Tag Archives: being and time

Mar 15 2013
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Academic Notes

III. Being and Time: Breakdown | Heidegger

Being, for Heidegger, is no longer a question of reduction, of building entities our of basic blocks. Instead, he delineates two modes of being: dealing with (Umgang) and cognition (Erkennen). He then directs us towards a way of being called existing which accounts for both of these modes of encountering beings in the world and having relations with them.

Heidegger will attempt to demonstrate that the “situated use of equipment (Heidegger’s term: essentially “something-in-order-to-do”) is in some sense prior to just looking at things and that which is revealed by use is ontologically more fundamental than the substances with determinate, context-free properties revealed by detached contemplation” (61). Being is revealed through use and action. This goes back to the idea that Dasein is not inner mental state, but rather its existence comes into being through they way it acts. “Dasein takes a stand on itself through its involvement with things and people” (61). 

So, we don’t just encounter things; we use things and manipulate them towards some ends, to get some activity done.

Equipment –“In the ‘in-order-to’ as a structure there lies an assignment or reference of something to something” (H 97). An “item” of equipment if what it is insofar as it fits into an equipment whole –> Logos “For something to function as equipment…there must be a nexus of other equipment in which this thing functions” (63). “Taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the being of any equipment there always belongs an equipmental whole, in which it can be this equipment that it is” (H 97). Availableness is Heidegger’s term for the way of being of those entities which are defined by their use in the whole (63).

We get to know things in terms of their functioning. “….our concern subordinates itself to the ‘in-order-to’ which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time” (H 98). This mode of understanding, Heidegger calls manipulating. It is the hammering itself which uncovers the specific “manipulability of the hammer) (H 98). Reflecting on something like a hammer rather than using it would give one a second-hand, derivative understanding of it which Heidegger says is “positive” but not “primordial.”

When we use equipment in the regular order of things and it works how it is supposed to, it sort of disappears. [MT: Heidegger appears to characterize disappearance not by an absence but rather as something being so immediately available–so immediately present–that it disappears/ is transparent.] “The peculiarity of what is primarily available is that, in its availableness, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be available quite authentically” (H 99).

“Not only is equipment transparent; so is the user” (66). The user’s everyday grasp of her environment is called circumspection. This activity is a kind of “sight” which does not involve deliberate awareness (66). Everyday skillful, masterful coping involves awareness but no self-awareness–no self-referential experience of acting in the sense understood by the representationalist model.

Comportment is not deliberate action, but neither is it mechanical. It differs from the last in 5 ways:

  1. Circumspection is a mode of awareness
  2. Comportment is adaptable and copes with the situation in a variety of ways
  3. Comportment reveals entities under aspects. [The person goes about his or her business (rather than deliberate, intentionality).]
  4. If something goes wrong, people and higher animals are startled.
  5. If the going gets difficult, we must pay attention and so switch to deliberate subject/object intentionality. (68-69).

Thus, Heidegger leaves open the possibility of deliberate intentionality at the moment of breakdown when normal coping is no longer possible.Three modes of disturbance:

  • conspicuousness (malfunction)
  • obstinacy (temporary breakdown)
  • obtrusiveness

“These progressively bring out both Dasein as a thoughtful subject and the occurrentness as the way of being of isolated determinate substances” (71). These breakdown moments (two of them: temporary breakdown and total breakdown -Dreyfuss’ terms) reveal two new modes of encountering entities and tw new ways of being of entities: unavailableness and occurrentness. The other kind of breakdown, malfunction, is a preview of the other two. We are going to go from available to unavailable.

Conspicuousness (malfunction) –“presents the available equipment in a certain unavailableness” (H 102-103). But, for most malfunctions, we already have ways of coping, so we can just readjust after an initial moment of being startled–and then move on. Transparent, circumspective can thus be quickly restored.

Obstinacy (temporary breakdown) –Something blocks an ongoing activity and that which was transparent is made manifest. Now, we act deliberately, paying attention to what we are doing. When deliberative activity is also blocked, then one is forced into deliberation–reflective planning. “The scheme peculiar to [deliberating] is the ‘if-then'” (H 410). Long-range planning is envisaging. Heidegger thus shifts focs from a being to Dasein’s ways of understanding/ coping with. 

Contra the representationalist model, deliberation is not a purely mental, theoretical state without reference to the world. Even when people make plans, they do so against a background of involved activity (74). “Thus, understanding is not in our minds but in Dasein–in the skillful ways we are accustomed to comport ourselves. Thus even when mental content such as rules, beliefs and desires arise on the unavailable level, they cannot be analyzed as self-contained representations as the tradition supposed. Deliberative activity remains dependent upon Dasein’s involvement in a transparent background of coping skills” (75).

-not finished-

*This is the text I’ve been using to help me through Heidegger: Dreyfus’ Being in the World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time.

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Mar 15 2013
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Academic Notes

II. Being and Time: Disinterested Knowledge | Heidegger

Heidegger critiques the concept of disinterested knowledge, the idea that one can retreat from the world in order to quietly deliberate in isolation to discover the true Being of being. In fact, Heidegger argues, the detached, reflective stance is derivative in character.

Traditional representationalist framework: perceive perspectives –> synthesize perspectives into objects –> assign objects a function on the basis of their physical properties. Manipulate tools that already have a meaning in the world which is itself organized in terms of purposes. Theory is prior to practice.

Heidegger: “This is the way in which everyday Dasein always is: when I open a door, for instance, I used a doorknob. The achieving of phenomenological access to the beings which we encounter, consists rather in thrusting aside our interpretive tendencies, which keep thrusting themselves upon us…and which conceal not only the phenomenon of such ‘concern,’ but even more those beings themselves as encountered of their own accord in our concern with them” (H 96).  Rather than an interpretive act, it’s a habituated practice in which we engage.

Merely staring at things or just contemplating the tools and equipment that we use/manipulate does not get us any closer to being. “Heidegger thus inverts the tradition and sees detached contemplation as a private modification of everyday involvement” (47). Contra the traditional view of practice which assumes that action must be explained in terms of beliefs and desires, Heidegger denies that intentionality is mental. Instead, Heidegger uses the term “comportment“ which has the structure of directing-oneself-toward. Comportment refers to our directed activity without mentalist overtones. The mental, Heidegger argues, is a construction of the theorist rather than a true description of the phenomenological. Comportment or intentionality is characteristic not of consciousness but of Dasein.

Heidegger will go on to show that:

  1. “intentionality without self-referential mental content is characteristic of the unimpeded mode of Dasein’s everyday activity, whereas mental-state intentionality is a derivative mode.
  2. both these modes of directedness (ontic transcendence) presuppose being-in-the-world, a more originary transcendence” (59).
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Mar 15 2013
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Academic Notes

I. Being and Time: Dasein | Heidegger

Heidegger is responding to the Cartesian tradition, in particular, to his former teacher Husserl, by substituting ontological questions for epistemological ones. The latter inquiry concerned, principally, the relationship between subject and object, between knower and known, and in the process, assigned a primary position to the knower in relation to the known. Heidegger upsets this structure by inquiring into the nature of our being–what he will come to call Dasein. Our being, he argues, is co-constructed/ is made intelligible in and through the world. Heidegger’s question is about the “is,” that is, about the being of Being. He counters formal, representationalist models by calling for a hermeneutic phenomenology that eviscerates the viewpoint that experience is basically a relation between a self-contained knower with an inner mental content and an outside world. Like Bourdieu (who would follow Heidegger), the latter argues that it is in fact our socialization into the world, into everyday and ordinary skills and practices that provides us with the background necessary to understand objects, to understand ourselves as subject. Yet more, contra Kant (and later, Habermas), he argues that these practices only work so long as they are in the background. In other words, so long as they are not explicit.

In some ways, Heidegger is comparable to Wittgenstein. Here is, however, where they differ: whereas Wittgenstein thinks that the practices that produce us as human subjects are an insoluble tangle, Heidegger believes that this commonsense background has an elaborate structure, and it’s the task of the analytic/ the philosopher to lay it out.

Dasein. —being is an intelligibility that is correlative with our everyday background practices (10). Dasein is not a conscious, transcendental, meaning-giving subject (13). Therefore, the term “being there” is used instead of “consciousness.” Dasein is more basic than mental states, intentionality and deliberation. Dasein operates similar to the term “human being”: just as human being can refer to a way of being that’s characteristic of all people, or it can refer to a specific person–“a human way of being, which he calles ‘being-there’ or Dasein” (14). In the latter half, Heidegger becomes more interested in a human being, a Dasein. 

He is interested in Dasein’s way of being. “Human beings, it will turn out, are special kinds of beings in that their way of being embodies an understanding of what it si to be” (15). Dasein’s activity–its way of being–manifests itself in how it comports itself towards itself. “That kind of being being towards which Dasein can comport itself in one way or another, and always does comport itself somehow, we call ‘existence'” (H 32). Existence is not equal to simply being materially real (like stones, for example). “Only self-interpreting being exist…Yet he is clear that to be a conscious subject or self is neither necessary nor sufficient for human existence, rather the reverse…” (15). It is the existential nature of man that’s the reason why man can represent beings as such. Thus, cultures exist as human beings exist. The practices of the latter contain an interpretation of what it means to be a culture. Or language. “Language is not identical with the sum total of all the words printed in a dictionary; instead…language is as Dasein is…it exists” (BP, 208, cited 15).

Existential –“understanding is a worked-out understanding of the ontological structures of existence, that is, of what it is to be Dasein” (20).

Existentiell —“understanding is an individual’s understanding of his or her own way to be, that is, of what he or she is” (20).

We cannot jump out of our network of beliefs and contemplate them from an outside view (as Husserl attempted to do, and the concept that underlies’ Habermas’ critical rationality). That makes no sense, according to Heidegger: we cannot be clear about the being that we take for granted. In fact, there really are no representationalist, mental beliefs to get clear about; there are only skills and practices. Thus human beings don’t have an a priori specific nature: either essentially rational beings or essentially sexual beings or whatever: “to be human is not to be essentially any of them. Human being is essentially self-interpreting” (23). Heidegger wants to describe the structure of this self-interpreting way of being.

So, to reiterate: Homo sapiens have factual characteristics. Man, however, is the result of a cultural interpretation (25).

What we are investigating: not consciousness, but Dasein. The understanding of being is not mental and our understanding of being is “covered up” (33). Two kinds of covered-up: undiscovered (the unknown unknown) and buried again (was discovered, but lost/buried again). Dasein attempts to pass off the phenomena that has covered over the original phenomenon as the truth itself. Thus, Being is always only accessible to us through being.

Heidegger’s work is a hermeneutic phenomenology: understanding being through everyday, common practices and discourses. Examples: Charles Taylor; Clifford Geertz.

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