Dasein

What did Heidegger ask?

When we say "the sky is blue" we know what "blue" means. But what about the "is", the being of things that are? Martin Heidegger revived this question, so obvious that no one asks it, as the first question of philosophy. He held that traditional metaphysics since Aristotle had always asked only about "beings" and had forgotten Being itself, a "forgetfulness of Being". So in Being and Time (1927) he raised again the question of Being (Seinsfrage), the question of "the meaning of Being in general".

Being and Time appeared in the phenomenological yearbook edited by Edmund Husserl and was dedicated to him. The planned second part never appeared and the work remained a fragment, yet it counts among the major works of twentieth-century philosophy.

Why "Dasein" instead of "human being"?

Heidegger held that to answer the question of Being one must first examine the being that asks it, and the only being that can ask and answer about the meaning of Being is the human being. But he avoided the word "human being", already loaded with theoretical preconceptions: rational animal, soul and body, knowing subject. Instead he chose the everyday German word Dasein, which ordinarily means "existence" and literally "being-there" (da-sein).

For Heidegger Dasein is the being that "I myself am in each case". Unlike other beings, Dasein is the "being for which, in its being, that very being is at issue". A stone does not make its being a stone into a question. A person cannot help asking "How should I live?" and "Is this the right way to live?". Dasein always already has a vague understanding of Being, and Heidegger's analysis starts from there.

Hegel used the same word quite differently. In Hegel's logic Dasein is "determinate being", the unity of being and nothing, the basic determination of every "something" that is what it is through its boundary with something else. Heidegger's Dasein names the human way of being, so the two usages must be kept apart.

What is being-in-the-world?

Heidegger rejected the idea that human beings first exist as a "subject" apart from the world and then come to know objects. Dasein is from the start "being-in-the-world" (In-der-Welt-sein). Think of a carpenter driving in a nail. He does not observe the hammer as "a lump of iron weighing so many grams". The hammer is "ready-to-hand" (zuhanden) within a web of uses linking it to nails, boards and the house he is building. Only when it breaks does it show up as something merely "present-at-hand" (vorhanden).

Heidegger called Dasein's basic relation to the world "care" (Sorge). The word only superficially touches its everyday sense of worry; it names the structure by which Dasein is always already engaged with things and people in the world. With it he also opposed Husserl's theoretical concept of intentionality: before human beings look at and know the world, they live in it handling things.

What are thrownness and projection?

On Heidegger's analysis Dasein has three moments. First, it is always "already in" a world: we did not choose the country, language or age we were born into. This having been thrown into a given situation is "thrownness" (Geworfenheit). Second, Dasein is "ahead of itself": understanding its world, it seizes or rejects possibilities and throws itself towards the future. This is "projection" (Entwurf). Third, Dasein is always "alongside" the things and people around it and absorbed in them: "falling" (Verfallenheit).

What is "the they" (das Man)?

Think of phrases such as "that's what everyone does these days" or "so as not to be embarrassed in front of others". According to Heidegger we usually enjoy ourselves as "they" do, judge books and art as "they" judge, and withdraw where "they" withdraw. "They" are no one in particular; Heidegger called this anonymous subject "the they" (das Man). The they levels down whatever is exceptional, and Heidegger called this function "publicness" (Öffentlichkeit). In his brief formula: "Everyone is the other, and no one is himself."

Heidegger called this state of being handed over to the they "inauthentic" existence and regarded it as the average starting point of human life. "Authentic" existence, by contrast, means taking responsibility for one's own life. Since Jürgen Habermas used the same German word Öffentlichkeit for the "public sphere" as a space of rational debate, their judgements are directly opposed.

What is being-towards-death?

What draws a person out of the they? Heidegger names anxiety and death. In anxiety the familiar meanings of the world suddenly collapse and one is thrown back on oneself. Death is always "my" death, which no one can die for me. Heidegger defines Dasein as "being-towards-death" (Sein zum Tode). In anticipating death, Dasein grasps its life as a whole with a past and a future, and can seize an "authentic" life decided by itself rather than as the they dictate.

On this basis Heidegger located the meaning of Dasein's being in "temporality". The book breaks off just where he meant to derive a general concept of time from it.

Why is it called "fundamental ontology"?

Heidegger called this analysis of Dasein's structures of being "fundamental ontology" (Fundamentalontologie), because it was to lay the foundation for every ontology that asks about the meaning of Being. To avoid imposing a theory, he started from Dasein in its everydayness and combined phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation.

He did not follow this path to the end. After his "turn" (Kehre) Heidegger found the tracing of all Being back to Dasein too "anthropocentric" and tried to think Being from Being itself, which led to his conception of a "history of Being".

Why did Marcuse look to Heidegger for a foundation for Marxism?

In 1928, the year after Being and Time appeared, Herbert Marcuse went to Freiburg to study with Husserl and Heidegger. He worked as Heidegger's assistant and belonged to his inner circle of students. The project he pursued between 1928 and 1932 is called "Heideggerian" or "phenomenological Marxism".

Its background was the "crisis of Marxism". By the early twentieth century the proletarian revolution Marx had predicted had not come, and attempts at revolution across Europe had failed. Marcuse thought a philosophical foundation was needed to explain why revolution did not happen and how revolutionary action was possible. He saw a lead in Heidegger's "concrete philosophy" and was drawn by the claim that historicity, as a basic determination of Dasein, demanded a "destruction" of history as it had been. Jürgen Habermas called Marcuse the "first Heideggerian Marxist".

From the start, however, Marcuse criticized Heidegger's individualism and his failure to give history a material constitution. He meant to habilitate under Heidegger with a study of Hegel's ontology and the theory of historicity, but Heidegger did not accept it. When Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were first published in 1932, Marcuse analysed them at once, and "alienated labour" became the starting point of his reading of Marx. In the same year he parted from Heidegger because of the latter's turn towards National Socialism. Heidegger formally joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party on 1 May 1933.

How did Marcuse criticize Heidegger?

Marcuse later criticized Heidegger's Dasein as a "sociologically and biologically neutral category". In a 1977 interview he pointed out that the whole dimension of how an individual sees himself at a certain stage of capitalism or under socialism, as a member of this or that class, is missing in Heidegger. Heidegger's individuals are purged of the injuries of their class, their work and their recreation, and there is no trace of daily rebellion or of the striving for liberation; the they is no substitute for social reality. He concluded that Heidegger's concreteness was to a great extent "a phony, false concreteness".

This criticism is a question put to every attempt to join phenomenology with Marxism. If an analysis of the structures of human existence leaves out the class and labour conditions in which that human being lives, it falls back into abstraction. Karel Kosík's effort in Dialectics of the Concrete (1963) to bring Heidegger and Marx together again was one result of wrestling with this problem.

What other criticism was made?

Being and Time was attacked for its style first of all. Theodor W. Adorno called Heidegger's manner of writing The Jargon of Authenticity (Jargon der Eigentlichkeit) and criticized it for suggestively reinterpreting everyday words such as "care" to popularize a certain way of thinking. Hans Ebeling saw antisocial tendencies in the stark opposition between Dasein and the they. Murat Ates made a different point: the anonymity of the they as "no one" does not mean that social differences and power relations disappear, and some people are privileged within the rule of the they.

Political readings diverge more sharply. Some read the contempt for the they and for everyday "idle talk" and the appeal to authenticity politically, as a critique of modernity, of anonymity in mass society and of liberal democracy. But Emmanuel Faye and others claimed that Being and Time dressed up Nazi and antisemitic concepts as ontology, which Thomas Sheehan rejected sharply as a "patently false claim". That Heidegger joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party and served as rector of Freiburg University in 1933 is documented fact. How that connects with the concepts of Being and Time remains a matter of interpretation. The debate continues in the entry on Heidegger's Black Notebooks.