## 1. Biographical Sketch




Martin Heidegger was born in Messkirch, Germany, on September 26,
1889. Messkirch was then a quiet, conservative, religious rural town,
and as such was a formative influence on Heidegger and his
philosophical thought. In 1909 he spent two weeks in the Jesuit order
before leaving (probably on health grounds) to study theology at the
University of Freiburg. In 1911 he switched subjects, to philosophy. He
began teaching at Freiburg in 1915. In 1917 he married Elfride Petri,
with whom he had two sons (Jorg and Hermann) and from whom he
never parted (although his affair with the philosopher Hannah Arendt,
his student at Marburg in the 1920s, is well-known).




Heidegger's philosophical development began when he read
Brentano and Aristotle, plus the latter's medieval scholastic
interpreters. Indeed, Aristotle's demand in the
*Metaphysics* to know what it is that unites all possible modes
of Being (or 'is-ness') is, in many ways, the question that
ignites and drives Heidegger's philosophy. From this platform he
proceeded to engage deeply with Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and,
perhaps most importantly of all for his subsequent thinking in the
1920s, two further figures: Dilthey (whose stress on the role of
interpretation and history in the study of human activity profoundly
influenced Heidegger) and Husserl (whose understanding of phenomenology
as a science of essences he was destined to reject). In 1915 Husserl
took up a post at Freiburg and in 1919 Heidegger became his assistant.
Heidegger spent a period (of reputedly brilliant) teaching at the
University of Marburg (1923-1928), but then returned to Freiburg to
take up the chair vacated by Husserl on his retirement. Out of such
influences, explorations, and critical engagements, Heidegger's
magnum opus, *Being and Time* (*Sein und Zeit*) was born.
Although Heidegger's academic and intellectual relationship with
his Freiburg predecessor was complicated and occasionally strained (see
Crowell 2005), *Being and Time* was dedicated to Husserl,
"in friendship and admiration".




Published in 1927, *Being and Time* is standardly hailed as
one of the most significant texts in the canon of (what has come to be
called) contemporary European (or Continental) Philosophy. It
catapulted Heidegger to a position of international intellectual
visibility and provided the philosophical impetus for a number of later
programmes and ideas in the contemporary European tradition, including
Sartre's existentialism, Gadamer's philosophical
hermeneutics, and Derrida's notion of
'deconstruction'. Moreover, *Being and Time*, and indeed
Heidegger's philosophy in general, has been presented and engaged
with by thinkers such as Dreyfus (e.g., 1990) and Rorty (e.g., 1991a, b)
who work somewhere near the interface between the contemporary European and the analytic traditions. A
cross-section of broadly analytic reactions to Heidegger (positive and
negative) may be found alongside other responses in (Murray 1978).
*Being and Time* is discussed in section 2 of this article.




In 1933 Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and was elected Rector of
Freiburg University, where, depending on whose account one believes, he
either enthusiastically implemented the Nazi policy of bringing
university education into line with Hitler's nauseating political
programme (Pattison 2000) or he allowed that policy to be officially
implemented while conducting a partially underground campaign of
resistance to some of its details, especially its anti-Semitism (see
Heidegger's own account in *Only a God can
Save Us*). During the short period of his rectorship--he resigned in 1934--Heidegger gave a number of public speeches
(including his inaugural rectoral address; see below) in which Nazi
images plus occasional declarations of support for Hitler are
integrated with the philosophical language of *Being and Time*.
After 1934 Heidegger became increasingly distanced from Nazi politics.
Although he didn't leave the Nazi party, he did attract some
unwelcome attention from its enthusiasts. After the war, however, a
university denazification committee at Freiburg investigated Heidegger
and banned him from teaching, a right which he did not get back until
1949. One year later he was made professor Emeritus. Against this
background of contrary information, one will search in vain through
Heidegger's later writings for the sort of total and unambiguous
repudiation of National Socialism that one might hope to find. The
philosophical character of Heidegger's involvement with Nazism is
discussed later in this article.




After *Being and Time* there is a reorienting shift in
Heidegger's philosophy known as 'the turn' (*die
Kehre*). Exactly when this occurs is a matter of debate, although
it is probably safe to say that it is in progress by 1930 and largely
established by the early 1940s. If dating the turn has its problems,
saying exactly what it involves is altogether more challenging. Indeed,
Heidegger himself characterized it not as a turn in his own thinking
(or at least in his thinking alone) but as a turn in Being. As he later
put it in a preface he wrote to Richardson's ground-breaking text
on his work (Richardson 1963), the "*Kehre* is at work
within the issue [that is named by the titles 'Being and
Time'/'Time and Being.']... It is not something
that I did, nor does it pertain to my thinking only". The core
elements of the turn are indicated in what is now considered by many
commentators to be Heidegger's second greatest work,
*Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)*, (*Beitrage zur
Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)*). This uncompromising text was written
in 1936-7, but was not published in German until 1989 and not in
English translation until 1999. Section 3 of this article will attempt
to navigate the main currents of the turn, and thus of
Heidegger's later philosophy, in the light of this increasingly
discussed text.




Heidegger died in Freiburg on May 26, 1976. He was buried in
Messkirch.


## 2. *Being and Time*


### 2.1 The Text and its Pre-History



*Being and Time* is a long and complex book. The reader is
immediately struck by what Mulhall (2005, viii) calls the
"tortured intensity of [Heidegger's] prose", although if
the text is read in its original German it is possible to hear the
vast number of what appear to be neologisms as attempts to reanimate
the German language. According to this latter gloss, the linguistic
constructions concerned--which involve hyphenations, unusual
prefixes and uncommon suffixes--reveal the hidden meanings and
resonances of ordinary talk. In any case, for many readers, the
initially strange and difficult language of
*Being and Time* is fully vindicated by the realization that
Heidegger is struggling to say things for which our conventional terms
and linguistic constructions are ultimately inadequate. Indeed, for
some thinkers who have toiled in its wake, Heidegger's language
becomes *the* language of philosophy (although for an
alternative and critical view of the language of *Being and
Time*, see Adorno 1964/2002). Viewed from the perspective of
Heidegger's own intentions, the work is incomplete. It was meant
to have two parts, each of which was supposed to be divided into three
divisions. What we have published under the title of *Being and
Time* are the first two divisions of (the intended) part one. The
reasons for this incompleteness will be explored later in this
article. 




One might reasonably depict the earliest period of Heidegger's
philosophical work, in Freiburg (1915-23) and Marburg (1923-6), before
he commenced the writing of *Being and Time* itself, as the
pre-history of that seminal text (although for an alternative analysis
that stresses not only a back-and-forth movement in Heidegger's
earliest thought between theology and philosophy, but also the
continuity between that earliest thought and the later philosophy, see
van Buren 1994, 2005). Viewed in relation to *Being and Time*,
the central philosophical theme in these early years is
Heidegger's complex critical relationship with Husserl's
transcendental phenomenology--what Crowell (2005, p.49) calls
"a dynamic of attraction and repulsion"--as driven
by Heidegger's transformative reading of Aristotle. As early as a
1919 lecture course, for example, we find Heidegger arguing that
Husserl's view (developed in the *Logical Investigations*,
Husserl 1900/1973), that philosophy should renounce theory and
concentrate on the things given directly in consciousness, is flawed
because such givenness is itself a theoretical construct. For the young
Heidegger, then, it is already the case that phenomenological analysis
starts not with Husserlian intentionality (the consciousness of
objects), but rather with an interpretation of the pre-theoretical
conditions for there to be such intentionality. This idea will later be
central to, and elaborated within, *Being and Time*, by which
point a number of important developments (explained in more detail
later in this article) will have occurred in Heidegger's
thinking: the Husserlian notion of formal ontology (the study of the a
priori categories that describe objects of any sort, by means of our
judgments and perceptions) will have been transformed into
*fundamental ontology* (a neo-Aristotelian search for what it is
that unites and makes possible our varied and diverse senses of what it
is to be); Husserl's transcendental consciousness (the
irreducible thinking ego or subject that makes possible objective
inquiry) will have been transfigured into *Dasein* (the
inherently social being who already operates with a pre-theoretical
grasp of the a priori structures that make possible particular modes of
Being); and Husserlian intentionality (a consciousness of objects) will
have been replaced by the concept of *care* or
*Being-in-the-world* (a non-intentional, or perhaps
pre-intentional, openness to a world). 




Each of these aspects of Heidegger's framework in *Being
and Time* emerges out of his radical rethinking of Aristotle, a
rethinking that finds its fullest and most explicit expression in a
1925-6 lecture course entitled *Logik* (later renamed *Logik
(Aristoteles)* by Heidegger's student Helene Weiss, in
order to distinguish this lecture course from a later one he gave also
entitled *Logik*; see Kisiel 1993, 559, note 23). On
Heidegger's interpretation (see Sheehan 1975), Aristotle holds
that since every meaningful appearance of beings involves an event in
which a human being *takes a being as*--*as*, say,
a ship in which one can sail or *as* a god that one should
respect--what unites all the different modes of Being is that
they realize some form of presence (present-ness) to human beings. This
presence-to is expressed in the 'as' of
'taking-as'. Thus the unity of the different modes of Being
is grounded in a capacity for taking-as (making-present-to) that
Aristotle argues is the essence of human existence. Heidegger's
response, in effect, is to suggest that although Aristotle is on the
right track, he has misconceived the deep structure of taking-as. For
Heidegger, taking-as is grounded not in multiple modes of presence, but
rather in a more fundamental temporal unity (remember, it's Being
*and* time, more on this later) that characterizes
Being-in-the-world (care). This engagement with Aristotle--the
Aristotle, that is, that Heidegger unearths during his early years in
Freiburg and Marburg--explains why, as Sheehan (1975, 87)
puts it, "Aristotle appears directly or indirectly on virtually
every page" of *Being and Time*. (For more on
Heidegger's pre-*Being-and-Time* period, see e.g., Kisiel
1993, Kisiel and van Buren 1994, and Heidegger's early occasional
writings as reproduced in the collection *Becoming Heidegger*.
For more on the philosophical relationship between Husserl and
Heidegger, see e.g., Crowell 2001 and the review of Crowell's
book by Carman 2002; Dahlstrom 1994; Dostal 1993; Overgaard 2003.)


### 2.2 Division 1


#### 2.2.1 The Question




Let's back up in order to bring Heidegger's central
concern into better view. (The 'way in' to *Being and
Time* that I am about to present follows Gelven 1989 6-7.) Consider
some philosophical problems that will be familiar from introductory
metaphysics classes: Does the table that I think I see before me exist?
Does God exist? Does mind, conceived as an entity distinct from body,
exist? These questions have the following form: does *x* (where *x* = some
particular kind of thing) exist? Questions of this form presuppose that
we already know what 'to exist' means. We typically
don't even notice this presupposition. But Heidegger does, which
is why he raises the more fundamental question: what does 'to
exist' *mean*? This is one way of asking what Heidegger
calls the question of the meaning of Being, and *Being and Time*
is an investigation into that question.




Many of Heidegger's translators capitalize the word
'Being' (*Sein*) to mark what, in the *Basic
Problems of Phenomenology*, Heidegger will later call the
*ontological difference*, the crucial distinction between Being
and beings (entities). The question of the meaning of Being is
concerned with what it is that makes beings intelligible *as*
beings, and whatever that factor (Being) is, it is seemingly not itself
simply another being among beings. Unfortunately the capitalization of
'Being' also has the disadvantage of suggesting that Being
is, as Sheehan (2001) puts it, an ethereal metaphysical something that
lies beyond entities, what he calls 'Big Being'. But to
think of Being in this way would be to commit the very mistake that the
capitalization is supposed to help us avoid. For while Being is always
the Being of some entity, Being is not itself some kind of higher-order
being waiting to be discovered. As long as we remain alert to this
worry, we can follow the otherwise helpful path of capitalization.




According to Heidegger, the question of the meaning of Being, and thus
Being as such, has been forgotten by 'the tradition'
(roughly, Western philosophy from Plato onwards). Heidegger means by
this that the history of Western thought has failed to heed the
ontological difference, and so has articulated Being precisely as a
kind of ultimate being, as evidenced by a series of namings of Being,
for example as idea, energeia, substance, monad or will to power. In this way Being *as such* has been
forgotten. So Heidegger sets himself the task of recovering the
question of the meaning of Being. In this context he draws two
distinctions between different kinds of inquiry. The first, which is
just another way of expressing the ontological difference, is between
the ontical and the ontological, where the former is concerned with
facts about entities and the latter is concerned with the meaning of
Being, with how entities are intelligible as entities. Using this
technical language, we can put the point about the forgetting of Being
as such by saying that the history of Western thought is characterized
by an 'onticization' of Being (by the practice of treating
Being as a being). However, as Heidegger explains, here in the words
of
*Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics*, "an ontic knowledge
can never alone direct itself 'to' the objects, because
without the ontological... it can have no possible Whereto"
(translation taken from Overgaard 2002, p.76, note 7). The second
distinction between different kinds of inquiry, drawn within the
category of the ontological, is between regional ontology and
fundamental ontology, where the former is concerned with the ontologies
of particular domains, say biology or banking, and the latter is
concerned with
the a priori, transcendental conditions that make possible particular modes of Being
(i.e., particular regional ontologies). For Heidegger, the
ontical presupposes the regional-ontological, which in turn presupposes
the fundamental-ontological. As he puts it:



> 
> 
> 
> The question of Being aims... at ascertaining the a priori
> conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine
> beings as beings of such and such a type, and, in doing so, already
> operate with an understanding of Being, 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*. (*Being and Time* 3:
> 31) (References to *Being and Time* will be given in the form of
> 'section: page number', where 'page number'
> refers to the widely used Macquarrie and Robinson English
> translation.)
> 
> 
> 




So how do we carry out fundamental ontology, and thus answer the
question of the meaning of Being? It is here that Heidegger introduces
the notion of *Dasein* (Da-sein: there-being). One proposal for
how to think about the term 'Dasein' is that it is
Heidegger's label for the distinctive *mode* of Being
realized by human beings (for this reading, see e.g., Brandom 2002,
325). Haugeland (2005, 422) complains that this interpretation clashes
unhelpfully with Heidegger's identification of care as the Being
of Dasein, given Heidegger's prior stipulation that Being is
always the Being of some possible entity. To keep 'Dasein'
on the right side of the ontological difference, then, we might
conceive of it as Heidegger's term for the distinctive kind of
*entity* that human beings as such are. This fits with many of
Heidegger's explicit characterizations of Dasein (see e.g.,
*Being and Time* 2: 27, 3: 32), and it probably deserves to be
called the standard view in the secondary literature (see e.g.,
Haugeland 2005 for an explicit supporting case). That said, one needs
to be careful about precisely what sort of entity we are talking about
here. For Dasein is not to be understood as 'the biological human
being'. Nor is it to be understood as 'the person'.
Haugeland (2005, 423) argues that Dasein is "*a way of
life* shared by the members of some community". (As Haugeland
notes, there is an analogy here, one that Heidegger himself draws, with
the way in which we might think of a language existing as an entity,
that is, as a communally shared way of speaking.) This appeal to the
community will assume a distinctive philosophical shape as the argument
of *Being and Time* progresses. 




The foregoing considerations bring an important question to the
fore: what, according to Heidegger, is so special about human beings as
such? Here there are broadly speaking two routes that one might take
through the text of *Being and Time*. The first unfolds as
follows. If we look around at beings in general--from particles
to planets, ants to apes--it is *human* beings
*alone* who are able to encounter the question of what it means
to be (e.g., in moments of anxiety in which the world can appear
meaning-less, more on which later). More specifically, it is human
beings alone who (a) operate in their everyday activities with an
understanding of Being (although, as we shall see, one which is
*pre*-ontological, in that it is implicit and vague) and (b) are
able to reflect upon what it means to be. This gives us a way of
understanding statements such as "Dasein is ontically
distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an
*issue* for it" (*Being and Time* 4: 32). Mulhall,
who tends to pursue this way of characterizing Dasein, develops the
idea by explaining that while inanimate objects *merely* persist
through time and while plants and non-human animals have their lives
determined *entirely* by the demands of survival and
reproduction, human beings *lead their lives* (Mulhall 2005,
15). In terms of its deep ontological structure, although not typically
in terms of how it presents itself to the individual in consciousness,
each moment in a human life constitutes a kind of branch-point at which
a person 'chooses' a kind of life, a possible way to be. It
is crucial to emphasize that one may, in the relevant sense,
'choose' an existing path simply by continuing unthinkingly
along it, since in principle at least, and within certain limits, one
always had, and still has, the capacity to take a different path. (This
gives us a sense of human freedom, one that will be unpacked more
carefully below.) This can all sound terribly inward-looking, but that
is not Heidegger's intention. In a way that is about to become
clearer, Dasein's projects and possibilities are essentially
bound up with the ways in which other entities may become intelligible.
Moreover, terms such as 'lead' and 'choose'
must be interpreted in the light of Heidegger's account of care
as the Being of Dasein (see later), an account that blunts any
temptation to hear these terms in a manner that suggests inner
deliberation or planning on the part of a reflective subject. (So
perhaps Mulhall's point that human beings are distinctive in that
they lead their lives would be better expressed as the observation that
human beings are the nuclei of lives laying themselves
out.) 




The second route to an understanding of Dasein, and thus of what is
special about human beings as such, emphasizes the link with the
taking-as structure highlighted earlier. Sheehan (2001) develops just
such a line of exegesis by combining two insights. The first is that
the 'Da' of Da-sein may be profitably translated not as
'there' but as 'open'. This openness is in turn
to be understood as 'the possibility of taking-as' and thus
as a preintellectual openness to Being that is necessary for us to
encounter beings as beings in particular ways (e.g., practically,
theoretically, aesthetically). Whether or not the standard translation
of 'Da' as 'there' is incapable of doing
justice to this idea is moot--one might express the same view by
saying that to be Dasein is to be *there*, in the midst of
entities making sense a certain way. Nevertheless, the term
'openness' does seem to provide a nicely graphic expression
of the phenomenon in question. Sheehan's second insight, driven
by a comment of Heidegger's in the *Zollikon* seminars to
the effect that the verbal emphasis in 'Da-sein' is to be
placed on the second syllable, is that the 'sein' of
'Da-sein' should be heard as 'having-to-be', in
contrast with 'occasionally or contingently is'. These dual
insights lead to a characterization of Dasein as *the
having-to-be-open*. In other words, Dasein (and so human beings as
such) cannot but be open: it is a necessary characteristic of human
beings (an a priori structure of our existential constitution, not an
exercise of our wills) that we operate with the sense-making capacity
to take-other-beings-as.




The two interpretative paths that we have just walked are not
necessarily in conflict: in the words of Vallega-Neu (2003, 12),
"in existing, Dasein occurs... as a transcending beyond
beings into the disclosure of being as such, so that in this
transcending not only its own possibilities of being [our first route]
but also the being of other beings [our second route] is
disclosed". And this helps us to grasp the meaning of
Heidegger's otherwise opaque claim that Dasein, and indeed only
Dasein, *exists*, where existence is understood (via
etymological considerations) as *ek-sistence*, that is, as a
standing out. Dasein stands out in two senses, each of which
corresponds to one of the two dimensions of our proposed
interpretation. First, Dasein can stand back or 'out' from
its own occurrence in the world and observe itself (see e.g., Gelven
1989, 49). Second, Dasein stands out in an openness to and an opening
of Being (see e.g., Vallega-Neu 2004, 11-12).




As we have seen, it is an essential characteristic of Dasein that,
in its ordinary ways of engaging with other entities, it operates with
a preontological understanding of Being, that is, with a distorted or
buried grasp of the a priori conditions that, by underpinning the
taking-as structure, make possible particular modes of Being. This
suggests that a disciplined investigation of those everyday modes of
engagement on the part of Dasein (what Heidegger calls an
"existential analytic of Dasein") will be a first step
towards revealing a shared but hidden underlying meaning of Being.
Heidegger puts it like this:



> 
> 
>  whenever an ontology takes for its
> theme entities whose character of Being is other than that of Dasein,
> it has its own foundation and motivation in Dasein's own ontical
> structure, in which a pre-ontological understanding of Being is
> comprised as a definite characteristic... Therefore fundamental
> ontology, from which alone all other ontologies can take their rise,
> must be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein. (*Being
> and Time* 3: 33-4) 
> 
> 
> 



It is important to stress here that, in
Heidegger's eyes, this prioritizing of Dasein does not lead to
(what he calls) "a vicious subjectivizing of the totality of
entities" (*Being and Time* 4: 34). This resistance
towards any unpalatable anti-realism is an issue to which we shall
return.




Dasein is, then, our primary 'object' of study, and our
point of investigative departure is Dasein's everyday encounters
with entities. But what sort of philosophical method is appropriate for
the ensuing examination? Famously, Heidegger's adopted method is
a species of phenomenology. In the Heideggerian framework, however,
phenomenology is not to be understood (as it sometimes is) as the study
of how things merely appear in experience. Rather, in a recognizably
Kantian staging of the idea, Heidegger follows Husserl (1913/1983) in
conceiving of phenomenology as a theoretical enterprise that takes
ordinary experience as its point of departure, but which, through an
attentive and sensitive examination of that experience, aims to reveal
the a priori, transcendental conditions that shape and structure it. In
Heidegger's Being-centred project, these are the conditions
"which, in every kind of Being that factical Dasein may possess,
persist as determinative for the character of its Being"
(*Being and Time* 5: 38). Presupposed by ordinary experience,
these structures must in some sense be present with that experience,
but they are not simply available to be read off from its surface,
hence the need for disciplined and careful phenomenological analysis to
reveal them as they are. So far so good. But, in a departure from the
established Husserlian position, one that demonstrates the influence of
Dilthey, Heidegger claims that phenomenology is not just
transcendental, it is *hermeneutic* (for discussion, see e.g.,
Caputo 1984, Kisiel 2002 chapter 8). In other words, its goal is always
to deliver an *interpretation* of Being, an interpretation that,
on the one hand, is guided by certain historically embedded ways of
thinking (ways of taking-as reflected in Dasein's preontological
understanding of Being) that the philosopher as Dasein and as
interpreter brings to the task, and, on the other hand, is ceaselessly
open to revision, enhancement and replacement. For Heidegger, this
hermeneutic structure is not a limitation on understanding, but a
precondition of it, and philosophical understanding (conceived as
fundamental ontology) is no exception. Thus *Being and Time*
itself has a spiral structure in which a sequence of reinterpretations
produces an ever more illuminating comprehension of Being. As Heidegger
puts it later in the text:



> 
> 
> 
> What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it
> the right way... In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of
> the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold
> of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have
> understood that our first, last and constant task is never to allow our
> fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception to be presented to us by
> fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific
> theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the
> things themselves. (*Being and Time* 32: 195)
> 
> 
> 




On the face of it, the hermeneutic conception of phenomenology sits
unhappily with a project that aims to uncover *the* a priori
transcendental conditions that make possible particular modes of Being
(which is arguably one way of glossing the project of "working
out [the] fore-structures [of understanding] in terms of the things
themselves"). And this is a tension that, it seems fair to say,
is never fully resolved within the pages of *Being and Time*.
The best we can do is note that, by the end of the text, the
transcendental has itself become historically embedded. More on that
below. What is also true is that there is something of a divide in
certain areas of contemporary Heidegger scholarship over whether one
should emphasize the transcendental dimension of Heidegger's
phenomenology (e.g., Crowell 2001, Crowell and Malpas 2007) or the
hermeneutic dimension (e.g., Kisiel 2002). 


#### 2.2.2 Modes of Encounter




How, then, does the existential analytic unfold? Heidegger argues
that we ordinarily encounter entities as (what he calls)
*equipment*, that is, as being for certain sorts of tasks
(cooking, writing, hair-care, and so on). Indeed we achieve our most
primordial (closest) relationship with equipment not by looking at the
entity in question, or by some detached intellectual or theoretical
study of it, but rather by skillfully manipulating it in a hitch-free
manner. Entities so encountered have their own distinctive kind of
Being that Heidegger famously calls *readiness-to-hand*. Thus:




> 
> 
> The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we
> seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship
> to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which
> it is--as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific
> 'manipulability' of the hammer. The kind of Being which
> equipment possesses--in which it manifests itself in its own
> right--we call 'readiness-to-hand'. (*Being
> and Time* 15: 98)
> 
> 




Readiness-to-hand has a distinctive phenomenological signature.
While engaged in hitch-free skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious
experience of the items of equipment in use *as independent
objects* (i.e., as the bearers of determinate properties that exist
independently of the Dasein-centred context of action in which the
equipmental entity is involved). Thus, while engaged in trouble-free
hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the
hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, *in the way that one would if
one simply stood back and thought about them*.
Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent. Moreover, Heidegger
claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and work-bench in this way not
part of the engaged carpenter's phenomenal world, neither, in a
sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes absorbed in his activity
in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and
against a world of objects. Crucially, it does not follow from this
analysis that Dasein's behaviour in such contexts is automatic,
in the sense of there being no awareness present at all, but rather
that the awareness that is present (what Heidegger calls
*circumspection*) is non-subject-object in form.
Phenomenologically speaking, then, there are no subjects and no
objects; there is only the experience of the ongoing task (e.g.,
hammering).




Heidegger, then, denies that the categories of subject and object
characterize our most basic way of encountering entities. He maintains,
however, that they apply to a derivative kind of encounter. When Dasein
engages in, for example, the practices of natural science, when sensing
takes place purely in the service of reflective or philosophical
contemplation, or when philosophers claim to have identified certain
context-free metaphysical building blocks of the universe (e.g., points
of pure extension, monads), the entities under study are
phenomenologically removed from the settings of everyday equipmental
practice and are thereby revealed as fully fledged independent objects,
that is, as the bearers of certain context-general determinate or
measurable properties (size in metres, weight in kilos etc.). Heidegger
calls this mode of Being *presence-at-hand*, and he sometimes
refers to present-at-hand entities as 'Things'. With this
phenomenological transformation in the mode of Being of entities comes
a corresponding transformation in the mode of Being of Dasein. Dasein
becomes a subject, one whose project is to explain and predict the
behaviour of an independent, objective universe. Encounters with the
present-at-hand are thus fundamentally subject-object in structure.




The final phenomenological category identified during the first
phase of the existential analytic is what Heidegger calls
*un-readiness-to-hand*. This mode of Being of entities emerges
when skilled practical activity is disturbed by broken or
malfunctioning equipment, discovered-to-be-missing equipment, or
in-the-way equipment. When encountered as un-ready-to-hand, entities
are no longer phenomenologically transparent. However, they are not yet
the fully fledged objects of the present-at-hand, since their broken,
malfunctioning, missing or obstructive status is defined relative to a
particular equipmental context. The combination of two key passages
illuminates this point: First: 




> 
> 
> [The] presence-at-hand of
> something that cannot be used is still not devoid of all
> readiness-to-hand whatsoever; equipment which is present-at-hand in
> this way is still not just a Thing which occurs somewhere. The damage
> to the equipment is still not a mere alteration of a Thing--not
> a change of properties which just occurs in something
> present-at-hand. (*Being and Time* 16: 103)
> 
> 
> 
> 



 And second:




> 
> 
> When something cannot be used--when, for instance, a tool
> definitely refuses to work--it can be conspicuous only in
> and for dealings in which something is manipulated. (*Being
> and Time* 68: 406) 
> 
> 
> 
> 



Thus a driver does not encounter a punctured
tyre as a lump of rubber of measurable mass; she encounters it as a
damaged item of equipment, that is, as the cause of a temporary
interruption to her driving activity. With such disturbances to skilled
activity, Dasein emerges as a practical problem solver whose
context-embedded actions are directed at restoring smooth skilled
activity.




Although Heidegger does not put things this way, the complex
intermediate realm of the un-ready-to-hand is seemingly best thought of
as a spectrum of cases characterized by different modes and degrees of
engagement/disengagement. Much of the time Dasein's practical
problem solving will involve recovery strategies (e.g., switching to a
different mode of transport) which preserve the marks of fluid and
flexible know-how that are present in ready-to-hand contexts. In the
limit, however (e.g., when a mechanic uses his theoretical knowledge of
how cars work to guide a repair), Dasein's problem solving
activity will begin to approximate the theoretical reasoning
distinctive of scientific inquiry into present-at-hand entities. But
even here Dasein is not 'just theorizing' or 'just
looking', so it is not yet, in Heidegger's terms, a pure
disengaged subject. With this spectrum of cases in view, it is possible
to glimpse a potential worry for Heidegger's account. Cappuccio
and Wheeler (2010; see also Wheeler 2005, 143) argue that the situation
of wholly transparent readiness-to-hand is something of an ideal state.
Skilled activity is never (or very rarely) perfectly smooth. Moreover,
minimal subjective activity (such as a nonconceptual awareness of
certain spatially situated movements by my body) produces a background
noise that never really disappears. Thus a distinction between Dasein
and its environment is, to some extent, preserved, and this distinction
arguably manifests the kind of minimal subject-object dichotomy that is
characteristic of those cases of un-readiness-to-hand that lie closest
to readiness-to-hand.




On the interpretation of Heidegger just given, Dasein's access
to the world is only intermittently that of a representing subject. An
alternative reading, according to which Dasein *always* exists
as a subject relating to the world via representations, is defended by
Christensen (1997, 1998). Christensen targets Dreyfus (1990) as a
prominent and influential exponent of the intermittent-subject view.
*Among other criticisms*, Christensen accuses Dreyfus of
mistakenly hearing Heidegger's clear rejection of the thought
that Dasein's access to the world is always theoretical (or
theory-like) in character as being, at the same time, a rejection of
the thought that Dasein's access to the world is always in the
mode of a representing subject; but, argues Christensen, there may be
non-theoretical forms of the subject-world relation, so the claim that
Heidegger advocated the second rejection is not established by pointing
out that he advocated the first. Let's assume that Christensen is
right about this. The supporter of the intermittent-subject view might
still argue that although Heidegger holds that Dasein
*sometimes* emerges as a subject whose access to the world is
non-theoretical (plausibly, in certain cases of un-readiness-to-hand),
there is other textual evidence, beyond that which indicates the
non-theoretical character of hitch-free skilled activity, to suggest
that readiness-to-hand must remain non-subject-object in form. Whether
or not there is such evidence would then need to be
settled. 


#### 2.2.3 Being-in-the-World




What the existential analytic has given us so far is a
phenomenological description of Dasein's within-the-world
encounters with entities. The next clarification concerns the notion of
world and the associated within-ness of Dasein. Famously, Heidegger
writes of Dasein *as* Being-in-the-world. In effect, then, the
notion of Being-in-the-world provides us with a reinterpretation of the
*activity of existing* (Dreyfus 1990, 40), where existence is
given the narrow reading (ek-sistence) identified earlier. Understood
as a unitary phenomenon (as opposed to a contingent, additive,
tripartite combination of Being, in-ness, and the world),
Being-in-the-world is an essential characteristic of Dasein. As
Heidegger explains: 



> 
> 
> 
> Being-in is not a 'property' which Dasein sometimes has
> and sometimes does not have, and *without* which it could
> *be* just as well as it could be with it. It is not the case
> that man 'is' and then has, by way of an extra, a
> relationship-of-Being towards the 'world'--a world
> with which he provides himself occasionally. Dasein is never
> 'proximally' an entity which is, so to speak, free from
> Being-in, but which sometimes has the inclination to take up a
> 'relationship' towards the world. Taking up relationships
> towards the world is possible only *because* Dasein, as
> Being-in-the-world, is as it is. This state of Being does not arise
> just because some entity is present-at-hand outside of Dasein and meets
> up with it. Such an entity can 'meet up with' Dasein only
> in so far as it can, of its own accord, show itself within a
> *world*. (*Being and Time* 12: 84)
> 
> 
> 




As this passage makes clear, the Being-in dimension of
Being-in-the-world cannot be thought of as a merely spatial relation in
some sense that might be determined by a GPS device, since Dasein is
never just present-at-hand within the world in the way demanded by that
sort of spatial in-ness. Heidegger sometimes uses the term
*dwelling* to capture the distinctive manner in which Dasein is
in the world. To dwell in a house is not merely to be inside it
spatially in the sense just canvassed. Rather, it is to belong there,
to have a familiar place there. It is in this sense that Dasein is
(essentially) in the world. (Heidegger will later introduce an
existential notion of spatiality that *does* help to illuminate
the sense in which Dasein is in the world. More on that below.) So now,
what is the world such that Dasein (essentially) dwells in it? To
answer this question we need to spend some time unpacking the
Heideggerian concept of an 'involvement'
(*Bewandtnis*).




The German term *Bewandtnis* is extremely difficult to
translate in a way that captures all its native nuances (for
discussion, see Tugendhat 1967; thanks to a reviewer for emphasizing
this point). And things are made more complicated by the fact that,
during his exposition, Heidegger freely employs a number of closely
related notions, including 'assignment',
'indication' and 'reference'. Nevertheless,
what is clear is that Heidegger introduces the term that Macquarrie and
Robinson translate as 'involvement' to express the roles
that equipmental entities play--the ways in which they are
involved--in Dasein's everyday patterns of activity.
Crucially, for Heidegger, an involvement is not a stand-alone
structure, but rather a link in a network of intelligibility that he
calls a *totality of involvements*. Take the stock Heideggerian
example: the hammer is involved in an act of hammering; that hammering
is involved in making something fast; and that making something fast is
involved in protecting the human agent against bad weather. Such
totalities of involvements are the contexts of everyday equipmental
practice. As such, they *define* equipmental entities, so the
hammer is intelligible as what it is only with respect to the shelter
and, indeed, all the other items of equipment to which it meaningfully
relates in Dasein's everyday practices. This relational ontology
generates what Brandom (1983, 391-3) calls Heidegger's
'strong systematicity condition', as given voice in
Heidegger's striking claim that "[t]aken strictly, there
'is' no such thing as *an* equipment"
(*Being and Time*, 15: 97). And this radical holism spreads,
because once one begins to trace a path through a network of
involvements, one will inevitably traverse vast regions of
involvement-space. Thus links will be traced not only from hammers to
hammering to making fast to protection against the weather, but also
from hammers to pulling out nails to dismantling wardrobes to moving
house. This behaviour will refer back to many other behaviours
(packing, van-driving) and thus to many other items of equipment (large
boxes, removal vans), and so on. The result is a large-scale holistic
network of interconnected relational significance. Such networks
constitute worlds, in *one of* Heidegger's key senses of
the term--an ontical sense that he describes as having a
pre-ontological signification (*Being and Time* 14:
93).




Before a second key sense of the Heideggerian notion of world is
revealed, some important detail can be added to the emerging picture.
Heidegger points out that involvements are not uniform structures. Thus
I am currently working with a computer (a *with-which*), in the
practical context of my office (an *in-which*), in order to
write this encyclopedia entry (an *in-order-to*), which is aimed
towards presenting an introduction to Heidegger's philosophy (a
*towards-this*), for the sake of my academic work, that is, for
the sake of my being an academic (a *for-the-sake-of-which*).
The final involvement here, the for-the-sake-of-which, is crucial,
because according to Heidegger all totalities of involvements have a
link of this type at their base. This forges a connection between (i)
the idea that each moment in Dasein's existence constitutes a
branch-point at which it chooses a way to be, and (ii) the claim that
Dasein's projects and possibilities are essentially bound up with
the ways in which other entities may become intelligible. This is
because every for-the-sake-of-which is the base structure of an
equipment-defining totality of involvements *and* reflects a
possible way for Dasein to be (an academic, a carpenter, a parent, or
whatever). Moreover, given that entities are intelligible only within
contexts of activity that, so to speak, arrive with Dasein, this helps
to explain Heidegger's claim (*Being and Time* 16: 107)
that, in encounters with entities, the world is something with which
Dasein is always already familiar. Finally, it puts further flesh on
the phenomenological category of the un-ready-to-hand. Thus when I am
absorbed in trouble-free typing, the computer and the role that it
plays in my academic activity are transparent aspects of my experience.
But if the computer crashes, I become aware of it as an entity with
which I was working in the practical context of my office, in order to
write an encyclopedia entry aimed towards presenting an introduction to
Heidegger's philosophy. And I become aware of the fact that my
behaviour is being organized for the sake of my being an academic. So
disturbances have the effect of exposing totalities of involvements
and, therefore, worlds. (For a second way in which worlds are
phenomenologically 'lit up', see Heidegger's analysis
of signs (*Being and Time* 17:107-114); for discussion, see
Dreyfus 1990, 100-2, Cappuccio and Wheeler 2010.)





As already indicated, Heidegger sometimes uses the expression
'world' in a different key sense, to designate what he
calls the "ontologico-existential concept of
*worldhood*" (*Being and Time* 14: 93). At this
point in the existential analytic, worldhood is usefully identified as
the abstract network mode of organizational configuration that is
shared by all concrete totalities of involvements. We shall see,
however, that as the hermeneutic spiral of the text unfolds, the notion
of worldhood is subject to a series of reinterpretations until,
finally, its deep structure gets played out in terms of temporality.



#### 2.2.4 The Critique of Cartesianism




Having completed what we might think of as the first phase of the
existential analytic, Heidegger uses its results to launch an attack
on one of the front-line representatives of the tradition, namely
Descartes. This is the only worked-through example in *Being and
Time* itself of what Heidegger calls the destruction
(*Destruktion*) of the Western philosophical tradition, a
process that was supposed to be a prominent theme in the ultimately
unwritten second part of the text. The aim is to show that although the
tradition takes theoretical knowledge to be primary, such knowledge
(the prioritization of which is an aspect of the
'onticization' of Being mentioned earlier) presupposes the
more fundamental openness to Being that Heidegger has identified as an
essential characteristic of Dasein.




According to Heidegger, Descartes presents the world to us
"with its skin off" (*Being and Time* 20: 132),
i.e., as a collection of present-at-hand entities to be encountered by
subjects. The consequence of this prioritizing of the present-at-hand
is that the subject needs to claw itself into a world of equipmental
meaning by adding what Heidegger calls 'value-predicates'
(context-dependent meanings) to the present-at-hand. In stark contrast,
Heidegger's own view is that Dasein is in primary epistemic
contact not with context-independent present-at-hand primitives (e.g.,
raw sense data, such as a 'pure' experience of a patch of
red), to which context-dependent meaning would need to be added via
value-predicates, but rather with equipment, the kind of entity whose
mode of Being is readiness-to-hand and which therefore comes already
laden with context-dependent significance. What is perhaps
Heidegger's best statement of this opposition comes later in
*Being and Time*.



> 
> 
> 
> What we 'first' hear is never noises or complexes of
> sounds, but the creaking waggon, the motor-cycle. We hear the
> column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire
> crackling... It requires a very artificial and complicated frame
> of mind to 'hear' a 'pure noise'. The fact that
> motor-cycles and waggons are what we proximally hear is the phenomenal
> evidence that in every case Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, already
> dwells alongside what is ready-to-hand within-the-world; it certainly
> does not dwell proximally alongside 'sensations'; nor would
> it first have to give shape to the swirl of sensations to provide a
> springboard from which the subject leaps off and finally arrives at a
> 'world'. Dasein, as essentially understanding, is
> proximally alongside what is understood. (*Being and Time* 34:
> 207)
> 
> 
> 




For Heidegger, then, we start not with the present-at-hand, moving
to the ready-to-hand by adding value-predicates, but with the
ready-to-hand, moving to the present-at-hand by stripping away the
holistic networks of everyday equipmental meaning. It seems clear,
then, that our two positions are diametrically opposed to each other,
but why should we favour Heidegger's framework over
Descartes'? Heidegger's flagship argument here is that the
systematic addition of value-predicates to present-at-hand primitives
cannot transform our encounters with those objects into encounters with
equipment. It comes in the following brief but dense passage:
"Adding on value-predicates cannot tell us anything at all new
about the Being of goods, but would merely presuppose again that goods
have pure presence-at-hand as their kind of Being. Values would then be
determinate characteristics which a thing possesses, and they would be
present-at-hand"(*Being and Time* 21: 132). In
other words, once we have assumed that we begin with the
present-at-hand, values must take the form of determinate features of
objects, and therefore constitute nothing but more present-at-hand
structures. And if you add more present-at-hand structures to some
existing present-at-hand structures, what you end up with is not
equipmental meaning (totalities of involvements) but merely a larger
number of present-at-hand structures.




Heidegger's argument here is (at best) incomplete (for
discussion, see Dreyfus 1990, Wheeler 2005). The defender of
Cartesianism might concede that present-at-hand entities have
determinate properties, but wonder why the fact that an entity has
determinate properties is necessarily an indication of
presence-at-hand. On this view, having determinate properties is
necessary but not sufficient for an entity to be present-at-hand. More
specifically, she might wonder why involvements cannot be thought of as
determinate features that entities possess *just when they are
embedded in certain contexts of use*. Consider for example the
various involvements specified in the academic writing context
described earlier. They certainly seem to be determinate, albeit
context-relative, properties of the computer. Of course, the massively
holistic character of totalities of involvements would make the task of
specifying the necessary value-predicates (say, as sets of internal
representations) incredibly hard, but it is unclear that it makes that
task impossible. So it seems as if Heidegger doesn't really
develop his case in sufficient detail. However, Dreyfus (1990) pursues
a response that Heidegger might have given, one that draws on the
familiar philosophical distinction between knowing-how and
knowing-that. It seems that value-predicates constitute a form of
knowing-that (i.e., knowing that an entity has a certain
context-dependent property) whereas the circumspective knowledge of
totalities of involvements (Dasein's skilled practical activity)
constitutes a form of knowing-how (i.e., knowing how to use equipment in
appropriate ways; see the characterization of readiness-to-hand given
earlier). Given the plausible (although not universally held)
assumption that knowing-how cannot be reduced to knowledge-that, this
would explain why value-predicates are simply the wrong sort of
structures to capture the phenomenon of world-embeddedness.


#### 2.2.5 Spatiality




In the wake of his critique of Cartesianism, Heidegger turns his
attention to spatiality. He argues that Dasein dwells in the world in a
spatial manner, but that the spatiality in question--Dasein's existential spatiality--cannot be a matter of
Dasein being located at a particular co-ordinate in physical, Cartesian
space. That would be to conceive of Dasein as present-at-hand, and
presence-at-hand is a mode of Being that can belong only to entities
other than Dasein. According to Heidegger, the existential spatiality
of Dasein is characterized most fundamentally by what he calls
*de-severance*, a bringing close.
" 'De-severing' amounts to making the farness vanish--that is, making the remoteness of something disappear, bringing
it close" (*Being and Time*: 23: 139). This is of course
not a bringing close in the sense of reducing physical distance,
although it may involve that. Heidegger's proposal is that
spatiality as de-severance is in some way (exactly how is a matter of
subtle interpretation; see e.g., Malpas 2006) intimately related to the
'reach' of Dasein's skilled practical activity. For
example, an entity is 'near by' if it is readily available
for some such activity, and 'far away' if it is not,
whatever physical distances may be involved. Given the Dasein-world
relationship highlighted above, the implication (drawn explicitly by
Heidegger, see *Being and Time* 22: 136) is that the spatiality
distinctive of equipmental entities, and thus of the world, is not
equivalent to physical, Cartesian space. Equipmental space is a matter
of pragmatically determined regions of functional places, defined by
Dasein-centred totalities of involvements (e.g., an office with places
for the computers, the photocopier, and so on--places that are
defined by the way in which they make these equipmental entities
available in the right sort of way for skilled activity). For
Heidegger, physical, Cartesian space is possible as something
meaningful for Dasein only because Dasein has de-severance as one of
its existential characteristics. Given the intertwining of de-severance
and equipmental space, this licenses the radical view (one that is
consistent with Heidegger's prior treatment of Cartesianism) that
physical, Cartesian space (as something that we can find intelligible)
presupposes equipmental space; the former is the present-at-hand
phenomenon that is revealed if we strip away the worldhood from the
latter. 




Malpas (forthcoming) rejects the account of spatiality given in
*Being and Time*. Drawing on Kant, he argues that "[any]
agent, insofar as it is capable of action at all (that is, insofar as
it is, indeed, an agent), acts in a space that is an objective space,
in which other agents also act, and yet which is always immediately
configured subjectively in terms of the agent's own oriented
locatedness" (Malpas forthcoming, 14). According to Malpas, then,
equipmental space (a space ordered in terms of practical activity and
within which an agent acts) presupposes a more fundamental notion of
space as a complex unity with objective, intersubjective and subjective
dimensions. If this is right, then of course equipmental space cannot
itself explain the spatial. A further problem, as Malpas also notes, is
that the whole issue of spatiality brings into sharp focus the awkward
relationship that Heidegger has with the body in *Being and
Time*. In what is now a frequently quoted remark, Heidegger sets
aside Dasein's embodiment, commenting that "this
'bodily nature' hides a whole problematic of its own,
though we shall not treat it here" (*Being and Time* 23:
143). Indeed, at times, Heidegger might be interpreted as linking
embodiment with Thinghood. For example: "[as] Dasein goes along
its ways, it does not measure off a stretch of space as a corporeal
Thing which is present-at-hand" (*Being and Time* 23:
140). Here one might plausibly contain the spread of presence-at-hand
by appealing to a distinction between material (present-at-hand) and
lived (existential) ways in which Dasein is embodied. Unfortunately
this distinction isn't made in *Being and Time* (a point
noted by Ricoeur 1992, 327), although Heidegger does adopt it in the
much later *Seminar in Le Thor* (see Malpas forthcoming, 5).
What seems clear, however, is that while the Heidegger of *Being and
Time* seems to hold that Dasein's embodiment somehow depends
on its existential spatiality (see e.g., 23: 143), the more obvious
thing to say is that Dasein's existential spatiality somehow
depends on its embodiment.




Before leaving this issue, it is worth noting briefly that space
reappears later in *Being and Time* (70: 418-21), where
Heidegger argues that existential space is derived from temporality.
This makes sense within Heidegger's overall project, because, as
we shall see, the deep structure of totalities of involvements (and
thus of equipmental space) is finally understood in terms of
temporality. Nevertheless, and although the distinctive character of
Heidegger's concept of temporality needs to be recognized, there
is reason to think that the dependency here may well travel in the
opposite direction. The worry, as Malpas (forthcoming, 26) again points
out, has a Kantian origin. Kant (1781/1999) argued that the temporal
character of inner sense is possible only because it is mediated by
outer intuition whose form is space. If this is right, and if we can
generalize appropriately, then the temporality that matters to
Heidegger will be dependent on existential spatiality, and not the
other way round. All in all, one is tempted to conclude that
Heidegger's treatment of spatiality in *Being and Time*,
and (relatedly) his treatment (or lack of it) of the body, face serious
difficulties. 


#### 2.2.6 Being-with




Heidegger turns next to the question of "*who* it is
that Dasein is in its everydayness" (*Being and Time,*
Introduction to IV: 149). He rejects the idea of Dasein as a Cartesian
'I-thing' (the Cartesian thinking thing conceived as a
substance), since once again this would be to think of Dasein as
present-at-hand. In searching for an alternative answer, Heidegger
observes that equipment is often revealed to us as being for the sake
of (the lives and projects of) other Dasein.



> 
> 
> The boat anchored at the shore is assigned in its Being-in-itself to
> an acquaintance who undertakes voyages with it; but even if it is a
> 'boat which is strange to us', it still is indicative of
> Others. The Others who are thus 'encountered' in a
> ready-to-hand, environmental context of equipment, are not somehow
> added on in thought to some Thing which is proximally just
> present-at-hand; such 'Things' are encountered from out of
> a world in which they are ready-to-hand for Others--a world
> which is always mine too in advance. (*Being and Time* 26:
> 154)
> 
> 
> 




On the basis of such observations, Heidegger argues that to be
Dasein at all means to Be-with: "So far as Dasein is at all, it
has Being-with-one-another as its kind of Being" (*Being and
Time* 26: 163). One's immediate response to this might be
that it is just false. After all, ordinary experience establishes that
each of us is often alone. But of course Heidegger is thinking in an
*ontological* register. Being-with (*Mitsein*) is thus
the a priori transcendental condition that makes it possible that
Dasein can discover equipment in this Other-related fashion. And
it's because Dasein has Being-with as one of its essential modes
of Being that everyday Dasein can experience being alone. Being-with is
thus the a priori transcendental condition for loneliness.




It is important to understand what Heidegger means by
'Others', a term that he uses interchangeably with the more
evocative 'the "they" ' (*das Man*). He
explains: 



> 
> 
> By 'Others' we do not mean everyone else
> but me--those over against whom the 'I' stands out.
> They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not
> distinguish oneself--those among whom one is too... By
> reason of this *with-like* Being-in-the-world, the world is
> always the one that I share with Others. (*Being and Time*
> 26: 154-5) 
> 
> 
> 
> 



A piece of data (cited by Dreyfus 1990) helps to illuminate this
idea. Each society seems to have its own sense of what counts as an
appropriate distance to stand from someone during verbal
communication, and this varies depending on whether the other person
is a lover, a friend, a colleague, or a business acquaintance, and on
whether communication is taking place in noisy or quiet circumstances.
Such standing-distance practices are of course normative, in that they
involve a sense of what one should and shouldn't do. And the norms in
question are culturally specific. So what this example illustrates is
that the phenomenon of the Others, the 'who' of everyday
Dasein, the group from whom for the most part I do not stand out, is
my culture, understood not as the sum of all its members, but as an
ontological phenomenon in its own right. This explains the following
striking remark. "The 'who' is not this one, not
that one, not oneself, not some people, and not the sum of them
all. The 'who' is the neuter, the
'they' " (*Being and Time* 27:
164). Another way to capture this idea is to say that what I do is
determined largely by 'what one does', and 'what one
does' is something that I absorb in various ways from my
culture. Thus Dreyfus (1990) prefers to translate *das Man* not
as 'the "they" ', but as 'the
one'.




This all throws important light on the phenomenon of world, since we
can now see that the crucial for-the-sake-of-which structure that
stands at the base of each totality of involvements is culturally and
historically conditioned. The specific ways in which I behave for the
sake of being an academic are what one does if one wants to be
considered a good academic, at this particular time, in this particular
historically embedded culture (carrying out research, tutoring
students, giving lectures, and so on). As Heidegger himself puts the
point: "Dasein is for the sake of the 'they' in an
everyday manner, and the 'they' itself articulates the
referential context of significance" (*Being and Time* 27:
167). Worlds (the referential context of significance, networks of
involvements) are then culturally and historically conditioned, from
which several things seem to follow. First, Dasein's everyday
world is, in the first instance, and of its very essence, a shared
world. Second, Being-with and Being-in-the-world are, if not
equivalent, deeply intertwined. And third, the sense in which worlds
are Dasein-dependent involves some sort of cultural relativism,
although, as we shall see later, this final issue is one that needs
careful interpretative handling.




Critics of the manner in which Heidegger develops the notion of
Being-with have often focussed, albeit in different ways, on the
thought that Heidegger either ignores or misconceives the fundamental
character of our social existence by passing over its grounding in
direct interpersonal interaction (see e.g., Lowith 1928, Binswanger
1943/1964, Gallagher and Jacobson forthcoming). From this perspective,
the equipmentally mediated discovery of others that Heidegger sometimes
describes (see above) is at best a secondary process that reveals other
people only to the extent that they are relevant to Dasein's
practical projects. Moreover, Olafson (1987) argues that although
Heidegger's account clearly involves the idea that Dasein
discovers socially shared equipmental meaning (which then presumably
supports the discovery of other Dasein along with equipment), that
account fails to explain why this *must* be the case. Processes
of direct interpersonal contact (e.g., in learning the use of equipment
from others) might plausibly fill this gap. The obvious move for
Heidegger to make here is to claim that the processes that the critics
find to be missing from his account, although genuine, are not a
priori, transcendental structures of Dasein. Rather, they are
psychological factors that enable (in a 'merely'
developmental or causal way) human beings to realize the phenomenon of
Being-with (see e.g., Heidegger's response to the existentialist
psychologist and therapist Binswanger in the *Zollikon
seminars*, and see Dreyfus 1990, chapter 8, for a response to
Olafson that exploits this point). However, one might wonder whether it
is plausible to relegate the social processes in question to the status
of 'mere' enabling factors (Gallagher and Jacobson
forthcoming; Poggeler 1989 might be read as making a similar
complaint). If not, then Heidegger's notion of Being-with is at
best an incomplete account of our social Being.


#### 2.2.7 Care




The introduction of the 'they' is followed by a further
layer of interpretation in which Heidegger understands
Being-in-the-world in terms of (what he calls) *thrownness,
projection* and *fallen-ness*, and (interrelatedly) in terms
of Dasein as a dynamic combination of *disposedness*,
*understanding* and *fascination with the world*. In
effect, this is a reformulation of the point that Dasein is *the
having-to-be-open*, i.e., that it is an a priori structure of our
existential constitution that we operate with the capacity to
take-other-beings-as. Dasein's existence (*ek-sistence*)
is thus now to be understood by way of an interconnected pair of
three-dimensional unitary structures: thrownness-projection-fallen-ness
and disposedness-understanding-fascination. Each of these can be used
to express the "formally existential totality of Dasein's
ontological structural whole" (*Being and Time* 42: 237),
a phenomenon that Heidegger also refers to as *disclosedness* or
*care*. Crucially, it is with the configuration of care that we
encounter the first tentative emergence of temporality as a theme in
*Being and Time*, since the dimensionality of care will
ultimately be interpreted in terms of the three temporal dimensions:
past (thrownness/disposedness), future (projection/understanding), and
present (fallen-ness/fascination).




As Dasein, I ineluctably find myself in a world that matters to me
in some way or another. This is what Heidegger calls
*thrownness* (*Geworfenheit*), a having-been-thrown into
the world. 'Disposedness' is Kisiel's (2002)
translation of *Befindlichkeit*, a term rendered somewhat
infelicitously by Macquarrie and Robinson as
'state-of-mind'.
Disposedness is the receptiveness (the just finding things mattering
to one) of Dasein, which explains why Richardson (1963) renders
*Befindlichkeit* as
'already-having-found-oneself-there-ness'. To make things
less abstract, we can note that disposedness is the a priori
transcendental condition for, and thus shows up pre-ontologically in,
the everyday phenomenon of *mood* (*Stimmung*). According
to Heidegger's analysis, I am always in some mood or other. Thus
say I'm depressed, such that the world opens up (is disclosed) to
me as a sombre and gloomy place. I might be able to shift myself out of
that mood, but only to enter a different one, say euphoria or lethargy,
a mood that will open up the world to me in a different way. As one
might expect, Heidegger argues that moods are not inner subjective
colourings laid over an objectively given world (which at root is why
'state-of-mind' is a potentially misleading translation of
*Befindlichkeit*, given that this term names the underlying a
priori condition for moods). For Heidegger, moods (and disposedness)
are aspects of what it means to be in a world at all, not subjective
additions to that in-ness. Here it is worth noting that some aspects of
our ordinary linguistic usage reflect this anti-subjectivist reading.
Thus we talk of being in a mood rather than a mood being in us, and we
have no problem making sense of the idea of public moods (e.g., the mood
of a crowd). In noting these features of moods we must be careful,
however. It would be a mistake to conclude from them that moods are
external, rather than internal, states. A mood "comes neither
from 'outside' nor from 'inside', but arises
out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such being" (*Being and
Time* 29: 176). Nevertheless, the idea that moods have a social
character does point us towards a striking implication of
Heidegger's overall framework: with Being-in-the-world identified
previously as a kind of cultural co-embeddedness, it follows that the
repertoire of world-disclosing moods in which I might find myself will
itself be culturally conditioned. (For recent philosophical work that
builds, in part, on Heidegger's treatment of moods, in order to
identify and understand certain affective phenomena--dubbed
'existential feelings'--that help us to understand
various forms of psychiatric illness, see Ratcliffe 2008.)





Dasein confronts every concrete situation in which it finds itself
(into which it has been thrown) as a range of possibilities for acting
(onto which it may project itself). Insofar as some of these
possibilities are actualized, others will not be, meaning that there is
a sense in which not-Being (a set of unactualized possibilities of
Being) is a structural component of Dasein's Being. Out of this
dynamic interplay, Dasein emerges as a delicate balance of
determination (thrownness) and freedom (projection). The projective
possibilities available to Dasein are delineated by totalities of
involvements, structures that, as we have seen, embody the culturally
conditioned ways in which Dasein may inhabit the world. Understanding
is the process by which Dasein projects itself onto such possibilities.
Crucially, understanding as projection is not conceived, by Heidegger,
as involving, in any fundamental way, conscious or deliberate
forward-planning. Projection "has nothing to do with comporting
oneself towards a plan that has been thought out" (*Being and
Time* 31: 185). The primary realization of understanding is as
skilled activity in the domain of the ready-to-hand, but it can be
manifested as interpretation, when Dasein *explicitly* takes
something *as* something (e.g., in cases of disturbance), and
also as linguistic assertion, when Dasein uses language to attribute a
definite character to an entity as a mere present-at-hand object. (NB:
assertion of the sort indicated here is of course just one linguistic
practice among many; it does not in any way exhaust the phenomenon of
language or its ontological contribution.) Another way of putting the
point that culturally conditioned totalities of involvements define the
space of Dasein's projection onto possibilities is to say that
such totalities constitute the fore-structures of Dasein's
practices of understanding and interpretation, practices that, as we
have just seen, are projectively oriented manifestations of the
taking-as activity that forms the existential core of Dasein's
Being. What this tells us is that the hermeneutic circle is the
"essential fore-structure of Dasein itself" (*Being and
Time* 32: 195).




Thrownness and projection provide two of the three dimensions of
care. The third is *fallen-ness*. "Dasein has, in the
first instance, fallen away from itself as an authentic potentiality
for Being its Self, and has fallen into the world" (*Being and
Time* 38: 220). Such fallen-ness into the world is manifested in
*idle talk* (roughly, conversing in a critically unexamined and
unexamining way about facts and information while failing to use
language to reveal their relevance), *curiosity* (a search for
novelty and endless stimulation rather than belonging or dwelling), and
*ambiguity* (a loss of any sensitivity to the distinction
between genuine understanding and superficial chatter). Each of these
aspects of fallen-ness involves a closing off or covering up of the
world (more precisely, of any real understanding of the world) through
a fascination with it. What is crucial here is that this
world-obscuring process of fallen-ness/fascination, as manifested in
idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity, is to be understood as
Dasein's everyday mode of Being-with. In its everyday form,
Being-with exhibits what Heidegger calls *levelling* or
*averageness*--a "Being-lost in the publicness of
the 'they' " (*Being and Time* 38: 220). Here,
in dramatic language, is how he makes the point.



> 
> 
> In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of
> information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the
> next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein
> completely into a kind of Being of 'the Others', in such a
> way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish
> more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the
> real dictatorship of the 'they' is unfolded. We take
> pleasure and enjoy ourselves as *they* take pleasure; we read,
> see, and judge about literature and art as *they* see and judge;
> likewise 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. (*Being and Time* 27: 164)
> 
> 
> 




This analysis opens up a path to Heidegger's distinction
between the authentic self and its inauthentic counterpart. At root,
'authentic' means 'my own'. So the authentic
self is the self that is mine (leading a life that, in a sense to be
explained, is owned by me), whereas the inauthentic self is the fallen
self, the self lost to the 'they'. Hence we might call the
authentic self the 'mine-self', and the inauthentic self
the 'they-self', the latter term also serving to
emphasize the point that fallen-ness is a mode of the self, not of
others. Moreover, as a mode of the self, fallen-ness is not an
accidental feature of Dasein, but rather part of Dasein's
existential constitution. It is a dimension of care, which is the Being
of Dasein. So, in the specific sense that fallen-ness (the they-self)
is an essential part of our Being, we are ultimately each to blame for
our own inauthenticity (Sheehan 2002). Of course, one shouldn't
conclude from all this talk of submersion in the 'they'
that a state of authenticity is to be achieved by re-establishing some
version of a self-sufficient individual subject. As Heidegger puts it:
"*Authentic Being-one's-Self* does not rest upon an
exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been
detached from the 'they'; *it is rather an existentiell
modification of the 'they'* " (*Being and Time*
27: 168). So authenticity is not about being isolated from others, but
rather about finding a different way of relating to others such that
one is not lost to the they-self. It is in Division 2 of *Being and
Time* that authenticity, so understood, becomes a central
theme.


### 2.3 Division 2


#### 2.3.1 Death




As the argument of *Being and Time* continues its
ever-widening hermeneutic spiral into Division 2 of the text, Heidegger
announces a twofold transition in the analysis. He argues that we
should (i) pay proper heed to the thought that to understand Dasein we
need to understand Dasein's existence *as a whole*, and
(ii) shift the main focus of our attention from the inauthentic self
(the they-self) to the authentic self (the mine-self) (*Being and
Time* 45: 276). Both of these transitions figure in
Heidegger's discussion of death.




So far, Dasein's existence has been understood as thrown
projection plus falling. The projective aspect of this phenomenon means
that, at each moment of its life, Dasein is Being-ahead-of-itself,
oriented towards the realm of its possibilities, and is thus
incomplete. Death completes Dasein's existence. Therefore, an
understanding of Dasein's relation to death would make an
essential contribution to our understanding of Dasein as a whole. But
now a problem immediately presents itself: since one cannot experience
one's own death, it seems that the kind of phenomenological
analysis that has hitherto driven the argument of *Being and
Time* breaks
down, right at the crucial moment. One possible response to this worry,
canvassed explicitly by Heidegger, is to suggest that Dasein
understands death through experiencing the death of others. However,
the sense in which we experience the death of others falls short of
what is needed. We mourn departed others and miss their presence in the
world. But that is to experience Being-with them as dead, which is a
mode of our continued existence. As Heidegger explains:



> 
> 
> The greater the phenomenal appropriateness with which we take the
> no-longer-Dasein of the deceased, the more plainly is it shown that in
> such Being-with the dead, the authentic Being-come-to-an-end of the
> deceased is precisely the sort of thing which we do *not*
> experience. Death does indeed reveal itself as a loss, but a loss such
> as is experienced by those who remain. In suffering this loss, however,
> we have no way of access to the loss-of-Being as such which the dying
> man 'suffers'. The dying of Others is not something which
> we experience in a genuine sense; at most we are always just
> 'there alongside'. (*Being and Time* 47: 282)
> 
> 




What we don't have, then, is phenomenological access to the
loss of Being that the dead person has suffered. But that, it seems, is
precisely what we would need in order to carry through the favoured
analysis. So another response is called for. Heidegger's move is
to suggest that although Dasein cannot experience its own death as
actual, it can relate towards its own death as a possibility that is
always before it--always before it in the sense that
Dasein's own death is inevitable. Peculiarly among Dasein's
possibilities, the possibility of Dasein's own death must remain
only a possibility, since once it becomes actual, Dasein is no longer.
Death is thus the "possibility of the impossibility of any
existence at all" (*Being and Time* 53: 307). And it is
this awareness of death as an omnipresent possibility that cannot
become actual that stops the phenomenological analysis from breaking
down. The detail here is crucial. What the failure of the 'death
of others' strategy indicates is that in each instance death is
inextricably tied to some specific individual Dasein. My death is mine
in a radical sense; it is the moment at which all my relations to
others disappear. Heidegger captures this non-relationality by using
the term 'ownmost'. And it is the idea of death "as
that possibility which is one's ownmost" (*Being and
Time* 50: 294) that engages the second transition highlighted
above. When I take on board the possibility of my own not-Being, my own
being-able-to-Be is brought into proper view. Hence my awareness of my
own death as an omnipresent possibility discloses the authentic self (a
self that is mine). Moreover, the very same awareness engages the first
of the aforementioned transitions too: there is a sense in which the
possibility of my not existing encompasses the whole of my existence
(Hinman 1978, 201), and my awareness of that possibility illuminates
me, *qua* Dasein, in my totality. Indeed, my own death is
revealed to me as inevitable, meaning that Dasein is essentially
finite. This explains why Heidegger says that death is disclosed to
Dasein as a possibility which is "not to be outstripped"
(*Being and Time* 50: 294).




Heidegger's account of Dasein's relation towards the
possibility of its own not-Being forms the backbone of a
reinterpretation of the phenomenon of care--the "formally
existential totality of Dasein's ontological structural
whole" (*Being and Time* 41: 237). Care is now interpreted
in terms of Being-towards-death, meaning that Dasein has an internal
relation to the nothing (i.e., to not-being; see Vallega-Neu 2003, 21,
for an analysis that links this 'not' quality to the point
made earlier that sets of unactualized possibilities of Being are
structural components of Dasein's Being). As one might expect,
Heidegger argues that Being-towards-death not only has the
three-dimensional character of care, but is realized in authentic and
inauthentic modes. Let's begin with the authentic mode. We can
think of the aforementioned individualizing effect of Dasein's
awareness of the possibility of its own not-Being (an awareness that
illuminates its own being-able-to-Be) as an event in which Dasein
projects onto a possible way to be, in the technical sense of such
possibilities introduced earlier in *Being and Time*. It is thus
an event in which Dasein projects onto a for-the-sake-of-which, a
possible way to be. More particularly, given the authentic character of
the phenomenon, it is an event in which Dasein projects onto a
for-the-sake-of-*itself*. Heidegger now coins the term
*anticipation* to express the form of projection in which one
looks forward to a possible way to be. Given the analysis of death as a
possibility, the authentic form of projection in the case of death is
anticipation. Indeed Heidegger often uses the term anticipation in a
narrow way, simply to mean being aware of death as a possibility. But
death is disclosed authentically not only in projection (the first
dimension of care) but also in thrownness (the second dimension). The
key phenomenon here is the mode of disposedness that Heidegger calls
*anxiety*. Anxiety, at least in the form in which Heidegger is
interested, is not directed towards some specific object, but rather
opens up the world to me in a certain distinctive way. When I am
anxious I am no longer at home in the world. I fail to find the world
intelligible. Thus there is an ontological sense (one to do with
intelligibility) in which I am not in the world, and the possibility of
a world without me (the possibility of my not-Being-in-the-world) is
revealed to me. "[The] state-of-mind [mode of disposedness] which
can hold open the utter and constant threat to itself arising from
Dasein's ownmost individualized Being, is anxiety. In this
state-of-mind, Dasein finds itself face to face with the
'nothing' of the possible impossibility of its
existence" (*Being and Time* 53: 310). Heidegger has now
reinterpreted two of the three dimensions of care, in the light of
Dasein's essential finitude. But now what about the third
dimension, identified previously as fallen-ness? Since we are presently
considering a mode of authentic, i.e., not fallen, Dasein, it seems that
fallen-ness cannot be a feature of this realization of care, and indeed
that a general reformulation of the care structure is called for in
order to allow for authentic Being. This is an issue that will be
addressed in the next section. First, though, the inauthentic form of
Being-towards-death needs to be brought into view.




In everyday Being-towards-death, the self that figures in the
for-the-sake-of-itself structure is not the authentic mine-self, but
rather the inauthentic they-self. In effect, the 'they'
obscures our awareness of the meaning of our own deaths by
*de-individualizing* death. As Heidegger explains: in
"Dasein's public way of interpreting, it is said that
'one dies', because everyone else and oneself can talk
himself into saying that 'in no case is it I myself', for this
'one' is *the* '*nobody*' " (*Being and Time* 51:
297). In this way, everyday Dasein flees from the meaning of its own
death, in a manner determined by the 'they'. It is in this
evasion in the face of death, interpreted as a further way in which
Dasein covers up Being, that everyday Dasein's fallen-ness now
manifests itself. To be clear: evasion here does not necessarily mean
that I refuse outright to acknowledge that I will someday die. After
all, as I might say, 'everyone dies'. However, the
certainty of death achieved by idle talk of this kind is of the wrong
sort. One might think of it as established by the conclusion of some
sort of inductive inference from observations of many cases of death
(the deaths of many others). But "we cannot compute the certainty
of death by ascertaining how many cases of death we encounter"
(*Being and Time* 53: 309).




The certainty brought into view by such an inference is a sort of
empirical certainty, one which conceals the apodictic character of the
inevitability with which my own death is authentically revealed to me
(*Being and Time* 52: 301). In addition, as we have seen,
according to Heidegger, my own death can never be actual for me, so
viewed from my perspective, any case of death, i.e., any actual death,
cannot be my death. Thus it must be a death that belongs to someone
else, or rather, to no one.




Inauthenticity in relation to death is also realized in thrownness,
through *fear*, and in projection, through *expectation*.
Fear, as a mode of disposedness, can disclose only particular oncoming
events *in* the world. To fear my own death, then, is once again
to treat my death as a case of death. This contrasts with anxiety, the
form of disposedness which, as we have seen, discloses my death via the
awareness of the possibility of a world in which I am not. The
projective analogue to the fear-anxiety distinction is
expectation-anticipation. A mundane example might help to illustrate
the generic idea. When I expect a beer to taste a certain way, I am
waiting for an actual event--a case of that distinctive taste in
my mouth--to occur. By contrast, when I anticipate the taste of
that beer, one might say that, in a cognitive sense, I actively go out
to meet the possibility of that taste. In so doing, I make it mine.
Expecting death is thus to wait for a case of death, whereas to
anticipate death is to own it. 



In reinterpreting care in terms of Being-towards-death, Heidegger
illuminates in a new way the taking-as structure that, as we have seen,
he takes to be the essence of human existence. Human beings, as Dasein,
are *essentially finite*. And it is this
finitude that explains why the phenomenon of taking-as is an
essential characteristic of our existence. An infinite Being would
understand things directly, without the need for interpretative
intercession. We, however, are Dasein, and in our essential finitude we
must understand things in a hermeneutically mediated, indirect way,
that is, by taking-as (Sheehan 2001). 


What are we to make of Heidegger's analysis of death? Perhaps
the most compelling reason for being sceptical can be found in Sartre,
who argued that just as death cannot be actual for me, it cannot be one
of my possibilities either, at least if the term
'possibility' is understood, as Heidegger surely intends it
to be, as marking a way of my Being, an intelligible way for me to be.
Sartre argues that death is the end of such possibilities. Thus:




> 
> 
> [The] perpetual appearance of chance at the heart of my projects
> cannot be apprehended as my possibility but, on the contrary, as the
> nihilation of all my possibilities. A nihilation which itself is no
> longer a part of my possibilities. Thus death is not my possibility of
> no longer realizing a presence in the world but rather an always
> possible nihilation of my possibilities which is outside my
> possibilities. (Sartre 1956, 537)
> 
> 
> 



If Sartre is right, there is a
significant hole in Heidegger's project, since we would be left
without a way of completing the phenomenological analysis of
Dasein.




For further debate over Heidegger's handling of death, see
Edwards' (1975, 1976, 2004) unsympathetic broadsides alongside
Hinman's (1978) robust response. Carel (2006) develops an
analysis that productively connects Heidegger's and
Freud's accounts of death, despite Heidegger's open
antipathy towards Freud's theories in general.


#### 2.3.2 Anticipatory Resoluteness




In some of the most difficult sections of *Being and Time*,
Heidegger now begins to close in on the claim that temporality is the
ontological meaning of Dasein's Being as care. The key notion
here is that of anticipatory resoluteness, which Heidegger identifies
as an (or perhaps *the*) authentic mode of care. As we have
seen, anticipation is the form of Being-towards in which one looks
forward to a possible way to be. Bringing *resoluteness* into
view requires further groundwork that begins with Heidegger's
reinterpretation of the authentic self in terms of the phenomenon of
conscience or Being-guilty. The authentic self is characterized by
Being-guilty. This does not mean that authenticity requires actually
feeling guilty. Rather, the authentic self is the one who is *open
to* the call of conscience. The inauthentic self, by contrast, is
closed to conscience and guilt. It is tempting to think that this is
where Heidegger does ethics. However, guilt as an existential structure
is not to be understood as some psychological feeling that one gets
when one transgresses some moral code. If the term 'guilt'
is to be heard in an ethical register at all, the phenomenon of
Being-guilty will, for Heidegger, be the a priori condition for there
to be moral codes, not the psychological result of transgressions of
those codes. Having said that, however, it may be misleading to adopt
an ethical register here. For Heidegger, conscience is fundamentally a
disclosive rather than an ethical phenomenon. What is more important
for the project of *Being and Time*, then, is the claim that the
call of conscience interrupts Dasein's everyday fascination with
entities by summoning Dasein back to its own finitude and thereby to
authenticity. To see how the call of conscience achieves this, we need
to unpack Heidegger's reformulation of conscience in terms of
anticipatory resoluteness. 




In the by-now familiar pattern, Heidegger argues that conscience
(Being-guilty) has the structure of care. However, there's now a
modification to the picture, presumably driven by a factor mentioned
earlier, namely that authentic Dasein is not fallen. Since conscience
is a mode of authentic Dasein, fallen-ness cannot be one of the
dimensions of conscience. So the three elements of care are now
identified as projection, thrownness and *discourse*. What is
discourse? It clearly has something to do with articulation, and it is
tempting to make a connection with language, but in truth this aspect
of Heidegger's view is somewhat murky. Heidegger says that the
"intelligibility of Being-in-the-world... expresses itself
as discourse" (*Being and Time* 34: 204). But this might
mean that intelligibility is essentially a linguistic phenomenon; or it
might mean that discourse is intelligibility as put into language.
There is even room for the view that discourse is not necessarily a
linguistic phenomenon at all, but rather any way in which the
referential structure of significance is articulated, either by deeds
(e.g., by hammering) or by words (see e.g., Dreyfus 1991, 215; Dreyfus
translates the German term *Rede* not as 'discourse'
but as 'telling', and notes the existence of non-linguistic
tellings such as telling the time). But however we settle that point of
interpretation, there is something untidy about the status of discourse
in relation to fallen-ness and authenticity. Elsewhere in *Being and
Time*, the text strongly suggests that discourse has inauthentic
modes, for instance when it is manifested as idle talk; and in yet
other sections we find the claim that fallen-ness has an authentic
manifestation called a *moment-of-vision* (e.g., *Being and
Time* 68: 401). Regarding the general relations between discourse,
fallen-ness and authenticity, then, the conceptual landscape is not
entirely clear. Nevertheless, we can say this: when care is realized
authentically, I experience discourse as *reticence*, as a
keeping silent (ignoring the chatter of idle talk) so that I may hear
the call of conscience; I experience projection onto guilt as a
possible way of Being in which I take responsibility for a lack or a
not-Being that is located firmly in my own self (where 'taking
responsibility for' means recognizing that not-Being is one of
*my* essential structures); and I experience thrownness as
anxiety, a mode of disposedness that, as we have seen, leaves me
estranged from the familiar field of intelligibility determined by the
'they' and thereby discloses the possibility of my own
not-Being. So, reticence, guilt and anxiety all have the effect of
extracting Dasein from the ontological clutches of the
'they'. That is why the unitary structure of
reticence-guilt-anxiety characterizes the Being of authentic
Dasein.




So now what of resoluteness? 'Resoluteness' is perhaps
best understood as simply a new term for reticence-guilt-anxiety. But
why do we need a new term? There are two possible reasons for thinking
that the relabelling exercise here adds value. Each of these indicates
a connection between authenticity and freedom. Each corresponds to an
authentic realization of one of two possible understandings of what
Heidegger means by (human) existence (see above). The first take on
resoluteness is emphasized by, for example, Gelven (1989), Mulhall
(2005) and Polt (1999). In ordinary parlance, to be resolved is to
commit oneself to some project and thus, in a sense, to take ownership
of one's life. By succumbing to, but without making any real
commitment to, the patterns laid down by the 'they' (i.e.,
by uncritically 'doing what one does'), inauthentic Dasein
avoids owning its own life. Authentic Being (understood as
resoluteness) is, then, a freedom from the 'they'--not, of course, in any sense that involves extracting oneself from
one's socio-cultural embeddedness (after all, Being-with is part
of Dasein's existential constitution), but rather in a sense that
involves individual commitment to (and thus individual ownership of)
one of the possible ways to be that one's socio-cultural
embeddedness makes available (more on this below). Seen like this,
resoluteness correlates with the idea that Dasein's existence is
constituted by a series of events in which possible ways to be are
chosen.




At this point we would do well to hesitate. The emphasis on notions
such as choice and commitment makes it all too easy to think that
resoluteness essentially involves some sort of conscious
decision-making. For this reason, Vallega-Neu (2003, 15) reminds us
that resoluteness is not a "choice made by a human subject"
but rather an "occurrence that determines Dasein". This
occurrence discloses Dasein's essential finitude. It is here that
it is profitable to think in terms of *anticipatory*
resoluteness. Heidegger's claim is that resoluteness and
anticipation are internally related, such that they ultimately emerge
together as the unitary phenomenon of anticipatory resoluteness. Thus,
he argues, Being-guilty (the projective aspect of resoluteness)
involves Dasein wanting to be open to the call of conscience for as
long as Dasein exists, which requires an awareness of the possibility
of death. Since resoluteness is an authentic mode of Being, this
awareness of the possibility of death must also be authentic. But the
authentic awareness of the possibility of death just is anticipation
(see above). Thus "only as anticipating does resoluteness become
a primordial Being towards Dasein's ownmost
potentiality-for-Being" (*Being and Time* 62: 354). Via
the internal connection with anticipation, then, the notion of
resoluteness allows Heidegger to rethink the path to Dasein's
essential finitude, a finitude that is hidden in fallen-ness, but
which, as we have seen, is the condition of possibility for the
taking-as structure that is a constitutive aspect of Dasein. Seen this
way, resoluteness correlates more neatly with the idea that human
existence is essentially a standing out in an openness to, and in an
opening of, Being.


#### 2.3.3 Temporality and Temporalizing




In a further hermeneutic spiral, Heidegger concludes that
temporality is the a priori transcendental condition for there to be
care (sense-making, intelligibility, taking-as, Dasein's own
distinctive mode of Being). Moreover, it is Dasein's openness to
time that ultimately allows Dasein's potential authenticity to be
actualized: in authenticity, the constraints and possibilities
determined by Dasein's cultural-historical past are grasped by
Dasein in the present so that it may project itself into the future in
a fully authentic manner, i.e., in a manner which is truest to the
mine-self.




The ontological emphasis that
Heidegger places on temporality might usefully be seen as an echo and
development of Kant's claim that embeddedness in time is a
precondition for things to appear to us the way they do. (According to Kant, embeddedness in time is co-determinative of our
experience, along with embeddedness in space. See above for
Heidegger's problematic analysis of the relationship between
spatiality and temporality.) With the Kantian roots of
Heidegger's treatment of time acknowledged, it must be registered
immediately that, in Heidegger's hands, the notion of temporality
receives a distinctive twist. Heidegger is concerned not with
clock-time (an infinite series of self-contained nows laid out in an
ordering of past, present and future) or with time as some sort of
relativistic phenomenon that would satisfy the physicist. Time thought
of in either of these ways is a present-at-hand phenomenon, and that
means that it cannot characterize the temporality that is an internal
feature of Dasein's existential constitution, the existential
temporality that structures intelligibility (taking-as). As he puts it
in his *History of the Concept of Time* (a 1925 lecture course):
"Not 'time is', but 'Dasein qua time
temporalizes its Being' " (319). To make sense of this
temporalizing, Heidegger introduces the technical term
*ecstases*. Ecstases are phenomena that stand out from an
underlying unity. (He later reinterprets ecstases as *horizons*,
in the sense of what limits, surrounds or encloses, and in so doing
discloses or makes available.) According to Heidegger, temporality is a
unity against which past, present and future stand out as ecstases
while remaining essentially interlocked. The importance of this idea is
that it frees the phenomenologist from thinking of past, present and
future as sequentially ordered groupings of distinct events. Thus:



> 
> 
> Temporalizing does not signify that ecstases come in a
> 'succession'. The future is not later than having been, and
> having-been is not earlier than the Present. Temporality temporalizes
> itself as a future which makes present in a process of having
> been. (*Being and Time* 68: 401) 
> 
> 
> 



What does this mean and
why should we find it compelling? Perhaps the easiest way to grasp
Heidegger's insight here is to follow him in explicitly
reinterpreting the different elements of the structure of care in terms
of the three phenomenologically intertwined dimensions of temporality.





Dasein's existence is characterized phenomenologically by
thrown projection plus fallenness/discourse. Heidegger argues that for
each of these phenomena, one particular dimension of temporality is
primary. Thus projection is disclosed principally as the manner in
which Dasein orients itself towards its future. Anticipation, as
authentic projection, therefore becomes the predominantly futural
aspect of (what we can now call) authentic temporalizing, whereas
expectation, as inauthentic projection, occupies the same role for
inauthentic temporalizing. However, since temporality is at root a
unitary structure, thrownness, projection, falling and discourse must
each have a multi-faceted temporality. Anticipation, for example,
requires that Dasein acknowledge the unavoidable way in which its past
is constitutive of who it is, precisely because anticipation demands of
Dasein that it project itself resolutely onto (i.e., come to make its
own) one of the various options established by its cultural-historical
embeddedness. And anticipation has a present-related aspect too: in a
process that Heidegger calls a *moment of vision*, Dasein, in
anticipating its own death, pulls away from they-self-dominated
distractions of the present.




Structurally similar analyses are given for the other elements of
the care structure. Here is not the place to pursue the details but, at
the most general level, thrownness is identified predominantly,
although not exclusively, as the manner in which Dasein collects up its
past (finding itself in relation to the pre-structured field of
intelligibility into which it has been enculturated), while fallen-ness
and discourse are identified predominantly, although not exclusively,
as present-oriented (e.g., in the case of fallen-ness, through
curiosity as a search for novelty in which Dasein is locked into the
distractions of the present and devalues the past and the projective
future). A final feature of Heidegger's intricate analysis
concerns the way in which authentic and inauthentic temporalizing are
understood as prioritizing different dimensions of temporality.
Heidegger argues that because future-directed anticipation is
intertwined with projection onto death as a possibility (thereby
enabling the disclosure of Dasein's all-important finitude), the
"primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is
the future" (*Being and Time* 65: 378), whereas
inauthentic temporalizing (through structures such as
'they'-determined curiosity) prioritizes the
present.



What the foregoing summary of Heidegger's account of
temporality makes clear is that each event of intelligibility that
makes up a 'moment' in Dasein's existence must be
unpacked using *all three* temporal ecstases. Each such event is
constituted by thrownness (past), projection (future) and
falling/discourse (present). In a sense, then, each such event
transcends (goes beyond) itself as a momentary episode of Being by, in
the relevant sense, co-realizing a past and a future along with a
present. This explains why "the future is not later than having
been, and having-been is not earlier than the Present". In the
sense that matters, then, Dasein is *always* a combination of
the futural, the historical and the present. And since futurality,
historicality and presence, understood in terms of projection,
thrownness and fallenness/discourse, form the structural dimensions of
each event of intelligibility, it is Dasein's essential
temporality (or temporalizing) that provides the a priori
transcendental condition for there to be care (the sense-making that
constitutes Dasein's own distinctive mode of Being).




(Some worries about Heidegger's analysis of time will be
explored below. For a view which is influenced by, and contains an
original interpretation of, Heidegger on time, see Stiegler's
1996/2003 analysis according to which human temporality is constituted
by technology, including alphabetical writing, as a form of
memory.)


#### 2.3.4 Historicality and Historizing




In the final major development of his analysis of temporality,
Heidegger identifies a phenomenon that he calls Dasein's
*historicality*, understood as the a priori condition on the
basis of which past events and things may have significance for us. The
analysis begins with an observation that Being-towards-death is only
one aspect of Dasein's finitude.



> [Death] is only the 'end' of Dasein; and, taken
> formally, it is just one of the ends by which Dasein's totality
> is closed round. The other 'end', however, is the
> 'beginning', the 'birth'. Only that entity
> which is 'between' birth and death presents the whole which
> we have been seeking... Dasein has [so far] been our theme only in
> the way in which it exists 'facing forward', as it were,
> leaving 'behind' all that has been. Not only has
> Being-towards-the-beginning remained unnoticed; but so too, and above
> all, has the way in which Dasein stretches along between birth and
> death. (*Being and Time* 72: 425).
> 
> 




Here Dasein's beginning (its 'birth') is to be interpreted
not as a biological event, but as a moment of enculturation, following
which the a priori structure underlying intelligibility (thrown
projection plus falling/discourse) applies. Dasein's beginning is
thus a moment at which a biological human being has become embedded
within a pre-existing world, a culturally determined field of
intelligibility into which it is thrown and onto which it projects
itself. Such worlds are now to be reinterpreted historically as
Dasein's *heritage*. Echoing the way in which past, present and
future were disclosed as intertwined in the analysis of temporality,
Dasein's historicality has the effect of bringing the past (its
heritage) alive in the present as a set of opportunities for future
action. In the original German, Heidegger calls this
phenomenon *Wiederholung*, which Macquarrie and Robinson
translate as *repetition*. Although this is an accurate
translation of the German term, there is a way of hearing the word
'repetition' that is misleading with regard to Heidegger's
usage. The idea here is not that I can do nothing other than repeat
the actions of my cultural ancestors, but rather that, in authentic
mode, I may appropriate those past actions (own them, make them mine)
as a set of general models or heroic templates onto which I may
creatively project myself. Thus, *retrieving* may be a more
appropriate translation. This notion of retrieving characterizes the
"specific movement in which Dasein is stretched along and
stretches itself along", what Heidegger now calls Dasein's
*historizing*. Historizing is an a priori structure of
Dasein's Being as care that constitutes a stretching along
between Dasein's birth as the entity that takes-as and death as
its end, between enculturation and finitude. "Factical Dasein
exists as born; and, as born, it is already dying, in the sense of
Being-towards-death... birth and death are 'connected'
in a manner characteristic of Dasein. As care, Dasein is the
'between' "(*Being and Time* 73: 426-7).


It is debatable whether the idea of creative appropriation does
enough to allay the suspicion that the concept of heritage introduces a
threat to our individual freedom (in an ordinary sense of freedom) by
way of some sort of social determinism. For example, since
historicality is an aspect of Dasein's existential constitution,
it is arguable that Heidegger effectively rules out the possibility
that I might reinvent myself in an entirely original way. Moreover,
Polt (1999) draws our attention to a stinging passage from earlier in
*Being and Time* which might be taken to suggest that any
attempt to take on board elements of cultures other than one's
own should be judged an inauthentic practice indicative of fallen-ness.
Thus: 



> 
> 
> the opinion may now arise that understanding the most
> alien cultures and 'synthesizing' them with one's own
> may lead to Dasein's becoming for the first time thoroughly and
> genuinely enlightened about itself. Versatile curiosity and restlessly
> 'knowing it all' masquerade as a universal understanding of
> Dasein. (*Being and Time* 38: 178)
> 
> 
> 



 This sets the stage
for Heidegger's own final elucidation of human freedom. According
to Heidegger, I am genuinely free precisely when I recognize that I am
a finite being with a heritage and when I achieve an authentic
relationship with that heritage through the creative appropriation of
it. As he explains: 



> 
> 
> Once one has grasped the finitude of one's existence, it
> snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which
> offer themselves as closest to one--those of comfortableness,
> shirking and taking things lightly--and brings Dasein to the
> simplicity of its fate. This is how we designate Dasein's
> primordial historizing, 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.
> (*Being and Time* 74: 435)
> 
> 




This phenomenon, a final reinterpretation of the notion of
resoluteness, is what Heidegger calls *primordial historizing*
or *fate*. And crucially, historizing is not merely a structure
that is partly constitutive of *individual* authentic Dasein.
Heidegger also points out the *shared primordial historizing of a
community*, what he calls its *destiny*.




When the contemporary reader of *Being and Time* encounters
the concepts of heritage, fate and destiny, and places them not only in
the context of the political climate of mid-to-late 1920s Germany, but
also alongside Heidegger's later membership of the Nazi party, it
is hard not to hear dark undertones of cultural chauvinism and racial
prejudice. This worry becomes acute when one considers the way in which
these concepts figure in passages such as the following, from the
inaugural rectoral address that Heidegger gave at Freiburg University
in 1933.



> 
> 
> The third bond [knowledge service, in addition to labour service
> and military service] is the one that binds the [German] students to
> the spiritual mission of the German Volk. This Volk is playing an
> active role in shaping its own fate by placing its history into the
> openness of the overpowering might of all the world-shaping forces of
> human existence and by struggling anew to secure its spiritual
> world... The three bonds--*through* the Volk to the
> destiny of the state in its spiritual mission--are *equally
> original* aspects of the German essence. (*The Self-Assertion of
> the German University*, 35-6)
> 
> 




The issue of Heidegger's later relationship with Nazi politics
and ideology will be discussed briefly below. For the moment, however,
it is worth saying that the temptation to offer extreme social
determinist or Nazi reconstructions of *Being and Time* is far
from irresistible. It is at least arguable that Heidegger's claim
at this point in his work is 'merely' that it is only on
the basis of fate--an honest and explicit retrieval of my own
culture which allows me to recognize and accept the manifold ways in
which I am shaped by that culture--that I can open up a genuine
path to personal reconstruction or to the possibly enriching structures
that other cultures have to offer. And that does not sound nearly so
pernicious. 


### 2.4 Realism and Relativism in *Being and Time*




One might think that an unpalatable relativism is entailed by any
view which emphasizes that understanding is never preconception-free.
But that would be too quick. Of course, if authentic Dasein were
individualized in the sense of being a self-sufficient Cartesian
subject, then perhaps an extreme form of subjectivist relativism would
indeed beckon. Fortunately, however, authentic Dasein isn't a
Cartesian subject, in part because it has a transformed and not a
severed relationship with the 'they'. This reconnects us
with our earlier remark that the philosophical framework advocated
within *Being and Time* appears to mandate a kind of
*cultural* relativism. This seems right, but it is important to
try to understand precisely what sort of cultural relativism is on
offer. Here is one interpretation.




Although worlds (networks of involvements, what Heidegger sometimes
calls *Reality*) are culturally relative phenomena, Heidegger
occasionally seems to suggest that nature, *as it is in itself*,
is not. Thus, on the one hand, nature may be discovered as
ready-to-hand equipment: the "wood is a forest of timber, the
mountain is a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is
wind 'in the sails' " (*Being and Time* 15:
100). Under these circumstances, nature is revealed in certain
culturally specific forms determined by our socially conditioned
patterns of skilled practical activity. On the other hand, when nature
is discovered as present-at-hand, by say science, its intelligibility
has an essentially cross-cultural character. Indeed, Heidegger often
seems to hold the largely commonsense view that there are
culture-independent causal properties of nature which explain why it is
that you can make missiles out of rocks or branches, but not out of air
or water. Science can tell us both what those causal properties are,
and how the underlying causal processes work. Such properties and
processes are what Heidegger calls the *Real*, and he comments:
"[the] fact that Reality [intelligibility] is ontologically
grounded in the Being of Dasein does not signify that only when Dasein
exists and as long as Dasein exists can the Real [e.g., nature as
revealed by science] be as that which in itself it is"
(*Being and Time*, 43: 255). 




If the picture just sketched is a productive way to understand
Heidegger, then, perhaps surprisingly, his position might best be
thought of as a mild kind of scientific realism. For, on this
interpretation, one of Dasein's cultural practices, the practice
of science, has the special quality of revealing natural entities as
they are in themselves, that is, independently of Dasein's
culturally conditioned uses and articulations of them. Crucially,
however, this sort of scientific realism maintains ample conceptual
room for Sheehan's well-observed point that, for Heidegger, at
every stage of his thinking, "there is no 'is' to
things without a taking-as... no sense that is independent of
human being... Before *homo sapiens* evolved, there was no
'being' on earth... because 'being' for
Heidegger does not mean 'in existence' " (Sheehan
2001). Indeed, Being concerns sense-making (intelligibility), and the
different ways in which entities make sense to us, *including as
present-at-hand*, are dependent on the fact that we are Dasein,
creatures with a particular mode of Being. So while natural entities do
not require the existence of Dasein in order just to occur (in an
ordinary, straightforward sense of 'occur'), they do
require Dasein in order to be intelligible at all, including
*as* entities that just occur. Understood properly, then, the
following two claims that Heidegger makes are entirely consistent with
each other. First: "Being (not entities) is dependent upon the
understanding of Being; that is to say, Reality (not the Real) is
dependent upon care". Secondly: "[O]nly as long as Dasein
is (that is, only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically
possible), 'is there' Being. When Dasein does not exist,
'independence' 'is' not either, nor
'is' the 'in-itself' ". (Both quotations
from *Being and Time*, 43: 255.)




How does all this relate to Heidegger's account of truth?
Answering this question adds a new dimension to the pivotal phenomenon
of revealing. Heidegger points out that the philosophical tradition
standardly conceives of truth as attaching to propositions, and as
involving some sort of correspondence between propositions and states
of affairs. But whereas for the tradition (as Heidegger characterizes
it), propositional truth as correspondence exhausts the phenomenon of
truth, for Heidegger, it is merely the particular manifestation of
truth that is operative in those domains, such as science, that concern
themselves with the Real. According to Heidegger, propositional truth
as correspondence is made possible by a more fundamental phenomenon
that he dubs 'original truth'. Heidegger's key
thought here is that before (in a conceptual sense of
'before') there can be any question of correspondence
between propositions and states of affairs, there needs to be in place
a field of intelligibility (Reality, a world), a sense-making structure
within which entities may be found. Unconcealing is the
Dasein-involving process that establishes this prior field of
intelligibility. This is the domain of original truth--what we
might call *truth as revealing* or *truth as
unconcealing*. Original truth cannot be reduced to propositional
truth as correspondence, because the former is an a priori,
transcendental condition for the latter. Of course, since Dasein is the
source of intelligibility, truth as unconcealing is possible only
because there is Dasein, which means that without Dasein there would be
no truth--including propositional truth as correspondence. But
it is reasonable to hear this seemingly relativistic consequence as a
further modulation of the point (see above) that entities require
Dasein in order to be intelligible at all, including, now, as entities
that are capable of entering into states of affairs that may correspond
to propositions.




Heidegger's analysis of truth also countenances a third
manifestation of the phenomenon, one that is perhaps best characterized
as being located *between* original truth and propositional
truth. This intermediate phenomenon is what might be called
Heidegger's *instrumental* notion of truth (Dahlstrom
2001, Overgaard 2002). As we saw earlier, for Heidegger, the
referential structure of significance may be articulated not only by
words but by skilled practical activity (e.g., hammering) in which items
of equipment are used in culturally appropriate ways. By
Heidegger's lights, such equipmental activity counts as a
manifestation of unconcealing and thus as the realization of a species
of truth. This fact further threatens the idea that truth attaches only
to propositions, although some uses of language may themselves be
analysed as realizing the instrumental form of truth (e.g., when I
exclaim that 'this hammer is too heavy for the job', rather
than assert that it has the objective property of weighing 2.5 kilos;
Overgaard 2002, 77; cf. *Being and Time* 33:199-200).




It is at this point that an ongoing dispute in Heidegger scholarship
comes to the fore. It has been argued (e.g., Dahlstrom 2001, Overgaard
2002) that a number of prominent readings of Heidegger (e.g., Okrent
1988, Dreyfus 1991) place such heavy philosophical emphasis on Dasein
as a site of skilled practical activity that they end up simply
identifying Dasein's understanding of Being with skilled
practical activity. Because of this shared tendency, such readings are
often grouped together as advocating a *pragmatist*
interpretation of Heidegger. According to its critics, the inadequacy
of the pragmatist interpretation is exposed once it is applied to
Heidegger's account of truth. For although the pragmatist
interpretation correctly recognizes that, for Heidegger, propositional
correspondence is not the most fundamental phenomenon of truth, it
takes the fundamental variety to be exhausted by Dasein's
sense-making skilled practical activity. But (the critic points out)
this is to ignore the fact that even though instrumental truth is more
basic than traditional propositional truth, nevertheless it too depends
on a prior field of significance (one that determines the correct and
incorrect uses of equipment) and thus on the phenomenon of original
truth. Put another way, the pragmatist interpretation falls short
because it fails to distinguish original truth from instrumental truth.
It is worth commenting here that not every so-called pragmatist reading
is on a par with respect to this issue. For example, Dreyfus (2008)
separates out (what he calls) *background coping*
(Dasein's familiarity with, and knowledge of how to navigate the meaningful structures of,
its world) from (what he calls) *skilled* or *absorbed*
coping (Dasein's skilled practical activity), and argues that,
for Heidegger, the former is ontologically more basic than the latter.
If original truth is manifested in background coping, and instrumental
truth in skilled coping, this disrupts the thought that the two notions
of truth are being run together (for discussion, see Overgaard 2002
85-6, note 17).




How should one respond to Heidegger's analysis of truth?
One objection is that original truth ultimately fails to qualify as a
form of truth at all. As Tugendhat (1967) observes, it is a plausible
condition on the acceptability of any proposed account of truth that it
accommodate a distinction between what is asserted or intended and how
things are in themselves. It is clear that propositional truth as
correspondence satisfies this condition, and notice that (if we squint
a little) so too does instrumental truth, since despite my intentions,
I can fail, in my actions, to use the hammer in ways that successfully
articulate its place in the relevant equipmental network. However, as
Tugendhat argues, it is genuinely hard to see how original truth as
unconcealing could possibly support a distinction between what is
asserted or intended and how things are in themselves. After all,
unconcealing is, in part, the process through which entities are made
intelligible to Dasein in such a way that the distinction in question
can apply. Thus, Tugendhat concludes, although unconcealing may be a
genuine phenomenon that constitutes a transcendental condition for
there to be truth, it is not itself a species of truth. (For
discussions of Tugendhat's critique, see Dahlstrom 2001,
Overgaard 2002.)




Whether or not unconcealing ought to count as a species of truth,
it is arguable that the place which it (along with its partner
structure, Reality) occupies in the Heideggerian framework must
ultimately threaten even the mild kind of scientific realism that we
have been attributing, somewhat tentatively, to Heidegger. The tension
comes into view just at the point where unconcealing is reinterpreted
in terms of Dasein's essential historicality. Because
intelligibility, and thus unconcealing, has an essentially historical
character, it is difficult to resist the thought that the propositional
and instrumental truths generated out of some specific field of
intelligibility will be relativistically tied to a particular culture
in a particular time period. Moreover, at one point, Heidegger suggests
that even truth as revealed by science is itself subject to this kind
of relativistic constraint. Thus he says that "every factical
science is always manifestly in the grip of historizing"
(*Being and Time* 76: 444). The implication is that, for
Heidegger, one cannot straightforwardly subject the truth of one age to
the standards of another, which means, for example, that contemporary
chemistry and alchemical chemistry might both be true (cf. Dreyfus
1990, 261-2). But even if this more radical position is ultimately
Heidegger's, there remains space here for some form of realism.
Given the transcendental relation that, according to Heidegger, obtains
between fields of intelligibility and science, the view on offer might
still support a historically conditioned form of Kantian empirical
realism with respect to science. Nevertheless it must, it seems, reject
the full-on scientific realist commitment to the idea that the history
of science is regulated by progress towards some final and unassailable
set of scientifically established truths about nature, by a journey
towards, as it were, God's science (Haugeland 2007).


The realist waters in which our preliminary interpretation has been
swimming are muddied even further by another aspect of Dasein's
essential historicality. Officially, it is seemingly not supposed to be
a consequence of that historicality that we cannot discover universal
features of ourselves. The evidence for this is that there are many
conclusions reached in *Being and Time* that putatively apply to
all Dasein, for example that Dasein's everyday experience is
characterized by the structural domains of readiness-to-hand,
un-readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand (for additional evidence, see
Polt 1999 92-4). Moreover, Heidegger isn't saying that any route
to understanding is as good as any other. For example, he prioritizes
authenticity as the road to an answer to the question of the meaning of
Being. Thus:



> 
> the idea of existence, which guides us as that
> which we see in advance, has been made definite [transformed from
> pre-ontological to ontological, from implicit and vague to explicitly
> articulated] by the clarification of our ownmost
> potentiality-for-Being. (*Being and Time* 63: 358)
> 
> 
> 



 Still,
if this priority claim and the features shared by all Dasein really are
supposed to be ahistorical, universal conditions (applicable everywhere
throughout history), we are seemingly owed an account of just how such
conditions are even possible, given Dasein's essential
historicality.




Finally, one might wonder whether the 'realist
Heidegger' can live with the account of temporality given in
*Being and Time*. If temporality is the a priori condition for
us to encounter entities as equipment, and if, in the relevant sense,
the unfolding of time coincides with the unfolding of Dasein (Dasein,
as temporality, temporalizes; see above), then equipmental entities
will be intelligible to us only in (what we might call) Dasein-time,
the time that we ourselves are. Now, we have seen previously that
nature is often encountered as equipment, which means that natural
equipment will be intelligible to us only in Dasein-time. But what
about nature in a non-equipmental form--nature (as one might
surely be tempted to say) as it is in itself? One might try to argue
that those encounters with nature that reveal nature as it is in itself
are precisely those encounters that reveal nature as present-at-hand,
and that to reveal nature as present-at-hand is, in part, to reveal
nature within present-at-hand time (e.g., clock time), a time which is,
in the relevant sense, independent of Dasein. Unfortunately
there's a snag with this story (and thus for the attempt to see
Heidegger as a realist). Heidegger claims that presence-at-hand (as
revealed by theoretical reflection) is subject to the same
Dasein-dependent temporality as readiness-to-hand: 



> 
> 
> ...if
> Dasein's Being is completely grounded in temporality, then
> temporality must make possible Being-in-the-world and therewith
> Dasein's transcendence; this transcendence in turn provides the
> support for concernful Being alongside entities within-the-world,
> *whether this Being is theoretical or practical.*
> (*Being and Time* 69: 415, my emphasis)
> 
> 
> 



 But now if theoretical
investigations reveal nature in present-at-hand time, and if in the
switching over from the practical use of equipment to the theoretical
investigation of objects, time remains the same Dasein-time, then
present-at-hand time is Dasein-dependent too. Given this, it seems that
the only way we can give any sense to the idea of nature as it is in
itself is to conceive of such nature as being outside of time.
Interestingly, in the *History of the Concept of Time* (a text
based on Heidegger's notes for a 1925 lecture course and often
thought of as a draft of *Being and Time*), Heidegger seems to
embrace this very option, arguing that nature is within time only when
it is encountered in Dasein's world, and concluding that nature
as it is in itself is entirely atemporal. It is worth noting the
somewhat Kantian implication of this conclusion: if all understanding
is grounded in temporality, then the atemporality of nature as it is in
itself would mean that, for Heidegger, we cannot understand natural
things as they really are in themselves (cf. Dostal 1993).


## 3. The Later Philosophy


### 3.1 The Turn and the *Contributions to Philosophy*




After *Being and Time* there is a shift in Heidegger's
thinking that he himself christened 'the turn' (*die
Kehre*). In a 1947 piece, in which Heidegger distances his views
from Sartre's existentialism, he links the turn to his own
failure to produce the missing divisions of *Being and
Time*. 



> 
> 
> 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 held back... Here
> everything is reversed. The division in question was held back because
> everything failed in the adequate saying of this turning and did not
> succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics... This
> turning is not a change of standpoint from *Being and Time*, but
> in it the thinking that was sought first arrives at the location of
> that dimension out of which *Being and Time* is experienced,
> that is to say, experienced from the fundamental experience of the
> oblivion of Being. (*Letter on Humanism*, pp. 231-2)
> 
> 
> 




Notice that while, in the turning, "everything is
reversed", nevertheless it is "not a change of standpoint
from *Being and Time*", so what we should expect from the
later philosophy is a pattern of significant discontinuities with
*Being and Time*, interpretable from within a basic project and
a set of concerns familiar from that earlier text. The quotation from
the *Letter on Humanism* provides some clues about what to look
for. Clearly we need to understand what is meant by the abandonment of
subjectivity, what kind of barrier is erected by the language of
metaphysics, and what is involved in the oblivion of Being. The second
and third of these issues will be clarified later. The first bears
immediate comment.




At root Heidegger's later philosophy shares the deep concerns
of *Being and Time*, in that it is driven by the same
preoccupation with Being and our relationship with it that propelled
the earlier work. In a fundamental sense, then, the question of Being
remains *the* question. However, *Being and Time*
addresses the question of Being via an investigation of Dasein, the
kind of being whose Being is an issue for it. As we have seen, this
investigation takes the form of a transcendental hermeneutic
phenomenology that begins with ordinary human experience. It is
arguable that, in at least one important sense, it is this
philosophical methodology that the later Heidegger is rejecting when he
talks of his abandonment of subjectivity. Of course, as conceptualized
in *Being and Time*, Dasein is not a Cartesian subject, so the
abandonment of subjectivity is not as simple as a shift of attention
away from Dasein and towards some other route to Being. Nevertheless
the later Heidegger does seem to think that his earlier focus on Dasein
bears the stain of a subjectivity that ultimately blocks the path to an
understanding of Being. This is not to say that the later thinking
turns away altogether from the project of transcendental hermeneutic
phenomenology. The project of illuminating the a priori conditions on
the basis of which entities show up as intelligible to us is still at
the heart of things. What the later thinking involves is a
reorientation of the basic project so that, as we shall see, the point
of departure is no longer a detailed description of ordinary human
experience. (For an analysis of 'the turn' that identifies
a number of different senses of the term at work in Heidegger's
thinking, and which in some ways departs from the brief treatment given
here, see Sheehan 2010.)





A further difficulty in getting to grips with Heidegger's
later philosophy is that, unlike the early thought, which is heavily
centred on a single text, the later thought is distributed over a large
number and range of works, including books, lecture courses, occasional
addresses, and presentations given to non-academic audiences. So one
needs a navigational strategy. The strategy adopted here will be to
view the later philosophy through the lens of Heidegger's strange
and perplexing study from the 1930s called *Contributions to
Philosophy (From Enowning)*, (*Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom
Ereignis)*), henceforth referred to as the *Contributions*.
(For a book-length introduction to the *Contributions*, see
Vallega-Neu 2003. For a useful collection of papers, see Scott et al.
2001.) The key themes that shape the later philosophy will be
identified in the *Contributions*, but those themes will be
explored in a way that draws on, and make connections with, a selection
of other works. From this partial expedition, the general pattern of
Heidegger's post-turn thinking, although not every aspect of it,
will emerge.




The *Contributions* was written between 1936 and 1938.
Intriguingly, Heidegger asked for the work not to appear in print until
after the publication of all his lecture courses, and although his
demand wasn't quite heeded by the editors of his collected works,
the *Contributions* was not published in German until 1989 and
not in English until 1999. To court a perhaps overly dramatic telling
of Heideggerian history, if one puts a lot of weight on
Heidegger's view of when the *Contributions* should have
been published, one might conceivably think of those later writings
that, in terms of when they were produced, followed the
*Contributions* as something like the training material needed
to understand the earlier work (see e.g., Polt 1999 140). In any case,
during his lifetime, Heidegger showed the *Contributions* to no
more than a few close colleagues. The excitement with which the
eventual publication of the text was greeted by Heidegger's
readers was partly down to the fact that one of the chosen few granted
a sneak preview was the influential interpreter of Heidegger, Otto
Poggeler, who then proceeded to give it some rather extraordinary
advance publicity, describing it as the work in which Heidegger's
genuine and complete thinking is captured (see e.g., Poggeler
1963/1987).




Whether or not the hype surrounding the *Contributions* was
justified remains a debated question among Heidegger scholars (see e.g.,
Sheehan 2001, Thomson 2003). What is clear, however, is that reading
the work is occasionally a bewildering experience. Rather than a series
of systematic hermeneutic spirals in the manner of *Being and
Time*, the *Contributions* is organised as something like a
musical fugue, that is, as a suite of overlapping developments of a
single main theme (Schoenbohm 2001; Thomson 2003). And while the
structure of the *Contributions* is challenging enough, the
language in which it is written can appear to be wilfully obscurantist.
Polt (1999, 140) comments that "the most important sections of
the text can appear to be written in pure Heideggerese... [as
Heidegger] exploits the sounds and senses of German in order to create
an idiosyncratic symphony of meanings". Less charitably, Sheehan
(2001) describes it as "a needlessly difficult text, obsessively
repetitious, badly in need of an editor", while Schurmann (1992,
313, quoted by Thomson 2003, 57) complains that "at times one may
think one is reading a piece of Heideggerian plagiarism, so encumbered
is it with ellipses and assertoric monoliths". Arguably, the
style in which the *Contributions* is written is
'merely' the most extreme example (perhaps, the purest
example) of a 'poetic' style that Heidegger adopts pretty
much throughout the later philosophy. This stylistic aspect of the turn
is an issue discussed below. For the moment, however, it is worth
noting that, in the stylistic transition achieved in the
*Contributions*, Heidegger's writing finally leaves
behind all vestiges of the idea that Being can be *represented
accurately using* some pseudo-scientific philosophical language.
The goal, instead, is to *respond appropriately* to Being
*in* language, to forge a pathway to another kind of thinking--*Being-historical thinking* (for discussion of this
term, see Vallega 2001, von Herrmann 2001, Vallega-Neu 2003, 28-9). In
its attempt to achieve this, the *Contributions* may be viewed
as setting the agenda for Heidegger's post-turn thought. So what
are the central themes that appear in the *Contributions* and
which then resonate throughout the later works? Four stand out: Being
as appropriation (an idea which, as we shall see, is bound up with a
reinterpretation of the notion of dwelling that, in terms of explicit
textual development, takes place largely outwith the text of the
*Contributions* itself); technology (or machination);
safeguarding (or sheltering); and the gods. Each of these themes will
now be explored.


### 3.2 Appropriation, Dwelling and the Fourfold




In *Being and Time*, the most fundamental a priori
transcendental condition for there to be Dasein's distinctive
mode of Being which is identified is temporality. In the later
philosophy, the ontological focus ultimately shifts to the claim that
human Being consists most fundamentally in dwelling. This shift of
attention emerges out of a subtle reformulation of the question of
Being itself, a reformulation performed in the *Contributions*.
The question now becomes not 'What is the meaning of
Being?' but rather 'How does Being essentially
unfold?'. This reformulation means (in a way that should become
clearer in a moment) that we are now asking the question of Being not
from the perspective of Dasein, but from the perspective of Being (see
above on abandoning subjectivity). But it also suggests that Being
needs to be understood as fundamentally a timebound, historical
*process*. As Heidegger puts it: "A being is: Be-ing holds
sway [unfolds]". (*Contributions* 10: 22. Quotations from
the Contributions will be given in the form 'section: page
number' where 'page number' refers to the Emad and
Maly English translation. The hyphenated term 'be-ing' is
adopted by Emad and Maly, in order to respect the fact that, in the
*Contributions*, Heidegger substitutes the archaic spelling
'Seyn' for the contemporary 'Sein' as a way of
distancing himself further from the traditional language of
metaphysics. This translational convention, which has not become
standard practice in the secondary literature, will not be adopted
here, except in quotations from the Emad and Maly
translation.)




Further aspects of the essential unfolding of Being are revealed by
what is perhaps the key move in the *Contributions*--a
rethinking of Being in terms of the notion of *Ereignis*, a term
translated variously as 'event' (most closely reflecting
its ordinary German usage), 'appropriation',
'appropriating event', 'event of appropriation'
or 'enowning'. (For an analysis which tracks
Heidegger's use of the term *Ereignis* at various stages
of his thought, see Vallega-Neu 2010). The history of Being is now
conceived as a series of appropriating events in which the different
dimensions of human sense-making--the religious, political,
philosophical (and so on) dimensions that define the culturally
conditioned epochs of human history--are transformed. Each such
transformation is a revolution in human patterns of intelligibility, so
what is appropriated in the event is Dasein and thus the human capacity
for taking-as (see e.g., *Contributions* 271: 343). Once
appropriated in this way, Dasein operates according to a specific set
of established sense-making practices and structures. In a Kuhnian
register, one might think of this as the normal sense-making that
follows a paradigm-shift. But now what is it that does the
appropriating? Heidegger's answer to this question is Being. Thus
Heidegger writes of the "En-ownment [appropriation] of Da-sein by
be-ing" (*Contributions* 141: 184) and of "man as
owned by be-ing" (*Contributions* 141: 185). Indeed,
this appropriation of Dasein by Being is what enables Being to unfold:
"Be-ing needs man in order to hold sway [unfold]"
(*Contributions* 133: 177). The claim that Being appropriates
Dasein might seem to invite the adoption of an ethereal voice and a
far-off look in the eye, but any such temptation towards mysticism of
this kind really ought to be resisted. The mystical reading seems to
depend on a view according to which "be-ing holds sway 'for
itself' " and Dasein "takes up the relating to
be-ing", such that Being is "something over-against"
Dasein (*Contributions* 135: 179). But Heidegger argues that
this relational view would be 'misleading'. That said, to
make proper inroads into the mystical reading, we need to reacquaint
ourselves with the notion of *dwelling*.




As we have seen, the term 'dwelling' appears in
*Being and Time*, where it is used to capture the distinctive
manner in which Dasein is *in* the world. The term continues to
play this role in the later philosophy, but, in texts such as
*Building Dwelling, Thinking* (1954), it is reinterpreted and
made philosophically central to our understanding of Being. This
reinterpretation of, and the new emphasis on, dwelling is bound up with
the idea from the *Contributions* of Being as appropriation. To
explain: Where one dwells is where one is *at home*, where one
*has a place*. This sense of place is what grounds
Heidegger's existential notion of spatiality, as developed in the
later philosophy (see Malpas 2006). In dwelling, then, Dasein is
located within a set of sense-making practices and structures with
which it is familiar. This way of unravelling the phenomenon of
dwelling enables us to see more clearly--and more concretely--what is meant by the idea of Being as event/appropriation.
Being is an event in that it *takes* (appropriates)
*place* (where one is at home, one's sense-making
practices and structures) (cf. Polt 1999 148). In other words, Being
appropriates Dasein in that, in its unfolding, it essentially
*happens in and to* Dasein's patterns of sense-making.
This way of thinking about the process of appropriation does rather
less to invite obscurantist mysticism.





The reinterpretation of dwelling in terms of Being as appropriation
is ultimately intertwined with a closely related reinterpretation of
what is meant by a world. One can see the latter development in a
pregnant passage from Heidegger's 1954 piece, *Building
Dwelling Thinking*.



> 
> 
> [H]uman being consists in dwelling and, indeed, dwelling in the
> sense of the stay of mortals on the earth.
> 
> 
> 
>  But 'on the earth' already means 'under the
> sky.' Both of these also mean 'remaining before the
> divinities' and include a 'belonging to men's being with
> one another.' By a primal oneness the four--earth and sky,
> divinities and mortals--belong together in one. (351)
> 
> 
> 




So, human beings dwell in that they stay (are at home) on the earth,
under the sky, before the divinities, and among the mortals (that is,
with one another as mortals). It is important for Heidegger that these
dimensions of dwelling are conceived not as independent structures but
as (to use a piece of terminology from *Being and Time*)
*ecstases*--phenomena that stand out from an underlying
unity. That underlying unity of earth, sky, divinities and mortals--the 'simple oneness of the four' as Heidegger puts
it in *Building Dwelling Thinking* (351)--is what he
calls the *fourfold*. The fourfold is the *transformed*
notion of world that applies within the later work (see e.g., *The
Thing*; for an analysis of the fourfold that concentrates on its
role as a thinking of things, see Mitchell 2010). It is possible to
glimpse the character of the world-as-fourfold by noting that whereas
the world as understood through *Being and Time* is a culturally
conditioned structure distinct from nature, the world-as-fourfold
appears to be an integrated combination of nature (earth and sky) and
culture (divinities and mortals). (Two remarks: First, it may not be
obvious why the divinities count as part of culture. This will be
explained in a moment. Secondly, the later Heidegger sometimes
continues to employ the sense of world that he established in *Being
and Time*, which is why it is useful to signal the new usage as the
transformed notion of world, or as the world-as-fourfold.)




There is something useful, as a preliminary move, about interpreting
the fourfold as a combination of nature and culture, but it is an idea
that must be handled with care. For one thing, if what is meant by
nature is the material world and its phenomena as understood by natural
science, then Heidegger's account of the fourfold tells against
any straightforward identification of earth and sky with nature. Why
this is becomes clear once one sees how Heidegger describes the earth
and the sky in *Building Dwelling Thinking*. "Earth is the
serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and
water, rising up into plant and animal... The sky is the vaulting
path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter
of the stars, the year's seasons and their changes, the light and
dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency
of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether"
(351). What Heidegger's language here indicates is that the
earth-as-dwelt-on and the sky-as-dwelt-under are spaces for a mode of
habitation by human beings that one might call *poetic* rather
than scientific. So, the nature of dwelling is the nature of the poet.
In dwelling we inhabit the poetic (for discussion, see e.g., Young 2002,
99-100).




How does this idea of dwelling as poetic habitation work for the
cultural aspects of the fourfold--dwelling among the mortals and
before the divinities? To dwell among the mortals is to be
"capable of death *as* death" (*Building Dwelling
Thinking* 352). In the language of *Being and Time*, this
would be to enter into an authentic and thus non-evasive relationship
with death (see above). However, as we shall see in a moment, the later
Heidegger has a different account of the nothing and thus of the
internal relation with the nothing that death involves. It is this
reworking of the idea of the nothing that ultimately marks out a newly
conceived non-evasive relationship with death as an aspect of dwelling,
understood in terms of poetic habitation. The notion of dwelling before
the divinities also turns on the development of a theme established in
*Being and Time*, namely that intelligibility is itself cultural
and historical in character. More specifically, according to *Being
and Time*, the a priori transcendental conditions for
intelligibility are to be interpreted in terms of the phenomenon of
heritage, that is as culturally determined structures that form
pre-existing fields of intelligibility into which individual human
beings are thrown and onto which they project themselves. A key aspect
of this idea is that there exist historically important individuals who
constitute heroic cultural templates onto which I may now creatively
project myself. In the later philosophy these heroic figures are reborn
poetically as the divinities of the fourfold, as "the ones to
come" (*Contributions* 248-52: 277-81), and as the
"beckoning messengers of the godhead" (*Building
Dwelling Thinking* 351). When Heidegger famously announces that
only a god can save us *(Only a God can Save Us*),
or that "the last god is not the end but the other beginning of
immeasurable possibilities for our history"
(*Contributions* 256: 289), he has in mind not a religious
intervention in an 'ordinary' sense of the divine, but
rather a transformational event in which a secularized sense of the
sacred--a sensitivity to the fact that beings are
*granted* to us in the essential unfolding of Being--is
restored (more on this below).




The notion of dwelling as poetic habitation opens up a path to what
Heidegger calls 'the mystery' (not to be confused with the
kind of obscurantist mysticism discussed above). Even though the world
always opens up as meaningful in a particular way to any individual
human being as a result of the specific heritage into which he or she
has been enculturated, there are of course a vast number of alternative
fields of intelligibility 'out there' that would be
available to each of us, *if only* we could gain access to them
by becoming simultaneously embedded in different heritages. But
Heidegger's account of human existence means that any such
parallel embedding is ruled out, so the plenitude of alternative fields
of intelligibility must remain a *mystery* to us. In
Heidegger's later philosophy this mysterious region of Being
emerges as a structure that, although not illuminated poetically in
dwelling as a particular world-as-fourfold, nevertheless constitutes an
essential aspect of dwelling in that it is ontologically co-present
with any such world. Appropriation is necessarily a twofold event: as
Dasein is thrown into an intelligible world, vast regions of Being are
plunged into darkness. But that darkness is a necessary condition for
there to be any intelligibility at all. As Heidegger puts it in *The
Question Concerning Technology* (330), "[a]ll revealing
belongs within a harboring and a concealing. But that which frees
[entities for intelligibility]--the mystery--is concealed
and always concealing itself.... Freedom [sense-making, the
revealing of beings] is that which conceals in a way that opens to
light, in whose clearing shimmers the veil that hides the essential
occurrence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what
veils".




It is worth pausing here to comment on the fact that, in his 1935
essay *The Origin of the Work of Art*, Heidegger writes of a
*conflict* between earth and world. This idea may seem to sit
unhappily alongside the simple oneness of the four. The essay in
question is notoriously difficult, but the notion of the mystery may
help. Perhaps the pivotal thought is as follows: Natural materials (the
earth), as used in artworks, enter into intelligibility by establishing
certain culturally codified meanings--a world in the sense of
*Being and Time*. Simultaneously, however, those natural
materials suggest the existence of a vast range of other possible, but
to us unintelligible, meanings, by virtue of the fact that they
*could* have been used to realize those alternative meanings.
The conflict, then, turns on the way in which, in the midst of a world,
the earth suggests the presence of the mystery. This is one way to hear
passages such as the following: "The world, in resting upon the
earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure
anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing,
tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there"
(*Origin of the Work of Art* 174).




Because the mystery is unintelligible, it is *the nothing*
(no-thing). It is nonetheless a *positive* ontological
phenomenon--a necessary feature of the essential unfolding of
Being. This vision of the nothing, as developed in Heidegger's
*What is Metaphysics?*, his 1929 inaugural lecture as Professor
of Philosophy at Freiburg, famously attracts the philosophical disdain
of the logical positivist Carnap. Carnap judged Heidegger's
lecture to turn on a series of unverifiable statements, and thus to be
a paradigm case of metaphysical nonsense (Carnap 1932/1959; for a nice
account and analysis of the disagreement between Heidegger and Carnap,
see Critchley 2001). But placing Carnap's positivist critique to
one side, the idea of the nothing allows Heidegger to rethink our
relationship with death in relation to poetic habitation. In *Being
and Time*, Being-towards-death is conceived as a relation to the
possibility of one's own non-existence. This gives us a sense in
which Dasein has an internal structural relation to the nothing. That
internal structural relation remains crucial to the later philosophy,
but now 'the nothing' is to be heard explicitly as
'the mystery', a kind of 'dark matter' of
intelligibility that must remain concealed in the unfolding of Being
through which beings are unconcealed. This necessary concealment is
"the essential belongingness of the not to being as such"
(*Contributions* 160: 199). In Being-towards-death, this
"essential belongingness" is "sheltered" and
"comes to light with a singular keenness"
(*Contributions* 160: 199). This is because (echoing a point
made earlier) the concealing-unconcealing structure of Being is
ultimately to be traced to Dasein's essential finitude. Sheehan
(2001) puts it like this: "[o]ur finitude makes all
'as'-taking... possible by requiring us to understand
things not immediately and ontically... but indirectly and
ontologically (= imperfectly), through their being". In
Being-towards-death, the human finitude that grounds the mystery, the
plenitude of possible worlds in which I am not, is highlighted. As
mortals, then, our internal relation to death links us to the mystery
(see *The Thing*). So dwelling (as poetic habitation) involves
not only embeddedness in the fourfold, but also, as part of a unitary
ontological structure, a necessary relationship with the mystery. (As
mentioned earlier (2.2.7), it is arguable that the sense of the nothing
as unactualized possibilities of Being is already at work in *Being
and Time* (see Vallega-Neu 2003, 21). Indeed, Heidegger's
explicit remarks on Being-towards-death in the *Contributions*
(sections 160-2) suggest that it is. But even if that is so, the idea
undoubtedly finds its fullest expression in the later
work.)




If the essence of human Being is to dwell in the fourfold, then
human beings *are* to the extent that they so dwell. And this
will be achieved to the extent that human beings realize the
"basic character of dwelling", which Heidegger now argues
is a matter of *safeguarding* "the fourfold in its
essential unfolding" (*Building Dwelling Thinking*, 352).
Such safeguarding is unpacked as a way of Being in which human beings
save the earth, receive the sky as sky, await the divinities as
divinities, and initiate their own essential being as mortals. Perhaps
the best way to understand this four-way demand is to explore
Heidegger's claim that modern humans, especially modern Western
humans, systematically fail to meet it. That is, we are marked out by
our loss of dwelling--our failure to safeguard the fourfold in
its essential unfolding. This existential malaise is what Heidegger
refers to in the *Letter on Humanism* as the oblivion of Being.
As we are about to see, the fact that this is the basic character of
our modern human society is, according to Heidegger, explained by the
predominance of a mode of sense-making that, in the
*Contributions*, he calls *machination*, but which he
later (and more famously) calls *technology*. 


### 3.3 Technology




In his 1953 piece *The Question Concerning Technology*,
Heidegger begins with the everyday account of technology according to
which technology is the vast array of instruments, machines, artefacts
and devices that we human beings invent, build, and then exploit. On
this view technology is basically a tool that we control. Heidegger
claims that this everyday account is, in a sense, correct, but it
provides only a limited "instrumental and anthropological
definition" of technology (*Question Concerning
Technology* 312). It depicts technology as a means to an end
(instrumental) and as a product of human activity (anthropological).
What needs to be exposed and interrogated, however, is something that
is passed over by the everyday account, namely the *essence* of
technology. To bring this into view, Heidegger reinterprets his earlier
notion of intelligibility in terms of the concept of a
*clearing*. A clearing is a region of Being in which things are
revealed as mattering in some specific way or another. To identify the
essence of technology is to lay bare technology as a clearing, that is,
to describe a technological mode of Being. As Heidegger puts it in the
*Contributions* (61: 88), "[i]n the context of the
being-question, this word [machination, technology] does not name a
human comportment but a manner of the essential swaying of
being".




So what is the character of entities as revealed technologically?
Heidegger's claim is that the "revealing that holds sway
throughout modern technology... [is]... a challenging...
which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy
which can be extracted and stored as such" (*Question
Concerning Technology* 320). The mode of revealing characteristic
of modern technology understands phenomena in general--including
the non-biological natural world, plants, animals, and indeed human
beings--to be no more than what Heidegger calls
*standing-reserve*, that is, resources to be exploited as means
to ends. This analysis extends to regions of nature and sections of
society that have not yet been harnessed positively as resources. Such
unexploited elements (e.g., an unexplored jungle, this year's
unemployed school leavers) exist technologically precisely *as*
potential resources.




Heidegger's flagship example of technology is a hydroelectric
plant built on the Rhine river that converts that river into a mere
supplier of water power. Set against this "monstrousness"
(*Question Concerning Technology* 321) is the poetic habitation
of the natural environment of the Rhine as signalled by an old wooden
bridge that spanned the river for hundreds of years, plus the river as
revealed by Holderlin's poem "The Rhine". In
these cases of poetic habitation, natural phenomena are revealed to us
as objects of respect and wonder. One might think that Heidegger is
over-reacting here, and that despite the presence of the hydroelectric
plant, the Rhine in many ways remains a glorious example of natural
beauty. Heidegger's response to this complaint is to focus on how
the technological mode of Being corrupts the very notion of unspoilt
areas of nature, by reducing such areas to resources ripe for
exploitation by the tourist industry. Turning our attention to
inter-human affairs, the technological mode of Being manifests itself
when, for example, a friendly chat in the bar is turned into networking
(Dreyfus 1993). And, in the light of Heidegger's analysis, one
might smile wryly at the trend for companies to take what used to be
called 'personnel' departments, and to rename them
'human resources'. Many other examples could be given, but
the general point is clear. The primary phenomenon to be understood is
not technology as a collection of instruments, but rather technology as
a clearing that establishes a deeply instrumental and, as Heidegger
sees it, grotesque understanding of the world in general. Of course, if
technological revealing were a largely restricted phenomenon,
characteristic of isolated individuals or groups, then
Heidegger's analysis of it would be of limited interest. The
sting in the tale, however, is that, according to Heidegger,
technological revealing is not a peripheral aspect of Being. Rather, it
*defines our modern way of living*, at least in the
West.




At this point one might pause to wonder whether technology really is
the structure on which we should be concentrating. The
counter-suggestion would be that technological thinking is merely the
practical application of modern mathematical science, and that the
latter is therefore the primary phenomenon. Heidegger rejects this
view, arguing in contrast that the establishment of the technological
mode of revealing is a necessary condition for there to be mathematical
science at all, since such science "demands that nature be
orderable as standing-reserve" by requiring that "nature
report itself in some way or other that is identifiable through
calculation and that it remain orderable as a system of
information" (*Question Concerning Technology* 328).
Either way, one might object to the view of science at work here, by
pointing to analyses which suggest that while science *may*
reduce objects to instrumental means rather than ends, it need not
behave in this way. For example, O'Neill (2003) develops such an
analysis by drawing explicitly on (one interpretation of) the Marxist
(and ultimately Aristotelian) notion of the *humanization of the
senses*. Good science may depend on the capacity for the
disinterested use of the senses, and so foster a non-instrumental
responsiveness to natural objects as ends rather than as means. This is
a 'humanization' because the disinterested use of the
senses is a characteristically human capacity. Thus to develop such a
capacity is to develop a distinctively human virtue, something which is
a constituent of human well-being. Moreover, if science may sometimes
operate with a sense of awe and wonder in the face of beings, it may
point the way beyond the technological clearing, an effect that, as we
shall see later, Heidegger thinks is achieved principally by some great
art. 




By revealing beings as no more than the measurable and the
manipulable, technology ultimately reduces beings to
*not-beings* (*Contributions* 2: 6). This is our first
proper glimpse of the oblivion of Being, the phenomenon that, in the
*Contributions*, Heidegger also calls the abandonment of Being,
or the abandonment of beings by Being (e.g., 55: 80). The notion of a
not-being signals two things: (i) technological revealing drives out
any sense of awe and wonder in the presence of beings, obliterating the
secularized sense of what is sacred that is exemplified by the poetic
habitation of the natural environment of the Rhine; (ii) we are
essentially indifferent to the loss. Heidegger calls this indifference
"the hidden distress of *no-distress-at-all*"
(*Contributions* 4: 8). Indeed, on Heidegger's diagnosis,
our response to the loss of any feeling of sacredness or awe in the
face of beings is to find a technological substitute for that feeling,
in the form of "lived-experience", a drive for
entertainment and information, "exaggeration and uproar"
(*Contributions* 66: 91). All that said, however, technology
should not be thought of as a wholly 'negative' phenomenon.
For Heidegger, technology is not only the great danger, it is also a
stage in the unfolding of Being that brings us to the brink of a kind
of secularized salvation, by awakening in us a (re-)discovery of the
sacred, appropriately understood (cf. Thomson 2003, 64-66). A rough
analogy might be drawn here with the Marxist idea that the unfolding of
history results in the establishment of capitalist means of production
with their characteristic 'negative' elements--labour treated merely as a commodity, the multi-dimensional alienation
of the workers--that bring us to the brink of (by creating the
immediate social and economic preconditions for) the socialist
transformation of society. Indeed, the analogy might be pushed a little
further: just as the socialist transformation of society remains
anything but inevitable (Trotsky taught us that), Heidegger argues that
the salvation-bringing transformation of the present condition of human
being is most certainly not bound to
occur.




To bring all these points into better view, we need to take a step
back and ask the following question. Is the technological mode of
revealing ultimately a human doing for which we are responsible?
Heidegger's answer is 'yes and no'. On the one hand,
humankind is the active agent of technological thinking, so humankind
is not *merely* a passive element. On the other hand, "the
unconcealment itself... is never a human handiwork"
(*Question Concerning Technology* 324). As Heidegger later put
it, the "essence of man is framed, claimed and challenged by a
power which manifests itself in the essence of technology, *a power
which man himself does not control*." (*Only a God
can Save Us*; 107, my emphasis). To explicate the latter
point, Heidegger introduces the concepts of *destining* (cf. the
earlier notion of 'destiny') and *enframing*.
Destining is "what first starts man upon a way of
revealing" (*Question Concerning Technology* 329). As such
it is an a priori transcendental structure of human Being and so beyond
our control. Human history is a temporally organized kaleidoscope of
particular ordainings of destining (see also *On the Essence of
Truth*). Enframing is one such ordaining, the "gathering
together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him
forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as
standing-reserve" (*Question Concerning Technology* 325).
This is, of course, a way of unpacking the point (see above) that
technology is "a manner of the essential swaying of being"
(*Contributions* 61: 88), that is, of Being's own
essential unfolding. 




Enframing, then, is the ordaining of destining that ushers in the
modern technological clearing. But there is more to it than that. To
see why, consider the following criticism of Heidegger's
analysis, as we have unpacked it so far. Any suggestion that
technological thinking has appeared for the first time along with our
modern Western way of living would seem to be straightforwardly false.
To put the point crudely, surely the ancient Greeks sometimes treated
entities merely as instrumental means. But if that is right, and
Heidegger would agree that it is, then how can it be that technological
thinking defines the spirit of our age? The answer lies in
Heidegger's belief that pre-modern, traditional artisanship (as
exemplified by the old wooden bridge over the Rhine), manifests what he
calls *poiesis*. In this context poiesis is to be understood as
a process of gathering together and fashioning natural materials in
such a way that the human project in which they figure is in a deep
harmony with, indeed *reveals*--or as Heidegger sometimes
says when discussing poiesis, *brings forth*--the essence
of those materials and any natural environment in which they are set.
Thus, in discussing what needs to be learnt by an apprentice to a
traditional cabinetmaker, Heidegger writes:



> 
> 
> If he is to become a true cabinetmaker, he 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 essence. In fact, this
> relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. Without that
> relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any
> occupation with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns.
> Every handicraft, all human dealings, are constantly in that danger.
> (*What is Called Thinking?* 379)
> 
> 




Poiesis, then, is a process of revealing. Poietic events are acts of
unconcealment--one is tempted to coin the ugly neologism
*truth-ing*--in which entities are allowed to show
themselves. As with the closely related notion of original truth that
is at work in *Being and Time*, the idea of entities showing
themselves does not imply that what is revealed in poiesis is something
independent of human involvement. Thus what is revealed by the
artisanship of the cabinetmaker is "wood as it enters into
man's dwelling". This telling remark forges a crucial
philosophical link (and not merely an etymological one) between the
poietic and poetic. Poietic events and poetic habitation involve the
very same mode of intelligibility.




By introducing the concept of poiesis, and by unearthing the
presence of the phenomenon in traditional artisanship, Heidegger is
suggesting that even though technological thinking was a possibility in
pre-modern society, it was neither the only nor the dominant mode of
bringing-forth. So what has changed? Heidegger argues that what is
distinctive about enframing as an ordaining of destining is (i) that it
"drives out every other possibility of revealing"
(*Question Concerning Technology* 332), and (ii) that it covers
up revealing as such (more precisely, covers up the
concealing-unconcealing character of appropriation), thereby leaving us
blind to the fact that technology is, in its essence, a clearing. For
Heidegger, these dual features of enframing are intimately tied up with
the idea of technology as *metaphysics completing itself*. He
writes: "[a]s a form of truth [clearing] technology is grounded
in the history of metaphysics, which is itself a distinctive and up to
now the only perceptible phase of the history of Being"
(*Letter on Humanism* 244). According to Heidegger, metaphysics
conceives of Being as a being (for more on the reduction of Being to a
being, see section 2.2.1 above). In so doing, metaphysics obscures the
concealing-unconcealing dynamic of the essential unfolding of Being, a
dynamic that provides the a priori condition for there to be beings.
The history of metaphysics is thus equivalent to the history of Western
philosophy in which Being as such is passed over, a history that, for
Heidegger, culminates in the nihilistic forces of Nietzsche's
eternally recurring will-to-power. The totalizing logic of metaphysics
involves the view that there is a single clearing (whatever it may be)
that constitutes reality. This renders thought insensitive to the
fundamental structure of Being, in which any particular clearing is
ontologically co-present with the unintelligible plenitude of
alternative clearings, the mystery. With this totalizing logic in view,
enframing might be thought of as the ordaining of destining that
establishes the technological clearing as the one dominant picture, to
the exclusion of all others. Hence technology is metaphysics completing
itself.




We are now in a position to deal with two items of unfinished
business. First, recall the stylistic shift that characterizes
Heidegger's later work. Heidegger not only increasingly engages
with poetry in his later thinking (especially the works of the German
lyric poet Holderlin), he also adopts a substantially more poetic
style of writing. But why? The language of metaphysics, which
ultimately unpacks itself as technological, calculative thinking, is a
language from which Heidegger believed he did not fully escape in
*Being and Time* (see quotation from the *Letter on
Humanism* at the beginning of section 3.1 above, and Vallega-Neu
2003 24-9 for discussion). What is needed to think Being historically,
to think Being in its essential unfolding, is a different kind of
philosophical language, a language suggested by the poetic character of
dwelling. It is important to realize that Heidegger's intention
here is not to place Being beyond philosophy and within the reach of
poetry, although he does believe that certain poets, such as
Holderlin, enable us to glimpse the mysterious aspect of Being.
His intention, rather, is to establish that the kind of philosophy that
is needed here is itself poetic. This explains the stylistic component
of the turn.




Secondly, recall the loss of dwelling identified by Heidegger.
Modern humankind (at least in the West) is in the (enframed) grip of
technological thinking. Because of this promotion of instrumentality as
the fundamental way of Being of entities, we have lost sight of how to
inhabit the fourfold poetically, of how to safeguard the fourfold in
its essential unfolding. Such safeguarding would, in a sense, be the
opposite of technological thinking. But what 'opposite'
amounts to here needs to be worked out with care. Given contemporary
concerns over deforestation, global warming and the like, it is
tempting to think that Heidegger's analysis of technology might
provide the philosophical platform for some sort of extreme
eco-radicalism. However, while there is undoubtedly much of value to be
said about the contribution that Heidegger's thinking may make to
contemporary debates in environmental ethics (see e.g., Zimmerman 1983,
1993, 2002), Heidegger was no eco-warrior and no luddite. Although he
often promoted a romantic image of a pre-technological age inhabited by
worthy peasants in touch with nature, he did not believe that it is
possible for modern humankind to forge some pastoral Eden from which
technology (in both the everyday and the essential sense) is entirely
absent. So we should neither "push on blindly with
technology" nor "curse it as the work of the devil"
(*Question Concerning Technology* 330). Indeed, both these
options would at root be technological modes of thinking. The way
forward, according to Heidegger, is not to end technology, but rather
to inhabit it differently (see e.g., Vallega-Neu 2003 93 note 15). We
need to transform our mode of Being into one in which technology (in
the sense of the machines and devices of the modern age) is there for
us to enjoy and use, but in which technology (in the sense of a mode of
Being-in-the-world) is not our only or fundamental way of encountering
entities. And what is the basic character of this reinhabiting? It is
to *shelter* the truth of Being in beings (e.g.,
*Contributions* 246: 273), to *safeguard the fourfold in its
essential unfolding*. In what, then, does this safeguarding
consist?


### 3.4 Safeguarding




Heidegger argues that if humankind is to enter into safeguarding, it
needs to learn (or perhaps to learn once more) to think of Being as a
gift that has been granted to us in history. Indeed, to think properly
is precisely to be grateful for the gift of Being (see *What is
Called Thinking?*). (Terms such as 'gift' and
'granted' should not be heard theologically, but in terms
of secularized sacredness and destining.) In this learning process,
certain artworks constitute ontological beacons that disrupt the
technological clearing. Thus recall that Heidegger identifies a shared
form of disclosure that is instantiated both by the old wooden bridge
over the Rhine and by Holderlin's poem "The
Rhine". We can now understand this identification in terms of the
claim that certain artworks (although of course not those that
themselves fall prey to technological thinking) share with traditional
artisanship the capacity to realize poiesis. In so doing such artworks
succeed in bringing us into contact with the mystery through their
expression of dwelling (poetic habitation). In listening attentively
and gratefully to how Being announces itself in such artworks,
humankind will prepare themselves for the task of
*safeguarding*.




But what exactly would one *do* in order to safeguard the
fourfold in its essential unfolding. Recall that in *Building
Dwelling Thinking* Heidegger presents safeguarding as a
four-dimensional way of Being. The first two dimensions--saving
the earth and receiving the sky as sky--refer to our
relationship with the non-human natural world. As such they forge a
genuine connection between the later Heidegger and contemporary
environmentalist thinking. However, the connection needs to be stated
with care. Once again the concept of poiesis is central. Heidegger
holds that the self-organized unfolding of the natural world, the
unaided blossoming of nature, is *itself* a process of poiesis.
Indeed it is poiesis "in the highest sense" (*Question
Concerning Technology* 317). One might think, then, that saving the
earth, safeguarding in its first dimension, is a matter of leaving
nature to its own devices, of actively ensuring that the conditions
obtain for unaided natural poiesis. However, for Heidegger, saving the
earth is primarily an ontological, rather than an ecological, project.
'Save' here means "to set something free into its own
essence" (*Building Dwelling Thinking*, p.352), and thus
joins a cluster of related concepts that includes dwelling and also
poiesis *as realized in artisanship and art*. So while, say,
fiercely guarding the integrity of wilderness areas may be one route to
safeguarding, saving the earth may also be achieved through the kind of
artisanship and its associated gathering of natural materials that is
characteristic of the traditional cabinetmaker. The concept of saving
as a setting free of something into its own essence also clears a path
to another important point. All four dimensions of safeguarding have at
their root the notion of *staying with things*, of letting
things be in their essence through cultivation or construction.
Heidegger describes such staying with things as "the only way in
which the fourfold stay within the fourfold [i.e., safeguarding] is
accomplished at any time in simple unity" (*Building Dwelling
Thinking* 353). It is thus the unifying existential structure of
safeguarding.




What now of safeguarding in its second dimension--to receive
the sky as sky? Here Heidegger's main concern seems to be to
advocate the synchronization of contemporary human life with the
rhythms of nature (day and night, the seasons, and so on). Here
safeguarding is exemplified by the aforementioned peasants whose lives
were interlocked with such natural rhythms (through planting seasons
etc.) in a way that modern technological society is not. One might note
that this dislocation has become even more pronounced since
Heidegger's death, with the advent of the Internet-driven,
24-hours-a-day-7-days-a-week service culture. Once again we need to
emphasize that Heidegger's position is not some sort of
philosophical ludditism, but a plea for the use of contemporary
machines and devices in a way that is sensitive to the temporal
patterns of the natural world. (For useful discussion see Young 2002,
110-113. Young makes an illuminating connection with Heidegger's
eulogy to van Gogh's painting of a pair of peasant shoes to be
found in *The Origin of the Work of Art*.)





Of course, these relationships with nature are still only part of
what safeguarding involves. Its third and fourth dimensions demand that
human beings await the divinities as divinities and "initiate
their own essential being--their being capable of death as death--into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may
be a good death" (*Building Dwelling Thinking* 352). The
latter demand suggests that we may safeguard each other as mortals by
integrating a non-evasive attitude to death (see above) into the
cultural structures (e.g., the death-related customs and ceremonies) of
the community. But now what about the third dimension of safeguarding?
What does it mean to *await* the divinities *as*
divinities?




Let's again approach our question via a potential problem with
Heidegger's account. Echoing a worry that attaches to the concept
of heritage in *Being and Time*, it may seem that the notion of
destining, especially in its more specific manifestation as enframing,
involves a kind of fatalism. Despite some apparent rhetoric to the
contrary, however, Heidegger's considered view is that destining
is ultimately *not* a "fate that compels"
(*Question Concerning Technology* 330). We have been granted the
saving power to transform our predicament. Moreover, the fact that
we are at a point of danger--a point at which the grip of
technological thinking has all but squeezed out access to the poetic
and the mystical--will have the effect of thrusting this saving
power to the fore. This is the good news. The bad news is that:



> 
> 
> philosophy will not be able to effect an immediate transformation of
> the present condition of the world. This is not only true of
> philosophy, but of all merely human thought and endeavor. Only a god
> can save us. The sole possibility that is left for us is to prepare a
> sort of readiness, through thinking and poetizing, for the appearance
> of the god or for the absence of the god in the time of foundering
> [*Untergang*]; for in the face of the god who is absent, we
> founder. (*Only a God can Save Us*
> 107)
> 
> 




That is what it means to await the divinities as divinities.


### 3.5 *Only a God can Save Us*




Heidegger sometimes uses the term 'god' to mean the
secularized notion of the sacred already indicated, such that to
embrace a god would be to maintain due sensitivity to the thought that
beings are *granted* to us in the essential unfolding of Being.
When, in the *Contributions*, Heidegger writes of the last or
ultimate god of the other beginning (where 'other' is in
relation to the 'first beginning' of Western thought in
ancient Greece--the beginning of metaphysics), it often seems to
be this secularized sacredness that he has in mind (cf. Thomson 2003;
see Crownfield 2001for an alternative reading of the last god that
maintains a more robust theological dimension, although one which is
concrete and historicized). However, Heidegger sometimes seems to use
the term 'god' or 'divinity' to refer to a
heroic figure (a cultural template) who may initiate (or help to
initiate) a transformational event in the history of Being by opening
up an alternative clearing (for this interpretation, see e.g., Young
2002, 98). These heroic figures are the grounders of the abyss, the
restorers of sacredness (*Contributions* 2: 6, see Sallis 2001
for analysis and discussion). It might even be consistent with
Heidegger's view to relax the requirement that the divine
catalyst must be an individual being, and thus to conceive of certain
transformational cultural events or forces themselves as divinities
(Dreyfus 2003). In any case, Heidegger argues that, in the present
crisis, we are waiting for a god who will reawaken us to the poetic,
and thereby enable us to dwell in the fourfold. This task certainly
seems to be a noble one. Unfortunately, however, it plunges us into the
murkiest and most controversial region of the Heideggerian intellectual
landscape, his infamous involvement with Nazism.




Here is not the place to enter into the historical debate over
exactly what Heidegger did and when he did it. However, given his
deliberate, albeit arguably short-lived, integration of Nazi ideology
with the philosophy of Being (see above), a few all-too-brief comments
on the relationship between Heidegger's politics and his
philosophical thought are necessary. (For more detailed evidence and
discussion, as well as a range of positions on how we should interpret
and respond to this relationship, see e.g., Farias 1989; Neske and
Kettering 1990; Ott 1993; Pattison 2000; Polt 1999; Rockmore 1992;
Sluga, 1993; Wolin 1990, 1993; Young 1997). There is no doubt that
Heidegger's Nazi sympathies, however long they lasted, have a
more intimate relationship with his philosophical thought than might be
suggested by apologist claims that he was a victim of his time (in
1933, lots of intelligent people backed Hitler without thereby
supporting the Holocaust that was to come) or that what we have here is
'merely' a case of bad political judgment, deserving of
censure but with no implications for the essentially independent
philosophical programme. Why does the explanation run deeper? The
answer is that Heidegger believed (indeed continued to believe until he
died) that the German people were destined to carry out a monumental
spiritual mission. That mission was nothing less than to be at the helm
of the aforementioned transformation of Being in the West, from one of
instrumental technology to one of poetic dwelling. In mounting this
transformation the German people would be acting not imperialistically,
but for all nations in the encounter with modern technology. Of course
destining is not a fate that compels, so some divine catalyst would be
needed to awake the German nation to its historic mission, a catalyst
provided by the spiritual leaders of the Nazi Party.




Why did Heidegger believe that the German people enjoyed this
position of world-historical significance? In the later writings
Heidegger argues explicitly that "[t]hinking itself can be
transformed only by a thinking which has the same origin and
calling", so the technological mode of Being must be transcended
through a new appropriation of the European tradition. Within this
process the German people have a special place, because of the
"inner relationship of the German language with the language of
the Greeks and with their thought". (Quotations from
*Only a God can Save Us* 113.) Thus it is
the German language that links the German people in a privileged way
to, as Heidegger sees it, the genesis of European thought and to a
pre-technological world-view in which bringing-forth as poiesis is
dominant. This illustrates the general point that, for Heidegger, Being
is intimately related to language. Language is, as he famously put it
in the *Letter on Humanism* (217), the "house of
Being". So it is via language that Being is linked to particular
peoples.




Even if Heidegger had some sort of argument for the world-historical
destiny of the German people, why on earth did he believe that the Nazi
Party, of all things, harboured the divine catalyst? Part of the reason
seems to have been the seductive effect of a resonance that exists
between (a) Heidegger's understanding of traditional German rural
life as realizing values and meanings that may counteract the insidious
effects of contemporary technology, and (b) the Nazi image of rustic
German communities, rooted in German soil, providing a bulwark against
foreign contamination. Heidegger certainly exploits this resonance in
his pro-Nazi writings. That said there is an important point of
disagreement here, one that Heidegger himself drew out. And once again
the role of language in Being is at the heart of the issue. Heidegger
steadfastly refused to countenance any biologistic underpinning to his
views. In 1945 he wrote that, in his 1934 lectures on logic, he
"sought to show that language was not the biological-racial
essence of man, but conversely, that the essence of man was based on
language as a basic reality of *spirit*" (*Letter to
the Rector of Freiburg University, November 4, 1945,* 64). In words
that we have just met, it is language and not biology that, for
Heidegger, constitutes the house of Being. So the German *Volk*
are a linguistic-historical, rather than a biological, phenomenon,
which explains why Heidegger officially rejected one of the keystones
of Nazism, namely its biologically grounded racism. Perhaps Heidegger
deserves some credit here, although regrettably the aforementioned
lectures on logic also contain evidence of a kind of historically
driven 'racism'. Heidegger suggests that while Africans
(along with plants and animals) have no history (in a technical sense
understood in terms of heritage), the event of an airplane carrying
Hitler to Mussolini is genuinely part of history (see Polt 1999,
155).




Heidegger was soon disappointed by his 'divinities'. In
a 1935 lecture he remarks that the


> works that are being peddled
> (about) nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism, but have
> nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this
> movement (namely, the encounter between global technology and
> contemporary man), have all been written by men fishing the troubled
> waters of values and totalities. (*An Introduction to
> Metaphysics* 166)
> 
> 

 So Heidegger came to believe that the spiritual
leaders of the Nazi party were false gods. They were ultimately agents
of technological thought and thus incapable of completing the historic
mission of the German people to transcend global technology.
Nonetheless, one way of hearing the 1935 remark is that Heidegger
continued to believe in the existence of, and the philosophical
motivation for, that mission, a view that Rockmore (1992, 123-4) calls
"an ideal form of Nazism". This interpretation has some
force. But perhaps we can at least make room for the thought that
Heidegger's repudiation of Nazism goes further than talk of an
ideal Nazism allows. For example, responding to the fact that Heidegger
drew a parallel between modern agriculture (as a motorized
food-industry) and "the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers
and extermination camps", Young (1997) argues that this would
count as a devaluing of the Holocaust only on a superficial reading.
According to Young, Heidegger's point is that both modern
agriculture and the Final Solution are workings-out of the
technological mode of Being, which does not entail that they should be
treated as morally equivalent. (Heidegger draws the parallel in a
lecture called *The Enframing* given in 1949. The quotation is
taken from Young 1997, 172. For further discussion, see Pattison
2000).




Heidegger's involvement with Nazism casts a shadow over his
life. Whether, and if so to what extent, it casts a more concentrated
shadow over at least some of his philosophical work is a more difficult
issue. It would be irresponsible to ignore the relationship between
Heidegger's philosophy and his politics. But it is surely
possible to be critically engaged in a deep and intellectually
stimulating way with his sustained investigation into Being, to find
much of value in his capacity to think deeply about human life, to
struggle fruitfully with what he says about our loss of dwelling, and
to appreciate his massive and still unfolding contribution to thought
and to thinking, without looking for evidence of Nazism in every twist
and turn of the philosophical path he lays down.