Insight Editions · No. 48
The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger
Second Edition
Charles B. Guignon (ed.)
Essays by Heidegger scholars examine his accounts of being, phenomenology, temporality, truth, art, technology, politics, and the development of his philosophy.
A study guide to The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger by Charles B. Guignon (ed.). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- A double movement. Heidegger tells two stories: a "Ptolemaic" one about how things show up in Dasein's practices, and a history of being in which modernity conceals that showing (Guignon, Intro).
- Being as the ground of unity. The question descends from Aristotle's many senses of being and Husserl's phenomenology, recast as the meaning of being (Frede, 1).
- A life in hard times. Heidegger's path runs from Catholic Messkirch through Marburg to the 1933 rectorate (Sheehan, 2).
- Phenomenology without intuition. Heidegger's principle keeps "to the things themselves" but drops Husserl's privileging of intuition and consciousness (Carman, 3).
- Time against presence. Husserl's time-consciousness is the hidden partner of BT's temporality (Dostal, 4).
- Kant as ground-layer. The Copernican strategy yields a thin a priori ontology, not authority over the sciences (Blattner, 5).
- Engaged agency. Heidegger, like Kant, articulates the background the disengaged picture needs (Taylor, 7).
- Death, time, history. Division II makes moribundus sum the heir of the cogito (Hoffman, 8).
- Truth as unconcealment. Correspondence is uncovering, grounded in an attuned opening that gives a historical essentialism (Wrathall, 9).
- Authenticity as moral ground. Self-focusing and historicity explain therapy's moral dimension (Guignon, 10).
- East and ecology. Nothingness links Heidegger to Mahayana and deep ecology, but yields no ethics (Zimmerman, 11).
- Theology. Heidegger's categories come from Christian factical life; his history of being is a rival Heilsgeschichte (Caputo, 12).
- Technology and politics. Technology is efficiency for its own sake; the same reading took him to and away from Hitler (Dreyfus, 13).
- The fourfold. Dwelling is nature and culture experienced as holy and local (Young, 14).
The argument map: from the question of being to dwelling in the fourfold.
How the book is built
The Preface to the second edition explains that Carman, Blattner, Wrathall and Young wrote new essays, while three first-edition essays (Rorty, Harrison Hall on intentionality and world, Olafson on the unity of Heidegger's thought) were dropped. Chapters 1-8 treat sources and themes up to Being and Time; 9-13 span the whole career; 14 treats the later thinking. Guignon also records how his own views changed: Seiende as "what-is", a qualified realism about what-is, the ready-to-hand as "more primordial" rather than "more real", disagreement with Dreyfus's "minimal hermeneutic realism", and Heidegger's own motto for his writings, "paths, not works". Most first-edition essays (Hoy, Taylor, Guignon on therapy, Caputo, Dreyfus) are unrevised, so their "today" is 1993.
The five themes that recur across the essays, and where each is worked out.
| Ch | Title (author) | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Intro. | Introduction (Guignon) | A Ptolemaic account of intelligibility plus a history of its concealment, read against cultural despair. |
| 1 | The question of being (Frede) | Aristotle's unity of being, via Scotus and Husserl, becomes the meaning of being. |
| 2 | Reading a life (Sheehan) | The years to 1938, the rectorate and its record, in seven steps. |
| 3 | The principle of phenomenology (Carman) | Heidegger keeps phenomenology but strips intuition and consciousness of privilege. |
| 4 | Time and phenomenology (Dostal) | Husserl's time-consciousness is the unacknowledged partner of BT's temporality. |
| 5 | Laying the ground for metaphysics (Blattner) | Apperception as time earns a thin a priori ontology, not a throne over science. |
| 6 | The hermeneutic turn (Hoy) | Understanding is Dasein's being; a pluralist circle holds Gadamer and Derrida. |
| 7 | Engaged agency and background (Taylor) | Rationalism ontologized method; articulating the background undoes it. |
| 8 | Death, time, history (Hoffman) | Death plays Descartes's demon; moribundus sum founds time and history. |
| 9 | Truth (Wrathall) | Correspondence as uncovering; unconcealment yields historical essentialism. |
| 10 | Authenticity and psychotherapy (Guignon) | Authenticity as narrative self-focusing gives therapy its moral ground. |
| 11 | Buddhism and deep ecology (Zimmerman) | Nothingness links Heidegger, Zen and Naess, but grounds no ethics. |
| 12 | Theology (Caputo) | Each turn tracks a theological attitude; the history of being is a Heilsgeschichte. |
| 13 | Nihilism, art, technology, politics (Dreyfus) | Paradigms focus practices; technology levels them; only a god can save us. |
| 14 | The fourfold (Young) | Dwelling is a holy, local nature-culture gathered by things, even in cities. |
Depth map of the Companion
Diagrams are at least as numerous as PDF pages.
| Block | Chapters | What you should be able to teach back |
|---|---|---|
| Frame | Intro (Guignon) | Ptolemaic clearing + history of being; meliorative wager vs Sheehan/Caputo |
| Question and life | 1 Frede, 2 Sheehan | Manifold of being; seven steps to Ereignis; rectorate ledger |
| Method | 3 Carman, 4 Dostal, 5 Blattner | Hermeneutic phenomenology; thick present; apperception as time |
| Agency | 6 Hoy, 7 Taylor, 8 Hoffman | Hermeneutic circle; engaged agency; moribundus sum |
| Truth and self | 9 Wrathall, 10 Guignon, 11 Zimmerman | Unconcealment; authenticity in therapy; Buddhism/deep ecology |
| Later Heidegger | 12 Caputo, 13 Dreyfus, 14 Young | Heilsgeschichte; Gestell; fourfold dwelling |
How to read this Companion without losing either story.
Heidegger's life-work, from fundamental ontology to the Nazi years
Why Heidegger now
In the 1950s and 1960s Heidegger could still be filed under "Phenomenology and Existentialism", the student of Husserl and precursor of Sartre, read in France and ignored in the English-speaking world. Guignon names three causes of the later explosion of interest, and a list of sources and heirs that shows how wide the net is.
- The hermeneutic turn. Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and H. L. Dreyfus made Heidegger the seminal figure in what David Hoy calls a "hermeneutic turn", with consequences for the human sciences, artificial intelligence and a postfoundationalist culture; Geertz, Kuhn, Walzer and Schafer came to call their approaches hermeneutic.
- Continental heirs. Gadamer (in his debates with Habermas) and the "postmodern" Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray and Bourdieu all start from Heidegger.
- The Nazi revelations. The 1987 publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism set off a flurry of reflection on philosophy and politics.
- Sources and heirs. He draws on St. Paul, the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey and Husserl against the line from Plato to Descartes to naturalism, and feeds Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Gadamer, Arendt, the therapists Boss and Binswanger, and the theologians Bultmann and Tillich.
What strikes Guignon most is how Heidegger blends positions usually thought irreconcilable: Kierkegaardian passion with systematic rigour, Romantic self-fulfilment with Hegelian communitarianism, respect for German Idealism with hard-headed realism, and a sense of historicity and finitude with the search for a stable "ground". Because he held that what matters is the "unsaid" and that interpretation must do "violence" to texts, the best scholarship on him diverges widely.
Fundamental ontology in Being and Time
Heidegger's insight is that the knots of philosophy come from one way of understanding reality that arose at the dawn of the West: the "substance ontology" (Frede's term, ch. 1), on which the real is what "stands under" (sub-stantia) properties and stays present through change. Because it prizes enduring presence it is also the "metaphysics of presence": Plato's Forms, Aristotle's primary substances, the Christian Creator, Descartes's res extensa and res cogitans, Kant's noumena and the physical stuff of scientific naturalism.
Since Descartes this ontology has bred either/ors: mind or mere matter; ideas represent objects or nothing exists outside the mind; a constant self or no personal identity; objective values or "everything is permitted". The moves become "as predictable and tiresome as tic-tac-toe". Heidegger's goal is to undercut the game: not to deny mind and matter but to show they are derivative, regional ways of being, "the detritus of some fairly high-level theorizing". As early as 1919 he blamed "the general domination of the theoretical", not just naturalism, for "messing up the real problematic" (GA 56/57 87). When we step back to theorize, the world goes dead for us.
How Guignon reconstructs Heidegger's escape from the Cartesian either/ors.
Ontology is "naive and opaque" unless it first asks about the meaning of being (BT 31). Since things are accessible only as they become intelligible to us, Heidegger needs a "fundamental ontology", and since Dasein is "the horizon in which something like being in general becomes intelligible", it begins with the analytic of Dasein, the published portion of Being and Time. This continues Kant's "Copernican revolution" (the essays by Blattner, Hoy, Dostal and Frede keep returning to Kant) but breaks with it: Heidegger brackets the mind as a self-evident starting point. What is basic is not the mental but what Taylor calls "engaged agency", described from the insider's perspective of our "average everydayness".
- Formal scaffolding. The examples are mundane (hammering, turning a doorknob, hearing motorcycles, a car's turn signal), but the goal is the "formal scaffolding (Gerüst)" of any Dasein: "transcendental generalizations" about the conditions of all interpretations (BT 244).
- Interpretierung, not Auslegung. As Hoy notes, the philosophical Interpretierung uncovers the "primary understanding of world" behind everyday interpretations (Auslegungen).
Dasein as a happening
Against the Cartesian picture of minds in bodies, backed by the "Cartesian extortion" (doubt mental substance and you sink into crude materialism), Heidegger treats existence as a "happening", a life story unfolding "between birth and death" (BT 427). A movement counts as action only because it is nested in a life story: typing counts as writing an essay because of my training behind it and the outcome ahead of it, not because of what passes through my mind.
- Thrownness (facticity). Dasein finds itself attuned to a historical context where things already count, disclosed in moods.
- Discourse. Agency articulates the world along the interpretations in our public language.
- Understanding (projection). Dasein has always taken a stand on its life through roles, vocations and relationships; tacit know-how projects possibilities, so existence is futural, "coming-toward" (zu-kommend) the future (Zu-kunft).
The future has priority over past and present: what I am shooting for decides how the past offers assets and how the present shows up as a situation, and it defines what my life adds up to "right up to the end". Dasein is an "ability-to-be" realized through concrete possibilities; holding a door or getting on line at the theatre, I constitute myself as well behaved. Zimmerman calls this "ontological phenomenalism": "the 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence" (BT 67), with no hidden substrate behind the phenomena.
Worldhood, breakdown and the clearing
In the workshop we do not meet a "hammer-thing" with properties to which we add a use-value. We meet hammering, "in order to" nail boards, "for" a bookcase, "for the sake of" being a person with a neat study. What is given is an "equipmental totality", the ready-to-hand, where a thing's "ontological definition" is its role in the projects under way. The totality of these relations Heidegger calls worldhood; the idea that there are "at first" bare present-at-hand things "in a space in general" is an "illusion" (BT 421).
The referential chain of the workshop: worldhood is the whole web of in-order-to and for-the-sake-of.
- The clearing. Because we take a stand, we open a leeway (Spielraum) where things count: as a cook, the spatula and pan stand out while the linoleum recedes.
- Interpretation. Auslegung ("laying out") works the fore-structure of understanding into an as-structure: the pan as for boiling an egg rather than for a white sauce (BT §§31-2).
- A unitary phenomenon. Equipment is defined by our uses and who I am is defined by equipmental contexts; there is no ultimate ground, so the meaning of being is an "abyss (Abgrund)" (BT 194).
- Breakdown. Smoothly working tools withdraw. When the handle breaks off the pot, the work stops, the web of relations lights up, and if the breakdown persists things obtrude as present-at-hand objects for theory. The contextless object is a by-product of "the disworlding of the world".
We are always in a hermeneutic circle, with no presuppositionless knowledge, yet no veil hides things. When a city "presents a magnificent view" from an overlook (IM 104), it is the city itself that shows itself from this point of view. Aerial photographs and street maps are just more points of view, so the idea of a view "as it really is" is an illusion of representationalism. Dasein-relativity is therefore consistent with a "full-blooded realism": "The world just is the human world."
In note 10 Guignon called the ready-to-hand "as real as anything can get", with science's entities as redescriptions (close to Dewey's water and H2O); note 14 admits the skeptic is not finished, since conflicting appearances and Frede's "fittingness" let the Kantian Ding an sich "rear its ugly head".
The turn to the history of being
Heidegger dates a "turn" from the 1930 essay "On the Essence of Truth". Guignon separates two interwoven strands: answers to the charge that Being and Time is anthropocentric transcendental philosophy treating Dasein as the source of "the entirety of non-Daseinal ... being" (ER 99), and responses to the "conservative revolution" that brought the Nazis to power in 1933.
In the seynsgeschichtlich approach of the mid-1930s, being is a "happening" that "needs" and "uses" humans but is not their creation; as Caputo puts it (ch. 12), it is "the coming to pass of the history of the epochal manifestations of being", so "the history of being is being itself" (EP 82). Humans become respondents called to the "safekeeping" of being. The analogy is language: we say original things only by drawing on its resources, and the understanding of being "happens behind our backs".
- The first beginning. The Greeks brought to light the ontological difference by asking "What are entities?", the "guiding question (Leitfrage)". Their first answer was physis, "self-blossoming emergence" (IM 14), with truth as unconcealment.
- Sophocles' "Ode to Man". The Greeks dimly saw that the "overpowering surge" is made to stand through the "gathering" of a historical people: "human-being is logos" (IM 171).
- Forgetting. Thinking of entities as present, the Greeks forgot the presencing itself and fixed on "beingness" (Seiendheit). Plato's idea, then being as "being produced" by nature or God, then the modern representing subject; Descartes's piece of wax shows being as what "remains".
- Platonism. The whole of metaphysics is "Platonism", from Anaximander to Nietzsche, and Nietzsche is "the most unbridled Platonist".
- Ereignis. Epochs come from an Ereignis, "event" tied to eigen ("own"): "an event of coming-into-its-own", which happens to humans, not something they do.
Concealment comes in two orders. First-order concealment is innocuous: every disclosure hides itself, as the lighting in a room stays invisible while it shows the items. Second-order concealment hides the concealment, so one way of presenting passes for "the only game in town". Guignon's example is modern individualism, which hides the social practices that make it possible and then explains every collective as an aggregate of individuals.
Technology and the other beginning
The diagnosis of technology, developed by Dreyfus (ch. 13), first takes shape in the Beiträge zur Philosophie (1936-8). Our age is one where "nothing is any longer essentially impossible or inaccessible. (108). This is "machination (Machenschaft)", "the priority of ordering over what it is supposed to accomplish" (336, 397), later "enframing" (Ge-stell), which reduces everything, humans included, to resources ordered for maximum efficiency.
- Abandonment of being. Entities "appear as objects merely on hand, as if being were not" (115); science hides "the essential fullness of nature" (QCT 174), and things cut off from any region become "un-beings".
- The other beginning. Only by fully feeling this distress can we hear the "echo (Anklang)" of being. The guiding question gives way to the "basic question (Grundfrage)" about the truth of being, or, in Sheehan's phrase, "How come truth?"
"The Origin of the Work of Art" gives the clearest clue. A great work is a world-transforming event, a "cultural paradigm" in Dreyfus's phrase. The Greek temple "holds its ground against the storm" and so makes the storm manifest; "Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes" (PLT 42). "The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves" (PLT 42-3), and it sets the measure (Mass) while exposing the measureless that still needs decision (PLT 55).
All art is "poetry" (Dichtung, "condensed") because truth happens by being composed (PLT 70); poetry turns a people's "saying" into a decision about "what is holy and what unholy" (PLT 43). Homer, the Psalms and the Sermon on the Mount found communities: an endowment for future "preservers" and a beginning that "already contains the end latent in itself". Since decline is inevitable, the beginning must be retrieved (wiederholt) by "thoughtful repetition" (IM 191). The new poet is Hölderlin, whose late hymns, edited by Norbert von Hellingrath in 1914, hit Heidegger "like an earthquake".
Frank Edler links Heidegger's Hölderlin to Hellingrath's "secret Germany" (das geheime Deutschland). Guignon sees a soteriological, apocalyptic metanarrative: history springs from primordial origins, passes through a dark night of forgetfulness, and promises redemption by recovering its origins. This was already in Being and Time: historiography projects "monumental" possibilities, Dasein must "choose its hero" (BT 437), and authentic history is "a critique of the present" (BT 449). In 1950 Heidegger wrote that "being itself is inherently eschatological" (EGT 18), though "the essence of being is never conclusively sayable" (460).
Heidegger and the Nazis: the background
After Farias (1987), Guignon argues, the debate lacked a sense of Heidegger's place in a wider wave. He was "a fairly minor, almost laughable, actor"; Hans Sluga finds him "of no central importance" in Nazi philosophy. The background is the conservative revolution, a backlash against modernization and liberalism building from the 1870s to 1933, as Germany turned from a backward agricultural nation into "one of the greatest industrial powers" (Fritz Ringer).
| Date | Strand of cultural despair |
|---|---|
| 1877-97 | Dilthey and Count Yorck lament secularization (BT §77) |
| c. 1900 | Youth Movement: belonging, nature, "a longing for a Caesar" |
| 1910-14 | Nietzsche's Will to Power; Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski translated |
| 1914 | Hellingrath's Hölderlin edition |
| 1919 | "The unity of the situation explodes" (GA 56/57) |
| 1920s | Defeat, inflation; the Cult of the Young |
| 1932 | Heidegger votes for the Württemberg winegrowers' party |
| 1933 | Rector (April), party member (1 May), Rectoral Address (May) |
| 1936 | Beiträge: the Volk cult as nihilism |
- Dostoyevski. "No other modern writer save Nietzsche" had such impact (Fritz Stern); his editor Arthur Moeller van den Bruck quoted "We are revolutionaries out of conservatism" and proposed a German socialism, a "third way" he called das dritte Reich. Löwith recalls a portrait of Dostoyevski on Heidegger's desk.
- Weimar's failure. The conservatives "sought a breakthrough to the past", to "destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future", the "new politics of old values".
Guignon's causal reading of the political strand of the turn, 1919 to 1936.
From situation to resoluteness to the Volk
The 1919 lectures show the cultural-despair vocabulary at work. A "situation" gives life unity: (1) it is "an 'event' ['Ereignis'], not a 'process'"; (2) it is relatively closed; (3) the "I" is never detached, it "swims within the situation" (GA 56/57 205-6). Now "the unity of the situation explodes", and experience flattens into the indifferent and commonplace. In the same period Heidegger broke with the Catholic church for the religious radicalism of Paul, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski and above all Luther; Gadamer reports that Heidegger once said he wanted "to be a new Luther".
- Falling and the "they". Everyday life drifts with das Man: we are "replaceable" (Hoffman), busy yet "tranquilized", knowing only "rules and public norms", so the they "deprives the particular Dasein of its responsibility" (BT 165, 334) and brings "a dimming down of the possible as such" (BT 239).
- Situation, not circumstances. Authentic resoluteness "gives itself the situation" (BT 347, 355); asked what stand to take, Heidegger answers, "Only the resolution itself can give the answer" (BT 345).
- Fate and generation. Authenticity "brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate" (BT 435), tied to a "struggle (Kampf)" with one's "generation" (BT 436), which may require "doing violence" to everyday complacency (BT 399).
For Heidegger in the early 1930s, Nazism promised rejuvenation through retrieval. He must have "shudderingly admired the terroristic idealism" of the movement (Stern). The Rectoral Address of May 1933 speaks of "the German fate in its most extreme distress" and of a Greek beginning that "does not lie behind us ... but stands before us", "a distant command bidding us catch up with its greatness". What had been the individual's task is now the nation's, and his talk of the Volk, a völkische Wissenschaft and the protection of the Volkstum reveals real commitment to völkisch ideology.
The break of 1936 and the verdict
By 1936 Heidegger was pulling back. The Beiträge still call for "the renewal of the world through the salvation of the earth" and for preparing "for the appearance of the last god" (411-12), but the needed decision now comes from the history of being, not from analysis of the political situation. Humans must achieve Inständigkeit, "steadfast standing-in-a-site" (233), a mode of "insistent caring" Heidegger later calls dwelling; the Black Forest farmhouse of "Building Dwelling Thinking" let "earth and heaven, divinities and mortals" enter into things (PLT 160). Humans become participants in the Fourfold (Young, ch. 14), "the conditioned ones" (be-dingt) (PLT 181).
- Volk as metaphysics. The Volk can "never be the goal and purpose"; making it so is "only a 'völkische' expansion of 'liberal,' 'me-centered' thinking" (319). "Everything must be at the service of the people" trivializes entities to the useful (30).
- Means mistaken for ends. The Nazis take the people, a means, for the goal, so their remedy deepens nihilism: the "noisy drunkenness with 'experiences'" of the gigantic meetings "is the greatest nihilism" (139).
- A philosophy creates a people. Not the reverse (42-3); "blood and race" as bearers of history make "prehistory" validate history (493). The Nazi revolution suffers from Bodenlosigkeit, groundlessness (122).
- For the sake of being. Care must be "simply 'for the sake of being,' not for the sake of man" (16): treasuring things for what they are. Guignon's examples are the Hopi sense of land as a gift and the Japanese "national treasures"; the later ideal is Gelassenheit, letting things be.
How the Companion itself is built
The Preface to the second edition explains the cast change: Carman, Blattner, Wrathall and Young wrote new essays; three first-edition essays (Rorty, Haar, Olafson) were dropped. Guignon's Introduction remains the frame. The chronological and thematic span (Aristotle to the fourfold, Messkirch to the Spiegel interview) is intentional: no single method chapter, but a relay in which each essay takes a joint Frede, Sheehan, Carman, Dostal, Blattner, Hoy, Taylor, Hoffman, Wrathall, Guignon, Zimmerman, Caputo, Dreyfus, Young.
Guignon's Companion as a relay, not a single school.
Two stories, and Guignon's meliorative wager
Guignon tells Heidegger as two interwoven stories. The first is "Ptolemaic": intelligibility is centred on Dasein's practices, the clearing in which things show up as ready-to-hand, present-at-hand, or as others. The second is a history of being: epochs of disclosure and concealment culminating in technology, with a hoped-for "other beginning". The turn around 1930 ("On the Essence of Truth") is where the second story becomes dominant, without simply cancelling the first.
On the Nazi years Guignon is explicit about method. His account's "meliorative tone" is "at odds with the brilliant and insightful work of Sheehan and Caputo, as well as with the majority of other commentators". The goal is "not to justify" actions he finds "disgraceful and contemptible", but to understand how a thinker of Heidegger's stature could have taken that path: a reading of cultural despair, the Cult of the Young, and the move from individual resoluteness to the Volk. Readers who want the harsher ledger should hold Guignon against Sheehan (ch. 2) and Caputo (ch. 12) in this same volume.
Guignon's two stories and the political strand of the turn.
Authenticity, fate and the struggle Guignon flags
Authenticity "snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one ... and brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate" (BT 435). Fate is tied into a wider "struggle" (Kampf) that makes up one's destiny "in and with its generation". That vocabulary is where Guignon sees the bridge from personal authenticity to political mobilisation, the same bridge Sheehan documents in the rectorate year and Caputo reads as a secularized Heilsgeschichte. Guignon's 1936 pull-back reading (care "for the sake of being, not for the sake of man") is the meliorative hinge; the Black Notebooks Update in this chapter records why later evidence strains that hinge.
Guignon ends on a balance. As with Nietzsche, Heidegger cannot be made consonant with our "deepest democratic sentiments" without distortion, and anyone who buys into the philosophy must reflect on its moral and political implications. Yet this "mystifying man from the backwoods of Germany" more than once redrew the philosophical map. Even Gadamer, at a 1989 Heidelberg conference, wondered whether his own way of keeping a low profile was really any better.
The question of being: Heidegger's project
The epigraph is Heidegger's last description of his life's work, from the notes for the Gesamtausgabe preface written shortly before his death in 1976: "An on-the-way in the field of paths for the changing questioning of the manifold question of Being" (GA 1 437). Frede grants that "one great idea" claims are often empty, but one guiding question fits Heidegger. To the end he held that the "questionability" of the Seinsfrage was the thrust of his work. The phrase can sound hopelessly vague: does "being" cover rocks, dreams and irrational numbers alike, or some capitalized "Being as such"?
Aristotle's manifold of being
The question began for Heidegger as a high school student, when a teacher gave him Franz Brentano's On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (1862). Greek made ontology natural: it distinguishes "beings" (ta onta), the verb "to be" (einai) and the abstract noun (ousia). Once reflection reached a certain level, the question arose whether being has one unified meaning or irreducibly many. Plato raised it explicitly in the Sophist, calling it a gigantomachia, "a battle among giants", and offered "what has the power to act or be acted on" as a compromise (242 ff.); Being and Time opens from this passage (BT 19).
It was Aristotle's manifold that dominated the West. There are as many senses of "being" as there are categories: the primary category of substance (natural things existing in their own right) and nine attributes (quality, quantity, relation, place, time, action, affection, possession, position). Aristotle used linguistic criteria (what we predicate of a stone) but held that the categories are read off nature, not imposed on it, so he stayed a metaphysical realist. With no univocal sense of being, there is only an "analogy of being", recently dubbed "focal meaning", centred on substance.
Aristotle's ontology as Frede presents it: the substance-centred scheme Heidegger set out to undo.
Because the focus on substance shaped metaphysics through the Middle Ages into modernity, "substance" and "things" with attributes and causal powers remained the building blocks, and Heidegger's main challenge. Medieval study showed him how heavily Christian doctrine leaned on Aristotle, "as neo-Thomism does to this day": "the handmaiden exerted a decisive influence over her mistress".
The early writings: psychologism and Duns Scotus
A contemporary reading Heidegger's early work could not have guessed his future. Neither the dissertation, "The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism" Yet the work was not wasted.
- Against psychologism. The key to meaning cannot lie in observing psychological processes: "the act of judging must not be confused with the meaning of what is judged" (GA 1 110). This conviction grounded his later allegiance to Husserl's phenomenology.
- Modes of reality. Epistemology must divide the whole domain of "being" into its different modes of reality (GA 1 186), physical, psychic, metaphysical and logical (GA 1 160), but the division is tentative and conventional.
- Scotus widens the categories. For theological reasons (God is not a substance like others, so unity, truth and goodness apply to him only by analogy), Scotus saw Aristotle's categories as fitting one region of reality only.
- Categories read into reality. If different disciplines import different categories, they are not read off nature; they are read into reality by us; the question of being becomes "the givenness of the object to the subject".
- Ratio significandi. The meaning of linguistic terms.
- Ratio intelligendi. The concepts of the mind, the aspect under which a thing is grasped.
- Ratio essendi. The mode of being of the object understood. The name "Socrates" means differently as a living individual, a historical figure or a stand-in for any man, so "being" means "object-givenness": "It is the function of the form in the complex of meaning to give the object its being" (GA 1 325).
Scotus therefore separates the ens rationis from the ens naturae and rejects any mirror theory of truth: signs "stand for" what they signify without resembling it, as the sign advertising wine outside a tavern need not resemble the wine (GA 1 265 ff.). Categories become "elements and means of the interpretation of the meaning of what is experienced" (GA 1 400). Here already appear seeds of Being and Time: comprehension assigns significance (Bewandtnis) to the object, which must be fit to bear it, and all understanding is "historically conditioned understanding of the living spirit" (GA 1 405, 407).
Heidegger's criticism was that the medieval division into created and uncreated being could not accommodate historical and individual conditioning, and he still accepted unconnected domains of being and reality (mathematical, natural, metaphysical, logical, psychic) side by side. There is no sign yet of Dasein, care or temporality. But he saw the "impression of a deadly emptiness of all previous systems of categories" (GA 1 399) and called it a "fateful error" (GA 1 406) to treat the theoretical attitude as the only one that shapes reality.
Why the ontology of occurrence is a fateful mistake
If Heidegger has found "important supplementary modes of being" (readiness-to-hand, being-with, existence), why does he treat the age-old commitment to Vorhandenheit (occurrence / presence-at-hand) as "so fateful a mistake" that he returns to it again and again? Frede's answer: once substance and occurrence become the default, the other modes are misread as subjective colouring or as regional ontologies, and the unity of the question of being is lost. Context determines which ontological possibility is seized; what is not open for decision is that some understanding of being is always already in play.
- Analogy / focal meaning. Aristotle allows no univocal definition of being; there is only an "analogy of being", lately dubbed "focal meaning", with substance at the centre. Heidegger pits the revived question against that tradition's ramifications, not against Aristotle as a straw man.
- Scotus step. In Categories and Meaning of Duns Scotous (1915) what intrigued Heidegger was why Scotus saw the Aristotelian categories as only one subclass fitting a special region: a door to multiple systems of categories and to the question of their unity.
- Brentano / Husserl step. The act of judging must not be confused with the meaning of what is judged (GA 1 110); intentionality (intentio) names what thoughts are about. Heidegger later reads intentionality as an imperfect carry-over of Greek aletheuein.
Frede: from Aristotle's manifold to the twofold forgetfulness.
The twofold task and the unfinished step
Heidegger's published program pairs Destruktion of the history of ontology with a constructive analytic of Dasein. Frede stresses that the constructive side was to reach the meaning of being via temporality; the published BT stops short. Care and ecstatic temporality prepare the ground; the step from Dasein's temporality to the Temporality of being remains the "unfinished" promise.
Counterarguments Frede keeps live
- Aristotelians say focal meaning already answers unity. Frede's Heidegger: focal meaning still privileges substance, so practical and existential modes stay secondary.
- Husserlian reply: intentionality already gives being as meant. Frede: Husserl still tilts toward theoretical presence; Heidegger burrows to pretheoretical disclosure.
- Completion hope. Later Beiträge and related texts do not, for Frede's purposes, simply finish BT's program under another name; the Companion assigns that later story to Guignon, Caputo, Dreyfus and Young.
Modes of being Frede says Vorhandenheit cannot absorb.
The break with Husserl
It is often said the "new Heidegger" owes his philosophy to Edmund Husserl, but Frede thinks this true "only in a very limited sense". Husserl's phenomenology already framed the critique of psychologism and the Scotus book, and Heidegger had read the Logical Investigations as a student without seeing how they helped. Only personal contact with the method showed him what phenomenology could do, and, increasingly, its shortcomings.
Husserl took Brentano's intentionality ("directedness toward") to describe every object as the content of an act of consciousness: thought of, wished for, doubted, seen. On the Cartesian assumption that consciousness is transparent to the pure ego, he made philosophy "a strict ego-centred science" supplying the a priori conditions of all other disciplines, a "transcendental subjectivist" who "bracketed" the external world. Heidegger agreed that the being of entities lies in the sense we gain of them, but raised three objections.
| Husserl | Heidegger's objection | What Being and Time does instead |
|---|---|---|
| Transparent pure ego | What is closest to me need not be understood; self-understanding is usually inauthentic | "Systematic suspicion"; start from everydayness |
| Bracketing the world | Immanentism turns objects of consciousness into objects in it | Being-in-the-world analysed without abstraction |
| Detached intuition | Still tied to the theoretical stance and the ontology of the occurrent | Care and practical modes of being |
- Suspicion, not doubt. Distinct from Cartesian systematic doubt, Heidegger's "systematic suspicion" assumes the phenomena may be familiar but not understood, so they must be "uncovered", "freed" and "laid bare": an archaeological vocabulary behind truth as unhiddenness.
- Two levels. The ontic (for humans, existentiell) level of facts open to observation, and the ontological (for humans, the existentialia) level of deep structures; every ontological claim needs "ontic confirmation".
- Dasein. The term keeps the literal "being-there": the disclosedness of our whereabouts is our most decisive trait, and analysis of Dasein must precede fundamental ontology.
- Plain German. The new vocabulary was meant to avoid old associations, not to make a secret doctrine; it plays on etymological families that English lacks.
Fundamental ontology is transcendental in the Kantian sense: it unearths the conditions under which we encounter things. "Meaning is that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself" (BT 193). It does not supply new facts but articulates what we know "in our bones", in Gilbert Ryle's phrase from his 1929 review in Mind.
The twofold forgetfulness of being
Heidegger claims no originality for our dim understanding of being; his originality lies in explaining why it never developed. The forgetfulness is twofold.
- Everyday forgetfulness. We take over ready-made interpretations and behave, speak and value as "one" does. Frede prefers "the One" to "the They", since das Man names a mode everyone shares, not a group set apart. Facing death in anxiety is what wrenches us free, though no one can live permanently in authenticity.
- Philosophers' forgetfulness. Their mistake "lies in the theoretical approach as such": thinker and object are treated as "indifferently occurring" alongside each other, and neither Kant's subject-centred ontology nor Husserl's intentional objects escaped it.
The mode of being is not fixed ontically: one "thing" can be equipment, an artwork or a specimen, and other people can be statistics, tools or "Dasein-withs". What is not open is the ontological structure of these possibilities. Frede translates Vorhandenheit as "occurrence": in German even a distant star in the Milky Way is vorhanden, so "presence-at-hand" suggests a nearness the word has lost, and "extant" wrongly suggests a contrast with the extinct.
Heidegger's twofold task
Supplying the missing modes is not enough; Heidegger wants a complete revision in two respects, the two tasks of Being and Time (BT 36-49): the "Ontological Analytic of Dasein as Laying Bare the Horizon" for the meaning of being, and "Destroying the History of Ontology."
- Destruktion is not deconstruction. The German word is less violent: an analysis showing where the derailment took place in Kant, Descartes and Aristotle. Heidegger thinks the tradition can be mastered and rectified, even though the missteps were inevitable.
- Not a historicist. A historicist Heidegger could not see himself as heir of Parmenides, discoverer of the tie between being and thinking; he would find only coincidences, as external as the likeness between a triceratops and a rhinoceros.
- The prejudice exposed. Being is not "the most general of generalities" (BT 29); today the prejudice says "being" is whatever the existential operator ranges over.
- Reality as thinghood. Being as "reality" (from res, thing; BT 96) splits subject and object and makes contact between them insoluble. Even Kant kept the persisting substance as the building block, and his attempt to prove the external world shows he had not questioned the old ontology enough; the result is "a splitting asunder of the phenomena" (BT 170).
The planned shape of Being and Time against what appeared in 1927 (BT 63-4).
Neither task was finished. Part II, on "Kant's doctrine of schematism and time", the "cogito sum" of Descartes and Aristotle's essay on time, never appeared. Division III of Part I, "Time and Being", which Heidegger said he had "held back" (BT 17) when forced to publish early, was the real stumbling block; he did not allow it into the posthumous edition, so why he was dissatisfied "perhaps will never be known".
Care, temporality and the unfinished step
The four modes and their kinds of understanding (theory, practical concern, solicitude, comportment to oneself) are so many "-sights" (Umsicht, Rücksicht, Vorsicht), and so far they form no unity. Had Heidegger stopped there, he would differ from Husserl only in the "root types" of understanding. Instead he introduced care (BT Div. I, ch. 6) as the unifying feature that makes our being being-in-the-world as an organic whole.
- Design, not projection. Entwurf is better read as "design", like an architect's blueprint, than "projection", which suggests psychology; within this design everything has its meaning and thereby its being.
- Future. The design is directed to an anticipated future as the aim of our endeavours.
- Past. It is not a free choice: we understand ourselves "always already" out of the past we have been and still are.
- Present. We are absorbed in the here and now, the falling way of understanding in terms of the One (BT §§27, 71).
Care as temporality: the three ekstases that make Dasein's world meaningful (BT 370 ff.).
These are the "ekstases" of temporality; "there is nothing 'ecstatic' about this", only that we are extended outward and never in a punctual now. Temporality is the transcendental condition of a meaningful world and was to open the "transcendental horizon" of being beyond Dasein. Why Heidegger never took that step is uncertain. He mentioned language: the concepts describing the horizon would come from what it conditions, so the foundation would be described in terms of the founded, which may not be possible "in a nonmetaphoric way". Later he found the whole project "foundational" and reeking of metaphysics; the 1972 On Time and Being says the younger work "must still in a way speak the language of metaphysics".
Frede doubts that the turn is a radical break. In the 1953 preface to Being and Time Heidegger affirmed that "the road it has taken remains even today a necessary one, if our Dasein is to be stirred by the question of being" (BT 17). Her conclusion: the question stayed the same while its meaning moved from Dasein's understanding to being as a gift Dasein receives.
Reading a life: Heidegger and hard times
The end of a Catholic philosopher
On Monday 23 December 1918, Elfride Heidegger, eight months pregnant, crossed a freezing Freiburg to tell Father Engelbert Krebs, who had married the couple in Freiburg Cathedral on 21 March 1917, that they would not baptize their child Catholic. "My husband has lost his church faith, and I have not found mine." They now thought "only as Protestants": a personal God, but no dogmatic ties. On 9 January 1919 Heidegger wrote to Krebs himself.
This was a watershed for the 29-year-old. Born 26 September 1889 in Messkirch to poor Catholic villagers who had lived through Bismarck's Kulturkampf, he spent seven and a half years preparing for the priesthood: six as a high school seminarian (1903-9), two weeks as a Jesuit novice (30 September-13 October 1909, dismissed for health) and a year and a half of theology. A heart condition ended that in February 1911; he turned to mathematics and philosophy under Heinrich Rickert, and took the doctorate on 26 July 1913.
- Groomed for the Catholic chair. Arthur Schneider and Heinrich Finke arranged a church grant of 1,000 marks a year, on condition he "remain true to the spirit of Thomistic philosophy", and steered him from "The Logical Essence of the Concept of Number" to Duns Scotus.
- Anti-Modernism. Pius X attacked "Modernism" from 1907; in September 1910 an anti-Modernist oath was imposed. Heidegger himself condemned Modernism in a speech at Hausen im Tal (6 September 1909) and in Der Akademiker (May 1910).
- The spaghetti letter. By 19 July 1914 he joked to Krebs that conformity could be met with vending machines in the train station and that independent thinkers could have their brains "replaced with spaghetti", while still assuring the archdiocese (1914-15) of his service to "Christian-Scholastic philosophy".
- Passed over. In June 1916 the chair went to Josef Geyser, "a second-rate neo-Scholastic" from Münster. Between June 1916 and March 1917 came the Protestantizing turn: he read Schleiermacher in summer 1917, then Luther.
Sheehan's causal chain for the end of the 'Catholic philosopher', 1913-19.
Husserl arrived in April 1916 to take the chair of non-Catholic philosophy. The first meetings were disappointing: he gave the habilitation a "desultory reading" and sent Natorp a "lackluster" evaluation in October 1917, because he took Heidegger for a Catholic philosopher. A "free Christian" who denounced the "Catholic International", Husserl opened up only when Heinrich Ochsner told him (November-December 1917) how far Heidegger had moved. Heidegger's romance with his Protestant economics student Thea Elfride Petri began in summer 1916; they were engaged by Christmas and married three months later, "both of them in deep religious crisis".
The radical phenomenologist
On 7 February 1919, two weeks after replacing Edith Stein as Husserl's assistant, Heidegger opened his first postwar course: "Today we are not ready for real reform of the university", and maturing for it "will take a whole generation" (GA 56/57 4). He cited Angelus Silesius, "Man, become essential!", and attacked "the overall dominance and primacy of the theoretical" (87).
The times were hard: right-wing death squads murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; Versailles took 10% of Germany's population, 13% of its territory and all its colonies, with reparations worth about $220 billion at the book's rates; by November 1923 the mark stood at 4.4 trillion to the dollar.
- The firsthand world. In the Umwelt, "everything comes at you loaded with meaning ... 'world happens'" (73); intentionality is "living out unto something", which "has absolutely nothing to do with an ego" (68-9).
- Theory drains life. Theory de-vitalizes, de-means and de-historicizes (entlebt, ent-deutet, ent-geschichtlicht); the "happening" of world (Er-eignis) is flattened to a "process" (Vor-gang), "a sphere where the breath is knocked out of you" (75).
- Hermeneutic intuition. Husserl's "principle of all principles" (Ideas §24, 1913) is reread: first-hand intuition is "an understanding intuition, a hermeneutic intuition", from which theory is a precipitate (117). Phenomenological living "cannot be acquired ... like putting on a uniform" (110).
- Telling the Master. At a Saturday discussion in mid-June 1919, Heidegger told Husserl his pure ego was "derived" from the historical ego by "repression" of historicity. Husserl said "You and I are phenomenology" and thought the problem was only Heidegger's language.
Heidegger "published absolutely nothing" between 1916 and 1927, which hurt his candidacy for Nicolai Hartmann's Marburg chair in 1925. Husserl's letter to Jaensch (30 June 1925) called him "the only philosophical personality of such creative, resourceful originality", "predestined to be a philosopher of great style". He still lost; then Being and Time appeared, "a bit prematurely", in late April 1927 and won him Hartmann's chair (fall 1927) and Husserl's own chair at Freiburg (fall 1928).
- The birthday speech. On 8 April 1929, presenting the Festschrift for Husserl's seventieth, Heidegger hinted he had left the master behind.
- Amicus Plato. Reading Being and Time at Lake Como (July-August 1929), Husserl wrote on the title page "Amicus Plato, magis amica veritas".
The political activist
Hitler became chancellor on 30 January 1933; after the Reichstag fire (27 February) civil liberties were suspended, the 81 Communist deputies arrested (7 March), the Enabling Act passed (23 March) and the "cleansing laws" issued (5 April). On 1 May, the day before hundreds of labour leaders were arrested, the new rector ostentatiously joined the Nazi Party. The same day the Husserls, near Locarno, received a letter of gratitude from Elfride; Husserl, born a Jew, had been removed from the university two weeks earlier. On 4 May he wrote to Dietrich Mahnke that Heidegger's "publicly enacted entrance into the Nazi party (very theatrical, indeed)" capped a break in relations and "his anti-Semitism, which he came to express with increasing vigor".
| Date | Heidegger's act, by Sheehan's documentation |
|---|---|
| 2 Oct 1929 | Grant letter for Baumgarten warns against the "Verjudung" of German intellectual life |
| Spring 1932 | Supporting the Nazis at the ballot box |
| 1 Jul 1933 | Tells Jaspers (whose wife was Jewish) of "a dangerous international alliance of Jews" |
| 29 Sep 1933 | Secretly denounces Hermann Staudinger as a wartime pacifist |
| 1 Oct 1933 | Introduces the Führer principle at the university |
| 3 Nov 1933 | Applies the cleansing laws to student aid; "the Führer himself and he alone is German reality" |
| 10 Nov 1933 | Radio appeal for leaving the League of Nations |
| 16 Dec 1933 | Secret letter against Eduard Baumgarten, who "frequented the Jew Fränkel" |
| 10 Feb 1934 | Urges Staudinger be fired without a pension |
| Apr 1934 | Resigns the rectorate; from 1934 declines Jewish doctoral students |
| 1936 | Praises Mussolini and Hitler against nihilism (GA 42 40-1); tells Löwith his engagement rested on historicity |
| 1938 | Blocks Max Müller's appointment as "unfavorably disposed" to the regime |
- Why Nazism. He embraced its anticommunism and saw it as a vehicle for Friedrich Naumann's vision: strong nationalism, militantly anticommunist "socialism", a charismatic leader and a middle European empire preserving Wilhelmian Germany against global technology.
- After the war. The State Committee for Political Purification declared him a "fellow traveler" and banned him from teaching; Freiburg defended him and he became emeritus in 1951. Otherwise he kept "a hermetic silence".
- "Inner truth and greatness". In 1953 he published the 1935 lecture line on the "inner truth and greatness" of the movement, its supposed mediation between humans and global technology, and tried in vain to have Yale University Press drop it from the translation.
- Blaming the Will to Power. He put the blame for the war and the Holocaust on an impersonal Will to Power embodied in Ernst Jünger's Der Arbeiter (1932): the "worker" as "the unconditional menial who has been expanded into the limitless master", in which "Being happens as power-to-make". "Today everything stands within this reality, whether it is called communism or fascism or world democracy."
- No democrat. He scorned Germany's "democratized decay" and liked to quote Iliad II 204: "The rule of the many is not good; let there be one ruler, one king."
Counterarguments Sheehan forces onto the table
- Error-as-errancy. If Irre explains the rectorate, responsibility thins toward fate. Sheehan records the move without endorsing it.
- Philosophy innocent, politics other. The seven steps show the same disclosure-thought feeding the political vocabulary of destiny and people; innocence-by-separation is hard to maintain.
- Condemnation without reading. Sheehan's documentary density (dates, letters, GA 40 disputed line, Yale/Arendt incident in notes) is itself an argument: verdicts need the record, not only the mood of 1945 or 1987.
Sheehan's ledger: documents against hermetic silence.
What will Heidegger have been?
By his death on 26 May 1976, aged 86, Heidegger's works were in all Western languages and in Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. He called himself the thinker of "one thought only": what is the provenance of disclosure? He mapped the structures of existence needed for this "event-of-intelligibility" and its historical epochs, but held that the book itself is unanswerable: we cannot ask why es gibt Sein without presupposing disclosure, so "the essence of aletheia is lethe".
Five things Heidegger says about the unfathomable origin of disclosure, in Sheehan's reading.
- Empropriation. Er-eignis brings disclosive comportment and disclosible entities into their "asymptotic 'own'" (proprius, eigen).
- Difference. Diaphora, Unterschied: the reason we are never self-coincident, registered most sharply in mortality.
- Fate and dispensation. Geschick (from schicken, to send) names the givenness of disclosure; Geschichte des Seins its epochal "dispensations".
- Facticity. Being thrown into endless finite mediation without knowing why.
- Nihilism. "Everything is endlessly accessible, except the fact that everything is endlessly accessible"; Heidegger urged us to be not less nihilistic but more. The wellspring "does not want ... to be called by the name Zeus" (Heraclitus, Frag. 32).
Four explanations of Heidegger's Nazism that Sheehan sets side by side, and the one he favours.
Sheehan lists four explanations: the thought is untouched by the politics; "metaphysics made him do it", errancy as a secular Original Sin; he was briefly trapped in metaphysical humanism, which the later thought overcomes; or the reasons were "much more simple, and much more base", rooted in concrete economic and social conditions. Since Heidegger said his engagement came from the essence of his philosophy, "perhaps his followers should believe him".
Sheehan ends with a programme. Readers should neither condemn the man nor join the "Perpetual Adoration Societies", but ask whether the pursuit of the essence of disclosure blinded Heidegger to specific modes of disclosure in economics, society and politics. With Derrida, they must show "the profound attachment of Heidegger's texts ... to the possibility and actuality of all nazisms", including those dressed as "Western democracy" or a "World Order". "Maybe it is not wise ... to be the thinker of 'one thought only'." Heidegger's own rule was "Possibility is higher than actuality", so how we read him now helps decide who he will have been.
Seven steps of the radical phenomenologist
Sheehan's middle section is not only biography; it is a seven-step reconstruction of how the Messkirch Catholic becomes the thinker of disclosure:
- Back to the Greeks. Husserlian intentional relatedness is only an imperfect carry-over of Aristotle's aletheuein (disclosing entities).
- Being, not only entities. Following Logical Investigations VI, 6, intentionality reveals the essence of entities, their being (Sein / Seiendheit), not objectivistically as whatness and thatness alone.
- Self-presentative nature. Rereading Metaphysics IX 10: natural entities are intrinsically self-presentative, accessible and intelligible (on hos alethes), even when hidden.
- Correlation. Entities are alethes only in correlation with human modes of disclosure (aletheuein), primarily practical.
- Phenomenology as method for metaphysics' question. Intentionality revealing being makes phenomenology a method for the analogical unity of the modes of being.
- Beneath pure consciousness. From the side of human nature and pretheoretical hermeneutic understanding (the twenties), Heidegger burrows beneath Husserlian immanence.
- Ereignis. Emphasizing how the disclosive correlation happens at all (the thirties), he comes to the a priori, factical, inexplicable givenness of the correlation: its "fatedness", back behind which one cannot go.
Sheehan's seven steps from intentionality to Ereignis.
The rectorate day and the postwar explanations
On May 1, 1933 the newly elected rector "very ostentatiously" joined the NSDAP. That same day Husserl and Malvine, vacationing near Locarno, received Elfride Heidegger's letter dated April 28: hard times under the "cleansing laws" for the convert of Jewish birth. Sheehan's chronology: Hitler chancellor 30 January 1933; Reichstag fire 27 February; rectorate roughly April 1933 through April 1934, heavy-handed and controversial.
After the war Heidegger largely kept "hermetic silence" about motives and forms of involvement, aside from explaining his political "error" in materials that include the Der Spiegel interview (published posthumously; English "Only a God Can Save Us") and "The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts" (trans. Harries, Review of Metaphysics 38, March 1985). Sheehan catalogues rival explanations readers still meet: victimization by "errancy" (Irre), almost a secularized Original Sin of disclosure; entanglement in metaphysical "humanism"; and harder claims of culpable choice. The chapter's title question, "What will Heidegger have been?", marks that the verdict remains a future perfect: settled only by how later generations read the record (Farias 1987, Ott, and, after this Companion, the Black Notebooks).
The principle of phenomenology
Heidegger engaged the whole tradition from the Presocratics to Nietzsche, yet ignored or scorned Spinoza, Rousseau, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Marx, Freud, Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap and nearly all Anglo-American philosophy "from Hobbes to Dewey". Which group would Husserl have joined had he not come to Freiburg in 1916? The letters are harsh: in January 1916 Husserl was "lacking the necessary breadth of vision"; to Löwith in 1923, "Husserl was never a philosopher, not even for one second in his life"; to Jaspers in December 1926, "If the treatise is written 'against' anyone, it's against Husserl". Being and Time nonetheless appeared in Husserl's Jahrbuch, dedicated to him "in admiration and friendship".
Three versions of the principle
In his preface for William Richardson (1963) Heidegger said Husserl's phenomenology inherited a position "already anticipated by Descartes, Kant, and Fichte", to which "the historicity of thinking remained utterly foreign", while Being and Time kept "a more faithful adherence to the principle of phenomenology". Carman distinguishes three versions of that principle, from weakest to strongest.
| Version | Husserl's claim | Heidegger's stance |
|---|---|---|
| 1. "To the things themselves!" | Describe accessible matters (Sachen), not hypotheses; against naturalism | Accepted, "more faithfully" |
| 2. Phenomena as appearances | Phenomena are subjective contents of consciousness (Erscheinungen) | Rejected: a phenomenon is "that which shows itself" |
| 3. "Principle of all principles" | Every primordially presenting intuition legitimates cognition (Ideas I §24) | Rejected: intuition is a remote derivative of understanding |
- Taking Husserl at his word. Against the claim of 1911 that research "must proceed not from philosophies but from things", Heidegger wrote in the margin: "We take Husserl at his word." The target was the "creeping naturalism" that leaves no room for mind, meaning or value.
- Appearance presupposes showing. Like Nietzsche ("with the true world we have also abolished the apparent one") and Wittgenstein (children learn "red" before "looks red"), Heidegger rejects global appearance/reality distinctions: "appearance is only possible on the basis of something showing itself" (SZ 29).
- The hidden in the shown. In the full phenomenological sense a phenomenon is what "first and foremost precisely does not show itself" yet belongs to what does, "as to constitute its meaning and ground" (SZ 35). Logos is "letting something be seen" (SZ 33).
- Description as interpretation. "Descriptive phenomenology" is a tautology, like "botany of plants". Description is not "botanical morphology", Husserl's "eidetic morphology" of attitudes: "The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic" (SZ 37).
Carman's ladder: Heidegger keeps the weakest version of the principle and rejects the two stronger ones.
Categorial intuition
The Sixth Logical Investigation cast a "spell" on the young Heidegger. To ground claims about intentionality in intuition, Husserl argued that we have categorial, logically structured, intuitions: we see not only the dog and the black, but that the dog is black; we see the pen and the paper together on the desk; we see that if the glass falls, the wine will spill. The intuited "is", "not", "and", "or" and quantifiers cannot be abstracted from sensations, against the empiricists.
- The origin of the concept of being. In §44 Husserl says we do not get "being" from introspection but from awareness of states of affairs themselves.
- Antidote to neo-Kantianism. For Heidegger the real attraction was that our understanding of being is preconceptual, prior to conceptual and propositional attitudes, against the neo-Kantian mediation of all experience by concepts.
- Older than Husserl. The insight was "more primordially thought by Aristotle and in the whole of Greek thinking", free of Cartesian prejudice; the question became whether the "thing itself" is "consciousness and its objectivity" or "the being of entities in its unconcealedness and concealment" (GA 14 87).
What Heidegger took from categorial intuition and what he left behind.
The reductions
Heidegger's departure is clearest in his repudiation of the transcendental and eidetic reductions of Ideas I. (Note 17 adds that §26 on being-with also rejects the Cartesian Meditations reduction to "the sphere of ownness".)
- Not Sartre's point. The claim is not that existence precedes essence by free choice; the Letter on "Humanism" says "the reversal of a metaphysical proposition remains a metaphysical proposition". The point is that essentia and existentia cannot be cleanly separated for an entity bound up with what it takes itself to be.
- A naturalistic "natural attitude". Husserl says the world is "occurrent" (vorhanden) for me and "I, the actual human being, am a real object like others in the natural world" (Id I 58), and he calls the natural standpoint a "theoretical attitude" (Id I 7). Heidegger: we do not meet ourselves like "houses, tables, trees, mountains"; we use, rely on, step on and ignore things, treating them as available (zuhanden).
The immanent critique of 1925
In the 1925 lectures Heidegger makes the question of being arise from "the immanent critique of the course of phenomenological research itself" (GA 20 124). The question is transcendental: how do comportments become accessible as intentional at all? Two years later, on the Encyclopaedia Britannica draft, he put it to Husserl: "What is the mode of being of the entity in which the 'world' is constituted?", "the central problem of Being and Time". "Ontology is possible only as phenomenology" (SZ 35), and phenomenology without the question of being is "phenomenologically inadequate" (GA 20 140).
Husserl's four determinations of consciousness, which Heidegger traces to the Cartesian idea of an absolute science (GA 20 142-7).
- Immanence. Names a relation among entities ("being-in-one-another"), "nothing at all ... about the being" of them (GA 20 142).
- Absolute givenness. Says only how one experience can be an object for another in reflection (GA 20 143).
- Absolute being. Echoes Descartes's substance: "immanent being nulla 're' indiget ad existendum"; annihilate the world and consciousness's existence "would not be touched" (Id I 91-2). This is where neo-Kantian idealism enters phenomenology (GA 20 145).
- Purity. The ideality of noemata, "the ontologically unclarified separation of the real and the ideal" (SZ 217).
None of the four is "drawn from the entity itself". Husserl's guiding concern is "How can consciousness become the possible object of an absolute science?", an idea that "has occupied modern philosophy since Descartes" (GA 20 147). Hence the verdict: "In the fundamental task of determining its proper field, phenomenology is unphenomenological!" (GA 20 178). The "pure I" and "consciousness in general" pass over facticity (SZ 229).
The wonder of wonders
"From the air" Husserl and Heidegger stand shoulder to shoulder; "on the ground" they diverge. Yet both start from philosophical wonder (Plato, Theaetetus 155d; Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b12). For Husserl, "The wonder of all wonders is the pure I and pure consciousness." His achievement, which shaped Sartre and Merleau-Ponty too, was to face intentionality as a genuine phenomenon, the defining feature of mind, instead of burying it under mental representations.
- A direct realist. "It is a serious error to draw any kind of real distinction between 'merely immanent' or 'intentional' objects" and actual ones; perception "seizes on a [thing it]self in its bodily presence" (Id I 78-9). Husserl "is a direct realist if anyone is", compatibly with his immanence/transcendence split.
- The uncanny part. We can fear the devil or seek the fountain of youth; what this shows is "that we understand that entities are, whether they are or not", perceiving things as existing without judging that they do.
- Wonder at wonder. Heidegger's question is not "Why is there something rather than nothing?" but the more uncanny fact that one entity knows there is something: "the existential constitution of Dasein makes possible the transcendental constitution of everything positive". What is wondrous is the possibility of wonder.
"To the things themselves" without the privilege of intuition
Husserl's battle cry returns us not to physical Dinge or empirical Tatsachen against essences, but to any immediately accessible Sachen. The "principle of all principles*" (Ideas I §24) says every primordially presenting intuition (Anschauung) is a source of legitimacy for cognition. Carman's Heidegger keeps the call and drops the privilege.
- Version 1 (intuition). Cognition legitimated by what presents itself "in its incarnate actuality". Heidegger: the thesis that all cognition aims at intuition has the temporal meaning that all cognition is a making-present (Gegenwärtigen); that fixation on presence is what hermeneutic phenomenology must undercut.
- Version 2 (consciousness). Phenomena as contents in consciousness; phenomenology as inquiry into subjectivity against the abyss between consciousness and reality (Ideas I 77). Heidegger: for Dasein there is no such abyss; being-in-the-world is the starting point.
- Version 3 (essential seeing). Categorial intuition / Wesenserschauung as immediate seeing of essences. Heidegger: the phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic (SZ 37), interpretation rather than observational description, and "more obviously inconsistent" with essential intuition than with the first two versions.
Carman: three Husserlian versions of the principle, and Heidegger's cut.
The 1925 immanent critique and historicity
In the 1925 lectures Heidegger distances hermeneutic phenomenology from Husserl's "ahistorical" perspective: Husserl's phenomenology was "elaborated into a particular philosophical position already anticipated by Descartes". The critique is immanent: it uses phenomenological standards (fidelity to the phenomena, avoidance of constructive theory) against Husserl's own privileging of intuition, presence and the temporal present. Being-in-the-world replaces the subject-object split as the field in which anything can show up as a phenomenon at all.
Counterarguments Carman keeps in view
- Husserlian reply: without intuition as legitimating source, phenomenology collapses into hermeneutic free play. Carman's Heidegger answers that coping disclosure already legitimates; intuition is a founded mode.
- Derrida/Bernet-style worry (shared with Dostal's chapter): any phenomenology of presence risks a metaphysics of presence. Carman treats hermeneutic phenomenology as the attempt to displace that fixation, not as its secret continuation.
- Consciousness first. If phenomena are only in consciousness, "the things themselves" never arrive. Being-in-the-world is the wager that they do.
What Carman keeps from Husserl and what he strips away.
Time and phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger
The standard story runs: Husserl, alarmed by relativism and historicism, offered a method of apodictic description ("Back to the things themselves!"); Heidegger took an "interpretive" turn toward finitude, worldliness and historicity; poststructuralists then found nostalgia for metaphysics even in Heidegger. Dostal objects that Gadamer and Ricoeur say their hermeneutics presupposes phenomenology, and that Derrida's own critique of presence began as a reading of Husserl on time (Speech and Phenomena). The phenomenology of time is therefore a key to the whole century of Continental thought.
Husserl's project and the place of time
Husserl wanted a formal ontology linked to material (regional) ontologies. Formal ontology must "state what holds good for any objects whatever" (Formal and Transcendental Logic, 1929); being is thought as objectivity, including "higher objectivities" of mathematics and the social sciences. It is transcendental in Kant's sense (B 25): concerned with "the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori". Unlike Kant, Husserl held we can know things as they are in themselves.
| Kant, Critique of Pure Reason | Husserl's counterpart |
|---|---|
| Transcendental Analytic (object in general) | Formal ontology, reached through formal and transcendental logic |
| Metaphysics of nature | Three regional ontologies: physics, somatology, psychology (Ideas II, III) |
| Transcendental Aesthetic (space, time) | Phenomenology of space (1907) and inner time |
| Schematism (categories as time-forms) | Needed but never supplied: categories never temporalized |
- Time's priority. For Kant, categories are rules of temporal configuration: substance is "the permanence of the real in time", cause "succession subject to a rule". Husserl too came to see time as the basic form of all experience.
- One small publication. His only publication on time was the 1905 lectures, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, issued in 1928 under Heidegger's editorship, which Heidegger agreed to do only after finishing Being and Time. Calvin Schrag said Heidegger "compiled" them; in fact Edith Stein did, and Heidegger did "relatively little but pass it on".
- The unpublished manuscripts. From about 1917 time became Husserl's central theme: Stein compiled the Bernau ("L") manuscripts, which Husserl called his most important work and tried in vain to get Roman Ingarden and then Eugen Fink to publish; the C manuscripts followed in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
The thick present and the standing now
Husserl brackets "objective" time, the punctilinear row of nows stretching to infinity, to see how time is constituted in experience. Against that one-dimensional line he offers a three-dimensional present: every moment is "thick", with retention of the past and protention of the future as part of it. Retention differs from memory (the past experienced as past, not as part of the present), and protention from hope or expectation. The flow is directional and irreversible.
Husserl's thick present: retention and protention belong to the now, unlike memory and hope.
In Ideas I (1913) Husserl defends the method as "transcendental idealism": phenomenological time is "the unitary form of all lived experience ... within one pure Ego", and cosmic time is constituted in it. "The whole of phenomenology is nothing more than the self-examination on the part of transcendental subjectivity"; this egological route is the "Cartesian way". But on time Husserl wavers between three positions.
- 1. Subjectivity is time. The ego is simply the flow of time, as Kant sometimes identifies the subject with inner sense.
- 2. The ego outside time. The ego is the origin (Ursprung) and source (Quelle, "spring") of time; like a spring it does not flow; it is the nunc stans, the standing now of scholasticism.
- 3. Time before subject and object. In the C manuscripts time is "radically pre-egological", "a temporalizing-temporal primal occurring [Urgeschehen] which does not spring from egological sources"; the standing now is groundless, "as constituting, not itself constituted". Heidegger would say "Temporality temporalizes" (BT 377).
Husserl's two problems of time, which Dostal finds again in Heidegger.
If time is prior to the ego, the most important level of analysis is no longer egology, and it is unclear that talk of a primal ego as monad or of the standing now still describes anything immanent: time is now neither "inner" nor "consciousness". This is Husserl's deep problem, both ontological and methodological. The higher-level problem concerns the relations of time as such, natural time ("space-time") and historical time; Husserl usually treats historical time as founded on natural time, mediated by bodiliness.
Heidegger's project: a misunderstood division of labour
Husserl ran a cooperative research programme: he would do formal ontology and method, his students the regional ontologies, published in his Yearbook (Being and Time appeared in Vol. 8, 1927, beside Oskar Becker's phenomenology of mathematics). He expected his ablest follower to supply the regional ontology of history. Heidegger instead pursued the ontology of time itself, so to Husserl he seemed to assert of being as such what fits only the historical region, leaving "anthropology, historicism, and relativism".
- Fundamental ontology. It seeks the a priori conditions not only of the sciences but "of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences" (BT 31); the regions are history and nature, grounding the human and natural sciences.
- Transcendental phenomenology. Phenomenology is "a methodological conception", the "how" of research (BT 50); "Husserl has given us the necessary tools", and "A-priorism is the method of every scientific philosophy which understands itself" (BT 490).
- No subject-object language. Heidegger faults Kant for neglecting "the subjectivity of the subject" (BT 45) and drops the subject-object vocabulary, which leads to representationalism.
- Not anthropology. The analysis concerns Dasein as the place where being shows itself, not human nature as a whole.
The single most important fact about Being and Time is that it is unfinished: of two parts with three divisions each (BT 63-4), only the first two divisions of Part I appeared. Yet the plan is clear: "the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time" (BT 40), and time is to be "the transcendental horizon for the question of Being" (BT 63).
- Ahead of itself. Understanding, existentiality: the future.
- Already in. Disposition (Befindlichkeit, better than "state of mind"), facticity: the past.
- Alongside. Fallenness: the present. Each dimension "stands out" (ekstasis) while the moment is a crossing of past and future, Husserl's thick unity again; both reject "now-time" (BT §81). Heidegger later admitted it was "Husserl's service to have seen these phenomena for the first time" (MFL 204).
What distinguishes Heidegger is the authentic and inauthentic living of time. For the most part Dasein is fallen, lost in the present and cut off from its ownmost possibility, death; Dasein is being-toward-death, and the story resembles the Christian fall (though not original sin). The present has priority for the inauthentic, the future for the authentic, which also gives understanding priority over disposition. Dostal's own note adds that Heidegger sometimes posits a third, "indifferent" mode.
From time to being: Basic Problems
Being and Time ends asking "Is there a way which leads from primordial time to the meaning of Being?" (BT 488). The summer 1927 lectures, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, footnoted as "a new elaboration of division 3 of part 1", set out to find it, but break off just before (after Part 2, chapter 1, on the ontological difference; the next chapter, "The Problem of the Basic Articulation of Being", was never given). The shift is marked by terms: Dasein's Zeitlichkeit versus being's Latinate Temporalität. The Letter on Humanism later says of "Time and Being": "Here everything is reversed", but that comes after the turn; there is no talk of reversal in Basic Problems.
The regions of being by type of temporality in Basic Problems (1927).
- A method problem. As "scientific", phenomenology must be neutral and indifferent toward its themes, inevitably objectifying. Yet Being and Time treats indifference as inauthentic, so phenomenology would seem inauthentic, which is absurd. The promised Part III on method never came, and "nowhere in Heidegger's early work is a satisfying account to be found".
- The standpoint problem. If we distinguish regions from within time (Dasein's perspective), how can we survey them "externally"?
The other ontological difference: nature and history
Besides the famous ontological Differenz (being and beings), Heidegger relies on an ontological Unterschied between nature and history. He charges the tradition with indifference to it: Kant's distinction of persons and nature collapses because the first Critique is a regional ontology of nature within which persons appear. Heidegger rarely faults Kant's account of nature itself. The Unterschied is "more disparate" than that between God's being and man's in traditional ontology (BP 176), which makes a unitary concept of being "exceedingly difficult".
Nature is "historical" only as encountered, in cultural cases such as a battlefield or a cult site (BT 440), and "culture is not the way that nature is" (BP 169). Dostal sees a Kantian result: we may know nature only as it appears in our involvements, which tempts us to sever ontology from epistemology, the very break phenomenology meant to overcome. Heidegger's problem is in one way greater than Husserl's, since Husserl at least thinks we are natural beings.
Conclusion: why the project stalled
Heidegger's starting point shifts as Husserl's did. In 1925 "Dasein ... temporalizes" (HCT 319), as Husserl's ego originates time; in Being and Time "temporality temporalizes" (BT 377) and "Time is primordial as the temporalizing of temporality" that makes care possible (BT 380), as in the late C manuscripts. In "Time and Being" (1962) Heidegger called the attempt in §70 "to derive human spatiality from temporality" "untenable" (TB 23), which challenges the Kantian priority of inner sense in both thinkers. The later "region" (Gegend), "nearness" and Zeit-Spiel-Raum give space equal weight.
- Methodologically. His account of being needs an indifference his account of Dasein cannot justify.
- Thematically. The gulf between Dasein and extantness makes a unitary concept of being "hopelessly difficult".
- Result. "The ecstatic-horizonal temporality delineated in Being and Time is not by any means already the most proper attribute of time" (letter to Richardson, 1962). The shift from Zeitlichkeit to Temporalität fails; another turn abandons "philosophy" for "thought". Still, time's central role gave us our insight into historicity and finitude.
Retention, protention and the thick present
Husserl's time-consciousness analysis is Dostal's hidden partner for BT. Every present moment carries retention of the past and protention of the future as essential to its being present. The past is retained as past in the present; the future is anticipated as not-yet. Crudely, they are "part of the present", which is why Dostal speaks of a thick present rather than a knife-edge now.
- Standing now / absolute flow. Beneath the constituted temporal objects runs a deeper level Husserl struggles to name without making it just another object in time.
- Ecstatic unity. Heidegger's "ecstatic" temporality names how each dimension stands out from the others (literal sense of ekstasis), yet belongs to one unity of care. Dostal reads this as radicalizing, not simply rejecting, Husserl's thick present.
- Division of labour misunderstood. Readers who treat Division I as "Husserlian" and Division II as "existential" miss that temporality was the joint from the start; Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927) makes the passage from time to being explicit.
Dostal: from Husserl's thick present to Heidegger's ecstatic temporality.
Bernet, Derrida and the return of absence
Rudolf Bernet, developing Derrida's critique, argues that absence "cannot so easily be disposed of" and that "the repressed element returns" to haunt Husserl. Dostal's milder claim: Husserl already builds absence into the present via retention and protention; Heidegger's critique of the metaphysics of presence is continuous with that insight when read carefully, not a clean break that leaves Husserl as mere presence-metaphysician. The "other ontological difference" (nature versus history) and the stall of the published BT project mark where the partnership was not carried through in print.
Why the project stalled, in Dostal's terms
The published BT never delivers the promised science of being. Dostal's chapter-end diagnosis: the passage from Dasein's temporality to the Temporality of being remained programmatic; Husserl's partner was never fully acknowledged in print; and the nature/history difference opened a second front. Later Heidegger largely drops the Husserlian scaffolding rather than completing it.
Partnership and break: Dostal's map of Husserl and Heidegger on time.
Laying the ground for metaphysics: Heidegger's appropriation of Kant
The epigraph sets the tone: "A philosophy comes to have true validity, when its own power is released and the possibility is provided for it to deliver a shock and to make a difference" (PIK 3). Being is "what determines entities as entities" (SZ 6), so ontology might seem to be a survey of entities like biology or philology. Why then begin with Dasein (BT §4)? Because Kant proposed that "objects must conform to our knowledge" (B xvi); if so, an account of our knowledge yields an ontology. Heidegger reads the Critique as "laying the ground for metaphysics" as fundamental ontology (KPM 1).
Empirical or a priori ontology
A "Copernican" ontology can be empirical or sociological: express hermeneutically the understanding of being in modern physics, note its history, compare it with the Aristotelian ontology of common sense, and catalogue the results. Such an ontologist is "beholden" to the practices she studies and cannot add her own ontology. Heidegger claims more.
- Regional ontologies outrank sciences. "The basic concepts of philology cannot be clarified with the help of philological methods ... Latent in every science ... lies a regional ontology which ... can never in principle be developed by this science" (PIK 25).
- Productive logic. Ontology is not the "logic that limps along afterwards" but "leaps ahead into a determinate region of being" and hands the sciences "transparent directives for inquiry" (SZ 10-11).
- Kant's real result. Kant's transcendental logic is "an a priori material logic of the region of being of nature", not a theory of knowledge.
The obvious source, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), is "immensely obscure" and to many "not so much an interpretation, as an abuse of Kant", and Heidegger was also "frying more than one fish", fighting the neo-Kantians. Since 1977 the far clearer 1927-28 lectures (GA 25) have been available, and Blattner works from them.
Time as the horizon of being
Heidegger also takes over a doctrine: being is articulated in terms of time. For Kant to be is, roughly, to be a causally interacting substance, and to be a substance is to persist through change: the penny turns from copper to green while the penny remains. Kant argues that only Newtonian matter, conserved in all change, passes the test, so pennies, chairs and bodies are not genuine substances. Since persistence is temporal, "to be is in part to be in time", and "time is the horizon for the understanding of being" (SZ 15-19). But how can we know a priori that everything that is exists in time?
- Epistemological apriority. Knowledge justified independently of experience, as counting pennies neither confirms nor refutes 4 + 4 = 8. Only judgments (objectively valid representations, B140) can stand in justificatory relations, as only complete sentences are true or false.
- The problem. Kant calls the representation of time an a priori intuition, and intuitions are not judgments. One reading makes intuitions implicit judgments (I see a white cat, A79/B104-5); but Kant also says forms of intuition "are indeed something ... but are not themselves objects which are intuited" (A291/B347).
- Enabling apriority. Heidegger's answer: "Philosophically fruitful is that meaning of a priori according to which a priori means 'enabling'" (PIK 73). Space and time ground experience by an "advance viewing" that is "free of objectification" (PIK 89).
Are space and time formal objects?
Heidegger's example: balls of different colour, weight, size and material lie "pell-mell"; to order them "we must look in advance at the intimate connection" (PIK 88). The tempting reading says we need a conceptual ordering principle, such as "by colour in order of the rainbow". Then space and time would be formal objects: systems of positions any objects could fill, like the positions on a baseball team that any ten Orioles players can occupy.
- Formal intuitions. Unlike the generic concept of chess (playable on no board at all), time is a concrete formal structure; a number line shares its formal properties, but time is present to the mind. Kant calls such structures formal intuitions.
- Forms of intuition are prior. Heidegger leans on the note at B160 that distinguishes formal intuitions from forms of intuition, which are not explained by formal principles.
- What hangs on it. If time were a formal object, its proper tools would be logic and physics, the view of Cohen, Natorp and Cassirer; as Michael Friedman shows, this aligns the neo-Kantians with Carnap and logical empiricism and explains the chasm between Heidegger and Anglophone philosophy.
What is at stake in Blattner's question: if time is a formal object, ontology belongs to logic and physics.
The dead end: implicit concepts
PIK suggests a first argument: forms of intuition are preconceptual because we need not have articulated the concepts of space and time to be guided by them. Heidegger treats concept formation as abstraction: comparing a pine, a willow and a lime tree, I remove differences to isolate what is common, which presupposes "the leading regard" by which I already see their unity (PIK 158). One can absorb the rainbow order from rainbows and prisms without ever making it explicit.
Blattner calls this argument "deeply flawed". It rests on a superficial theory of concepts: the implicit grasp looks like an implicit but conceptual mastery of the same unity, so logic and science would still be the right tools. And it proves too much: the rainbow principle would also count as a form of intuition.
The real argument: apperception as time
The better argument runs through Heidegger's most controversial thesis: beneath conceptual synthesis lies a preconceptual synthesis of the pure productive imagination, more basic than receptivity or spontaneity. "Prior to conceptual unification the manifold must be 'gone through, taken up, and connected'" (PIK 184). Comparing the trees, I do not lose sight of one as I see the next; "this many must be given to me in one", in "a surveyable zone [Umkreis]" (PIK 187).
Blattner's reconstruction: the temporal unity of experience is presupposed by every concept, so it cannot itself be conceptual.
That zone is transcendental apperception, which Heidegger identifies with the pure form of time. To learn to see unity in data I must hold the data together through time, the "threefold synthesis" of the A-Deduction (A98-104), plainly modelled on Husserl's time lectures, which Heidegger was then editing. The past must remain available "not as an explicit object of recollection, but as a retained repository of information". Hence temporality enables every concept, and with it ordinary perception (seeing a cat), mathematics (constructing a Euclidean triangle) and abstract logic. The rainbow rule depends on that unity; the unity "does not return the favor". This argument does not depend on abstractionism.
Counterarguments Blattner flags
- Neo-Kantians and Carnapians say ontology without logic and physics is poetry. Blattner's Heidegger replies that logic already presupposes a temporal horizon of intelligibility.
- Orthodox Kantians (and Henrich) say the preconceptual-apperception thesis is eisegesis. The chapter treats that dispute as live, not settled.
- Kemp Smith dating and related apparatus slips are editorial; the argument turns on CPR Bxvi's Copernican claim and on the Prolegomena equivalence of objective and universal validity.
Two ontologies after Kant: Friedman’s parting of the ways, in Blattner’s neighbourhood.
Time as the origin of ontology, and its limits
What the argument from apperception earns, and what it does not.
- Too thin for regional ontologies. Pure time cannot yield a priori ontologies of life, matter or history, and Blattner calls this "a happy result".
- Lafont's objection. Cristina Lafont argues that a priori regional ontologies make Heidegger "aggressively anti-empirical": basic concepts cannot be discredited by research, and their shifts become "inexplicable alterations in 'the truth of being'". Drop the thick claim and the anti-empiricism goes with it; Heidegger "has not earned" more.
- Not too unrestrained. If pure time grounds only the present-at-hand, are the ready-to-hand and existence forced into that mould? No: the antecedent zone is the form of detached cognition only; engaged manipulation and living our lives have their own times, "the temporality of circumspection" and "originary temporality" (developed in Blattner's Heidegger's Temporal Idealism, 1999).
Neo-Kantian stakes: Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer, Carnap
Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer dominated Kant studies in Heidegger's day. They agreed that logic and physics were the proper tools of ontology. As Michael Friedman has shown (A Parting of the Ways, 2000), that aligns neo-Kantians broadly with Carnap and logical empiricism: ontology becomes the logical syntax of science. Heidegger's appropriation of Kant is a rival claim that time, not logic, is the horizon of being, and that ontology is a priori without being a branch of mathematical physics.
- Empirical or a priori ontology. If ontology merely catalogues what sciences find, it comes too late. If it is a priori, it needs a non-empirical source. Heidegger finds that source in the horizonal role of time.
- Dead-end path in PIK. Strong suggestions that forms of intuition are preconceptual simply because we need not have articulated the concepts of space and time. Blattner shows why that path fails: it cannot explain how those forms guide experience without becoming just more concepts.
- Real argument: apperception as time. Heidegger's controversial thesis that Kant implicitly embraces a preconceptual form of apperception, identified with the a priori representation of time. Objective validity and necessary universal validity are equivalent (Prolegomena); for Heidegger that equivalence is secured by temporality, not by logical form alone.
Blattner's fork: dead-end preconceptual forms versus apperception as time.
Why space and time are not formal objects
If space and time were themselves objects with properties, they could not be the horizon within which objects appear. Blattner tracks Heidegger's claim that the a priori representation of time is nonobjective: it is the condition for objects, not one more item among them. The schematism (even when Blattner's text slips past the word) is the hinge where pure concepts meet temporal determinations; Heidegger reads that hinge as evidence that productive imagination and temporality do the real work Kant assigned to understanding.
Heidegger and the hermeneutic turn
From a branch of philosophy to philosophy itself
Gadamer, in Truth and Method (1960), the first to turn Heidegger's account into a general hermeneutics, asks "How is understanding possible?" Before Heidegger that sounded like one branch of philosophy. From Schleiermacher (1768-1834) to Dilthey (1833-1911), hermeneutics defended the Geisteswissenschaften by giving them a separate cognitive operation, understanding, which left them "poor cousins" of the lawlike natural sciences and left understanding a "derivative and deficient subspecies of knowledge".
- The reversal. Gadamer: Heidegger showed "understanding is not just one of the various possible behaviors of the subject but the mode of being of Dasein itself". Understanding-as-cognition (versus explaining) is "an existential derivative of that primary understanding" (BT 182).
- The circle goes down. The textual circle of parts and whole becomes a circle of Dasein and world, so knowledge is a subspecies of understanding, not its rival.
- Relativism defused. Dilthey's hermeneutics was "plagued by the threat of relativism" about its own status. Heidegger calls BT an interpretation too, but with a deeper idea of understanding: "our most basic ability to live in and cope skillfully with our world".
| Term | Translation | Covers | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verstehen | understanding | primary coping, projecting possibilities | basic mode of Dasein |
| Auslegung | interpretation ("i") | everyday skills: hammering, typing, driving | understanding "becomes itself" |
| Interpretierung | Interpretation ("I") | thematized, discursive articulation, philosophy, philology | derived form, and what BT is |
| Entdecktheit | discoveredness | assertions about non-Dasein things | truth of statements |
| Erschlossenheit | disclosedness | the total context opened up | condition of discovery |
Philosophical Interpretation is reflective in two senses: it thematizes what everyday coping does implicitly, and it is self-reflective, being one manifestation of the primary understanding it describes. So it is "not simply arbitrary": it binds to the degree that it is adequate to the phenomena, philosophy included. Its derivations echo Kant's transcendental deduction, and Heidegger claims §31 goes deeper than Kant (BT 184), but Hoy reads them as "a reasonably complete and plausible reconstruction", not one decisive argument. The Cartesian starts from disconnection and fails to explain connection; Heidegger starts from connection and must explain disconnection, as when a broken tool becomes junk.
Projection, possibility and "Become what you are"
Understanding discloses possibilities, which are neither logical nor merely not-yet-actual. Dasein exists as "definite" possibilities it finds itself already having. A physics student is not collecting facts but becoming a physicist, "where who one is and what one does are inseparable". Dasein can also err by fixing possibilities so rigidly it takes them as necessities (BT 183), and has "in every case already gone astray" (BT 184).
- Projecting, not choosing. Heidegger rejects the "liberty of indifference". Projection holds a context of significance and a for-the-sake-of-which, and is not a list of options with pros and cons: such a list would be interminable.
- Factuality versus facticity. Factuality suits things whose facts can be listed; Dasein's facticity is its thrown, concrete limits, so Dasein is always "more" than it is factually.
- Against Sartre. For Sartre, "a voluntary deliberation is always a deception", "les jeux sont faits". Heidegger needs no such claim: deliberation is efficacious but supervenes on a background that can never be fully thematized.
Why 'Become what you are' is a genuine imperative for Dasein but empty for things.
"Become what you are" (BT 186), with roots in the Greeks and Nietzsche, sounds paradoxical, and is for things. Dasein is not what it is factually, but is what it is factically, and so can become what it already can be, or fail to.
Interpretation and the fore-structure
On what makes one interpretation better, Hoy notes that since interpretations involve possibilities, "true" and "false" fit poorly: a good interpretation frees up further assertions, its set of assertions is open, and rivals may share many truths. Heidegger prefers authentic or inauthentic, genuine or not, transparent or opaque. His paradigms are opening a door and hammering, not texts: seeing is "seeing-as", and we hear a motorcycle first, not its noise. Hoy's own example is reading: we do not see marks and then construe them; the text "comes to be only in the reading". What is understood is "not the meaning but the entity"; meaning is the web of relations in which something is intelligible as something (BT 193).
The fore-structure of understanding: three tacit levels, all in play at once, behind every explicit 'as'.
- Not in pieces. These levels must not be broken "into pieces" (BT 192); they are all in play at once and do not function independently of explicit interpretation.
- Not anti-linguistic. Heidegger need not claim understanding is "more essentially prelinguistic than linguistic"; asserting is itself interpretive.
- No poor cousins. Philology is a derivative case without disparagement; mathematics is "narrower" (BT 195), not poorer; historiography can highlight the possibilities of action.
After Heidegger: Gadamer, Derrida and pluralism
Hoy's reconciliation: both moments live inside one dynamic circle.
Deconstructionists see in Gadamer faith in the unity of the text, a vestige of metaphysics, and traditionalism. Critics see in deconstruction a "dalliance with an impossible 'outside'" and, with Habermas, a resistance unable to build. Hoy defines monism as positing the one right interpretation in all interpretation, and argues BT points to pluralism.
- Holism is revisable. The context is a single whole but "always revisable" from within; striving for coherence coexists with hidden error and bias and the recognition that no interpretation is final.
- Plural criteria. Richness, relevance to the present, genuineness, authenticity decide between rivals, and are themselves interpretable.
- No nihilism. That later generations will alter our interpretations does not make them mostly false.
- Tradition is not the past. We criticize the present's interpretation of how it came to be; good criticism sees where the present misconstrued inherited possibilities (BT §74, 438).
- Gadamer's reply. The circle is dynamic: a text can give us a shock, and "fancies" and "popular conceptions" fail when worked out. Deconstruction can be a necessary moment that secures the text's alterity, while pure deconstruction needs an assumed meaning to deconstruct.
The better interpretation is more self-aware: it discloses its own conditions and procedures. Sichverstehen means "knowing one's way around", so a good interpretation discloses something about both Dasein and the world.
Gadamer, Derrida, Habermas: the political charge
Deconstructionists see in Gadamer faith in the unity of the text, a vestige of metaphysics, and traditionalism politically suspect. Critics see in deconstruction a "dalliance with an impossible 'outside'" and, with Habermas (Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), a resistance unable to build. Hoy's reply:
- Holism is revisable. The context is a single whole but "always revisable" from within; striving for coherence coexists with hidden error and bias.
- Tradition is not the past. We criticize the present's interpretation of how it came to be; good criticism sees where the present misconstrued inherited possibilities (BT §74, 438).
- Dynamic circle. Gadamer: a text can give us a shock, and "fancies" and "popular conceptions" fail when worked out. Deconstruction can be a necessary moment that secures the text's alterity; pure deconstruction still needs an assumed meaning to deconstruct.
- No nihilism. That later generations will alter our interpretations does not make them mostly false.
Hoy's pluralism houses reconstruction and deconstruction as moments of one circle.
What traditional hermeneutics could not do
From Schleiermacher (1768-1834) to Dilthey (1833-1911), hermeneutics defended the Geisteswissenschaften by giving them a separate cognitive operation, understanding, against the lawlike natural sciences. That defense left the human sciences "poor cousins" and left understanding a "derivative and deficient subspecies of knowledge". Dilthey's version was "plagued by the threat of relativism" about its own status: if all knowledge is historically situated, how can hermeneutics claim authority?
Heidegger's reversal, as Gadamer formulates it in Truth and Method (1960), is that understanding is "not just one of the various possible behaviors of the subject but the mode of being of Dasein itself". Understanding-as-cognition versus explaining becomes "an existential derivative of that primary understanding" (BT 182). The textual circle of parts and whole becomes a circle of Dasein and world. Knowledge is a subspecies of understanding, not its rival.
Hoy's map: from poor-cousin hermeneutics to philosophy as Interpretation.
Why the Cartesian starts in the wrong place
Philosophical Interpretation is reflective twice: it thematizes what everyday coping does implicitly, and it is self-reflective, being one manifestation of the primary understanding it describes. So it is "not simply arbitrary": it binds to the degree that it is adequate to the phenomena. Its derivations echo Kant's transcendental deduction, and Heidegger claims §31 goes deeper than Kant (BT 184), but Hoy reads them as "a reasonably complete and plausible reconstruction", not one decisive argument.
- Cartesian start. Begins from disconnection (subject sealed off from world) and fails to explain connection.
- Heideggerian start. Begins from connection (being-in-the-world) and must explain disconnection, as when a broken tool becomes junk and shows up as present-at-hand.
- Against Sartre's deception claim. For Sartre "a voluntary deliberation is always a deception", "les jeux sont faits". Heidegger needs no such claim: deliberation is efficacious but supervenes on a background that can never be fully thematized.
- Against Shusterman and Ricoeur's arch. Understanding is not a prior operation later reprocessed: "In interpretation, understanding does not become something different, but instead it becomes itself" (BT 188).
- Against de Man and Bloom (as Culler puts them). Understanding is not "a special case of misunderstanding": misunderstandings show up only against shared success.
Engaged agency and background in Heidegger
Two ways a body "shapes" a world
"Engagement" means that an agent's world is shaped by its body, culture or form of life, and that relation is "subtly different" from causation.
- Causal shaping. I cannot see the wall behind me because light from it cannot reach my retina: an ordinary statement of contingent causality.
- World shaping. My scene is oriented up and down, near and far; things "lie to hand" or are "out of reach"; I lack "good purchase" and must shift left. These terms "make sense only against the background of this kind of embodiment". A creature from another planet might find "extensionally equivalent" descriptions but could not project the terms as we do.
- The upshot. The second relation concerns conditions of intelligibility. Its contours define engaged agency, what Heidegger called the "finitude" of the knower.
Taylor's note 3 explains the "dialogue of the deaf" between AI's critics (Dreyfus, Searle) and its proponents: the critics mean world shaping, while strong-AI proponents hear only the first, causal relation, which has "not yet swum into their conceptual ken".
How procedure became ontology
Taylor's genealogy of the disengaged picture: good methods were 'poured in theoretical concrete' into the mind.
The dominant picture has the agent take in "bits" of information, "process" them into a picture, then act through a calculus of means and ends, which makes computer models of the mind plausible to lay people. Modern reason, from Descartes, is procedural: reason is the faculty by which we think properly, demanding reflexive self-policing and breaking beliefs into components. The method is "an uncontestable advance" in certain domains. "The fateful step" was ontologizing it: Locke's "simple ideas" pour procedure "in theoretical concrete".
The second strand is objectivity: colour is not in the object, the sun does not "rise", and before Galileo people "saw" cannonballs fly straight then drop. Nagel's aim of a view "from nowhere in particular" is, stated modestly, "an indispensable condition" of physics. Disengagement, better seen as "a rare and regional achievement", became the nature of mind.
| Feature of the disengaged picture | Source | Heidegger's reply (BT) |
|---|---|---|
| Atomism of input | Locke's simple ideas, Hume's impressions | things show up within a totality of involvements |
| Computation | calculus of means and ends | made inoperative once atomism and neutrality fall |
| Neutrality | fact shorn of value, objectivity | things are first disclosed as ready-to-hand, not "given subjective coloring" (BT 101) |
Dualism and monistic mechanism look opposed but are both ontologies of disengagement. Mechanism cannot even state world shaping: for a program, "the unintelligible is what cannot be processed". The picture and mechanism then prop each other up "in a posture of mutual support", so the model "benefits from the onus of argument" and needs no defence unless powerful arguments shake it.
The background
The background is "subsidiary" to the focal object, in Polanyi's terms what we "attend from". I am not simply unaware of it (as I am of the far side of the moon), since it makes my experience intelligible and can be articulated; but I am not focally aware of it.
World shaping is a third relation, which rationalism mistakes for one of the other two.
- Not representations. The first term of world shaping is "a really existent agent in the world", not a representation. Heidegger's "preunderstanding" of how to get around is a knowing how; "knowing our way about" is "really moving around, handling things", not an inner layer mirroring action (Merleau-Ponty).
- Articulation is its own skill. Articulating how you feel about someone differs from describing a scene with that person; it is neither restating what was formulated nor fresh discovery.
- Complete articulacy is a chimera. "Any articulation itself needs the background to succeed", and each articulation redefines us, so the process is "by its very nature uncompletable". Rationalism, treating ideas as bits of information, ends in "almost comical consequences", like Hume finding no idea of the self.
- Kant's step. Even a Humean impression, to be a sensation and not reflection, must be about something; aboutness places it in a world whose unity is presupposed. Cut all links and we have "a blind play of representations, less even than a dream" (A112).
- Heidegger's step. Grasping things as neutral objects is a possibility "only against the background" of a world disclosed as ready-to-hand: a modification of a primitive stance of involvement, so it cannot be basic.
- The key words. Ursprünglich ("primordial") means a condition of what modifies it, not just earlier; zunächst und zumeist ("proximally and for the most part") sounds weak but names the background for what is not it.
The shared argument form: articulate the background the rival needs, then show it cannot fit his picture.
Unsympathetic readers treat BT as an interesting description of everyday life with no bearing on ontology; everyday consciousness, they say, may be a construct. Taylor's reply is that Heidegger's purpose is Kant's: to show the neutral stance could not be original and fundamental. And the existential analytic is itself an articulation of the background: "The picture puts itself in motion." This pragmatic self-confirmation gives the analytic its force.
Counterarguments and the unfinished release
Taylor insists the emergence from rationalism is "only partial" and "always menaced with being rolled back". Merleau-Ponty built on Heidegger; Wittgenstein belongs on the same short list. The release needs constant re-articulation because the disengaged picture still "benefits from the onus of argument" in common sense, cognitive science and much AI.
World shaping is a third relation that rationalism mistakes for cause or logic.
Why AI critics and AI builders talk past each other
Taylor's note 3 explains the "dialogue of the deaf" between AI's critics (Dreyfus, Searle) and its proponents: the critics mean world shaping (conditions of intelligibility fixed by embodiment and form of life), while strong-AI proponents hear only causal shaping (light must reach the retina), which has "not yet swum into their conceptual ken". Extensionally equivalent descriptions available to a creature from another planet would still fail to project terms like "lying to hand" or "out of reach" as we do.
Dualism and mechanism as twins
Dualism and monistic mechanism look opposed but are both ontologies of disengagement. Mechanism cannot even state world shaping: for a program, "the unintelligible is what cannot be processed". The disengaged picture and mechanism then prop each other up "in a posture of mutual support", so the model "benefits from the onus of argument" and needs no defence unless powerful arguments shake it.
Taylor: how good methods were poured into theoretical concrete as the nature of mind.
Kant's step and Heidegger's step, spelled out
The disengaged theorist can retort: show me the preunderstanding I cannot do without, or stop talking about fly bottles and Seinsvergessenheit. The answer is the strategy pioneered by Kant.
- Kant's step. Even a Humean impression, to be a sensation and not reflection, must be about something; aboutness places it in a world whose unity is presupposed. Cut all links and we have "a blind play of representations, less even than a dream" (A112).
- Heidegger's step. Grasping things as neutral objects is a possibility "only against the background" of a world disclosed as ready-to-hand: a modification of a primitive stance of involvement, so it cannot be basic.
- Key words. Ursprünglich ("primordial") means a condition of what modifies it, not just earlier; zunächst und zumeist ("proximally and for the most part") sounds weak but names the background for what is not it.
- Polanyi's terms. The background is "subsidiary" to the focal object: what we "attend from". We are not simply unaware of it (as of the far side of the moon), since it makes experience intelligible and can be articulated; but we are not focally aware of it.
- Complete articulacy is a chimera. "Any articulation itself needs the background to succeed", and each articulation redefines us, so the process is "by its very nature uncompletable". Rationalism, treating ideas as bits of information, ends in "almost comical consequences", like Hume finding no idea of the self.
Death, time, history: Division II of Being and Time
Why Division I was incomplete
Division II opens (BT 274-8) with two claims. The question of being needs a primordial interpretation of Dasein as a whole. And Division I "cannot lay claim to primordiality": its fore-having "never included more than the inauthentic Being of Dasein, and of Dasein as less than a whole" (BT 276). Totality and authenticity go together because the authentic life expresses Dasein as a whole, and Dasein's totality shows only in being-toward-death.
- The third-person sense. While I live, my identity is open to revision: each choice reshapes what my life "was all about". Death closes that process.
- The first-person dilemma. Either I am, and talk of my completed identity is meaningless from my standpoint, or it is meaningful, but only as an event others witness (HCT 308-9).
- A false alternative. The dilemma treats death as a present-at-hand event in the world (BT 280). I need not wait for it; I am "powerless to escape the possibility of dying at precisely that particular moment".
Death's two functions in Hoffman's reading: it completes my identity and makes it uniquely mine.
Mineness follows from non-representability (BT 283-4). Someone else could fill my job, could have been the husband of the woman I married. Apparent exceptions such as the surgeon's table or the dean's office are avoidable if I change my goals, but "in no case can I avoid appearing before the tribunal of death". So all my experiences are mine only because my life as a whole is individuated by its term, which demands repudiating the identity of indiscernibles: I am this person by a primitive "thisness", not by any set of properties.
The demon and the threat of death
The parallel faces an objection: Descartes's demon deceives me constantly, while death seems remote when, "fresh from my yearly medical checkup", I walk on a sandy beach. Hoffman answers that the commonsense view of death is "a gross distortion".
- Care and mortality are equiprimordial. My life matters to me "only because I am aware that it can be snatched away"; conversely "dying is grounded in care" (BT 296). Since care is constant, death's threat must be constant too.
- Pure possibility. Death is "the only pure possibility" of Dasein, free of actuality and of both causal and logical necessity; our control-oriented stance reduces possibilities to manageable events (BT 305-7).
- Indefiniteness. Death's "when" is Unbestimmtheit, never confined to a moment, and so tied to no "here" or "there": the threat in anxiety comes "from nowhere" (BT 231, 310).
- Step one: suspension. Descartes's demon suspends the truths of everyday life; anxiety before death makes the public world fail me, since it cannot protect me, and "takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself ... in terms of the world" (BT 232).
- Step two: certainty. Descartes finds "he can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think I am something"; Dasein falls back on the certainty and truth of moribundus sum (BT 309).
- Not apodictic, but more primordial. Heidegger denies death's certainty is apodictic evidence; it is not "of a lower grade" but "more primordial than any certainty" about entities or formal objects (BT 309-10). Dasein can withdraw assent from mathematics, never from "the gnawing sense of its mortality".
- Performative structure. On Hintikka's reading (1962), "I do not exist" is "existentially inconsistent" with uttering it; likewise every stance, even denying my mortality, testifies to my existence as a mortal self.
Time: three temporalities
Death replaces the instantaneity of the cogito with temporality: facing a finite future brings me face to face with my past, my history and background (BT 373, 435). Hoffman stresses a third, underlying form: the temporality of anxiety (BT 394), whose present is "held on to" but is not yet the moment of vision.
| Ecstasis | Inauthentic | Anxiety (ground) | Authentic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Future | awaiting, expecting acceptance by the "they" | face to face with indefinite death | anticipation of death |
| Past | forgetting; remember A only by forgetting B | brought back, neither forgetting nor remembering | repetition of heritage |
| Present | making-present: surround oneself with reassuring goods | "held on to" | moment of vision (Augenblick) |
The ecstases are ordered independently of chronology (BT 375-6): the future is not "later", since I am equally vulnerable now; the past is my thrownness, not something "no longer now"; temporality is "a process of temporalizing in the unity of the ecstases" (BT 377).
How ordinary clock time is derived from inauthentic temporality (BT 374, 416, 456-9).
"'Time' as ordinarily understood ... arises from inauthentic temporality" (BT 374). Each ecstasis has "a 'whither' to which one is carried away" (BT 416), so my past is mirrored in the past of the world. Everyday absorption forces us to reckon with time and date events (BT 456-7): "the horizon for the 'now' is the 'today'" (BT 459).
Guilt, repetition and history
The call of conscience tells ordinary Dasein of a guilt that is general and unconditional, a predicate of the bare "I am" (BT 326), unlike guilt for crossing a red light or not paying child support. "Dasein is not itself the basis of being": thrownness is shot through with nullity, and the self "can never get that basis into its power; and yet ... must take over Being-a-basis" (BT 330). I am guilty for the wrong attitude toward my entire past.
From death to history: anticipatory resoluteness turns thrownness into heritage.
"Authentic being-towards-death ... is the hidden basis of Dasein's historicality" (BT 438). Death "shatters all one's tenaciousness" (BT 308) and frees me "from the illusions of the 'they'" (BT 311). In repetition I accept my heritage in its "full contingency and groundlessness", and gain a fate (I cannot be "anything and everything"), a destiny (my life belongs to my community) and a hero to choose from. Yet rootedness comes "only by exploring the full depths of its own subjectivity", so Heidegger belongs with Descartes, Kant, Fichte and with Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus.
Hintikka's performative cogito as the bridge
On Jaakko Hintikka's reading (1962), "I do not exist" is "existentially inconsistent" with uttering it; likewise every stance, even denying my mortality, testifies to my existence as a mortal self. Hoffman needs this bridge because he grants that death's certainty is not apodictic evidence in Descartes's sense, yet wants moribundus sum to play the same structural role as cogito sum: suspension of the public world, then a certainty more primordial than assent to formal objects. Dasein can withdraw assent from mathematics, never from "the gnawing sense of its mortality".
Two suspensions, two certainties: Hoffman's Cartesian inheritance thesis.
Totality and authenticity must arrive together
Division II opens (BT 274-8) with two claims Hoffman treats as one argument. The question of being needs a primordial interpretation of Dasein as a whole. And Division I "cannot lay claim to primordiality": its fore-having "never included more than the inauthentic Being of Dasein, and of Dasein as less than a whole" (BT 276). Totality and authenticity go together because the authentic life expresses Dasein as a whole, and Dasein's totality shows only in being-toward-death.
- Third-person sense. While I live, my identity is open to revision: each choice reshapes what my life "was all about". Death closes that process.
- First-person dilemma. Either I am, and talk of my completed identity is meaningless from my standpoint, or it is meaningful, but only as an event others witness (HCT 308-9).
- False alternative. The dilemma treats death as a present-at-hand event in the world (BT 280). I need not wait for it; I am "powerless to escape the possibility of dying at precisely that particular moment".
- Mineness from non-representability. Someone else could fill my job or have been the husband of the woman I married. Apparent exceptions (surgeon's table, dean's office) are avoidable if I change goals, but "in no case can I avoid appearing before the tribunal of death". So all my experiences are mine only because my life as a whole is individuated by its term: a repudiation of the identity of indiscernibles in favour of primitive "thisness".
Hoffman: why Division I's fore-having was less than a whole.
Guilt as a predicate of the bare "I am"
The call of conscience tells ordinary Dasein of a guilt that is general and unconditional, a predicate of the bare "I am" (BT 326), unlike guilt for crossing a red light or not paying child support. "Dasein is not itself the basis of being": thrownness is shot through with nullity, and the self "can never get that basis into its power; and yet ... must take over Being-a-basis" (BT 330). I am guilty for the wrong attitude toward my entire past.
"Authentic being-towards-death ... is the hidden basis of Dasein's historicality" (BT 438). Death "shatters all one's tenaciousness" (BT 308) and frees me "from the illusions of the 'they'" (BT 311). In repetition I accept my heritage in its "full contingency and groundlessness", and gain a fate (I cannot be "anything and everything"), a destiny (my life belongs to my community) and a hero to choose from. Yet rootedness comes "only by exploring the full depths of its own subjectivity", so Heidegger belongs with Descartes, Kant, Fichte and with Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus.
Truth and the essence of truth in Heidegger's thought
Unconcealment is not a redefinition of propositional truth, and propositional truth cannot explain it: "beings ... must already be manifest before such predication and for it" (P 103). Heidegger was emphatic early and late: compare GA 34 (1931-32) with "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" (1964), where raising the question of aletheia "is not the same as raising the question of truth".
Part 1: correspondence as uncovering
Heidegger starts from the customary view: "an assertion is true if what it means and says corresponds with the matter" (GA 9, 178). The "old definition of truth is indeed basically right" but is "merely an approach to the problem" (FCM 342). His quarrels are with two assumptions.
- Propositions are not the paradigm. We call things true too: "a true friend", "the true God", "true gold", as the medievals did with adaequatio. Fool's gold "conceals its what-being" (GA 34, 118). Negative assertions ("there are no Olympian gods") correspond to no object in a condition, which exposes the prior whole we speak out of (FCM 345).
- Correspondence is not mirroring. Across all uses its structure is "so-as" or "just-as" (BT 259; GA 21, 10): an assertion is true when it directs us to a state of affairs "just as" it is.
- Not verificationism. Heidegger turns to demonstration only because there "the relationship of correspondence must become visible" (BT 260), not to define truth as verification (against Lafont and Okrent's readings).
Heidegger's example (BT 260-1): even an assertion that 'merely represents' is directed at the real picture.
Take "the picture on the wall is hanging askew". If someone judges without looking and "merely represents" it, "to what is he related? To 'representations,' shall we say? Certainly not." "Asserting is a way of being towards the thing itself that is." Confirmation shows "the Being-uncovered [Entdeckt-sein] of the entity itself" (BT 260-61). A sign points without corresponding (BT 258); an assertion corresponds because it lets the thing show itself in its condition: "The Being-true (truth) of the assertion must be understood as Being-uncovering" (BT 261).
- Pre-predicative coping. Things first show up articulated along our practices for dealing with them, in "the whole complexity of their involvements" (OHF 77): we "know our way around".
- Dimming down. Predication is an "explicit restriction of our view" (BT 197) that isolates a feature and lets the thing stand as an object with determinate properties (P 141), the "apophantical as" versus the "hermeneutical as".
- Gain and loss. The 1925-26 lectures (GA 20, GA 21) say assertion "makes certain relations stand out" (HCT 57) with a thematic clarity natural perception lacks, but we can no longer deal with the thing naturally (GA 21, 144-7). Hence "Propositional truth is rooted in a more originary truth (unconcealment) ... ontic truth" (P 103).
Against Strawson's view (1950) that "the correspondence theory requires not purification but elimination", Wrathall argues Heidegger agrees in spirit: there is no representation to compare, so "correspondence" names no genuine relation between independent items but an orientation that lets a thing appear. Properly understood, it still marks successful versus unsuccessful assertions and points us to unconcealment.
Part 2: the paradox of essential definitions
Truth needs things that stand as a measure: "this being ... must be accessible in advance in order to present itself as a standard" (BQP 18). It also needs essences: if a table had no essential features, "there is a table in the room" could refer to anything. But compare (BQP 69 ff.) "the lights in this lecture hall are on now" with "truth is the correctness of an assertion".
- Correspondence is not sufficient. An essential claim must hold counterfactually: showing all tables are wooden does not show a plastic table-shaped object is no table.
- Facts come too late. To test "gold is the noblest of the metals" against "gold is an element with atomic number 79", each camp rounds up different samples and rejects the other's evidence: "we have already presupposed the legitimacy of the essential determination" (BQP 71).
- The threat. If the world cannot decide, essences look projected, and anti-essentialism brings anti-realism in its wake, threatening the possibility of truth itself.
The paradox of essential definitions (BQP 69-71): each definition selects the very samples that confirm it.
| Kripke | Heidegger (Wrathall) | |
|---|---|---|
| Denies | that reference needs knowledge of the essence | that grasping an essence is grasping a proposition |
| Reference by | ostension: "that kind of thing", fixed by paradigms | a prior, attuned manifestness the ostension relies on |
| Gold | always was element 79; earlier speakers did not know it | different ages pick out the same lump as different kinds |
| Result | robust realism, possibly massive error | historical essentialism and realism |
Kripke's thought experiment: an optical illusion (or a demon in South African and Russian mines) makes gold look yellow when it is blue; we would announce not that gold does not exist but that gold is blue ("Just imagine the world financial crisis"). Wrathall thinks Heidegger would accept this, and Dreyfus has argued that formal indication anticipates rigid designation. But Heidegger holds that "the knowledge of the essence must be accomplished anew by each one who is to share it" (BQP 78): we know essences "and yet do not know" them (BQP 73), as a way of being attuned, a "good existential grip".
Wrathall's resolution: the same lump, picked out under two attunements, yields two essences, each then settled by the world.
Historical essentialism
Even ostension needs the thing already manifest: the first gold-finders responded to some salient properties among indefinitely many (colour, weight, good for jewelry, "gleaming in a way that seems divine", lying in front of my favourite chair). Each age has a different "productive seeing" (BQP §24). For Heidegger, essence is not the property but what makes it count as essential, "what matters to us in all things" (OWL 95).
- Today's attunement. We are moved by flexibility and efficiency: everything shows up as to be "unlocked", "exposed" and "switched about ever anew" (QCT 14 ff.). Atomic structure is what lets us turn gold into a resource, so it seems essential.
- Contingent, not arbitrary. We cannot decide by consensus to pick out something else as "gold"; our dispositions are built into us by our world. An essence is "not manufactured, but ... also not simply encountered like a thing already present at hand" (BQP 77).
- Realism kept. There is "a way that the universe is independently of us", but no final, correct vocabulary every age must accept.
Material truth, negative assertions, and unveiledness
Wrathall presses two cases that break the picture of truth as a relation between a proposition and an object in a condition.
- Material truth. The Greeks call gold "true gold" when it shows itself as what it is; fool's gold "conceals its what-being" (GA 34, 118). Truth is first "a character of the beings themselves", not of sentences about them.
- Negative assertions. "There are no Olympian gods" corresponds to no object in a condition. If negatives were the paradigm, every assertion would show itself as true or false only on the basis of a prior ability to comport with the whole practical situation: "in every individual assertion about something the whole of beings is already implicated" (FCM 345).
- Unveiledness of being. Unconcealment is not merely that entities show up; it is "the disclosure of beings through which an openness comes into its essence" (P 146). "Unveiledness of being first makes possible the manifestness of beings" (P 103). Without a world already opened with essential properties, there is nothing for assertions to be right or wrong about.
Wrathall's ladder: from propositional correspondence up to the openedness that makes correspondence possible.
Against verificationism and against elimination
Two rival Anglo-American readings of Heidegger on truth get rejected.
- Not Lafont, not Okrent. Cristina Lafont (Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure, 2000) and Mark Okrent (Heidegger's Pragmatism, 1988) treat demonstration as defining truth. Wrathall: Heidegger turns to demonstration only because there "the relationship of correspondence must become visible" (BT 260), not to replace correspondence with verification.
- Not Strawson's elimination. P. F. Strawson (1950) said correspondence "requires not purification but elimination" because no relation between independent items (statement and fact) can be found. Wrathall agrees there is no genuine relation between two self-standing items, yet keeps the word: "correspondence" names an orientation that lets a thing appear just as it is, and still marks successful versus unsuccessful assertions.
- Davidson parallel. Wrathall's Monist essay (1999) on Heidegger and Davidson fills out the structure: both refuse a third mediating representation between mind and world.
How dimming-down yields concepts
The 1925-26 lectures (GA 20, GA 21) spell the gain and loss of predication more sharply than BT alone.
- Restriction of view. Predication is an "explicit restriction of our view" (BT 197) that isolates a feature and lets the thing stand as an object with determinate properties.
- Conceptual payoff. That isolation first yields the determinate content that lets one form conceptual connections, draw inferences, and justify one intentional state by another.
- Practical cost. One can no longer deal with the thing naturally (GA 21, 144-7). Thematic clarity is bought by leaving the workshop's ready-to-hand totality.
- Hermeneutical versus apophantical as. Pre-predicative coping takes the hammer as a hammer inside involvements; assertion converts that into the apophantical as of a property ascribed to an occurrent object (BT 201, 260).
Gain and loss when assertion dims the ready-to-hand down to the occurrent.
Counterarguments Wrathall keeps in view
- Anti-essentialists say that if samples are selected by the definition, essences are projections and truth collapses.
- Kripkeans reply that reference is fixed by ostension and the world decides the essence (gold always was element 79); Wrathall grants the thought experiment about blue gold and the financial crisis, then insists ostension already needs a prior attunement.
- Scientific realists object that atomic number is not merely a technological attunement. Wrathall's reply is historical essentialism: the same lump can be picked out as divine likeness or as resource, each essence then settled by the world relative to that grip.
- Quietists say unconcealment adds nothing once correspondence is purified. Wrathall's answer is the ladder above: without unveiledness of being, there is no measure for correctness.
Authenticity, moral values, and psychotherapy
Why therapy needs moral discourse
Heidegger hoped his thinking would benefit "a large number of suffering human beings" and joined Medard Boss's seminars, yet therapists met him mainly through 1950s-60s existentialism, as a rugged individualist who lives intensely and creates his own world through leaps of radical freedom. As existentialism waned, its freedom came to look like "do-your-own-thing" willfulness and the misery of the "me-generation".
- The vacuum. Ira Progoff: when traditional orthodoxies broke down, the individual was "isolated and cut adrift". C. Marshall Lowe: the therapist "assumes a new moral authority" once held by the clergy.
- New complaints. Morris Eagle: clients now suffer less from classical neuroses than from "feelings of meaninglessness, feelings of emptiness", with causes in "the lack of stable ideologies and values".
- Ill-equipped theory. As an "applied behavioral science", therapy distrusts value judgments; for Freud, morality is the harsh superego, more source of conflict than cure.
| Naturalist assumption | What it says | Symptom in therapy |
|---|---|---|
| The self as a thing | a "subject of inwardness" only contingently related to the world | self-encapsulated centre of action |
| Instrumental agency | life as means-ends calculation, psychotechnology | "strengthening the ego", "managing stress"; silent on which ends are worth pursuing |
| Ontological individualism | individuals only contingently aggregated | "therapeutic contractualism" (Bellah): relationships kept while I "continue to grow" |
Why the "third force" slipped back
The humanistic and existentialist movements of the 1950s-60s drew on romantic expressivism: an inner seed of potential to be expressed. But they kept ontological individualism.
- Rollo May. He insists values matter more "than pleasure and even more important than survival", yet his only positive ideal is commitment for the sake of integration, which makes values "mere means to ends". The "what not" in "business achievement or what not" exposes the gap: the free chooser faces a "smorgasbord of values" with no reason to find any binding.
- Boss and Binswanger. Boss's "existential guilt" is failing "to fulfill all his possibilities"; Binswanger sees problems in a constricted "world-design". Boss is sure that with freedom "mankind's ethics becomes self-evident". Guignon detects the romantic faith in a "child within", which Freud taught us to suspect: our possibilities include hostility and aggression.
- Negative freedom. Where everything is possible nothing binds: in Rieff's line, "the absurdity of being freed to choose and then having no choice worth making".
Why the 'third force' slipped back into what it opposed.
Everydayness and inauthenticity
Bracketing naturalism, Heidegger finds the self to be an unfolding event, "stretched out between birth and death" (BT 427): "Dasein finds 'itself' proximally in what it does" (BT 155). Against expressivism Guignon calls this a "manifestationist" view: a blunt, forthright woman's no-nonsense style simply is her being honest, as "my wearing loafers and old sweatshirts is my being a casual dresser". "Being-a-self is ... only in its process of realization" (MFL 139), and a life has, with Ricoeur, the structure of a narrative.
- Projection. Everything I do makes me "a parent who is neglectful or supportive": being-toward-death means everything contributes to who I am becoming.
- The "they" is Janus-faced. It is "a primordial phenomenon" of Dasein's positive constitution (BT 167) and our medium of intelligibility, but it levels choices to "the familiar, the attainable, the respectable" (BT 239), a "dimming down of the possible as such".
- Falling and double forgetting. Some forgetting is needed to work, but we forget the forgetting itself (BP 290), and sink into "extravagant grubbing about in one's own soul" (BP 160). Life shrinks to "one damned thing after another", lived as techne (production) rather than praxis, whose "end is doing well itself".
Guignon's path from everydayness to authentic existence.
Authenticity: not an inner self
Authenticity "does not detach Dasein from its world" (BT 344); it is "a fuller and richer form of participation" in the public context, seized "in terms of this interpretation, against it, and yet again for it" (BT 435). Anxiety reveals everydayness as flight from our "thrownness toward death"; facing it, Dasein is "snatched back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities" (BT 435, 308) and lives with "cumulativeness and direction": Gadamer's "anticipation of completion", Kermode's "sense of an ending", Pindar's "become what you are" (BT 186).
- Means-ends. I run to get healthy; I help a friend to get him in my debt. Life becomes an episodic sequence of strategies, running "a grim imposition", friendship "cynical and manipulative", the present trivialized by "the carrot at the end of the stick".
- Constituent-ends. I run as part of being a healthy person; I help for the sake of being a good friend. The present becomes "the arena in which our coming-to-fruition is fulfilled". This self-composing has the continuity of authentic temporality.
Implications for therapy
Hume may be right that no "ought" follows from an "is", but Heidegger shows connections of "overwhelming plausibility": anyone who wants intelligibility and direction must care about unity and coherence. The liberal objection that therapists must stay neutral rests on unargued values (pluralism, tolerance, rights), and its "do-your-own-thing" individualism is often the book of the problems therapy treats.
Guignon's four contributions of Heidegger's authenticity to therapeutic practice.
- Metavalues. Resoluteness, steadiness, courage, integrity and clear-sightedness; the authentic person "chooses to choose" and "resolves to keep repeating itself" (BT 355), with a "sober joy".
- Authentic historicity. Our core commitments (to children, justice, against cruelty) come from a heritage, Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, behind Enlightenment rights. Authentic Dasein "chooses its hero" and reveres "the sole authority which a free existing can have" (BT 437, 443): exemplars such as Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Helen Keller and Malcolm X.
- Solidarity. "Our fates have already been guided in advance in our being with one another" (BT 436). Genuine freedom lies "not in the absence of all constraints" but in clarity about constitutive stories.
- Therapy as renarrativizing. After Roy Schafer and Donald Spence, therapy jointly composes a more coherent narrative, which is moral: "To tell a story is inescapably to take a moral stance" (Bruner); a story "must make me true to its own demands" (Hauerwas).
Counterarguments Guignon answers
- Liberal neutrality. Therapists must stay value-neutral. Reply: neutrality rests on unargued values (pluralism, tolerance, rights), and its individualism is often the book of the problems treated.
- Hume's is/ought. No ought from an is. Reply: Heidegger shows connections of "overwhelming plausibility": anyone who wants intelligibility and direction must care about unity and coherence.
- Boss/Binswanger romanticism. Freedom makes ethics "self-evident"; constricted world-designs are the problem. Reply: the "child within" faith ignores hostility and aggression that Freud mapped; negative freedom leaves "no choice worth making" (Rieff).
- Existentialist leap. Authenticity as terrible freedom. Reply: authenticity "does not detach Dasein from its world" (BT 344); it is fuller participation "in terms of this interpretation, against it, and yet again for it" (BT 435).
Means-ends versus constituent-ends: same actions, different lives (Wiggins via Guignon).
How therapy met Heidegger, and what it missed
Guignon's opening path is carefully dated. Heidegger told Medard Boss he hoped his thinking would leave the study and reach "a large number of suffering human beings". English-speaking therapists, however, met him through 1950s-60s existentialism: Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus. The resulting "existentialized" Heidegger was a rugged individualist facing absurdity with leaps of radical freedom. As that image faded into "do-your-own-thing" willfulness and the "me-generation", the motive for reading Heidegger in the clinic faded with it.
- Progoff and Lowe. Ira Progoff: once traditional orthodoxies broke, the individual was "isolated and cut adrift". C. Marshall Lowe: the therapist "assumes a new moral authority" once held by the clergy.
- Eagle's new complaints. Clients suffer less from classical neuroses than from "feelings of meaninglessness, feelings of emptiness", causes lying in "the lack of stable ideologies and values".
- Freudian block. As applied behavioral science, therapy distrusts value judgments; for Freud, morality is the harsh superego, more source of conflict than cure. Yalom's existential psychotherapy and Daseinsanalysis (Boss) tried to reopen the moral field without a theory that could justify it.
Guignon's diagnosis: therapy inherited moral work without a moral ontology.
Manifestationist self versus expressivist seed
Against romantic expressivism (an inner seed waiting to be expressed), Guignon reads Heidegger as manifestationist: the self is "an unfolding event" stretched between birth and death (BT 427). "Dasein finds 'itself' proximally in what it does" (BT 155). A blunt woman's no-nonsense style is her honesty; wearing loafers is being a casual dresser. With Ricoeur, a life has narrative structure; with Aristotle (NE 1140b), the end of praxis is "doing well itself", not a product outside the action.
- Projection as authorship. Everything I do makes me "a parent who is neglectful or supportive". Being-toward-death means every episode contributes to who I am becoming.
- Double face of the they. The they is "a primordial phenomenon" (BT 167) and our medium of intelligibility, yet it levels choices to "the familiar, the attainable, the respectable" (BT 239).
- Double forgetting. Some forgetting is needed to work; falling forgets the forgetting itself (BP 290) and sinks into "extravagant grubbing about in one's own soul" (BP 160). Life shrinks to "one damned thing after another".
Heidegger, Buddhism, and deep ecology
Early Heidegger: the self as clearing
Western nothingness belongs mainly to mystics such as Meister Eckhart, for whom God is "Divine Nothingness", the unconditioned openness in which things appear; the awakened soul lives in releasement (Gelassenheit). Heidegger, whose hopes of the priesthood ended for health reasons, kept drawing on such mystics. His idea that human existence is the clearing in which entities appear, not a thing opposed to them, helped him overcome both dualism and anthropocentrism.
- Birds and nests. Birds apprehend entities but do not notice explicitly that things are, and have no identity crises (GA 29/30).
- Kant reworked. Knowing is not a relation between mind and object: the temporal openness of Dasein (past, present, future) holds open horizons on which things appear as instruments, objects or persons. Even thoughts are entities appearing in that clearing, like trees, cars and books.
- Being as presencing. To be is to disclose itself (Anwesen), which needs an absencing (Abwesen): Da-sein is "the place in which being occurs".
- Anxiety. It reveals our groundlessness, which we hide by identifying with thoughts, bodies and possessions. Resolutely accepting it, we become authentic and let things show themselves "in more complex, complete, and novel ways".
Zimmerman's reconstruction of early Heidegger's debt to mysticism and to Kant.
Zimmerman compares the Zen story: before enlightenment mountains are mountains; at satori they cease to be; afterwards they are mountains again. So too authenticity returns to everyday practice, but not conformist: "chopping wood and carrying water" attuned to presencing.
The turn: being withdraws
Later Heidegger stopped treating the clearing as a human capacity; inauthenticity became a social and historical phenomenon caused by the self-concealment of being since Plato. He "mistakenly believed" in the 1930s that National Socialism would open a second beginning as powerful as the Greek one, then concluded it betrayed its "inner truth and greatness"; his "lifelong refusal to renounce unambiguously" his own version remains a concern.
Heidegger's history of being as ground, in Zimmerman's summary: the clever animal's craving for power.
Against causal stories he cites Angelus Silesius: "The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms" (SG 101-2). The clearing is finally constituted by a thing that gathers earth and sky, gods and mortals in a "cosmic dance", the self-organizing coordination of uncaused appearances he calls logos. This, "close to Taoism", is his nearest point to Mahayana.
Heidegger and the East
- The evidence of interest. He linked tao to Ereignis (OWL 92); spent summer 1946 translating parts of the Tao Te Ching with Paul Shih-yi Hsiao; cited Chuang-Tzu as early as 1930 (Pöggeler); and reportedly said D. T. Suzuki voiced what he had been trying to say, a story William Barrett calls possibly apocryphal. Japan has produced many translations of BT (the chapter counts seven).
- The counter-evidence. In the 1966 Spiegel interview, transformation "cannot happen because of any takeover by Zen Buddhism ... Thinking itself can only be transformed by a thinking which has the same origin and calling". Zimmerman sees here a metaphysical East-West binary that privileges the West, though Heidegger also undermines Western claims to superiority by showing rationality is groundless. East and West live in different "houses of being".
- Abhidharma. Anatman: no substantial self, only five impersonal skandhas built of some eighty kinds of dharmas, which are real "from their own side" (svabhava). Dependent co-origination (pratitya samutpada) drives samsara; nirvana is the one unconditioned state. "If one does this, that follows; if one undoes that, this follows."
- Nagarjuna (c. 150 CE). Even the dharmas are empty (sunyata); Two Truths, everyday and ultimate; no subject, no object, and nirvana is samsara. The Hua-yen image is Indra's jewel net, each gem reflecting all the others with none prior.
- Generative emptiness. Despite Nagarjuna's warning, some made sunyata a "groundless ground": the word comes from "to swell", and the zero symbol was once the symbol for sunyata. If nothing has an essence, every phenomenon has equal worth, which refutes anthropocentrism. Mahayana's vow to save all beings underwrites its environmental activism.
Zimmerman's map of the convergence he finds, and its points of strain.
Five affinities and the differences
| Affinity | Heidegger | Mahayana / Zen |
|---|---|---|
| Constricted self | inauthenticity: the ego craving security | suffering from clinging to an ego |
| Form is emptiness | being and das Nichts "virtually the same" | Heart Sutra; sunyata as clear light |
| Non-dual care | care one always already is | compassion; "not two" |
| Will versus release | early resoluteness, later Gelassenheit | Rinzai resolve, Soto letting be |
| Human, not anthropocentric | Dasein appropriated into the fourfold | Buddha nature in all sentient beings |
| Beyond good and evil | gripped by illusion under National Socialism | Zen masters backing Japanese militarism (Victoria, Zen at War) |
The last affinity is a warning: "Love God, and do what you will" can license transgression, so zeal for mystical anarchy "must be tempered by insight into humanity's enormous capacity for self-delusion". Later Heidegger also recommended meditative practice, breathing and paradoxical questions, his own koans.
- Kyoto school limits. Nishitani and Masao Abe use Heidegger to galvanize a Zen grown "intellectually flabby", but Abe says he never reached absolute nothingness, staying too close to metaphysics and to thinking. Abe also warns that Zen's Non-thinking risks becoming "mere not-thinking".
- Anthropocentrism remains. For Abe, Heidegger never reached "the completely dehomocentric, cosmological dimension"; Karl Löwith made the same charge. Yet Ereignis, sunyata and tao may be "different names" for the acausal play of phenomena, and Dogen (1200-53) analysed the temporality of nothingness in kindred terms.
- A metaphysics of nothingness. If Ereignis "gives" time and being and "sends" the epochs, Buddhists may see a metaphysical category; Zimmerman replies that some Mahayanists did the same with sunyata, and that the Kyoto school turned to Heidegger because Mahayana lacks resources to confront planetary technology.
Deep ecology and the limits
Arne Naess's deep ecology rests on an eight-point platform: unlike reform environmentalism, it holds that only overcoming anthropocentrism and human-nature dualism can save the biosphere. Zimmerman reads Heidegger, Buddhism and Naess's "ecosophy" as three forms of non-dual phenomenalism: to be is to appear, not restricted to human awareness. Naess's gestalts organize changing phenomena; there is no ultimate divide "between me and fungus, fox, or forest".
Three grounds for resisting technology's transformation of nature, and Sheehan's counter-reading.
- Naess objects. He rejects "phenomenalism" for ontological realism: "We do not construct things. We construct concepts of things", aimed at postmodern claims that nature is a social construct, which would make protecting wilderness pointless (though Steven Vogel argues constructivism increases responsibility).
- Heidegger's ground. Like Aristotle, a living being develops by its own internal possibilities; as Kant's respect for persons rests on their mode of being, respect for animals, plants and ecosystems could rest on theirs.
- The limit. Authentic disclosure generates wonder and awe but "no necessarily valid insights" about beings or politics, and Heidegger's Nazism "gives ammunition" to those who call deep ecology incipient ecofascism. He is also anti-Darwinian in separating humans from animals.
- Sheehan's challenge. On Thomas Sheehan's reading, Heidegger's basic concepts imply no alternative to technological disclosure: "To let entities be means to let them be present ... by endlessly engaging them". Then "only a god can save us now" is best read ironically, and Heidegger sides with progressive (Marxist and liberal) humanization of nature.
Deep ecology's eight-point stake, and Sheehan's irony
Arne Naess's deep ecology (unlike reform environmentalism) holds that only overcoming anthropocentrism and human-nature dualism can save the biosphere. Zimmerman reads Heidegger, Buddhism and Naess's ecosophy as three forms of non-dual phenomenalism: to be is to appear. Naess objects to the label "phenomenalism", insisting on ontological realism: "We do not construct things. We construct concepts of things", against postmodern claims that nature is a social construct (Steven Vogel replies that constructivism increases responsibility).
- Heidegger's ground for respect. Like Aristotle, a living being develops by its own internal possibilities; as Kant's respect for persons rests on their mode of being, respect for animals, plants and ecosystems could rest on theirs.
- The hard limit. Authentic disclosure yields wonder and awe but "no necessarily valid insights" about beings or politics. Nazism "gives ammunition" to those who call deep ecology incipient ecofascism. Heidegger is also anti-Darwinian in separating humans from animals.
- Sheehan's challenge. On Thomas Sheehan's reading, Heidegger's basic concepts imply no alternative to technological disclosure: "To let entities be means to let them be present ... by endlessly engaging them". Then "only a god can save us now" is best read ironically, and Heidegger sides with progressive humanization of nature.
- Developmental exit. Citing Ken Wilber, Zimmerman proposes compassion for all beings may need postconventional moral levels while most people remain at levels consistent with "religious tribalism and militant nationalism"; "Global transformation lies centuries in the future". Until then: minimize damage, maximize constructive development, criticize modernity without "denying its noble achievements".
Three allies for letting beings be, and the political brake Zimmerman insists on.
Why both traditions attract environmental critics
Zimmerman opens with the charge that Western anthropocentrism and dualisms (mind/body, reason/feeling, human/nature, male/female) license transforming the earth into "a titanic factory". Both Heidegger and Mahayana claim that only insight into nothingness lets humans "let beings be". That shared claim is why deep ecologists and comparative philosophers keep pairing them, and why Zimmerman's verdict must be double: affinities are real, guidance is thin, and politics can go badly wrong.
Angelus Silesius, the fourfold, and the cosmic dance
Later Heidegger cites Angelus Silesius: "The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms" (SG 101-2). Against causal ground-stories (Plato's form, Roman cause, medieval creation, Cartesian subject, technological Will to Will), the clearing is finally constituted by a thing that gathers earth and sky, gods and mortals. The self-organizing coordination of uncaused appearances he calls logos is, Zimmerman says, "close to Taoism" and Heidegger's nearest point to Mahayana: form or being is not other than emptiness; the known is not other than the knower.
Zimmerman's path from mystical nothingness to the fourfold gathering.
East-West evidence and the Spiegel refusal
- Interest. Links tao to Ereignis (OWL 92); summer 1946 translating parts of the Tao Te Ching with Paul Shih-yi Hsiao; cites Chuang-Tzu as early as 1930 (Pöggeler); the D. T. Suzuki anecdote (William Barrett, possibly apocryphal). Japan produced multiple BT translations (chapter counts seven).
- Refusal. Spiegel interview 1966: transformation "cannot happen because of any takeover by Zen Buddhism"; thinking transforms only by thinking with "the same origin and calling". Zimmerman reads a metaphysical East-West binary, even while Heidegger undermines Western superiority by showing rationality is groundless.
- Kyoto school. Nishitani and Masao Abe use Heidegger to stiffen a Zen grown "intellectually flabby"; Abe says Heidegger never reached absolute nothingness, staying too close to metaphysics and to thinking; Abe also warns Zen's Non-thinking can become "mere not-thinking".
- Löwith charge. Like Abe, Karl Löwith says Heidegger never reached the "completely dehomocentric, cosmological dimension".
Heidegger and theology
Catholic beginnings
Drawing on Hugo Ott, Caputo recalls the sexton's son of St. Martin's in Messkirch, a family loyal to Rome after Vatican I, a boy "marked from the start for the Catholic priesthood" and lifted by church scholarships, one meant for doctoral work on Aquinas. His first publications (1910-12) in the ultraconservative Der Akademiker attacked "Modernism" and quoted Görres: "Dig deeper and you will find yourself standing on Catholic ground." He broke off priestly studies in 1911 for health reasons, and failed to win the Chair of Catholic Philosophy at Freiburg in 1916.
- Logic and grammar. He linked Husserl's anti-psychologism with the medieval "speculative grammar", where modus significandi reflects modus intelligendi, which reflects modus essendi.
- The living side. The habilitation's postscript says scholastic theory expresses "the soul's relationship to God", to be reached through moral theology and Eckhart (GA 1 404, 410). That thinking "belongs" to being stayed with him for life.
- Destruction as retrieval. His first "destruction" of tradition meant breaking through its surface to retrieve living roots (BT 437, 44), a "positive" operation.
Caputo's map: each turn in Heidegger's path tracks a changed theological attitude.
1919: the break and the formal analytic
In 1919, at his first child's baptism, he wrote to Engelbert Krebs: epistemological insights "have made the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me - but not Christianity and metaphysics". His interest shifted from logic to history, to a "hermeneutics of facticity", and to early Christian scripture, guided by Pascal, Luther and Kierkegaard back to Augustine and Paul. In 1921 he called himself to Löwith "a Christian theologian".
- Luther's model. Luther "even used the word 'destruction'" for recovering scriptural Christianity beneath scholastic scaffolding.
- Aristotle too. Heidegger would not call Aristotle "a plague upon us on account of our sins"; his Aristotle readings won him Marburg (1923) and collaboration with Rudolf Bultmann.
- One task. Retrieving Greek or early Christian factical life yields the same categories (care, concern, temporality, historicity): a "peculiar kind of ahistoricism" aiming, in a "very Husserlian and neo-Kantian" way, at formal structures free of any "existentiell ideal" (BT 311).
"Phenomenology and Theology" (1927-28) set the terms: philosophy, the science of being, differs "absolutely" from theology, an ontic, positive science "more like chemistry than philosophy", whose positum is "Christianness". Theology does not ground faith but shows why it cannot be grounded; "sin" gets conceptual form only through the ontological concept of guilt, as "codirection" and "correction". Faith is "philosophy's existentiell enemy", yet theology must "consort with the enemy".
The war years
After 1928 came "the darkest days": Nietzsche and the "bizarre work" of Ernst Jünger made his thought "excessively voluntaristic and heroic", leading to the 1933 Rectoral Address and Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), with "Dasein" contracted to a German mode of being, set against American consumerism and Russian communism (IM 46). He turned hostile to Christianity: he spurned Jesuit students, treated Max Müller badly, and had Honecker's Catholic chair abolished in 1941.
| Text | Faith and questioning |
|---|---|
| 1922 (GA 61 197) | philosophy must be "a-theistic", yet a philosopher "can be a religious man"; questioning may lead into religious decision |
| 1935 (IM 6-7) | the believer has the answer before asking and can only act "as if"; Haecker's What Is Man? is "scribbling" |
Ironically, this was when he most shaped Catholic theology: Müller, Siewerth, Lotz and above all Karl Rahner, whose transcendental Thomism read questioning as the mind's dynamism toward God, and whose Hearers of the Word made Dasein ontologically disposed to revelation.
Caputo's charge: the later 'history of being' borrows biblical categories it then calls Greek.
He read Parmenides and Heraclitus in kerygmatic terms (being "addressed" to man) and called for an "other beginning" like metanoia or the Second Coming. As Kierkegaard said, the discovery of time and history was Judeo-Christian; the kairos and the Augenblick (BT §67a) were "quite alien to the Greeks".
The later writings
The 1936-38 Contributions (GA 65) mark the third turn: metaphysics is being's withdrawal, will to power its culmination, and thinking becomes not-willing: Gelassenheit, Eckhart's word. Thought is "granted": "not quietism but asceticism, the hard work of a kind of poverty of spirit". The mysticism is structural: thinking stands to being as the soul to God, but being is "the event of manifestness", and God becomes "a function of being's history". The Fourfold, from Hölderlin, yields "a much more pagan-poetic god", with "virtually nothing to do with the God whom Jesus called abba".
Theology's reception of the later Heidegger, as Caputo traces it.
- Ott's post-Bultmannian theology. Heinrich Ott, Barth's student, read resurrection sentences as a call to a new mode of being, not propositions; The Later Heidegger and Theology (1963) brought this to America.
- The divine God. In 1959 Heidegger told the old Marburgers his thought ruled out the God of metaphysics (causa sui), not a God before whom one can "dance or bend one's knee" (ID 72), echoing Pascal.
- A full circle. Heidegger died in 1976, was buried in Messkirch's Catholic churchyard, and Bernard Welte said mass and the eulogy: "He who seeks" for his life, "He who finds" as "the secret message of his death". He had written that his "future lay in his theological beginning" (OWL 10).
Caputo's counterargument to the "mere demythologizing" defence
One might say the later history of being just continues BT's demythologizing of salvation history into ontology. Caputo denies the continuity: BT still formalizes Christian structures; the later story re-mythologizes them as a Greek-sounding destiny of Being. The difference is not Greek purity versus biblical residue, but myth for myth. Caputo's polemic about "the smallness and perversity of the man" is aimed at that substitution, not at denying the religious seriousness of the early work.
Four theological readers of Heidegger, and Caputo's verdict on the later turn.
Formal indication and the Luther model
Between 1919 and 1922 Heidegger, who told Karl Löwith in 1921 he was "a Christian theologian", studied the "factical experience of life" of New Testament communities, especially their experience of time. His model was Luther's critique of Aristotle and medieval Aristotelian scholasticism: Luther even used "destruction" for recovering authentic Christian experience from Scholastic overlays. Caputo's point is that the later Destruktion of the history of ontology is the secular twin of that Lutheran project.
- Pascal, Luther, Kierkegaard led him back to Augustine and Paul, not only to Scotus and Suarez.
- Categories such as care, falling, authenticity, historicity are formalized from Christian factical life: stripped of ontic Christian content so they can function as formal indications for any Dasein.
- That is why Bultmann, Rahner, Lotz and others "beheld their own image" in BT: the categories still carried the shape of the life they formalized.
Caputo: how Christian factical life becomes formal indication, then a rival Heilsgeschichte.
Bultmann, Rahner, Ott, Barth: four theological receptions
Rudolf Bultmann read BT as having discovered "the very structure of religious and Christian existence" without the "ontico-mythical worldview" of first-century cosmologies. Demythologizing isolates care, decision, temporality, authenticity as the universal-existential structure; the kerygma can then be restated for modern hearers.
Karl Rahner (with Lotz, following Maréchal's transcendental Thomism) unfolded questioning as the mind's dynamism toward God. The fore-having of being becomes a preunderstanding of God, the being sought in all thought and action. In Hearers of the Word that becomes a transcendental anthropology of the hearer of revelation.
Heinrich Ott (student of Karl Barth, also of Bultmann) used the later Heidegger's rejection of humanism to open a path that confirmed Barth's objections to Bultmann and to BT-era Heidegger. Ott's Denken und Sein (1959) pursued thinking toward the "truly divine God" of Identity and Difference: not God as causa sui, but the God "before whom one can dance or bend one's knee" (ID 72), echoing Pascal's God of Abraham against the God of the philosophers.
Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology, and politics
From existential structures to the history of being
Kierkegaard defined the self as "a relation that relates itself to itself": who I am depends on the stand I take, in action, not thought. His The Present Age (1846) described authority disappearing, differences leveled and "alternate fits of lethargy and excitement". In BT Heidegger treated leveling as old as tools; around 1930 he turned to the understanding of being peculiar to modern culture, since in BT "'phenomenology' ... had not yet been thought in terms of the history of being" (EP 15).
Nihilism
Heidegger quotes Nietzsche (c. 1882): "Our age is an agitated one, and precisely for that reason, not an age of passion ... basically it is freezing". With no goal through which a people's forces cohere (N 1 157), "everything is on a par": parties, religions, causes and practices. Kierkegaard's cure was unconditional commitment, but in a rational culture it looks like "a dangerous dependency", the workaholic or "a woman who loves too much".
- Retreat into experience. When the public world is flat, art, religion, sex and education become "experience"; "the 'lived experience' as such becomes decisive" (N I 86). "The loss of the gods" turns religion into "mere 'religious experience'" (QCT 117).
- Values are the problem. For Plato the good draws us; the Enlightenment made values objects we choose; Nietzsche saw that we posit them, and what we posit we can unposit. "No one dies for mere values" (QCT 142).
- The background must stay tacit. Our practices give meaning only while they remain "the soil out of which we live": "Every decision ... bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed" (PLT 55).
The work of art: world and earth
Practices must be focused and held up to practitioners. Geertz's Balinese cockfight is "a story they tell themselves about themselves"; Heidegger calls this "truth setting itself to work", and the Greek temple his example: it gathers the paths in which "birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace" take the shape of destiny (PLT 42). The medieval cathedral made it possible to be a sinner or a saint; there could be no saints in ancient Greece, only "weak people who let everybody walk all over them".
How a cultural paradigm works, on Dreyfus's reading of 'The Origin of the Work of Art'.
- Kuhn's parallel. Newton's Principia guided normal science for two centuries; paradigms are "prior to, more binding, and more complete than any set of rules" abstracted from them, and cannot be "reduced to logically atomic components".
- World and earth. The work solicits efforts to make it explicit and all-governing (its world aspect); its concreteness resists that totalization (its earth). A temple of steel would not work.
- Other founding acts. Truth also happens in "the act that founds a political state", "the essential sacrifice", and "the thinker's questioning" (PLT 61-2): the U.S. Constitution is fecund because never interpreted once and for all; the founding act could also be a charismatic leader such as Hitler.
Technology
Paradigms can be nihilistic. Ours celebrate "flexibility and efficiency, not for the sake of some further end": computers ever faster and cheaper with no known use, fast-food chains, Heidegger's Rhine power station, where "the Rhine itself appears as something at our command" (QCT 16). Like Kuhn's normal science, technology treats what does not yet fit (wilderness, friendship, stars) as anomalies to be brought under control. Ours is "the only culture that tries to make the social and natural order total".
| Stage | How things show up | Heidegger's text |
|---|---|---|
| Tool | a means and a human activity | "correct" but not the essence (QCT 5) |
| Object | stands over against a subject | modern metaphysics |
| Standing-reserve | "on call for a further ordering"; subject and object both "sucked up" | QCT 17, 173 |
| Human resource | "the most important raw material", to be enhanced | EP 104 |
An airliner is not a tool but a cog in the transportation system, and we are used by it to fill the planes. Dreyfus finds the attitude in HAL from 2001, who on Dreyfus's paraphrase is happy using all his capacities "to the maximum", and in the human potential movement. Hence the perfectly ordered welfare society is "not the solution" but the culmination.
Releasement, marginal practices and a new god
Dreyfus's two-stage reading of Heidegger's response to technology.
Releasement (Gelassenheit) says "'yes' and at the same time 'no'" to devices (DT 54). The Japanese, Dreyfus suggests, put the television set and the household gods on the same shelf. One reading (with Rorty) makes technology "just as good as any other clearing". Dreyfus rejects it: releasement gives only "a possibility and a promise", a "holding pattern" while awaiting "a new rootedness".
- Saving marginal practices. Friendship (not networking), backpacking in the wilderness, "drinking the local wine with friends": the "saving power of insignificant things", at risk of being mobilized for health and efficiency.
- Only a god can save us. A new paradigm cannot be made "the goal of a crash program like the moon flight". Dreyfus's hint is Woodstock (1969): pagan enjoyment of nature, dancing and Dionysian ecstasy joined to neglected Christian peace and love of neighbour, with electronics serving the music.
Politics
The same reading led Heidegger to Hitler: in 1935, "Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy", with Germany "in the center" (IM 31-2). By 1938 ("The Age of the World Picture") he saw National Socialism as the most dangerous form of "total mobilization" (QCT 137) and faith in a Führer as faith in technological ordering (EP 105).
One interpretation, two political conclusions, in Dreyfus's account.
Heidegger's personal mistake was taking Hitler for such a god, though "The Origin of the Work of Art" had already supplied a test: a true work sustains struggle between earth and world and resists total mobilization. But "there is no interpretation-free criterion for testing a new god". His philosophy is dangerous because it exposes us to "some demonic event or movement that promises renewal". It claims no infallibility, against Habermas's charge: "I can provide no credentials" (PLT 186), and "Any path always risks going astray ... unswerving, yet erring".
Kierkegaard's Present Age as the problem-statement
Dreyfus opens with Kierkegaard's definition of the self as "a relation that relates itself to itself": who I am depends on the stand I take in action, not thought. The Present Age (1846) already described authority disappearing, differences leveled, and "alternate fits of lethargy and excitement". Nietzsche (c. 1882) adds: "Our age is an agitated one, and precisely for that reason, not an age of passion ... basically it is freezing". With no goal through which a people's forces cohere (N 1 157), "everything is on a par": parties, religions, causes and practices.
- Unconditional commitment fails as a public cure. In a rational culture it looks like "a dangerous dependency", the workaholic or "a woman who loves too much".
- Retreat into experience. Art, religion, sex and education become "lived experience" (N I 86); "the loss of the gods" turns religion into "mere 'religious experience'" (QCT 117).
- Values are the disease. For Plato the good draws us; the Enlightenment made values objects we choose; Nietzsche saw that we posit them, and what we posit we can unposit. "No one dies for mere values" (QCT 142).
- Background must stay tacit. "Every decision ... bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed" (PLT 55). Practices give meaning only as "the soil out of which we live".
Dreyfus's cascade from leveling to the need for a cultural paradigm.
Geertz, Kuhn, and founding acts beyond art
Clifford Geertz's Balinese cockfight is "a story they tell themselves about themselves". Heidegger's Greek temple gathers the paths in which "birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace" take the shape of destiny (PLT 42). The medieval cathedral made sinner and saint possible; there could be no saints in ancient Greece, only "weak people who let everybody walk all over them".
- Kuhn's parallel. Newton's Principia guided normal science for two centuries; paradigms are "prior to, more binding, and more complete than any set of rules" and cannot be "reduced to logically atomic components".
- World and earth. The work solicits efforts to make it explicit and all-governing (world); its concreteness resists totalization (earth). A temple of steel would not work.
- Other founding acts. Truth also happens in "the act that founds a political state", "the essential sacrifice", and "the thinker's questioning" (PLT 61-2). The U.S. Constitution is fecund because never interpreted once and for all; the founding act could also be a charismatic leader such as Hitler.
Why the danger is success, and why politics stays dangerous
Reckoning in terms of "decline and loss ... catastrophe, and destruction" is "merely technological behavior" (QCT 48). Treating technology as a problem for a commission of statesmen is technological too (DT 52). The real threat: that technology could make life "tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects" (PLT 116), so that "calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking" (DT 56). Technology is "our destiny, not our fate": once we see that we receive this understanding of being, we have already stepped outside it, and "the selfsame danger is ... the saving power" (QCT 39).
- Releasement. Says "'yes' and at the same time 'no'" to devices (DT 54). Dreyfus's Japanese shelf (television beside household gods) is a cultural sketch, not a proof.
- Not Rorty's parity. One reading (with Rorty) makes technology "just as good as any other clearing". Dreyfus rejects it: releasement is only "a possibility and a promise", a "holding pattern" while awaiting "a new rootedness".
- Marginal practices. Friendship (not networking), backpacking, "drinking the local wine with friends": the "saving power of insignificant things", always at risk of being mobilized for health and efficiency.
- Woodstock as hint, not program. A new god cannot be "the goal of a crash program like the moon flight". Woodstock (1969) briefly joined pagan enjoyment of nature to neglected Christian peace and love, with electronics serving the music.
- 1933 to 1938. Same reading of the West as technological nihilism led Heidegger to Hitler (1935 IM 31-2: Russia and America "the same dreary technological frenzy"), then by 1938 ("Age of the World Picture") to see National Socialism as the most dangerous form of "total mobilization" (QCT 137). The Origin of the Work of Art had already supplied a test (earth-world struggle) that he did not use. "There is no interpretation-free criterion for testing a new god".
Dreyfus: one philosophical reading, two political seasons, one residual danger.
The fourfold
The one prior gloss Young finds, Olafson's in the first edition, calls the idea "mythic" with philosophical import "far from clear". Geviert is an obscure word for a square or courtyard, like a farmyard enclosed by buildings: an essentially spatial notion. A place is a dwelling-place, "a Te Papa, as the Maori put it", to the extent it shows up as a Geviert.
The four, and the fifth dimension
| Element | Heidegger's words | Young's gloss | Dwellers are |
|---|---|---|---|
| Earth | "the building bearer, nourishing with its fruits" (PLT 178) | all things animal, vegetable, mineral | "on" it |
| Sky | "the sun's path, the course of the moon ... the clemency and inclemency of the weather" | rhythms of seasons, day and night, and weather | "under" it |
| Gods | "the beckoning messengers of the godhead" (PLT 149) | heritage embodied in mythologized heroes, BT's "life models" rethought | "before" them |
| Mortals | those "capable of death as death" (PLT 178) | humans, as against animals who merely perish | "with" them |
The gods are a community's "divine destinings", "laws" or "edicts", unspoken, as when Antigone appeals beyond Creon's edict to bury Polynices; they allow critique of "the voice of the people" (HE 312). By dwelling "in the sight of the gods", "man become[s] a people (Volk)" (GA 39 216). So the fourfold is "really the twofold of nature and culture". Why then the elevated language? To show that "poetically man dwells".
- Horizons of disclosure. Intelligibility needs a horizon (DT 63): to get "You'll never bathe in that again" about a river I need the "stuff" rather than the "thing" horizon. Everyday life runs on equipmentality: the white, Henry Moore-like hollowed sphere shows up "as, and only as, a urinal". Everyday language is eindeutig, "one-meaning".
- Metaphysics. Nothing is wrong with horizons (against the "universal paranoia" of Foucault and Derrida), but ours can ossify into "the way reality is", hiding the "reservoir" of the not-yet-disclosed (PLT 60).
- Poetry. The poetic word is vieldeutig, with "inexhaustible" resonance (GA 52 15). Unlike Kant's "aesthetic idea", whose resonances stay inside our transcendental horizon, Heidegger's point to Being beyond language: if I name my love "a foundation, a blessing, a grace, a rose, a summer's day, a ...", "what is important here are the dots". Poetry "founds the holy"; the dwelling-place has a fifth dimension, the holy.
Caring-for and the good death
"The fundamental character of dwelling is caring-for (Schonen)", and it is double. The dweller is cared for, "preserved from harm and danger ... at peace" (PLT 149), and cares for, as "shepherd" or "guardian" (P 252). "People do not litter their homes ... in the way they litter motorways."
- Safety. The ultimate threat is death, but to one who has overcome metaphysics, death is "the side of life that is averted from us" (PLT 124-5, thinking with Rilke): the "nothing comprehensible to us", "positive", not the "privative-negative" abyss. So mortals become capable of "the good death" (PLT 151).
- Guardianship. Reverence is what it is to see a place as holy. Guardians still change things, but harmoniously, "bringing forth" its potential: the eleventh-century Sakutei-ki tells gardeners to "Listen to the request made by the land".
Three questions
- Many fourfolds. Nearness needs farness; with no sense of the foreign there is no homeland. TV and the Internet threaten "a uniform distancelessness" (PLT 166): "The global village is not a village." A dwelling-space is bounded, so fourfolds are local, joining universalism (always care for the dwelling-place) with localism; with global threats, "To think locally I must ... act globally."
- Their unity. The four "mirror" each other functionally: from earth read off sky (arctic wastes under an arctic sky); from gods read off mortals. Mirroring between nature and culture is harder: Nietzsche links virtues to land and sky (thrift in cold climates, not in an easy South Pacific), but Arab and French in Algeria, or Maori and Pakeha in New Zealand, share one earth and sky with different gods.
- Dwelling in the city. Young answers this third question in the last section.
Young's answer on nature and culture: a range, not a one-to-one fit.
Heidegger's reply would be that inhabiting is not dwelling: dwelling needs Bodenständigkeit, as in his 1934 radio talk "Why do we stay in the Provinces?", whose work is "of the same sort" as the peasant's, rooted in "Alemanic-Swabian soil". The British in India (E. M. Forster) prided themselves on not dwelling; Camus's homesickness for Algeria shows colonizers can come to dwell, and then cultures converge. Young's verdict: nature fixes a range of gods at home in a place, and Heidegger, with no colonies to think about, assumed "a one-to-one correspondence between ethnic communities and natural places", as when in 1961 he called modern art worthless for no longer arising from "an ethnic or national world".
The thing, and the city
In the age of "the flight of the gods", with no communal artwork like the Greek temple or medieval cathedral (or what Bayreuth and the Nuremberg rally tried to revive), dwelling needs a focus: the thing. Old High German thing was a gathering of the people. Heidegger's paradigm is the peasant jug pouring local wine (its terroir) at the village Stammtisch: "in the gift of the outpouring dwells the simple singlefold of the four" (PLT 173).
How a 'thing' gathers the fourfold, on Young's reading of 'The Thing'.
Young's Anglo-Saxon version: a Yorkshire Christmas dinner, snow-light through mullioned windows, a silence before the carving, and "inexplicable and unfathomable" belonging. Things can gather for a culture, a smaller "us", or just for me: "the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plough ... crown and cross" (PLT 182). "To dwell is to be disposed to epiphanies of dwelling", like Bruce Mason's Te Parenga beach or Camus's "Return to Tipasa" (1952), where "years of wrath and night melted slowly away".
Poetry, horizons and founding the holy
"Poetically man dwells" is not a call to write verse. Intelligibility, the possibility of statements that are unambiguously true or false, depends on "horizons of disclosure" (DT 63). Everyday life runs on shifting horizons (the river as stuff versus as thing). Poetry, in Hölderlin's and Heidegger's sense, founds the holy (GA 52 193, I 138, GA 4 148): it delivers us from the "flatness of metaphysics" so that reality can show up as that before which we must bow down in awe. To dwell is to dwell in the holy; earth and sky become nature experienced as holy, gods and mortals become culture gathered by a common heritage.
- Earth + sky ≈ nature experienced poetically, not as standing-reserve.
- Gods + mortals ≈ culture: individuals gathered by a shared pantheon and heritage.
- Good death (PLT 151): showing up to oneself as mortal is a touchstone of the right relation to Being; mortals who can die well can dwell.
Young: from horizons of disclosure to the Geviert as dwelling-space.
Thinging, bounded homeland and uniform distancelessness
A jug, a bench, a footbridge, a plough, a tree, a crown, a cross: each can be an occasion of "thinging" (PLT 182). In Greece and the Middle Ages, things gathered the fourfold for an entire culture; in modernity they can still gather for an us, though for a smaller circle. A dwelling-space is bounded: "cleared and free ... within a boundary", and a boundary is "not that at which something stops but ... that from which it begins its presencing" (PLT 154).
Modern information technology (TV, Internet) threatens homeland by creating "uniform distancelessness", everything equally near and equally remote. McLuhan's "global village" is, Young insists, only a metaphor: the global village is not a village. E. M. Forster's British in India (with few despised exceptions) did not dwell there: heavy dress, rigid discipline and pompous manners showed the incongruity of their "gods" with Indian earth and sky; they prided themselves on out-of-placeness.
Counterarguments Young answers and leaves open
- Olafson (first edition): fourfold is "mythic", import "far from clear". Young replies that without it one understands "almost nothing" of later Heidegger, because dwelling is belonging within the fourfold.
- Anti-city charge. Heidegger's unfavourable contrasts with farm and old bridge look anti-urban; Young separates the gathering analysis from the taste.
- Politics of soil. May 1933 praise of Schlageter is left with "no reason to doubt the sincerity"; Young's own Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism (1997) defends separability of dwelling-thought from Nazism. The Companion chapter does not re-argue that defence in full.
What gathers a dwelling-place, and what flattens it.
Main Points
Twenty-two takeaways
- Being is intelligibility, not a thing. The question of being asks what makes it possible for entities to be intelligible at all; being is "not an entity" but the horizon of sense (Frede, Sheehan, Introduction).
- The background comes first. Explicit representation, theory and choice rest on skilled, shared practices that can never be fully spelled out; this is the book's most durable claim (Taylor, Dreyfus, Hoy).
- Truth is uncovering before it is correspondence. A statement can match a fact only within an attuned opening in which things already show up; every unconcealing also conceals (Wrathall).
- Time is the hidden ground. Dasein's ecstatic temporality, not Husserl's inner time-consciousness or Kant's categories, makes understanding possible, though time drops out of the later work (Dostal, Blattner, Hoffman).
- Technology is a way of revealing. The danger is not machines but the understanding of everything as standing reserve, optimized for flexibility, "efficiency for its own sake" (Dreyfus).
- The politics are inside the thought, not beside it. The same reading of history, heritage and a people's destiny that frames Division II and dwelling led him into Nazism in 1933; most essays ask how far it can be separated (Introduction, Sheehan, Dreyfus, Young).
- There are two stories. A "Ptolemaic" account of how things show up in practices, and a history of being in which modernity forgets that showing (Introduction).
- Phenomenology without privileged intuition. Heidegger keeps "to the things themselves" but denies that intuition or consciousness is the ultimate source of evidence (Carman).
- Kant yields a thin a priori. The Copernican method grounds a minimal ontology of time and world, not authority over the sciences (Blattner).
- Engaged agency undoes rationalism. Rationalism turned a method into an ontology; showing the background reverses that, as Kant began to do (Taylor).
- Death plays the Cartesian demon. Anxiety strips the world of significance and leaves a certain moribundus sum, from which time and history follow (Hoffman).
- Historical essentialism. Essences are real but relative to an age's understanding of being (Wrathall).
- Authenticity has a moral shape. Self-focusing and owning one's heritage explain why therapy has a moral dimension it cannot drop (Guignon).
- Nothingness links East and West, but grounds no ethics. Heidegger, Zen and deep ecology share a letting-be that does not by itself tell us what to do (Zimmerman).
- Theology runs underneath. Heidegger's categories grew out of Christian factical life, and his history of being reads like a rival sacred history (Caputo).
- Art focuses a world. Works and paradigms gather scattered practices into a shared style; technology levels them into resources (Dreyfus).
- Only a god can save us. The later Heidegger hopes for releasement and a new paradigm, not a programme; whether that is resignation is contested (Dreyfus).
- Dwelling is local and holy. The fourfold is nature and culture experienced poetically, as a place to care for and be cared for (Young).
- Things can still gather. Without a communal artwork, ordinary things (a jug, a meal, a bridge) gather the fourfold "from time to time" (Young).
- Heidegger is not anti-city. Earth and sky can enter urban life; architects read him well (Young).
- These are paths, not works. Heidegger called his writings "paths, not works", and the volume reads him as questioning, not a system (Preface).
How the strongest takeaways connect: from being as intelligibility to the politics of a people's destiny.
Where the essays split: how human, how historical, and how ethical the opening is.
Frameworks and mental models
These are the reusable tools the essays draw from Heidegger, each a way of seeing the background behind an explicit claim.
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Ready-to-hand / present-at-hand | Things show up first as equipment in use, and only in breakdown as objects with properties | A tool, process or system becomes visible only when it fails |
| Fore-structure | Interpretation always starts from prior having, sight and grasp | Checking which assumptions shaped a reading or a requirement |
| Background practices | Explicit rules rest on tacit skills that cannot be fully formalized | A rulebook or model fails on cases its writers took for granted |
| Unconcealment | Every way of revealing hides other possibilities | A metric or model starts to define what counts as real |
| Standing reserve (Gestell) | Everything is ordered as a resource for flexible use | People, places or data are treated only as inputs to optimize |
| Being-towards-death | Facing finitude individualizes and frees one from "the they" | A decision is being made only because "that is what one does" |
| Authentic historicity | Owning a heritage means choosing from it, not repeating it | Renewing a tradition, an institution or a professional identity |
| The fourfold and the thing | Places and things gather nature and culture into a world worth caring for | Designing spaces, rituals or products people actually dwell with |
Who's who
| Person | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) | Subject of every chapter |
| Charles B. Guignon | Editor; Introduction, Preface and ch. 10 on authenticity and therapy |
| Edmund Husserl | Teacher and foil for phenomenology and time (1, 3, 4) |
| Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Thomas of Erfurt | Sources of the question of being and the habilitation (1, 2, 12) |
| Immanuel Kant | Model for laying the ground for metaphysics (5, 7) |
| Dilthey, Gadamer, Habermas, Derrida | The hermeneutic tradition before and after Heidegger (6) |
| Descartes | Foil for engaged agency and for death as certainty (7, 8) |
| Medard Boss | Psychiatrist of the Zollikon Seminars (10) |
| Nishitani, Arne Naess | Zen and deep ecology partners (11) |
| Luther, Paul, Augustine, Eckhart | Theological sources (12) |
| Hölderlin, Nietzsche | Poet of dwelling and thinker of nihilism (13, 14) |
| Hubert Dreyfus, Julian Young | Readers of technology, politics and the fourfold (13, 14) |
Arguments you must not flatten
- Frede: reviving the question of being is not a slogan; it is a reply to substance ontology's absorption of all modes into occurrence.
- Sheehan: the seven phenomenological steps and the rectorate documents belong to one life; hermetic silence is not an answer.
- Carman / Dostal / Blattner: phenomenology, time-consciousness and Kant are the method engine of BT, not optional background.
- Hoy / Taylor / Hoffman: understanding, engaged agency and being-toward-death are the existential engine; pluralism, finitude and moribundus sum block both relativism and Cartesian restart.
- Wrathall / Guignon / Zimmerman: truth as unconcealment, authenticity as moral ground for therapy, and cross-cultural ecology extend BT without making it a self-help brand.
- Caputo / Dreyfus / Young: the later corpus is a secular Heilsgeschichte, a diagnosis of efficiency for its own sake, and a fourfold of holy local dwelling; each invites political abuse and each contains internal brakes (Caputo's demythologizing demand, Dreyfus's "only a god", Young's city-capable gathering).
Master map: three engines and three later risks.
Dated ledger (Asia/Calcutta labels in Status)
About this book
The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger by Charles B. Guignon (ed.), 2006. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
- Being is intelligibility, not a thing. The question of being asks what makes it possible for entities to be intelligible at all; being is "not an entity" but the horizon of sense (Frede, Sheehan, Introduction).
- The background comes first. Explicit representation, theory and choice rest on skilled, shared practices that can never be fully spelled out; this is the book's most durable claim (Taylor, Dreyfus, Hoy).
- Truth is uncovering before it is correspondence. A statement can match a fact only within an attuned opening in which things already show up; every unconcealing also conceals (Wrathall).
- Time is the hidden ground. Dasein's ecstatic temporality, not Husserl's inner time-consciousness or Kant's categories, makes understanding possible, though time drops out of the later work (Dostal, Blattner, Hoffman).
- Technology is a way of revealing. The danger is not machines but the understanding of everything as standing reserve, optimized for flexibility, "efficiency for its own sake" (Dreyfus).
- The politics are inside the thought, not beside it. The same reading of history, heritage and a people's destiny that frames Division II and dwelling led him into Nazism in 1933; most essays ask how far it can be separated (Introduction, Sheehan, Dreyfus, Young).