray, ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1978), 329nl.
It is curious that Heidegger hardly mentioned the theme of culture in Being and
Time. In his 1929 debate with Ernst Cassirer at Davos, he remarked: "I can very well
admit that if ...one takes this analysis of Dasein in Being and Time as an investigation
of people, and then asks the question how, on the basis ofthis understanding of people,
it might be possible to understand culture and the realms of culture; ...it is absolutely
impossible to say anything from what is given here." Heidegger and Cassirer, "Davoser
Disputation,'' in Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1951), 256 = Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft,
5th ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 199. The broader implications
of Heidegger's interpretation of culture are the central theme ofJeffrey Andrew Barash,
Heidegger et son siecle: Temps de l'etre, temps de l'histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1995), 105-49.
11. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 378-97.
12. Heidegger's discussion of objectivity in historical matters and the grounding of
historical meaning in the Dasein that seeks to grasp it bear a striking resemblance to
certain aspects of Nietzsche's thought. Later in Heidegger's chapter on temporality and
historicity, he explicitly uses Nietzsche's philosophy, but not in relation to this specific
theme, where certain points of congruence would seem to be most striking. In the
second meditation of his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche wrote: "Yes, one goes so far
 Historical Meaning in the Fundamental Ontology of Being and Time 187

as to suppose that he who has no relation to a moment of the past is called on to represent
it . . . that is what one calls 'objectivity.' ... Only in the strongest exertion of your most
noble qualities will you discover what in the past is great and worthy of being preserved
and known." Nietzsche, "Yorn Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fur <las Leben:' in
Friedrich Nietzsche: Erkenntnistheoretische Schriften, ed. J. Habermas et al. (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 56 = Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History
for Life," in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), 93-94. On Heidegger's relation to Nietzsche in his critique
of Dilthey, see Jeffrey Andrew Barash, "Ober den geschichtlichen Ort der Wahrheit:
Hermeneutische Perspektiven bei Wilhelm Dilthey und Martin Heidegger," in Martin
Heidegger: Innen- und Aussenansichten, ed. Siegfried Blasche et al. (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1989), 58-74.
13. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 384-85.
14. Wilhelm Dilthey, Die geistige Welt, Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens, Gesam­
melte Schriften, vol. 5, 6th ed. (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1974), 36-41; Heidegger, Sein und
Zeit, 384-85.
15. Dilthey, "Ober <las Studium," in Geistige Welt, 37.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Karl Mannheim, "Das Problem der Generationen:' Koiner Viertelsjahrhefte 7:2
(1928), 164.
19. In his lectures of the late 1920s, Heidegger explicitly distanced himself from
"bourgeois [ burgerliche]" styles of thinking, which he felt took comfort in the illusion of
eternal truth. See, for example, Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 24:314, where after attacking
the notion of eternal truth, he stated that "philosophical and scientific knowledge do
not bother themselves at all about the consequences [ of this], even if these consequences
are still uncomfortable for bourgeois understanding." It was perhaps Hannah Arendt
who best understood the deeper political implications of Heidegger's emphasis on
collective inauthenticity. On this theme, see Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Maid
and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998); Dana
R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate ofthe Political (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996); Jeffrey Andrew Barash, "T he Political Dimension of the Public World: On
Hannah Arendt's Interpretation of Martin Heidegger," in Larry May and Jerome Kohn
(eds.), On Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996),
251-68; Jeffrey Andrew Barash, "Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger and the Politics of
Remembrance:' International Journal ofPhilosophical Studies 10:2 (May 2002): 171-82.
20. Georg Iggers, The German Conception ofHistory (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1968), 244.
21. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 389, 391.
22. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 24:31-32.
23. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 375.
24. Ibid., 375, 395.
25. Ibid., 397.
188 Jeffrey Andrew Barash

26. Alfons Degener, for example, noted the importance of this correspondence in
highlighting the metaphysical implications of Dilthey's thought. Yorck seems to have
encouraged the metaphysical tendency in Dilthey. See Degener, "Zwei Wege zu Diltheys
Metaphysik" (Ph.D. diss., University of Munster, 1927), 9.
27. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 20:2. Or, as Heidegger expressed this thought in his
August 8, 1928, letter to Elisabeth Blochmann: "In the historical sciences . .. there lies a
specific understanding of existence; according to my conviction, indeed, the traditional
separation of natural and human sciences is in every form a superficiality... . From
a metaphysical standpoint there is only one science [Wissenschaft]." Heidegger and
Blochmann, Briefwechsel, 1918-1969, ed. Joachim W. Storck (Marbach am Neckar:
Deutsche Schiller-gesellschaft, 1989), 25.
28. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 8-11.
29. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 24:390.
30. Notwithstanding his argument for the primary unity of natural and historical
thinking in the ontology of Dasein, it is difficult to see any affirmative message in
Heidegger's thought for the natural sciences. However much Dasein's modes of Being
may apply to the human sphere, it is difficult to envision how the choices of tempo­
ralizing that underlie Dasein's authenticity or inauthenticity would have anything but
a negative implication for natural sciences such as physics and astronomy. Although
Heidegger suggested the contrary at various points in his writings of this period, and
even that authentic science in general would be possible, when it came to defining what
form authentic science would take, Heidegger sidestepped the question: "We shall not
trace further how science has its source in authentic existence. It is enough now if we
understand that the thematizing of entities-within-the-world presupposes Being-in­
the-world as the basic state of Dasein, and if we understand how it does so:' Heidegger,
Sein und Zeit, 363.
31. Heidegger and Cassirer, "Davoser Disputation;' in Heidegger, Kant und das Prob-
lem der Metaphysik, 252 = Kant and the Problem ofMetaphysics, 197.
32. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 24:316.
33. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 396.
34. Ibid., 424.
35. Ibid., 22.
36. Ibid., 395.
 11
The Demise of Being and Time:
1927-1930
Theodore Kisiel

A LTHOUGH IT MAY WELL BE the most important book in twentieth-century

philosophy, Being and Time remains a fragment. "This astonishing torso;'
as Herbert Spiegelberg called it, was judged by its own author to be an immature,
premature thought-path. "The fundamental flaw of the book Being and Time
is perhaps that I ventured forth too far too soon:' 1 This remark alludes to the
hastiness of the book's publication. Heidegger began to think through the issues
in the "war emergency semester" of 1919, 2 began to write his book in 1923-
1924 in the form of a long (and unpublished) journal article on the concept
of time, 3 and presented the structure of its first division in his lecture course
of the summer semester of 1925. 4 But he finished the final version of the first
two divisions of the text in only a few months of 1926, under intense academic
publishing pressure. 5 The "first half" of Being and Time appeared as a separate
volume in April 1927, and one month later, together with only one other text
(Oskar Becker's Mathematische Existenz) in Husserl's Jahrbuch fur Philosophie
und phiinomenologische Forschung.
But why was the "second half" never published? Why was the text of this
planned two-volume work, which Heidegger sketched in its entirety in an
outline,6 interrupted in the course of its composition, even before the appear­
ance of the first volume? In the following decades, Heidegger often told the
story of this interruption, and usually referred in this context to the various
misinterpretations of Being and Time as anthropology, ontology of the human
being, and existential philosophy. The failure to recognize the book's intention
as fundamental ontology might well have been prevented or diminished with

189
190 Theodore Kisiel

the timely appearance of the missing third division of Part One. We will cite
the best-known story7 along with some important supplements, in order to
gain some anecdotal indications of the content of the missing division.

Furthermore, the understanding of the "concept of existence" used in Being and

Time is made difficult by the fact that the existential concept of existence appro­
priate to Being and Time [i.e., "man's being-a-self, insofar as it ...relates to being
and to the relation to being": GA49, earlier on p. 39] was first developed in full
in the division that as a consequence of the interruption of the publication was
not communicated; for the third division of Part One, "Time and Being;' proved
during the typesetting to be unsatisfactory. [''And at the same time, external cir­
cumstances (the excessive length of the Jahrbuch volume) fortunately prevented
the publication of this section." 8] The decision to break up the text was made
[in the first days ofJanuary 1927-T.K.] during a visit to Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg,
where it became clear to me from our lively, friendly arguments based on the proof
sheets of Being and Time that the elaboration I had attained thus far of this most
important division (I.3) would have been unintelligible. The decision to break
up the publication was made on the day that the news of the death of Rilke
reached us. ["A conversation about Rilke on the same day made especially clear to
me that the fundamental position of Being and Time was irreconcilably different
from both Rilke and Jaspers:' 9] ["The attempt"-in its first execution, T.K.-"was
'destroyed; 10 but a new start was made, on a more historical path, in the lecture
course of summer semester 1927." 11] Still, I was of the opinion at the time that I
would be able to say everything more clearly over the course of the year.That was
an illusion. So the succeeding years yielded some publications that attempted to
raise the genuine question by circuitous routes. [ GA49,40]

Being and Time ( 1927) ... originated ...as an initial way of making the question
of being visible, as far as possible, from the ground up and at the same time in
an actual execution-in the form that essentially leads beyond all former ways
of posing the question and yet leads back into the confrontation with the Greeks
and with Western philosophy. [GA66, 413]

Precisely because the way of posing the question of the meaning ofbeing (the truth
of the projection of being-not of beings) is other than that of all of metaphysics
up to now, this questioning could have shown what it achieves-although what
was communicated often says what this questioning intends. For what was unsat­
isfactory in the section that was held back was not an uncertainty in the direction
of questioning and its domain, but only an uncertainty in its proper elaboration.
[GA66,414]

According to the outline, the final, "systematic;' third division on "Time and
Being" was supposed to carry out "the explication of time as the transcendental
horizon for the question of being" (SZ 39). One could have expected that this
 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 191

final division of Part One of Being and Time, at least in the transition to the
"historical" Part Two with its "phenomenological destruction of the history of
ontology;' would emphasize the completely different form of its question of
being as opposed to "all of metaphysics up to now." Secure in its revolutionary
direction of questioning, but inadequate in its proper elaboration-to the point
of being unintelligible for intellects like Rilke and Jaspers: what exactly was
unsatisfactory in the third division, which after repeated attempts to formulate
it, was never to appear? Heidegger's explanation in the "Letter on 'Humanism'"
strikes us as a final summary of these attempts. In this context Heidegger is
trying to deflect the misinterpretation of the "projection" of the understanding
of being as an achievement of subjectivity. It can be thought only as the ecstatic
relation to the clearing of being:

The adequate execution and completion of this other thinking that abandons
subjectivity is surely made more difficult by the fact that in the publication of Being
and Time the third division of the first part, "Time and Being;' was withheld ( cf.
Being and Time, p. [SZ] 39). Here everything is reversed. The division in question
was held back because thinking failed in the adequate saying ofthis turning [ Keh re]
and did not succeed with the help of the language ofmetaphysics. The lecture "On
the Essence of Truth;' thought out and delivered in 1930 but not printed until
1943, provides a certain insight into the thinking of the turning from "Being and
Time" to "Time and Being:' This turning is not a change ofstandpoint from Being
and Time, but in it the thinking that was sought first arrives at the locality of that
dimension out of which Being and Time is experienced, that is to say, experienced
in the fundamental experience of the oblivion of being. 12

The inadequacy of the withheld section lies in the way it speaks of the turn
(Kehre). It fails in the attempt to carry out this turn with the help of the language
of metaphysics, that is, the language of subject and object, which dominates
the grammar of Western languages. That is why the later Heidegger seeks a
transformation of the essence of language; he waits for a "language of be­
ing" that will indicate the appropriating event (Ereignis) of Seyn and Zeyt, 13 an
event that does not lie at our disposal.The younger Heidegger was already aware
of this problem in Western language.Just before he outlines the general plan of
Being and Time he remarks, "For the ...task [ of grasping beings in their being]
we lack not only most of the words but, above all, the 'grammar"' (SZ 39).
From his review article on "Recent Research on Logic" (1912) to his Habilita­
tionsschrift on the Scotist doctrine of categories and meaning (1915-1916), 14
the young Heidegger's interest revolves around a "logic of philosophy" (as the
title of a book by Emil Lask has it), 15 which examines the peculiar phenomena
at the margins of the ruling grammar of the subject-predicate relation, such
as existential statements and impersonal sentences. The logic of philosophical
192 Theodore Kisiel

concept formation, which for the neo-Kantian Lask is a transcendental logic, is

developed by Heidegger into a phenomenological (hermeneutic-ontological)
logic. Already in the war emergencysemester of 1919 he replaces the well-known
neo-Kantian impersonal expression for the transcendental difference-"lt 'is'
not, but it is valid (or more generally: 'it values')"-with newly coined im­
personal expressions, which are now really supposed to express an ontological
difference: "It 'is' not, but it's worlding, it's happening, it's appropriating itself
[es er-eignet sich]:' 16 Thus in Being and Time we find existential-ontological
statements such as, "It [temporality] is not, but it temporalizes itself [es zeitigt
sich]:' 17 Likewise, the horizon of this temporality "simply 'is' not, but rather it
temporalizes itself." 18
Heidegger's search for a nonobjectifying language of being in the frame­
work of a phenomenological logic of philosophical concept formation becomes
particularly clear in the dramatic closing hours of the 1919 war emergency
semester. 19 Here Heidegger tries to free the main methodological concept of
phenomenology, the concept of intentionality, in its application to the primal­
something (life in and for itself, lived experience), from all traces of a for­
mal logical misinterpretation as a rigid dualism of subject and object. By ob­
jectifying life and handling it theoretically, this misinterpretation leads to a
de-vivification, de-historicization, de-interpretation, and de-worlding of life.
In its pure phenomenological formality, intentionality is simply a directing­
itself-toward. As comportment as such, it is indicated in its pure moment of the
formal "toward;' which Heidegger considers the heart, the center, the middle,
the origin, the concealed source of life-the inner happening of its being. The
toward ( das Worauf) of this comportment is initially described as a unitary
intentional relation from motivation to tendency and back, in an intentional
"circular" motion of "motivated tendency or tending motivation:• 20 In Being
and Time, "the toward-which [das Woraufhin] of the primary projection" is
the meaning of Dasein qua temporality, whose circular motion is redescribed
as a thrown projecting of a prestructured context "according to which some­
thing becomes comprehensible as something [and ] conceived in its possibility"
(SZ 324, 151).
Formal indication thus becomes the "methodological secret weapon" in
Heidegger's logic of philosophical concept formation. 21 In the published frag­
ment of Being and Time it is mentioned about a half-dozen times without
further explanation (SZ 53, 114, 116f., 179, 231, 313-15; but also "provisional
indication;' 14, 16, 41). Formal indication, as hermeneutic phenomenology's
guiding method for the phenomenology of the phenomenon in a distinctive
sense (SZ 35), would have to become a main theme of the third division, to
be explicated there in its hermeneutical logic. On the way to Being and Time,
 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 193

Heidegger passes through a series of formal indications, but each should be

seen as a formal deepening of the prestruction (Praestruktion) of intentionality,
which is understood as pure directing-itself-toward: as an intentionality with
the three dimensions of relation sense, content sense, and actualization sense
(1920-1922), supplemented with a unifying temporalization sense in 1922; as
Da-sein (1923), being-in-the-world (1924), to-be (Zu-sein, 1925), ex-sistence
(1926), and transcendence (1927-1929). Thus the pure formula for the struc­
ture of care in Being and Time, "ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world)
as being-amid (entities encountered within-the-world)" (SZ 192), is dearly
intentional, in the broader (pretheoretical) sense. The "new start" on Divi­
sion III "on a more historical path;' in summer semester 1927, thus reaches the
following conclusions by way of a series of formal indications: "Intentionality
is the ratio cognoscendi of transcendence. Transcendence is the ratio essendi
of intentionality in its diverse modes."22 In Kantian terms, transcendence be­
comes the condition of the possibility of intentionality. 23 As the basic trait of
the ontological structure ofDasein, transcendence belongs to the existential­
ity of existence. 24 "On a more historical path" one notices how strongly the
features of the formal indications are expressed in a traditional "language of
metaphysics."
Finally, the entire series of formal indications will prove to have "the con­
dition of its possibility in temporality and temporality's ecstatic-horizonal
character." 25 Intentionality, transcendence, existence: at their root they each
indicate their temporal structure. What could be more formal in factical life
than time? And as regards the function of indication: what could be more
concrete and immediate in factical life, what could be nearer to us than time?
Ecstatic time is both the ultimate formality of life (being) and the most inti­
mate and immediate nearness ofDasein, facticity as such. In a note that belongs
among the new attempts to begin Division III, Heidegger remarks: "temporal­
ity: it is not just a fact, but itself the essence of the fact: facticity. The fact of
facticity (here the root of the 'reversal of ontology'). Can one ask, 'How does
time originate?' ... Only with time is there a possibility of origination....But
then, what is the meaning of the impossibility of the problem of the origination
of time?"26

I. Toward the Reconstruction of the Missing Third Division

"That the intentionality of 'consciousness' is grounded in the ecstatical unity

of Dasein, and how this is the case, will be shown in the following Division"
(SZ 363, note). This explicit reference to Division III is further evidence that it
194 Theodore Kisiel

would have included a major methodological section on the sense-of-direction

(Richtungssinn) of a formally indicative hermeneutics. The same §69 of Being
and Time includes a similar reference, but this one refers not only to the "idea
of phenomenology, as distinguished from the preliminary conception of it
which we indicated by way of introduction [§7] :' but also to the corresponding
"existential conception of science" and its understanding "of the ontological
genesis of the theoretical attitude;' "Yet a fully adequate existential Interpre­
tation of science cannot be carried out until the meaning of being and the
'connection' between being and truth have been clarified in terms of the tempo­
rality of existence" (SZ 357). And this clarification is the "central problematic"
(SZ 357) of Division III. As a preparation for these tasks of the following di­
vision, §69c (SZ 364ff.) develops "the temporal problem of the transcendence
of the world;' that is, the problem of how the world temporalizes itself as the
toward-which ofthe temporal ecstases into a horizonal unity in accordance with
the "horizonal schemata" -the respective "whithers" of the ecstases. The tem­
poral transcendence of the world is thereby founded ecstatically-horizonally.
The ecstatical unity of temporality is also designated at the start of §69 as the
cleared clearing of Dasein, which grounds the disclosedness of the there (cf.
SZ 350f.). The clarification of the connection between being and truth thus
begins with Dasein, whose fundamental characteristic is the understanding of
being. In turn, the understanding of being is made possible by disclosedness,
that is, disposed understanding-dynamically understood as thrown project­
ing (cf. §44c, SZ 230). The thrown projection that is Dasein in its ek-sistence is
ultimately-and so finitely-grounded in ecstatical temporality, in the cleared
clearing of the there. In this way time is used as the "preliminary name"
for truth, which is now understood as disclosedness, clearing, and uncon­
cealment. "Being [projected as time-T.K.] and truth 'are' equiprimordially"
(SZ 230).

II. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Summer

Semester 1927)

Placing it within the history of his development, Heidegger understands his

lecture course of summer semester 1927 to be a "new elaboration of Division 3
of Part 1 of Being and Time" ( ln). 27 The course completes only part of the path
indicated in Being and Time toward the correlation of being and truth before
it is broken off because of the great detour it takes through the history of on­
tology. The "first and last and basic problem" of a phenomenological science
of being is: "How is the understanding of being at all possible?" (15). More
explicitly, "Whence-that is, from which antecedently given horizon-do we
 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 195

understand the like of being?" (16). The presupposed analytic of Dasein gives
a first answer: "time is the horizon from which something like being becomes
understandable at all. We interpret being by way of time (tempus). The inter­
pretation is a Temporal [ temporale] one. T he fundamental subject of research
in ontology ...is Temporality [Temporalitiit]" (17). Ontology is not only a crit­
ical and transcendental science (cf. 17), but also a Temporal one (cf. 228),
which is hence quite different from all other, so-called positive sciences. But
it is like the positive sciences in one way. A positive science must objectify the
entities that lie before it upon the latent horizon of their particular being,28
upon the whither of the "projection ofthe ontological constitution of a region
ofbeings" (321)-their being what and how they are. Similarly, ontology must
objectify being itself" upon the horizon of its understandability'' (322)-that is,
upon Temporality. Ontology becomes a temporal science "because Temporal
projection makes possible an objectification [ Vergegenstiindlichung] of being
and assures conceptualizability, and thereby constitutes ontology in general
as a science" (323). T he fundamental act by which ontology constitutes itself
as science is the objectification of being as such (cf. 281). This act has "the
function of explicitly projecting what is antecedently given upon that toward
which it has already been projected [and unveiled] in pre-scientific experience
or understanding" (282). The explicit objectification "thematizes" (281), and
"thematization objectifies" (SZ 363). T his articulation of the basic concepts
of a science, or explicit interpretation of its guiding understanding of being,
determines the distinctive conceptual structure of the science, the possibility
of truth that pertains to it, and its manner of communicating its true propo­
sitions (SZ 362f.). The true propositions of scientific ontology are a priori,
transcendental, and Temporal (cf. 323f.). The phenomenological language of
being as such is the language ofTemporality, which is properly "the transcen­
dental horizon for the question about being" (324). With this, the explicit goal
of Division Ill, "the explication of time" as such a "horizon:' has been reached
( SZ 39). Temporality ( Temporalitiit) is the transcendental horizon ofthe under­
standing of being, especially when this understanding overtly questions being
and thus itself becomes worthy of questioning.
Temporality ( Temporalitiit) is the temporality (Zeitlichkeit) that is inter­
preted in the existential analytic, when it is thematized in its function as con­
dition of possibility of the pre-ontological and ontological understanding of
being, and thus of ontology as such ( cf. 324, 388). In this function, Temporal­
ity is "the most original temporalizing of temporality as such" (302). As the
most original temporality, it is the most radical-the temporality that is funda­
mentally factical down to its abyssal ground, that is, the "appropriating event"
(Er-eignis), if we may here use the later Heidegger's favorite word. But in 1927
Heidegger hesitates to push forward into the concealed depths of temporality,
196 Theodore Kisiel

"above all with regard to its Temporality:' and even to enter "the problem of
the finiteness of time" (307f.).

To what extent is a negative, a not, involved in Temporality in general and, con­

jointly, in temporality? We may even inquire to what extent time itself is the
condition of possibility of nullity in general.... Closer consideration shows that
the not and also the essential nature of the not, nullity, likewise can be interpreted
only by way of the nature of time and that it is only by starting from this that
the possibility of modification-for example, the modification of presence into
absence-can be explained.... We are not well enough prepared to penetrate into
this obscure region. [311f.]

A reason for this lies in the incompleteness of the analyses of Temporality

as a whole as "temporality with regard to the unity of the horizonal schemata
belonging to if' (307). T he horizon of ecstatic temporality is understood
more precisely as the horizonal schema of the corresponding ecstasis. For
every ecstasis, as a removal-to, also has in it an anticipation of the formal
structure of the "whither" of the removal, which is never an indefinite
removal into nothingness. T his anticipated whither of the ecstasis is the
horizonal schema that belongs to it (cf. 302). In Being and Time (SZ 365),
the horizonal schemata are expressed prepositionally, that is, in a meaninglike
way, following the model of meaning as the pre-structured toward-which
(SZ 152): the for-the-sake-of (the ecstasis of the future as coming-toward),
the in-the-face-of-which of thrownness or the to-which of abandonment
(past, Ge-wesenheit), the in-order-to (present). But in Summer Semester
1927, Heidegger intends to designate the horiwnal schemata with the Latin
expressions for the "tenses" ( Tempora) of time. "Here, in the dimension of
the interpretation of being via time, we are purposely making use of Latinate
expressions for all the determinations of time, in order to keep them distinct
in the terminology itself from the time-determinations in the previously
described sense" (305). Praesens is used instead of "present" ( Gegenwart),
and praesens now means the horiwnal schema of the present. More precisely,
praesens (instead of the in-order-to) is supposed explicitly to "constitute the
condition of possibility of understanding handiness as such" (305).

As the condition of possibility of the "beyond itself," the ecstasis of the present
has within itself a schematic prefiguration of the where out there this "beyond
itself" is.... Praesens is not identical with present, but, as basic determination of
the horizonal schema of this ecstasis, it joins in constituting the complete time­
structure of the present. Corresponding remarks apply to the other two ecstases,
future and past (repetition, forgetting, retaining). (306]

But Heidegger treats only the ecstasis of the present in regards to praesens,
and says nothing at all about the other ecstases in regards to their presumably
 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 197

Latinized tenses and schemata, the futurum and praeteritum. Yet praesens in
particular is not independent; it stands in an inner Temporal connection with
the other Temporal schemata. "In each instance the inner Temporal intercon­
nections of the horizonal schemata of time vary also according to the mode of
temporalizing of temporality, which always temporalizes itself in the unity of
its ecstases in such a way that the precedence of one ecstasis always modifies the
others along with it" (307). In a summary of the prepositional nexus of Being
and Time, Heidegger had already emphasized that the relations of the in-order­
to can be understood only "if the Dasein understands something of the nature of
the for-the-sake-of-itself" (295). An in-order-to (present) can be revealed only
insofar as the for-the-sake-of (future) that belongs to a potentiality-for-being
is understood.
But the futurum, as the condition of possibility of understanding the self of
Dasein, does not come under consideration at all, not even in its inner connec­
tion to praesens. With his exclusive treatment of praesens, Heidegger apparently
leaves room for the domination of a metaphysics of constant presence, which
understands the being of beings only "in the horizon of productive-intuitive
comportment" (165) and which is interpreted up to its epochal conclusion in
the contemporary age of technology. In this way the most brilliant insights
of the analytic of Dasein, for example, insights into the existential priority of
the future and into the historicity of Dasein, are not followed further, up to
the fundamental horizon of the most radical temporality. Heidegger's break
with the Platonic thesis of recollection had been indicated in his transforma­
tion ofPindar's saying, "become what you [always already] are;' into "become
what you have to be"; in Being and Time the directive is "be what you will be"
(cf. SZ 145), "become what you yourself are not yet at all" (cf. SZ 243), or
"become what you can be" (cf. the statements on "resoluteness;' SZ 305f.). But
this transformation is not taken farther, into the uttermost Temporal horizon
and into its abyssal implications. T he levels of Dasein's historicity-for exam­
ple, how, in the resolute repetition of the destiny of the change of generation,
the past perfect of precedented Dasein takes the form of the future perfect of
a community-remain uninvestigated in the Temporality of their modes of
being.
Hence the historiological-practical science of Christian theology, which takes
as its object the traditional and repeated happening of revelation for the com­
munity of faith, is corrected only in a formally indicative way by philosophical
concepts and is no longer understood in a philosophically scientific way, that
is, Temporally. 29 With the renunciation of the language game ofTemporality,
the dream of philosophy as Temporal science-that is, the objectification of
being itself on the horizon of time-comes to an end. T he thought that philos­
ophy cannot be a science at all thus becomes the main theme of Introduction
to Philosophy, the lecture course of Winter Semester 1928-1929.
198 Theodore Kisiel

III. The Metaphysical Foundations ofLogic

(Summer Semester 1928)

But already in the course of his final Marburg lectures, concerning Leibniz's
logic and the principle of sufficient reason, it becomes gradually dear to
Heidegger that philosophy itself is more originary in its logic and ontology
than any science, due to its radicalization on the basis of originary temporal­
ity, and is thus completely different from science. With its new elaboration of
ecstatic-horizonal temporality as nihil originarium (cf. 196, 210), 30 one could
see The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic as the second (and last) "start on a
more historical path" toward "the problem of 'Time and Being' indicated in
Being and Time" (208). But Heidegger no longer speaks of the third division,
but rather of the not yet published "second part" (168) of Being and Time as
the place where the tasks projected in §69, in particular the radical turnabout
from intentionality to transcendence, are carried out. For "on a more historical
path" the tasks have now multiplied in their scope and extent. After The Basic
Problems of Phenomenology, the analytic of the Temporality of being now in­
cludes the Temporal exposition of the problem of being, that is, the distinction
of the basic problems of phenomenological ontology that are comprised in
the question of being: the problems of (1) the ontological difference; (2) the
regionality of being and the unity of the idea of being; (3) the basic articula­
tion of being; (4) the veridical character of being (cf. 154, 158, 152f.). But the
Temporal analytic, which constitutes fundamental ontology along with the an­
alytic of Dasein and its temporality, becomes in its execution "at the same time
the turning-around, where ontology itself expressly turns back to the meta­
physical ontic in which it implicitly always remains" (158). This overturning
pertains to the inescapable ontical founding of ontology, which Aristotle had
already recognized in his double concept of ontology as first philosophy and
theology. 31 Relying on Max Scheler's concept of metasciences, such as metan­
thropology, Heidegger designates metaphysical ontic as "metontology:' T he
double concept of philosophy as fundamental ontology and metontology "is
only the particular concretion of the ontological difference, i.e., the concretion
of carrying out the understanding-of-being. In other words, philosophy is the
central and total concretization of the metaphysical essence ofexistence" (158).
On the basis of fundamental ontology, metontology poses the basic ontical­
existentiell questions of concrete Dasein in its particular world, in the midst of
beings as a whole, as in Kant's metaphysica specialis "according to the concept
of the world": What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? {178f.).
Metontology, as a metaphysics of the ontical primal phenomenon of human
existence in its exceptional position in the cosmos, does not only thematize the
global questions of"life conduct" and "worldview" in ethics, politics, practice,
 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 199

technique, and faith (cf. 157). Metontology also considers the regional ques­
tions of the difference between human existence and non-Dasein beings, such
as the "worldless" stone and the animal, which is "poor in world"; 32 particular
questions concerning Dasein, such as its "being factically dispersed into bodili­
ness and thus into sexuality" (137); historical questions, such as a metaphysics
of myth (209) and the metaphysics of other worldviews. 33
To what extent does the new elaboration of ecstatic-horizonal temporality
in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, in which Temporality is never men­
tioned, point to this conversion of the Temporal analytic into the new task of
a metontology? In contrast to the presentation in The Basic Problems of Phe­
nomenology, originary temporality is ruled by the ecstatic being-toward-itself
in the mode of the for-the-sake-of-itself (cf. 213). "This approaching oneself
in advance, from one's own possibility, is the primary ecstatic concept of the
future" (206). The for-the-sake-of is thus the distinguishing mark of Dasein,
"that it is concerned with this being, in its being, in a specific way. Dasein exists
for the sake of Dasein's being and its potential-to-be... . It belongs to Dasein's
essence to be concerned in its being about its very being" (186). The for­
the-sake-of-itself formally determines an ontological circuit that transcends
beings-the "circle" (215) of self-understanding, of freedom, of selthood and
its binding obligations. "Freedom gives itself to understand, freedom is the
primal understanding, i.e., the primal projection of that which freedom itself
makes possible" (192). But what does freedom make possible? The world, "the
wholeness of beings in the totality of their possibilities" (180), which gets its
specifically transcendental form of organization from the particular for-the­
sake-of in each case (cf. 185). The world temporalizes itself primarily from
the for-the-sake-of, from the ecstasis of the future, and is grounded in the ec­
static unity and wholeness of the temporalized horizon (cf. 21 lf.). Heidegger
now speaks of an "ecstematic" unity of the horizon, that is, a systematic unity
that is temporalized by the unity of the ecstases (cf. 208). This horizonal unity
weighted toward the future is the "temporal condition for the possibility of
world" (208). Because this horizon is not an entity, it cannot be localized any­
where. It shows itself only in and with the ecstases as their ecstema. It is "not at
all primarily related to looking and intuiting, but by itself means simply that
which delimits, encloses, the enclosure. ... It 'is' not as such, but it temporalizes
itself" (208). Or better: it's worlding!-to use an expression that Heidegger
revives now, having coined it in 1919 (cf. 170-73). With this formulation,
Heidegger wants to convey that the world is not an entity, but a temporal How
of being. The world, the unity of the temporal horizon, is "nothing that is, yet
something that 'is there' [etwas, was es gibt]. The 'it' that gives this non-entity
is itself no being, but is the self-temporalizing temporality. And what the lat­
ter, as ecstatic unity, temporalizes is the unity of its horizon, the world ... that
200 Theodore Kisiel

which simply arises in and with temporalization. We therefore call it the nihil
originarium" (210).
It's worlding, it's giving, it's temporalizing itself: these are the impersonals of
sheer facticity. "The primal fact, in the metaphysical sense, is that there is any­
thing like temporality at all" (209). Sheer facticity is the nihil originarium, and
the product of the "peculiar productivity intrinsic to temporality" is "precisely
a peculiar nothing, the world" (210). Thus the primal fact of temporality is no
factum brutum, but rather "primal history pure and simple" (209), "the primal
event [ Urereignis]" (212). The impersonal sentence "it's appropriating itself [es
er-eignet sich]" already makes an appearance in 1919 as the principium indi­
viduationis, that is, the principle of facticity as such. 34 But in The Metaphysical
Foundations of Logic, Heidegger emphasizes the ontical aspect of the "happen­
ing of transcendence;' in which "beings are already discovered as well" (217).
The metaphysical primal history of Dasein as temporality also documents the
completely "enigmatic" tendency to understand beings as intratemporal, ex­
tratemporal, and supratemporal (212 ). Of course, "the event of the world-entry
of beings" happens only as long as there exists historical Dasein, which as being­
in-the-world gives beings the opportunity to enter the world. "And only when
[being-in-the-world] is existent, have [present-at-hand] things too already en­
tered world, i.e., become intraworldly" (194). "There is time, in the common
sense, only with the temporalization of temporality, with the happening of
world-entry. And there are also intratemporal beings, such that transpire 'in
time,' only insofar as world-entry happens and intraworldly beings become
manifest for Dasein" (210). The thorough elaboration of world-entry is in part
Heidegger's answer to the basic metaphysical problem of the ontological re­
lation between realism and idealism (SZ §§43, 44c) in his confrontation with
Max Scheler (13If.), which he inserts in this lecture course on the occasion
of Scheler's death. Intraworldliness and intratemporality do not belong to the
essence of the present-at-hand in itself, which remains the same entity that it is
and as which it is, "even if it does not become intraworldly, even if world-entry
does not happen to it" (194). The happening of the world-entry of beings is
only the transcendental condition of possibility for the fact that extant entities
reveal themselves in their in-itselfness, and thus "for [extant] things announc­
ing themselves in their not requiring world-entry regarding their own being"
(195; cf. 153). The fact that we are called to let beings be what and how they
are is another sign of the facticity and thrownness of temporal Dasein, whose
powerlessness in the face of beings is disclosed in transcendence and in world­
entry (cf. 215). The freedom of transcendence is at the same time the binding
character of the ground.
To sum up what we have said in temporal terms: "The ecstematic tempo­
ralizes itself, oscillating as a worlding. World entry happens only insofar as
 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 201

something like ecstatic oscillation temporalizes itself as a particular temporal­

ity....The entrance into the world by beings is primal history pure and simple"
(209).The explication ofthe oscillating vectors ofworld-entry is not completely
new in Heidegger.In a decisive closing statement in the war emergency semester
of 1919, he said, "But this means that the sense of the something as the expe­
rienceable implies the moment of 'out towards; of 'direction towards; 'into a
(particular) world; and indeed in its undiminished 'vital impetus:" 35 The oscil­
lating rhythm of the primal spring oflife, in its motivated tendency or tending
motivation, is to be found in the oscillation of time. 36 In the summer semester
of 1928, Heidegger recognizes Bergson's ontical language of the elan of time as
the source of ontologically directed expressions-for example, the being ofthe
ecstases "lies directly in the free ecstatic momentum.... Temporality is the free
oscillation of the whole ofprimordial temporality; time expands and contracts
itself. (And only because of momentum is there throw, facticity, thrownness;
and only because ofoscillation is there projection)" (207f.). Thrown projection,
instead ofmotivated tendency, is now the basic movement ofDasein.The basic
projection of transcendence, which finds its possibility in the unity of ecstatic
oscillation, now becomes "the upswing, regarded as [ swinging] toward all pos­
sible beings that can factically enter there into a world" (209). World-entry is,
to begin with, an ecstatic happening ofworlding, that is, the unitary oscillation
of the removal (raptus) of the ecstases into a unitary horizon. Oscillating or
swinging from the ecstatic unity of time, the horizon is not an objectification;
it may not be represented as "anything thing-like, present at hand" (cf.208).
The transcendence of Dasein is an upswing into the possibilities of the
world, which itself is "the free surpassive counter-hold of the for-the-sake-of"
( 193). Transcendence means leaping over the beings that in each case factically
and factually exist, to "an excess of possibilities, within which Dasein always
maintains itself as free projection" (192).Dasein is always "farther" than any
factual entity. In its "domain" of the understanding of being there lies the inner
possibility of enrichment: "Dasein always has the character of being-richer­
than, of outstripping" (211). It is, in its originary temporalizing, an effusive
exuberance of possibilities. Transcendence, according to Plato, is epekeina tes
ousias: "The for-the-sake-of, however, (transcendence) is not being itself, but
surpasses being, and does so inasmuch as it outstrips beings in dignity and
power" (219, Heidegger's rendition of Republic 509b). "The freedom toward
ground is the outstripping, in the upswing, of that which carries us away
and gives us distance" (221). Yet we must also emphasize the unfreedom of
finite transcendence: "On the basis of this upswing, Dasein is, in each case,
beyond beings ...but it is beyond in such a way that it, first of all, experiences
beings in their resistance, against which transcending Dasein is powerless"
(215).
202 Theodore Kisiel

IV. The Break Begins: Introduction to Philosophy

(Wmter Semester 1928-1929)

Since 1919, when Heidegger characterized philosophy as the pretheoretical

primal science of originary life, he gave a vacillating answer to the question of
whether phenomenological philosophy should be a primal science, or even any
science at all. For philosophy, as primal science, is unlike any other science, be­
cause it is supposed to be supratheoretical or pretheoretical-a nontheoretical
science, which seems to be a square circle. Already in the Winter Semester of
1919-1920 (according to unpublished student transcripts) Heidegger remarks
that philosophy, as "originary science:' is not a science at all "in the real sense,"
for every philosophy presumes to do more than mere science. And in the next
semester he traces this "more" back to the original motive of philosophizing,
that is, the disquieting of life itself.
This pre- and supratheoretical "more" is "thematized" again in the Winter
Semester of 1928-1929, at the end of the phenomenological decade of Heideg­
ger's development (1919-1929). As the successor of Husserl, Heidegger takes
up anew the theme of the scientificity of philosophy in this first of the later
Freiburg lecture courses, which bears the title Introduction to Philosophy. Phi­
losophy is not a science among others, but is more originary than any science.
"Philosophy is indeed the origin of science, but for this very reason it is not
science-not even a primal science" ( 18). 37 Because it gives science its possibil­
ity, philosophy is something more, something else, something higher and more
originary. This "something else" is related to transcending, of which science as
such is incapable. Or better: philosophy is something deeper, more radical, and
more essential because philosophizing is "an existing from the essential ground
of Dasein, [i.e.] becoming essential in transcendence" (218). 38 It is not a science
at all-not out of lack, but out of excess, because through the understanding
of being it is a constant inner friendship (philia) with things, and is thereby
truer to the matters at stake and "more scientific than any science can ever be"
(219). Therefore the expression "scientific philosophy" is not just superfluous,
like the term "round circle;' but also a deceptive misunderstanding (cf. 16, 22,
219, 221).
Philosophizing as explicit transcending, as explicitly letting transcendence
happen, is grounded in the "primal fact" (223, 205) of the understanding of
being, the thrown projection of being. Transcending is, first, the surpassing
of beings, which happens in science on the basis of the prior, nonobjective,
background projection of the ontological constitution of beings; on this ba­
sis, beings in themselves come to appear and can be articulated as openly
lying before us (positum). ''Against the background [this means horizon!] of
the being that is projected in the projection, the entity that is thus determined
 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 203

first comes into relief" (196). But in this projection of the fundamental, posi­
tive concepts of the sciences, being itself remains unconceived, and at first even
inconceivable.Nevertheless, the understanding of being is "nothing other than
the possibility of carrying out the distinction between beings and being-in
short, the possibility of the ontological difference" (223). There remains the
radical possibility of developing the understanding of being into a conceiving
of being, that is, into a question about what being itself is, and how such things
as the understanding of being and transcendence become possible. This self­
articulating transition from the preconceptual understanding of being to the
questioning will to conceive is philosophy as explicit transcending.
Philosophy is now sharply delimited from science, which is the cognition of
beings as positum in a demarcated domain. "Neither being as such nor beings
as a whole and as such, nor the inner connection between being and beings [in
transcendence-T.K.] is ever accessible ... to a science" ( 224). "Transcendence
is nothing that could lie before us like an object of science" (395). Being itself
is no positum, but is like a nothing, and is close to the nonentities of the world
and freedom. What, then, is the language of being, onto-logos (200f.), if it is
not scientific language? For the propositional truth of science is founded "on
something more originary that does not have the character of an assertion"
(68). Philosophy as onto-logy, "the thematic grasping and conceiving of being
itself" (200), in essence becomes a problem that cannot be solved until we
can "unveil the full, inner direction of the essence of philosophizing" (217).
Significant in the edition of these 1928-1929 lectures is a single paragraph on
time as the transcendental horizon of the question of being, that is, on the
schematic-phenomenological construction of the concept of being by way of
time at the heart ofDivision III.This paragraph, as the editors note, was not read
out loud in the lecture course (218n). 39 Even the discussion of the "construction
of the problem of being" or the "construction of transcendence" (cf. 394, 396,
400), which occasionally surfaces in Heidegger's lecture-manuscript (the basis
for GA 27), is not to be found in the more extensive student transcripts of
the course. Instead, philosophizing as questioning about the concept of being
becomes an everlasting, ever failing, inexhaustible task-a task that "leads us
again and again into situations from which there seems to be no exit" (216).
And the question ofbeing, which "leads us anew into abysses" (205 ), is only one
path to philosophy, the path via science.But in order to make the full concept of
philosophy intelligible, this path must be supplemented by two further paths:
via worldview and via history.
A goal common to both paths is important for our purposes. Being and Time
had already expressed the transcendence ofbeing-in-the-world and thereby the
transcendence of the world (cf. SZ §69c). "If transcending means being-in-the­
world, and if this in each case means taking a stance in the world, a worldview,
204 Theodore Kisiel

then explicit transcending-philosophizing-means an explicit development

of a worldview" (354f.). Philosophy as worldview is a stance, in the distinctive
sense of what the Greeks called ethos (cf. 379), and which the later Heidegger
will identify with the hermeneutic relation of being-human as the Brauch (tra­
dition, custom, usage, practice) that develops from our dwelling in the world,
the habit of a habitat. 40 "Philosophy is not one worldview among others, not
one stance among others, but the stance that comes from the ground of tran­
scendence, the grounding stance pure and simple" (SM 678; cf. GA 27, 397).
In philosophizing, as explicitly letting Dasein's transcendence happen from its
ground, the most originary possible stance takes place (396). "Only in explic­
itly letting transcendence happen, in the breaking-open of the inner breadth
and originality of transcendence, do the concrete possibilities of the [concrete]
stance [ of factical existing] open up. But these concrete possibilities for the
stance [of factical worldviews] are not determined on the path of philosophy,
but [in each case] from the particular Dasein itself" (397; cf. SM 679). De­
veloping a particular stance and promulgating it as a standard is not the task
of philosophy as the fundamental stance, which expresses the conditions of
possibility and the presuppositions of the primal act of taking a stand in the
world, that is, the "form" of its actualization (cf. 390). At the most, and at
best, philosophy can be the "occasion" for the possibilities of a stance to break
open for the factically existing human being in their basic traits, in a free and
nonbinding way; the individual's own coming to a stance and attaining a stance
can then be sharpened in free choice and decision (SM 679 = GA 27,397; also
381). The more originary the fundamental stance of philosophizing Dasein,
the freer and less binding is each act of allowing a stance to take place in the
Dasein of others. And the less bindingly the fundamental stance takes place,
the better it can awaken the stance in others.
Philosophy as a wake-up call and as the occasion for free decision and
interpretation-this is philosophy's exhortative function, which Aristotle al­
ready designated as protreptic. This function of philosophy is connected to
two temporally determined and interwoven features of the transcendence of
Dasein: its freedom and its historical particularity. Philosophizing-letting
transcendence happen from its ground-

means precisely the development of that transcendence of Dasein which we call

freedom.... The essence of philosophizing consists in its development of the
leeway and space of free movement [ Spielraum] into which concrete, historical
Dasein, which is in each case guided by a particular stance, can enter. The fact
that philosophy develops the leeway [ =freedom] for the particular attainment
of a stance means that philosophizing is essentially linked to the future. Just as
 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 205

myth is an essential and necessary recollection for philosophy, the future of its
questioning is its real strength. But the present disappears, for the present is
always only the tip of the moment that takes its power and its wealth from futural
recollection.... With futural remembrance, we indicate the distinctive historical
position that the metaphysical essence of philosophy bears within it. [SM 680f.;
cf. GA 27, 398]

Philosophy is the liberation of the particular Dasein (401). Philosophizing,

as letting the particular leeway happen for the moment of decision and the
possibilities that are temporalized at this moment, is itself the primal action of
letting-be (cf. 205 ), of release (Gelassenheit)-"a primal action of the freedom
of Dasein-yes, the happening of the space for the freedom of Dasein itself"
(214), "a 'deed' of the highest and most originary sort, which is possible only
on the basis of the innermost essence of our existence-freedom" (103). "In
the letting-happen of transcendence as philosophizing there lies the originary
release ofDasein, man's trust in the Da-sein within him and in its possibilities"
(401). "This entity [called] Da-sein . .. in and through its being, lets such a
thing as a 'there' [a field ofopenness and disclosure] first be" (136).
And this "there" is always particular, in each case mine, in each case ours, and
this means in each case historical. Dasein never exists in general, so "philosophy
does not occur in general, as such, somewhere, in some indefinite Dasein or in
itself" (SM 682 = GA 27, 399). "Dasein never exists in general; as concrete, it
exists in a particular circumstance and, depending on these circumstances, in
each case secures for itself the essential and inessential situations [ of action]"
(227; cf. SM 407). The explicit and decisive leap into worldview as a stance is
necessarily the leap into one's own historicity, into concrete historical circum­
stances, into the specific historicity of one's own questioning from the whole of
one's own historical situation (cf. 400). In a radical sense, philosophy leaps into
the historicity of its factical Dasein, in order to attain originality and strength
and to be what is essential (cf. SM 682f.). The fact that the essential and orig­
inary is revealed only in historical concretion is a difficulty that is considered
along the third path to the full essence of philosophy. This difficulty is noth­
ing other than the problem of the essence of philosophical truth as opposed
to scientific truth, and thus the problem of the essence of truth as such. This
problem of truth belongs together with the problem of being (in the first path)
and the problem of the world (in the second path) within the architectonic
of philosophy. More precisely, each of these problems constitutes the whole of
philosophy (cf. SM 683).
In this first of the late Freiburg lecture courses, in the Winter Semester of
1928-1929, Heidegger breaks off some old directions ofhis path ofthinking. But
206 Theodore Kisiel

the course also forges the way for new directions that Heidegger's development
will follow in the coming decade:
1. First, this lecture course documents the first signs of the often halt­
ing and even silent abandonment of the conceptual constellation "horizon­
transcendence-Temporality;' which had formed the original core of the pro­
jected third division of Being and Time. In December 1928, Heidegger be­
gins tentatively and provisionally to distance himself from the book Being and
Time and to interpret its thought-path as a dead end. In "On the Essence
of Ground" (his article for the Husserl Festschrift, composed October 1928,
around the time of the first draft of Introduction to Philosophy) he speaks,
without explicitly mentioning Division III, of Being and Time's "sole guiding
intention ... the entire thrust, and the goal of the development of the problem":
"what has been published so far of the investigations on 'Being and Time' has
no other task than that of. .. attaining the 'transcendental horizon of the ques­
tion concerning being' [on the basis of time-T.K.J:' 41 Yet he still emphasizes
that "in the present investigation, the Temporal interpretation of transcen­
dence is intentionally set aside throughout:'42 This even though Heidegger's
personal copy of the 1929 edition includes two handwritten marginalia that
still recognize Temporality as the condition of possibility of temporality: "the
essence of the 'happening' -temporalization of Temporality as preliminary
name for the truth of be-ing [Seyn]."43 In the Contributions to Philosophy
( 1936-1938) temporality, or "the originary unity of the ecstatic remotion that
clears and conceals itself;' 44 is understood as the first beginning's transition
to the grounding of the time-play-space of the site of the moment (cf. GA
65, 18, 29, 294). In order to complete this passage of transition, it was nec­
essary "above all to avoid any objectification of be-ing, both by withhold­
ing the 'Temporal' interpretation of be-ing and by attempting to make the
truth ofbe-ing 'visible' independently of this interpretation (freedom toward
ground in 'On the Essence of Ground')."45 In the Summer Semester of 1930,
for example, freedom and not the unitary horizon of Temporality is desig­
nated as "the condition of the possibility of the manifestness of the being of
beings, of the understanding of being:' 46 Nevertheless, one could always still
"identify" freedom and temporality by means of mediating concepts such as
"possibilitY:'
As we noted, in Introduction to Philosophy the objectifying language of the
"transcendental horizon of time" is mostly held back. It is not without critical
questions and reservations that Heidegger introduces the long-familiar, "com­
monplace piece of self-evidence" 47 of the single yet threefold "horizon" of time
in his phenomenological interpretation of the essence of radical boredom, in
Winter Semester 1929-1930.According to this self-evident notion, ifwe wish to
gather all beings together at once, in all three perspectives-respect (present),
 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 207

retrospect (past), and prospect (future), "the perspectives of all action and in­
action of Dasein" 48 -then in order to do this, we introduce and assume an
original, unifying, and fully disclosed horizon of time.

Let us concede for a moment ... that the full horizon of time is the condition
of possibility for the manifestness of beings as a whole ... What does it mean to
say that time is a horizon? ... It is hard to say what horizon means here, or how
this-namely functioning as a horizon-is possible in terms of the essence of
time.... The temporal horizon is in each case playing a role in every manifestation
of beings as a whole ... Yet this then entails that the temporal horizon can play
a role in manifold ways which are still entirely unfamiliar to us, and that we do
not have the slightest intimation of the abysses of the essence of time.... How
does time come to have a horizon? Does it run up against it, as against a shell that
has been placed over it, or does the horizon belong to time itself? Yet what is this
thing for, then, that delimits (horizein) time itself? How and for what does time
give itself and form such a limit for itself? And if the horizon is not fixed, to what
is it held in its changing? These are central questions. 49

The assumption of a temporal horizon will become still more questionable

in the basic experience of the most radical boredom. The mood of radical
boredom is precisely the oscillation between the empty expanse of the tempo­
ral horizon and the peak of the moment of vision (Augenblick). The moment
is the acute vision of Dasein's resoluteness toward being-there, which in each
case, as existing, is in the fully grasped situation of action, as this particular,
singular, and unique being-there. 50 "The moment of vision ruptures the en­
trancement of time, and is able to rupture it, insofar as it is a specific possibility
of time itself. It is not some now-point ... but is the look of Dasein in the
three [temporal-T.K.] perspectival directions." 51 The entrancement of time
is ruptured, and can be ruptured only by time itself, by the moment of vision
that belongs to temporality. Thereby time itself has now become still more
enigmatic for us, "when we think of the horizon of time, its expanse, its hori­
zonal function-among other things as entrancement-and finally when we
think of the way in which this horizon is connected to what we call moment of
vision:' 52

Whence the necessity of this relation between expanse and peak, between horizon
and moment of vision, between world and individuation, and why does it arise?
What kind of "and" is it that links these terms? Why must that expanse of the
entrancing horizon ultimately be ruptured by the moment of vision? And why can
it be ruptured only by this moment of vision, so that Dasein attains its existence
proper precisely in this rupture? Is the essence ofthe unity and structural linking of
both terms ultimately a rupture? What is the meaning of this rupture within Dasein
itself? We call this the finitude of Dasein and ask: What does finitude mean? 53
208 Theodore Kisiel

These questions reach in their origin back to the question of the essence
of time.54 As the basic question of metaphysics, it is the question about being
and time. Is time itself finite, and is a being that is finite in its ground and
essence still a question that belongs to metaphysics? A note from around the
time of the Contributions (1936-1938), written by Heidegger in the copy of
Being and Time that he kept in his cabin, in the section on the "Design of the
Treatise" ( SZ 39 ), gives the third division on "Time and Being" a new direction .
This note lists three tasks that must be carried out regarding "the difference
bound to transcendence": "The overcoming of the horizon as such. The return
into the source. The presencing out of this source."55 But it was not until the
Feldweg-Gespriiche ( 1944-1945, GA 77) that Heidegger thoroughly overcame
and deconstructed the transcendental-horizonal construction of metaphysics:
beyond the horizon and the objects that stand opposed to it, the objects that
the horizon embraces, there comes toward us the free expanse of an enveloping
open, a "regioning region" in whose "while" things come to last for a while,
instead of appearing as objects. 56
2. Philosophy is not a science, but a directing, exhorting protreptic. The
course of Winter Semester 1929-1930 emphasizes this point from a unique
perspective in Heidegger's very last treatment of formal indication. In con­
trast to scientific concepts, all philosophical concepts are formally indicative.
"The meaning-content of these concepts does not directly intend or express
what they refer to, but only gives an indication, a pointer to the fact that
anyone who seeks to understand is called upon by this conceptual context to
undertake a transformation of themselves into their Dasein [into the Da-sein
within them-T.K.] :' 57 A formally indicative concept "merely directs us toward
our proper and peculiar task."58 But when concepts are generic and abstract,
rather than proper to the unique occasion on which they are to be interpreted,
"the interpretation [is deprived] of all its autochthonous power, since whoever
seeks to understand would not then be heeding the directive that lies in every
philosophical concept:' 59 Yet the kind of interpreting that seeks out one's own
facticity in each case is not "some additional, so-called ethical application of
what is conceptualized, but ... a prior opening up of the dimension of what is
to be comprehended:'60 The concepts and questions of philosophizing are in a
class of their own, in contrast to science. These conceptual questions serve the
task of philosophy: not to describe or explain man and his world, "but to evoke
the Dasein in man." 61
Among Heidegger's still unpublished "Supplements to Being and Time' is
found a preface to the third edition of the book, drafted in the middle of 1930,
which announces a completely new elaboration of the published first half of
Being and Time and, furthermore, a second half which would contain only
the third division of Part One. But in 1931, the third edition of the first half
 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 209

appeared unchanged. The book project titled Being and Time had now finally
failed, although Heidegger communicated his decision of a definitive break
only to a few confidants in personal letters:
November 14, 1931, Heidegger to Rudolf Bultmann: "My own attempts,
especially in the midst of these baseless times, become even pettier than they
already are. In the meantime, I wear the mask of someone who 'is writing his
second volume.' Behind this shield I can do whatever I like, that is, what I feel
an inner necessity to do.'' 62
September 18, 1932, Heidegger to Elisabeth Blochmann: "People think that
I am writing SZ II, and are even talking about it. That's all right with me. SZ I
was once a path for me that led me somewhere, but now this path is no longer
trodden and has become overgrown. That is why I can no longer write SZ II. I
am not writing any book at all.''63
December 16, 1932, Heidegger to Bultmann: "It is difficult for me to say
anything about my own efforts. My inner bearing has become much more
ancient, the more clearly I see over the passing years that the task posed for me
in SZ is the task of contesting the ancient question of being."
An overgrown path that can no longer be traveled, yet a necessary path full of
tasks for further thought. "The path through SZ [is] unavoidable, yet it is a dead
end [Holzweg]-a path that suddenly stops.... SZ-only a transition, which
[stands] undecided between 'metaphysics' and the event of appropriation." 64
With the Contributions (1936-1938), Heidegger begins increasingly to apply
a fundamental critique or "destruction" to the publication Being and Time.
Correspondingly, in 1941 he could write:

We take "Being and Time" as the name for a meditation whose necessity lies far
beyond the activity of an individual, who cannot "invent" this necessity but cannot
master it either. We thus distinguish the necessity named "Being and Time" from
the "book" with this title. ("Being and Time" as the name for an appropriating
event in be-ing itself. "Being and Time" as the formula for a meditation within
the history of thinking. "Being and Time" as the title of a treatise that tries to
carry out this thinking.) 65

Appendix: The References to the Earliest Draft of

the Third Division

I. Textual references. In the earliest editions of Being and Time (until the
sixth edition) one finds a footnote to §68d on "The Temporality of Discourse"
( SZ 349) that gives us an insight into the thematic structure of the very first draft
of Division III-that is, the "systematic" draft that was supposedly completely
210 Theodore Kisiel

unintelligible to intellects like Rilke and Jaspers. The footnote reads, "Cf.
Division Three, Chapter II of this treatise" and refers to problems that in part
are already indicated in §69 as substantive themes to be treated in Division III,
such as the development of the problem of the connection in principle between
being and truth on the basis of the problematic of temporality. But in §68d the
elaboration of this basic problem of phenomenology now becomes the pre­
supposition for "the analytic of the temporal Constitution of discourse and the
explication of the temporal characteristics of language-structures." Central to
an ontological explication is the widely dispersed grammar of the verb "to be"
in the articulation of the variations of its conjugation. For discourse does not
primarily temporalize itself in one particular ecstasis. The verb is grounded in
the whole of the ecstatic unity of temporality. Furthermore, the three tenses
are mingled with "the other temporal phenomena of language-'aspects' and
'temporal stages."' In particular, contemporary linguistics, which is obliged
to carry out its analyses with the help of the vulgar concept of time, cannot
even pose the "problem of [the] existential-temporal structure of the aspects
[Aktionsarten]" (SZ 349).
Verbal action is grammatically divided into three basic types: I) momenta­
neous, instantaneous, iterative; 2) continuous, ongoing, lasting, imperfect; 3)
perfect, complete, perfecting. Above we have already encountered an experi­
ential variant of this division: the three types of boredom, variously based on
a limited constant time, a wavering-fleeting time, and the time of Dasein as
a whole, which is entranced as a horizon. For horizonal time as Temporality
is an ontological, transcendental, or a priori perfect "which characterizes the
kind of being belonging to Dasein itself " (SZ 85). 66 "Each ecstasis as such has
a horizon that is determined by it and that first of all completes that ecstasis'
own structure."67 The open horizon where each ecstasis ends is a perfective
sign of the finitude of temporality, for "this end is nothing but the beginning
and starting point for the possibility of all projecting:'68 The enabling of the
transcendental perfect has the character of a prior letting-be (Seinlassen) (SZ
85), or better, releasedness ( Gelassenheit), where the perfective suffix is both
active and passive, in the ambiguity of the middle voice: it means both already­
having-let-be-in-each-case and letting-be. Thus we have a series of perfective
existentials in Being and Time: thrownness, dis-posedness,69 discoveredness,
fallenness, resoluteness, etc. The perfect expresses an action that has somehow
become definitive and that is always still in the further process of becoming.
The perfect is used only when the effect of earlier activity is still at work. Hei­
degger comments, for example, that in perception, understood in terms of
intentionality, what is central is neither perceiving nor the perceived; instead,
perceivedness is the enabling center of the intentionality of perception, the sense
of its intentional direction, which is neither subjective nor objective and which,
 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 211

as what makes perception possible, can ultimately be understood only on the

basis of the essence of time.70
2. Archival reference. Along with the manuscript of the lecture course of
Winter Semester 1925-1926 in the Heidegger Archives in Marbach, there is a
file of some 200 pages wrapped in a sheet marked "1.3:' A selection of about
30 pages from this text has been published, 71 but these include none of the many
pages-and an entire file-that are marked with the number "69." For the entire
folder is a collection of notes that refer to the themes, and even to particular
chapters, of the unpublished Division III, and which were probably written in
1926-1927. A summary of the classification of the notes indicates a division
into about six chapters in the missing division. Chapter 1 would have probably
borne a title such as "Phenomenology and the Positive Sciences" and would
have treated the method of ontological (as opposed to ontical) thematization.
"Temporality (Zeitlichkeit) and Worldliness" is the explicit title of Chapter 4,
which would have taken its themes primarily from §69c of Being and Time. One
also finds remarks, expressions, and turns of phrase throughout this text that
do not appear in Heidegger's known lectures and publications: for example, the
division of awaiting into "expectative-presentative-perfective"; "moments
of existence" such as "the formally futural" and "the formally perfect"; the
claim "time is a self-projection upon itself (its horizonal [aspect], its ecstatic
[aspect]):' A thorough study of the entire file can deepen our knowledge of
the direction and goals of the missing Division III, and enrich the attempt to
reconstruct it. 72

-translated by Richard Polt in consultation with the author

Notes

1. Heidegger, "A Dialogue on Language," in On the Way to Language, tr. Peter D.

Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971 ), 7. (This translation and others have occasionally
been modified; such modifications will not be noted individually.)
2. Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, tr. Ted Sadler (London: Athlone,
2000).
3. Cf. Theodore Kisiel, "Why the First Draft of Being and Timewas Never Published,"
Journal of the British Sodety for Phenomenology 20 (1989): 3-22. Heidegger's 70-page
journal article entitled Der Begriffder Zeitwas finalized in November 1924 and appears
in Der Begriffder Zeit, GA 64. ("GA" will refer to volumes ofHeidegger's Gesamtausgabe,
published in Frankfurt am Main by Vittorio Klostermann.)
4. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, tr. Theodore Kisiel
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
212 Theodore Kisiel

5. Cf. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time" (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), esp. 477-89.
6. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York: Harper & Row, 1962), 63f. (German page 39f.). Henceforth cited as "SZ" followed
by the German pagination.
7. Die Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus, GA 49, 39f.
8. Besinnung, GA 66, 413.
9. Zur Erlauterungvon SZ, manuscript, 1941.
10. Substantial notes pertaining to this first draft were however preserved. See the
Appendix to this chapter.
11. Besinnung, GA 66, 413f. The lecture course in question is The Basic Prob­
lems of Phenomenology, tr. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1982).
12. Heidegger, "Letter on 'Humanism:" tr. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 249f.
13. These obsolete spellings of Sein (being) and Zeit (time) are used by Heidegger
in some texts, beginning in the later thirties, to indicate his nonmetaphysical under­
standing of being and time. (Trans.)
14. "Neuere Forschungen iiber Logik" and Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des
Duns Scotus, both in Heidegger, Friihe Schriften, GA 1.
15. Emil Lask, Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre: Eine Studie iiber den
Herrschaftsbereich der logischen Form (Tilbingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1911).
16. Cf. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time," chapter 1.
17. SZ 328; cf. Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, tr. Michael Heim
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 204.
18. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 208.
19. Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 90-99.
20. Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 99.
21. Cf. Theodore Kisiel, "Die formale Anzeige: Die methodische Geheimwaffe des
fri.ihen Heideggers;' in Markus Happel (ed.), Heidegger-neu gelesen (Wilrzburg:
Konigshausen & Neumann, 1997).
22. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 65.
23. Cf. ibid., 314f.
24. Cf. ibid., 162.
25. Ibid., 268.
26. Heidegger, "Unbenutzte Vorarbeiten zur Vorlesung vom Wintersemester
1929/1930: Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit;' Heidegger
Studies 7 (1991), 9.
27. Within this section, parenthetical references are to The Basic Problems of Phe­
nomenology unless otherwise indicated.
28. Heidegger never speaks of a horizon of being; the term is reserved in this context
for a horizon of time or of the world. But a horizonal temporality is mentioned for
the very first time in Being and Time in relation to the horizonal schema of the as­
structure, the "if-then" schema (SZ 359), that is, the what and how of the being of an
 The Demise of Being and Time: 1927-1930 213

entity, in accordance with which the genesis of theoretical comportment occurs by way
of a modification of the understanding of being.
29. Cf. "Phenomenology and Theology;' a lecture held in 1927-1928, in Pathmarks.
30. Within this section, parenthetical references are to The Metaphysical Foundations
of Logic unless otherwise indicated.
31. Cf. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 158, 178; The Basic Problems of Phe­
nomenology, 19f.
32. Cf. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Soli­
tude, tr. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995), 261f.
33. Cf. Heidegger, Einleitung in die Philosophie, GA 27. A translation of this text,
Introduction to Philosophy, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.
34. Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 63; cf. The Metaphysical Foundations of
Logic, 209.
35. Towards the Definition ofPhilosophy, 97.
36. Cf. ibid., 99, 80-83, 51.
37. Within this section, parenthetical references are to GA 27 unless otherwise indi­
cated.
38. Cf. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 221.
39. The two sentences about a "transcendental horizon" before the paragraph in
question were not read out loud, either. I have compared the GA 27 edition with a
much more extensive transcript by Simon Moser, and have supplemented and improved
my citations from the edited version using explanatory expressions from the Moser
transcript (henceforth "SM"). (A copy of this Moser transcript is to be found in the
Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at the Duquesne University Library.)
40. "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer," in On the Way to
Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 32-33.
41. Heidegger, "On the Essence of Ground;' tr. William McNeill, in Pathmarks, 371,
note 66.
42. Ibid., note 67.
43. Ibid., 123, note a; cf. 132, note a.
44. Heidegger, Beitriige zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), GA 65, 234. Cf. Contributions
to Philosophy (From Enowning), tr. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999), 165.
45. Beitriige zur Philosophie, GA 65, 451. Cf. Contributions to Philosophy, 317.
46. Heidegger, The Essence ofHuman Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy, tr. Ted
Sadler (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 205.
47. The Fundamental Concepts ofMetaphysics, 145.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 146.
SO. Cf. ibid., 169, 149.
51. Ibid., 151.
52. Ibid., 152.
53. Ibid., 170.
214 Theodore Kisiel

54. Cf. ibid., 171.

55. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY, 1996), 35.
56. Cf. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, tr. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund
(New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 65££.
57. The Fundamental Concepts ofMetaphysics, 297; and on p. 296: "our understanding
must first twist free from our ordinary conceptions of beings and properly transform
itself into the Da-sein in us."
58. Ibid., 293.
59. Ibid., 298.
60. Ibid., 296.
61. Ibid., 174.
62. The letters to Bultmann are to be published in Rudolf Bultmann I Martin Hei­
degger: Briefwechse4 ed. Andreas Gro:Bmann and Klaus Muller (Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann, forthcoming).
63. Martin Heidegger, Elisabeth Blochmann: Briefwechse4 1918-1969, ed. Joachim
W. Storck (Marbach am Neckar : Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1989), 54.
64. Der Weg: Der Gang durch SZ, unpublished typescript, 1945.
65. Heidegger, Die Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus, GA 49, 27.
66. Cf. Heidegger's handwritten note on SZ 85: Being and Time, tr. Stambaugh, 79.
67. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 306.
68. Ibid., 308.
69. Befindlichkeit, translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as "state-of-mind" and
Stambaugh as "attunement." (Trans.)
70. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 68££.
71. Heidegger, "Aufzeichnungen zur Temporalitat (Aus den Jahren 1925 bis 1927):'
Heidegger Studies 14 ( 1998): 11-23.
72. Cf. Dietmar Kohler, Martin Heidegger: Die Schematisierung des Seinssinnes als
Thematik des dritten Abschnittes von "Sein und Zeit" (Bonn: Bouvier, 1993).
 12
Being and Time in Retrospect:
Heidegger's Self-Critique
Dieter Thoma

I about
N 1941 MARTIN HEIDEGGER EXPLAINED, "I think I myself know something
the fact that this book [Being and Time] has its flaws. It's like climbing
an unascended mountain. Because it is both steep and unknown, whoever
travels here sometimes falls. The wayfarer suddenly loses his way. At times he
even falls down without the reader noticing:' 1 If we follow this saying, there
turn out to be four tasks involved in interpreting Heidegger's "self-critique:' 2
First, one must find the passages in Being and Time where, according to the
author's later assessment, he undertook "false paths"(GA 66, 411), "detours
and retreats;' 3 or even fell down. These falls need not, of course, be fatal; the
later Heidegger believes that in Being and Time he pulled himself back to his
feet every time, and partially conquered the rest of the ascent. Nevertheless, at
the end of his work on Being and Time, that is, at the end of his "half attempts:' 4
he lost his way. As is well known, this work remained unfinished; in particular,
the third division of Part One, which, according to Heidegger's report in 1928,
was supposed to describe a "turn" (Kehre), 5 is missing. "The attempt failed
along the way," Heidegger remarks. 6 He did not, however, attribute this failure
to the fundamental direction of Being and Time itself, but rather to the still
insufficient circumspection of the author (or the mountain climber). For the
author could not go any further-not, however, because there had not been
any path at all, but rather because he did not see it and in a certain way he was
"walking blind."
The second point forms a counterpoint to the first. As a contrasting figure to
that mountain climber who is afflicted by setbacks, one can imagine someone

215
216 Dieter Thoma

who knows how to avoid headlong falls and is on the right path. Heidegger
thinks he is able to find such a figure in the course of carrying out an "immanent
critique" in the form of a "purifying" of Being and Time. 7 The genuinely correct
path, "the one track" (GA 66,411), should be elaborated from Being and Time.
The question is how exactly this direttissima should have developed from the
point of view of the late Heidegger.
This question leads immediately to the third problem that lies hidden in
the citation given at the beginning. Imagine that ideal path Heidegger traces
in retrospect as an isolated line in space. Whether it is in fact a philosophical
"royal road" depends on the region over which it is supposed to pass. For
example, it would be inappropriate to make hairpin turns on a level plain. T he
pressing question is what sort of "mountain" Heidegger later attributes ( or
imputes) to the expedition of Being and Time. It is only if this "mountain" in
fact corresponds to the target he had set for himself at that time that what he later
deplores as a false path or a headlong fall can be rightly seen as a shortcoming,
according to the inner logic of Being and Time. In turn, it is possible that what
seemed to Heidegger according to his later revision to be a purified movement
through the region appeared from his own earlier viewpoint as a path in another
landscape which leads to a dead end, or where one loses the ground beneath
one's feet or meets with granite. In this third point the question, generally
speaking, is whether what Heidegger says in retrospect about Being and Time
may be valid as "immanent critique" or whether he addresses his early major
work from a foreign perspective and paints a distorted picture. The problem is
that there are two perspectives-an early and a late-whose relation must first
be clarified.
Fourth, along with his internal attempts at clarification and delimitation,
there is the issue of Heidegger's efforts to defend Being and Time from external
attacks, or as he puts it, against a "confusion of misinterpretation." 8 His own
self-critique is joined by the rebuttal of external critiques and certain interpreta­
tions which, from his point of view, conceive of Being and Time in misleading
ways. To stay within the framework of our metaphors, then, these mislead­
ing ways set the author of Being and Time on a track which does not appeal
to him.
With these four points the course is laid out which I want to travel along in
the following four sections. As a preliminary note, one remark is in order: there
may be a decisive answer to the question of whether Heidegger's late texts in
comparison with Being and Time should be seen as the purified, freer unfolding
of his thinking or as a step backwards. But the concern of this commentary
is not to deliver such an answer. Here it is rather a question of giving, on
the basis of Heidegger's "self-critique;' the dearest possible description of the
relationship between Being and Time and his later writings.
 Being and Time in Retrospect: Heidegger's Self-Critique 217

What Heidegger in hindsight finds "awkward" 9 are first and foremost the titles
under which he placed his early enterprise. He considers it unavoidable that at
first he had to think "in the tracks" from which he frees himself. Thus he uses
concepts like "phenomenology;' "metaphysics of Dasein" (in the Kant book),
and "fundamental ontology" (GA 49, 28). Accordingly a weakness in Being
and Time is that the garment in which his philosophy was clothed at the time
consisted of old fabric. On the one hand, Being and Time was "metaphysically
articulated and presented;' and on the other hand, it was "nonetheless thought
otherwise" (GA 66, 321). In this distinction lies the thesis that what is traditional
remained external to the thinking of Being and Time-and it can thus be shaken
off-so that the "other thinking" comes to the fore all the more purely. That
he still had difficulty at the beginning establishes the authenticity with which
he labored under the burden ofthe past, which was not so easily cast off. 10
But why did Heidegger reject the titles under which he placed his early enter­
prise? He explains this in the most detail in regard to "fundamental ontology;'
which now appears to him as something "provisional:' 11 His reference point is
here a sentence from the introduction to Being and Time: "Therefore fundamen­
tal ontology ... must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein" (SZ 13). 12
The later Heidegger rejects the idea that it is through such an existential analytic
that "the foundation for ontology itself which is still lacking, but is to be built
upon that foundation" can be erected. 13 This idea appears to him as misleading
because he sees Being itselfalready engaged in that analytic-so there is nothing
left that would still have to be built on the foundation. Accordingly the analytic
of the inner constitution ofDasein does not precede ontology; rather it should
already be nothing other than the thinking ofBeing. In a marginal note from
his own copy of Being and Time Heidegger thus finds fault with the fact that
his earlier presentation remains "misleading, above all in relation to the role
of Dasein" (SZ 439). 14 To the extent that "Dasein's horizon of understanding"
is itself already indebted to Being, this horizon cannot "endure"-as it is now
put-"any construction thereupon" that would thematize for the first time the
Being ofbeings as understood by Dasein; the horizon does not serve as Being's
"condition" or "foundation." 15 On account of this, in a later marginal note
Heidegger strives for the "overcoming of the horizon as such" (SZ 440) and
"forbids" himself without hesitation to use this word. 16 The early definition of
"horizon" is bound to that which projects itselfand looks out upon something,
and not to that which makes possible this regard in some way. Therefore he
later says, "That temporality which was termed in Being and Time ecstatic­
horizontal is in no way the sought for most unique characteristic of time that
corresponds to the question ofBeing." 17
218 Dieter Thoma

Heidegger sees himself in Being and Time as searching for a bridge between
two questions: the question about the temporality ofDasein and the question
about truth. To the extent, namely, that Dasein "endures" its temporal consti­
tution or is able to "displace" itself into it (cf. SZ 325, 445), beings should be
accessible in their unconcealment, in other words in their "truth"; they become
"cleared:' It is exactly this transition from temporality to truth 18 that Heidegger,
as he explains in retrospect, "suspected, but did not master" in Being and Time. 19
According to the intention Heidegger attributes to himselfin hindsight, the
self-discovery ofDasein in Being and Time should proceed with the opening or
clearing (Lichtung) ofa world in which beings in their Being come to appearance
for Dasein. Indeed Dasein itself "belongs to the world" (SZ 65) or even, as is
clarified in a marginal note, "obeys and listens to the world" (SZ 441). But
this connection was not adequately expressed at first, if we follow the later
self-critique. Heidegger sees the reason for this, in a word, in a subjectivistic
contamination of Being and Time. He confirms this analysis through different
examples, and three of these critical points will be treated here briefly: they
have to do with space, language, and the I. In the first example we will discuss
space.
As Heidegger remarks concisely in 1962, "The attempt in Being and Time,
section 70, to derive human spatiality from temporality is untenable:' 20 T his
self-critique-rarely as candid as here-is directed against the thesis from Be­
ing and Time according to which time has a "founding function for spatiality"
(SZ 368, translation modified). At that point it was said that "something such
as place:' and thus "space," first arises out of the temporally conceived Dasein,
the "self-directive discoverY:' thus "on the basis of its ecstatico-horizonal tem­
porality'' (SZ 368f.). But what Heidegger cannot delete in these earlier views
is precisely the authentic action of Dasein, to whom a unique temporal di­
mension belongs. What is interesting in this self-critique at this point is that
even the later Heidegger is not concerned with strictly separating space from
time. According to his later positions, furthermore, it falls to time to "make
room, that is, provide ... the self-extending, the opening up, of future, past,
and present:' 21 Thus space is also here derived from time. Time is of course no
longer assigned to Dasein as "thrown projection," but it makes its appearance
rather as the successor to that "Temporality [ Temporalitiit] of Being" of which
Heidegger had spoken in Being and Time and also in the lectures from sum­
mer semester 1927.22 Previously it was declared that this "Temporality" was
a (merely "turned" around) aspect of the temporality (Zeitlichkeit) ofDasein.
T he failure of this conjunction is now attested to indirectly in that Heidegger
in his later self-critique repudiates the derivation ofspace from the temporality
ofDasein and instead ascribes it to time as a movement in the "event ofappro­
priation" or "enowning" (Ereignis). He thereby breaks apart the temporality of
 Being and Time in Retrospect: Heidegger's Self-Critique 219

Dasein and the Temporality of Being-contrary to the program of Being and

Time. The failure to unite these two sides is nothing other than the failure of
the completion of Being and Time.
The persistent self-sufficiency of Dasein is also noticeable in relation to a
second critical point: the concept oflanguage, which in Being and Time is intro­
duced in connection with the concept of "involvement" (Bewandtnis). There it
is said that the "Being of innerworldly beings" with which Dasein is concerned
consists in their "involvement" for Dasein, more precisely in the '"towards­
which' of serviceability and the 'for-which' of usability" (SZ 84). Along with
this "involvement" goes the "signification" that an entity has. Dasein is "fa­
miliar" with the world as "significance" (Bedeutsamkeit), and the significations
that are thereby opened up to Dasein "found;' says Heidegger, "in turn the
[possible] Being of word and language" (SZ 86f.). He notes at this point in
the margin of his personal copy: "Untrue. Language is not imposed, but is the
primordial essence of truth as there [Da]" (SZ 442). The interweaving into
pragmatic relations that marked Heidegger's analysis of the world displaces,
according to Heidegger's later judgment, the primordiality oflanguage, which
precedes all doing and letting. (Moreover, the question of whether this pri­
mordiality is conceived as fidelity to the soil or structural priority opens up
the entire spectrum of Heidegger interpretations from "the Black Forest" to
Michel Foucault.) That interweaving oflanguage with actions was, however, an
expression of the self-sufficiency of Dasein, which is later rejected as residual
subjectivism.
Heidegger now sees the very same residual subjectivism-this is the third
critical point-at work in the talk of the "I" itself. The procedure by which
Dasein itself came to itself was described in Being and Time as a running
toward death, by which it was thrown back upon itself and was first put into
the position to be itself. "Saying I" belonged to this Being-one's-self: "With the
'I; this entity has itself in view" (SZ 318). Indeed Heidegger already proceeded
cautiously in these statements, with quotation marks. Nevertheless, later this
"I" had to appear to him as a deviation from that "self" which "refers not to
the self as an entity [ das seiende Selbst] but rather to Being and the relation to
Being" (GA 49, 39). In 1934 he says, "It is precisely the bursting ofl-hood and
of subjectivity through temporality that conveys Dasein as it were away from
itself and dedicates it to Being, compelling it in this way to Being-one's-self:' 23
In a marginal note to Being and Time there is a warning: "clarify more precisely:
saying-I and being a self" (SZ 445).
According to Heidegger's summary, "the attempt and the path [in Being
and Time] ...confront the danger of unwillingly becoming merely another
entrenchment of subjectivity ...the attempt itself hinders the decisive steps;
that is, hinders an adequate exposition of them in their essential execution:' 24
220 Dieter Thoma

In retrospect he sees his earlier conception in danger of a "fall ... into a merely
modified subjectivism." 25 The question is now how he describes a path from
Being and Time that leads directly to the later thought.

Heidegger may have recognized parts of Being and Time that rendered difficult
the overcoming of subjectivity, the task he had made his own. These are the
"false paths" or "falls" of which he speaks in retrospect. At the same time he
vehemently defends himself against the interpretation according to which his
early major work should be considered a direct contribution to the theory of
subjectivity. This self-defense is carried out so apodictically that it appears as
a defiant reaction to his own critique of the residual subjectivism of his early
major work when he declares in 1941, "In Being and Time the essence of the
selfhood of man is not determined by 'I-hood; not as personality and not
at all as the 'subjectivity' of a 'subject"' (GA 49, 60). More generally he says
in 1949: "It"-namely the substance of Being and Time-"remains valid:' 26
But wherein consists this substance? Or more precisely, what is later defined
as the substance which may remain valid as an improved, purified version of
Being and Time? With subtle conceptual displacements Heidegger attempts to
liberate what he sees as its essential content from deficiencies and to guard it
against misunderstandings.
In the center of these displacements there stands nothing other than the
principal concept of Being and Time, "Dasein": "Because Being-in-the-world
belongs essentially to Dasein, its Being towards the world is essentially concern"
(SZ 57). In a marginal note to this sentence Heidegger writes: "being-human
here equated with being-here [Da-sein]" (SZ 441, translation modified), and
this comment is nothing but a self-reproach. This reproach presses itself upon
Heidegger in the course of his self-critique because he wants to overcome the
active self-will of Dasein as man. In contrast to the equation of Dasein and
man he considers in a subsequent marginal note the formulation "being-here,
wherein man essentially happens [ west]" (SZ 442, translation modified). The
reinterpretation implied here-and in the end the abolition of the concept of
Dasein-proceeds in several steps.
The first step occurs at the end of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics with
the talk of the "Dasein in man." 27 Here Dasein changes from an apparently
constitutive condition of man into a condition to which man is related. This
difference is sharpened in a second step in the middle of the 1930s.
Now it is man who, insofar as he allows himself into his Dasein, enters at
the same time into the world as the play of Being. Heidegger claims that in
 Being and Time in Retrospect: Heidegger's Self-Critique 221

Being and Time the "essence of man's selfhood" had already been determined
"by the insistence in the projection ofBeing, i.e., by being-here.'' 28 Should that
imply that this "being-here" is identical with the Dasein from Being and Time?
That would be misguided. For while the "old" Dasein had to endure in itself
the ambivalence of being able to exist in the mode of inauthenticity as well
as authenticity, there appears here by contrast a "new" being-here, a "site"29
into which man can displace himself or "in" which he can "stand" (GA 49, 50
and 54; cf. GA 69, 57). The later interpretation of being-here can make sense
only if this "new" being-here is reserved for a particular (authentic) form of
the "old" Dasein. By contrast, the latter receives in the course of this revision a
modest designation: it is nothing but "man;' who can either become "insistent
in the [new] being-here" (GA 49, 61) or remain forgetful of Being. "Therefore
it remains misleading;' as Heidegger puts it in 1941, "when in Being and Time
the talk is about 'human Dasein.' The term 'being-here' absolutely must be
used because it names something that never coincides with being-human, but
is rather of a 'higher' essence than man" (GA 49, 62). This new difference
between man and Dasein reaches its sharpest point in Heidegger's remark that
his "thinking' is "in-human" in the sense that it "does not rely upon standards
and goals and motives of mankind up to now;' to which he adds: "Such thinking
is-being-here" (GA 69, 24). One could say that in this tension between man
and Dasein the old alternative of inauthenticity and authenticity returns. Of
course according to Being and Time it was, ontologically speaking, unimportant
which specific individuals attained authenticity, but now Heidegger rejects this
indifference. The respective distance from or nearness to being-here and thus
toBeing becomes,as it is now put, "determined through Being itself " (GA 49,
62f.): "Not every historical mankind is expressly assigned to the insistence of
being-here; in history up until now absolutely none,due to the forgetfulness of
Being that is to be thought in terms of the destiny of Being" (GA 49, 61). But
Heidegger now thinks he can hear when,in the sense of that nearness of Being,
"the hour of our history ... has struck" (GA 39,294). (Of course he misheard
on occasion, for example in 1933.)
As a result of the separation from man, the concept of Dasein as distin­
guished from Being becomes superfluous, and in the course of this third step
it disappears from the later work. Now it suffices to see "man's distinctive fea­
ture" in his standing "open to Being,face to face with Being; thus man remains
referred to Being and so answers to it.'' 30 Heidegger's discourse now concerns
the "belonging together of Being and man."31 But because this doubling still
brings with itself the illusion of the "objectification" of Being (Seyn) 32 and
motivates the deceptive impression that here two different things have to be
brought together, that pair of concepts is finally given up. In order not to
stray from Being and Time, at this point I would like to leave unexplained
222 Dieter Thoma

this last step toward the "event" and the "fourfold," in which man is already
involved.
Despite these incisive redescriptions Heidegger insists that he remains faith­
ful to his first undertaking, Being and Time-except for the contaminations
discussed above in the first section. The question in the following section will
be whether his retrospective interpretation remains immanent, that is, whether
the task that he retroactively assigns to Being and Time coincides with what
he had first attempted. If we follow the metaphor which Heidegger himself
used for his undertaking, the question now becomes: is the "mountain" that
he climbed in Being and Time in fact the same mountain that he ascribes to his
retrospectively described path?

Heidegger's self-critique of Being and Time pursues a double strategy: he ex­

cludes certain subjectivistic errors (see above, section 1) in order to blaze a path
through this work that leads directly to the late thought (see above, section 2).
This of course raises the question of whether he does justice to his early main
work with this separation of disruptive externals and a positive core. For the
sake of intelligibility I would like to discuss this question starting from a single
short passage, which runs: "That Present which is held in authentic temporality
and which thus is authentic itself, we call the 'moment of vision' [Augenblick].
This term must be understood in the active sense as an ecstasis. It means the
resolute rapture with which Dasein is carried away to whatever possibilities and
circumstances are encountered in the Situation as possible objects of concern,
but a rapture which is held in resoluteness" (SZ 338).
First of all I will briefly explain the context of this passage in Being and
Time. The "moment of vision" was introduced there as "authentic present."
The "present" on the other hand was assigned in general to "falling" as one of
the structural forms of"disclosedness" (SZ 334f. and 346). This "falling" attains
the "authentic" form of the "moment of vision" insofar as the present does not
render itself independent at the expense of the other temporal dimensions of
that which will come and that which has been. It is precisely for this reason that
the "rapture" should be held in "resoluteness" (see above), and thus remain
related to the temporal totality of Dasein (cf. SZ 298 and 305).
Despite the danger of being fastidious, I would now like to pursue the in­
terpretations to which the above cited passage, as a "test case" from Being and
Time, is subjected in the course of Heidegger's further development. I restrict
myself thereby above all to the idiom of the "rapture of Dasein which is held in
resoluteness" and ask what happens to the two concepts that are juxtaposed in it.
 Being and Time in Retrospect: Heidegger's Self-Critique 223.

The first explanations of rapture are found in the lecture course of sum­
mer 1928. According to this course it means a "stepping out [from] itself:'
the "upswing" ( Oberschwung), the "ecstasis," to which the "transcendence" of
Dasein is linked.33 Rapture as ecstasis is clarified as what is characteristic of
"Ek-sistenz.'' But rapture's standing-outside has already been conceived at this
point-so Heidegger says in 1941-in the orbit of the questioning of Being
and Time as "standing-in" or "insistence" (GA 49, 53f. and 76).This reversal of
perspective is summarized in 1949: "The stasis ofthe ecstatic consists-strange
as it may sound-in standing in the 'out' and 'there' ofunconcealedness, which
prevails as the essence of Being itself. What is meant by 'existence' ...could be
most felicitously designated by the word 'insistence.'" 34 Summing up this ter­
minological interplay, we find that the concept that we first discussed, namely,
"rapture:' turns out to be insistence---this is so not on the basis of a subsequent
revision, but rather as an allegedly faithful exposition of Being and Time.
And what happens to the second concept, that of resoluteness? Notwith­
standing its martial undertone Heidegger wants to show precisely with this
concept the consistency of his work. The new spelling as resolute openness
(Ent-schlossenheit) 35 makes it clear that it is supposed to be a matter of an un­
locking (Aufschliessen) ofoneself, and thus a "self-opening" or "keeping-open.''
As an idiom opposed to inauthenticity this was understood in Being and Time
as a being-open for oneself, for one's own Being; what also belonged entirely
to this "resoluteness towards [Dasein] itself" (SZ 298) were energy and zest for
action, as is made clear in Being and Time and the texts from around 1933. In
the following years Heidegger opposes "resoluteness" to the "decided action
of a subject" and interprets it as "the opening up of Dasein out of its captivity
in beings toward the openness of Being." 36 "Resoluteness" is indeed defined as
"will" ; 37 to will oneselfis, however, nothing but an affirmation ofthat which one
is, and because one's own Being is already embedded in the world, when man
wills himself he really wills nothing but Being.38 "Resoluteness" then becomes
explicitly identified with "insistence:' into which, as we saw, "rapture" had also
already changed: "What is essential to resoluteness lies ...in the ... openness to
the truth ofBeing as such....It is the insistence in the exposure to the here [ Da]:
Being-here." 39 In this way the talk in the Contributions to Philosophy ofthe "will
to enowning [Ereignis]" and of"the insistence in enowning" 40 can amount to
the same thing. The second concept to be discussed here, "resoluteness:' also
turns out at the end of Heidegger's explication to be insistence.
If we now allow ourselves to be led back from this late insight to the passage
which I cited at the beginning of this section as a "test case:' then something
troubling results. If in Being and Time what he means by "moment of vision" is
"the resolute rapture ... but a rapture which is held in resoluteness" (SZ 338),
then on the basis of Heidegger's later interpretation there now arises the thesis
224 Dieter Thoma

that the moment of vision is "the insistent insistence, but the insistence which
is held in the insistence of Dasein." This is unfortunately rather nonsensical.
Whereas in Being and Time the opposition between resoluteness (to one's own
self) and rapture (toward the world) is expressed by the "but:' this opposition
now collapses with the general expansion of"insistence" -and the sense of that
statement thereby breaks down.
One may find the opposition between resoluteness and rapture in Being
and Time questionable or not-that is irrelevant here. What is decisive is that
Heidegger expressly makes the claim to have remained faithful to the genuine
concern of Being and Time in his later interpretations; but according to my "test
case" this claim is untenable. When it comes to the statement discussed here, the
strategy to overcome contaminations and sustain a true core fails. Heidegger
does not do justice to what is treated in Being and Time. He attempts rather to
polish it up in such a way that it fits into his later thought. Contrary to his own
testimony he does not practice an "immanent critique" of Being and Time (see
my introduction), but rather he steps out of the immanence of that work.
What is lost in the later mistaken interpretation of Being and Time is the
independent dimension in which Dasein had to deal with itself. In this di­
mension man was summoned to an engagement with himself. As late as in
the lectures of summer 1928 we can read the following: "Existing is precisely
this being towards oneself." 41 Accordingly the "concept of subjectivity and of
the subjective [ought to be] ...fundamentally transform[ed]:' thus retained in
another form. 42 This subjectivity is anchored more deeply in Being and Time
than Heidegger later wants to believe-so deeply that it cannot be eliminated
as a contamination.
The revisionary reading, according to which in Being and Time the subject
has indeed already been "overcome," 43 gains a certain plausibility if one starts
from a concept of the subject as it is laid out in Heidegger's own critique of
metaphysics. According to this critique the subject is driven by the tendency
to posit itself and to dominate the world. The Dasein of Being and Time does
not of course succumb to this power fantasy, despite all of its "control" over
beings; it exists on a ground which it itself has not posited. This encourages
the late Heidegger to declare that at bottom, Dasein was actually already far
from the subject. Thus the later question of whether the Dasein of Being and
Time is still to be attributed to the philosophy of the subject functions purely
rhetorically: "How should something ever be 'subjective' which precisely does
not arise from a subjectivity?" (GA 49, 50).
The problem is only that this question is not at all rhetorical, but misleading.
Of course that which is "subjective" need not also "arise from a subjectivity:' It
belongs rather to the fundamental structure of subjectivity to experience itself
in a self-relation about whose origin there is no sufficient information. When
this subject does not make itself into its own origin, it surely does not cease
 Being and Time in Retrospect: Heidegger's Self-Critique 225

to be a subject. A common problem in the history of modern philosophy­

from Descartes and Montaigne to Kant, Rousseau, and Schelling-is that the
subject has encountered its self-referential nature and self-determination in
ever-recurring ways. This is in no way something that the subject makes "arise"
from itself. One may submit this structure of subjectivity to critique; Heidegger
prefers, however, to provide a caricature of self-control, and so it becomes
easy for him to exclude the Dasein of Being and Time from this caricature. 44
This Dasein belongs, nonetheless, together with the problem of self-relation,
in the framework of a theory of subjectivity which retains its validity while
keeping its distance from the idea of the power-obsessed subject. This problem,
which in Heidegger's later reading remains unnoticed, cannot be conceived as
a mere contamination of Being and Time. Rather it belongs to the independent
systematic core of this book, which becomes unrecognizable in his revisionary
attempt to arrange the early main work in such a way that it appears as a
still clumsy ascent on the "mountain" of Being. For this reason Heidegger's
conjunction, according to which one can only "gain access" to the later thought
starting out from Being and Time and Being and Time must be understood as
"contained" in the later thought, is untenable. 45 A fitting statement at this
point is one originally aimed at Karl Marx: "Such fundamental and flagrant
contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers; in the work of the great
authors they lead into the very center of their work."46
The opposition in Being and Time between "resoluteness" and "rapture"
thematizes a gulf between self and world, the Being of Dasein and Being as
such-a separation which prevented Heidegger from completing within the
logic of Being and Time the self-enclosed movement within the "same" that he
later titles "the turn." 47 After the completion of Being and Time failed, Heidegger
first had to make the gulf between self and world disappear in order to prepare
for the "turn" from a new, simulated starting point. But with this, Being and
Time as a factical starting point is lost and Heidegger's work breaks apart. It
does not make available the reference points which could be related to each
other strictly under the title "turn:' This concept causes confusion because it
presupposes the immanence and closedness of a movement that turns itself
to itself and comes back to itself, whereas there never really was any such
movement.
In view of the difficulties with this "turn," the passage from Being and Time
by which I let myself be guided in this section as a "test case" is enlightening in
two respects. First, as we saw, the passage gives evidence that Being and Time
still provided for a "relation" of man that was not a direct relation to "Being;'
but related on the one hand to one's own Being-oneself and on the other hand
to the world. Second, as we will show, the passage gives evidence that that to
which man relates himself there is conceived in Being and Time otherwise than
in the later work.
226 Dieter Thoma

Dasein was "enraptured" by "whatever possibilities and circumstances are

encountered in the Situation as possible objects of concern" (SZ 338). This
pragmatic transition to the "object of possible concern" would have a strange
effect if one tried to transfer it to "insistence" in the later context. In the
background of this difficulty there is a concept that now-like its conceptual
pair, Dasein (see above, section 2)-is subject to reinterpretations: namely,
the "world." Just as Dasein as "resolute" in Being and Time became capable of
acting, so too the world by which it was "enraptured" had pragmatic features;
how Dasein was conceived there was mirrored in the world. Thus later on, at
the same time as Dasein, its "world" must also be held at abeyance. Therefore,
Heidegger writes that the "analyses of the environment" in sections 14-24
of Being and Time are "on the whole and with respect to the guiding goal of
secondary signification." 48 On the other hand he introduces the new concept of
"earth" as that into which "Dasein, as historical, is already thrown" ; 49 in Being
and Time precisely this would still have been the "world;' but Heidegger gives
no more precise information about the change of concepts effected here.
When one takes a step back and compares the late to the early Heidegger,
the following alternatives open up. If one turns to Being and Time, then one
confronts the problem of how a Dasein entangled in its concerns comes to
itself in such a way that it enters into a free relationship to the world, in other
words, in such a way that the world opens itself to it. However, Being and Time
obviously lacks a satisfactory solution to this problem. The widely divergent
interpretations which find in Heidegger on the one hand the decisionist, and
on the other hand the contextualist, are merely a symptom of this problem. If to
the contrary one concentrates on the later texts, then one brings that problem
brusquely to a standstill: "resoluteness" on the one hand and "rapture" on the
other become transformed into the very same "insistence."
How one should decide this question in view of these alternatives is not this
commentary's business. But in neither way can Being and Time be accommo­
dated under the roof of a "proper and singular question" 50 that slowly purifies
and clarifies itself. Heidegger's claim, on the one hand, merely to purify (see
section 1) and on the other hand, merely to interpret his early masterwork
(see section 2) is misleading; in the course of his interpretation he turns away
from it.

Heidegger's attempt to extract from Being and Time the core which contains
the seed for his further thought is accompanied by efforts to defend his early
masterwork from interpretations which retain, instead of this core, merely the
 Being and Time in Retrospect: Heidegger's Self-Critique 227

husks, that is, the externals. His self-critique is therefore accompanied by a

defense against external critique, and if necessary, even against false friends (as
is perhaps the case with Jaspers, whose Existenzphilosophie is stigmatized as the
"emptiest leveling'' of his thought: GA 69, 9). Heidegger takes up and tackles
two misunderstandings above all: the first leads to the anthropologizing and
the second to the ethicizing of Being and Time. I would like briefly to deal with
both these points.
It is obvious from Heidegger's point of view that the "differentiation from
every kind of philosophical anthropology" ( GA 49, 33) is decisive for the cor­
rect understanding of Being and Time: with Dasein's Being-in-the-world the
specialized treatment of man, in which his essential traits are investigated, is
disposed of. In his view, precisely this isolation is fateful. If Heidegger had to
distinguish himself from an anthropology of Arnold Gehlen's sort, he would
say: human life is not already endowed with characteristics which determine
its ambitions in relation to the environment into which it then falls. If he had
to distinguish himself from a pragmatism ofJohn Dewey's sort (at the basis of
which there is an anthropology implicitly directed against Gehlen), he would
say: the world is not utterly exhausted in the experiences that human life has
in its dealings with it.
Heidegger's reservation with respect to anthropology can easily be retraced:
for him what is ultimately in question is not man at all-or at most, it is man
only insofar as man is opened for Being. Of course this remains unclear in Being
and Time because the "world" in which Dasein is involved does not yet possess
the independence which is granted to it later in the leeside of the "earth:' when
man is conceived as one of the players, so to speak, in a "fourfold of the world;' 51
a "world play." 52 So Heidegger's critique of the anthropologizing of Being and
Time contains something irritating. He indeed defends himself against a sep­
arate treatment of man, but this does not hinder him from making assertions
about man in the framework which he constructs: about the structures of his
everyday life, about the constitution of his Being-in-the-world, etc. One could
say that the critique of the isolated treatment of human peculiarities itself con­
tains an anthropological assertion about the worldliness or contextuality of
human life.
Heidegger now defends this assertion in a second step directed against an
ethicizing interpretation. The decisive keyword in his interpretations after 1927
is that of the "neutrality" of the analytic of Dasein. 53 Accordingly the priorities
and tendencies in it, and how they are connected to the ethical questions of
obligation and will, play no more of a role than "prophesying and heralding
world-views." 54 In the background of this aversion to morals and ethics, found
already in Heidegger's earliest texts, there stands a critique inspired by Nietzsche
of "values" that are distant from life.
228 Dieter Thoma

No objection to Being and Time has been made with such popularity as
that according to which Heidegger has sketched here, a separate world that is
"not everyone's affair:' Following this objection, the question becomes what
then speaks on behalf of living "as Dasein does;' and why then one should or
would want to live "in this way." But nothing so aroused Heidegger's polemical
verve as this objection concerning the separate world. He was encouraged to
engage in this polemic because the images drawn of his idiosyncrasies were so
varied that they could easily be stigmatized as caricatures. Thus he saw himself
during the Nazi period exposed to the reproach that in Being and Time he
succumbed to the "influence" of a "'metropolitan' conception" of life ( GA 66,
327). On the other hand he was amused by the reproach that for him "the
world [consisted] only of cooking pots, pitchforks, and lampshades," and that
he had "no relationship at all to 'higher culture' ... and to 'Nature;" for all this
"does not come to the fore in Being and Time:' Heidegger saw the "genuine
ground" for such "misinterpretations ...in the fact that one ascribes as it were
self-evidently to the author the wish to establish here a 'system of the world;
whereas something completely different is in question" ( GA 49, 44).
Just as little as he tolerates the reproach that the world he describes is one­
sided does Heidegger accept that Dasein is prejudiced in its way of world­
disclosure. He defends himself against the reproach of the "philistine" that
"human Dasein must not be laid out so gloomily and exclusively as care:' 55
because then "gloom and grief " would be demanded. 56
When he speaks of the "neutrality" of his analytic of Dasein, Heidegger
could have two different things in mind. On the one hand, it could be a matter
of exhibiting a constitution of Dasein that underlies all of its behaviors and of
which one can become certain in the mode of authenticity. In this respect what
one does would not be decided in advance, but rather only the way in which
one comes to and stands toward this doing would be modified. According to
this reading, the "authentic" existence in Being and Time favors a particular
way of life no more than, say, "falling" is meant in a disparaging way. 57 This
argument comes to light especially forcefully in the claim that Dasein, despite
its often reviled "neuter" state, opens up "the intrinsic possibility for being
factically dispersed into bodiliness and thus into sexuality."58
On the other hand, Heidegger could entirely join a modifying claim to his
analytic and all of its "neutrality." It would be "neutral" then not because
it allows diverse deviations, but rather because the grounding for "authentic"
Dasein is neither tendentiously designated nor positively asserted. Accordingly,
a determinate form of life is very much worked out in Being and Time, but it
does not originate from an ethical, non-neutral, tendentious decision; it has
nothing to do with moral obligation and will. It discloses itself in the insight
into the constitution of Dasein, to which it merely corresponds.
 Being and Time in Retrospect: Heidegger's Self-Critique 229

In his later writings Heidegger follows the second of the above mentioned
variants. On the basis of his now strictly drawn distinction between Dasein
and man he sees the latter exposed to an "errancy" which can be put to an end
only through its "transformation:' 59 In 1946 he repeats his critique of "ethics"
as a baseless construction. Nevertheless at the same time he clarifies that a
"peremptory directive" as to how man "ought to live" 60 is to be found in an
"originary ethics" which "ponders the abode of the human being;' how man
"determines himself from the ... belongingness to Being."61 From this there
should arise "directives:' "law and rule" in a new sense. 62 The question about
the good life is here replaced by the question about life in accordance with
Being-and this is a fundamental characteristic of his thought, which is in fact
already found in Heidegger's earliest texts onward.
In his interpretation of Being and Time Heidegger wants to claim for himself
such uniformity throughout. Nonetheless, our overview of his "self-critique"
has shown that the attempt to present Being and Time as the first and still
unsure step on a path that later was trodden farther brings with it distortions
and confusion. This is of course not surprising; it is well-known that authors
are not predestined to be their own most competent interpreters.
Heidegger was occasionally pained by the deficiencies which appeared in
Being and Time when his later standards were applied to it. In view of the
misunderstandings which he considered resolved by these later standards which
corrected Being and Time, he arrived at the conclusion that it "would be good
if one were to let Being and Time, the book and the matter, finally repose for
an indeterminate future" (GA 49, 34). But insofar as this conclusion implies
the recommendation that one now abide only by the less "misleading" later
thought of Heidegger, one should not follow it.

-translated by Daniel J. Dwyer

Notes

1. GA 49, Die Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus, 27. [Translator's note: "Glf' will
refer to volumes of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, published in Frankfurt am Main by
Vittorio Klostermann. Where existing English translations are available, they will be
cited first, followed by the corresponding volume and pagination of GA or another
specified German edition. Subsequent references to untranslated GA volumes will be
parenthetical. All references to Sein und Zeit will be indicated parenthetically by "SZ"
and the German pagination ofthe seventh and later editions (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer,
1953- ). Unless otherwise indicated, the English translation of this text is Being and
Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row,
1962).]
230 Dieter Thoma

2. Heidegger designates his text "Auseinandersetzung mit 'Sein und Zeit'" -a text
which dates from 1935 to 1936 and will appear in GA 82, Zu eigenen Veroffentlichungen--­
as a "self-critique" (cf. GA 66, Besinnung, 420); this text was not available to me.
Heidegger's "critique" must be understood in a neutral sense, that is, as an attempt
at delimitation and clarification. The classic texts containing self-interpretations­
including the "Letter on 'Humanism;" in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeil) (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998) = Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1967), the letter to Richardson in William Richardson, Heid egger: Through Phenomenol­
ogy to Thought, 4th ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), and the lecture
"Time and Being;' in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002) = Zur Sache des Denkens (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1976)-have
now been supplemented by detailed comments in GA 49 and GA 66.
3. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters 1925-1975, ed. Ursula Ludz, trans.
Andrew Shields (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004), 84 = Briefe 1925 bis 1975 und andere
Zeugnisse, ed. Ursula Ludz (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), 104; GA
49, 40.
4. On Time and Being, 44 = Zur Sache des Denkens, 47.
5. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), 158 = GA 26, Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Logik
im Ausgang van Leibniz, 201.
6. Letter to Jan Aler, November 1970, in Zeitschrift fur Asthetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft 18 (1973): 5. Details concerning this third division can be found in
GA 49, 39f. and GA 66, 413f.; cf. also Theodore Kisiel's contribution in this volume.
7. On Time and Being, 55 = Zur Sache des Denkens, 61; Contributions to Philoso­
phy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1999), 154 = GA 65, Beitriige zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), 221.
8. GA 69, Die Geschichte des Seyns, 9.
9. Pathmarks, 288 = Wegmarken, 209.
10. Cf. On Time and Being, 30 = Zur Sache des Denkens, 32; Contributions to Philos­
ophy, 246 = GA 65, 351.
11. Contributions to Philosophy, 215 = GA 65, 305.
12. Cf. On Time and Being, 31 = Zur Sache des Denkens, 34; Pathmarks, 288-89 =
Wegmarken, 209.
13. On Time and Being, 31 = Zur Sache des Denkens, 33f.
14. In Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1977), 439. [Translator's note:
all subsequent parenthetical references to Heidegger's marginal notes will be to this
German edition's pagination and the translations will be those found in Being and
Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996).]
15. On Time and Being, 31-32 = Zur Sache des Denkens, 34.
16. Cf. Georg Picht, "Die Macht des Denkens," in Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger,
ed. Gunther Neske (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977), 204.
17. Letter to Richardson, in Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to
Thought, xii.
 Being and Time in Retrospect: Heidegger's Self-Critique 231

18. Cf. Jean Grondin, Le tournant dans la pensee de Martin Heidegger (Paris: PUF,
1987), 32ff.
19. GA 69; cf. GA 66,300; Contributions to Philosophy, 246 = GA 65,351.
20. On Time and Being, 23 = Zur Sache des Denkens, 24.
21. On Time and Being, 14 = Zur Sache des Denkens, 15.
22. SZ 19 and 39; The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 228 = GA 24, Die Grundprobleme der
Phiinomenologie, 324.
23. GA 38, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, 163; cf. GA 39, Holderlins
Hymnen "Germanien" und "Der Rhein," 101.
24. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 4, ed. David Farrell Krell,trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (San
Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), 141 = Nietzsche, Band II (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961)
194-95.
25. Arendt and Heidegger, Letters 1925-1975, 84 = Briefe 1925 bis 1975 und andere
Zeugnisse, 104.
26. Cited from Roger Munier, "Todtnauberg 1949;' in Martin Heidegger, ed. Michel
Haar (Paris: l'Herne, 1983), 154.
27. Kant and the Problem ofMetaphysics, 5th ed., trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997), 164 = GA 3, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 234.
28. GA 49, 60; cf. GA 66, 144f. [Translator's note: "insistence" will translate
Instiindigkeit, which means standing steadfastly in the truth of Being. This is not to
be confused with Insistenz as Heidegger uses it in 1930 to mean "hold[ing) fast to what
is offered by beings, as if they were open of and in themselves": "On the Essence of
Truth;' in Pathmarks, 150.)
29. On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper and Row,
1971), 159-60 = Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfulligen: Neske, 1959), 156; Contributions to
Philosophy, 171 = GA 65,242.
30. Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002), 31 = Identitiit und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 22.
31. On Time and Being, 42 = ZurSache des Denkens, 45.
32. Contributions to Philosophy, 317 = GA 65, 451.
33. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 205-9 = GA 26, 265ff.; Pathmarks,
108 = Wegmarken, 34.
34. Pathmarks, 284, translation modified = Wegmarken, 203.
35. Pathmarks, 15lf. = Wegmarken, 93f.
36. Offthe Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Hayes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,2002), 41 = Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1950), 55.
37. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2000), 22f. = Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik (Tiibingen: Niemeyer,
1953), 16f.
38. Nietzsche, vol. 1, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row,
1979),51 and 136 = Nietzsche, Band I, 63 and 161.
232 Dieter Thoma

39. GA 66, 144f.; cf. GA 38, 162f.; Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson
and E. Hans Freund (NY: Harper and Row, 1966), 82-83 = Gelassenheit (Pfullingen:
Neske, 1959), 61.
40. Contributions to Philosophy, 40 and 50, translation modified = GA 65, 58 and
72.
41. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 189 = GA 26,244; cf. SZ 325; Nietzsche,
vol. 1, 51 = Nietzsche, Band I, 63.
42. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 195 = GA 26, 252.
43. Offthe Beaten Track, 76 = Holzwege, 104 and Pathmarks, 249 = Wegmarken, 159;
GA 49, 50 and 60.
44. Heidegger's caricature has several disagreeable consequences. Those who start
from Heidegger and think further along deconstructionist lines take over his late cri­
tique of the subject all too lightly and fall thereby into the misleading schema depicted
above. Then there are those who, under a reversal of these premises but still beholden
to this schema, blame Heidegger for eliminating the subject in its autonomy and ratio­
nality. They thereby overlook the intrinsic difficulties with which this subject must still
struggle. A further problematic consequence of Heidegger's caricature of the subject
manifests itself in the interpretation of his engagement with National Socialism: it is
in retrospect interpreted as an errant path in which subjectivism as the "bad side" of
Being and Time has rendered itself independent. Yet Heidegger's Nazi engagement, as a
version of the "will to enowning" (see above), stands quite close to his own counterpart
to the so-called subject. Thus, the context of Heidegger's encounter with Being and
Time also includes his confused interpretation of National Socialism.
45. Letter to Richardson, in Richardson, Heidegger, xxii.
46. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, second edition ( Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), 104-5.
47. Cf. Grondin, Le tournant dans la pensee de Martin Heidegger; Thomas Sheehan,
"'Kehre' and 'Ereignis': A Prolegomenon to Introduction to Metaphysics;' in A Com­
panion to Heidegger's "Introduction to Metaphysics," ed. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Dieter Thoma, Die Zeit des Selbst und die
Zeit danach: Zur Kritik der Textgeschichte Martin Heideggers 1910-1976 (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 444-65; Dieter Thoma, "Stichwort: Kehre. Was ware, wenn
es sie nicht gabe?" in Heidegger-Handbuch, ed. Dieter Thoma (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler,
2003), 134-41.
48. Pathmarks, 121, translation modified= Wegmarken, 52.
49. Off the Beaten Track, 47 = Holzwege, 62; cf. GA 39, 88.
50. Pathmarks, 287 = Wegmarken, 207.
51. On Time and Being, 42 = Zur Sache des Denkens, 45.
52. On the Way to Language, 106 = Unterwegs zur Sprache, 214.
53. Pathmarks, 122 = Wegmarken, 54; Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 136ff. =
GA 26, 171ff.; cf. Jean Greisch, Ontologie et temporalite: Esquisse d'une interpretation
integrale de "Sein und Zeit" (Paris: PDF, 1994), 499ff.
54. The Metaphysical Foundations ofLogic, 137 = GA 26, 172; cf. Pathmarks, 253 =
Wegmarken, 163; GA 66, 144f.
 Being and Time in Retrospect: Heidegger's Self-Critique 233

55. GA 38, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, 162.
56. GA 69, 213; cf. GA 69, 57 and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 165-66 =
GA3, 236.
57. Pathmarks, 253 = Wegmarken, 163.
58. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 137 = GA26, 173.
59. Cf. Contributions to Philosophy, 58 and 163 = GA65, 84 and 230; Off the Beaten
Track, 40ff. = Holzwege, 53£.
60. Pathmarks, 268 = Wegmarken, 183.
61. Pathmarks, 271, translation modified= Wegmarken, 187£.
62. Pathmarks, 274 = Wegmarken, 191; cf. Dieter Thoma, "Existenz," in Ethik: Bin
Grundkurs, ed. Heiner Hastedt and Ekkehard Martens (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1994).
 Selected Bibliography

This bibliography is only a small selection from the extensive literature by and on
Heidegger, with an emphasis on recent work in English.
The plan of the Gesamtausgabe, or complete edition of Heidegger's writings, can be
found at the publisher's website: www.klostermann.de.
Each volume of the yearly journal Heidegger Studies contains an update on the texts
that have been published in the Gesamtausgabe and their translations into English,
French, Italian, and Spanish.
The most complete and up-to-date international bibliography of secondary literature
on Heidegger since 1990 can be found on the Web site of the library of the University
of Freiburg: www.ub.uni-freiburg.de/referate/02/heidegger/heidgg90.html.

Editions and Translations of Being and Time

Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper
&Row, 1962.
Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1996.
Sein und Zeit. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt
am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977.
Sein und Zeit. 15th ed. Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1984. Later Niemeyer editions are
reprints of this one, which has been corrected in light of the Gesamtausgabe edi­
tion. Both this Niemeyer edition and the Gesamtausgabe edition include Heidegger's
marginal notes from his personal copy of Sein und Zeit; these notes are included in
the Stambaugh translation but not the Macquarrie and Robinson translation.

235
236 Selected Bibliography

Other Texts by Heidegger Especially Relevant to

Being and Time

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Composed 1927. Trans. Albert Hofstadter.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
Der Begriff der Zeit. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 64. Composed 1924. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm
von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004.
Einleitung in die Philosophie. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 27. Composed 1928-1929. Ed. Otto
Saame and Ina Saame-Speidel. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
2001.
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Composed 1929-
1930. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995.
History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Composed 1925. Trans. Theodore Kisiel.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Composed 1929. Trans. Richard Taft. 5th enl. ed.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 21. Composed 1925-1926. Ed.
Walter Biemel. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995.
The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Composed 1928. Trans. Michael Heim.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity. Composed 1923. Trans. John van Buren.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Reference Works

Bast, Rainer A., and Heinrich P. Delfosse. Handbuch zum Textstudium von Martin
Heideggers "Sein und Zeit," vol. 1, Stellenindizes, philologisch-kritischer Apparat.
Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1979.
Denker, Alfred. Historical Dictionary of Heidegger's Philosophy. Lanham, Md.: Scare­
crow, 2000.
Feick, Hildegard, and Susanne Ziegler. Index zu Heideggers "Sein und Zeit." 4th ed.
Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer, 1991.
Thoma, Dieter, ed. Heidegger-Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung. Stuttgart: J. B.
Metzler, 2003.

Single-Author Commentaries and Studies

Blattner, William D. Heidegger's Temporal Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1999.
Carman, Taylor. Heidegger's Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in
"Being and Time." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
 Selected Bibliography 237

Dahlstrom, Daniel 0. Heidegger's Concept of Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2001. Chapter 4.
Dastur, Franc,:oise. Heidegger and the Question of Time. Trans. Franc,:ois Raffoul and
David Pettigrew. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1998.
De Boer, Karin. Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger's Encounter with HegeL Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2000.
Dreyfus, Hubert. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time,"
Division I. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
Gelven, Michael. A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time." Rev. ed. De Kalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 1989.
Greisch, Jean. Ontologie et temporalite: Esquisse d'une interpretation integrale de "Sein
und Zeit." Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994.
Guignon, Charles. Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983.
Herrmann, Friedrich-Wilhelm von. Subjekt und Dasein: Interpretationen zu "Sein und
Zeit." 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985.
---· Hermeneutische Phiinomenologie des Daseins: Eine Erliiuterung von "Sein und
Zeit,"vol. 1, Einleitung: Die Exposition der Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein. Frankfurt
am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987.
---· Heideggers "Grundprobleme der Phiinomenologie": Zur zweiten Halfte von "Sein
und Zeit." Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991.
Kaelin, Eugene. Heidegger's "Being and Time": A Reading for Readers. Tallahassee: Uni­
versity Press of Florida, 1988.
Kisiel, Theodore. The Genesis of Heidegger's "Being and Time." Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993.
Kockelmans, Joseph J. Heidegger's "Being and Time": The Analytic of Dasein as Funda­
mental Ontology. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989.
Luckner, Andreas. Martin Heidegger: "Sein und Zeit": Bin einfuhrender Kommentar. 2nd
ed. Paderborn: Schoningh, 2001.
Polt, Richard. Heidegger: An Introduction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Chapters 3-4.
Vogel, Lawrence. The Fragile "We": Ethical Implications of Heidegger's "Being and Time."
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994.
Zimmerman, Michael E. Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger's Concept of
Authenticity. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981.

Collections of Essays Largely about Being and Time

Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Mark Wrathall, eds. Heidegger: A Critical Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992.
___ , eds. Heidegger Reexamined, vol. 1, Phenomenology, Dasein, and Truth; vol. 2,
Authenticity, Death, and the History ofBeing. New York: Routledge, 2002.
__ , eds. A Companion to Heidegger. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Elliston, F., ed. Heidegger's Existential Analytic. New York: Mouton, 1978.
238 Selected Bibliography

Guignon, Charles, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1993.
Kockelmans, Joseph J., ed. A Companion to Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time."
Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University
Press of America, 1986.
Macann, Christopher, ed. Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments, vol. 1, Philosophy.
London: Routledge, 1992.
Rentsch, Thomas, ed. Martin Heidegger, "Sein und Zeit." Klassiker Auslegen, vol. 25.
Berlin: Akademie, 2001.
Scharff, Robert C., ed. The Blackwell Guide to Heidegger's "Being and Time." Oxford:
Blackwell, forthcoming.
 Index

a priori, 5,39,158,166n7 philosophy,204; on phronesis, 7, 9,

ability to be,potentiality for being, 142,144-47,149; on the soul,47,
potential-to-be,being-possible 100-101; on theoria, praxis, and
(Seinkonnen), 6,54-55, 59-60,66, techne, 7,89,92-97
126,159,199. See also possibility; attunement,dis-posedness,disposition
projection (Befindlichkeit), 58,78-79,102,159,
absence,35-36,38,42,155,196 210
action,56,81-83,99, 106-8,110, Augenblick. See moment
114-15, 121,130, 132,218,223.See authenticity,genuineness
also ethics; praxis (Eigentlichkeit): defined,3,8,24,
Adorno,Theodor,17 53-54,85-87,114; and disclosedness,
anthropology,47,68,227 8, 115,158-59; as ideal or possibility,
anxiety (Angst), 3, 102,125-26,132, 88n9, 221,228; and resoluteness, 24,
143-46 150; and temporality/historicity, 11,
the "anyone:' See the "they" 37,87,160,155-64,173-74;and the
appropriation,appropriating event, "they;' 8, 85-86,114-15, 124,147,
advent or event,enowning (Ereignis), 172-73,175. See also death;
12,26,87n2,191-92, 195,200,209, inauthenticity; resoluteness
218,222-23,232n44
Aquinas,Thomas,19, 47,51 Barth, K., 19
Arendt,Hannah,187n19 The Basic Problems ofPhenomenology, 5,
Aristotle: on being, 16,19,24-25, 36, 11,33-34, 162-63,166n7,180,
165n6,183, 198; on ethics and 194-97,218
politics,113,115, 153nll; on Becker,0.,189

239
240 Index

Being,being (Sein): and Dasein,2, Contributions to Philosophy, 206,208-9,

23-25,40,59,67,91, 169,217,221, 223
223; meaning of,2,4,19,21, 30n14, culture, 81,179,186n10
36,50,185;question of,4-5,15-28,
49-50, 75,198,203; and temporality, Dasein,being-here,Da-sein (Dasein):
2,30n14,36,164, 195; understanding and being, 2,5,23-25,40, 64-67,91,
of,2,34,40, 43,64-67,169,195,203, 169,217,221,223; being of,6,21, 23,
217. See also ontological difference; 47-72,77,100,197,199;defined,2,
ontology; presence 26,49,77,169; and man,2, 12, 48-49,
being-handy. See readiness-to-hand 208, 220-21. See also care;existence;
being-in-the-world,3,6�1,63,80,91, there
94,124, 170-72 Dasein-with (Mitdasein), 8,107,112
being-on-hand. See presence-at-hand death: and authenticity,3, 9-10,132,
being-possible. See ability to be 149,157-58,164,172-73; Dasein's
being-with (Mitsein), 8, 105-15,147. See relation to,25, 35,63-64, 157,219;
also Dasein-with; the "they" defined,9,79,126,149
Bergson,Henri,201 deconstruction, 40-41
Blochmann,E.,209 deficient modes,108
body,6-7,75-76,82 Derrida,Jacques, 16
Braig, C.,17 Descartes, Rene,3,6, 25,48,75, 89,101,
Bultmann, R., 19,209 117-19, 125,183,225
Dewey, John,227
Caputo,J.,50 Dilthey,Wilhelm,11,16,175-81,184
care (Sorge), 24,128,228; as Being of disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), 3,8,115,
Dasein,3,23,57-60,64,66,100,155, 156,159,163
163; structure of, 41-42,62,125, discourse (Rede), 68-69, 110, 113,
159-60 125-26, 134,210
Cassirer,E.,171,186n10 disposition, dis-posedness. See
Chisholm,R.,60 attunement
Christianity,18,27,147,149-50, distantiality (Abstiindigkeit), 111
197 Division 3 (of Part I of Being and Time),
Cicero,28,47,56 30nl4,40,190-91,193-95,203,206,
circumspection ( Umsicht), 69,98-99, 208-11, 215
100,102,137n30 Duns Scotus,17
clearing (Lichtung), 91, 191, 194,218
concern, solicitude (Fursorge), 100, earth,226-27
108-9,147 ecstasis: defined,10,161,223; and
concern,taking care (Besorgen), 91-97, horizon, 5,38, 161-64,194,199; and
106,108-9 temporality/Temporality,3,10,35,
conscience,8-9,118,126-34, 157 161-64, 173-74,181,197,201
consciousness,2,117-18,120,135n15. ego. See Husserl; "I"
See also self-awareness enowning. See appropriation
constitution,60 environment,surrounding world
construction, 40-41 ( Umwelt), 105,171,226
 Index 241

equipment,useful things (Zeug), 83-85, historicity ( Geschichtlichkeit), 3, 10-11,

96-98,106-7,121,228 87,150,166n7, 174,180,182, 184-85,
essence,26,35,37, 51,59,165-66n6 186n10,197,205
ethics, 86-87,133,144, 227-29 Holderlin,Friedrich,28
everydayness, 77, 108, 114, 121, 124, horizon,2,12,30n14, 36,160-64,199,
171 201,206-7,210,212n28,217
existence,49-50,51-57,62-64,80,85, horizonal schema,5,11,162,194,
128 196-97,212n28
existentialism, 4,19,53,59 Husserl,Edmund: contrasts with
existentials,existentialia (Existenzialien), Heidegger, 19, 40, 60,158,202;
49-50 parallels to Heidegger,4,22,40,162,
167n12; and phenomenology, 40,89,
facticity (Faktizitiit), 58,78, 100, 125, 118,135n15; on transcendental ego,
131,172-73,186n7,193,200. See also 112,118-20, 124,130. See also
situatedness; thrownness phenomenology
falling-prey, falling, fallenness
(Verfallen), 58,172-73, 186n7,228 "I:' 8,110-12,119, 122-24, 128, 136n21,
finitude,86, 101,126,160, 164,172, 219. See also self; self-awareness
182-84,207 inauthenticity,23-24,37,54, 85-86,
formal indication,36,192,208 172-73,221. See also everydayness;
Foucault, Michel, 219 one-self; the "they"
fourfold, 222, 227 insistence (Instiindigkeit), 13,221,223,
freedom, 115,132-33, 151,199,204-6 226,231n28
fundamental ontology,22-23, 47, 49,66, instant. See moment
72,217 intentionality,9,60,117-18,120-22,
future,35-38,40,42, 157-60, 164,197, 128-29,134,161-62,192-93,210
• 199 interpretation,55
Introduction to Philosophy, 202-8
Gadamer, Hans-Georg,16 involvement (Bewandtnis), 98-99, 219
Galileo, 67
Gehlen,A.,227 Jaspers,K.,4,17,19, 53, 57,73n18,118,
generation, 150-51, 175-77 190,227
genuineness. See authenticity Jemeinigkeit. See mineness
glance of the eye. See moment Jesus, 150-51
gods, 28
guilt,3,9, 36-37, 44n6, 129-32, 146, kairos, 146-47,149,153nl1
149 Kant,Immanuel,9, 33,91,134,
138-39n38,183,198,225
handiness. See readiness-to-hand Kierkegaard,Soren,4,19, 24,53,57,
Hartmann,N.,120 73n18,103nl,117,125,128,132,142,
Hegel,G. W. F.,5,19, 36,53,113,165n6, 147,159
174,177,183
here. See there language,30n14,68, 191,210,219
historicism, 11,170,182-83 Lask,E.,191-92
242 Index

"Letter on 'Humanism;" 24,191,229 ontological difference, 29n2,72n6,192,

Levinas,Emmanuel,16 198,203
life,55-56 ontology, 22-23,34,36,39--40,65, 102,
logic,10,20, 52,156,191-92 195,203,211. See also fundamental
Luther,Martin,147, 153nll ontology

Mannheim, K.,177 Parmenides, 15,25,47

Marcel,G.,17 Pascal,Blaise,19
Marion,J.-L.,16,50 past,35-39,41--42,158-59, 170,174-75,
Marx,225 197
meaning,sense (Sinn), 2,10,30n14,35, people (Volk), 175-76
160-61,196 phenomenology,4,19,40--41,89,102,
The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 118,135n15,192,217
52,198-201,223 phronesis, 7,9,42,45n14,94,96,129,
metontology, 12,198-99 137n27,142,144--46,149, 153nll,
mind,6,48,70-72,75-76,81-83, 117 166n9
mineness (Jemeinigkeit), 124,126,128 physicalism, 71,76, 83-84
Misch,G.,16 physics,67,71-72
moment,moment of vision,glance of Pindar,165n3,197
the eye,instant (Augenblick), 7, Plato,6, 15,25-27,47--48,92,115, 130,
101-2,147,149-50, 153nll, 159-60, 133, 183,197,201
166n9,174,207,222 Plotinus,17
Montaigne,Michel de,225 poiesis, 93,95-96,101
move-away. See rapture possibility,5,6,35-36,51, 53-54,71, 86,
102,126,132-33,157,201,206.See
National Socialism,232n44 also ability to be; projection;
neo-Kantianism, 19, 21, 171,176, understanding
192 potentiality for being. See ability to be
neutrality,91,227-28 potential-to-be. See ability to be
Nietzsche, 4, 103nl, 138n32,159, praesens, Praesens (Praesenz), 33-36, 38,
186-87nl2,227 196-97
nothing,nothingness,44n6,128, praxis, 89,93-99, 101. See also action
199-200,203 presence,5,11,25-26,33-38, 95,
101-2, 155-56, 165n2,183,185,
objectification,thematization 196-97
( Vergegenstiindlichung), 34,44n2, 195, presence-at-hand, objective presence,
197,201,206 being-on-hand (Vorhandenheit), 52,
objective presence. See presence-at-hand 58,61,97,156
"On the Essence of Ground;' 132-33, present,34-38,40--42,55,57, 156,
206 158-73,175,222
the "one." See the "they'' pre-Socratics, 48, 71
one-self,they-self (Man-selbst), 86,114, projection, 54-55, 57,78-80
121-23, 125-28,134.Seealsothe
"they" questioning,20-21
 Index 243

Ranke,L.,177 solicitude. See concern,solicitude

rapture,move-away (Entruckung), 162, (Fursorge)
222-26. See also ecstasis space,218-19
readiness-to-hand,being-handy, St. Paul,147,153nll
handiness (Zuhandenheit), 97-98, state-of-mind. See attunement
107,156 subjectivism,30nl4,98,218-20,232n44
reason,9,114,118,128-34 subjectivity,12,101, 118,122-28,
reduction,40-41 137n25,191,219-20,224-25
reference (Verweisung), 106 substance,75-77,83-84
relativism, 182-83 surrounding world. See environment
relevance (Bewandtnis), 107
repetition (Wiederholung), 150,160,173, taking care. See concern,taking care
175 (Besorgen)
resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), 24,131, techne, 93-94,96-97,142
146,149,151,157,159,197,207, technology,27-28
222-26 temporality (Temporalitiit), 5,11,30n14,
responsibility, 130,132-33 33--43,195-98,206,218-19
Rickert,H.,11,20,176-80 temporality, timeliness (Zeitlichkeit); and
Rilke,Rainer Maria,190 being,2,11,25-26,42,195-97,
Rorty,R.,141--42 199-201,17-19; and Dasein,2-3,25,
Rousseau,Jean-Jacques,225 30n14,64,101-2,173,192,218;and
facticity,193,200; structure of, 3,10,
Sartre, Jean-Paul,17,58-59 38,41--42,57,173,206-7,210-11;
Scheler, 198,200 and truth,4,10,156,163,218. See also
Schelling,225 ecstasis; future; horizon; past; present
Schopenhauer,159 thematization. See objectification
science: assumptions of,76,98; basis in theoria and theory,7,44n3,93-94,
Dasein,65-66, 90, 93, 181-82, 96-97, 99,101,158
188n30; and ontology/philosophy,22, there,here (Da), 2,23,194,205,219,223
33,67,195, 198,202-3,208 the "they," the "anyone," the "one," the
self,101, 110-15,219 one (das Man), 112-15; and
self-awareness, 119-28,130. See also authenticity,8,85-86,114-15,124,
consciousness; "I" 147,172-73,175;defined,3,8,81,
sense. See meaning 112,171,176,185n5;and
significance (Bedeutsamkeit), 85,141,219 intelligibility, 141,151
Simmel,G., 180 they-self. See one-self
situatedness,35,78, 131. See also thrownness, 80,130-31,146. See also
facticity; thrownness facticity; situatedness
situation (Lage), 146,153n7 timeliness. See temporality
situation (Situation), 146--47,149-50, transcendence,90-91, 101,133, 163,
153n7 200-204,223
skepticism, 182 transcendental,39--40,131, 163-64,190,
Smart,J. J. C.,71 192,195,200,203,206,210
Socrates,6,47--48,60,71,109 transcendental ego. See Husserl
244 Index

Troeltsch, E., 179 values, 84-85

truth,3, 10,156, 182-85, 194,205,
218 Windelband,W.,11, 178-79
Tugendhat, E., 17, 114-15, I37n27 Wittgenstein,Ludwig,118, 124,127,
turn, turning, turning-around (Kehre), 141-42
191,198,215,225 world,60,80,84,90-99,125, 163,
199-200,203,218,226
understanding, 54-55, 64-65,68, 78, 98, worldview, 172, 204
125, 181-82
useful things. See equipment Yorck,180-81
 About the Contributors

Jeffrey Andrew Barash (Universite de Picardie, Amiens) is the author of Martin

Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning, Heidegger et son siecle: Temps
de l'Etre, temps de l'histoire, and articles on Heidegger, Arendt, Strauss, Lev­
inas, and the philosophy of history. His latest book is Politiques de l'histoire:
L'historicisme comme promesse et comme mythe.

Steven Crowell (Rice University) is the author of many articles on phenomenol­

ogy and Continental philosophy, some of which are collected in Husserl,
Heidegger, and the Space ofMeaning: Paths toward Transcendental Phenomenol­
ogy. He is coeditor of T he New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomeno­
logical Philosophy.

Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Boston University) is the author of Heidegger's Concept of

Truth and of numerous articles on Heidegger, Kant, Hegel, and other German
thinkers. He has edited several philosophical anthologies and the Philosophical
Writings of Moses Mendelssohn.

Karin de Boer (University of Groningen) is the author of Thinking in the Light

of Time: Heidegger's Encounter with Hegel and of articles on Heidegger, Hegel,
and Derrida.

Hubert L. Dreyfus (University of California, Berkeley) is the author of numer­

ous essays and books on Heidegger, technology, and Continental philosophy,

245
246 About the Contributors

including Being-in-the-World, What Computers Still Can't Do, and On the In­
ternet.

Gunter Figal (University of Freiburg) is the author of Martin Heidegger:

Phiinomenologie der Freiheit and Heidegger zur Einfuhrung as well as books
on Adorno, Nietzsche, and Socrates. Some of his essays are collected in For a
Philosophy of Freedom and Strife: Politics, Aesthetics, Metaphysics.

Jean Grondin (University of Montreal) has published numerous books and arti­
cles on Heidegger, hermeneutics, and Kant, including Introduction to Philosoph­
ical Hermeneutics, Sources of Hermeneutics, and Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biog­
raphy. His latest books are Du sens de la vie and Introduction a la metaphysique.

Charles Guignon (University of South Florida) is the author of Heidegger and the
Problem of Knowledge and On Being Authentic, as well as articles on Heidegger,
hermeneutics, and psychotherapy. His edited volumes include The Cambridge
Companion to Heidegger, Richard Rorty, and The Existentialists: Critical Essays
on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre.

Theodore Kisiel (Northern Illinois University) is the author of The Genesis

of Heidegger's "Being and Time" and numerous articles on Heidegger, some
of which are collected in Heidegger's Way of Thought. He is the translator of
Heidegger's History of the Concept of Time and coeditor of Reading Heidegger
from the Start.

William McNeill (DePaul University) is the author of The Glance of the Eye:
Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory, editor of Heidegger's Pathmarks,
and cotranslator of Heidegger's lecture courses Holderlin's Hymn "The Ister"
and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. He is preparing translations of
two more lecture courses on Holderlin.

Graeme Nicholson (University of Toronto, emeritus) is the author of fllustra­

tions of Being, Seeing and Reading, Plato's "Phaedrus," and articles on Heidegger,
Gadamer, Plato, and other topics. He has coedited anthologies of articles on
Gadamer and Emil Fackenheim.

Richard Polt (Xavier University, Cincinnati) is the author of Heidegger: An

Introduction and The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger's "Contributions to
Philosophy." With Gregory Fried, he has translated Heidegger's Introduction
to Metaphysics and edited A Companion to Heidegger's "Introduction to Meta­
physics."
 About the Contributors 247

Dieter Thomii (University of St. Gallen, Switzerland) is the author of Die

Zeit des Selbst und die Zeit danach: Zur Kritik der Textgeschichte Martin
Heideggers 1910-1976 and editor of Heidegger-Handbuch. He has also au­
thored philosophical books on parenthood, autobiography, Americans, and
happiness.