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MARTIN HEIDEGGER EXPLAINED: BEING AND TIME (1927)

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Biography of Martin Heidegger
1. Brief Overview of Heidegger's Life
2. The "Elephant in the Room" About Heidegger
3. Heidegger's Philosophical Value
4. Summary of Being and Time
1. Introduction
1. Chapter I: The Necessity, Structure and Priority of the Question of Being
2. Chapter II: The Twofolk Task in Working Out the Question of Being; Method and Design of Our Investigation
2. Division One: Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein
1. Chapter I: Exposition of the Task of a Preparatory Analysis of Dasein
2. Chapter II: Being-in-the-World in General as the Basic State of Dasein
3. Chapter III: The Worldhood of the World
4. Chapter IV: Being-in-the-World as Being-With and Being-One's-Self; The "They"
5. Chapter V: Being-in as Such
6. Chapter VI: Care as the Being of Dasein
3. Division Two: Dasein and Temporality
1. Chapter I: Dasein's Possibility of Being-a-Whole, and Being-Towards-Death
2. Chapter II: Dasein's Attestation of an Authentic Potentiality-for-Being, and Resoluteness
3. Chapter III: Dasein's Authentic Potentiality-for-Being-a-Whole, and Temporality as the Ontological Meaning of Care
4. Chapter IV: Temporality and Everydayness
5. Chapter V: Temporality and Historicality
6. Chapter VI: Temporality and Within-Time-ness as the Source of the Ordinary Concpetion of Time
5. The Bridge to Heidegger's Later Thought

1. Introduction

In this lecture, I will attempt to explain Martin Heidegger's most famous text, Being and Time. Any understanding of Heidegger simply MUST start with this work, even though in my personal opinion his later texts are even more sublime. But they are completely incomprehensible without first understanding Being and Time.

2. Biography of Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was himself a highly accomplished lecturer on philosopy. When discussing a philosopher, he famously limited his discussion of that thinker's biography to "He was born, he thought, he died."

I'm sympathetic to this approach. I always find myself skipping or skimming through a thinker's biography at first. Though I don't abbreviate to the degree that Heidegger did, I try to only give the bare essentials that I think are relevant for understanding what we're all really here for which is the philosophy. I do believe that there are biographical details about Heidegger which make his thought easier to grasp, so I will try to spell them out.

2.a. Brief Overview of Heidegger's Life

Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in the small, rural, conservative, and religious town of Meßkirch in southwest Germany. His father was a sexton at the local church and he was raised as a Roman Catholic. He was a fairly private person and spent most of his free time in his country home in the nearby Black Forest. He was very fond of the outdoors and felt that spending time alone in nature was essential for doing his greatest, clearest thinking. His favorite among many outdoor pursuits was skiing.

In 1917, he married a woman named Elfride Petri whom he remained with for life. However, behind closed doors he had something of an open marriage as both husband and wife conducted extramarital affairs with the knowledge and consent of the other. Heidegger's two most sustained lovers were Elisabeth Blochmann and Hannah Arendt, two notable scholars in their own right. Heidegger raised two sons, although only one of them was biologically his own.

Heidegger received a Jesuit education and originally planned to enter a seminary, but was disqualified because of a "heart condition," which seemed to have been psychosomatic. As such, his entry into the study of philosophy came via a study of Aristotle as understood through medieval scholastic thinkers like John Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. Heidegger eventually entered the University of Freiburg as a lecturer and primarily focused on the ancient Greeks and medieval scholastics. However, his philosophical influences would soon broaden. Some of the most important thinkers whose influence on Being and Time is obvious are Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Søren Kierkegaard.

Even more important than these three, however, were contemporaries Edmund Husserl and Wilhelm Dilthey. Heidegger actually became an assistant and, eventually, close friend of Husserl, who taught at the same university. He never forgot his deep indebtedness to Husserl for awakening him into his most serious philosophical thought. Being and Time is dedicated to Husserl. The exact nature of Husserl's influence will be discussed in the summary of the text itself.

Heidegger died in 1976. He chose to have a traditional Catholic funeral even if he had strayed far from the church over his many years. He was buried in his family grave in Meßkirch.

2.b. The "Elephant in the Room" About Heidegger

The reason I feel the need to dedicate some space to discussing Heidegger's biography is, in part, a notorious part of it which has unfortunately cast a negative shadow over much of his philosophical work: Martin Heidegger was an active member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

On 1933/01/30, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Almost a month later on 1933/04/21, Heidegger was elected as the rector of the University of Freiburg. On 1933/05/01, Heidegger officially joined the Nazi Party. (Note that he did so on May Day, possibly signalling a motivation related to labor concerns.) He made his support for Adolf Hitler, the Nazi regime, and Nazi youth movements apparent to all. As rector, he also oversaw the implementation of countrywide laws that kept Jewish academics out of privileged positions in universities.

The picture is more complicated than it appears on the surface, however. As rector, Heidegger apparently forbade students to put up anti-Jewish posters or hold book burnings. It would also seem strange for Heidegger to be a simple antisemite, as several of his close friends and lovers were Jewish, including no less than Husserl, Blochmann, and Arendt. The latter two would defend him after the war along with other students. Husserl died in 1938 and Heidegger chose not to attend his funeral, seemingly to avoid drawing negative suspicions. He regretted this for the rest of his life and called it a moral failing on his part.

Heidegger abandoned his post as rector the very next year in 1934. He never again directly involved himself in politics, although he did remain an active member of the Nazi Party all the way until it was dissolved in 1945. After the war, Heidegger was pronounced a "Mitläufer" or "fellow-traveller," meaning he was not directly guilty of any crimes, but he was unable to be formally exonerated of involvement either. He was banned from teaching for four years, after which he was allowed to return as a professor emeritus, but never again as philosophy chairman.

How exactly to interpret the full picture of this is still debated, often with a lot of acrimony. Frustratingly, Heidegger never officially "apologized" for his time as a Nazi. Those who are unsympathetic to him will say that it is a sign of his weakness as a thinker and intellectual. If they are particularly extreme, they might write off his entire philosophy as the work of a fascist. A highly idiosyncratic fascist, but a fascist nonetheless. They might used the so-called Black Notebooks as evidence. These private notebooks were only published in 2014. They reveal him mixing his own philosophical thoughts with common antisemitic tropes of Jews as materialistic, rootless cosmopolitans.

Personally, I do not share this view. I think that Heidegger wrote much that is odious and that he was a man of many moral failings and poor judgments. But I do think that his philosophy is largely independent of his personal failings and can meaningfully be separated from them. Those like me who are sympathetic have our own sources to point to. Heidegger himself would later say that as a lecturer during the Nazi years, he did his best to subtly critique and undermine the Nazi party line, which he saw him thought as opposed to. Of course, the oppressive policies of the time meant that he had to hide his critiques in coded language. Heidegger repeatedly spoke of what he called the "inner truth and greatness" of the Nazi movement, which was apparently in opposition to the mainstream ideology around him.

We can then ask: What did Heidegger see as appealing in Nazism? What was this "inner truth and greatness" that apparently no one around him saw? Much of that will only be clearer in reading his later thought, as Being and Time predates all of this. But I can provide a brief hypothesis: Heidegger felt very uncomfortable and disillusioned with the way the world was progressing into modernity. He felt great unease at the seeming nihilism and lack of purpose in a society that was increasingly technological and jaded. He longed for there to be a great philosophical renewal that would open up new pathways of thought and of BEING. He wanted something like a return to ancient Greece, where everything seemed meaningful and open to possibility. And he believed that the German people would be the ones who had the duty to do this, primarily because of their intellectual heritage as well as their language and its similarity to ancient Greek.

It is thus very easy to see how Heidegger could have been caught up in the Nazi zeitgesit and seen a reflection of his hope in the mood around him. But in the end, while he never said it so explicitly, in my opinion it is clear from his later writings that he saw Nazism as just another example of modernity becoming inhumane and blinded. One might critique him for equalizing the Nazis with other regimes of modernity, but I think it was clear that at the very least we can say that his opinion of the regime was negative.

One of the primary ways he felt this was a strong rejection of what he called the overly "biological" thinking of the Nazis. He highly disagreed with the belief that "German" culture and thought was to be only "Aryan" culture and thought. He saw the value of the German "Volk" was primarily based on thought, language, and culture. He spoke mockingly of Nazis whose idea of the value and meaning of their people could be reduced to "skull measurements." This antipathy went both ways. The Nazi authorities saw Heidegger as a crank and thought his writings were nonsense. He was considered to be disposable enough that in 1944 he was drafted into the Volkssturm (the desperate and final emergency national conscription of able-bodied men into the army) to build fortifications on the Rhine.

3. Heidegger's Philosophical Value

On the basis of the above, I argue that Heidegger was by no means just a Nazi ideologue. I personally believe that his philosophy can be completely disconnected from all these personal failings. But at this point you may ask "Why bother with Heidegger?" Why not just study someone who you don't have to engage with all these moral qualms about? The answer is simply that no one can replace Heidegger. We know this becuase many have tried to replace him with someone more ethically palatable, but there is simply no one who opened up the possibilities of philosophy in the 20th century in the way Heidegger did. The only figure I think compares is Ludwig Wittgenstein. But whereas Wittgenstein's influence is more palpable in the English-speaking world (despite the fact that he wrote in German), in Europe no one takes greater precedence than Heidegger. In fact, we can trace a lot of the so-called analytic/continental divide in western philosophy to an acceptance or rejection of Heidegger.

There is no understanding 20th century philosophy, especially in Europe, without understanding Heidegger. And I think that he is especially appropriate for our day as he offers perspectives on many modern problems such as global heating, artificial intelligence, automation, and social atomization. I would go so far as to say that the philosophical importance of these can only be fully understood by engaging with Heidegger.

Many have also pointed out that Heidegger is a uniquely "eastern" philosopher in the west. He has often been compared to the Zen Buddhist tradition, but in my opinion Heidegger is much closer to a Daoist than a Buddhist. Scholar on Daoism Chang Chung-yuan once said that "Heidegger is the only western philosopher who not only intellectually understands Dao, but has intuitively experienced the essence of it as well." [1] Heidegger had in fact talked to Japanese Kyouto School philosophers of the day and the influence seems to have gone both ways, though Heidegger never refers to them by name. I see much overlap between "animistic" faiths like Shintou and Native American traditions as well.

In some ways, Heidegger's role in the 20th century of philosophy is very ironic and full of contradictions. It was the Nazi Heidegger who ended up becoming the greatest influence on modern and even post-modern thought in Europe. All kinds of thinkers that the Nazis would have considered socially corrosive degenerates could not have existed without Heidegger, such as Sartre and the existentialists, Adorno and the Frankfurt School, Derrida and the deconstructionists, and Foucault and the post-structuralists.

What is most interesting about this, however, is that Heidegger pushed the western world so far into modernity not by rejecting the foundations of western thought, but by engaging with them more seriously than anyone had done in 2000 years. Indeed, Heidegger was able to "destroy" the 2000+ year history of western metaphysics not because he moved PAST it, but precisely because only he dared to go far enough BACK. His later writings feel more in line with wise men like Laozi and Heraclitus than Kant or Hegel. Heidegger was alone in daring to go back far enough to reawaken the most fundamental questions from the mysterious and murky era of Presocratic thought. It was only Heidegger who dared to take philosophy back from the logicians and scientists and give it back to the poets and sages.

3. Summary of Being and Time

Sein und Zeit or Being and Time was not the first thing that Heidegger ever published. But pretty much evreything he published prior to Being and Time reads like him working out and practicing themes that are better expressed in the latter work. At the same time, pretty much every theme in Heidegger's later writings is somehow prefigured in Being and Time and dependent upon an understanding of it. So there really is only one right place to begin studying Heidegger and it is this text.

It is a difficult text. It is long, it is written in torturously dry and exacting prose, and it has an extremely idiosyncratic lexicon of invented and repurposed words that make comprehending its themes often feel akin to learning a new language. Any researcher will tell you that you simply MUST read a philosopher in their original tongue to fully grasp them, but Heidegger is an especially strong case. Much of the meaning and nuance of the words he uses to introduce new concepts are very connected to the German langauge.

But as Miles Groth points out in an interview, the difficulty in Heidegger's language is not so much that you need a German thesaurus to understand all the obscure and difficult academic words that he uses. Heidegger was a country boy and his language shows it. His terminology is connected to everyday colloquial expressions, so it is rather an awareness of German as it is spoken in its native, natural, almost slang-like nuances that makes his terminology more understandable. [2]

It is impossible to capture all of this in English, but translators have tried. Although it has its problems, the translation of Being and Time that I continue to use is the first English translation from 1962 by John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson. All quotes are from this edition unless otherwise specified. However, there are a few particularly misleading phrases that I change to my preferred translations of them.

With that in mind, I will now begin to summarize the work proper. I rely heavily on the excllent commentaries of Michael Gelven, Hubert L. Dreyfus, and William Blattner.

4. Summary of Being and Time

4.a. Introduction

4.a.i. Chapter I: The Necessity, Structure and Priority of the Question of Being

What is Being and Time about? It is a complex work which touches on a lot of things, but the truth that it is a very intensely focused book in temrs of its objective. That objective is an attempt to answer a very simple question:

What is "being?"
or
What does it mean to "be?"

This question really is the guiding light for Heidegger's entire philosophical career. All of his work circles around it. It is for him the first and most fundamental question of all philosophy. And yet this question has by and large been forgotten and passed over in the western philosophical tradition for almost 2000 years. This question is bound to be misinterpreted. So Heidegger first takes some time to explain the WRONG way to go about answering this question and what pitfalls we need to avoid.

The first thing to make explicit is what Heidegger calls the "ontological difference." The term "ontology" refers to the philosophical discipline that deals with "being." Some traditional questions that might occur in ontology include:
Does God exist?
Do minds exist apart from material bodies?
Does the external world exist apart from our conception of it?
Note, however, that all of thees refer to something "existing." What does this word actually mean? What do we have in mind when we say something "exists" or "doesn't exist?" In even more basic language, what do we have in mind when we say that something "is" or "isn't?" This question is then the most fundamental question in ontology, although it is one that doesn't get asked very often.

At this point, however, we can easily get misled by our language. If I phrase the question as "What is being?," It looks superficially similar to other questions of the form "What is X?":

What is X?
What is "being?"
What is a dog?
What is an idea?
What is water?
What is nitrogen?

In all of these sentences, we use the form "What is X?" and plug some "thing" in the place of X. But in asking the question of "being," Heidegger isn't so much insterested in the "X" of "What is X?," but in the "is."

All of this is to say that whatever being means, it can't just be one THING among other THINGS in the world. We can't have mountains, trees, rivers, wishes, poems, dreams, rules, and then "being" as one of those things among others, even if it is somehow ranked above all the others in a hierarchy as the most universal or most foundational. This difference between "things" and "being" itself is the "ontological difference:

things, entities, beings │       "being"      
─────────────────────────┼────────────────────
                         │                    
       mountains         │       "being"      
       trees             │                    
       prayers           │                    
       revolutions       │                    
       humans            │                    
       plants            │                    
       numbers           │                    
       unicorns          │                    
       etc.              │                    
                         │                    

Note that this isn't merely a difference between things that are material and actual and those that are not. abstract entities like numbers and fictional entities like unicorns would also be on the "thing" side of the ontological difference and be opposed to "being" itself. This is why Heidegger calls his work one of "fundamental" ontology. He's not just asking about what kinds of things there are in the world and how they are, but about what it actually means to BE in the first place.

Whatever "being" means, it can't just be A being among other beings. It wouldn't really answer the question of what being means to just turn "being" into one entity among othres. And yet, that is precisely what philosophers have tried to do for the past 2000 years, which is why this question never really gets answered. Roughly from Plato onward, philosophers have tried to "ground" being in some particular THING or ENTITY, be it idea, process, substance, God, monad, noumenon, will-to-power, or whatever else. Allt hese theories really do is shuffle around the conceptual metaphysical "furniture" that we have. They never really answer what being MEANS.

This means that we have to move in a fundamentally different way and be sure to never start thinking of "being" as if it is a kind of ultimate, transcendent, metaphysical entity that stands above out mortal existence. That is the exact OPPOSITE of how we need to conceptualize it. That is part of the reason that I do not capitalize "being" in this text the way that many other translators do. It is also why a better way to frame this question is not "What is being?," but "What does it mean to 'be?'"

As you could guess from the title, Heidegger's provisionally suggested answer is that, ultimately, being has something to do with time. On an intuitive level, this makes some sense. Whenever we think of something existing, we tend to think of it as being permanent or being impermanent. Whenever we think of it as permanent, we think of it as being the same over time. When we think of it as being impermanent, we think of it changing over time. In both cases, "time" is there in the background of our conception. But the full relation of time to being has to be answered more carefully.

Before we discuss the exact method of investigation, it is worth quoting Heidegger as he reminds us of the historical importance of returning to this question of being in the late 1920s when he wrote this. Namely, he argues that all sciences seemed to be having a crisis in defining their most basic concepts, and that these crises are exactly what make these sciences most mature and robust. We will certainly see the same crises in our modern day, and having an idea of what "being" itself means will continue to help us.

This excerpt also serves as an introduction to the style of Being and Time. I highly recommend reading the original book, but be prepared for its turgid, belabored blocks of text. Heidegger became a much prettier writer as he went on in his career. Personally I like his prose even in his early career, but it is an acquired taste:

4.a.ii. Chapter II: The Twofold Task in Working Out the Question of Being; Method and Design of Our Investigation

What does it mean to "be?" Now that the question is clear, we have to figure out how to answer it. We cannot answer it in the same way so many other thinkers have tried to in the past. In Heidegger's words:

"Entities" will be our general word for things that are on the other side of the ontological difference from "being" itself. That is, things like flowers, candles, atoms, speeches, aspirations, etc. The difference will remain much more clear if we have a division between "being" and "entities" instead of "being" and "beings."

But now we have a problem: How can we study something that isn't an entity? Heidegger's answer is that we must use the method of phenomenology.

The Phenomenological Method

Phenomenology is a philosophical field that largely owes its existence to Heidegger's mentor, Edmund Husserl. The main goal of it, compared to other philosophical disciplines, is to study conscious experience "from the inside." By describing and observing the manner and structure in which we experience and conceptualize things, we can hopefully arrive at something that is more generally revealing about the nature of existence.

For Heidegger, the only way to access "being" itself and not just individual entities is to study the structure of phenomenal experience. Only then can we peer into that which seems to be there but that we remain unconscious of. Heidegger's conception of phenomenology is distinct from Husserl's, but both ultimately seek to reach philosophical insights via the careful and unbiased description of what is most real to us: our conscious experience.

It might sound strange to get at the question of fundamental ontology via phenomenology. But Heidegger's hope is that by describing the wya some particular thing "exists," in a careful, attentive, and thorough way, we can notice the general structure of "being" itself. The best analogy to explain how this is accomplished comes from a commentary by William Blattner, who I will directly quote:

Heidegger hopes to do the same for "being" generally. By describing the general structure of existence behind any particular entity, we can hopefully start to have a sense of the "ground" of being that makes it all possible.

Of couse, there are many entities we could choose to analyze, The entity of Heidegger's choice is the entity that we have the greatest access to and closest relationship with: ourselves. Heidegger's term for the kind of entity that humans are is "Dasein." I will later explain what exactly this term means and why we have to use it instead of simply saying "man" or "human beings" or something like that. We ourselves, Dasein, are what will be analyzed. By describing our own existence in more explicit and clear ways than ever attempted before in philosophy, we can get a better grasp of what the "ground" of being is that makes us able to exist in the way that we do.

This might sound like circular reasoning. How are we able to study "ourselves" in our own specific "being" if we don't know what "being" itself means in full? Haven't we just presupposed the very thing we're trying to understand? Heidegger makes a surprising claim by agreeing that this investigation is inherently "circular." However, this circle is not a vicious one. To paraphrase him in a later work, rather than escaping the circle, we simply need to enter it in the correct way.

This text is primarily hermeneutical, which means it is "interpretive." The text then follows what is called the "hermeneutic circle" in the study of interpreting literature, language, history, etc. The hermeneutic circle posits that when we come to interpret things, we always do so on the basis of a kind of circularity:

If I seek to interpret a work of literature, I might read through it and start with a vague and average understanding of what the work means as a whole. But one passage might present me with particular difficulty, However, I revisit this passage on the basis of what I understand about the rest of the work and suddenly it makes a little more sense. Of course, now that this one part makes more sense, I have to revise my idea of what everything else in the text means on the basis of its relation to that particular passage. And then my new, more thorough understanding will allow me to have a greater understanding of that individual passage (and others).

This is the hermeneutic circle operating: We interpret individual parts on the basis of the whole, but then also interpret the whole on the basis of the individual parts. By moving back and forth we eventually move from a vague and average understanding to one that is more rich.

Nor does the hermeneutic circle only apply to things that might be considered "subjective" like literary criticism. For example, any time a new historical document is discovered, we have to understand it on the basis of what we generally know about the surrounding era. But when we understand that historical document to a good degree, it chanes how we conceive of the era around it as well, because now we have new data for our overall understanding.

The hermeneutic circle even applies for something like a foreign language. If I start to learn a language like Japanese, I will have to start with a very general understanding of what some individual words mean by approximating them in English, even if their nuance and use is different enough for these to be imperfect translations. But then when I become more fluent, I will start to see those words are used in more sentences and see how they are used in different situations that relate to other words. I will have a fuller perspective of what those words "really" mean and how their nuance might be different to an English approximation. But I never could have achieved that without first having a vague and average understanding of what they more or less mean.

This is how all interpretive enterprises go and it is how Being and Time will proceed as well. We will sketch out our own being only on the basis of the vague and average understanding that we have of what it means to be Dasein (a human being). But then by doing so, we will hopefully be able to understand something about what it means to "be" more genreally.

The structure of Being and Time reflects this circular process. As Michael Wheeler has pointed out, the structure of Being and Time consists of a number of outward "spirals" where something is described and interpreted on one level, but then on the basis of that is expanded and interpreted on a new, broader, and more fundmental level: [4]

                             ▲
        even richer          │
       understanding         │
                             │
┌─────────────────────────┐  │
│         richer          │  │
│      understanding      │  │
│                         │  │
│   ┌───────────────────┐ │  │
│   │                   │ │  │
│   │      basic        │ │  │
│   │   understanding   │ │  │
│   │       │           │ │  │
│   │       └───────────┘ │  │
│   └─────────────────────┘  │
│                            │
└────────────────────────────┘

This means that Being and Time is an immensely re-readable work. In fact, it seems to demand more than one reading, because by its very structure we have to "understand" the work before we really can "read" it, paradoxical as this might seem. That is why Heidegger opens with such a robust and challenging Introduction to spell out the meaning of the work at a broad glance. It is also why I made this lecture. I think the text will be much easier to parse if you read this lecture either before or alongside your reading of it.

It sould be noted, however, that Being and Time is ultimately an unfinished work. Originally, Heidegger planned for there to be two main, parts, each with three divisions. The first part would open with a division that analyzed the entity that we all are, which is Dasein. In the second division, Dasein's being would ultimately be shown to be possible on the basis of time. The third division would extrapolate time to be the general "horizon" to answer the question of being. The second part would be a so-called "destruction" of the history of ontology, that is to say a study of important prior philosophers and a critical assessment of how they've either understood or obscured the question of being. This would be more than just an attempt to gloat and look better than prior philosophers. It would be an attempt to make the answer of the meaning of being more clear by comparing it with the prior thinkers whose work instrumental in getting us to this point. It would have proceeded in a reverse chronological order by first studying Kant, then Descartes, and finally Aristotle. However, only the first two divisions of part one were ever completed:

Part One: the interpretation of Dasein in terms of                             
          temporality, and the explication of time                             
          as the transcendental horizon for the 
	  question of being
                                                                               
          1. the preparatory fundamental analysis  ─────┐                      
             of Dasein                                  │                      
                                                        ┼──── These first two are
          2. Dasein and temporality                ─────┘     all that were finished!   
                                                                         
          3. Time and being                                                    
                                                                               
Part Two: basic features of a phenomenological                                 
          destruction of the history of ontology,                              
          with the problematic of temporality as                               
          our clue                                                             
                                                                               
          1. Kant's doctrine of schematism and                                 
             time, as a preliminary stage in a                                 
             problematic of temporality                                        
                                                                               
          2. the ontological foundations of                                    
             Descartes' 'cogito sum', and how the                              
             medieval ontology has been taken over                             
             into the problematic of the 'res                                  
             cogitans'                                                         
                                                                               
          3. Aristotle's essay on time, as                                     
             providing a way of discriminating                                 
             the phenomenal basis and the limits                               
             of ancient ontology

This means that the ultimate answer to the question of being itself never quite gets resolved in the text of Being and Time itself. Most of the material that probably would have made up the unwritten portions of Being and Time ended up materializing in later texts. But the point still stands that this text itself is unfinished. Part of this is because Heidegger became skeptical that time really was the so-called horizon that the question of being could be completely answered on the basis of. But in any case, all of Heidegger's later thought requires us to be familiar with the ground laid by Being and Time. And much that is discovered along the way will be deeply informative regardless.

4.b. Part One, Division One: Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein

4.b.i. Chapter I: Exposition of the Task of a Preparatory Analysis of Dasein

In order to understand Being and Time, one word that we absolutely have to get clear about the meaning of is "Dasein." As I said, "Dasein" is Heidegger's term for what we all are. But why wouldn't he have just said "man," "human beings," "the self," "consciousness," or anything like that? The reason is that according to Heidegger, what we really ARE is not any one of these things and thus not adequately translated by any of them, even though it has something to do with all of them.

The word "Dasein" is a vernacular term for "existence" in the German. It literally means "there-being," being a combination of "Da" (which essentially is the linguistic equivalent of a pointing finger) and "Sein," which means "being." The word "Dasein" thus literally means "there-being" or "being-there." And it is the term Heidegger uses to re-awaken an analysis of our existence without the presupposition of something like a "self" or "consciousness."

How are we to think about Dasein, ourselves, if not as a human, a self, a consciousness, and so on? First and foremost, Dasein is an ENTITY and not just a mode of being. If we remember the ontological difference, Dasein is on the same side as things like stones, clouds, money, phosphorus, and not on the side of "being" itself.

However, it would be a big mistake to limit our understanding of Dasein to that of other fields of science. It would be a mistake to see it as merely the corporeal human body or as a kind of soul-substance. We are not doing biology, so the physical makeup and processes of the human organism are not of interest to us here. We are not doing psychology, so the particular cognitive properties of brains and their relation to our behavior are not of interest to us here. And we are not doing anthropology, so the way that any humans or groups of humans act as individuals or as a culture is not of interest to us here. Dasein is what humans are insofar as they EXIST, which is prior to all of these.

And yet, Dasein is absolutely NOT the traditional Cartesian view of an "I-thing" isolated from the material world that simply stands above it like a neutral observer. In fact, this is the exact OPPOSITE of how Heidegger wants us to understand Dasein. For him, Dasein is something that always comes into being on the basis of a world and others alongside it. Dasein seems to be described in some sections as a kind of shared being that exists at a public level, where it seems like a kind of cultural norm or "social construct" to use a trendy phrase. But then in other sections it seems to be something that has the most private, solitary experiences that ther can be. These two are not in conflict. Heidegger will show that Dasein is a kind of thing that by its very structure has both a public, shared existence and a private, personal one.

What is it that is so special about Dasein as an entity compared to others? For Heidegger, it is that human beings (Daseins) seem to already have an awareness of what it means to be, as vague and simplified as it may be. The fact that we constantly say that things "are" or "aren't" something or other is proof of this. And our understanding of being is not just neutral and uninterested. Human beings uniquely are interested in and "take a stand on" their own existence. Dasein always makes some choice about its existence. Even if we choose to do nothing and simply "go with the flow," that is still choice that we have made.

The term Heidegger uses to explain is is "comportment." Dasein always "comports" itself in one way or anothre towards its own being. This is a useful word because it is neutral. It doesn't imply conscious willing, nor mental contemplation, nor active decision-making. Our "stand" on how we are is embodied in how we ARE and not in how we think. Heidegger's term for a mode of being which is interested in and cares about that very being is "existence."

The word "existence" doesn't have the same general meaning that it does in everyday speech in Heidegger's work. For him, "existence" is a special kind of being, and it is the kind of being that we as Dasein have. Existence is a kind of being that is aware of and invested in its own being. The movement of philosophy known as "existentialism," exemplified by figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, gets its name from this ultimately Heideggerian use of the term "existence." Although the importance of Being in Time in French existentialism cannot be overstated (and was in fact the primary reason that Heidegger became famous in the English-speaking world), it should be noted that Heidegger thought Sartre fundamentally misunderstood his work and that he distinced himself from the "existentialist" movement entirely. Regardless, the term "existence" is very important for this text. Lots of things in the world "are," but only Dasein "exists."

We will now examine the being of Dasein very carefully. However, we should not forget that the main question of Being and Time is not the meaning of Dasein, but the meaning of "being" in genreal. But it is easy to forget this because the two divisions of the text that were completed are the ones that deal with Dasein. So while most of the following will discuss Dasein, it is important to remember that we do this in order to spell out the meaning of "being" generally. With that in mind, we can begin.

4.b.ii. Chapter II: Being-in-the-World in General as the Basic State of Dasein

In the interest of understanding Dasein, we have to take it all on board. We can't just look at exceptional, unique parts of our existence. The most broad, general state that we describe Dasein as is "In-der-Welt-sein" or "being-in-the-world." We should not be misled by the spatial relationship implied in this term. Being-in-the-world has nothing to do with something being physically inside of something else that surrounds it. The "in" that appears in being-in-the-world is not at all the same as a goldfish being "in" a bowl or a chair being "in" a classroom.

Dasein is not A being in the world, it is being-in-the-world. The "in" in being-in-the-world means DWELLING in the world and BELONGING to it. We are in our most basic state already engaged with the world, engaged in it, concerned with it, and not separate from it. This is why Heidegger is deeply skeptical of the Cartesian view that we are at our core a free-floating subject that looks out at and takes on the world as an object. Heidegger will take apart this view more fully later on. For now, we should at least understand that at our most basic state we are already fundamentally "in" the world.

This is why being-in-the-world cannot be understood as the traditional image of the self as an isolated subject set apart from and encountering the world as an object. He says that certainly we sometimes experience the world that way. We especially do so in the fields of academic thoughtful exploration like science and philosophy. Sometimes we experience this in our personal lives as well. Sometimes it feels like we are observers that are separate from and set apart from everything around us. But Heidegger disagrees with the idea that this is the fundamental way that we exist. He says that the overwhelming majority of the time we don't have an experience of ourselves as an isolated subject set apart from the world. In fact, we usually don't have an experience of ourselves as a "subject" at all!

Think about all the mundane, average, everyday things we do in the course of a day. We spend a lot of our lives doing things like brushing our teeth, changing clothes, unlocking a door with a key, eating breakfast, waiting for a bus or a train, cleaning our house, and so on. If we are successful in these dealings, we don't have an awareness of our "self" at all. The basic state of Dasein is a non-reflective, undifferentiated state of very basic relation to everything around us.

Of course, we can encounter the world and the things in it in a more analytical and theoretical way. But Heidegger claims that this is a secondary state which is derived from the more primordial relation we have as being-in-the-world. Our primary relation to the world is a a general state of being where we don't differentiate ourselves from everything around us or set ourselves apart from objects of the world as a subject.

Being-in-the-world is a "unitary" phenomenon. That means that we can't simply break it down into a number of smaller pieces that are simply added together. However, we do need to understand the idea of the "world" and of "being-in" more fully if we want to really get being-in-the-world and thus Dasein into our grasp. This will be the focus of the next few chapters.

4.b.iii. Chapter III: The Worldhood of the World

Just as we can by no means understand Heidegger's conception of Dasein by simply listing physical features of the human body, we cannot understand the "world" of being-in-the-world as merely the sum of all the material things that there are in nature. This does not help us get at what he calls the "worldhood" of the world. However, in order to understand what we do mean by the "world," we need to analyze the way that various things in our experience do show up and make themselves manifest to Dasein.

Equipment

Heidegger introduces two terms to explain how things can show up to us in our various dealings:

"Vorhandenheit" or "presence-at-hand"
"Zuhandenheit" or "readiness-to-hand"

The most famous example to make the distinction between these two clear is that of a hammer. We can look at a hammer and consider it as an isolated "thing." We can consider its size, its weight, its shape, its materiality, its general "hammerness," or any other quality what we consider part of something like its "substance." This reflective, abstracted, removed, uninvolved way of conceptualizing is the attitude we have in theoretical activities like science or philosophy. The hammer in this case shows up as "present-at-hand."

But the laborer who actually USES a hammer in his daily life does not conceive of the hammer this way. In fact, he usually doesn't "conceive" of the hammer at all. He simply uses it for the task of hammering. And when fully absorbed in that activity, the hammer itself "retreats" from his experience and he stops noticing it as a "thing" in and of itself. And it is not just the hammer. Just as he will not see the hammer as an object, he will not see himself as a subject. This is because the hammerer involved in this activity simply exists AS being-in-the-world. He doesn't divide things up in his experience. In this case, the hammer shows up as "ready-to-hand."

It's important to note that readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand are not just properties that things have. Nor are they just a kind of "coloring" that modifies some base experience. They are fundamentally different modes of being in which things make themselves manifest. These modes of being are constitutive for the thinghood of things. A thing that shows up as ready-to-hand is a fundamentally different thing than if it shows up as present-at-hand.

Of course, there is one thing that is neither ready-to-hand nor present-at-hand and that is Dasein. Dasein has to stand apart from these two modes as the thing for which they show up. As we discussed in the previous section, the vast majority of our life is spent in this non-reflective, average, everyday state. Heidegger calls it "circumspection." Most of our life is spent in this involved circumspection.

This means that the majority of the time anything shows up for us, it shows up as what Heidegger calls "Zeug" or "equipment." "Equipment" is not something that we first conceptualize, but something that we first use, manipulate, involve ourselves with, and so on. Heidegger makes it clear that there really is no such thing as AN equipment. We could have no way to experience hammers as equipment without concepts like nails, boards, buildings, wood, metals, etc. There is always an "equipmental totality" that allows things to show up as equipment. For example, people in the modern western world have no special awareness of chairs when they sit down in them. But if someone from ancient Japan were to see a chair, they would in no way be able to experience it as a "chair," because there would be no context for "chairs" in their society. They would only come to experience it as a kind of oddly-shaped hunk of wood.

The "World" Contra Descartes

Things show up as ready-to-hand on the basis of there being a full context for them to do so in. Of course, we are normally not aware of this. When I am typing an email to my manager at work, I don't notice the keyboard AS a keyboard, but I simply use it without reflection or attention. Indeed, the more absorbed I am in writing the email, the less I even divide something called a "keyboard" out of the totality of my experience. However, what happens when a key stops working? Suddenly, I'm cognizant of the keyboard in its THINGHOOD. I don't yet experience it as purely present-at-hand, but I am no longer using it smoothly and without interruption. Heidegger calls this in-between state "unreadiness-to-hand."

Now, I may just press the key a few more times until it fixes itself, return to typing an email as usual, and thus return to my typical involved circumspection. But suppose the key completely stops responsing. And then another one does. And then the entire keyboard stops responding. Suddenly, I look for a solution by checking the wires and so on. When I do this, I gradually become aware that they keyboard is a material thing with its own properties, the computer that it is connected to is a material thing with its own properties, that I am using it to make words appear on a screen, that I'm doing that so that I can send an email to my manager, that I'm trying to send an email in order to be a responsible employee, and so on.

The last of these (doing it in order to be a responsible employee) is really the most important one. In Heidegger's terminology, it's called an "Umwillen" or "for-the-sake-of-which." The "for-the-sake-of-which" that we have determines our whole experience of the world. And what is this "world?" It is exactly what gets "lit up" by a disturbance like the above: The relation of the keyboard to the computer, the computer to the email, the email to the manager, the manager to our status as an employee, and so on.

When something gets interrupted or "breaks down," we get a glimpse of the full structure of contexts that allow things to show up as ready-to-hand in our various dealings. This is the "world." And it is ultimately conditioned by our for-the-sake-of-which. Dasein has always assigned itself some for-the-sake-of-which or another, whether it does so consciously or not. This for-the-sake-of-which is not something that can be grasped as an entity, however. It is rather the basis that allows entities to manifest themselves in the first place.

This is a very different way of conceiving of the world and the ontology of the things in it than we see in most of the western tradition. In order to call attention to just how distinct it is and to make his claims more clear, Heidegger now takes the time to contrast his view with the flagship example of traditional western ontology, René Descartes.

Let's consider the traditional Cartesian view, which, consciously or not, has become engrained in much of western philosophy and science. For Descartes, there are certain objective "things" in the world that have their own substance which is independent of our interests and designs. For example, a hammer has a specific substance or thinghood based on objective features like the physical space it takes up, the material it is made out of, its size, shape, and weight, etc. Eventually, we would start to see things like hammers on the basis of how we can pragmatically use them. But this only occurs on the basis of this most fundamental scientific awareness. Such is Descartes's view.

We can essentially summarize the difference in the two views with Heidegger's terminology. For Descartes, we begin with the present-at-hand and get to the ready-to-hand only by becoming more familiar with the thing and starting to ignore its more objective, scientific properties. Heidegger's view is the exact opposite. For him, we begin first and foremost with the ready-to-hand and get to the present-at-hand by stripping away all of our various involvements with the thing and the lived, worldly context that it emerges in. Only by "wrenching it out" of this context are we able to "free" it for contemplation as an entity that is free-floting and able to be isolated in its substance. It is clear that these two views are diametrically opposed. That said, both of them appear coherent and comprehensible at first glance. So on the basis of what should we believe Heidegger's account over Descartes's?

Heidegger's argument for why Descartes's view is brief and murky. It would have most likely been more fully fleshed out in the unwritten second half of Being and Time during the so-called "destruction" of western ontology. But I will try to summarize the argument, paraphrasing Michael Wheeler: While we conceivably can get to the present-at-hand by "de-worlding" and abstracting the ready-to-hand, we cannot get to something like the ready-to-hand from the present-at-hand in any way that makes sense. The best way to do that seems to be adding on value judgments to it like "sufficiently heavy" or "useful in X context." But these sorts of values themselves are present-at-hand structures. That is because they are abstracted out of our lived, involved circumspection. In other words, you would simply be adding more present-at-hand structures onto something that is already present-at-hand. And it is hard to see how this could result in readiness-to-hand. [5]

The Spatiality of the World

What Descartes did get right, according to Heidegger, was that "spatiality" is essential for entities to show up in the world, including Dasein itself. After all, being-in-the-world seems to be a phrase that implies a spatial relationship. But for Heidegger, where Descartes erred was in viewin this "spatiality" in a purely physical, mathematical sense. He defined the "real" of the material world as something that has "extension," which is to say something that takes up space. But Heidegger argues that the kind of metrical, scientific "taking up space" that Descartes has in mind is an abstraction out of a more primordial kind of spatiality.

But what else could "space" mean if not physical location and extension? First, a basic observation: Phenomenal closeness and distance are very different from physical closeness and distance. For a good example, let's say that I am wearing glasses and looking at a painting in an art gallery. The glasses will be much PHYSICALLY "closer" to me than the painting. But in terms of which of the two things are more central to my experience and thus "closer" in temrs of which stands out most to me, it is the painting by far. In fact, the better a pair of glasses is, the less I will "experience" them at all. If I talk to my friend on the phone, my friend who I am invested in is much more a part of my being than the inert phone in my hand. If I'm walking to my favorite restaurant, I'm thinking more about the sandwich I will eat than the sidewlak that my feet are actually touching.

We could bring up many more examples. Indeed, our modern world with computers and smartphones has only made it easier and easier to have physically "far" things be close to us in non-physical ways. Heidegger himself noticed this all the way back in 1927 when this text was written, and we can only imagine how much more it applies today:

This is the first and most important thing to remember: What is closest to us is not necessarily what is physically nearest. But what is this "closeness" if not physical location relative to our body? It is the PHENOMENAL closeness and distance that Dasein assigns to things that are ready-to-hand. Dasein always has a certain for-the-sake-of-which that orients Dasein, gives it direction, and thus decrees how the world we dwell in appears to us. And in so doing, it has to give everything a range of closeness or distance to us. Some things have to matter to us more than others or have more of a central use than another, and so on. All equipment has a "region" in the equipmental totality that Dasein is involved in.

So far, this shouldn't be very controversial. Most people would agree that we can feel like things that are physiclally far away are more important and thus "closer" than things that are physically near. In fact, it's very topical today to call attention to how young people become so isolated because all of their closest friends are online and thus so physically far away from them. I'm sure you've seen videos about that.

But the truth is that Heidegger's extrapolation is more radical than the above. He doesn't think that we just "feel" like far things are closer to us and thus delude ourselves into not noticing the physical distance which is more "real." He actually claims that the whole idea of physical closeness and distance is a LATTER phenomenon that is dependent on this more foundational and prior PHENOMENAL experience of closeness and nearness:

In short, even being able to say something like "2 kilometers away," "above," or "inside of" is a latter phenomenon derived from a lived, involved understanding of spatiality like "within walking distance," "on the ceiling," or "available when I reach in my wallet," and so on. Even to orient something like left and right requires us first to be IN a world. We might call these latter modes "subjective," but for Heidegger, these are the most "real" and primary ways we enocunter entities within the world. That's not to say that scientific knowledge based on measurements or so in is somehow a "distortion." By no means! But this data is a latter phenomenon that is abstracted and de-worlded.

One question that goes more or less unanswered in this section is how we interpret the fact that we, as Dasein, always seem to be "in" a physical body. Or should we say that Dasein "has" a physical body? Or that Dasein "is" a physical body? Heidegger only references this obliquely when discussing the directions of right and left as we experience them:

Some later phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty have taken up the nature of the body in a way that is influenced by Heidegger. But it remains unclear what exactly the "problematic" of Dasein's "bodily nature" would have been from a purely Heideggerian perspective.

4.b.iv. Chapter IV: Being-in-the-World as Being-With and Being-One's-Self; The "They"

So far, we have defined Dasein in its average everydayness as being-in-the-world. But we know that in our daily lives, we consider "ourselves" to be Dasien. WHO is Dasein in its average everydayness? How does this being-in-the-world relate to the way we tend to refer to Dasein as an "I" or a "subject?" Traditionally, we think of the "self" or "I" as being some kernel that stays the same beneath a constantly shifting manifold of experience and that relates to that manifold in some way. But this is the "I" as presence-at-hand, not as existence. It doesn't do full justice to the phenomenal experience of Dasein as sketched out above.

Being-With

Dasein always comes into existence along with a world. It is never a free-floating subject that is isolated and cut off from everything around it. And one element of that world is the presence of "Others," that is, other Daseins. Even in the most basic relation I have to equipment before me, I have an awareness of others. Even something simple, like the way equipment shows up for us, depends on this. The carpenter who is hammering knows that he is working on a house that Others will live in. The tailor who sews a suit knows that it is a suit that an Other will wear. And this presence of Others is never just "tacked on to" our "base" experience:

We encounter things as ready-to-hand not solely because of our OWN designs and interests, but because we in some way or other relate otherselves to other Daseins. For example, a hammer is ready-to-hand in large part because we are in a culture of fellow hammer-users that we more or less conform to. Heidegger explains that just as Dasein is "In-der-Welt-sein" or "being-in-the-world," it is also "Mitsein" or "being-with." The world that we encounter equipment in is a social one, which always already has Others in it.

That said, we sould not understand "being-with" as merely the addition of a number of individual subjects existing alongside each other. In fact, the experience of "subjects" at all and the number of them in any given state of affairs is grounded on being-with, ont the other way around. It is only on the basis of being-with that we come to have any awareness of ourself as a "self." We never fully lack an awareness of Others. We always stand in some relationship to Others, even when we are alone. Our awareness of what it means to be ourself is only possible on the basis that we will somehow or other relate to Others, even if the way we relate to them is by abandoning them all and going to live alone in a cabin in the woods, for example. Heidegger's term for this way that Other Daseins always matter to us in some way or other and that we always have some attitude toward them is "solicitude." We can love Others, hate them, envy them, miss them, or be flatly indifferent to them. All are forms of solicitude.

In a sense, this dissolves the whole "problem of other minds" that many philosophers have struggled with. We might start to wonder how we can "really" know that there are other beings around me who tihnk and feel like I do and are not just zombies or automatons that convincingly appear to be conscious in the same way that I am. This problem, however, only occurs if we think of ourselves as an isolated "I-thing" that is cut off from and encounters a bunch of other isolated "I-things." This is a present-at-hand abstraction derived from the way we actually exist in our everyday being-in-the-world. In being-with, we already have access to Others along with the access we have to ourselves via our shared activities and involvements. We only get into a mindset where we can entertain this idea of Others being zombies or automatons if something has broken down and gone awry in our daily being-with. [6] [7] [8]

The "They"

In its average everydayness, Dasein is certainly not a kind of isolated subject that is cut off from and observing things around it. Dasein is being-in-the-world and comes into existence always already involved with a world. So it is being-with and comes into existence always already with some solicitude towards other Daseins. But this still hasn't necessarily answered the question: WHO is Dasein in its average everydayness? Heidegger makes a surprising claim: Dasein is, in its average everydayness, by and large NOT Itself. It is what he calls "das Man" or "the 'they.'"

The most common translation of "das Man" is "the 'they,'" and so I will continue to use it. However, it has a misleading air that we must correct if we are to understand Being and Time at all. It sounds at first glance as if Heidegger is describing something sinister when he talks about the "they." It sounds as if he is saying that we become a thoughtless, conformist drone who is blinded by and crushed by the wright of an oppressive system that tries to keep us from becoming our true self. This is definitely NOT the impression that Heidegger wants us to have when we read "the 'They.'"

The original German term is "das Man." It could be perhaps more literally translated, as Hubert L. Dreyfus does, as "the One." But this is equally misleading as it makes it seem as though he is describing some mystical "oneness of all things." In fact, Heidegger means "one" in the very prosaic sense of "what one does" or "what one is to do." In German, this is an especially common term. In English, when giving directions, advice, or otherwise speaking about general behavior, we usually use the word "you" to stand for a neutral, interchangeable subject. For example, we say "You walk to the end of the block and take a left," "You pronounce Gloucester as GLOSTER," "You're not supposed to put your elbows on the table," and so on. Saying "One is not supposed to put one's elbows on the table" sounds very formal in English, but in German, casual speech uses "one" in just the way that English-speakers use "you." For example, even when just giving directions, German-speakers say "one walks to the end of the block and takes a left" in the same way that we would say "YOU walk to the end of the block and take a left."

This is the sense of "das Man" or the "they." The "they" is, most broadly speaking, those whom we do not distinguish ourselves from. Even if we think of ourselves as individualists or people with unusual lifestyles, if we are honest about our average everydayness, the vast majority of its is spent doing things accoridng to "the rules." We cook our food according to the recipe. We cross the street when the light shines a certain way. We wear the same kind of clothes as those expected by others in our profession. And so on. We do as "they" do. But the "they" is never a phenomenon of some definite group of individuals:

The "they" manifests as a kind of mass, where individual subjects start to vanish as we are absorbed into it:

The "they" generally consists of a kind of "average" or "levelling-down" of everything:

This state is called the "publicness" of Dasein. In its average everydayness, Dasein "disburdens" itself of having to take control of its own decisions and agency:

Dasein, the majority of the time, IS the "they" and has already surrendered itself over to it. It should be specified that this in no way means that Dasein stops existing. But like Dasein, the "they" is never something present-at-hand and is by no means something like a "universal subject."

Dasein can either "lose itself" to the "they" and remain engaged in the public world, never really taking hold of itself and having any awareness of its own agency and identity. Heidegger calls this mode of being "Uneigentlichkeit" or "inauthenticity." Alternatively, it can take back control of itself from the "they," recognize its own individuality and be in charge of its own destiny. He calls this mode "Eigentlichkeit" or "authenticity."

The primary focus of Division One is on Dasen in its inauthentic state, where it exists in a kind of average everydayness and doesn't really come to terms with itself AS itself. Division Two focuses more on authentic Dasein, where Dasein comes out of its everyday existence and starts to come to terms with its real selfhood and the responsibility as such that it uniquely possesses.

Now there is one point that must be made very abundantly clear:

THERE IS NO SENSE OF MORAL JUDGMENT IN THE TERMS "AUTHENTIC" AND "INAUTHENTIC!" IF YOU READ "AUTHENTICITY" AS "GOOD" AND INAUTHENTICITY AS "BAD," YOU HAVE MISUNDERSTOOD BEING AND TIME!

Generations have misunderstood this text by not grasping this. There is no sense of a moral judgment in the distinction between "authentic" and "inauthentic." Many have read this section as a kind of call for us to "be ourselves" and not be crushed by conformity. It is hard not to get swept up in that feeling when we read some of the most evocative passages in this section. But for Heidegger, being the inauthentic they-self is simply a way that Dasein can be. In fact, it is a way that Dasein MUST be at least part of the time, as it is a very part of Dasein's structure both to find itself lost in the "they" and also to reach out from it and become itself. A Dasein that only existed in its fully authentic state would be as incomplete as one that only existed in its inauthentic state.

It is especially easy to get mistaken about this, since the words "authentic" and "inauthentic" have such a moral air in English, where the latter implies a kind of dishonesty or cowardice. But we should take these words in their most literal, etymological sense. Just like the original "Eigentlichkeit" and "Uneigentlichkeit" in German, the English words have a root which literally means "self," namely "auto." Thus, "authentic" literally means something like "with self" and "inauthentic" as something like "without self." And THIS is what we should take these terms to mean. Dasein is "authentic" when it has some conception of its "self" and is "inauthentic" when it does not. And there is no judgment here about which one is the "right" way to be. It is simply a description of ways that Dasein is from a phenomenological point of view.

And this helps us bring a view of who exactly Dasein "is" into greater focus. In its average everydayness, it IS largely the "they" and has already given itself over to it. We don't have a full grasp of "who" Dasein is in its authentic mode until Division Two. But much of the roundwork to understand that has to be accomplished in the next chapters.

4.b.v. Chapter V: Being-in as Such

We know that Dasein in its average everydayness is being-in-the-world and have defined both the "world" and the "who" of Dasein to a suitable degree for the time being. Now we have to really understand the structure of the "being-in" part of being-in-the-world. This chapter is very long, complex, and difficult to understand. But it is also the most important of Division One and possibly of the entire text. We will have to proceed very carefully.

It might seem as though we are moving closer to the "real" nature of Dasein. And this is true in a way. But Heidegger now takes pains to make it clear how his fundamental ontology is different from that of other philosophers in the western tradition. Namely, his involves the concept of what he calls "equiprimordiality." This means that multiple characteristics can be equally basic and primal. Both would be essential to the phenomenon, but neither can be more basic than the other or be reduced to anything else that is more basic. And both can only be understood in relation to each other. For Heidegger some phenomena may simply be this way at their core. For whatever reason, the western philosophical tradition has been reluctant to accept this: [9]

We've already seen that in the phenomenon of being-in-the-world, Dasein and the world are both equiprimordial. That is to say, although we can analyze both of them on their own, there cannot be a world without Dasein and there cannot be Dasein without a world. But now we have to explain the exact relationship that happens in the phenomenon of "being-in." It is certainly nothing like one isolated present-at-hand subject in Dasein encountering an isolated present-at-hand object in the world. Instead, Heidegger focuses on three parts of the "being-in" structure, all of which are equiprimordial for it: [10]

"Befindlichkeit" or "disposedness"
"Verstehen" or "understanding"
"Rede" or "discourse"

We will analyze each of these in turn:

Disposedness

Remember the etymology of "Dasein." It literally means a "being-there." This is very important and would be more consistenly obvious in the original German. As we discussed, Dasein is being-in-the-world. In order for the "world" to appear around it, Dasein must be oriented in some way or another. It has a "for-the-sake-of-which" that allows certain things to appear as ready-to-hand our present-at-hand for it. Out of a network of involvements, there is some nexus "carved" out of it. But the web of relations doesn't scale out forever.

To reuse the example of sending an email to a manager, our "there" is conditioned by the relation of a lot of things (relation of keyboard to computer, computer to email, email to manager, etc.). This potentially expand infinitely. But it doesn't. Our nexus of involvements is delimited in some way or other by our for-the-sake-of-which. And THIS is what Heidegger calls our "there." A "there" is disclosed for us. Dasein IS the disclosedness of its "there." In this "there," Dasein is "being-there."

One of the things that is constitutive for this "there" is "Befindlichkeit." I translate as "disposedness." I use most of the terms in the original MacQuarrie/Robinson translation just as they appear, even if sometimes I think they can be somewhat misleading. But in this case, I must make an excpetion. MacQuarrie and Robinson translate "Befindlichkeit" as "state-of-mind." And this is a particularly pernicious phrasing which is bound to lead to confusion. The term "state-of-mind" sounds too internal and cerebral for what "Befindlichkeit" really entails.

"Befindlichkeit" literally means something like "how one finds oneself" in the German. It is a particular affect of Dasein that allows it to have any "mood" or "feeling." As a phenomenon, it is very much before all cognizing and mental activity. Therefore, I will continue to translate "Befindlichkeit" as "disposedness," including revising the excerpts from the MacQuarrie/Robinson translation that I quote. But just note that if you read about Being and Time and see someone refrering to "state-of-mind," it's the exact same thing.

A disposedness is essentially the ground for there to be any kind of "Stimmung" or "mood." This original German word "Stimmung" also means "tone" (in the sense of a note of music). And this is a good way to think of it. Dasein is always "attuned" to the world in one way another. That is to say, it is always in one mood or another. We should think of this more broadly than just the simple "feelings" in a child's picture book like happy, sad, angry, and so on. It is close to think of it as sometihng like the "mood" of a crowd, of an era in time, of a city, of a film or painting, and so on. But of course "feelings" like happiness, sadness, fear, and so on are part of moods.

Dasein is always in some mood or another. And our everyday language hints at something important here. It is notable that we speak of "being in" a mood and not of the mood "being in" us. That is because of the special way that moods show up for us existentially: [11]

Moods are far from just a kind of coloring or "tint" over an objective world that is "out there." The mood that Dasein is in fundamentally changes how things show up in the world for it. Our "there" is conditioned by our mood. The world and our "there" is very different when we are elated, when we are angry, when we are afraid, when we are bored, and so on. Dasein cannot get outside of being in a mood, because its "there" is disclosed to it on the basis of a mood. Even the cool-headed, objective, and impartial stance of the scientist is a kind of mood. A disposedness and with it a mood is one of the things that is constitutive for the disclosure of a "there." And it is only on the basis of this disclosure that there is anything like "experience" in the first place.

Remember that the etymology of "Befindlichkeit" (disposedness) literally means something like "how one finds oneself." The word "find" here is particularly important. This is because Dasein does not ever first come into the world neutrally and view it from an uninvolved stance. Dasein is always already delivered over to some way of being open to the world or another. It always finds itself already being involved in some way or another. It has always already found itself there. Heidegger calls this "Geworfenheit" or "thrownness." Dasein is always "thrown" into the world in one way or another. It always finds iself having "already arrived" into its circumstances. Disposedness is the clearest way that we can understand this thrownness.

Understanding

In terms of constituting Dasein's existence, disposedness is equiprimordial with "understanding" and "discourse." The section on "understanding" is embedded in the general analytic of being-in, which masks how important is really is. Michael Gelven calls attention to this section as being one of the most important in the whole text and as bein essential to comprehending everything that follows it. So while we should not forget that we are talking about one of the three equiprimordial characteristics of "being-in," we need to spend a lot of time realizing its full implications. I follow Gelven's commentary very closely in this section.

Dasein always has some sort of understanding. But "understanding" does not merely mean "thinking" or any other kind of cognitive mental activity. All mental functioning like this is a latter phenomenon that only appears on the basis of understanding. Understanding is a more primordial phenomenon where Dasein's existence-structure is revealed. It does this by disclosing Dasein's possibilities. To get a sense of what this means, we need to review some of the groundwork already covered.

The most immediate awareness we have of the world and the things in it is not a scientific, disinterested, dispassionate apprehending of present-at-hand things. We first encounter the world as ready-to-hand equipment. That is, we encounter it on the basis of how we can USE it. We encounter things on the basis of their usability, serviceability, capacity to do something, and so on. But think about these words: usability, serviceability, capacity. We only recognize something as being useful, serviceable, or capable on the basis of some PLAN or POSSIBILITY that is laid out before us in advance, even if we are not consciously aware of it.

Possibility is the necessary condition for things to show up as ready-to-hand. The world gains significance on the basis of something I plan to do or have the ability to do or, alternatively, not to do. Even the present-at-hand, where we experience things in their bare thinghood appears as such for a certain purpose, like contemplation, gaining of knowledge, progress in science, and so on. And just as Dasein is always disposed in some way or another and is never just neutrally apprehending the world and waiting to make a judgment on it, Dasein has also always already seized some posisbilities and not others. Possibilities are never just free-floating and disconnected from experience. All things occur against an unspoken background of possibilities.

This overwhelming priority of possibility is essential for understanding Being and Time. For Heidegger, the possible is always prior to the actual and the actual always depends on the possible. This is actually a pretty strange claim from the perspective of traditional western philosophy and science. The more common view that most hold is that the possible is dependent on the actual. After all, if we think about if something is "possible" or not, the first thing we tend to look at is the "actual" relevant states of affairs. Then we try to extrapolate on the basis of those. But Heidegger says that this ignores the most fundamental step. In order to look at what is "actually" before us, we first need possibilities.

Heidegger claims that the world first presents itself as a breadth of possibilities. This awareness of our possibilities is foundational to the world "appearing" to us at all. Our possibility to exist in some way or another comes before the actuality of anything in our world. Remember how in the discussion of the "world," he spelled out that it is the "for-the-sake-of-which" that we have that determines the significance that everything in the world has. It is our for-the-sake-of-which that allows things to show up in the first place. And what is a for-the-sake-of-which but a possibility? It is a possibility of being that Dasein has seized upon.

There aren't many explicit arguments in the text for why possibility precedes actuality or facts, as this is primarily a phenomenological accounts rather than a logical argument. However, Michael Gelven calls attention to how we might sketch it out. For example, why is it the case that a thing cannot be both "a" and "not-a." For example, why cannot it not be both raining and not raining? Because I CANNOT picture both things being true at once. Why can a square not have three corners? Because I CANNOT imagine a square with three corners. And these are ultimately statements of possibility. Even basic logic like this is something that we abstract from an awareness of our own possibilities. [12] We might also think of simple acts of perception as based on possibilities. When I look at a brick wall, my understanding of it as a "thing" is bound up with and dependent on the fact that I cannot see through it, that I cannot stick my hand through it, that if I kick it my foot will hurt, etc.

Since Dasein comes into existence by understanding and having an awareness of its own possibilities, there is an important takeaway: Dasein is always to some degree MORE than what it "is." What I mean by this is that in order to have an awareness of my possibilities, I have to "reach out" of what I actually "am" at the moment. Heidegger calls this "projection" (not to be confused with psychological projection). Dasein has to "project itself" out into its possibilities. In order to conceive of your possibilities, you have to see yourself as "more" than you are right now. You have to consider the future. You have to consider things outside of yourself. You have to consider yourself changing in some ways. You have to consider the equipment of the world and how you will use it.

Heidegger famously says that Dasein is always more than what it "factually" is, but is never more than what it "factically" is. ("Factically" meaning a sort of fact from an existential point of view.) That is to say, Dasein is more than just a corporeal body with a central nervous system, neurons firing in the brain, cell processes, etc., because it always "reaches out" psat itself to conceive of its possibilities. But it is never more THAN the projection it has onto its own possibilities with regard to its "there." That is what Dasein IS.

Something important comes to light here: We can come to know and conceive of our possibilities not because they enter into our minds as something to consider. We come to know our possibilities because we ARE our possibilities. This actually solves a big problem in epistemology. The traditional problem is that of how we can come to conceive of possibilities. Conceiving of what is possible but not yet or even not ever actual is a big part of the human experience. And yet, how can we come to direct our cognitive activity towards something that is not actual? It doesn't make sense for possibilities to come from objects of our experience, because what we experience is always actual and never just possible. But if something comes from our mind and doesn't hav any relation to objects of experience, it is hard to see how that could count as knowledge at all, and therefore how we could judge some thing to be possible and others not to be.

For Heidegger, the above problem occurs because the order is all wrong. Possibilities are not things that we later derive from experience and from thinking. They are part of EXISTENCE. Possibilities are there from the very beginning and are part of who we are. We don't need to "create" them out of experience and cognition. They are already there! It is only because there are possibilities, or perhaps more accurately, because WE are possibilities, that things like experience and cognition even come into being.

This is a radical idea because it essentially collapses epistemology (the study of how we come to know things and determine them as true or false) into ontology (the study of what there is). Traditionally there is a problem of philosophers having to explain how "pure" reason relates to the kind of lived experience we have with our senses. For Heidegger, there was never a conflict between these two in the first place because there is no such thing as "purely" cognitive knowing that is cut off from our experience.

While Heidegger essentially does his best to dissolve the boundary between "pure" cognitive activity and lived experience, there is still more to our understanding than merely seizing on possibilities. It is true that our underestanding arises out of our existence-structure. That is to say, in our existence we are a number of possibilities and it is by coming to terms with them that we have an "understanding" in the more dispassionate, conceptual way that we typically think of. But that might seem like an incomplete explanation and that is because it is.

Heidegger now claims that along with "understanding," there is "Auslegung" or "interpretation." Do remember, however, that "interpretation" is not something "extra" added on top of understanding. It is a part of the same process. The German word for interpretation, "Auslegung," literally means a kind of "laying out." And this is important. It implies that you already have the "stuff" before you. You can only lay something out that is already "there" in some way or another. When we interpret, we don't create something new out of thin air. We rather bring what is already THERE into focus.

By "interpretation," he doesn't only mean the kind of thing that goes on about works of art or historical texts or whatever else. Whenever we encounter anything in the world, we take it AS something. Interpretation is far from merely a heady, intellectual activit. When we take something AS something, what we are really doing is just making clear our relatoin to that thing. For example, I can take a hammer AS a hammer because it is of a certain use to me, that of hammering on things in order to make them stay fixed in place. If it cannot do this, it is not a hammer.

However, something can only show up AS that thing if it is already ready-to-hand. I can only take a hammer AS a hammer if I'm in a world where hammers are used and I'm familiar with how to use them. This of course means that interpretation can only happen against a background of something which is already there. Heidegger calls this "something" the "Vor-Struktur" or "fore-structure." In short, in any interpretation we already have some context for encountering something, some direction to how we take it in, and some vague idea of how to make sense of it. This is the "fore-structure."

This process of interpretation happens anytime we take something AS something. But it is important to remember that none of this is purely cognitive or conceptual. All this "taking-as" comes out of Dasein's involvement with and USE of the ready-to-hand. Interpretation is simply this as-structure becoming more explicit. Michael Gelven points out the example of a kiss between two lovers. How do we "interpret" the kiss AS an expression of affect? There's nothing in the kiss itself that we can interpret affection from in isolation. It only comes to have meaning on the basis of the affection already being there. [13]

From the phenomenon of interpretation we ultimately get the phenomenon of meaning. A pen AS a pen has to be able to be used for writing. A broom AS a broom has to be able to be used for sweeping. This is "meaning" of those items. But note that these "meanings" are arrived at based on the potential these things have to be USED. And that means that, ultimately, their meaning does not lie in the things themselves nor in the words we use to refer to them. Their meaning ultimately lies in DASEIN, as Dasein is the one who makes use of them.

The meaning of things is part of being-in-the-world. Dasein is somehow familiar with the world and if so required can make explicit the way in which the world is available to it via interpretation. Meaning is thus a mode of being-in-the-world. Meaning only exists in Dasein. Dasein can never be outside the realm of meaning. Other entities in the world might be devoid of meaning. But never Dasein. Dasein is always the ground for its own meaning.

Even something like propositional logic is originally grounded in our everyday as-structure. To use Gelven's example, we might have a proposition like "The hammer is too heavy." When I say that the hammer is too heavy, I am indeed calling attention to the hammer AS a hammer. But I'm not calling attention to the CONCEPT OF a hammer, but the hammer itself. This is because the hammer itself IS my use of it. My use is the primary "meaning" of it. I'm also pointing out a particular property of it (its heaviness). And I do it in order to communicate to another our shared comportment and our relation to the ready-to-hand. But none of this is the strict theory of propositional logic where I attach the independent idea of "hammerness" to the independent idea of "heaviness." This kind of propositional logic is derivative of the worldly nature of the assertion. Like most science and theory, it is a present-at-hand derivation from the original ready-to-hand assertion.

There is an important point to remember in all of this which makes it such a central part of the text as a whole: Being and Time itself is a "hermeneutical" text, meaning it is primarily INTERPRETIVE. That is, Heidegger here describes not just the way we take a hammer AS a hammer, but also the way we are to "interpret" Being and Time itself. And that ultimately means that we are not inventing something out of nowhere. The structure of being is already "there" and we already have some awareness of it, dim as it may be. The purpose of Being and Time is to make this understanding more clear and articulated, not to invent it out of thin air.

Discourse

The section on "understanding" is substantial and important enough that it can be easy to forget where exactly we are in the text. To review, we are trying to analyze the "being-in" structure of Dasein's average, everyday being-in-the-world. We have focused on three characteristics of it that are equiprimordial: disposedness (the specific state of our "thrownness" into the world), understanding (the projection of possibilities and apprehending of meaning via interpretation), and discourse. Now we can finally focus on "Rede" or "discourse." The section on "discourse" is often quite difficult, but it is clearly important since it is a fundamental part of being-in-the- world. I follow Hubert L. Dreyfus's commentary very closely here.

The German word for "discourse," "Rede," literally means something like "speech" or "talking." But what Heidegger has in mind is something more fundamental than "language." Discourse is for him was has to first be there in order to make language possible. Dreyfus prefers to translate it as "telling," which plays on the German word's original meaning but also accurately points to a more general usage. Think of "telling" the time, for example. Most broadly put, discourse is the ground for there to be any kind of intelligibility.

I find the best way to illustrate this is an example from my own learning of Japanese as a foreign language: In English, like many other languages, we use the words "lightning" and "thunder" to explain the phenomenon of streaks of light in the sky and the booming noises that follow them, respectively. In Japanese, on the other hand, they use a single word to refer to the entire lightning-and-thunder phenomenon: 雷 ("kaminari"). This makes sense, of course. Lightning and thunder always follow each other, so why not refer to both of them with a single word? But it seems that in English we take it as two phenomena that always follow each other: a light phenomenon that ends and a separate sound phenomenon that always follows it. In Japanese, on the other hand, we take it as one single phenomenon with a light component and a sound component that do not overlap but nevertheless are connected as a single process.

Heidegger's term for this is the world being "articulated" (in the sense that the joints in our fingers are, for example). When we come to exist i nthe world, we are able to take certain entities AS entities. We speak meaningfully of individual things like hammers, nails, boards, and so on in the midst of our various involvements. Dasein is thrown into a world that is already "articulated" or "carved up" into certain "nodes" of signification, on the basis of which we can interact with and invovle ourselves with various dealings and other Daseins aronud us. Of course, this will vary as much as anything else that is culturally or societally dependent, which is why we sometimes see discrepancies like the English and Japanese methods for "carving up" the lightning-and-thunder phenomenon.

What is important for Heidegger is that discourse, the way the world becomes intelligible to us, is PRIOR to language. We come to use language in words to express the articulated significance of the world to other Daseins. Discourse is a more broad and immediate thing than language. To use the examples that Dreyfus gives, a surgeon does not have words for all the ways he cuts, nor does a chess master have words for all the patterns of a game that he can recognize and respond to. The significance that emerges in discourse is what allows the world to first have a structure that can become reflected in language: [14]

As Michael Gelven puts it, the most basic foundation of language is not grammar or logic. It is discourse. [15] Discourse is what allows things to come to us as intelligible, and they always do. But making clear the intelligibility of the world has to be a two-way street. Discourse requires us to be open to understanding the significance of the world in a particular way. And much of that consists not in "speaking" but in hearing, listening, and being silent:

Just as we never see "pure" visual data, we never hear "pure" sound tones:

It is on the basis of this "discourse" that we get anything like language. And it should follow the above analysis that in language we never "first" here the words or grammar, but we hear what is being "said." Of course, we CAN analyze language and understand things like its grammatical structure or how it sonuds from a purely acoustic point of view. But this is always something we do by abstracting out of our USE of language in order to point out the shared intelligibility of the world that we dwell in alongside other Daseins. As Dreyfus points out, we get to understand how "uncanny" language is when it is "de-worlded" by repeating a word over and over until it loses all meaning and simply becomes a series of strange sounds. [16] We first and foremost learn language by USING it, not by conceptualizing it theoretically. Even when we encounter a language that we do not speak, we take it as an unintelligible LANGUAGE and not as a pure mishmash of sound tones.

Whenever we use language, we do more than merely understand words and grammar. Language is primarily used as a "tool" to encounter the shared significance that the world has to us with other Daseins. This is a very difficult idea to get used to. We normally think of language as a way of transferring something that we have in our mind and moving it to the outside world so that others can internalize it into their own minds. As Dreyfus humorously points out, we are brainwashed into believing that language operates this way as soon we are old enough to sit down and watch Sesame Street with its depiction of pictures inside of heads that get transferred to speech bubbles! But for Heidegger, this idea is totally wrong. It is a remnant of the Cartesian view that isolates the "self" as an internal "I-thing" that is set apart from the world. Language is something we use as a tool in a world that is already shared. [17] [18]

The "Movement" of Everyday Dasein

We have now thoroughly explored the the three equiprimordial characteristics of being-in: disposedness, understanding, and discourse. Dasein is always the disclosure of a certain "there," and these three determine the very makeup of that "there." However, we ended Chapter IV by pointing out that Dasein in its average everydayness is, by and large, lost in and already given over to the "they." Now it is time to tie these two points together.

Heidegger points out the "movement" of Dasein in its everydayness in terms of three characteristics:

"Thrownness" (see "disposedness")
"Projection" (see "understanding")
"Falling" (Dasein's average everydayness)

In its average everydayness, Dasein is in a state of "fallenness." Despite the evocative, somewhat religious-sounding terminology, it is important to note that the term "falling" by no means has any sense of negative moral judgment. It is a description of an existential structure, not a lesson how we "should" or "should not" be. There is no "falling" here in the sense of "fallen into sin" or "fallen from a state of grace." It is simply a description of how we exist. And by and large, Dasein has already "fallen" into the world" and "turned awayfrom its own self, its own authenticity, and thus from an awareness of what it really means to "be."

To explain what exactly makes up this "fallenness" and how it covers up our real being, Heidegger points out three characteristics:

"Gerede" or "idle talk"
"Neugier" or "curiosity"
"Zweideutigkeit" or "ambiguity"

Heidegger's own descriptions of these are pretty self-explanatory, so I won't have to do much more than quote him at length.

"Gerede" or "idle talk" signifies the variety of unexamined talking and average communication that the they-self has to engage in. Note the etymological connection of "Gerede" (idle talk) to "Rede" or discourse. This is because what is authentic and original in discourse gets passed along and perverted through the realm of idle talk. In idle talk, lots of things get said without much importance. A general sense of intelligibility comes to us, but we never disocver its ground. We hear about what happened, what it means, and how we should feel about it, but always submit to the "they" to give it its significance. This keeps Dasein constantly uprooted and cut off from a more direct relationsip to the world:

"Neugier" or "curiosity" signifies Dasein constantly looking outward for new and novel things. It is constantly hustling and bustling to read the newest headlines, see the newest movie, and so on, but never to really stay anywhere long. Curiosity keeps Dasein constantly engaged but really always distracted. It takes on an inordinate number of facts, but doesn't really come into contact with the most central questions. In making everything a possible avenue for exploration, it equalizes everything and, in doing so, keeps everything at the same equal distance. It never allows Dasein to "dwell." Curiosity is stimulus but never really meaning. And therefore it does not allow Dasein to take itself back from the "they:"

Lastly, "Zweideutigkeit" or "ambiguity" signifies how in our everyday they-self we become unable to distinguish what is genuinely disclosed and what is not. It makes everything seem as though it were already fully grasped and understood. We accept the public understanding of the "they" as if it were our own and become unable to tell one from the other. The ability and necessity of coming to terms with our self in an authentic way begins to seem superfluous and alien:

Such is our average everydayness or "inauthentic" self. Under the conditions of idle talk, curiostiy, and ambiguity, we remain largely pacified and tranquil. Tranquil, of course, doesn't mean "lazy:"

Of course, this falling is not deprived of an apparent, although really sham, "understanding" of the self. Heidegger includes something of a subtle barb at contemporary figures in psychoanalysis like Carl Jung here (MBTI enthusiasts BTFO!):

In our fallenness, we have a life that is full of stimulus and apparent understanding where we never have to question:

Once more, it bears repeating that we should never think of "falling" or "inauthenticity" as some inherently "bad" thing. And we should certainly not think of it as somehow less "real" than authenticity. Nor should the two be thought of as totally separate. Authenticity and inauthenticity are not distinguished by being in the presence of such everydayness or not. We are always being-in-the-world. They have to do with how this everydayness is SEIZED UPON and REPONDED TO.

4.b.vi. Chapter VI: Care as the Being of Dasein

All of the above has prepared the ground for the final chapter of the first division, where Heidegger will sketch out Dasein in its everydayness as a "structural whole." You might ask why it is important to unite all of the above "existentials" in some whole. Let's remember that that this analysis of Dasein is ultimately "preparatory." It is ultimately meant to spell out the ontological ground of Dasein's being. If there was no way to do that, then we couldn't move from the being of everyday Dasein to "being" in general. All we would have would be a number of random phenomenological observations. As the title of the book indicates, that "ground" is ultimately time. But to get to why that is, we have to understand what it is to be Dasein at its core beyong just listening a bunch of features of Dasein's being.

That ultimate ground of what it is to be Dasein turns out to be what Heidegger calls "Sorge" or "care." This should NOT be read in the sense of mushy sentimentality that the word has in English. We should understand "care" in the most general sense of "caring" about one thing or another.

Anxiety

In order to reveal that Dasein's being is care, Heidegger calls attention to a rather revealing phenomenal experience: the experience of "Angst." This term, "Angst," is generally translated as "anxiety" in the English. It's not an inaccurate translation, but we will misunderstand it if we take this word too clinically in the sense of "social anxiety disorder." Heidegger wants to make "anxiety" clearer by contrasting it with "fear." When we are "afraid," it is always of some definite threatening ENTITY. But in anxiety, it is our BEING itself which makes us anxious. I will follow Hubert L. Dreyfus's explanation closely here.

If we remember Chapter III of the analytic, we discussed what happens when some piece of equipment breaks down and becomes unusable. If a keyboard, for example, stops responding when I'm writing an email, it begins to "light up" the whole web of relations and involvements that structure the world in which we dwell. Anxiety is more or less the same thing happening, but with DASEIN instead of a piece of equipment.

Dasein generally comes to understand itself in terms of the "they" and what is laid out for it in the public world that it is thrown into. But everyone has had an experience where somehow we no longer feel at home in the world or see a place for ourselves to exist inside of it. Everything feels uncanny, quite literally in fact, as the original German word for "uncanny," "unheimlich," literally means "not at home." In anxiety, Dasein retreats out of the world and sees it as an alien place that it sees no way to exist in the midst of in the way it normally can. The more the world becomes clear and salient AS a "world," the less of a place for ourselves we see in it.

Hubert L. Dreyfus explains this so well that I will quote his description of "anxiety," with a few Heideggerian phrases changed to my preferred translations:

Dreyfus references the films of Michelangelo Antonioni as a particularly evocative depiction of "anixety," which can help us to get a handle on what Heidegger is talking about:

In anxiety, everything seems uncanny and strange. And yet there is never a particular "object" or "phenomenon" that this uncanniness is oriented towards. That is precisely because a unlike a mood like fear, which is directed at a particular frightening THING in the world, what evokes anxiety is our own BEING. We can quote Heidegger at length because no one describes it as well as him:

All of the above goes to show that while anxiety is never "about" anything in particular, it does reveal something deeply real. Namely, it reveals to Dasein its own ture nature. In anxiety, Dasein realizes who it truly is. We suddenly realize how we are thrown into the world and come to see the possibilities that are before us. Before US, not the "they." We have a complete view of our own freedom and individuality. And that is, in a sense, frightening. It is Dasein in its most authentic state, where we have a complete view of our individual existence.

It should now be no wonder that we so often seek to give ourselves up to the "they" and live a distracted everyday existence. This direct confrontation with our own being-in-the-world brings us face-to-face with a paralyzing awareness of our own inherent groundlessness. And that can be unsettling. The good news is that anxiety is not the only way to experience our individual existence. It is simply the one that is easiest to understand.

The Care-Structure

And what is that individual existence? It is what stands before us clearly in anxiety. Heidegger calls the structure of this existence "Sorge" or "care." Again, this sense of "care" has nothing to do with some loving sense of compassion. Heidegger gives an unwieldy but useful and important definition of "care:"

"Care" is "ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world) as being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world)"

In simpler terms, "care" means some sort of "caring" about something or another. It means being interested, concerned, excited, disappointed, etc. Even the most neutral and disinterested disposition we could have is not truly devoid of care. The scientist, for example, still cares to obtain objective data and thus comports himself in a way that will allow him to obtain it. Nothing comes before "care" in the being of Dasein. Of course, that does not mean that "care" is some primal element. It is still a phenomenon that is ARTICULATED. We are focusing less on a "substance" or a "process" and more on a STRUCTURE.

To return to Heidegger's formulation: As Dasein we project possibilities. Dasein doesn't just HAVE possibilities, it IS possibilities. It is aware of possible ways to be, whether they are authentic (oriented around my own being) or inauthentic (oriented around the being of the "they"). His term for this being in which being itself is an issue for Dasein is "being-ahead-of-itself." That is because we understand our current possibilities not solely by what is currently actual but also by what is not yet actual and is outside of ourselves.

Heidegger also says that "care" is "ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world)." This is because we come to project possibilities in a world that we are already thrown into. We thus have a certain defined range, context, and disposedness that characterizes the possibilities we project. He also notes that "care" is "being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world)." That is to say, Dasein is for the most part occupied with particular things and duties in its average everydayness.

This is the structure of "care." It is reflected, as we see, in diposedness, understanding, and fallenness, and with it thrownness, projection, and absorption in the publicness of the "they." In Division Two, Heidegger talks about the care structure as it manifests in Dasein's authentic state, which we have only hinted at up to now. And ultimately he will show that the ground for Dasein's being as care is time. But before that, Heidegger takes the time to address a few of the more traditional "problems" of philosophy that might come to mind on the basis of what we have established thus far and to do so on sturdier ground.

Care and Scientific Truths

Let's start by thinking about "reality." What is "real?" Is the world just my experience of it? Does the external world exist outside of me? Are other people real or just part of my imagination? Heidegger has alread ystarted to undermine the traditional idea of the world as a number of objects set apart from a subject. But now he takes the whole Cartesian view apart more thoroughly. It is important to do so, as most objections to and criticisms of Heidegger will probably rely on some form of this metaphysical picture. If we can argue against it and dissolve the whole "problem" of reality in the first place, these criticisms won't need to emerge.

Traditionally philosophers have conceived of "reality" as simply the full aggregates of objects that there are "out there." In their conception, there are a number of objects that are sterile and empty of meaning and significance beyond the most neutral things we can say about them like their material extension in space. In their "real" state, they are merely physical, material things with no actual "meaning." Such is their view.

The problem with this view is that there's nothing that makes this barren, scientific view more immediately correct. We never arrive at the "meaning" or "essence" of a thing by encountering it in its barren so-called "reality" independent of the "world." What we encounter in the "essence" here is not the thing "itself." We encounter the FUNCTION it plays in our world, which is always how we interpret what a thing is. Seeing a hammer as "extended wood and metal fashioned in X formation" is also an INTERPRETATION at the end of the day. It is simply one that emerges from a very different disposedness and with a very different purpose in mind than seeing it as equipment.

"Reality," as philosophers have traditionally conceived of it, is basically accurately translated as presence-at-hand in Heidegger's teminology. And we should see presence-at-hand as one mode of how we relate to the world. If we think of it this was and not as a separate "realm" that we have to pass over some wall in order to have access to the "actuality" of, most of the problems disappear.

There have been many thinkers who have used some sort of argument to make statements about how our "interior" relates to the "exterior" world and the "reality" thereof. But this whole problem of uniting the interior and exterior is all based on something that is mistaken: the idea that there is an isolated subject or ego that has to reach over some gap to reach the "real" world. There is no such thing as an isolated, worldless subject or ego. Dasein already has a world by its very structure. Dasein is being-in-the-world and the world comes into existence already along with it. There is no need to "prove" the reality of an external world, nor to "presuppose" it, nor to take it as a matter of "faith." All of this is based on a division that is assumed but not substantiated by our phenomenological experience. There is no need to take up the problem of Dasein somehow "getting to" the world. It is always already in it.

This is sort of a troubling idea. It might sound like an extreme form of postmodernism where everything, including scientific truths, is essenially a "social construct." The lineage of this kind of thinking is indeed traceable back to Heidegger. But Heidegger's view is not so extreme. His view is subtle and equally sensitive to cultural relativism and to the integrity and importance of scientific consensus. In fact, Michael Wheeler has even argued that Heidegger's view in Being and Time can be called a form of scientific realism. [21] We need to get clear about the details, however.

The view that we seem required to take in science is that there is an independent relaity that does not depend on us and that in doing scientific experiments and arriving at hypotheses, we gain access to this reality or at least are able to decide what is most likely to be true of it. At first glance, this seems to sit ill at ease with Heidegger's philosophical project. This is because Heidegger says that the reason we have access to "things" in the world is that "reality" emerges in a shared social context of meaning. Remember that we come to conceive of what things ARE based on our designs, interests, projection of possibilities, and so on. We come to understand what something like a hammer is based not on some world-independent features that we analyze but on how it SERVES us and gets USED in a wide nexus of assigned meaning.

Even if we do take a more cool-headed, so-called scientific approach and look at a hammer as a hunk of wood and metal with various properties of size, weight, texture, and so on, this is still something that we in the end INTERPRET for a certain purpose. Namely, for the purpose of scientific knowledge. When we think about "reality" in the scientific sense, we are thinking of a present-at-hand encounter that we have for the purpose of making discoveries.

Now, the scientist might say that this present-at-hand view is the one that is most "real." For example, we normally encounter water as ready-to-hand equipment. We wash dishes with it, swim in it, watch it pouring out of a fountain, and so on. But by stripping away these "involvements," we arrive at water not as a tool or equipment but as "H2O." This is independent of our interests and uses, of course. Water was H2O before we ever discovered what "H2O" was, indeed before human beings ever emerged on the planet.

What is important to remember, however, is that there is never "being" without a "taking-as." THINGS can be independent of Dasein, but there is never INTELLIGIBILITY that is independent of Dasein. Things like trees, mountains, rivers, and so on can occur without Dasein, as they have for thousands and thousands of years before human beings ever emerged on the planet. But in order for them to come into BEING, Dasein is necessary. Dasein is necessary to take any entity as either ready-to-hand or even as present-at-hand. It's important to dwell on this last point: even understanding any entity as "independent of us" is something that requires US, Dasein, to become intelligibility. There is no concept of "independent of Dasein" without understanding Dasein.

While things can occur without Dasein, there is never any intelligibility and thus never any "being" to them without us. This is a hard point to spell out, because anything we can say about something scientifically is something we get at through intelligibility. Technically, even dividing nature up into things like trees, rocks, and so on is a form of making them intelligible to us. So there is pretty much nothing that we can say about "the real" that has nothing to do with us. But the point remains that all forms of making things intelligible, either as something we are involved with (ready-to-hand) or something independent of our conerns (present-at-hand) is a kind of interpretation. And that cannot occur without Dasein.

In the end, it seems as though Heidegger's position is that "the real," in terms of what occurs and not, is indeed independent of us. "Nature" is whatever it is independently of what we think about it. However, "nautre" only gains intelligibility and offers anything up as something we can have access to the BEING of on the basis of certain background practices that determine how "the real" will show up.

I will give a hypothetical example: Oil and water never mix. An ancient culture may have explained this by something like the god of the sea and the god of the vinyard disliking each other because they are competitive souces of food. That seems quaint nowadays, where we explain these two substances not mixing on the basis of their molecular properties. But both of these are ultimately structures of intelligibility and meaning that we set up to decide what can count as fact. But there is an important way that this does not merely lapse into a postmodernist void: These structures cannot actually change what those facts ARE. That is, whether we set up a social practice explaining things in terms of angry gods or in terms of incompatible molecules, oil and water still refuse to mix. And THAT fact that they refuse to seems to be what is independent of us.

There is a potentially unsettling upshot of this. In the end, it does "equalize" science a bit with other ways in which "the real" is disclosed to us. That is to say, Heidegger does not think that science is the "ultimate" way in which everything else becomes intelligible. The only thing that ever grounds one set of social practices as THE one that makes everything else intelligible is Dasein. Modern science is one way of revealing and describing "the real." It is a social practice at the end of the day. So is religion. So it ethics. So is art. So is history. All of these are ways that "things" can give us access to some kind of truth and create understanding, and Heidegger doesn't seem to rank one above the other.

Though scientists might find this disturbing, nothing about it really puts anything established by science in danger. Heidegger does not think that science is merely a matter of convention and doesn't take issue with its method and role in the world. He gives it all the integrity it deserves. But no one should expect a poetic or ethical sense of revealing from science. The kinds of questions asked in science have nothing to do with those asked in ethics, religion, etc. Dreyfus calls Heidegger a "plural realist" for this reason. He seems to think that there are multiple ways that we arrive at truth about what is "real." [22]

Truth as Disclosure

But what is "truth?" What is the "truth" that we get access to in science and presumably in philosophy as well? What does it mean to say that something is "true?" For Heidegger, the philosophical traditoin has erred when trying to answer this question. The tradition only tells us WHEN something is true or false. They give us the CRITERION for truth, but they don't answer the question of what truth actually MEANS.

We traditionally think of truth as "correspondence." This is the business of propositional logic and should strike us as intuitive. If I have a proposition like "I have a pen on my desk," we'd have to look at the actual state of affairs in the real world and see if it matches up. If it does indeed correspond to what we encounter in the real world, then it is true. This is truth-as-correspondence. But this theory and others like it really just answers the question of WHEN an instance of truth occurs. What is actually HAPPENING in one of those instances?

For Heidegger, truth is always first a "disclosure." In his later work, Heidegger will especially latch onto the ancient Greek word for truth: "aletheia." "Lethe" in Greek literally means something like "concealment," "hiddenness," "coveredness," etc. It is most famous for appearing as the name of the River Lethe in the underworld in Greek mythology, where the shades of the dead go to drink and forget their former lives. A-lethe-ia is thus an UNconcealment, an UNhiding, an UNcovering, and a DISclosure. For Heidegger, this is the most foundational meaning that there is to truth: a revealing. Truth-as-correspondence is a derived phenomenon and not a full understanding of truth.

Consider a proposition like "I have a pen on my desk." How do we verify if this is true or false? By seeing if it corresponds to the real fact of the matter. But I need to look at the desk and actually SEE If there is a pen on it or not. In other words, I look at the desk and a pen is either disclosed to me or not. Correspondence is something that can only emerge on the basis of something SHOWING itself to me, so I can compare what is real with the proposition. I have to already have some awareness of a phenomenon called a "pen" to know if what I am looking at counts as one or not.

Note, however, that this process of "disclosure" happens as a part of our own being-in-the-world. And that ultimately means that "truth" is not a characteristic of propositions, nor of the things in the world that they refer to. Truth is a characteristic of DASEIN. Dasein is always the disclosure of some "there" or another. The whole structure of care involves us being alongside entities within the world. And in order for us to grasp and encounter any entities whatsoever, they have to somehow become disclosed to us. The number of entities disclosed is always some definite range. Because Dasein is thrown into the world, it is always in some state or another and thus focused on some entities and not others. When Dasein comes to understand, it projects itself onto its possibilities. This is the most primal and immediate kind of "truth" that there is. We interpret all things on the basis of possibilities, and that is the basis of anything showing up for us.

This isn't to say we can never get things wrong. This original "disclosure" eventually trickles down into assertions that we can use properly or improperly. For example, I can see a piece of cloth on the floor, think it's a cockroach, and say that there is a cockroach on the floor and be incorrect But it is only possible to make this assertion and for it to be either correct or incorrect on the basis of some kind of disclosure that allowed me to understand what a cockroach is, what the floor is, and so on. We also have to remember that Dasein, in its average everydayness, exists in a state of fallenness, where it becomes absorbed in the "they." So it is no wonder that the original disclosure of something, which is not so easily explained in a simple proposition, more often than not ends up getting simplified and distorted through becoming hearsay and getting unthinkingly repeated.

There is an important takeaway here: Dasein in its inauthentic they-self always covers up and is cut off from the original disclosure of truth. But fallenness is part and parcel of Dasein's being-in-the-world. This means that both "truth" and "untruth" are equiprimordial for Dasein. Wherever there is some disclosure, it is because some other thing has been concealed or covered up. And that which is concealed or covered up is only so because some other things have been revealed.

This is a very difficult concept to explain. An analogy that appears in this text a few times is that of Dasein as a "clearing" in the sense of a clearing in a forest. What comes to be comprehensible and disclosed is a small clearing in the midst of a vast forest of the unknown. For Heidegger, all revealing has to occur on a background of concealment. Dasein is the disclosedness of a certain "there." But for any "there" to come to the fore, something else has to be ignored. Dasein can have its own existence and be recognized and understood as an individual thing precisely because it is a "there" and not an "everywhere."

An example will help this become clearer. When we conceive of a "tree," we might think of it as a fundamentally different thing from the seed that it grows out of. But if we really stop and think about it, are they really different things? What is the moment that a seed stops being a seed and becomes a tree? Suddenly, it's not so clear. We see the whole interrelated process of seed to sapling to tree to decaying tree to mulch to new trees and so on and don't know where to draw the lines. But ultimately, we ARE able to make sense of a seed as a different thing from a tree, even though there are no firm boundaries. It's precisely because we choose to IGNORE a substantial amount of ways that the seed is related to other phenomena that it can show up as a "seed."

If we don't put any of these barriers up, then the seed won't be revealed as its own phenomenon, because we can't tease it out from the tree, the soil, the nutrients from the sun, and so on. But if we cover up its relation in this full process of growing, sprouting, decaying, becoming mulch, and so on, we can isolate the "seed" as a thing in itself, there are always a huge number of potential ways for things to show up and be intelligible to us. We always have to choose some and leave others behind.

The idea that truth is not a feautre of anything but Dasein is a bit troubling. It sounds like it might lapse into some extreme skepticism or even solipsism. But Heidegger is clear that Dasein never chooses what is true or false. It only responds to truth as it is disclosed. There are no such things as "eternal truths," unless it is absolutely known that Dasein will exist forever. Things are true when they are disclosed in a world that we share with others and have some kind of shared background practices in which we can make statements about what is true or not. But we do not create these practices. We are thrown into them. And the fact that some things will be true or not is not something we have control over. For example, water will always be H2O, even when there are no humans. But it will not be TRUE that water is H2O if there are no humans. That is because "truth" is something that is disclosed to Dasein. Without Dasein, there is no need for anything called "truth."

This discussion of truth is extremely important for the entire text, because ultimately what it does is give justification for the existential analytic of Dasein as something relevant and useful for answering the question of being generally. As Michael Gelven reminds us, what makes this so important is that because truth is "disclosure," the entire analytic of Dasein can be taken up as something that is true, even as just a possibility. It is what makes this entire analytic philosophically valuable and not just a kind of therapeutic reflection. In making the existential structure of Dasein come to the fore, it has been disclosed to us. And that itself is what truth is: something being disclosed.

And the fact that we can arrive at truth by doing an existential analytic and having something disclosed to us means that it can open up the pathway to the question that the whole book is really after: the question of being in general. As mentioned in the Introduction, the full leap to "being" in general remains incomplete in Being and Time proper. But the next and last remaining division shifts to the real ontological work. Remember that this division is a "preparatory" analytic of Dasein. All of this was to lay the groundwork for really examining Dasein in its "authentic" state. In Division Two, Heidegger aims to show that the structure of care and thus of all of Dasein's possibilities and the things they disclose is actually "temporality." [23]

4.c. Division Two: Dasein and Temporality

4.c.i. Chapter I: Dasein's Possibility of Being-a-Whole, and Being-Towards-Death

Before diving into Division Two, it will be helpful to quickly review where we are at this point in the text:

The purpose of this text is to arrive at the meaning of being in general. In order to do so, we took a specific entity, Dasein, as our theme. To understand Dasein, we need to understand it as a WHOLE. That means that we began by looking at Dasein in its average everydayness. In this state, Dasein is being-in-the-world and is by no menas set apart from "objects" in the world as a subject. The "world" is the general nexus of meaning in which we experience the ready-to-hand. In being-in-the-world, we are also being-with, because we always have some awareness of and solicitude towards Others. In fact, we are generally given over to the "they" in our everyday existence.

The structure of this "being-in" is complex. Dasein is the disclosure of a "there." Dasein exists in a state of thrownness, because it is always already involved in some definite range of possibilities and affairs with a certain disposedness. It comes to understand both itself and everything else by projecting its possibilities. This projection of possibilities is how things gain meaning. This meaning is articulated by means of discourse, upon the basis of which things become intelligible. By and large, Dasein is "fallen" into the world and given over to the "they," so this disclosure of its own possibilities (and thereby everything else as well) remains covered up. This entire complex structure is summed up in the word "care" and is defined as "ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world) as being- alongside (entities encountered within-the-world)."

Division One focused on Dasein in its average everydayness. It focused on Dasein in its inauthentic existence, where it is "fallen" into the world and given over to the they-self. There were intimations of what "authenticity" means as a contrast, but we never really spent long on it. This is what Division Two seeks to answer. And it will be ontologically relevant, since we have a greater awareness of Dasein's real structure of being when we study it in its authentic state. This is because in its authentic state it has some greater ontological awareness of what it means to "be" when it has some sense of its own individuality (its own "being").

However, there seems to be a roadblock before us when we try to understand Dasein in a holistic way. Near the end of the last section, we came to understand that Dasein is always "ahead-of-itself," that is to say, it "reaches out" into its possibilities. In this way, Dasein is always "more" than it it factually "is." There is always something about Dasein that is still outstanding. Dasein always projects out into possibilities. It IS its thrown projection. With that in mind, it seems like we might never be able to get Dasein fully in view and have a complete grasp of what it is, becuase there will always still be something outstanding. Indeed, it seems that, definitionally, the moment Dasein has nothing more outstanding and not yet realized, it will no longer be Dasein.

Death as Our Ownmost

But there is something that presents Dasein with a clear and undoubted end and thus a sense of its own finitude, where it will be in a state where it no longer has any possibilities to reach out into: That something is its own death. Authentic Dasein has an awareness of death. With that in mind, Heidegger now analyzes the ontological importance of death. None of this has to do with the biological functions of ceasing vitality, any psychological understanding of the effect of death, any theological question about of the possibility of life after death, anthropological questions about how we respond to and engage with death as a culture, or even just a moral question about whether dying is a "good" or "bad" thing and how we should conceive of it for our own betterment. The question is about what death ultimately means for Dasein. And the answer is that it provides Dasein with finitude and thus helps it to get a holistic view of itself.

Of course, there is a difficulty here. Death is always, definitionally, out of our grasp. We do not "experience" our own death. Death is the end of all our experiences. If we only have a total grasp of Dasein when we die, then wouldn't we, by necessity, never have a total grasp of Dasein?

At first, it seems as though we might be able to understand death by experiencing the death of Others. After all, most of us somehow come into contact with the phenomenon of death long before we actually die. People die every second of every day around the world. We hear of deaths constantly. And of course, we all eventually experience the deaths of friends and loved ones. But since Dasein is a being-with in its average everydayness, we usually experience these deaths more in the sense of a relation of solicitude. We experience the person no longer being in the world and the phenomenon of his lack and unavailability, as the rituals of memorial and remembrance, or even just as the pure materiality of his lifeless corpse. But we do not actually experience his death AS death:

We never experience the death of another AS death. That is because my death is always MY OWN. We can substitue any other Dasein for ourselves or vice versa in understanding in a lot of public, everyday, shared concerns and involvements. It is in fact quite necessary to do so to arrive at a shared world with Others. But deaht is what gives us our wholeness. We can thus never understand what it actually MEANS for any other Dasein to die. My death is always something that is only mine and can never be understood by another. I can live someone else's life, but I can never die someone else's death. My death is always what Heidegger calls my "eigenste" or "ownmost."

Being-Towards-Death

So the problem continues to loom large. How can we get a sense of Dasein "as a whole" if there is always something outstanding (i.e. not yet realized) in its existence and if finitude is only provided by death? The answer is that Dasein does not need to actually be AT its end to realize that it is GOING TO end. We do not actually need to be AT the end of our life to have a grasp of our totality, but only to be aware that we will die. It must be the case that to have a grasp of Dasein in its totlaity, we don't need a full catalog of all the actual experiences that any Dasein will have. That, indeed, would only be possible at death. But no particular experience, nor the sum of them all, is really relevant to what we are after.

What we need to have is an awareness that it is possible for us not to "be." Heidegger's term for this is Sein-zum-Tode or "being-towards-death." This doesn't mean the actual experience of death. Nor does it mean a kind of constant brooding over the fact that we will one day die. It is rather the existential awareness of the possibility of not-being. Like anything else, we come to be aware of this through Dasein's own disclosure.

We come into being-towards-death and thus authenticity in the same way we come into the inauthenticity of our average everydayness: via the care-structure, which consists of "ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world) as being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world)." In articulating the care-structure once more, Heidegger focuses on the three components reflected in it: understanding (ahead-of- itself), thrownness (being-already-in), and fallenness (being-alongside). We will see how being-towards-death reflects all three of these.

Understanding consists of the projection of possibilities. And certainly death is a possibility for Dasein. It is the one that brings the very being of Dasein into focus in that it is unavoidable, that we will do it alone, and that no one can share it with us.

In terms of thrownness, we are "thrown" into having to die. We find ourselves inevitably having to die. It is not something we chose. We get a revealing of it through disposedness, and the disposedness that reveals it is "Angst" or anxiety. In Division One, we explained that anxiety is a mood where we seem to be unable to find "ourselves" in the world. It individualizes us by making our own possibilities paralyzingly clear, but does so in a way that makes us seem unable to fir into the world. This sense of "retreating" and the lack of "being" of Dasein gives us a foretaste of death and it individualizes us, just as death does.

This leaves us with fallenness. Our fallenness is conditioned by an average absorption in the "they." And we certainly have some relation to death in our everydayness. In fact, because death is so commonplace, it might sound strange that we are only authentic when we are aware of our possibility for dying. Aren't we all already aware of our possibility for dying? Even in our average everydayness, none of us deny that we will someday die. It is simply a given. It seems like such an obvious truism as to not be any kind of revelation.

But this is how deftly the "they" can cover things up. We might have an awareness of death in our fallenness, but we never take it up as our OWNMOST possibility. In our publicness, we say things like "Everybody dies," "Death is universal," "Nobody avoids death," and so on. We de-individualize death and, in so doing, run away from our OWN being-towards-death by making broad equivocations. We turn death into something which will "of course" reach Dasein someday, but that doesn't belong to anyone in particular. What passes for an awareness and acknowledgement of death is really a method of covering it up and not taking it up as something that is in each case ours and ours alone.

As we can see, the care-structure remains evident even in being-towards-death, because it involves projection, thrownness, and fallenness. Care is still the being of Dasein. And now we have the requisite link from Division One, which discussed inauthentic Dasein, to Division Two, which discusses authentic Dasein. The link is that both are grounded in care and that the meaning of the being of both is still found in the care-structure.

We know that the inauthentic they-self hides death from us by turning it into something that is for everyone and thus common to all. Nothing could be further from the truth. Death is our ownmost. It is always mine and mine alone. The primary way that the they-self hides death from us is by only seeing it as an actuality and not as a possibility. This sounds bizarre, as generally we would think of something being "actual" as seemingly being more "out in the open" and "real" than something merely "possible." But remember that for Heidegger, possibility is ontologically prior to actuality and that the actual only exists because of the possible. And this makes sense if we think about it. As long as we only ever see death as an "actuality," we will never take it as our own. That is because it will never be an actuality for us while we are still alive. Indeed, definitionally, the moment death is an actuality for us, "we" are no longer there to take it as one. But if we look at death as a possibility, suddenly it is open to us.

Anticipation

What does "being-towards-death" consist in if not just sitting around and waiting for death to occur as an actual event? To make this clear, Heidegger introduces two terms to be distinguished:

"Vorlaufen" or "anticipation"
"Erwarten" or "expectation"

The latter, "expectation" is merely waiting for something that is probable to occur as an actuality someday. "Anticipation" is different. The original german word, "Vorlaufen," etymologically means something like "running ahead of." It means to pick that thing up as a possibility that is our own. This distinction is much more important than it may seem on the surface. An "anticipatory" attitude towards death in being-towards-death is the basis fo authentic Dasein.

When we come to understand the possibility of our own not-being, we also have the possibility of our own "being" revealed to us. In understanding that, we have the awareness of who we "really" are come to the fore. Of course, we seem to have some awareness of this in our everyday life. We say things like "Before I die, I'd like to try skydiving" or "Nobody has ever been on their deathbed wishing they'd spent more time at the office." We emphasize what is important and central to us as our own selves by linking it to our death.

This gives us what Heidegger calls "freedom." Paradoxically, true freedom comes with the awarenss of something which is inevitable and unable to be resisted: our own eventual not-being. But by coming to terms with that possibility, we get access to a way of being in which we have a full awareness of our possibilities as who WE really are and not just as the they-self. We understand first and foremost that we are beings who exist and who can exist in any way we wish to, not just those ways of being prescribed by the "they:" [24] [25]

4.c.ii. Chapter II: Dasein's Attestation of an Authentic Potentiality-for-Being, and Resoluteness

Having this full awareness of our possibilities is what Heidegger calls an "authentic potentiality-for-being." It is authentic in that it is focused on our possibilities as OURSELVES, not as the they-self of our fallen everydayness. Heidegger says that this is largely understood through "Gewissen" or "conscience," which we experience as the "call of care." He says that this "call" awakens us to our "Schuld" or "guilt." This section sounds very spiritual, almost like a secularized form of Christianity. But what he describes here is really rooted in our everyday experience. It is not a kind of mysticism, and strictly speaking it really has nothing to do with "ethics" or "doing the right thing," which is what makes all the talk about "conscience" and "guilt" that much more confusing. In any case, this is a very difficult chapter and we will have to proceed carefully to explain exactly what is going on in it.

Guilt and the Call of Conscience

Heidegger's definition of "guilt" is very removed from the way we typically understand this word. It is characteristic for Heidegger to take a word for a specific phenomenon and to use it to refer to a more fundamental structure that it is a particular manifestation of. And is understanding of "guilt" follows this pattern. So, while we should not limit our understanding of "guilt" in Heidegger's sense to our everyday understanding of what "guilt" means, we can start to understand it by reflecting on what we mean when we say we experience "guilt" in our average everydayness. In doing so, we will see the phenomenological relevance of it, because we will see how it reflects a more basic existential structure.

We generally live in our normal, undisturbed, involved circumspection in our ordinary being-in-the-world. We are inauthentic in that we don't focus on ourself as an individual "subject" or "I." However, suppose that suddenly one of our transgressions is made obvious. For example, maybe we forgot to turn off the light when leaving the room and left it on all day, wasting electricity. Or maybe we forgot our friend's birthday and realize the next day that we forgot to send her a message. Or maybe it's something more extreme. Perhaps we cheated on an exam and the teacher calls us out by name before the class. In all of these situations, we feel that WE are guilty. We sense that it is nothing that can be passed off onto someone else. We, as an INDIVIDUAL, feel the "guilt."

At the same time, in this moment of "guilt," we become acutely aware of our thrownness. We realize the circumstances we have found ourselves in and what we have done to incur this guilt. And along with thrownness we have projection. We reach an understanding based on projecting the possibilities of what we can do now that we have been found guilty. Certainly, whatever these possibilities are, they are OURS. We cannot rely on the "they" to make up for whatever WE have done. In this sense, being "guilty" uniquely makes us authentic.

What I am talking about, however, is the average, everyday understanding of "guilt." When Heidegger talks about "Schuld" or "guilt," he's talking about "guilt" as an existential structure, which is something more than just the state of affairs of some ethical breach, the actions taken to make up for that breach, or a fear about a punishment that will occur as a result of that breach. The average understanding of guilt helps us get a sense of what the effect is like. But existential "guilt" is something far more broad. It has nothing to do with some bad action or feeling bad about it. In fact, it really has nothing to do with "morality" at all.

In a very difficult section, Heidegger claims that to be "guilty" is for Dasein to be the the basis or "ground" of a "nullity:"

To fully explain what this means, we need to back up a bit and sketch out the full "drama" of how come to terms with our "guilt." Heidegger decsribes this a "call of conscience." In our average everyday understanding of "guilt," we can more or less understand this. When we have a sense of guilt, we feel the voice of conscience in the back of our head calling us out of our everyday existence and encouraging us to do better. But again, we are talking about something more fundamental than just the feeling of remorse about doing some bad action.

Michael Gelven explains that the "call of conscience" is a small drama of sorts that happens entirely between and about the self. The one who is called is our self in our fallen public mode, the one who does the calling is the self in our authentic mode, and it calls us to leave our fallenness and come into our own authenticity, because it is only in authenticity that we can correctly respond to guilt. But what is this "guilt" if not just remorse over an ethical breach of sorts? It is ourselves being the "ground of a nullity." But what does this mean?

When we experience the call of conscience, we experience the ability to choose to respond to it or not. That means that at the most fundamental, structural level of Dasein's existence, there is already a choice to make about how to act. Dasein already hsa the choice to be authentic or not to be authentic. It has the choice to be honest or dishonest. Any choice it makes also has its "nullity," meaning its opposite or its NOT. This "nullity" exists at the very basis along with its positive.

And what this means at even more basic level is that Dasein is inherently GROUNDLESS. While we are indeed thrown into our various circumstances as being-in-the-world, there is not one way that we have to be at our core. None of the roles or dealings we have assigned to us in our fallen, everyday existence are who we really ARE. Our "ground" for our being is something that we have to seize on in one way or another. The call of conscience never makes ONE particular recommendation for the "right" or "wrong" way to act. It simply directs us to the "guilt," and thus to the ability to choose that we already have. It gives us back our agency.

This is what "guilt" means at the most basic, fundmental, existential level. And that is something far more fundamental than just a sense of morals. In fact, Heidegger agues that the fact that we are necessarily guilty is the basis for there to be anything like "morality" in the first place. Before there can be morality, there must be an ability for us to choose one way or another.

The whole "drama" of the call of conscience nevertheless is still part of Dasein's being, and thus still reveals the structure of care. In experiencing the kind of anxiety where we can hear the call of conscience, Dasein no longer feels at home in the "they" and has to come to terms with its own individualized existence. It becomes aware of the particular circumstances it has already inevitably found itself in. This is the dimension of thrownness as revealed via disposedness.

In conscience, Dasein becomes aware of its guilt because it becomes aware that it is the ground of its own nullity. I, as my authentic self, can accept or reject the possibilities that I have. And this guilt is uniquely mine, my ownmost, because I cannot fall back on the "they." This is the dimension of understanding via the projection of posisbilities.

We can say that thrownness/disposedness as well as projection/understanding emerge in consceince. But there is a third part of the care-structure, which is fallenness. And that is not reflected in conscience. Why not? Because conscience is something that uniquely calls us to be authentic. It cannot exist in fallenness, which is necessarily inauthentic. Heidegger says that consciousness is not conditioned by thrownness, projection, and fallenness, but rather by what is equiprimordial for disclosure: disposedness (and therefore thrownness), understanding (and therefore projection), and DISCOURSE. This is because we experience our conscience as a "call." We can only adequately respond to and recognize conscience if we keep silent and "listen" to when it calls us. [26]

The term Heidegger uses for this form of being open which is the ground for intelligibility is "discourse," and his name for this particular kind of open and receptive listening where we are not deafened by the loudness of the "they" is "reticence:"

Heidegger's unwieldy description of the disclosure of Dasein that emerges in the call of conscience is thus "reticent self-projection upon one's ownmost being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety."

Resolutenss

This particular kind of authentic existence is one that we come to have a glimpse of via the experience of the call of conscience. Heidegger calls it "Entschlossenheit" or "resoluteness." The term in German means something like decision, resolve, having made up one's mind, and so on. The etymological connection to choice and to freedom is important. Authentic existence is "resolute." It uniquely asserts its own existence and its grounded in its own sense of responsibility and guilt. It is thus uniquely free to be itself.

When we are authentic, we want to have a conscience. We want to act without appealing to anything outside of ourselves to "justify" what we do. When we do so, we act resolutely. We act in our own name, for ourselves, and take full responsibility for our actions. In resoluteness, we realize that we are fundamentally NOT at home in the world and have no inherent and "natural" way to be. It will be a form of disclosure where I am reticent and do not follow the traditional language spelled out for me. I will have to find it intelligible only in the terms of what is particular for me.

That said, it would be a big mistake to see resoluteness as changing us into a free-floating subject. Even in our authentic mode, we are still utimaltely being-in-the-world and being-with. Resoluteness is simply a new mode of being-with Others in the world. It is one that has taken charge of its own awareness of itself and with it the full burden of responsibility for choosing its own existence, but not one that is indifferent to or cut off from the world around it. In being resolute, we are as thrown into our particular circumstances in a publicly shared world as we ever have been. But now we are able to take them up as our OWN and with a full recognition of our own authentic being, not simply having them laid out and pre-ordained for us. [27]

To remind us what the exact point of this section is, it is to have a clearer grasp of Dasein's authentic existence, which ultimately comes out to be "anticipatory resoluteness." This phrase joins together "anticipation" (the cumulative phenomenon of Chapter 1) and "resoluteness" (the cumulative phenomenon of Chapter 2). But how are the two to be linked? And what is the value of doing so? This is the business of the next chapter.

4.c.iii. Chapter III: Dasein's Authentic Potentiality-for-Being-a-Whole, and Temporality as the Ontological Meaning of Care

Our understanding of Dasein is slowly becoming more and more holistic and complete. In its most authentic state, Dasein is "anticipatory resolutness." With this understanding of authentic Dasein, we can finally show the ultimate ground that makes Dasein possible, and that ground is "temporality." First, however, we should explain why anticipation and resoluteness have to be linked together. Joining the two is of course a convenient shorthand for the being of authentic Dasein, but there is a natural reason to see the two as part of a unitary phenomenon and not simply a gluing-together of separate characteristics. This section is very fine and subtle and I follow the commentaries of Gelven and Wrathall/Murphey closely.

Anticipatory Resolutenss

In short, anticipation and resoluteness seem to imply each other and cannot be understood without each other. In Heideggerian terminology, they are equiprimordial. When we are anticipatory, we understand our "being" as it most truly is: finite, individual, and uncanny. That is, we are not "at home" at or specifically constrained by any particular state of affairs of social structure we find ourselves in). When we are resolute, we realize that our being is inherently "unjustifiable." That is, we have an awareness of our guilt (our inherent groundlessness and an ability to choose for ourselves our way to be). We are aware that we cannot pass off our responsibility to anything else, and cannot find a "justification" or "ground" for our behavior in anything but ourselves.

These two phenomena tend to come together. Part of realizing our own guilt and groundlessness is realizing that we will someday die and thus that we are necessarily finite and contingent. In anticipating, the awareness we have of ourselves always makes our own existence more clear to us. In doing this, we become free by escaping the bounds of the "they." We must thereby must also become resolute, as there is nothing left but ourselves to take charge of our own guilt.

The unitary phenomenon of anticipatory resoluteness thus leaves us without anything left to cover up our true nature. We cannoy deny the nullity at the basis of our existence that awakens us to our groundlessness by passing off our own guilt onto the "they." Nor can we flee and hide in the face of our own finitude and individuality by refusing to have an authentic being-towards-death. In anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein is uniquely whole and is uniquely itself.

Of course, even in anticipatory resolutness, Dasein never becomes a purely present-at-hand thing. It still is always a way of existing. It is still always being-in-the-world. The "self" is never a solitary Cartesian soul-substance, even when it is authentic. It is never an "entity." Dasein is an entity, but the self is not. The self is rather a different way and STRUCTURE of being. It is the quality that distinguishes authentic existence from inauthentic existence. This only sounds strange when we have an overly Cartesian expectation of what the "self" should look like. [28] [29]

Temporality

In the very beginning of the text, Heidegger made it clear that we are always caught in a "hermeneutic circle" in this investigation. We never start from zero, but always come to interprety things on the basis of something understood, as vague and indistinct as it might be. We have a very vague understanding of what it means to "be." But it is distorted and uncertain. The point of the text up until now has been to make this awareness more clear and salient.

It is important to remember the generally "circular" nature of this text." We already have some knowledge of our existence, but sketching out its structure makes it clearer and clearer. The hermeneutic method never seeks to ground our knowledge of existence in something outside of it. Philosophers have tried to do this for 2000 years by appealing to something like God, monad, substance, process, etc. and never really answered the question. We don't need to appeal something outside of our existence to understand it. We just have to make it clearer. It is important to remember this as we are about to take a big step and make the leap to interpreting the being of Dasein in terms of "temporality."

Before that, we have to take the final step in seeing Dasein as a structural "whole." Dasein's existence-structure has not changed. Whether authentic or inauthentic, that structure is care. And the definition and articulation of care appears as:

   "ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world) as      
    being-alongside (entities within-the-world)"         
                                                         
                                                         
"being-already-    "ahead-of-         "being-alongside   
in-(the-world)"     itself"            (entities         
     ▲                  ▲              within-the-world)"
     │                  │                  ▲             
     │                  │                  │             
thrownness/        understanding/     fallenness/        
disposedness       projection         discourse

Now we are ready to explain the ground of Dasein's being not merely existentially, but ONTOLOGICALLY. That is, we can interpret its being not simply on the level of our interest in and relation to our own being, but to what that "being" means in and of itself. Since Dasein's authentic existence is anticipatory resoluteness, the question now becomes: On the basis of what can there be anticipatory resoluteness? And the answer is "temporality." For there to be anticipatory resoluteness, we have to exist in time.

This is largest pivot in the text of Being and Time as it exists. We have not yet made the leap from the being of Dasein to the meaning of being generally, and indeed we will not in the whole existing text of the book. That would have only happened in later portions that were never finished:

Dasein as the         Dasein as             meaning of    
care-structure ─────► "temporality" ──────► "being" itself
                                              ▲           
                                              │          
we never make it all the way here! ───────────┘

We now move from the existential structure of Dasein to the ontological gronud that makes the analysis of this structure possible. This is a hefty undertaking. It involves having to essenitally repeat the entire analytic of Dasein on a more fundamental basis. But it is necessary to do this in order to firmly establish the ontological ground of Dasein's being, and in doing so to hopefully have a basis to make the jump to "being" proper.

Now, we would do well to remind ourselves of what exactly we are doing. We are asking about the "meaning" of what it is for Dasein to "be" on a more fundamental level. But "meaning" is a phenomenon that occurs on the basis of understanding and interpretation. Meaning is the result of us projecting our own possibilities. In order for a lamp to be a lamp, it has to be something that we can use to light up an area. When we ask about what something "means," we are asking what it makes it POSSIBLE to be. So now we have to ask the same question about Dasein's being, which is care: How is it possible for there to be care? The most authentic base of care which allows Dasein to show up as a structural whole is anticipatory resoluteness.

So now the question is what makes anticipatory resoluteness possible? The answer is "time." More accurately, it is "temporality." What is the difference between these two? "Time" more or less means exactly what it does in our normal speech. It is the typical present-at-hand understanding of "clock-time," or time as a series of successive "nows" that we have in our daily engagements, or even the relativistic sense of time that's been established in modern physics. But this is an understanding of time that is present-at-hand. "Temporality" is more foundational.

"Temporality" is a phenomenon in which Dasein orients itself and that it is able to ground its existence in. It consists of three "ekstases" of past, present, and future. The term "ekstasis" in Greek literally means a "standing out." This is where the term "ecstasy" in the sense of rapturous joy comes from, as in extreme rapturous joy we "beside ourselves" or "outside of" ourselves with joy. We "stand out" from ourselves in joy. Thus the "ekstases" of future, past, and present are kinds of forms or patterns that structure how things will show up from us. Literally they make things "stand out" from the generla temporal sense in a particular direction. This will become clearer as we discuss the temporal dimensions of anticipatory resoluteness and then Dasein more holistically. Much of the following analysis follows Michael Gelven closely.

Traditionally we think of the present as being the "real" locus of what and who we are. But Heidegger makes a surprising claim. He says the ekstase of the present is by far the LEAST important for what we, as Dasein, really "are." It is still important, of course. Dasein is temporal and all three ekstases are essential for the way it exists. But he says that the most important of the three is by far the ekstase of the future, then the past, and finally the present:

         Traditional view:           
                                     
            ┌─────────┐              
Past────────│─Present─│────────Future
            └─────────┘              
         We are "really" here        
                                     
                                     
         Heidegger's view:           
                                     
Future─────────Past──────────Present 
◄──────────────────────────────────► 
more central            less central

The "locus" of ourselves then seems to be in the future rather than the present. And this makes sense when we remember that anticipatory resoluteness is a being-towards-death. In it, Dasein authentically takes on and owns its own possibilities. But there is no being-towards anything at all unless there is a future. Of course, this is something more basic than simply the "future" in a sense of a "not-yet-occurring now." It is the future in the sense of what we look out and go towards. It is something that has meaning for us.

All forms of awareness and consciousness consist in our attitude of being-towards a future. The German word for "future," "Zukunft," literally means a "coming-toward," and Heidegger often puts a hyphen in the word, writing it as "Zu-kunft" to emphasize this meaning. This way of relation that is futurally-oriented is the ekstase of the future. Since Dasein is a projection into its possibilities and is always being-ahead-of-itself, it should make sense that he attaches such importance to the future.

Of course, we cannot move TOWARDS a future without also coming FROM a past. We have a great deal of meaning on the basis of our past. If you try to conceive of "yourself" without making any reference to your past in any way, it's almost impossible to do. If you could conceive of yourself completely isolated from your past, it probably wouldn't seem very much like "you" at all. But again, the ekstase of the past does not merely mean a "no-longer-occurring now." It is also something that is more complex than just the function of "memory." The importance of the phenomenon of memory already presupposs the importance and meaning that the past has to the present. It simply shows HOW the past gets related meaningfully to the future and presen. The past as an ekstase has meaning as the thing that we "come out from" whenever we move towards something.

The present is traditionally thought of as the most difficult and elusive of the three dimensions of time to get a hand on. It is that on the basis of which the past and future gain their meaning, it seems. But is there any real thing called the "present?" Is ther esome infinitesmal moment of "nowhood" that constantly gets replaced? Or is the present merely a kind of dividing line that nothing really exists in? Those kind of questions, however, are concerned with present-at-hand clock-time, not with temporality. And furthermore, these questions only plague us if we view the present as the significant focal point of our existence. But Heidegger doesn't. He believes the future is the most important of the three ekstases. So now the question becomes: How is the present meaningful to Dasein? And the answer is in the etymology: The "present" is where things come into having "presence." It is where we are directly aware of our own activity. For our actual existence, this is how the present comes to gain its significance.

Any present-at-hand understanding of time as a series of isolated "nows" is highly abstracted awway from the original experience of temporality is. And to sum up what that experience is: As Dasein, I have possibilities before me that I always reach out towards. Therefore I have meaning on the basis of the future. I have arrived to where I am able to perform particular actions and exist in particular situations becuase of previous actions that continue to carry weight. Therefore I have meaning on the basis of the past. I perform these particular actions in particular situations that become available directly in front of me. Therefore I have meaning on the basis of the present.

If we remember the phrase used to describe care, we can see how the three ekstases are directly reflected in it:

       FUTURE──────────────────────────────────PAST────────────────────────────────────PRESENT           
                                                                                                         
                                                                                                         
that which I project                 that which allows a certain             that which I perform actions
possibilities out into               range of actions to be                  directly in the midst of    
        │                            available before me                          │                      
        │                                  │                                      │                      
        │             ┌────────────────────┘          ┌───────────────────────────┘                      
        │             │                               │                                                  
        ▼             ▼                               ▼                                                  
"ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world) as being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world)"
──────────────── ────────────────                ─────────────────────────                               
        ▲             ▲                               ▲                                                  
        │             │                               │                                                  
        │             │                               │                                                  
the basis of     the basis of                    the basis of current                                    
projection of    disposedness                    actions and situations                                  
possibilities    and of thrownness                                                                       
and of guilt                                                                                             

This might seem like a simplistic and incomplete way to view "time." But is it really? Does the view of time as a series of "nows" actually more reflect how we experience it? And it it doesn't, doesn't that mean it's just a present-at-hand derivation of something that we actually have access to? Heidegger thinks that these ekstases are the core of what "time" is, and that it is only on the above that we have a conception of "clock-time."

One possible objection runs as follows: If we conceive of time in terms of these temporal ekstases, then all we can really know about time is our own finite existence. After all, time as something we experience and make meaning for ouselves on the basis of is finite. That was the whole point of being-towards-death and anticipatory resoluteness, after all. But we know that time seems to stretch out infinitely before "us" and after "us," or at least at the very least it stretches out far before we were ever bron and came into existence and will conitnue for long after we are dead and have passed out of existence. Surely, we can in some sense understand these extensions of time that transcend our own finite existence. How can this be the case if time is ultimately understood as something for ourselves to project possibilities onto, come from, and act within?

Heidegger assures us, however, that this does not in any way refute the fact that time is, in its original temporal character, finite. If we remember the distinction between authenticity (being centered around ourselves) and inauthenticity (not being centered around ourselves), we can say that "authentic" time is finite while "inauthentic" time is infinite. The ekstases of temporality are the foundation of our understanding of ourselves as finite. Therefore, any time we describe time as something infinite, we are describing it based on something other than ourself. And that necessarily means that we are abstracting it away from what is most immediately apparent and primordial. None of this means that the standard mathematical understanding we have of time is wrong. It is actually quite similar to the discussion of spatiality versus the scientific understanding of space in Chapter 3 of Division One. Temporality is the necessary ontological condition for the being that Dasein has, and our ordinary understanding of time is something we derive on the basis of that.

To sum it up, temporality is what makes the care-structure possible. The characeristics of care are derived from the three temporal ekstases of future, past, and present. Temporality is "ecstatic" in nature, which is to say that it ultimately gains meaning form the way we experience it in terms of the ekstases of future, past, and present. All three are important and constitutive for Dasein, but the most significant of them is the future. Dasein is always reaching out into its future. The primordial understanding of time that we have is of a time that is finite. Time may indeed be infinite, and that is the business of physicists to decide. But as far as it gains meaning for us, time must be finite. [30]

4.c.iv. Chapter IV: Temporality and Everydayness

We have seen how the most basic structure of "care," both authentically and inauthentically, is fundamentally "temporal" to its core. Temporality is the condition on which the care-structure is possible. However, in the interest of being thorough, it is necessary to revisit all of the preceding existentials sketched out in Division One and re-ground them on a more firm ontological basis of temporality. There is, after all, a reason we had to spend so much time going through these existentials before arriving at care as the being of Dasein. They are what make up Dasein's average everydayness and understanding them is a part of understanding Dasein in its totality. Therefore incorporating them into the temporal interpretation is part of the general "outward spiral" structure of the text.

We now have to "zoom out" and revise everything we already have an awareness of on a new basis. This can be tedious. I'll do my best to be thorough, but if there is any chapter of this book where you don't need to worry aobut following every detail, it is this one. As long as you follow that we are accurately following the hermeneutic circle by showing how the text is consistent in grounding everyting in temporality with no exceptions, you will be alright.

The Temporality of Care

The general structure of care, in which Dasein is the disclosednesss of a "there," conists of thrownness (and with it disposedness), projection (and with it understanding), and fallenness. All of these existentials are temporal in character. All three are characterized by all three ekstases of future, past, and present. But each one has one of these that is its primarily ground. Namely, projection/understanding is primarily grounded in the ekstase of the future, thrownness/disposedness is primarily grounded in the ekstase of the past, and fallenness is primarily grounded in the ekstase of the present. We will analyze these three in turn.

First, we will explain the temporality of understanding. In understanding there is both an inauthentic sort of understanding. It is on the basis of understanding that we are able to draw a distinction between authentic and inauthentic Dasein. This is because understanding is a projection of possibilities. At the beginning of Division Two, we introduced the distinction between inauthentic "expecting" and authentic "anticipation" with regard to the future, namely in being-towards-death. Inauthentic Dasein only "expects," by projecting various possibilities of its average everyday affairs. Authentic Dasein "anticipates" and projects the possibility of its OWN not-being in order to become aware of itself as its genuine individual self and thus is able to wrench back control of itself from the "they."

The most important ekstase in understanding is the future. Dasein always projects its possibilities as something that is in the future, whether it does so authentically (oriented around and gaining meaning on the basis of its own being) or inauthentically (oriented around and gaining meaning on the basis of its fallen, everyday affairs). Dasein becomes open to any situation as the area for action on the basis of the present, whether authentically (as a chance for its own freedom) or inauthentically (as the they-self). And it takes up its own past as the basis for its current action, either authentically (as something to possess and make its own) or inauthentically (uncritically and automatically).

Next, we will explain the temporality of disposedness, as shown in the state of thrownness. Dasein is always in some mood or another. Our understanding, and with it our disclosedness of our "there," is informed by it. We can't possibly hope to examine every mood that there is, so Heidegger focuses on just two that have been important for the analytic thus far: anxiety and fear. These are supposed to represent an authentic versus and inauthentic temporality, respectively. Heidegger introduces two new terms to distinguish an authentic and inauthentic relation to the past, namely "repetition" and "Vergessenheit" or "forgetting." We can explain these when we examine the moods of anxiety and fear themselves.

The most important ekstase in disposedness is the past. We can begin to analyze the moods of anxiety and fear to understand this. We'll begin with the inauthentic mood of fear. It might seem strange at first to say that the primary ekstase involved in fear is that of the past, as it seems like fear is mostly oriented around the future. When we "fear" something like an out-of-control fire, an oncoming train, a mugger with a gun, or whatever else, we are seeing it as a FUTURE threat that is approaching us. So when we fear, we largely respond to what we see as an oncoming danger, and that is obviously something futural.

But Heidegger's reasoning is that in fearing we become aware of exactly WHAT is being threatened: ourselves and our HAVING been what we were up until now. We are made aware of the security of the past by a future danger. And the present is where our actions in the face of this threat play out. Fear is inauthentic mood precisely because in "fearing" we fear some THING OUT IN THE WORLD. It happens when we are absorbed in the world. Therefore, the awareness it gives us of the past is also inauthentic (based around the world and things in it). This is called "forgetting."

Anxiety, on the other hand, is the disposedness we have made such use of in Chapter 6 of Division One. In anxiety, everything in the world becomes clear, but we see no place for "ourselves" in it. Of course, this is a futural aspect. We see nowhere for ourselves to take meaningful action, which is oriented towards the future. And in doing so, we stand before ourselves in clarity and have a full view of who we are. But this too has been occasioned by our HAVING been, which is the central ekstase here just as in fear. We feel all of this anxiety on the basis of having previously been absorbed in the world and having not felt so individualized. We have an immediate awareness of this which takes place in the present. And it is not any particular THING in the world that we feel anxiety towards. Anxiety is directed at our own being. The authentic awareness we have of the past is called "Wiederholung" or "repetition."

Finally, we will examine the temporality of fallenness. But unlike understanding/projection and disposedness/thrownness, there can be no division between an authentic and inauthentic falling. By its very nature, falling is inauthentic. Dasein in its average everydayness is absorbed in things around it and not aware of its own existence.

The most important ekstase in fallenness is the present. That is precisely why we traditionally think of the present as the real "locus" of our existence. The reason that the present is so important for falling is pretty simple: In falling, we are concerned with whatever "actual" things are going on around us. And for something to be actual it must be in the present. The element of the past and future ekstases in falling are similarly "normal" and "common-sense." They are understandings that are restricted to seeing no-longer-actual and not-yet-actual events, not taking them up as possibilities that have meaning to us. The inauthentic relatioship to the present is called "Gegenwärtigen" or "making-present."

As mentioned, there can be no authentic relationship to the present in falling, because falling is inherently inauthentic. But Heidegger's name for such an authentic relationship to the present is "Augenblick" or "moment-of-vision." The term "Augenblick" literally means "a blink of the eye." It is appropriated from the theological tradition and is previously found in Luther and Kierkegaard. In such a moment-of-vision, we can take the present in terms of possibilities that we are free to choose. This is present in authentic understanding/projection and disposedness/thrownness.

The last section mentions the temporality of discourse, which also takes place in disclosure. This is a pretty simple thing to explain. In almost all languages, we have some sort of tense to mark a sense of temporality, like the future tense, past tense, present tense, etc. This is a sign that language, as derived from discourse, ultimatley takes its ground from the temporal nature in which things come to have intelligibility.

We can sum up this very complex section as follows: Understanding/projection is primarily grounded in the future (authentically as anticipation, inauthentically as expecting). Disposedness/thrownness is primarily grounded in the past (authentically as repetition, inauthentically as forgetting). Fallenness is primarily grounded in the present as making-present (inauthentically). There is no authentic relation to anything in fallenness, but an authentic relation to the present is called a moment-of-vision:

             │                  │               │             
  ORIENTING  │  EXISTENTIAL     │  AUTHENTIC    │  INAUTHENTIC
  EKSTASE    │                  │  MODE         │  MODE       
  ───────────┼──────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────────
             │                  │               │             
  future     │  understanding/  │  anticipation │  expecting  
             │  projection      │               │             
  ───────────┼──────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────────
             │                  │               │             
  past       │  disposedness/   │  repetition   │  forgetting 
             │  thrownness      │               │             
  ───────────┼──────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────────
             │                  │               │             
  present    │  fallenness      │  [none]       │  making-    
             │                  │  (moment-of-  │  present    
             │                  │   vision)     │             
  ───────────┴──────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────────

The Temporality of Everyday Dasein

However, the structure of anticipation/repetition/moment-of-vision in authenticity and of expecting/forgetting/making-present in inauthenticity is contained in ach of the three existentials. The care-structure in which Dasein dicloses itself is temporal to its core. Of course, with disclosedness comes being-in-the-world. We now must review the opening sections on being-in-the-world, but on the basis of its ontological ground. Being-in-the-world is possible on the basis of temporaliy.

Our everyday being-in-the-world by and large consists of involved circumspection. That is, it consists of our engagement with entities, whether they are ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. This is temporal in character as well. Involved circumpsection, during which we manipulate and use ready-to-hand equipment, is a mode of making-present (the inauthentic mode of the present ekstase). Whenever we are involved with equipment for the sake of doing something or other, it is an action that we take in the present. And we do it without an explicit awareness of our "self." To be a little more thorough in investigating this phenomenon, Heidegger explains that our involvement with ready-to-hand equipment consists of "Gewärtigen" or "awaiting" and "Behalten" or "retaining."

Let's take the familiar example of a hammer. When we use a hammer, we discover its towards-which, that is to say, how it is appropriate for such-and-such a purpose or not. This isn't a cognitive thing where we do some intellectual brainstorming, however. It is a way of handling, manipulating, or USING the thing. This is "awaiting." At the same time, we do so on the basis of how we have come to understand the equipment. We have had some experience with hammers that we act on the basis of. And we have some particular disposition towards them, just as the hammer has its own features and dispositoins. This is "retaining." Note, however, that awaiting and retaining are still all a part of the present. We say "I AM awaiting" or "I AM retaining," just as we say "I AM hammering this nail."

Our invovled cirucmspection is still possible on the ground that the present is meaningful to us. It is possible on the ground that there is a present where we can await and retain the various involvements of the things we engage ourselves with. But we don't only encounter entities as ready-to-hand. We also encounter them as present-at-hand. Earlier in the text, Heidegger argues that readiness-to-hand is prior to presence-at-hand and that presence-at-hand is dependent on the former. Now he takes some time to explain how the crossover occurs, though it is a bit difficult to follow. I sketch it out largely following Mark A. Wrathall and Max Murphey.

In order to see things as present-at-hand, we have to "strip away" all the lived involvements that we normally encounter them under, so that we can see the things in a more abstracted state. Heidegger argues that we do this on the basis of resoluteness. We resolve to be committed to the truth and finding out what the truth is by ignoring and resisting our everyday inclinations towards involved circumspection. And of course, resoluteness is only possible on the basis of temporality. Namely, it is oriented around the future that we project our possibility into. So the present-at-hand, as something that we arrive at on the basis of resoluteness, is also temporal in nature. [31]

The entire constitution of something like a "world" first occurrig to us is also possible on the basis of temporality. We know that Dasein is the disclosedness of a particular "there," and that as being-in-the-world we come into a certain nexus of intelligibility that is carved out on the basis of our for-the-sake-of-which. A for-the-sake-of-which is a possibility. It is a possible way to be. And our projection out into possibilities is possible only on the basis of the futural ekstase.

Of course, for the full phenomenon of the "world" to come into the fore, we also need the two other ekstases. The ekstase of the past is essential for the world, because the way that things show up is also conditioned by the circumstances we've been thrown into. The ekstase of the present is essential because we always manipulate certain equipment for some in-order-to that is oriented in our present. With this min imnd, the world is fully temporal because it is the three temporal ekstases that create a unity in the world out of these phenomena of thrown circumstances, the in-order-to, and the for-the-sake-of-which.

Heidegger ends this section by pointing out that the whole phenomenon of spatiality discussed earlier on is dependent on temporality as well. If you remember, we discussed how any kind of scientific, metrical understanding of space is a dervied phenomenon from a phenomenal sense of spatiality where we allot things a "region' in our involved circumspection. Recall the example of a friend we talk to on the phone who is much "closer" to us than the phone in our hand. But this allotment of spatial relevance i sonly possible when we are in a state of fallenness and absorbed in the things of the world. As such, it is dependent on the ekstase of the present.

Pat yourself on the back if you made it through this section. It is very easy to become fatigued at this point. And we are indeed in the home stretch of Being and Time. The next chapter discusses the notion of "historicality" insofar as it is relevant to temporality and the being of Dasein. [32]

4.c.v. Chapter V: Temporality and Historicality

In the discussion of being-towards-death, Heidegger made the claim that death is something that helps us get Dasein into focus "as a whole" because it provides a definite limit to Dasein and sets up a kind of barrier about what makes Dasein itself. But if we can do that by becoming aware of Dasein's "end" in death, can we not do the same by analyzing the other "end" that brackets it: its "birth?"

Certainly, as much as any Dasein has to come to an end at some point, it also must have a beginning. Any particular human being is born at some point. But this brings up an old problem in philosophy: How do we account for the apparent unity we have over the course of our life from bith to death, which are very different from each other? What does any particular event I had when I was 5 years old have to do with one which will happen tomorrow? Traditionally, philosophers would posit some kind of "soul-substance" that lurks beneath the surface, but since Heidegger has done so much work to show that there is no isolated "I-thing" set apart from the world but only a self that is already being-in-the-world and emerges along with the world, we can't imagine he will posit anything like a soul.

How, then, do we create any kind of unity out of the past experiences that could make up any "self?" For Heidegger, it takes place via what is called "historicizing." In fact, the way ALL past events have relevance and gain some kind of unity and coherence is via historicizing. So what applies for how we find relevance and unity in past events that WE experienced will apply part and parcel for ones that are "before" our time as well. My summary of this section on historicality relies heavily on Michael Gelven's commentary.

Let's say we're trying to write a book about the history of any major event of epoch, be it the fall of the Roman Empire, the Protestant Reformation, the Chinese Revolution, or whatever else. What events will be a part of this book? Surely we have to draw the line somwhere. But how do we decide that? We have to decide it on the basis of something that is already "there." That something is what finds a unity and common thread of significance through a whole bunch of disconnected historical events. We have to decide the range of relevant data to put in.

At the same time, a simple list of events and dates does not a history book make. This would be a "timeline," not a genuine "history." Not only do we have to have some boundaries we set up, but we have to know what is most meaningful from a historical perspective. There is a reason that we tend to see some events as more meaningful than others. Christopher Columbus landing in the Americas would be a much more meaningful and significant event for a history of the Aztec Empire than it would be for the history of the Ming Dynasty in China, even though both of them would overlap in terms of the time they span.

All of the above goes to show that when we do "history," which is to say make past events meaningful to us, what we ultimately do is tell a "story" in some way or other. This point is driven home by the fact that the German word for history, "Geschichte," is like the French "histoire" in that it is both the word for "history" and for "story." This principle applies for all past events, whether they are ones that happen to us or not. The way we can group certain ones and find a unity among disparate elements of the past is by finding them somehow significant.

The now the grand-scale question is this: On the basis of what does Dasein take the past as something significant, whther that past is its "own" or not? The answer is authentic historicality. And it must be stressed that this is AUTHENTIC historicality. An inauthentic historicality would be understanding history solely as a list of past events. Authentic historicality is historicality that gives the past some degree of significance to us. In particular, it is historicality that has some basis in "Erbe" or "heritage," "Schicksal" or "fate," and "Geschick" or "destiny." Unlike other terms in this text, "heritage," "fate," and "destiny" are never explicitly defined. But it becomes pretty clear what Heidegger means by them.

"Heritage" in this sense is, broadly speaking, an understanding that we have of past events that somehow affect one's comprehension of oneself. For example, an American might come to see their own personal significance as somehow determined by past events like the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, and so on. But it is not just a knowledge of the facts of these events that constitutes heritage. To have heritage we have to accept this history as something personally significant, for better or worse. We have to take on the way that this "tradition' we are thrown into is a part of our "guilt" and "responsibility" (in the Heideggerian senses of the words, obviously).

This doesn't mean that we simply have to submit ourselves to becoming a cog in the machine of history. We can in fact strike out in new and original ways. Nor does it mean that we have to become history professors and know every detail about our tradition. We can legitimately take on heritage even on the basis of a very vague and average awareness of our own tradition. But there is never a way to authentically step outside of any connection to past events whatsoever. We can only be authentic by in some sense owning our heritage.

If heritage is more or less past-oriented and related to our disposedness/thrownness, it seems that "fate" is more or less future-oriented and related to our understanding/projection. Yes, in a move that should surprise no one at this point, Heidegger ultimately grounds historicality in temporality as well. "Fate" by no means implies a kind of inescapable, predetermined course that we will inevitably follow. Fate seems to refer to an awareness of our own possibilities which emerge in a definite range due to the historical context into which we have been thrown (our heritage). Fate is the way that we are resolute towards our own authentic possibilities as informed by the significance of past events. It means resolutely accepting the things that may happen, whatever they may be, on the basis of our authentically choosing our own path.

If heritage defines the past of historicality and fate its future, he uses the familiar term "moment-of-vision," the authentic mode of making-present, to define its present. But Heidegger also uses the term "destiny," which seems to be similar to fate, but perhaps to apply on a broader scale to peoples or nations instead of individuals. Destiny is when a whole people acts resolutley at once. This has some echoes of Hegel. But Heidegger doesn't talk about it very much. In general, he uses the term "fate" to more or less stand for this whole authentic relation to the past.

What makes this most interesting is that historicality, our authentic relation to past events, is, somewhat surprisingly, not most meaningfully defined by the ekstase of the past but by the ekstase of the future. Of course, as historicality is temporal, all three ekstases will be meaningful. But historicality is more oriented towards the future than the past. History is characteristic of a Dasein that currently ek-sists. Because we can only seize on possibilities that are truly our own, we grasp the fate and heritage that makes them most genuine and meaningul when we genuinely historicize. And in doing so we become open to possibilities via an evocation of the past that broadens the perpsective of our mere fallen everydayness.

This becomes easier to understand when we consider the example of a particular historical artifact. Michael Gelven brings up the example of a pipe that once belonged to Abraham Lincoln. Is this particular item "historical?" We would all say that it is. But is is certianly not "historical" on the basis of no-longer-exisitng. Indeed, it sits before us under the glass in a museum. Potentially, we could pick it up and use it as a pipe just like any other ready-to-hand pipe in the modern world. But what makes it "historical" is that the WORLD around it no longer exists. That is to say, it no longer has the same nexus of meaning that allowed it to be used in a ready-to-hand fashion. It is no longer equipment. [32]

This might all seem pretty obvious. But it reveals something important: the locus of historicality is ultimately in DASEIN, not in particular objects or even events that are historical in nature. It is Dasein's own being-in-the-world that is historical. History is thus about the particular "worlds" of Dasein that came before us. Heidegger introduces the term "world-history" to explain this. But this doesn't mean "world history" in the sense of the history of all peoples on the earth in contrast to, say, the history of France. In fact, something particularly focused like the history of the French Revolution would be a far greater exmaple of what Heidegger is talking about in "world-history," becuase it would be able to focus more closely on the specific fate and destiny of a specific people, and thus the particular "world" in the sense of neuxs of intelligibility that they existed in. [33]

It is always by this awareness of a "world" that we are able to unify the varied and disparate facts and events of the past. And if what is ultimately "historical" is being-in-the-world, then now we know how past events can be meaningful to the currently-existing Dasein. In inauthentic historicality, we might simply make a list of past events in a timeline. And this is important in its own right. But it isn't really "history" in an authentically historical fashion. In authentic historicality, we take history as significant in terms of our understanding (our projection of possibilities). We recover and make clear the structure of possibiilities that once shaped and delimited the realtionship between Dasein and entities around it in the circumstances into which worlds of the past were thrown.

Doing this makes our own present possibilities all the more salient and clear. We have to somehow take on the psat as a kind of story that we draw meaning on the basis of. Heidegger in fact argues that the very activity of "doing history" in the sense of researching the past in a more "scholarly" way is dependent on it. We first have to be able to take the past as meaningful for our future possibilities in order to accurately reconstruct it via history at all.

To return to the beginning, we can say that in a sense Dasein is bracketed by its "birth," but its relation to this is very different from the way it is "bracketed" by its death. To take our birth as significant is certainly possible and in fact highly likely. But the general way in which we do it is not that different from the way we take any other past event as significant to us (such as the events that shaped the culture and tradition we were born up into and the world as we knew it). We have to take the past as authentically significant as a part of the heritage we are thrown into, as somehow realted to the fate ahead of us, and as important for our current moment-of-vision. In that sense, what ultimately makes us whole and unified is the historicizing of a grouping of past events, some of which involve us, on the basis of a kind of story. And ultimately what directs this is our future projection into possibilities: [34]

4.c.vi. Chapter VI: Temporality and Within-Time-ness as the Source of the Ordinary Conception of Time

The final chapter of Division Two of Being and Time has a simple goal: to round out everything thus touched on by explaining how our ordinary concpetion of time as a successive series of "nows" is itself ultimately dependent on temporality. I largely rely on Wrathall and Murphey's summary in explaining it.

At first, it might sound kind of silly and redundant to have to show that time itself is "temporal." But it has become clear from the above that the original notion of temporality is something very different from our common, everyday present-at-hand understanding of "time." Temporality apprehends the ekstase of the future as that from which the awareness of possibilities, responsibility, and guilt emerge, the ekstase of the past as that from which the significance we have as already thrown tino a world emerges, and the ekstase of the present as the ground by which the possibility of current actions and situations emerges. This is how we first and foremost experience anything "temporal." But it is very different from our ordinary normal understanding of "clock-time." How does that understanding of "clock-time" fit into this?

In Heidegger's words, we are always "reckoning" with time in our daily experience. And here he means our ordinary understanding of clock-time. We work our jobs according to set shifts. We keep an eye on the time when boiling something on the stovetop. We plan to meet people at a certain time of the day. We constantly orient ourselves in ways that are sensitive to what is happening, what has happened, and what will soon happen. Of course, we have some awareness of the ways that activities show up in relationships to each other that can be ordered and measured.

However, even this is not a mere successive series of "nows." Indeed, we might only become aware of what time it "is" at work when it's 10 minutes until our break. There can be gaps where stop noticing the sequential or measurable time of our activities. Everyone knows what it's like to lose track of time when becoming invested in someting.

Time is largely a "public" phenomenon. The way we make sense of time is born out of the way we make sense of what we DO together in time. Our common understanding emerges as a way of coordinating activities and accomplishing goals. The division of time into segments like "days" was ultimately derived from a relation to the sun and the moon. It was born frm a cycle of light that made it possible to be out and active and a cycle of darkness during which we had to retreat and wait. And from this came a device invented to help coordinate activities more closely on the basis of this public, shared understanding of time. That device is a clock.

It is due to the clock that we get our inauthentic fallen understanding of time as a seriesof successive "nows." That is not to say that clock-time is somehow "incorrect" by any means. It is correct exactly for what it seeks to measure and accomplish. But it is by no means fundamental. The "time" on a clock is an INTEPRETATION of termporality. It does this by turning time into something present-at-hand and depriving it of any significance it might have for us.

As we remember, however, presence-at-hand is ultimately derivative of our lived, involved circumspection. Clock-time is an abstraction of something more real. And it makes sense for our temporality to not follow it. Indeed, there is no way that the past or future could be significant to us if we exicted in clock-time, because the only thing that would ever be "real" is the present and the past or future would not exist. But we experience time as ekstases. And THOSE are what allow us to project possibilities and give meaning to present actions on the basis of past ones. It is only by our time being ecstatic that we can find the future and past meaningful.

All of the above can be summarized by saying that Dasein's being is thoroiughly temporal. It is only possible for Dasein to exist in the way that it does on the basis fo temporality. And this is because we have a real primordial understanding of ecstatic time, not merely of present-at-hand clock-time. There is a long history of philosophers struggling to explain how a "subject" like ourselves can exist "through" a series of successive "nows." But it is simply mistaken. That is not how our primordial understanding of temporality is. There is no need to explain how we can "enter into" time or bring us "to" it. To be Dasein at all is to be temporal. [36]

5. The Bridge to Heidegger's Later Thought

Being and Time ends with Chapter 6 of Division Two. The book was never completed, so the ending seems rather abrupt. If finished, the text would have extrapolated what we learned about the being of Dasein and show that being more generally is also grounded in temporality. Then he would have gone on to carefully engage with, criticize, and assess prior attempts to answer the question of being by Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle. But this was never written.

Part of the reason for this was because Heidegger himself seemed to grow skeptical of the idea that temporality really could act as the ground for all other modes of being. I have a separate lecture which follows Heidegger's later thought and shows how he goes about answering that question in later texts.

In spite of the fact that this work ultimately "failed" to meet its goal, it is certainly one of the most noble "failures" in the history of philosophy. French existentialism would not exist witohut Being and Time. Nor would Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Heidegger even has his admirers in the analytic tradition. Hubert L. Dreyfus has argued that Being and Time has particular relevance with regard to the problem of artificial intelligence and the nature of what it really is to be a human compared to a computer that can think. Heidegger was also in contact with Japanese scholars of the Kyouto School, and his influence on the east seems to have been reciprocal.

While I personally find Heidegger's later career to be even more informative and rich than this text, it is an indispensable background to have. Almost everything important in later Heidegger is prefigured in this text. The discussion of Dasein as a "clearing" prefigures his writings on Kant and his critique of the field of western metphysics. The discussion of "world-history" and the way that worlds can "decay" and pass out of being prefigures his writings on the role of art and poetry in our sense of being. His talk of science as a structure of orientation and intelligibility prefigures his writings on technology and the struggle for non-technical ways of revealing in the modern world. His discussion on phenomenal distance and the way our world becomes increasingly collapsed by modern technology prefigures his strange and obtuse discussion of what he calls the "Foufold" of "earth, sky, divinities, and morals." And his description of authentic historicality seems like a clue for the extremely fine and subtle concept of "Ereignis" or "enowning," which will permeate all of his later work.

Thank you very much for reading.

FOOTNOTES

1. Laozi [trans. Chang Chung-yuan], Tao - A New Way of Thinking: A Translation of the Tao Te Ching With an Introduction and Commentaries, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2013

2. Miles Groth, "The Miles Groth Interview", Ereignis, 2004/02/02

3. William Blattner, Heidegger's "Being and Time": A Reader's Guide, Continuum, 2007, p. 32

4. Michael Wheeler, "Martin Heidegger", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011

5. Ibid.

6. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, The MIT Press, 1990, p. 151

7. Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, 1989, Northern Illinois University Press, p. 70

8. Mark A. Wrathall & Max Murphey, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 12

9. Ibid., p. 13

10. Michael Wheeler, "Martin Heidegger", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011

11. Ibid.

12. Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, 1989, Northern Illinois University Press, p. 81-103

13. Ibid.

14. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, The MIT Press, 1990, p. 215-224

15. Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, 1989, Northern Illinois University Press, p. 104-106

16. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, The MIT Press, 1990, p. 215-224

17. Ibid.

18. Mark A. Wrathall & Max Murphey, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 16

19. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, The MIT Press, 1990, p. 180

20. Ibid., p. 181

21. Michael Wheeler, "Martin Heidegger", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011

22. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I, The MIT Press, 1990, p. 248-264

23. Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, 1989, Northern Illinois University Press, p. 119-135

24. Mark A. Wrathall & Max Murphey, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 24-26

25. Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, 1989, Northern Illinois University Press, p. 147-155

26. Ibid., p. 156-168

27. Mark A. Wrathall & Max Murphey, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 26-30

28. Ibid., p. 30-34

29. Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, 1989, Northern Illinois University Press, p. 169-177

30. Ibid., p. 177-185

31. Mark A. Wrathall & Max Murphey, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 35-43

32. Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, 1989, Northern Illinois University Press, p. 185-199

33. Ibid., p. 200-214

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. Mark A. Wrathall & Max Murphey, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 48-51