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Overview
Heidegger For Beginners explicates many of Heidegger's central ideas, including the Nothing, average-everydayness, care, existence, being-in-the-world, the One, the critique of technology, anxiety, and most importantly, being - a notion which may offer us the key to understanding the very mystery of our own existence. Explained here in a way that makes it both accessible and relevant, Heidegger's thought not only challenges an entire intellectual tradition, but also challenges our own self-conceptions, the very manner in which we, as humans, choose to exist.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781934389133 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | For Beginners |
| Publication date: | 08/21/2007 |
| Series: | For Beginners |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.29(d) |
About the Author
Eric LeMay taught writing at Columbia, the University of Chicago, and Harvard. He currently lives in Athens, Ohio, and is on staff in Ohio University. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Gastronomica, Poetry Daily, and he currently serves as the web editor for Alimentum: The Literature of Food.
Read an Excerpt
HEIDEGGER FOR BEGINNERS
By ERIC C. LEMAY, JENNIFER A. PITTS, Paul Gordon
For Beginners LLC
Copyright © 1994 Eric C. LeMay and Jennifer A. PittsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-939994-09-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction and Background
At a secluded cottage in Germany's Blck Forest region, a thinker presents us with the challenge of our modern age ...
The world and everything in it exists to be used—by us! Why? Because we are human; because we give the world its "frame of reference"; because we think.
For a clear understanding of Heidegger's philosophy, it is necessary to go back a few thousand years and familiarize ourselves with some of the ancient Greeks who started things off by asking a few nagging questions ...
The Ancient Greeks
During each disembodied state, we know the Forms but, to our chagrin, we forget about them at birth. However, through the use of reason, we are able to slowly recall all our disembodied knowledge.
Consequently, philosophers, as persons of reason, are closest to eternal knowledge and, Plato would add, are best fit to rule. (Plato envisioned a world run by philosophers instead of politicians!)
Descartes
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
From Rousseau to Kant
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1711-1778)
Roughly one-hundred years after Descartes postulated this rather abstract Thinking Thing, another philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, took this Thing and gave it a more romantic Hair. Walking through the woods of St. Germain, Rousseau came to realize his true inner nature: a nature full of goodness, harmonious with the rest of the natural world. He felt that humans were not cold, analytic things, but rather creatures isolated from their true natures by the constraints of modern society. Rousseau called this core of human nature the Self.
This Self, however, was so deep, so rich, so full of goodness, so darn wonderful that Rousseau felt it had to be something more than just his own self. Having decided that he must have tapped into a universal soul, Rousseau felt he could come to know nature of all humanity simply by examining the intricacies of his own mind. Rousseau and his followers caused such a backlash that a new school of philosophy emerged, asserting that Rousseau was a deluded idealist.
We know things from experiencing them and then using that information as a base upon which to build more complex knowledge—not from going deeply into the corridors of our own minds.
Along with structures like Time and Space, Kant came up with categories such as Unity, Reality, Substance and Possibility, which all help filter experience. Kant presumed that we all have the same filters and, thus, by examining the categories of his own mind, Kant believed, like Rousseau, that he could generate universal human knowledge.
Nietzsche
Nietzsche transformed the way philosophers approached questions of knowledge and truth. Truth, even when it wasn't coerced by power, had to be interpreted.
Even our most basic truths depend on interpretation. For example, two parallel lines do meet if a geometry system is based on the curve of the earth. Lines parallel at the equator will meet at the poles.
Kierkegaard and Husserl
Truth, for Kierkegaard, was subjective. In his view, we cannot know anything universal, anything that transcends time. If there was a timeless truth, we could not comprehend it, because we ourselves are not timeless. Consequently, truth which is relevant for the individual could not be anything greater than the individual. Kierkegaard considered this subjectivity of truth very important.
What about God?
Kierkegaard did not say (as Nietzsche would a few years later) that God is dead.
He said only that we cannot know God exists. Therefore, we must make a leap of faith.
This leap is the way to authentic existence.
Kierkegaard was himself a Christian, but he did not think that going to church and praying had anything to do with being so. Rather, the most noble thing one could do was to bank everything on one's belief, knowing you could never be certain.
Husserl believed that scientific knowledge was very useful, but, despite this utility, it did not produce the most important kind of knowledge. While we benefit from knowledge about atoms and radio waves, this information does not help us to understand our human concerns. For example, take a scientific approach to love ...
By focusing his attention on the act of this "experiencing of" rather than on the thing being experienced or on the person who was having the experiencing, he produced a new kind of knowledge. This knowledge could account for things unthinkable by science, such as ...
CHAPTER 2... enter Heidegger
Over the course of his life, Heidegger wrote over fifty volumes of work on almost every conceivable topic, starting in 1914 with his doctoral thesis on the medieval philosopher, Duns Scotus. Heidegger himself, however, started a few years earlier.
On the twenty-sixth of September 1889, Heidegger was born into a strongly Catholic family in the town of Messkirch in the Black Forest region of Balden-Wurtemberg, Germany.
Heidegger received his formal philosophical training at the University of Freiburg under Heinrich Rickert, a neo-Kantian, and Edmund Husserl.
From 1915 to 1928, Heidegger lectured at both Freiburg and the University of Marburg. establishing a widespread reputation.
In 1927, Heidegger published his magnum opus, Being and Time, which eventually became world renowned. In 1928, as a member of the Nazi party, Heidegger succeeded Husserl, a Jew, as chairman at Freiburg. Heidegger actively helped to implement Nazi policy throughout the university. In 1944, by order of Allied authorities, Heidegger was suspended from teaching until 1951.
There is an appendix on Heideggere's Nazism at the end of this book that touches on this topic, but it cannot begin to explain how some people—like the composer Richard Wagner or the Ezra Pound—can exhibit such genius in one area while being so politically and morally irresponsible.
Being
Plato set a precedent when he questioned various aspects of the world around him, rather than focusing on the world itself. From that point on, philosophers have been preoccupied with things of the world, rather than the more primordial fact: the very existence of the world.
Heidegger's philosophy is an attempt to think through the significance of this basic condition of existence which he dubbed ...
Likewise, Being is the necessary condition for beings to exist. Without Being, without basic existence, no individual could exist.
Also, just as one never actually sees light, but rather things lit by light, one never directly experiences Being, but rather beings which exist through Being.
Another approach to understanding Heidegger's idea of Being is to contrast it with what he calls ... "The Nothing." Once we recognize the significance of the world's existence, we can also fathom the possibility of its non-existence. The Nothing is the possibility of the non-existence of all things, literally "no-thing." The notions of Being and the Nothing are difficult to grasp because they are so self-evident that they have been taken for granted.
On the other hand, they are central to understanding our condition as humans. To better conceive these ideas, let us turn our attention toward a 20th century cultural figure ... John Lennon. Regardless of one's personal disposition towards John, we could easily imagine a world in which he never existed. Perhaps the aura of the hippie sub-culture would have been different or perhaps the Beatles would have never existed.
Now think of a world where the Beatles have never existed. Given that they were the first huge international stars of rock and roll, perhaps without their presence rock and roll would never have emerged as the major musical genre it became. From a world where rock and roll never existed, we can continue our line of thought and imagine a world where no music has ever existed.
Each being we eliminate brings us closer and closer to the Nothing.
From the erasure of music, we the non-existence of all art human could fathom the non-existence practices, of all art, the non-existence of those the non-existence of the world humans, those humans help constitute, and finally, the non-existence of the space in which our world revolves.
At that point, we have come to the Nothing, the non-existence of everything. In grasping this possibility of the Nothing, we can appreciate and understand the importance of Being. Being is that which makes all beings possible — the universe, the world, humans, human practices, art, music, rock and roll, the Beatles and John Lennon.
Each being, however, is temporal in the sense that time is an intrinsic part of its make-up. Every human being naturally and inevitably grows old. In the end, each being ends up in a state of "nothingness." Every human being eventually dies.
Humans participate in both Being, by existing, and the Nothing, by ceasing to exist. Only the two possibilities of Being and the Nothing are continual. Heidegger thought that the world we live in, the world of beings, could only be properly understood in light of existence and non-existence, of Being and Nothing.
Due to his insights about existence, Heidegger is considered an important existentialist philosopher. Existentialism bases its insight on the fact of primordial existence.
Heidegger, by the way, refused this label for reasons which will be discussed when we examine his relationship to the Existentialist movement in philosophy.
Heidegger thought that the entire history of philosophy, after taking its original cue from Plato, had forgotten about Being and concentrated solely on beings. His exposure of the more primordial Being, he claimed, marked the end of philosophy—a tradition of thinking beings—and started a new task called "thinking"—an attempt to understand Being.
Once Heidegger exposed Being, he needed to figure out how to understand its elusive nature. After all, Being is not an individual being, so it is impossible to examine or observe it. He dealt with this concern by examining how the issue of Being arose. How is it possible that Being is an issue? What is it that allows for the asking of questions about Being? His answer:
WE DO!
Similar to the way in which Heidegger exposed the complexity and significance of the self-evident truth that things exist, he showed that because we, as humans, are capable of raising questions about existence and Being, that implies that we, as humans, are somehow capable of answering those questions.
We are unique from all other beings because our existence is an issue for us. We, as a special kind of being, can ask those fundamental questions that pertain to every being.
In short, we are capable of inquiring about Being. Human beings are a special type of being, where Being presents itself to be known. Heidegger thought that the ability to raise these issues meant we had a special relationship to them and, somehow, a way of answering them. His explanation of this answer is best understood in relation to the history of philosophy. Past philosophers have always gone about answering important questions by trying to discover some exceptional state of events or exceptional state of mind that could be used to explain the everyday world.
Plato's "theory of ideas" required that one accept reincarnation and otherworldly Forms. Descartes' "thinking thing" presupposed the fantastic assumption that the world did not exist. In fact, each philosopher, in his own way, had ignored the everyday world and gone in search of some extraordinary principle that would explain the world.
Rather than trying to find some exceptional state of existence, Heidegger decided to do a phenomenological investigation of humans in their average-everydayness. (Remember, Husserl's phenomenology is concerned with the "experience" or "awareness" of something.) Simply put, Heidegger investigated the experience of being a typical human being.
As part of his investigation, Heidegger had to figure out the significance of existence for humans, because existence, as the most primordial condition of the world, was bound to affect the entire way humans live.
"Dasein"
To mark the significance of our existence, Heidegger gave the name Dasein to the type of being we call human beings, the type of being you are. Dasein translates as "being-there." So before anything else, we exist, we are "there," and that is how we should conceive of ourselves, according to Heidegger, if we are going to understand our lives, our "average-everydayness."
Heidegger turned not only Descartes, but all of the past history of philosophy, on its head. Before Heidegger, it had been thought that one's particular existence had no effect on how one pondered philosophical issues. Consequently, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche and even the Zen masters believed they could examine the essence of all humanity.
Heidegger showed how these views ignored a central characteristic of all knowledge with his notion of ...
Because existence functions as the underlying ground of Dasein, our existence determines our possibilities for knowledge (as well as everything else). The event of this existence is our "thrown-ness." Basically, the story goes like this ...
Heidegger thought that every human (every Dasein) is completely shaped by his or her culture. Having no control over the "thrown-ness" of one's social environment, one becomes part of a culture, and all of one's behaviors are consequently learned from that culture.
Everything one could possibly do is already proscribed by one's social environment. There is nothing unique about any particular human being. No one is an autonomous individual, free to choose her own way of existing. Heidegger's insight becomes more clear when we examine what he meant by starting that human beings are constituted in terms of their environment.
A child learns how to behave from social interaction with adults. The use of the word "learns," though, is misleading, because it presupposes that there is someone who learns. Adults who interact with the child do not teach, but create behaviors within the child which eventually form what one would call a "person." Only when a newborn has been sufficiently formed by its environment does it become a Dasein. These behaviors—moving, thinking, speaking, etc.—which make up our existence, are so basic that we never fully recognize their significance.
In turn, each of these larger worlds can be broken down into smaller ones that more specifically define a Dasein. Thus a Dasein in America might be involved in ...
Depending on the particular world or worlds in which one happens to be involved, certain factors become more or less important in terms of one's constitution. For example, a Dasein involved in the world of science might not blink an eye during a stock market crisis. However, a Dasein involved in the business world might have a different reaction. Dasein is defined by its involvement in various worlds.
To stress the importance of the "world," Heidegger called Dasein's activity of existing being-in-the-world. The use of the hyphens emphasizes that there is no distance between ourselves and the world. We are as much a part of the world as it is a part of us. Rather than thinking of "in" as a spatial indicator such as being "in" a country or being "in" a box, the easiest way to understand Heidegger's being-in-the-world comes from thinking of "in" as an indicator of involvement such as ...
Heidegger thought that no distance, either physical or mental, exists between ourselves and our world. Dasein's interest and involvement with its world is intrinsic to Dasein. There is no existing, no "being-there," without a world in which to exist. A person without a world makes no sense. The world and Dasein are one and the same.
The One
In fact, for Heidegger, there is a very specific way we make sense of our world: through our relationship with ...
The One represents all the possibilities for Dasein's world as a collective whole. The One consists of other Dasein whose presence creates the world in which an individual Dasein can act.
An easier way to understand what Heidegger meant by the One is to imagine how he thought the One functions in our culture.
Heidegger believed that such social practices, which make up Dasein's world, are specifically established by the One. The One is the embodiment of a Dasein's world and, consequently, of a Dasein's personal possibilities — of "what one can be." For example, in our culture, one could be a police officer or a doctor or a soldier, but one could not be a witch doctor—the social role does not exist for Westerners. The One has a normative function in the sense that it shapes Dasein's behavior.
Heidegger's German term for the One, "das Man," is also translated as "the They."
This translation better illuminates the control and authority the One (or the They) has over each individual.
The One constitutes the environment in which an individual can and must act. It is what gives meaning and intelligibility to each Dasein's existence. Through the One, we make sense of ourselves and the world around us by learning how "one lives." Rather than understanding our world through the laws of science or through some god, individuals make the world intelligible by participating in a social context, a world, which has certain customs embodied by and expressed through the One.
Rules for behavior are all just contingent elements of various cultures.
All the specific elements of a world each contribute to Dasein's most significant activity, being-in-the-world ...
... and being-in-the-world is made sensible in terms of Dasein's interaction with the One. The One represents and embodies Dasein's world.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from HEIDEGGER FOR BEGINNERS by ERIC C. LEMAY, JENNIFER A. PITTS, Paul Gordon. Copyright © 1994 Eric C. LeMay and Jennifer A. Pitts. Excerpted by permission of For Beginners LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction and Background,... enter Heidegger,
The Thinking Thing: Human-Centered Philosophy,
Heidegger's Influence,
Heidegger & Nazism,
Further Reading,
A sampling of Heidegger's works available in English,