Insight Editions · No. 49
The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time
Mark A. Wrathall (ed.)
Essays examine Heidegger's Being and Time, addressing its arguments about being, worldhood, mood, death, temporality, historicality, and the book's major interpretive disputes.
A study guide to The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time by Mark A. Wrathall (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
- Start with the question. Heidegger asks what it means for anything to be, and starts with the one entity that already understands being: Dasein, the human way of existing.
- Practice before theory. We meet things first as available equipment within a world of purposes, and only derivatively as occurrent objects to be described.
- Disclosure has three strands. Mood, understanding and discourse open a space in which things can matter, make sense and be talked about.
- Idealism and skepticism lose their grip. Signs, truth and the external world are recast so that the old question "is anything really out there?" stops making sense.
- Authenticity is owning finitude. Death, conscience and resoluteness show a self that can choose itself, though the chapters split sharply on what "death" means.
- Time is the sense of care. Temporality unifies the whole, and historicality ties a life to a heritage that can itself collapse.
The argument map: from the question of being through world and disclosure to authenticity, time and history.
How the Companion is built
The first two chapters orient. Wrathall and Murphey walk through all 83 sections, and Denker reconstructs how a hurried 1927 publication, rushed out when the Berlin ministry balked at giving Hartmann's Marburg chair to an author without a book, became a torso of two divisions out of six. Carman and Martin then ask what kind of claims the book makes: about the meaning of being, and about whether its descriptions of Dasein are necessary, typical or exemplary.
The middle chapters work through Division I. Cerbone finds Heidegger's account of space marred by a missing body, Dreyfus reads the "one" as both enabling and levelling, Ratcliffe argues that mood is more basic than Heidegger allows, Wrathall treats understanding as horizontal projection, Fultner places language on a continuum with practice, and Gordon reads the analysis of signs as a polemic against Cohen and Cassirer.
The later chapters turn to truth and Division II. McManus argues that falsehood presupposes a world, Thomson and Schear read death as world collapse, Han-Pile explains the "choice to choose oneself", Blattner reads authenticity as owning one's existence and Käufer shows why temporality is the sense of care. Sheehan ends by arguing that Heidegger was a phenomenologist throughout, and that "being" always meant meaningfulness.
| Ch | Title | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | An Overview of Being and Time | Section-by-section map of the published torso. |
| 2 | A Carefully Planned Accident? | Denker: haste, the Marburg chair and the missing divisions. |
| 3 | The Question of Being | Carman: being is the intelligibility of entities, not an entity. |
| 4 | The Semantics of "Dasein" | Martin: existentialia as exemplars, not bare facts. |
| 5 | Space and Spatiality | Cerbone: regions and de-severance, but no body. |
| 6 | Being-with-Others | Dreyfus: the one as levelling, conformity and shared intelligibility. |
| 7 | Why Mood Matters | Ratcliffe: moods open the space in which anything matters. |
| 8 | Human Understanding | Wrathall: understanding as projection onto possibilities. |
| 9 | Language and Assertion | Fultner: a continuum from practice to assertion. |
| 10 | The Empire of Signs | Gordon: §§17-18 as anti-neo-Kantian polemic. |
| 11 | Skepticism, Truth, and Falsehood | McManus: falsehood is a founded mode, so the sceptic's subject cannot err. |
| 12 | Death and Demise | Thomson: death as the collapse of one's world. |
| 13 | The "Choice to Choose Oneself" | Han-Pile: a medio-passive self-ascription of responsibility. |
| 14 | Authenticity and Resoluteness | Blattner: steady loyalty to who one factically is. |
| 15 | Temporality and Care | Käufer: temporality makes care's unity possible. |
| 16 | Historical Finitude | Schear: heritages and worlds can end. |
| 17 | Heidegger as Phenomenologist | Sheehan: being means meaningfulness, early and late. |
How to read disputes without losing the plot.
Stats for this deepened edition
Use the chapter map table below as the routing layer; use synthesis frameworks when you need cross-chapter glue.
Division I versus Division II jobs.
An Overview of Being and Time
The plan and the torso
Heidegger set out to "work out concretely the question concerning the sense of 'being'". The book was to have two parts of three divisions each. Part One would explicate time as the transcendental horizon for the question of being; Part Two would "destroy" the history of ontology by working backwards through Kant, Descartes and Aristotle. Only the first two divisions of Part One appeared. They focus on one "determinate entity", Dasein, the kind of entity we humans are in each case.
| Planned unit | Content | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Part One, Division I | Preparatory analysis of everyday Dasein | Published 1927 |
| Part One, Division II | Dasein and temporality | Published 1927 |
| Part One, Division III | Time and being: temporality as horizon of being in general | Never completed |
| Part Two, I-III | Destruction of ontology: Kant, Descartes, Aristotle | Never completed (see §6) |
The authors prefer "sense" to the usual translation "meaning", because "meaning" sounds merely linguistic. Things make sense when they fit together in a stable, coherent way, so that we know our way around them and can anticipate what belongs and what is out of place. Sense is "that onto which projection projects", the background organisation that shapes every encounter. We clarify the sense of being when we clarify what we grasp in telling what is from what is not.
Why ask about being, and why start with Dasein
Being cannot be defined like an ordinary concept, and everyone seems to understand it already. Heidegger accepts both points, yet insists that appeals to the self-evident often hide a superficial grasp. Dasein gets priority because it is defined by its understanding of being: we relate to being, we see that there are different ways to be, and we can "decide our existence". Dasein also understands the being of entities unlike itself, so analysing its comportments opens several modes of being at once.
Why the inquiry starts with Dasein: the questioner already understands being.
Two arguments motivate the question. First, every science presupposes a tacit ontology, a "productive logic" that discloses its domain; without explicit ontology, sciences risk unfounded metaphysical assumptions. Second, our being matters to us, so a clear grasp of being should guide how we take a stand on our lives.
The method is phenomenology: description that exhibits the essential structures of Dasein in its everydayness. Because it lays out what we already tacitly understand, it is hermeneutic phenomenology. Division I yields a provisional account; Division II repeats it on a higher basis to show why these structures are determinative. The answer is temporality.
The route the published book takes, and the unwritten remainder.
Division I: existence, availability, occurrence
Traditional ontology, from Aristotle to Descartes, treated humans and things alike as substances: self-sufficient bearers of properties in external relations. Heidegger argues that our pre-reflective ways of telling entities apart rest on an ontological difference between modes of being. Much of Division I articulates these distinctions.
Dasein's mode of being is existence (Existenz). The authors render the other two modes as "occurrentness" (Vorhandenheit, usually "presence-at-hand") and "availableness" (Zuhandenheit, "readiness-to-hand"). Available things offer ready, intelligible uses; occurrent things appear when we abstract from practical engagement and study bare physical properties. Tradition's error was to interpret everything as occurrent.
Because "being is an issue" for Dasein, its being matters to it and can be altered by it. Rival definitions of human essence (rational animal, image of God, Cartesian conscious subject) all assume humans are ontologically like other things, differing only in a special property. Heidegger reads this history as evidence that Dasein interprets its own essence. Hence his famous claim: "the 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence". Dasein's essence is "open", yet we are also shaped by others and inherit our possibilities from a shared world.
Being-in-the-world and the world of equipment
Being-in-the-world is a unitary phenomenon. Dasein and world are not two self-sufficient items that later connect. "Being-in" is not spatial containment but being at home in a way of living, familiar with an organised whole of entities, activities and ideals. Our embodied constraints are our facticity. Our primary dealings are concern (Besorgen) with available things; theory, including science, is one derivative form of understanding.
The equipment nexus: each tool points to others and finally to a for-the-sake-of-which.
The world is not the physical universe but the unified totality of significant relationships. Its everyday entities are equipment: clothes, cars, doors, pens. A working pen is transparent; we are absorbed in what we write. When it is too heavy or its cap sticks, its properties become conspicuous and it shows a deficient mode, un-availableness, yet we do not then study it: we toss it aside. Heidegger concludes that "there 'is' no such thing as an equipment"; each item is a node in a totality defined by "in-order-to" relations to tasks, other equipment and human roles. That structure he calls significance (Bedeutung), and the structure of worlds in general worldhood. It normally withdraws, surfacing only in breakdown.
| Mode | How it shows up | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Available | Transparent, solicits use within a totality | A pen while writing |
| Un-available | Conspicuous, obtrusive, missing | A pen whose cap will not come off |
| Occurrent | Bare properties, decontextualised | The pen as mass, volume, forces |
| Existence | Being is an issue; self-interpreting | The writer |
This frame drives Heidegger's attack on Descartes' res extensa. Everyday space is not a metric manifold but a network of places and regions defined by our activities. Remoteness (Entfernung) first means ease of access: a city an hour's flight away can be "closer" than the countryside between. Geometric space comes later, by abstraction.
Who is Dasein? The "one"
Dasein is "in each case I myself", but terms like "self" and "subject" serve only as formal indicators; the self must not be read as an enduring substance. In everyday life, identity comes through norm-governed social practices, which already build in others. The authors' epigram: in everyday existence, "the public is primitive and the private is derivative". Even a trespasser expresses an interpretation of himself in terms of the norms he breaks.
We constantly measure ourselves against others (distantiality), so everyday Dasein is being-with (Mitsein); others appear as Dasein-with, and we show them solicitude (Fürsorge). One consequence: in everyday life there is no "other minds" problem, because we never infer that others are Dasein. Everyday Dasein is the anonymous "one" (das Man): "one waits in line", "one just doesn't do that". Without the possibility of authenticity, there would be only conformism, in which "it was no one" who acted. Everyday existence is public, levelled down and disburdened of responsibility; authenticity always works against this background.
Being-in: disposedness, understanding, discourse
Heidegger rejects deriving everything from a single "primal ground"; Dasein and world are equiprimordial, and "Dasein is the being of this 'between'". Being-in has three equiprimordial structures:
Three equiprimordial structures of being-in.
- Disposedness (Befindlichkeit). We find ourselves thrown into a situation where things already matter. Mood (Stimmung) is not a subjective colouring: one is always in a mood, and only through moods do things show up as significant. Even the calm of science is a mood that suits observation.
- Understanding (Verstehen). We project onto possibilities, which are not "possible-actuals" but orders of meaning, like the rules of a game. Committing to one is interpretation (Auslegung), which need not be explicit: opening an unfamiliar door is interpretation. Its structure is the "as-structure" of affordances.
- Discourse (Rede). The articulation of the world into "nodes of signification". Language comes after: "to significations, words accrue".
Assertion is derivative. It picks out a subject, predicates a property and expresses a judgment, reinterpreting the available as occurrent. The everyday mode of being-in is falling (Verfallen), our tendency to be absorbed in public ways of doing things, with three marks: idle talk (gossip, hearsay), curiosity (restless craving for novelty) and ambiguity (no longer telling genuine from sham understanding). Heidegger insists falling is no "bad and deplorable property" but an essential tendency, though it enables inauthenticity.
Care, anxiety, reality and truth
The unity of being-in-the-world is care (Sorge), which joins an affective sense (caring about) and a projective sense (taking care of). Care shows itself in anxiety (Angst): an indeterminate threat from nowhere in particular, in which equipment becomes "completely without importance" and we feel uncanny (unheimlich), "not-at-home". Falling is best understood as flight from anxiety. Anxiety also shows that we exist "as being-possible", free to choose ourselves.
Care as the unity of Dasein's being.
The analytic also dissolves external-world scepticism. Sceptic and anti-sceptic both assume an occurrent mind facing occurrent objects linked by knowledge. Once our being is care, doubting the world is itself a derivative way of being-in. Division I ends with truth as unconcealment (aletheia): entities are "truly" revealed in practical engagement, not only in propositions. Untruth takes forms matching each kind of uncovering (false belief, misuse, inauthenticity), so Dasein must keep re-appropriating what has been uncovered against semblance.
Division II: death and wholeness
Division II opens by doubting that the Division I account is primordial enough, since it barely considered authentic Dasein. The problem is wholeness: being "ahead-of-itself" means something is always outstanding, and closing all possibilities would make us "Dasein-no-longer". The solution needs a concept of wholeness proper to existence, not to equipment.
Heidegger distinguishes three endings. Perishing (Verenden) is biological ending; demise (Ableben) is the social, legal and biographical ending of a human life; death in the existential sense names no event at all but a possibility: "the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein". Everyday culture treats death as an event that happens to everyone, but not now, which is "the mode of evasion", like a satellite whose orbit shows gravity's constant pull.
Authentic being-toward-death is anticipation ("running forward"), not brooding or suicide. It shows every possibility as one we can but need not embrace, freeing us to "choose among the factical possibilities". Anticipation is what makes Dasein a unified whole.
Conscience, guilt and resoluteness
A self lost in the "they-self" still needs a way to decide from its own self. Heidegger finds it in the call of conscience, treated ontologically as a mode of discourse that shows me my guilt. Existential guilt is "being the (null) reason of a nullity". Grund means reason, cause and background at once. I am guilty in two ways: I am the reason something is not, and my reason itself lacks justification. Thrownness means I "never have power over [my] ownmost being from the ground up", yet every choice waives other possibilities. Guilt is no privation: it is "the existential condition for the possibility of the 'morally' good and for that of the 'morally' evil".
From the call of conscience to resoluteness.
The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness, defined by nothing worldly. Conscience gives no maxims; the everyday reading, which treats life as a "household" whose debts need balancing, is itself a flight. Hearing the call means "wanting to have a conscience", which issues in resoluteness (Entschlossenheit): owning my contingent disposedness while knowing it is ungrounded. Its discourse is reticence, and it discloses the concrete Situation (as against the generic Lage of das Man).
Temporality as the sense of care
Anticipatory resoluteness joins the two: anticipation shows our existence as contingent and individual; resoluteness shows our responsibility; facing death's unsurpassability makes guilt "something constant". The resulting self is not a persisting thing but a constancy of commitment, and "it is entirely possible that I am my own self only intermittently".
What makes this possible is primordial temporality, a "unified lack of self-coincidence". The future is not a not-yet-now but the movement of "coming toward" myself in my ownmost possibility. The past is "being as it has been", which resoluteness takes over. The present is "letting oneself be encountered". These are not successive moments but ecstases of one "ekstatikon", and authentic temporality temporalises from the future.
| Care moment | Ecstasis | Authentic | Inauthentic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Understanding | Future | Anticipation | Awaiting (expecting) |
| Disposedness | Past | Repetition (retrieval) | Forgetting |
| Falling / being-amidst | Present | Moment of vision | Making-present, distraction |
Everydayness re-read in time
Division II chapter 4 repeats the analysis of everydayness on this basis. Fear of a snarling dog brings me back to how I am, but yields no coherent self, a "self-forgetting"; anxiety instead allows repetition, a selective owning of my facticity. Curiosity tries to be maximally present, "seeking to see only in order to see". Equipment use involves an "awaiting that retains and makes present", with a "specific kind of forgetting" of self. Theory arises not merely when work stops but when an entity is freed from its place and projected onto a spatio-temporal "world-point", grounded in a resolve for truth. The world's unity rests on the horizonal schemata of the ecstases (for-the-sake-of-which, thrownness, in-order-to). Spatiality is "embraced" by temporality: Dasein "takes space in" rather than occupying it.
History and ordinary time
Chapter 5 turns to diachronic unity, Dasein's "historizing" (Geschehen) between birth and death. Things are "past" because their world is no longer. We draw our possibilities from the heritage circulating in public interpretation. Resolute choice of an inherited possibility is fate, both inherited and chosen; a community's shared possibilities are its destiny (Geschick), won "in communicating and in struggling". Authentic Dasein "chooses its hero" through repetition, understood as a "reciprocative rejoinder" rather than copying. Authentic historiology, drawing on Dilthey and Yorck, recovers past possibilities and detaches us from "the 'today'".
Chapter 6 derives ordinary time. We always "reckon with time", hurrying as the sun sets. Concern produces datability ("now that..."), spannedness and publicness, plus a world-character: time is "the time for something". Clocks make it measurable, encouraging the illusion of "now-time", a gapless, infinite sequence of present nows. Heidegger does not deny this conception but calls it derivative, and judges Hegel the most rigorous failure to explain how subjects inhabit such time. The book ends with an open question: "Does time itself manifest itself as the horizon of being?"
Falling's three marks, spelled out
Chapter 5 of Division I closes with the everyday mode of being-in as falling (Verfallen). This is not a moral fall but Dasein's tendency to be absorbed in public ways of doing things. Three marks structure it:
- Idle talk (Gerede). Discourse uprooted from a first-hand uncovering of the matter. One talks about what "one says", and the talk circulates with a semblance of understanding that closes off genuine appropriation.
- Curiosity (Neugier). Seeking to see only in order to see. Interpretation withholds purposive engagement and is satisfied with whatever superficial reading the "one" supplies. Distraction leads quickly to further distraction (171-3).
- Ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit). When idle talk makes everything "accessible to everyone", it becomes impossible to decide what is genuinely disclosed and what is not. Public interpretation has a "semblance of cooperative involvement" while people focus on superficialities (174-5).
Heidegger insists falling is no "bad and deplorable property" but an essential tendency. It enables inauthenticity when an individual Dasein interprets itself solely in terms of the anonymous self of das Man and disburdens itself of responsibility for its own existence.
Falling's three marks and the flight into das Man.
Solicitude and the two extremes of being-with
Being-with is not optional: even solitude is a deficient mode of Mitsein. Concern (Besorgen) is for equipment; solicitude (Fürsorge) is for other Dasein. Two extremes structure everyday solicitude:
| Mode | What it does | Effect on the other |
|---|---|---|
| Leaping in (einspringende) | Takes over the other's care and throws it back as something finished | Dominates; the other becomes dependent and dominated |
| Leaping ahead (vorspringende) | Leaps ahead of the other in its existentiell potentiality-for-Being | Helps the other become transparent to itself and free for its care |
| Everyday indifference | Passing one another by, not-mattering | The usual public mode between the extremes |
The positive modes of solicitude, like authentic being-toward-death later, show that Mitsein need not collapse into das Man. The overview stresses that in everydayness there is no "other minds" problem: we do not infer that others are Dasein; they show up already as Dasein-with within shared practices.
Signs, reference and the worldhood of the world
Before spatiality, Division I chapter 3 works through reference (Verweisung) and signs. Every item of equipment refers within a totality of involvements (Bewandtnisganzheit). A sign is equipment whose specific character is to indicate; Heidegger's stock example is the automobile's turn indicator (Winker), which makes the environing world of traffic explicit for circumspective concern. Signs do not invent reference; they make an already operative referential totality conspicuous.
Worldhood is the structure of that totality: the "in-order-to", the "towards-which", the "for-the-sake-of-which" that finally refers back to Dasein's own possibilities. The world is not the sum of present-at-hand objects but the wherein of understanding. When Wrathall and Murphey later hand the sign sections to Gordon (Chapter 10), the overview has already set the equipmental baseline against which neo-Kantian relationism will be judged.
Anxiety, care and the sceptic's mistake
Anxiety is not fear of a definite entity. In Angst, environmentally available entities "sink away" and become "completely without importance" (völlig belanglos); no person or thing can fill the lack we recognise, our uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit, "not-at-home-ness"). Falling is best read as flight that "dims down" recognition of the not-at-home (189). Anxiety shows being-in-the-world as a unitary whole: I need a world and long to belong, yet I do not belong uniquely to any world and might find myself unable to carry on the pretence of belonging.
The closing sections of Division I dissolve external-world scepticism. Sceptic and anti-sceptic share three presuppositions: Dasein as an occurrent mind, the world as an occurrent manifold of mind-independent objects, and knowledge as the basic subject-object link (200-1). Once our being is care, doubt of the world is itself a derivative way of being-in. Truth as unconcealment (aletheia) is primordial; uncoveredness (Entdecktheit) is a species of it. Propositional truth is derivative. Untruth matches each uncovering: false belief, misuse or incompetence, and inauthenticity. Authenticity requires continually appropriating what has been uncovered "against semblance and disguise" (222).
From care to truth: how Division I closes.
Guilt as being the null reason of a nullity
Existential guilt is not a debt to be paid off. Heidegger's formally existential idea: guilt is "being the reason for a nullity" (283). Grund means reason, cause and background at once. Two nullities:
- I am the reason that something is not (a possibility shut off, a state of affairs deficient).
- My reason itself lacks adequate justification: I am a null reason.
Thrownness means we "never have power over [our] ownmost being from the ground up" (284), yet we always stand in one possibility and have waived others. I do not merely have reasons; I am the reason I act. Changing thrownness always happens on the basis of prior disposedness. Hence "Dasein is as such guilty" if the formal definition holds (285). Guilt is no privation that could be eliminated; it is "the existential condition for the possibility of the 'morally' good and for that of the 'morally' evil" (286).
The call of conscience summons the hearer out of public idle talk "into its ownmost possibilities, as a summons to its ownmost ability-to-be-a-self" (273). The caller is "definable in a 'worldly' way by nothing at all": Dasein in its uncanniness, "the bare 'that-it-is' in the 'nothing' of the world" (276). Conscience gives no maxims and no ideal universal way to live. Everyday conscience, which treats life as a "household whose indebtednesses simply need to be balanced" (293), is itself a phenomenon of flight. Factical indebtedness is only the occasion for the call; it does not exhaust its significance (290).
Anticipatory resoluteness and constancy of the self
Anticipatory resoluteness joins being-toward-death and wanting-to-have-a-conscience. Anticipation discloses existence as contingent, transitory, individual and uncanny. Resoluteness discloses undischargeable responsibility. Facing death's unsurpassability makes guilt "something constant". The resulting self is not a persisting substance but a constancy of commitment, and "it is entirely possible that I am my own self only intermittently".
- Perishing (Verenden): biological ending of a living thing.
- Demise (Ableben): social, legal and biographical ending of a human life.
- Death (Tod): no event, but the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein; ownmost, non-relational, certain yet indefinite, unsurpassable.
Historizing, fate and the derivation of clock time
Between birth and death Dasein historizes (Geschehen). Antiquities are "past" not because of age but because their world is no longer. Possibilities circulate in the public heritage; resolute choice of an inherited possibility is fate (Schicksal), both inherited and chosen. A community's shared possibilities are its destiny (Geschick), won "in communicating and in struggling". Authentic Dasein "chooses its hero" through repetition as a "reciprocative rejoinder", not copying. Authentic historiology, drawing on Dilthey and Count Yorck, recovers past possibilities and detaches us from "the 'today'".
Ordinary time is derived, not denied. Concern produces datability ("now that..."), spannedness, publicness and a world-character: time is "the time for something". Clocks make time measurable and encourage the illusion of now-time, a gapless infinite sequence of present nows. Hegel is judged the most rigorous failure to explain how subjects inhabit such time. The published book ends with the open question that would have opened Division III: "Does time itself manifest itself as the horizon of being?"
From historizing to ordinary clock time.
Equiprimordiality versus primal-ground ontology
Wrathall and Murphey stress Heidegger's refusal of the "unrestrained tendency to derive everything and anything from some simple 'primal ground'" (131). Equiprimordial phenomena cannot be derived from something more basic and cannot exist without each other. Dasein and world are equiprimordial; disposedness, understanding and discourse are equiprimordial constituents of being-in. Methodologically this blocks both materialist reductions (world without Dasein) and idealist reductions (Dasein without world). "Dasein is the being of this 'between'" (132): a particular opening up of world, not a subject that then represents an object.
Thrownness and facticity name the passive side: we find ourselves already in a world arranged in a definite fashion, with characteristics that are not brute facts but meaningfully taken up. Mood is the concrete manifestation of disposedness; one is always in a mood, and tranquil observation is itself a mood suited to discovering occurrent entities, not proof that moods are optional.
Possibilities as orders of meaning
Heideggerian possibility is not a possible-actual (an event that could occur but has not). Possibilities are orders of meaning, whole coherent ways of organising what is actual, like the rules of a game that are never actual the way a thrown pitch is. In understanding we project the actual onto such orders; in interpretation we commit to and work out a definite understanding. Opening a door puts an open-ended ability to work on this latch, this push or pull, refining the ability as one goes.
Das Man: enabling conformity and disburdened agency
Distantiality disposes us to interpret ourselves in terms of public norms. Inauthenticity is "standing in subjection to others": unthinking acceptance that disburdens responsibility. The anonymous self of "one waits in line" / "one drives on the right" is who we are when we defer. Das Man makes social conformity possible as the background of intelligibility; without authenticity there would be nothing but conformism, and "the agency through which most things come about is one of which we must say that 'it was no one'" (127). Authenticity, "discovering the world in my own way" (129), always takes over everyday possibilities from das Man rather than inventing a private world.
Equiprimordial being-in and the Anyone.
Division II in the overview's compression
The overview's second half compresses death, guilt, resoluteness, historizing and the derivation of clock time so later chapters can argue in detail. Keep three overview-level claims when reading Thomson, Han-Pile, Blattner, Käufer and Schear:
- Death is not an event but the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein; anticipation, not brooding or suicide, is the authentic relation.
- Guilt is being the null reason of a nullity; conscience summons without maxims; everyday "household" balancing of debts is flight.
- Time: between birth and death Dasein historizes; fate/destiny name owned and shared taking-over of heritage; clocks produce now-time as a leveled derivative; the book ends asking whether time is the horizon of being.
Ready-to-hand breakdown and the birth of the occurrent
Wrathall and Murphey track how the available becomes conspicuous. When equipment breaks, goes missing, or obstinately blocks the job, the referential totality lights up and entities can show as present-at-hand. That is not a fall into error; it is how theoretical looking becomes possible. The hammer that was transparent in driving nails becomes a weighted object with properties. Science cultivates this occurrent stance deliberately, but it still depends on a world of involvements it does not create.
Circumspective concern remains the default. Even a scientist walks the corridor as available space before measuring it. The overview's warning: philosophies that start from the occurrent object have already skipped the phenomenon that makes objects discoverable.
Breakdown path from tool to object.
Being-in as the between, not containment
Being-in is not water in a glass. Spatial containment is a present-at-hand relation between occurrent entities. Dasein's being-in is familiarity with definite ways of existing and taking a stand on its being. The three structures of disposedness, understanding and discourse specify that familiarity without ranking one as the substance of the others. Each must be read through the others (133).
Mineness as formal indicator
Jemeinigkeit does not mean a private inner theatre. It means existence is always already mine to own or disown. That formal feature later supports authenticity without requiring a deep expressivist self. The Anyone can live my life for me precisely because mineness can be fled.
Solicitude and everyday Mitsein.
Overview path through Division II themes.
Falling's three faces in everyday disclosedness
The overview treats falling (Verfallen) as a tendency toward the world of the Anyone, not a moral lapse from a pure origin. Its everyday faces are idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity. Idle talk circulates an average intelligibility that understands without first-hand uncovering. Curiosity seeks novelty rather than dwelling. Ambiguity makes it impossible to decide what is genuine understanding and what is public semblance. Together they "dim down" the uncanniness anxiety can disclose.
Authenticity does not abolish falling; it modifies how one takes up public possibilities. That is why Division II must return to death and conscience: only there does the overview show how mineness can be won against the dimming.
Falling's everyday faces and the counter-move.
Care as ahead-already-amidst
Care (Sorge) formalises being-in-the-world as ahead-of-itself (projection), already-in (thrownness) and being-alongside (falling amidst entities). The overview insists this is one structure, not three modules. Anxiety is privileged because it can disclose the structure as a whole when particular entities sink into insignificance. Theoretical knowledge and practical success both depend on care; they do not explain it.
Care's three of one structure.
Being and Time: A Carefully Planned Accident?
A book that seemed to spring from nowhere
When Being and Time appeared in 1927 it made Heidegger famous, though he had published nothing since his 1916 Habilitation on Duns Scotus. Like Athena from Zeus' head, it seemed to have no genesis, and Heidegger encouraged the mystery: his early writings were republished only in 1972, and the original plan of the Gesamtausgabe excluded the early Freiburg lecture courses of 1919-1923. He dated the story from his first Marburg course in 1923-4. Denker's corrective rests on Kisiel's The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (1993), which he calls required reading.
From a well-ordered world to facticity
For Heidegger, philosophy starts from the "es gibt", "it gives, there is": a world is simply given. To the young Heidegger the giver was God; later he concluded that we can experience nothing beyond the gift itself. Born on 26 September 1889 in Messkirch, son of a cooper and sexton, he grew up in a devout Catholic world whose order, he later wrote, came from God as first cause. Denker calls this an "Augustinian" world view, which made the student Heidegger an anti-modernist who blamed the principle of autonomy (Descartes, Kant) for modern ills.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1903-06 | Gymnasium in Constance, lives in Konradihaus seminary under Conrad Gröber (later Archbishop of Freiburg) |
| 1907 | Gröber gives him Brentano's dissertation on Aristotle |
| Sep 1909 | Jesuit novitiate at Tisis; dismissed after two weeks on health grounds |
| Feb 1911 | Heart trouble ends plans for the priesthood |
| Oct 1911 | Switches to mathematics and physics; Rickert his main teacher |
| 26 Jul 1913 | Doctorate: The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism |
| 26 Jul 1915 | Habilitation (Duns Scotus); Catholic chair later goes to Josef Geyser |
| 1 Apr 1916 | Husserl arrives in Freiburg as Rickert's successor |
| 20 Mar 1917 | Marries the Protestant Elfride Petri |
| 9 Jan 1919 | Letter to Krebs: break with "the system of Catholicism" |
| 1923 | Appointed at Marburg after the "Natorp-Bericht" |
| Feb-Mar 1926 | Writes the first 175 pages in Todtnauberg |
In Constance he met the clash of a free-thinking humanist gymnasium with a monastic seminary, and this conflict shaped his development. His theology professor Carl Braig coined the concept of "modernism"; Pope Pius X condemned it and cast Kant as the villain who cut the intellect off from God. Neo-Scholasticism made all sciences "handmaids of theology". Denker says it took Heidegger some twenty-five years to resolve this conflict.
As a mathematics and physics student, Heidegger tasted academic freedom. His two decisive influences, Heinrich Rickert and Edmund Husserl, were a Protestant and a free Christian. A 1914 letter to Engelbert Krebs mocks the papal Motu proprio: perhaps independent thinkers should have their brains "replaced by 'Italian salad'". His income depended on Catholic grants, so the decree threatened his career.
Making the tradition fluid
The Scotus book used modern logic (Lask, Rickert, Husserl) to "make fluid" scholastic tradition while mining that tradition for modern answers. Denker sees here the two-part structure of Being and Time: a systematic analytic followed by a destruction of the history of ontology. In 1911 Heidegger still praised "the eternal treasure of truth"; by 1914 he saw human life, even logic and mathematics, as historical. From there it is a short step to treating Christianity itself as historical: God's Word is spoken "in time".
The decisive event was his marriage. Elfride Petri, a student of national economics, did not convert; when their son Jörg was born on 21 January 1919, they declined to baptise him. Elfride told Krebs: "My husband no longer has his Catholic faith and I have not found it." From 1915 Heidegger studied Protestant theologians (Troeltsch, Harnack, Overbeck, Schleiermacher), mysticism, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Simmel and Bergson. Heinrich Ochsner wrote in 1917 that Schleiermacher's second speech "On Religion" contained the essence of Heidegger's views. Husserl supplied the tools. On 9 January 1919 Heidegger told Krebs that historical knowledge had made "the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me, but not Christianity and metaphysics". He would justify his "existence [Dasein] and work ultimately before God", which Denker reads as Lutheran.
Phenomenology of religious life
From the 1919 war emergency semester to 1923, Heidegger worked out his method through a phenomenology of religious life. Dogmatism closes off lived experience, so he scraped away layers of doctrine to reach moments when the Divine "erupts" (primal Christianity, Augustine, mysticism, Luther, Kierkegaard). Karl Jaspers, whom he met in spring 1920, shared his focus on limit situations (death, love, faith, sickness), a bias Heidegger later dropped: in Being and Time, Dasein shows itself first in averageness.
Four questions behind the book
In January 1922 Paul Natorp asked Husserl about Heidegger for a Marburg post; the rumour of a "hidden king" was already circulating. Heidegger spent three weeks producing the "Natorp-Bericht", "Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle". It outlines fundamental ontology plus destruction, sets the public "Anyone" and fallenness against seizing one's own death, defines existence as the countermovement to falling, and reads phronesis as resolute insight into a concrete situation. It introduced an Aristotle book scheduled for volume 7 of Husserl's Jahrbuch; Being and Time appeared in volume 9.
Four lines of inquiry that fed Being and Time.
To explain the turn to Aristotle, Denker reconstructs the question Heidegger faced after 1918, "who am I?", which unfolds into four.
- Philosophy. A primal science in Husserl's sense, held until 1929, but understood as a regulative idea and as the opposite of a world view. Only "the genuineness of a personal life" yields genuine insight, the "existentialist core" that made his teaching magnetic.
- Modernity. Max Weber's "Science as a Vocation" argued that science cannot tell us "what we should do, how we should live". Heidegger accepted Weber's critique of world views but would not leave us "to our fate": he sought a rigorous philosophy that shows meaningfulness is given with existence itself.
- Being a Christian. Not a world view but imitation of Christ. Greek concepts both expressed and covered up early Christian experience, while Christian views hide Greek experience, a double covering that demands destruction. Heidegger first used Christian care (Sorge) against Greek contemplation, then found in Aristotle a phenomenology of life, care and kairological time.
- Philosopher and Christian at once. Possible, but a "Christian philosophy is a round square". Denker suggests Being and Time is the answer: an analytic of the structure that makes Greek, Christian and modern ways of being human possible.
| Aristotle's way of "truing" | Heidegger's gloss |
|---|---|
| Nous | Pure beholding |
| Sophia | Authentic inspective understanding |
| Phronesis | Solicitous circumspection |
| Techne | Productive working procedure |
| Episteme | Inspectional demonstrative determination |
The road through 1923-1926
The last Freiburg course, "Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity" (1923), first uses being-there as a formal indication and treats hermeneutics as Dasein's self-understanding, not text interpretation. It poses the trio of questions later found in Being and Time (what is a world, what is "in", how does being-in appear) and distinguishes environment, with-world and self-world. The 1924 lecture "The Concept of Time" to the Marburg theologians already contains the book's core: Augustine showed that time is measured through our disposedness.
The path to Being and Time, 1919 to 1927.
The 1925 course on the History of the Concept of Time (GA 20) launches the research programme proper. "The history of the concept of time is ... the history of the question of the being of beings." From the Eleatic Stranger in the 1924-5 Plato course, Heidegger takes "What is being?" as the start of radical phenomenology. He transforms Husserl's three breakthroughs, intentionality, categorial intuition and the a priori, into care, understanding and time: "we do not say what we see, but rather ... we see what one says about the matter", and "scientific ontology is nothing but phenomenology".
| Husserl's breakthrough | Heidegger's transformation |
|---|---|
| Intentionality | Care as Dasein's basic structure |
| Categorial intuition | Understanding: we always live in the categorial |
| The a priori | Time: the a priori is historical |
In GA 20 Heidegger briefly borrows Husserl's "appresentation" from the unpublished Ideas II: a field appresents the farmer who ploughed it, a nightgown the lover who wore it. Others are appresented "in the how of their going about the world", so Denker reads the analytic as a kind of structuralism that replaces substance with function. Still missing are existence, thrownness and mineness. In the final hour Heidegger finds the link: "Not 'time is' but 'Dasein qua time temporalizes its being'."
The logic course and the switch to Kant
The 1925-6 logic course (GA 21), the last Hannah Arendt attended, criticised psychologism and the Neo-Kantian view of truth as validity of judgment, returning to Aristotle's pre-judicative truth of nous. Under pressure to publish (Nicolai Hartmann had left for Cologne, and the Berlin ministry balked at appointing an author without recent books), Heidegger abruptly switched, just before Christmas 1925, from Aristotle to Kant's schematism: time is "an original pure and general self-affection". In the final hour he made a fateful terminological choice, replacing "having-to-be" with Existenz, since "having-to-be" still implies an entity that has to be, whereas ek-sistence names a standing-out. The analytic was to become a kairology.
Dates that fix the "accident"
Denker's narrative is a chronology of preparation that suddenly yields a different book. Key stations:
| Date | Event | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 26 Jul 1913 | Doctorate: The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism | Anti-psychologism already in view |
| 1915 | Habilitation on Duns Scotus (actually Thomas of Erfurt) | Medieval grammar and categories |
| 20 Mar 1917 | Marriage to Elfride Petri | Break with parental Catholicism intensifies |
| 23 Dec 1918 / 9 Jan 1919 | Elfride visits Father Krebs; Heidegger's letter to Krebs | "System of Catholicism" renounced as unlivable |
| Apr 1916 / from May | Husserl arrives Freiburg; contact deepens | Phenomenology becomes the method |
| KNS 1919 | War Emergency Semester course | Hermeneutics of factical life announced |
| Jan 1922 | Natorp writes Husserl about Heidegger | Marburg appointment path opens |
| 1923 | Full professor at Marburg | Aristotle book still the career plan |
| 25 Jul 1924 | "The Concept of Time" lecture to Marburg theologians | Time as horizon already thematic |
| WS 1924-5 | Plato's Sophist (GA 19) | Being and logos worked through Greek texts |
| 5 Nov 1925 | Logic course begins (last Arendt attends) | Pressure to publish intensifies |
| Feb 1926 | Retreat to Todtnauberg | The "accident": BT assembled |
| 1927 | Publication in Husserl's Yearbook | World sensation; torso of six divisions |
Denker's path: from Catholic formation to the Todtnauberg book.
Four questions and the Aristotle that never came
Denker organises the years before 1926 around four questions Heidegger was pressing: the being of the human being, the being of history, the being of philosophy itself, and the being of being. The planned Aristotle book would have answered them inside a "destruction" of the ontological tradition. What appeared instead was an analytic of Dasein that still advertised Part Two's destruction (Kant, Descartes, Aristotle) without delivering it. The "carefully planned accident" is that years of Aristotle, Paul, Augustine, Dilthey and Husserl research coalesced into a book whose published form Heidegger had not outlined as such in 1922.
Kisiel, Sheehan and the genesis literature
Denker draws heavily on Theodore Kisiel's The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (1993) and on Thomas Sheehan's reconstructions of the early Freiburg and Marburg courses. The WS 1923-4 start date some narratives prefer is, for Denker, too late: the breakthrough is already audible in KNS 1919 and the religion courses. The Marburg pressure of 1925 (department demanding a major publication for the chair) explains the Todtnauberg urgency without reducing the book to career panic.
From well-ordered cosmos to factical life
Before the war Heidegger still wrote within a neo-scholastic and neo-Kantian horizon: a well-ordered world in which logic, categories and faith could be reconciled. The war, the marriage conflict and the Krebs break shatter that cosmos. Factical life (factisches Leben) becomes the phenomenon: life as it is lived, already interpreting itself, before theory. The 1919 course names this turn as a hermeneutics rather than a theory of knowledge. Phenomenology is retained as method and stripped of Husserl's transcendental ego as the exclusive starting point.
Making the tradition fluid means reading Aristotle, Paul and Augustine not as authorities to apply but as sources whose concepts must be destructured so that the experiences they once named can show up again. The phenomenology of religious life (GA 60) works this programme on primal Christian experience: kairological time, care, and the world's having already seized us.
Why "carefully planned accident" is not a joke
Alfred Denker's title names a real historiographical claim: Heidegger spent years preparing an Aristotle book and a destruction of the ontological tradition; what he published in Husserl's Yearbook in 1927 was a different book assembled in a Todtnauberg burst under Marburg promotion pressure. The "plan" is the decade of facticity research (KNS 1919 onward); the "accident" is the published architecture (two divisions of a promised six) that froze a transitional synthesis.
Denker's four pre-1926 questions (being of the human being; of history; of philosophy; of being) explain why BT can feel overfull: it is answering several research programmes at once. The destruction promised for Part Two (Kant, Descartes, Aristotle) largely migrates into later lecture courses; readers who treat BT as a closed system miss Denker's point that the torso status is structural, not merely unfinished.
Denker: planned research vs published torso.
Catholic break without simple atheism
The Krebs letter (9 Jan 1919) renounces the "system of Catholicism" as unlivable while Heidegger still speaks as a Christian theologian in a broad sense. Denker refuses both hagiographic continuity with Thomism and a clean secular conversion story. The hermeneutics of facticity needs that unresolved middle: primal Christian experience (kairology, care) remains a phenomenological resource after dogmatic constraints fall away.
Sources feeding the 1926 condensation.
Marburg, Arendt and the pressure to publish
Denker ties the final assembly to institutional facts: from 5 November 1925 the logic course proceeds under promotion pressure; Hannah Arendt attends her last seminars; in February 1926 Heidegger retreats to the hut at Todtnauberg and forces the manuscript into publishable shape. The Aristotle monograph still named as the career plan does not appear. What appears is the Yearbook torso that made him famous and left Division III and Part Two as debts.
Kisiel's genesis dating and Sheehan's course reconstructions remain Denker's backbone. Disputes about whether the breakthrough is 1919 or 1923-4 matter for how much "accident" one hears: earlier dating makes BT look like condensation; later dating makes it look more like a Marburg invention.
- Jan 1922: Natorp writes Husserl; Marburg path opens.
- 1923: full professor at Marburg; Aristotle book still the plan.
- 25 Jul 1924: "The Concept of Time" to Marburg theologians.
- WS 1924-5: Plato's Sophist (GA 19).
- 5 Nov 1925: Logic course; publication pressure peaks.
- Feb 1926: Todtnauberg assembly.
- 1927: publication in Husserl's Yearbook.
Break with system Catholicism into facticity.
Yearbook torso and the missing divisions
Publication in Husserl's Yearbook (1927) made the book a "world sensation" while freezing its incomplete shape. Promised were two parts of three divisions each; what appeared was Division I and Division II of Part One. Division III ("Time and Being") and the whole destruction of Part Two remained debts paid only partially in later lectures (Basic Problems, Kant book, etc.). Denker's accident thesis predicts exactly this: a condensation under pressure will advertise an architecture it cannot complete in one volume.
The Question of Being
Being is not a thing
The single most important point is that being does not itself exist. The difference between being and entities is the ontological difference (named in GA 24, soon after Being and Time). Traditional questions such as whether universals, God or free will exist are ontic: they concern entities. Even "why is there something rather than nothing?", which Heidegger later calls the fundamental question of metaphysics, differs from his question, which asks what it is for whatever there is to be.
The ontological difference between beings and their being.
Heidegger's nearest definition: being is "that which defines entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities ... are in each case already understood". Being is not a property. Kant saw, in refuting the ontological argument, that being is a logical, not a "real" predicate: "Dogs exist" looks like "Dogs bark", but we know what non-barking dogs are and not what non-existent dogs would be. Kant's quip is that "a hundred actual dollars do not contain the least bit more than a hundred possible ones."
Meaning without semantics
The question is about the meaning (Sinn) of being, but not in a linguistic sense. Meaning is "that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself". The book opens with the Eleatic Stranger in Plato's Sophist confessing perplexity about "being", which can make the inquiry sound semantic. It is not. We show our understanding of being in using equipment competently, responding to objects and living as humans; words are only one manifestation.
So when Heidegger proposes that "time [is] the possible horizon of any understanding of being", he is not describing the objective nature of time. He describes how we make sense of time: first as the thrown projection of our lives, then as occasions for action, and finally as an abstract succession of moments. Carman here disagrees with William Blattner's "temporal idealism": the question is how clock time becomes intelligible, not how it becomes sequential.
Lafont's challenge: is the difference sharp?
Cristina Lafont, following Ernst Tugendhat, argues that the project founders on an equivocation. Hermeneutics pushes Heidegger toward holism and contextualism, yet he keeps a sharp Kantian split between a priori philosophy and a posteriori science. Reading being as semantic content, she concludes that Heidegger stayed loyal to Frege's thesis that meaning determines reference, which Quine, Putnam, Donnellan, Kripke and Kaplan have refuted. If so, our understanding of being would be open to empirical revision after all.
Carman calls this a Procrustean reading that badly distorts Heidegger, since his "meaning" is far wider than Fregean sense. Yet it raises two real questions: must the ontological difference be sharp rather than gradual, and is any such difference consistent with hermeneutic holism?
Is the line between something and nothing sharp?
One might argue it must be sharp because Heidegger calls Hegel's thesis that "pure being and pure nothing are the same" correct. But "correct" is Heidegger's faint praise, implying deeper untruth: being and nothing are not empty concepts. "The nothing" figures in anxiety, when entities as a whole slip away. Heidegger is not fooled by grammar; "the nothing" is a rhetorical device for our experience of the finitude of what there is.
Nor is the something/nothing line obviously sharp. Degrees of being flourished in Plato and Neoplatonism, in Descartes' Third Meditation and in Kant's reply to Moses Mendelssohn, where the soul might fade by "elanguescence". Heidegger himself reads the pre-Socratic physis as "emerging-lingering holding sway": archaic Greek things dawn, linger and fade rather than popping in and out of being.
Ways of being, unified by analogy
Hegel and many others held being to be simple, univocal and empty. Heidegger's most original and controversial idea is that the meaning of being is plural. A stone is occurrent, present at a moment; a hammer is available, ready for use on occasions for action; Dasein exists, thrown into a situation and pursuing ends. Kant held "position" to be "perfectly simple"; Heidegger dismisses this as a mere repeat of Descartes.
Heidegger's main ways of being, and the question of their unity.
| Mode of being | Paradigm entity | What it is to be |
|---|---|---|
| Occurrentness (Vorhandenheit) | Stone, molecule | Present at a discrete moment |
| Availability (Zuhandenheit) | Hammer, shoes | Usable on occasions for action |
| Existence (Existenz) | Dasein | Thrown into a situation, pursuing ends |
Kris McDaniel notes that Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Meinong, Moore, Russell and Husserl were all ontological pluralists of some kind. What unifies the modes? Not univocity but analogy, as Aquinas said. The generic sense of "being" presupposes the restricted senses, as the generic sense of "healthy" presupposes healthy animals, urine and medicine. "Being" cannot be merely equivocal like "page", or "there are two kinds of page" would be nonsense.
Carman's picture: plural ways of being, analogically unified; being's own self-giving kept apart.
The generic notion need not apply to being itself, even though "there are" several ways of being. In the "Letter on 'Humanism'" Heidegger reserves "es gibt" ("it gives") for being: "the 'it' that 'gives' ... is being itself." Carman defends this against the charge of defining the problem away. The self-giving of being is not even analogically related to the being of entities, and identifying the giver with being blocks a regress like Plato's Third Man.
The a priori perfect
So Lafont's critique virtually answers itself. Heidegger did overcome Kant's sharp splits (a priori/a posteriori, essence/accident). His a priori is the "a priori perfect", what is "always already" established and relatively invariant. In "The Age of the World Picture" he says the Greeks' ta mathemata meant what we know in advance: "the corporeity of bodies, the vegetation of plants, the animality of animals".
The difference must still be firm enough to separate philosophy from the human sciences. Anxiety (§40) is not a psychological report; the critique of Cassirer on myth is not anthropology; das Man is not armchair sociology; the later "history of being" is not intellectual history. But unlike Kant and Husserl, Heidegger does not make philosophy an autonomous science insulated from history. "Being is always the being of an entity." His transcendental conditions are horizons, conditions of actuality as well as possibility.
Naming by the principal part
This explains why Heidegger's ontological vocabulary is embroidered with ontic terms. He justifies "primordial time" by the principle a potiori fit denominatio, naming a thing by its principal part (synecdoche). The same logic covers "authentic temporality" (the condition of both authenticity and inauthenticity, as Blattner showed), "death" (the constant closing down of possibilities), "guilt" (being answerable in principle), and availability and occurrentness, named after their canonical ontic cases.
From question to experience: the turn
Being and Time never answers "the" question of being. Its central thesis is only that time is "the transcendental horizon for the question of being". With the turn (Kehre) of the mid-1930s, Heidegger drops the systematic programme for a retrospective history of being (Seinsgeschichte), first named in the 1936-8 Contributions (GA 65), with Nietzsche marking the culmination and end of metaphysics.
Being as intelligibility, not a super-entity
Taylor Carman presses the point that the question of being is not a search for a highest entity or a genus under which all entities fall. Being is "that on the basis of which entities are already understood" (6): the intelligibility of what is. Ontology as traditional metaphysics keeps asking "what is there?" and so stays ontic; fundamental ontology asks how anything can show up as anything at all. The "ontological difference" (being versus entities) is thus a difference in the order of questioning, not a difference between two inventories.
Carman reads Division I as showing that the understanding of being is already at work in everyday coping, long before theory. Presence-at-hand is a founded mode that abstracts from readiness-to-hand; it is not the default furniture of the world. Against readings that treat "being" as a mysterious X, he insists the phenomenon is ordinary until philosophy covers it over by forcing every disclosure into the present-at-hand frame.
Carman's ladder from ontic curiosity to the question of being.
Why Dasein is the point of entry
Only an entity that understands being can ask the question. That entity is Dasein: "Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological" (12). Carman resists both subjectivist reductions (being = what a mind represents) and realist dismissals (being = the sum of mind-independent stuff). The middle path: entities do not depend on Dasein for their existence, but being as disclosedness does. Kant's Refutation of Idealism is near; so is the later worry that this still smells of transcendental idealism.
Against the genus reading and the emptiness charge
If being were a highest genus, Aristotle's critique would apply: being is not a genus. If being were empty, positivism would win. Carman's reply: the question is formal-indicative. It points toward a structure to be filled by phenomenological exhibition, not toward a definition to be plugged into a calculus. The "emptiness" of early formulations is methodological; Division I's analyses of world, Mitsein, care and truth are the filling.
Ontological difference vs ontic inventory.
Intelligibility without subjectivism
Carman holds together two claims critics often split: entities can be mind-independent in their existence, while being as disclosedness depends on Dasein's understanding of being. That is why the chapter sits next to Martin's modal-semantics worries and Gordon's idealism worry. If one drops independence, BT becomes idealism; if one drops the dependence of disclosedness, the question of being collapses into ontic inventory. Carman's middle is unstable under pressure and still the Companion's clearest statement of the intended path.
Formal indication versus definition
Carman treats early empty-sounding formulations as formal-indicative: they point to a structure to be filled by exhibition (world, Mitsein, care, truth). Readers who demand a genus definition up front replay the tradition's mistake. Division I is the filling; Division II reinterprets the filled structure temporally. The emptiness charge is thus a timing error about when phenomenological content is supposed to arrive.
The Semantics of "Dasein" and the Modality of Being and Time
Existentialia and their Kant-Dilthey lineage
Division I lists existentialia (Macquarrie and Robinson; "existentials" in Stambaugh): mineness, being-in-the-world, being-with, das Man, care. They articulate Existenz, Dasein's mode of being. Martin traces the notion to Wilhelm Dilthey, who held that Kant's categories serve only the natural sciences and called for a "critique of historical reason" with categories of life for the human sciences. One of Dilthey's lists: lived experience, duration, meaning, significance, value, whole and part, development. Like Kant's categories, they are pure: brought to experience, not derived from it.
Heidegger calls Dilthey "on his way towards the question of Life" but limited in his concepts. His own definition follows Dilthey's groove: existentialia are "to be sharply distinguished from what we call 'categories'"; together they are "the two basic possibilities for characters of Being", separating a who from a what. On this lineage, existentialia carry modal force: Dasein could not be without them. The text says so repeatedly: being-in-the-world is "necessary a priori"; Dasein is "essentially being-with".
The problem: description yields actuality
Phenomenology sold itself as description ("auf die Sachen selbst!"); Heidegger calls "descriptive phenomenology" tautological. But descriptions of a suspect or a floor plan tell us how things are, not how they must be. Trivial solutions exist (p entails "possibly p"), yet a non-trivial account is owed.
Three semantic models
Martin sets aside the debate over whether "Dasein" is a mass or count term (there are as many Daseins in his kitchen as human bodies) and asks how the term gets its meaning.
Three models for what existential descriptions mean.
| Model | Fixed first | Reading of the analytic | Main cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Extensionalist (Olafson) | Reference: same individuals as "human being" | De re claims about humans | Assumes ontological homogeneity of all humans |
| Intensionalist (Steiner) | A definition: a being that questions being | De dicto claims about whatever satisfies it | Description of a few cases cannot warrant general claims |
| Exemplar (Martin) | A sample: Heidegger and his reader, in the context of ontology | De re claims about exemplars, extended by ontological likeness | Must sort ontological from contingent features |
The extensionalist model. Frederick Olafson says "human being" and "Dasein" are extensionally equivalent but intensionally distinct. Then dolphins, robots or aliens cannot be Dasein, and no human could fail to be. This presupposes an ontological homogeneity thesis for humanity, which is contestable: religions speak of conversion as birth of "a new being", and Husserl's Crisis edges toward an ontological change in "European Man" once infinite ideals of reason appear.
The intensionalist model. George Steiner defines Dasein as "a being which questions Being, by first questioning its own". Now Alpha Centaurians might qualify and some humans might not. Modal operators behave very differently de dicto and de re: "the tallest philosopher in the room is a philosopher" is necessary de dicto, contingent de re (it might pick out Charles Taylor, Paul Churchland or Shaquille O'Neal). And richly describing a few self-concerned beings gives no warrant that their features belong to Dasein as such.
Carman's transcendental strategy, tested
A recurring pattern looks transcendental: understanding others is a "primordially existential kind of Being" that makes knowledge of them possible; "only because" the senses belong to a disposed being-in-the-world can they be affected. Taylor Carman's Heidegger's Analytic reads these as claims about hermeneutic conditions, adapting Henry Allison's "epistemic conditions" from knowledge to interpretation. Martin notes that Carman is merciless to Husserl ("never a philosopher, not even for one second", Heidegger told Löwith) while leaning on Kant.
Carman's semantics wavers between extension and intension, and his recurring "we" and "our" hide the problem. His account of discourse as "the hermeneutic condition par excellence" runs:
- (1) Interpretation requires distinguishing content from object (the "semantic gap", the "as").
- (2) We open that gap by competent use plus discourse (wrinkling one's nose in a hot subway carriage counts).
- (3) Therefore use and discourse are conditions of the possibility of interpretation.
Premises (1) and (3) are modal and general; (2) is neither. The argument is invalid unless our way is the only possible way. Carman concedes Heidegger offers no "knock-down transcendental arguments" and places hermeneutic necessity between causal and logical necessity. Martin objects that transcendental claims without transcendental arguments sound like "conclusions without premises".
Exemplar semantics
The third option treats "Dasein" like a natural-kind term. "Gold" can be fixed by a sample in a context of inquiry (chemistry); its intension (atomic number 79) and extension are then discovered, and "my ring is gold" becomes a de re necessity (the Kripke model). Read "We are ourselves the entities to be analysed" as ostension: the exemplars are Heidegger and his reader, the context is ontology. "Dasein" then names them and anything sharing their ontological structure.
How exemplar semantics turns description into necessity.
This avoids the homogeneity thesis and gives a cheap guarantee that the described case is a perfect exemplar. Two difficulties remain: we still need a way to tell ontological from contingent features (the ring is also round and bought in New York), and the context of inquiry is dynamic, since "gold" predates chemistry and ontology, for Heidegger, has been forgotten. Martin sees these as the right difficulties: they make the project first-personal, a continuation of the Delphic injunction to know thyself.
Illustration: Befindlichkeit in §29
Heidegger first says that what is ontologically "Befindlichkeit" is ontically our familiar mood. He then describes: Dasein "always has some mood"; in moods "Being has become manifest as a burden". On the exemplar model these are particular claims about the exemplars, establishing that moods belong to their ontological structure. Only then come the modal claims: "only because the 'there' has already been disclosed in a Befindlichkeit can immanent reflection come across 'experiences' at all". The paragraph begins "From what has been said we can already see", so the modal thesis follows from the ontological result instead of proving it, which fits the exemplar reading and not a regressive transcendental argument.
Objections and the Husserlian challenge
- "Human Dasein." The phrase appears (pp. 51, 198, 382, 401; often in Basic Problems), but mostly in restrictive contexts about the human sciences, which suits the intensionalist or exemplar readings; on the extensionalist reading it would be a pleonasm.
- Substantialising Dasein. Ascribing properties is not substantialising in Heidegger's target sense, which is Spinoza's: what "is in itself and is conceived through itself". A hammer has properties but is what it is only in relation to other equipment.
- External tools. Using Kripkean semantics is legitimate, though Heidegger's own resources (formal indication, existential versus logical modality) deserve study.
Why modal claims need a semantics of "Dasein"
Being and Time is thick with necessity-talk: Dasein must have moods; reflection would be impossible without Befindlichkeit; death is certain. Wayne Martin asks how a descriptive phenomenology can underwrite such modals. His answer turns on what "Dasein" means, not on a hidden metaphysics of essences.
He sets aside the older debate over whether "Dasein" is a mass or count noun (settled, for him: as many Daseins in the kitchen as human bodies) and isolates three semantic models that change the logical form of Heidegger's claims.
Martin's three semantic models for 'Dasein'.
Extensionalist model and the homogeneity thesis
On the extensionalist reading, "Dasein" gets its meaningful use by referring to the same individuals as "human being" or "homo sapiens", without being a synonym. Frederick Olafson wrote that the concepts are "extensionally equivalent" but "not intensionally equivalent". Commitments follow:
- No open question whether dolphins, Alpha Centaurians or robots could be Dasein.
- No open question whether some normally functioning humans fail to be Dasein.
- The analytic reads as de re ontology: claims about an antecedently specified set.
The hidden assumption is the ontological homogeneity thesis: all humans are of one ontological type. Martin notes that religious discourses of "a new being" after conversion, and even Husserl's Crisis remarks on "European Man" after the discovery of infinite idealities, press against that fiat. Modal operators then behave as in the stock example: "the tallest philosopher in the room is a philosopher" is necessary de dicto but contingent de re of Charles Taylor, Paul Churchland or Shaquille O'Neal.
Intensionalist model and Olafson's wavering
A pure intensionalist fixes the sense first: a being that questions being by questioning its own being (George Steiner's definition). Extension is then empirical and open. The analytic becomes de dicto: "Dasein is subject to moods" means beings with an understanding of being are one and all subject to moods. Olafson sometimes talks this way when he says that humans "prove to be" Dasein on Heidegger's analysis, a discovery that the extensionalist reading would make trivial.
Carman's transcendental strategy under pressure
Taylor Carman (see also Chapter 3) offers a transcendental reading: existentialia are conditions of the possibility of ontic experience. Martin worries that this strategy still needs a grip on which entity's conditions are being mapped, and that regressive transcendental arguments can smuggle the modal conclusions into the setup. When Carman addresses interpretation, he still needs an account of how the analytic's terms get determinate meaning without already assuming the ontology they establish.
Exemplar semantics in detail
Martin's preferred exemplar semantics models "Dasein" on natural-kind terms whose meaning is fixed by samples, not by a closed description. We start with ourselves (and those around us) as meaning-fixing exemplars of the kind of entity that has an understanding of being. Description of the exemplar yields features; modal claims then generalise from the ontological result ("From what has been said we can already see..."), fitting §29's order on Befindlichkeit better than a pure regressive deduction.
Two difficulties remain, which Martin treats as the right ones:
- Separating ontological from contingent features (the wedding ring is also round and bought in New York).
- The context of inquiry is dynamic: "gold" predates chemistry, and ontology has, for Heidegger, been forgotten.
Objections Martin registers
- "Human Dasein" appears (pp. 51, 198, 382, 401; often in Basic Problems), mostly in restrictive contexts about the human sciences: awkward for pure extensionalism (would be pleonastic), natural for intensionalist or exemplar readings.
- Substantialising Dasein. Ascribing properties is not Spinoza's substance ("in itself and conceived through itself"). A hammer has properties yet is what it is only in relation to other equipment.
- External tools. Kripkean semantics is a legitimate clarifying device; Heidegger's own formal indication and the existential/logical modality distinction still deserve more work than Martin gives them.
Modal objects: Husserl's contrast case
Wayne Martin contrasts Heidegger with Husserl's willingness to posit modal objects in the content of experience (a spatial object necessarily presents aspectivally; no experience presents a container larger inside than out). Heidegger's text is full of necessity-talk without Husserl's explicit modal ontology. That gap is Martin's problem: how do descriptive claims earn "must" and "would be impossible"?
The three semantic models change the logical form of every major thesis in BT. Extensionalism buys de re necessity about the human kind via ontological homogeneity (contested by conversion discourses and Husserl's own "European Man" remarks in the Crisis). Intensionalism buys de dicto necessity from the definition of Dasein and leaves dolphins, robots and Alpha Centaurians open. Exemplar semantics treats "Dasein" like a natural-kind term fixed by samples (ourselves), with inductive-phenomenological generalisation, and admits the hard problems: sorting ontological from contingent features, and the dynamic history of inquiry.
Martin: from modal problem to exemplar warrant.
Homogeneity thesis under pressure.
"Human Dasein" as a semantic clue
Martin notes the phrase "human Dasein" (BT pp. 51, 198, 382, 401; often in Basic Problems). Under pure extensionalism the phrase is nearly pleonastic. Under intensionalist or exemplar readings it is natural: it restricts attention to the human instance of a kind that might, in principle, have other instances. He also blocks the scare that ascribing properties "substantialises" Dasein into Spinoza's substance: a hammer has properties yet is what it is only in a equipmental nexus.
Kripkean tools are, for Martin, legitimate clarifiers. He still flags unfinished business: Heidegger's own formal indication and the distinction between existential and logical modality need more work than one chapter can give. Carman's transcendental strategy (Chapter 3) remains a live alternative Martin pressures but does not claim to have refuted on every front.
What each semantics settles in advance.
Why cartoons still matter
Martin admits his three models are "cartoons rather than fully elaborated portraits". The admission does not cancel the challenge. Even a cartoon semantics shows that readers already assume a logical form when they hear "Dasein must...". Companion users should exit the chapter able to say which model they are using when they quote a modal line from BT, and what warrant that model claims. Carman's dispute about transcendental reading is the internal cross-reference that keeps the cartoon from hardening into dogma.
Heidegger on Space and Spatiality
Descartes' two ideas of the sun
The spatiality sections close the long chapter on the worldhood of the world, right after Heidegger's critique of res extensa. Descartes, the geometer of Cartesian coordinates, made extension the essence of matter. In the Third Meditation he compares two ideas of the sun: from the senses it looks small; "astronomical reasoning" shows it several times larger than the earth, and reason judges the sensory idea the less faithful. The perceptual idea is perspectival and agent-centred; the astronomical idea factors out the reasoner's location entirely. That suits a disembodied mind, which at that stage of the Meditations does not even know it has a body.
Heidegger's strategy, as throughout Division I, is to show that the tradition's concepts are derivative ("founded") and pass over the phenomena that make them intelligible. He is not merely reversing Descartes' ranking. He denies that Dasein has "insideness", being enclosed by an extended container, at all, while keeping open "the kind of spatiality which is constitutive for Dasein". Cerbone's worry is that this exclusion is so strict that what remains may no longer be spatial.
Places and regions
The account begins well. Readiness-to-hand already implies closeness, but "every entity that is 'to hand' has a different closeness, which is not to be ascertained by measuring distances". At Cerbone's desk the keyboard must be under his hands, the chair against his back, the lamp just out of reach. Equipment "has its place, or else it 'lies around'". Places belong to regions, the "whither" that lets equipment belong somewhere.
How equipment gets its place: regions first, then places, then positions.
- Directions. "The 'above' is what is 'on the ceiling'; the 'below' is what is 'on the floor'." Three-dimensional space is "still veiled".
- Distance talk. Morgantown is "not far at all" to a Californian but "all the way in Morgantown" to Cerbone's son Henry; replacing either with "thirty-eight miles" loses the practical sense.
- The sun. It has its own places (sunrise, midday, sunset, midnight), defined by changes in the usability of its light and warmth. Heidegger has no urge to correct the everyday sun the way Descartes does.
De-severance and directionality
Next Heidegger grounds regional space in Dasein itself: equipment can be met in environmental space "only because Dasein itself is 'spatial'". Dasein's spatiality has two features: directionality (Stambaugh's term for orientation) and de-severance (Ent-fernung; Dreyfus: "dis-stance"; Stambaugh: "de-distancing"). "Dasein is essentially de-severant: it lets any entity be encountered close by as the entity which it is." This is not moving physically nearer, which animals or heat-seeking missiles can do, but bringing close by procuring, readying, having to hand, and even in "a purely cognitive manner".
Existential spatiality: nearness by concern, not by measured distance.
| Translation of Entfernung | Translator |
|---|---|
| De-severance | Macquarrie and Robinson |
| Dis-stance | Hubert Dreyfus |
| De-distancing | Joan Stambaugh |
Everyday estimates follow de-severances: "a good walk", "a stone's throw", "as long as it takes to smoke a pipe". New York is "not far" when flying from Pittsburgh, while a store two miles away is "too far" on an unsafe road; pointing out the inconsistency would be a feeble joke. Exact knowledge of distances "remains blind" unless it serves concern. Even the workshop ("measure twice, cut once") shows that measurement presupposes measuring: Dasein sets standards and tolerances, and "there is no such thing as exactitude in and of itself". An "eternal observer" exempt from Dasein could not measure.
Where the account goes wrong
Heidegger says that what is closest is what is "desevered to an average extent when we reach for it, grasp it, or look at it". So far, so worldly and public: rooms, aisles, sidewalks and even wheelchair ramps embody an average. Trouble comes when he ties closeness to attention.
Attention is an odd criterion, since skilful coping makes equipment transparent: on this test the hammer I am using would become remote because I no longer attend to it, contradicting Heidegger's earlier claim that closeness "regulates itself" by manipulating and using. Dreyfus, puzzled, merges the criteria: what is near is "that with which I am currently absorbedly coping". Cerbone replies that the two pull against each other: absorbed coping is precisely not noticing. And Heidegger allows purely cognitive closeness: reaching for a cup given by a friend in Paris, which is closer, cup or friend?
Not individualism but disembodiment
Dreyfus complained that §23 turns individualistic, abandoning public workshop space. Cerbone disagrees: as Jeff Malpas argues, any ontological structure must be instantiated by particular agents at particular locations, so some indexicality is harmless. The real problem is that Heidegger describes how public structure "emerges into salience" in mental terms (noticing, attending) rather than bodily ones (reaching, grasping, navigating). Attentional closeness is not publicly accessible as spatial, has no metric, and so cannot ground "the space of nature". If two people spot a friend across the street, is the friend closer than the pavement, and equally close to both? (And what if one is wearing heels?)
| Sense of proximity | Example | Public? | Metric? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bodily-practical | Hammer in hand, keyboard | Yes, average extent | Roughly |
| Attentional | Acquaintance twenty paces away | No | No |
| Cognitive | Friend in Paris | No | No |
| Measured | Thirty-eight miles | Yes | Yes |
The body that is missing
Heidegger says Dasein's "'bodily nature' hides a whole problematic of its own" and leaves it aside. Dreyfus even says that for Heidegger "the body is not essential", odd for a champion of coping. William Blattner detects "a subterranean form of dualism" between natural and self-interpreting characteristics. Didier Franck notes that Dasein must have hands for its being to be named being-at-hand.
Cerbone's diagnosis of the spatiality sections.
Descartes' two suns and the foundedness claim
Cerbone opens with Descartes' Third Meditation: the sensory sun looks small; astronomical reasoning makes it larger than the earth. Reason prefers the non-perspectival idea. That ranking suits a mind that does not yet know it has a body. Heidegger's §§22-24 reverse the order of founding: regions and places of concern come before measured positions. He is not merely flipping Descartes' preference; he denies that Dasein has "insideness" in an extended container at all, while still claiming a "kind of spatiality which is constitutive for Dasein".
Everyday distance talk proves the point: Morgantown is "not far" to a Californian and "all the way in Morgantown" to Cerbone's son; "thirty-eight miles" erases the practical sense. The sun has places (sunrise, midday, sunset, midnight) defined by usability of light and warmth. Heidegger feels no urge to "correct" the everyday sun.
Cerbone's diagnosis: spatiality without the body.
The attention paradox and subterranean dualism
Heidegger says what is closest is what is "desevered to an average extent" when we reach, grasp or look. Trouble starts when closeness tracks attention: the street one walks is "farther" than the friend one thinks of; spectacles on the nose are "more remote" than the picture on the wall. Cerbone's charge: once nearness is cognitive or attentional rather than bodily, de-severance stops being recognisably spatial. Animals and heat-seeking missiles can change metric distance; only Dasein "brings close" by concern, but without a phenomenology of the lived body the account floats free of embodiment. A "subterranean dualism" survives the critique of res extensa.
What a repaired account would need
Cerbone does not scrap regions and places; he wants them anchored in embodiment, later themes in Heidegger's Zollikon Seminars and in Merleau-Ponty. Measurement ("a good walk", "a stone's throw", workshop tolerances) already shows Dasein setting standards; an "eternal observer" could not measure. The missing step is showing how hands, gait, left/right and vulnerability constitute directionality, so that de-severance is not just another name for caring about something.
From lived nearness to metric distance.
Wheelchair ramps and average de-severance
Cerbone's most charitable reading of closeness to an "average extent" points to public embodiments: rooms, aisles, sidewalks and wheelchair ramps encode whose body is assumed. That is still worldly and spatial. The account goes wrong when attention overrides embodiment: thinking of a friend makes the street "far," while spectacles on the nose are "more remote" than the picture. A repaired phenomenology would keep average public spaces and restore the lived body as constitutive of directionality (left/right, reach, vulnerability), as Zollikon and Merleau-Ponty later urge.
Everyday distance talk Cerbone preserves.
Eternal observer cannot measure
Cerbone underlines Heidegger's remark that an "eternal observer" exempt from Dasein could not measure. Measurement presupposes concerns that set tolerances ("measure twice, cut once"). Exact knowledge of distances "remains blind" unless it serves concern. The moral for AI perception stacks: metric maps without a concern structure are not yet spatiality in BT's sense, even when they are excellent coordinate systems.
Being-with-Others
Losing oneself in the world
Descartes' Subject is a self-sufficient substance, "an entity which ... needs no other entity in order to be". Being and Time shows instead that in skilled coping Dasein "must forget itself" to "actually go to work". At this level there is no Subject: Dasein is "nothing but ... concerned absorption in the world" (GA 20). The world "withdraws" so we can act. But Heidegger's account of the social world is thin: "those among whom one is too" could still be a world of self-sufficient others, not selves absorbed into one another.
Moods: from personal to shared
In Being and Time, moods show "how one is, and how one is faring", an index of one's own life; Basic Problems (1927) calls mood being "affectively self-finding". Only in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30, given two years later) does Heidegger introduce shared attunements. A person in good humour "brings a lively atmosphere", another "puts a damper on everything": "attunements ... in advance determine our being with one another." Mood is "like an atmosphere in which we first immerse ourselves", so "we must dismiss the psychology of feelings, experiences, and consciousness". Heidegger notices that moods are "infectious" but, as a phenomenologist, does not explain how.
Moods spread between people before anyone reflects on them.
Merleau-Ponty's "miracle"
Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes this absorption: "It is precisely my body which perceives the body of another, and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions." But Merleau-Ponty admits that how intentionality could dwell in "masses of cells" "can never be made comprehensible". His description is plausible; the mechanism stays magical.
Mirror neurons
Dreyfus finds the missing mechanism in mirror neurons, discovered in monkeys by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese and colleagues (reported 1992). A neuron that fires when a monkey grasps a peanut also fires when it watches another monkey, or the experimenter, do the same. "Our motor system 'resonates' along with that of the observed agent", with no interpretation needed.
| Phenomenon | Mirror-neuron account |
|---|---|
| Echopraxia in dementia | "Release" of a normally inhibited covert simulation (Gallese) |
| Normal restraint | Motor system simulates while spinal signal is suppressed (Ramachandran) |
| Contagious yawning, laughter | Observed action triggers its repetition |
| Learning cultural meaning | Baby imitates the caretaker's loving smile and picks up its sense |
To avoid a purely reflex (empiricist) story, Dreyfus proposes that a caretaker answers a baby's reflex smile with a culturally meaningful smile, which the baby then mirrors, acquiring its meaning. V. S. Ramachandran predicted that mirror neurons would "do for psychology what DNA did for biology".
Odysseus' warning
Dreyfus denies that Dasein is always "experiencing": experiences are what we thematise in reflection. As Odysseus and Telemachus hide the suitors' weapons in perfect sync, Pallas Athena lights their way and Telemachus exclaims at the "white fire blazing". Odysseus replies: "Be still: keep still about it: just remember it." Turning the background into a figure stops it doing its work; attending to your skills makes you, at best, merely competent. Heidegger agrees: "We can never look upon the phenomenon of world directly."
Three functions of the one
Dreyfus translates das Man as "the one", not "the They": "one eats one's peas with a fork", and "one pays one's taxes" even if we or anyone might cheat the Internal Revenue Service.
The one (das Man) does three jobs in everyday life.
| Function | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Negative | Domination, distantiality, levelling of all possibilities (borrowed uncredited from Kierkegaard) | "Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated" |
| Neutral | Sly, unnoticed conformity to norms | Distance-standing: farther from someone with flu, closer in noise, softer in church |
| Positive | Articulates the referential context of significance | Shared background practices that make a common world |
The neutral case is the subtle one. Anthropologists codify distance norms (Dreyfus calls the field "proximics"; it is usually spelled proxemics), but the skill is endlessly flexible and learned without awareness, through our bodies mirroring others. "The more openly the 'one' behaves, the harder it is to grasp, and the slier it is." Heidegger, Dreyfus complains, fails to separate this neutral conformity from conformism, which levels and covers up our groundlessness.
The positive role surprises readers: "The 'one' is an existentiale; and as a primordial phenomenon, it belongs to Dasein's positive constitution", and "itself articulates the referential context of significance". None of this is "in any way conscious or intentional". Pierre Bourdieu makes the same point about body hexis: "The child imitates not 'models' but other people's actions", and embodied principles are "placed beyond the grasp of consciousness".
Dreyfus's route from Heidegger to neuroscience.
Being-with as structure, not empathy add-on
Hubert Dreyfus (with the chapter's framing) reads Mitsein as equiprimordial with being-in-the-world: others are not inferred from behaviour after a lonely subject is in place. The workshop already refers to the supplier, the user, the owner. Even solitude is a deficient mode of being-with. Empathy theories that start from my mind and tunnel to yours get the order wrong; they presuppose the shared world they try to build.
Das Man is the public intelligibility that levels: one does what one does. It is both enabling (norms, roles, average interpretation) and covering (disburdening of answerability). Authenticity does not exit Mitsein; it modifies how one takes over public possibilities.
From Mitsein to das Man and back to answerability.
Against the Cartesian other-minds setup
The skeptical "problem of other minds" assumes present-at-hand subjects sealed in cabinets of consciousness. Once the primary phenomenon is a shared practical world, the problem is relocated: breakdowns of understanding others are real (misreading a gesture, cultural opacity), but they are disturbances within Mitsein, not proofs that others were never there. Psychiatric and developmental cases (as the chapter's Update notes) can strain or reconfigure being-with without reinstating the Cartesian starting point.
Solicitude extremes inside Mitsein.
Distantiality and the who of everyday Dasein
Dreyfus's chapter keeps distantiality (Abständigkeit) in view: care about how one differs from others drives both leveling and distinction-seeking. The everyday who is das Man before it is an authentic self. Workshops, queues and traffic already refer to others; the "problem of other minds" is a theoretical deformation. Authentic being-with modifies solicitude (leaping ahead rather than leaping in) without exiting Mitsein.
Conformism without a conspirator
When "it was no one" who brought something about (127), responsibility dissolves without requiring a conspiracy. Dreyfus's point is structural: pure conformism yields group behaviour with no assignable agent. Authenticity re-personalises action against that background without denying that the background norms remain the only vocabulary of action available to take over.
Why Mood Matters
Moods open a space of mattering
Stimmung is, for Heidegger, a fundamental existentiale: we are always in some mood, and apparent moodlessness is an inconspicuous mood. Without mood we would not find ourselves in a world at all. Befindlichkeit has many translations; Ratcliffe rejects Macquarrie and Robinson's "state of mind" because moods are neither inner states nor features "out there", but a pre-subjective, pre-objective sense of belonging.
| Rendering of Befindlichkeit | Source |
|---|---|
| State of mind | Macquarrie and Robinson (1962) |
| Affectedness | Dreyfus |
| Attunement | Stambaugh (used by Ratcliffe) |
| Disposedness | Blattner |
| Sofindingness | Haugeland |
Belonging to a world means practical immersion, not spectating. In Ratcliffe's office the keyboard is woven into his typing; his shoes are functional but solicit nothing; the pile of student essays matters as an unappealing chore. Other things are urgent, threatening, boring or impossible, and a person entering opens possibilities such as conversation, love or shame. These significances form a holistic web. Moods do not settle that this pen is for writing; they settle which kinds of mattering are possible at all.
Mood thus constitutes the "being-in" of being-in-the-world and our thrownness: one can find a tiger threatening only within a mood that allows threat. People try to describe such shifts when jetlagged, hung over, exhausted or grief-stricken, and psychiatric illness makes them stark. In severe depression practical significance and connection with others can vanish, or threat can become the shape of all experience. Hamlet has "lost all my mirth", and the world is "a sterile promontory".
Mood, understanding and discourse
Mood, understanding and discourse are inseparable aspects of care. Division II says "the primary item in care is the 'ahead-of-itself'", suggesting that understanding has priority. Ratcliffe disagrees. Understanding decides whether a thing is significant here (a mallet is not enticing in brain surgery), but mood decides whether such significance can exist; mood shapes the possibility space in which understanding works. Discourse, too, is constrained by mood, while public interpretation "has already been decisive even for the possibilities of having a mood". Ratcliffe prefers a weak reading: interpretation disposes us against some moods without making them impossible, so the dependence is asymmetric.
Depth: from fear to boredom
Heidegger spends much time on fear, which looks like a focused emotion, not a mood. He analyses its object, the fearing and what we fear for (ourselves), notes its future orientation, and distinguishes alarm (sudden), dread (unfamiliar) and terror (both), plus timidity, shyness, misgiving and being startled. But he also names a background, "fearfulness", that "has already disclosed the world". Ratcliffe adds that the same background enables feelings of safety: an invulnerable being could feel neither safe nor unsafe.
Love for one's child and intense grief blur the line, since they are focused and yet "change one's world". Heidegger's analysis of three forms of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929-30) fits.
Hence the most "powerful" moods are those we are oblivious to. Other analyses fit the model: Richard Garrett distinguishes despair about a project, personal despair and philosophical despair; Anthony Steinbock separates disappointment (loss of a hope), hopelessness (hope still intelligible) and despair, "loss of the ground of hope".
Ratcliffe's strata of mood: each level opens or closes the possibilities the level above presupposes.
What makes a ground mood?
Heidegger singles out ground moods (Grundstimmungen), above all anxiety, in which "Dasein brings itself before itself". Everyday mood is evasion or falling; in anxiety significance falls away, "everyday familiarity collapses", and we can no longer misread ourselves as worldly things, which opens authentic self-understanding. "That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such."
Fear is "anxiety, fallen into the 'world'": fear of death fears the end of a worldly entity, missing "the possibility of the impossibility" of existing. Ratcliffe separates an inescapable disposition toward anxiety from rare occurrent anxiety, and proposes (avowedly revising Heidegger) that a ground mood is simply one that is a condition of possibility for other moods without presupposing a further mood. What illuminates philosophically is not being in a mood (anxiety "robs us of speech") but the contrast between moods; descent into depression rarely enlightens, though recovery might.
The neglected variety, and the body
Heidegger's short list of anxiety and boredom leaves out wonder or awe that there is something rather than nothing. English speakers usually call these states feelings: significance, estrangement, unreality, disconnection, familiarity, objectless dread, ecstasy. Ratcliffe names them existential feelings, partly because they involve bodily awareness, the feeling body through which we perceive (as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre show). Heidegger's bodily nature "hides a whole problematic of its own", and even the Zollikon Seminars (1959-69, with psychiatrist Medard Boss) say nothing about the bodily nature of mood.
This vagueness blurs the central concept. Gerrit Glas distinguishes forms of anxiety (painful disconnectedness, before death, before freedom, before meaninglessness), all present in Heidegger's account. As Blattner notes, Heideggerian anxiety resembles depression in the "total insignificance of the world" and in an awareness of loss, though it seems brief rather than enduring.
Is time more basic than mood?
Division II grounds care, including mood, in original temporality. Ratcliffe doubts it. Depressed people say "Time moves like treacle" (Sally Brampton), cannot remember what "ten in the morning" means, or report that past and future are "absorbed entirely by the present moment" (Andrew Solomon). Loss of significance is not a way of experiencing time but determines how time can be experienced. Perhaps mood and time are inextricable without either reducing to the other; a stronger claim would make mood more fundamental than time.
Mood before belief: the possibility space
Ratcliffe's central claim: a mood is not a coloured wash over pre-given objects but a condition of possibility for intentional states. "The mood has already disclosed ... being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something." Without mood we would not find ourselves among things that matter; apparent moodlessness is an inconspicuous mood. Befindlichkeit is poorly rendered as "state of mind" (Macquarrie and Robinson); Ratcliffe prefers Stambaugh's "attunement" among the options (affectedness, disposedness, sofindingness).
Understanding decides whether this mallet is enticing in brain surgery; mood decides whether practical significance is possible at all. Division II's priority for the "ahead-of-itself" does not, on Ratcliffe's reading, demote mood: the pursuit of possibilities already presupposes a mood-shaped space. Discourse is likewise constrained by mood, while public interpretation "has already been decisive even for the possibilities of having a mood". He prefers a weak reading: interpretation disposes us against some moods without making them impossible.
Depth theory and the three forms of boredom
A deeper mood is presupposed by a shallower one or renders it unintelligible. Fear's background "fearfulness" enables safety as well as threat; an invulnerable being could feel neither. Love and grief blur emotion/mood lines because they are focused yet world-changing.
Body, psychiatry and the revision of temporality
Ratcliffe pushes beyond BT by insisting on the lived body as a site of mood (contra Heidegger's relative silence in these sections) and by using psychiatric testimony: severe depression can erase practical significance and interpersonal connection, or make threat the shape of all experience. Hamlet's "sterile promontory" is a literary analogue. He also questions whether mood is as thoroughly grounded in temporality as Division II claims; some bodily and pathological shifts seem to reorganise time rather than merely express a prior temporal structure.
Ratcliffe: mood constrains understanding and discourse.
Shared moods and ground moods
Ratcliffe allows shared moods that are social without being identical with das Man's idle talk. A team's dread before a product launch, a city's grief after disaster, or an age's ground mood (Grundstimmung) in the later Heidegger can set what kinds of mattering are widely livable. Profound boredom in the 1929-30 lectures discloses beings as a whole when even the most engaging options go inert. That extends BT's anxiety-centred story without simply replacing it.
Fear still matters as the chapter's ladder rung: Heidegger analyses object, fearing, and fearing-for (ourselves), plus alarm, dread, terror, timidity, shyness, misgiving and being startled. Safety is the counterpart possibility an invulnerable being could not have.
Fear analysis items Ratcliffe retains.
Asymmetric dependence with public interpretation
Ratcliffe's weak reading of the line that public interpretation has been decisive for possible moods: das Man can dispose against some moods (making authentic anxiety harder to enter) without making them impossible. That keeps mood's primacy over the shape of the possibility space while still honouring falling. Strong readings that make publicness the total author of mood would erase psychiatric and grief-driven shifts that clearly outrun average intelligibility.
Heidegger on Human Understanding
Vertical versus horizontal
Pragmatist readers (Dreyfus, Blattner, Carman) arrange kinds of understanding vertically: skilful know-how is the foundation on which deliberate, conceptual acts rest. Wrathall accepts that some acts are founded on others, but says Heidegger's account is horizontal: each kind of understanding is a concretisation of one formal structure, and none needs to be derived from another. What makes one kind more "primordial" is only its centrality to the function of world disclosure.
Three theses
- Primacy of understanding over cognition. Understanding "is not an acquaintance derived from knowledge, but a primordially existential kind of being" that makes knowledge possible. Cognition becomes one mode of understanding, not its definition.
- Interpretation develops understanding. "This development of the understanding we call 'interpretation'. In it the understanding appropriates understandingly that which is understood by it."
- Interpretation is pervasive. "All prepredicative simple seeing of the available is in itself already understanding-interpreting"; Dasein always maintains itself "in a certain interpretedness". Even places ("the 'above' is what is 'on the ceiling'") are circumspectively interpreted.
Two errors turn these into an inconsistent triad: treating understanding as a discrete type of act, and treating interpretation as making explicit for cognition. Then: (1) coping is more basic than cognition; (2) interpretation brings understanding to cognition; (3) interpretation pervades all comportment. If interpretation is cognitive and pervasive, practice cannot be primary.
| School | Keeps | Gives up or weakens | Interpretation is... |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hermeneuticist (Gadamer, Ricoeur) | Pervasiveness (3) | Primacy of practice (1) | "The explicit form of understanding", linguistic |
| Pragmatist (Dreyfus, Blattner) | Primacy of practice (1) | Pervasiveness (3) | Deliberate, conceptual, propositional |
| Carman | Both, moderately | Full pervasiveness | Demonstrative showing (a shrug, a wrinkled nose) |
| Wrathall | All three | The cognitive reading of (2) | Enacting a commitment to possibilities |
Where the schools go wrong
Gadamer writes that "understanding is always interpretation", so language moves to "the center of philosophy". Ricoeur anchors language in orientation to a situation, but treats understanding as already linguistically articulated by tradition. Hermeneuticists thus read Being and Time as underrating language and see the later "turn to language" as Heidegger's correction.
Dreyfus divides understanding into coping, interpretation and assertion, with coping itself in three levels (manipulation, coping with the local background, coping with the world); interpretation arises "when a skill fails to suffice". (Wrathall notes Dreyfus mistakenly listed everyday coping as interpretation, an error Dreyfus confirmed in conversation.) For Blattner, interpretation is understanding "suffused with conceptuality", the line between "what can and cannot be expressed in assertion". Both must then gloss Heidegger's pervasiveness passages as being about understanding or cognition, which Wrathall calls a nonstarter: pre-predicative seeing cannot be propositionally articulated. Carman's "explicit" as demonstrative showing cannot explain why we would always be gesturing.
Understanding as projection
Understanding's function is to disclose in advance the relations that make entities what they are and to place us among them with familiarity. Its structure is projection: "The projection character of understanding constitutes ... the disclosedness of its there as a there of an ability to be", opening a leeway (Spielraum) of possible ways to be. Unlike "pure apprehension", projection does not terminate in an object; it carries us "out and away" from it.
Understanding projects possibilities; interpretation works them out.
Projection is recursive: we understand a baseball bat by projecting it onto the rules of baseball, the rules onto bats, balls and pitches, and ultimately everything onto time. It is also thrown: a bat affords very different possibilities to Albert Pujols than to Wrathall. Dasein projects "both upon its 'for-the-sake-of-which' and upon significance". And projection keeps possibilities open: being diverted into one "does not lay aside" the others. It is "not a mode of cognition but the basic determination of existing": absorbed in work, "I move in the in-order-to". Even theorising moves in an open field of affordances.
Understanding and interpretation as Wrathall reconstructs them; enriched understanding feeds new projection.
Interpretation as enactment
Interpretation is "the working-out [Ausarbeitung] of possibilities projected in understanding", not "the acquiring of information". Committed possibilities "exert a counter-thrust" that makes us develop our skills. Wrathall distinguishes three moments: working out (carrying out), development (Ausbildung) (refining what the world affords), and expressness (lifting a relation into salience). Note the repeated aus- ("out"): carrying out, making out, laying out. Wrathall links it to "exact", from Latin ex-agere, to drive out to completion.
Interpretation comes in many forms. Gadamer's typology gives cognitive (criticism), normative (legal application) and reproductive (performance) interpretation, crossed with Heidegger's thematic and circumspective modes.
| Form | Thematic example | Circumspective example |
|---|---|---|
| Normative | An umpire calls a strike | A soccer player holds his run to stay onside |
| Reproductive | Performing a play or score | Pujols taking the field as a first baseman, in his own way |
Expressness (Ausdrücklichkeit) is broader than explicitness. A pitcher throwing to first to check the runner expresses one affordance without making it explicit. "The 'as' makes up the structure of the expressness of what is understood": the as-structure is the structure of affordances, the desk showing up as for writing.
Pervasive, but not total
So some interpretation is present in every worldly action, yet never exhausts the world, since unchosen possibilities stay open. The hermeneutic circle here is not textual: taking a stand develops possibilities and so enriches understanding. Everyday interpretation follows "the 'one'", which restricts options to "the familiar, the attainable, the respectable". This is the truth in the hermeneuticist view: we inherit a world already interpreted by our community.
The inconsistent triad in full
Wrathall's diagnosis turns on two errors that convert Heidegger's three theses into an inconsistent triad:
- Primacy of practice: coping (know-how) is more basic than cognition (knowing that).
- Interpretation brings understanding to cognition.
- Interpretation pervades understanding-comportment.
If interpretation is necessarily cognitive and also pervasive, practice cannot be primary. Hermeneuticists (Gadamer, Ricoeur) keep (3) and soften (1): "understanding is always interpretation", so language moves to "the center of philosophy". Ricoeur anchors language in orientation to a situation but still treats understanding as already linguistically articulated by tradition; BT then looks as if it underrated language until the later turn. Pragmatists (Dreyfus, Blattner) keep (1) and soften (3): interpretation arises "when a skill fails to suffice" and is deliberate, conceptual, propositional. Dreyfus's vertical ladder runs coping (manipulation / local background / world) then interpretation then assertion; Wrathall notes Dreyfus once listed everyday coping under interpretation, an error Dreyfus confirmed in conversation. Blattner draws the line at "what can and cannot be expressed in assertion". Carman keeps both theses moderately by reading "explicit" as demonstrative showing (a shrug, a wrinkled nose), which cannot explain why we would always be gesturing.
How schools break the triad; Wrathall keeps all three.
Projection as "apprehending x by looking at y"
Understanding's function is to disclose in advance the relations that make entities what they are and to place us among them with familiarity. Its structure is projection: "The projection character of understanding constitutes ... the disclosedness of its there as a there of an ability to be", opening a Spielraum of possible ways to be. Unlike "pure apprehension", projection does not terminate in an object; it carries us "out and away" from it. Wrathall's film-projector image: you see the film not by staring at the reel but by looking away to the image it throws on the screen. We understand a thing better the more transparently we see through to what it affords.
Projection is recursive: a baseball bat is understood by projecting it onto the rules of baseball, the rules onto bats, balls and pitches, and ultimately everything onto time. It is thrown: the same bat affords different possibilities to Albert Pujols than to Wrathall. Dasein projects "both upon its 'for-the-sake-of-which' and upon significance". Projection keeps possibilities open: being diverted into one "does not lay aside" the others. It is "not a mode of cognition but the basic determination of existing": absorbed in work, "I move in the in-order-to".
Fore-structure and the as-structure
Interpretation has a fore-structure: fore-having (Vorhabe), fore-sight (Vorsicht) and fore-conception (Vorgriff). The "as-structure" is not first a propositional "S is P" but the affordance-as of circumspection: the door as to-be-opened, the hammer as for-driving. Assertion later reinterprets the available as occurrent by picking out a subject, predicating a property and communicating a judgment. Wrathall's point against both schools: if interpretation is the enactment that commits to some projected possibilities and works them out, it can pervade coping without being cognitive, and cognition can remain a founded mode.
Pervasive but not total
Interpretation is pervasive in the sense that Dasein always maintains itself "in a certain interpretedness", yet not every moment is a deliberate laying-out. Enriched understanding feeds new projection: after I have interpreted this door, the next unfamiliar door already shows up within a thicker fore-having. The account is horizontal: each kind of understanding (tool use, conversation, theory, self-understanding) is a deformalised version of one structure, ranked only by centrality to world disclosure, not by a foundation-to-superstructure ladder.
Assertion as a late deformalisation
On Wrathall's horizontal map, assertion is not the goal of all understanding but one deformalisation among others. The as-structure of circumspection can become the "S is P" of a judgment when entities are re-interpreted as occurrent. Hermeneuticists who put language at the centre and pragmatists who quarantine interpretation to breakdown both mis-locate assertion: it is real, founded and powerful, yet not the measure of projection.
Horizontal deformalisations of one structure.
Thrown projection and unequal affordances
Projection is thrown: the same baseball bat affords a different possibility space to Albert Pujols than to a weekend player. Skills, stature, history and aims are not extras; they are how disposedness loads projection. Wrathall's horizontal thesis still holds: the structure is shared even when the deformalisations diverge wildly. Interpretation enacts a commitment inside that loaded space; it does not invent the load from scratch.
Why Carman's shrug is not enough
Taylor Carman's demonstrative reading of "explicit" (shrug, wrinkled nose) tries to keep pervasiveness without full cognitivising. Wrathall's objection: we are not always gesturing. Enactment of projected possibilities can be entirely unthematic and still count as interpretation in Heidegger's sense. That preserves the triad: practice remains primary, interpretation develops understanding, and interpretation pervades comportment without becoming a commentary track.
Fore-structure of interpretation.
Heidegger's Pragmatic-Existential Theory of Language and Assertion
Reference before meaning
Heidegger discusses reference (Verweisung) before he discusses language. Equipment (Zeug) is what it is only within a totality: a spatula scrapes a bowl of batter for a cake for a school fundraiser, and so on. Reference constitutes this holistic structure, which gets its meaning from Dasein's projects. We are usually absorbed in it, like driving home without knowing how; breakdowns (an engine light, running a stop sign) make the referential whole visible.
Serviceability is "the condition ... which makes it possible for the character of such an entity to be defined by its appropriatenesses". Appropriateness depends on thing, user and task: a whisk of metal or bamboo works, one of clay or chocolate does not; a right-handed spatula frustrates a left-hander. This blocks idealist readings: what works depends on how the world is. Appropriateness also has a normative sense, how a thing is "supposed" to be used, and an etymological link to appropriation.
Signs are the paradigm of reference. A car's turn-signal arrow belongs to the totality "traffic" and also points, representing the driver's intention, a tool of communication like Wittgenstein's builders. Heidegger lists indicators and markers as signs, distinct from symbols and expressions, yet words often function as signs: "STOP", anaphora, indexicals like "this". German zeigen means both to point and to show, linking pointing to disclosure.
| Term | Fultner's gloss |
|---|---|
| Verweisung (reference) | Relations constituting the equipmental totality |
| Bedeutsamkeit (significance) | The relational whole of signifyings |
| Bedeutungen (significations) | Articulable meanings, made possible by significance |
| Sprache (language) | The totality of words: discourse's "worldly being" |
| Rede (discourse) | The existential articulation of intelligibility |
Because significance is holistic and makes significations possible, language is holistic too. Heidegger counters the reification of meanings and prefigures the later Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson.
Assertion as derivative
We always meet things as something (tables, doors, bridges), never as bare objects: the hermeneutic "as"-structure. "Simple seeing of the things closest to us ... bears in itself the structure of interpretation"; merely staring at something is "a form of no-longer-understanding". Children experience a meaningful world long before they can speak. Assertion is meaningful, but not the primary locus of meaning.
Assertion as a derivative mode of interpretation.
Fultner contrasts an articulatory view (language as a code that puts pre-existing meanings into words unchanged, a variant of instrumentalism) with a transformative view (articulating the implicit changes the background of significance). At least a weak transformative view must hold for Heidegger. He analyses assertion for two reasons: to show how the as-structure is modified, and because the tradition makes assertion "the primary and authentic 'locus' of truth", which he wants to ground in disclosure (aletheia). His word Aussage (statement, testimony), rather than Satz, stresses use over abstract propositions in the manner of Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein.
Assertion remains interpretation, presupposing fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception. It is derivative because it distances us from absorbed coping: "Fore-sight aims at something present-at-hand in the ready-to-hand." The "as" is levelled from the hermeneutic as of circumspection to the apophantic as of propositional judgment. This has an advantage, detached contemplation, but no assertion captures pure presence-at-hand, since words belong to a holistic language tied to our interests. As Robert Brandom says, the move is "not one of decontextualization, but of recontextualization". Assertions let us talk about absent things and spread knowledge, as Mark Okrent stresses.
A continuum, not a dichotomy
"This hammer is too heavy" is hardly a theoretical statement. One might say "Too heavy!" or just grab a smaller hammer. Compare "This hammer weighs 567 g", which is relatively indifferent to Dasein's purposes. A running commentary ("The spatula cleans the sides of the bowl nicely") fits absorbed coping. What matters is the function of an utterance, not its grammar; we use language absorbedly until something disturbs it, like the monolingual speaker who just talks louder.
Language use on a continuum from practical talk to detached assertion.
Fultner: language moves between two poles.
Communication brings a risk too. Assertions can be repeated without the original context, like a game of telephone, producing unjustified claims and idle talk. That the norms of speech can be violated is what makes them norms rather than laws.
Language and discourse
"The existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse", equiprimordial with attunement and understanding. Discourse "is the articulation of intelligibility"; language is "the way in which discourse is put into words", the totality of words that can be met as ready-to-hand. This is not Saussure's langue: breaking utterances into "word-things that are present-at-hand" destroys language.
The original sense of logos is speech: "The human being shows itself as the entity which talks." Talking is prior to rationality and does not privilege asserting: discourse is "assenting or refusing, demanding, warning, pronouncing, consulting or interceding ... or 'making assertions'". This anticipates speech-act theory, though Heidegger grounds semantics ontologically, which is why "talk is most primordially disclosed in silence". Discourse makes being-with explicit, so language is essentially shared. Its moments are what is talked about, what is said, communication and manifestation (Bekundung), an analysis that prefigures Habermas.
Language like the body
Asked whether language is ready-to-hand equipment, Dasein, or neither, Fultner answers both, and neither. Unlike computers or wheels, which we might never have invented, language is not contingent: we cannot put it down. Nor is it Dasein: it has no projects or consciousness. "We are linguistic beings just as we are embodied ones": we did not invent either, yet we adapt both to our purposes.
Assertion's three moments and the continuum
Barbara Fultner reads Heidegger's theory of language as pragmatic-existential: reference and use precede meaning construed as freestanding propositional content. Assertion (Aussage) is a derivative mode of interpretation with three moments:
- Pointing out (Aufzeigen): picking an entity out of the referential totality.
- Predication: determining it as such-and-such, which narrows the as-structure.
- Communication: speaking forth so that others can share the disclosedness.
Each step moves from the available toward the occurrent. A hammer "too heavy" said while working still rides on circumspection; the same words in a physics lab reify mass. Fultner insists on a continuum, not a clean dichotomy: everyday talk slides along the gradient; logic and science push toward maximally occurrent assertion without ever fully escaping worldhood.
From discourse to assertion on Fultner's continuum.
Language like the body
Fultner likens language to embodiment: we do not first have meanings and then clothe them in words; "to significations, words accrue" (BT 161). Discourse (Rede) is equiprimordial with disposedness and understanding; language (Sprache) is its worldly expression. Hearing and keeping silent are modes of discursive disclosedness alongside speaking. The later Heidegger's elevation of language does not, on her reading, simply reverse BT; it radicalises the claim that articulation is not an optional add-on to a mute coping.
Against a pure speech-act transplant
Fultner engages speech-act and inferentialist vocabularies (Austin, Brandom) as clarifying tools while resisting a full transplant. Heidegger's "communication" is sharing disclosedness within Mitsein, not primarily the transfer of mental contents. Norms of assertion arise from the world's significance and from das Man's average intelligibility; they are not grounded first in a scorekeeping game and only then applied to tools.
Idle talk as linguistic falling
Idle talk is Rede uprooted from first-hand uncovering. It is not "mere chatter" as a moral failing but the default public way language circulates: one understands because "one" has already interpreted. Curiosity and ambiguity have linguistic faces (novelty-seeking discourse; undecidable genuine/sham talk). Authentic discourse tends toward reticence and Situation-specific saying, not maximal explicitness.
Hearing, silence and Mitsein
Fultner's discourse includes hearing and keeping silent as modes alongside speaking. Silence can be richer disclosedness than chatter; hearing is not passive reception of noises but discursive attunement to what is said and unsaid in a shared world. That blocks both a metaphysics of inner speech as the essence of Rede and a behaviourism that counts only audible tokens.
Assertion's three moments on the continuum.
Words accrue to significations
The slogan "to significations, words accrue" (BT 161) reverses folk semantics. Meanings are not first inner items waiting for labels; articulated significance is primary, and lexical items hitch to it. Fultner uses that to explain why translation, jargon drift and empty buzzwords are ontological issues: when words detach from first-hand uncovering, idle talk is already underway.
Logic and science on the far end
Fultner places logic and theoretical science at the far end of the assertion continuum: maximally occurrent subject-predicate structure, still never fully worldless. Enterprise modelling languages and knowledge graphs sit near that end. They uncover rigorously and also cover over the available practices they abstract from. Idle talk is the failure mode in the middle: neither first-hand circumspective talk nor disciplined theory.
The Empire of Signs: Heidegger's Critique of Idealism in Being and Time
The neo-Kantian background
At Davos in 1929 Ernst Cassirer confessed, "I must confess that I have found a neo-Kantian here in Heidegger." Heidegger had taken his doctorate in 1913 under Heinrich Rickert of the Freiburg (Southwest) school, but he fought the Marburg School hard. He even claimed that "Husserl himself fell into the clutches of neo-Kantianism between 1900 and 1910." Gordon notes that Heidegger's animosity may also have been fed by extra-philosophical prejudice: Marburg's founder Hermann Cohen was a German Jew and a democratic socialist.
| Figure | Key work | Doctrine Heidegger targets |
|---|---|---|
| Hermann Cohen | Logic of Pure Knowledge (1902) | "We begin with thought": pure thought alone generates knowledge; the thing-in-itself is abolished; the infinitesimal "principle of origins" (Ursprungsprinzip) produces reality from negation |
| Ernst Cassirer | Substance and Function (1910) | Science moves from substance to functional relations among signs: "The lawfulness of the real means ... nothing more ... than the reality of the laws" |
| Heidegger | Being and Time §§17-18 (1927) | Relations "lurk" in involvements; they resist "mathematical functionalization" |
In short, the neo-Kantians wanted to replace ontology with an idealistic relationism among signs, grounded in a priori cognition. That theory is Heidegger's foil.
Why discuss signs at all?
The world is a referential totality (Verweisungsganzheit), understood by circumspection rather than by staring. Signs (signposts, boundary stones, the mariner's storm ball, the car's turn arrow) look like a convenient model of reference as such. But Heidegger quickly blocks this: all equipment refers, but not all equipment indicates. A hammer is understood in hammering, not as "indicating" a house to be built.
Signs in Being and Time: equipment that shows the referential whole.
Gordon's answer is that signs are the limit case most open to an idealist reading. An arrow is just a triangle on a line unless someone takes it as pointing, so reference might seem to be added by thought. Heidegger replies that indication is "not a sort of bonus over and above what is already present-at-hand." The farmer's south wind as a sign of rain is met "as equipment which has not been understood", not as a bare occurrent thing later interpreted; a knot in a handkerchief works only within everyday concern.
The fetish digression
Heidegger then turns to "primitive Dasein", which may show phenomena "less concealed and less complicated by extensive self-interpretation", a premise shared with Durkheim's Elementary Forms (1912). He concludes that fetishism and magic are inapt examples: in the fetish "the sign coincides with that which is indicated", because the sign "has not as yet become free" from what it signifies.
Gordon's reading: two failures on either side of articulated reference.
"Pure thinking" in scare quotes
At the end of §18 Heidegger voices the worry: has the "substantial Being" of entities "been volatilized into a system of Relations", and, since relations are "something thought", dissolved "into 'pure thinking'"? The scare quotes point at Cohen. His answer is that the in-order-to, the for-the-sake-of and the with-which "resist any sort of mathematical functionalization; nor are they merely something thought". Against Cassirer he adds: "Functional concepts are never possible except as formalized substantial concepts." On this view neo-Kantianism starts from decontextualized substances, formalizes them, and ends with a world that is nothing but an empire of signs.
An inverted idealism?
In "What Is Metaphysics?" (1929), anxiety dissolves the referential whole: "The nothing is the origin of negation, not vice versa". This directly reverses Cohen's principle of origins: "the idea of 'logic' itself disintegrates." What remains is "pure Da-sein". Gordon calls this a mirror image of the idealism Heidegger rejected: bare existence, cut off from the world, revealed as the ground of Being.
Davos, Cohen's Ursprungsprinzip and Cassirer's functions
Gordon situates §§17-18 against the Marburg School. At Davos in 1929, Cassirer said he had found "a neo-Kantian" in Heidegger. Cohen's Logic of Pure Knowledge (1902) begins with thought: the thing-in-itself is abolished; the infinitesimal "principle of origins" (Ursprungsprinzip) produces reality from negation. Cassirer's Substance and Function (1910) moves science from substance to functional relations among signs: "The lawfulness of the real means ... nothing more ... than the reality of the laws." Heidegger's counter: the in-order-to, for-the-sake-of and with-which "resist any sort of mathematical functionalization"; nor are they "merely something thought". "Functional concepts are never possible except as formalized substantial concepts."
Gordon's foil: from Marburg signs to BT involvements.
Why the south wind and the handkerchief knot
The farmer's south wind as sign of rain is met "as equipment which has not been understood", not as a bare occurrent later interpreted. A knot in a handkerchief works only within everyday concern. The car's turn arrow looks like a pure "triangle on a line" until use shows indication is "not a sort of bonus over and above what is already present-at-hand." Signs are the limit case most open to idealist capture; Heidegger blocks that capture by embedding indication in the referential totality.
Fetish, inflation and deflation
The digression on "primitive Dasein" and fetishism (shared premise with Durkheim's Elementary Forms, 1912) sets a deflationary failure-mode: sign and signified coincide, so there is no articulated reference. Neo-Kantian idealism is the inflationary opposite: discrete present-at-hand bits linked only by thought. Gordon's aphorism: the fetish worshipper is an uncomprehending idealist, and the modern idealist a sophisticated fetish worshipper. Heidegger must occupy the middle: an articulated world that is neither.
Kant's Refutation as the ghost in the machine
Gordon hears Kant's Refutation of Idealism (B274-9) behind the polemic: entities remain independent; only Being depends on the understanding of Being. Disclosure by involvement is not ontic dependence. Yet "What Is Metaphysics?" (1929) reverses Cohen: anxiety dissolves the referential whole; "The nothing is the origin of negation, not vice versa"; "the idea of 'logic' itself disintegrates"; what remains is "pure Da-sein". Gordon names this a mirror-image idealism of bare existence.
"What Is Metaphysics?" as the mirror image
Gordon's sting is chronological: BT §§17-18 fight Marburg functionalisation by embedding signs in concern; the 1929 inaugural lecture then dissolves the referential whole in anxiety and declares "The nothing is the origin of negation, not vice versa". The scare quotes around Cohen's thinking-first programme return as a phenomenology that can look like bare-existence idealism. Readers should hold both moments without forcing a false reconciliation.
Inflation and deflation of the sign.
Functional concepts as formalized substantial concepts
Heidegger's line, "Functional concepts are never possible except as formalized substantial concepts," is Gordon's wedge against Cassirer. Relations among signs that claim to replace involvement still smuggle a substantial world they claim to have overcome. §§17-18 try to show indication lurking in use before any such formalisation. Whether that escape from idealism succeeds remains Gordon's open verdict.
Durkheim parallel without anthropology cosplay
Gordon notes the shared premise with Durkheim's Elementary Forms (1912): "primitive" religion as a clue to representation. Heidegger's fetish digression is philosophical, not fieldwork. The critical-lens risk is exoticising; the intended payoff is structural: coincidence of sign and signified as the deflationary failure-mode opposite Marburg inflation.
Heidegger on Skepticism, Truth, and Falsehood
The "scandal of philosophy"
Kant called it "a scandal of philosophy and of human reason in general" that no cogent proof of external things had been given. Heidegger inverts the charge: the scandal "is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again". External-world scepticism is a "sham" problem (GA 20), posed only by someone who starts from the "isolated subject" and then wonders how it gets out of its inner "sphere".
Heidegger declines to offer a proof. He builds an ontology in which no such subject and sphere exist, and when told he has merely "nullified the problem of knowledge" he asks "what authority decides whether ... there is supposed to be a problem of knowledge?" McManus grants that the Cartesian picture is not adopted for nothing. Dreams, errors, the evil demon and the brain in a vat seem to show, in Ernst Tugendhat's words, that "our relation to beings is a specifically mediate one". So the burden is to show why there is no problem.
Heidegger distrusted proof by argument here, since any argument would have to use the very terms that embody the confusion. His charge is that the Cartesian ontology is "indefinite", the product of "ontological indifference". The deep complaint is not that it breeds scepticism but that it cannot explain intentionality, the power of belief to represent and, above all, to misrepresent the world.
Sein-bei and the reply from error
"Knowing is a mode of Dasein founded upon being-in-the-world." Our being is Sein-bei entities, a phrase with no clean English equivalent (roughly French chez). The renderings matter, as McManus later shows:
| Translator | Rendering of Sein-bei |
|---|---|
| Macquarrie and Robinson (Being and Time) | being-alongside |
| GA 20 translation (Kisiel) | being-involved-with |
| GA 21 translation (Sheehan) | being-familiar-with, being-at-home-with |
| Hubert Dreyfus | being-amidst |
The Cartesian will naturally point to error. Heidegger answers that delusion and error, where "no relationship of being to the entity is secured", are "once again only modes of Sein-bei" (GA 20). The sceptic's question about the whole world is then "a misunderstanding of the very questioning", since questioning presupposes a being already in the world. Heidegger's model is Aristotle, for whom "knowledge of that world is not a problem". Book Theta of the Metaphysics separates the synthetic truth and falsehood of propositions about composite entities from our grasp of simple asyntheta, where the only failure is "not-apprehending" and success is thigein, "touching", with "no distance". Daniel Dahlstrom calls this reading of Aristotle "audacious" and even "rapacious".
Three conditions of falsehood
The 1925-6 Logik lectures (GA 21) give Heidegger's fullest account. Walking in a dark wood, he declares of a bush, "It's a deer." Even this false statement is "grounded in a prior knowledge".
What a false assertion presupposes, in McManus's reading.
McManus notes a vacillation in the first condition. The natural reading makes the "something given" the bush, which fits John McDowell's idea of object-dependent thought: with no object, as when Heidegger imagines hallucinating "an automobile being driven through the room", no proposition is expressed at all. Yet Heidegger slides to world-dependence: "Always already there is a priori disclosure of world", and "I have to be moving in the forest, ... or if not in the forest then someplace else". The upshot: to believe falsely, one must grasp the kind of entity, the kind of circumstances, and the range of alternatives those circumstances allow.
McManus's route from falsehood to Heidegger's deeper notion of truth.
Truth, and why the familiarity counts as truth
The traditional conception places truth in assertion and makes its essence "agreement" with an object. Heidegger calls this "by no means ... primary": assertion is grounded in Dasein's disclosedness, the "most primordial 'truth'", the condition for assertions being true or false. The three conditions identify a familiarity with the world that any true or false claim presupposes. That familiarity cannot be read off the world, because it is what makes seeing that things are thus-and-so possible. Hence "Dasein is 'in the truth'" (§44): we "live constantly in this state of letting-things-encounter-us". Tugendhat's question remains open: why call this truth at all?
Two models of pre-propositional understanding
The familiar model is "practical and economic": we work with tools, and propositional awareness enters only when the tool breaks. McManus thinks this is not Heidegger's best thought. It invites the objection that it is a mere "genetic" story about the order of discovery, not about what belief is, and Heidegger himself protested: "It never occurred to me ... to try and claim ... that the essence of man consists in the fact that he knows how to handle knives and forks or uses the tram" (GA 29/30).
McManus's own model is measurement. A child learning to say "two meters long" must learn to lay a ruler straight, check that it does not bend or slip, and care about such failures. Without that mastery a person may see objects that are two meters long but not see them as two meters long. The model draws on Heidegger's remarks that observation and science require mastery of a "praxis".
Falsehood and error as founded modes
The model maps onto the three conditions. Prior having becomes facility with a practice and familiarity with the "ways" of its objects. Envisioning and alternatives become the determinate range of answers, four, five or six meters, never "a deer" or "the Shah of Iran". Greek pseudos fits too: a failed measurement does not yield nothing but covers over, presenting the length as other than it is.
Actual errors still need explaining. In the 1923-4 lectures (GA 17) the world deceives by its "circumstantial character", things being given in more than one way, and by its "elusive character", "obscured by fog, darkness and the like". McManus reads this practice by practice: fading light hinders judging colours but not weights; one's own temperature skews estimates of temperature but not of pitch. Heidegger adds that "the more concretely I am in the world, the more genuine the existence of deception". McManus glosses this as competing demands: we bodge a measurement because we cannot afford a decent thermometer, or guess a length because other commitments leave no time.
Being-in-the-world and scepticism revisited
On the skill model, understanding no longer seems to "lie within". Skills are worldly, and a skill one could never apply is no skill at all. As with McDowell's demonstratives, losing the general "touch" of the world leaves no inner agent with false beliefs, only an "utter inability to apprehend". Heidegger's Habilitation (GA 1) already said that without a first moment of clearness "thinking stands still". So the world must reveal itself "insofar as I am at all", and the presupposition of truth "has been 'made' already with the Being of the 'we'".
McManus thinks Heidegger anticipates Wittgenstein's language-games, Hilary Putnam's division of linguistic labour and McDowell, pressing the Cartesian to explain how inner states could be "anything but dark". Appeal to intrinsic intentionality starts to look like a "magical theory of reference". His closing suggestion explains the sceptic's appeal: cognitive tools withdraw like a hammer in use, so our dependence on practices is not part of the "phenomenal content" of experience. That is exactly why we can imagine keeping our thoughts as brains in vats.
Truth as uncovering, not correspondence first
Denis McManus reconstructs Heidegger's account of truth (aletheia as uncovering) without treating it as a dismissal of propositional truth. Assertion can be true or false only because Dasein is already in a world where entities can be uncovered or covered over. The "locus of truth" is Dasein's disclosedness; judgments inherit truth from that more primordial uncovering. Skepticism that demands a proof of the external world from inside a cabinet of consciousness has already skipped the phenomenon of being-in-the-world.
McManus on truth, falsity and the skeptical demand.
Falsity, semblance and falling
Falsity is not a bizarre mirror of a freestanding true proposition; it is a mode of covering-over that still depends on disclosedness. Semblance, distraction and idle talk show how the Anyone circulates an average uncoveredness that can block fresh uncovering. McManus keeps room for scientific and logical truth as rigorous founded modes, not as the enemy of phenomenology.
Untruth's three faces in the overview's wake
McManus's chapter pairs with Wrathall's overview on untruth: false belief, misuse/incompetence, and inauthenticity each cover over in a different register. Keeping them distinct prevents collapsing Heidegger into either "all truth is subjective" or "only science is true". Semblance is the everyday middle where average uncoveredness circulates without fresh contact with the entity.
Founding order for truth claims.
Realism without the cabinet
McManus preserves a realist impulse: entities are not created by judgment. What phenomenology denies is that the primary access to them is a representation inside a sealed subject. Once being-in-the-world is primary, correspondence theories can be relocated as accounts of a founded success (assertion matching how an entity has been uncovered), not as the definition of truth itself. Falsity remains possible and serious inside that order of founding.
Appropriation against semblance
McManus converges with the overview's closing on truth: authenticity requires continually appropriating what has been uncovered "against semblance and disguise" (222). That is an epistemic and existential discipline at once. Skeptical scenarios that begin by discarding the world discard the only place where uncovering and covering-over make sense.
Death and Demise in Being and Time
Why the topic stays contested
Thomson names four sources of controversy. Heidegger's terminology is obscure where it looks technical ("the possibility of the impossibility of existence in general") and misleading where it looks ordinary ("death", "demise", "possibility"). The topic is central: John Haugeland calls death "the fulcrum of Heidegger's entire ontology", because it discloses futurity, the first horizon of originary temporality, and because authenticity cannot be understood without it.
The third problem is method. Phenomenology asks readers to test descriptions against their own experience, but the experience at issue, "real" or authentic anxiety, is "rare" and hard to endure; Heidegger concedes the demand is "a fantastically unreasonable demand" (eine phantastische Zumutung). The first existentialist readers, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre, did test Heidegger against their own experience; Thomson thinks later scholarship's quest for objectivity, and perhaps distance from Heidegger's Nazism, made it step back from that kind of immanent critique. Fourth, the literature is polarised.
| Camp | "Death" means | Representatives |
|---|---|---|
| First (larger) | Ordinary ending: demise, decease, mortality | Paul Edwards, Piotr Hoffman, Stephen Mulhall |
| Second (smaller) | Global collapse of significance, as in depression | William Blattner |
| Second | Collapse of an understanding of being, as in a scientific paradigm shift | John Haugeland |
| Second | End of a historical world that lets a new epoch begin | Carol J. White |
Hoffman's protest sums up the first camp: "Up cannot mean down; black cannot mean white, and death cannot mean something that you can live through!" Thomson's goal is to show how Heidegger moves from demise to death without either conflating them (camp one) or treating them as heterogeneous (camp two).
Perishing, demising, dying
The key passage, which Thomson calls P1 (BT 247), separates three terms we normally use interchangeably:
Three senses of ending that Being and Time keeps apart.
- Perishing (Verenden). The ending of anything that merely lives; "Dasein never perishes", since describing Dasein's end in terms drawn from worldless objects is a category mistake. Thomson's slogan: "Pears perish, but Daseins demise and die."
- Demise (Ableben). The "intermediate phenomenon": the experienced terminal collapse of one's intelligible world that accompanies biological perishing, if one is awake and it is not too sudden. Someone who perishes in dreamless sleep ceases to be without demising.
- Dying (Sterben). The way of being in which Dasein is toward its death (Tod). "Demising ... is something Dasein can do only so long as it dies."
Against Jacques Derrida, "Dasein never perishes" does not mean "I never end", whether as Epicurus's consolation or as Kierkegaard's and Blanchot's lament. Heidegger thinks Dasein can experience its own end, and that experience is what he calls death. Demise carries Epicurus's paradox ("When I am, death is not, and when death is, I am not"): an "Erleben" des Ablebens, a "living-through of ceasing to live", is absurd. If death were only demise, Dasein could never grasp itself as a whole: before demise its projects stretch into an unknown future; after it, Dasein is no longer here. Heidegger's way out is a death one can live through: "Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is" (245), and Dasein "does not have to" die with an experience of its factical demising (247).
Böhme, Kierkegaard and the secularised conversion
Heidegger glosses his usage with Jakob Böhme (1575-1624): "As soon as a human being comes to life, he is at once old enough to die." Thomson faults Joan Stambaugh's rendering, "As soon as a human being is born", which suggests that newborns can die in a way late-term foetuses cannot; the point is that anyone with a world to collapse can die. The background is Pauline "dying to the world" and Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death, where "death is itself a passing into life".
In Kierkegaard (as Anti-Climacus), confronting despair strips away "the fully clothed self of immediacy" and reveals a "naked and abstract" infinite self, which then repossesses its actual self. Heidegger secularises this: anxiety breaks the world's grip (death), and we turn back to it (resoluteness). Thomson reads Heidegger's ambivalent acknowledgements of Kierkegaard as anxiety of influence, and calls the overall view Heidegger's perfectionism of "how we become what we are".
The possibility of an impossibility
"Higher than actuality stands possibility" (38), meaning existential possibility (Möglichsein), not logical possibility. Think of a teacher, husband or pet owner whose defining project collapses. Skills and habits do not vanish: one keeps filling the dead pet's food bowl, projecting toward a project one can no longer project into. Generalise to all projects at once and you have the "possibility of an impossibility".
Death's formal features in Being and Time.
Heidegger marks the distinction with two terms: our being-possible (Möglichsein, the projects) and our ability-to-be (Seinkönnen, the projecting). Everyday Dasein flees anxiety into das Man's "indifferent tranquility" ("everyone dies, but not me, not today"), turning anxiety into fear of an oncoming event. Enduring it instead reveals uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit): no life project fits us perfectly, since nothing in the structure of the self says what we should do. This is anticipation, the first moment of authenticity.
When projects collapse, projection does not cease. "I still am this inability-to-be." Death "gives Dasein nothing to be 'actualized'" (262). As a crashed hard drive or a broken-down car makes equipment conspicuous, global collapse makes Dasein conspicuous to itself as projecting into projects. This "existential solipsism" is no Cartesian cogito; it is a "world-hungry" Dasein (Dreyfus's phrase) face to face "with its world as world" (188).
Thomson's reading of authenticity as a double movement.
Resoluteness and finite freedom
Resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) is the passage back. It gives up the paralysing belief that there is a single correct choice, since no substantive self could dictate one. Dasein, "free for death", understands itself in "the power of its finite freedom" (384) and can "choose to choose". The freedom is finite because it is constrained by thrownness and talents, by the concerns of one's generation, by the facts of the situation, and by an unpredictable future; Heidegger rejects any Sartrean "radical choice". The hyphenated Ent-schlossenheit ("un-closedness") signals openness to the situation, not stubbornly sticking to a plan.
In the moment of insight, like a gestalt switch, Dasein takes over an inherited role through a "reciprocative rejoinder" (386), fitted to its aptitudes and to the needs of its time. Authenticity, as anticipatory resoluteness, is a "revolutionary movement": we are involuntarily turned away from the world, then voluntarily turn back to it.
Formal indication: the bridge from demise to death
Formal indication is the pivot of Heidegger's method: it extracts formal structures from an ontic phenomenon and fleshes them out at the ontological level, as with ontic and ontological guilt, conscience, and time. "All ontological investigations of such phenomena as guilt, conscience, and death must start with what the everyday interpretation of Dasein 'says' about them" (281). So the six defining features of death are drawn from an analysis of demise:
| Formal structure | Demise (ontic) | Death (ontological) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. End | Terminal world collapse; paradoxical, since no one lives through it | Global collapse of mattering that I live through, constantly and in authentic death |
| 2. Ownmost | No one can demise in my place | Reveals projecting as my most basic self, "stronger than death" |
| 3. Non-relational | I demise alone | I must choose myself; no one can project for me |
| 4. Certain | Empirically certain; das Man says "one dies, but not now" | Transcendentally certain: projecting is the horizon of all experience |
| 5. Indefinite | Impending, "indefinite as to its 'when'" | Pure horizon of futurity underlying all experience |
| 6. Non-surpassable | Nothing comes after it | Not something I get beyond; I live through what it discloses |
Thomson concludes that the ontic and ontological interpenetrate, against orthodox Heideggerians and critics like Jürgen Habermas. Phenomenological attestation works only if readers can see the ontological phenomenon conditioning the ontic one.
Fear of demise and anxiety about death
Heidegger claims that fear of demise "perverts anxiety into cowardly fear" (266), and that even heroic defiance of demise shows "cowardliness in the face of anxiety". Thomson says no interpreter has thematised this claim; it is usually reduced to Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death (1973). Heidegger anticipates the suspicion that he redefined death to make it survivable and calls it one of "the grossest perversions": anticipatory resoluteness "is not a way of escape" (310).
The real question is what we fear in demise. It is not merely irreversible world collapse, which would make anxiety derive from fear, the reverse of Heidegger's order. We fear losing our world and still being here to experience the loss, the very thing the suicidal hope for: to be rid of ourselves. Fear of demise is misplaced but not unfounded, against Thomas Nagel, because in death we really can "be our not being".
Four sources of the death controversy
Thomson lists four reasons the debate persists:
- Terminology. Formal definitions sound obscure ("possibility of the impossibility of existence"); ordinary words ("death", "demise", "possibility") are used non-commonsensically.
- Centrality. Haugeland: death is "the fulcrum of Heidegger's entire ontology" because it discloses futurity, first horizon of originary temporality, and because authenticity is unintelligible without it.
- Method. Phenomenology demands testing against one's own experience, but authentic anxiety is "rare" and hard to endure; Heidegger calls the demand "a fantastically unreasonable demand" (eine phantastische Zumutung) (266). Early readers (Levinas, Sartre) still tested; later objectivity and distance from Nazism, Thomson thinks, pulled scholarship back from immanent critique.
- Polarisation. Camp one (Edwards, Hoffman, Mulhall) equates death with demise/mortality. Camp two (Blattner, Haugeland, White) hears world-collapse under different descriptions. Hoffman's protest: "Up cannot mean down... and death cannot mean something that you can live through!"
Thomson's path from demise to formal indication of death.
Formal indication and the six features
Thomson's bridge is formal indication: Heidegger builds death's six defining features by formally indicating them from an analysis of demise, then deformalising them into the existential concept. The features (end; ownmost; non-relational; certain; indefinite; unsurpassable) apply differently on the ontic and ontological registers (see the chapter table). Death and demise are functionally independent: one can die without demising (survive world collapse) and demise without dying (reach one's end without authentic anxiety). That independence justifies the strange terminology against both camps.
Böhme, Paul and Kierkegaard's conversion pattern
"As soon as a human being comes to life, he is at once old enough to die" (Böhme). Thomson faults Stambaugh's "is born", which suggests newborns can die in a way late-term foetuses cannot; the point is having a world to collapse. Pauline "dying to the world" and Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death (Anti-Climacus) supply the conversion pattern: despair strips the "fully clothed self of immediacy", revealing a naked abstract self that must repossess its actuality. Heidegger secularises: anxiety breaks the world's grip (death); resoluteness turns back to it. Thomson reads the ambivalent Kierkegaard acknowledgements as anxiety of influence.
Possibility higher than actuality
"Higher than actuality stands possibility" (38) names existential Möglichsein, not logical possibility. A teacher, husband or pet owner whose defining project collapses keeps filling the dead pet's food bowl, projecting toward a project one can no longer project into. Generalise to all projects at once: the "possibility of an impossibility". Projecting itself is "stronger than death" in the sense that the horizon of futurity survives the collapse of any particular for-the-sake-of-which.
Fear of demise versus anxiety before death
Thomson keeps Heidegger's distinction sharp: das Man transforms anxiety into fear of an oncoming event (demise). Fear has a definite object; anxiety does not. Camp-one readers who hear only mortality thus capture what the Anyone already says about ending, while missing the phenomenon Heidegger uses to disclose futurity. Camp-two readers who sever death from demise entirely lose the formal-indication bridge: the six features are learned from demise and then deformalised.
Levinas and Sartre remain Thomson's models of immanent critique: they tested the phenomenology against lived alternatives (Levinas) or rival phenomena such as the look of the other (Sartre's "death of my possibilities"). Thomson's methodological plea is that post-existentialist objectivity without first-person testing cannot adjudicate the dispute.
Six formal features: ontic clue to ontological death.
Why "live through" is not a contradiction
Hoffman's slogan ("death cannot mean something that you can live through") assumes death = demise. Thomson's reply: if death were only demise, Epicurus's paradox would block any grasp of existence as a whole. Heidegger's way out is a death that is a way to be "which Dasein takes over as soon as it is" (245). One need not demisingly experience one's end (247). Functional independence follows: world-collapse can be survived; demise can arrive without authentic anxiety ever having struck.
Formal indication is the method name for building the six features from the ontic clue without equating the registers. Ownmost, non-relational, certain, indefinite, unsurpassable, and "possibility of impossibility" apply differently when the topic is demise versus existential death. The chapter table (ontic vs ontological) is the payoff of that method.
Epicurus paradox and Heidegger's exit.
Camps and Thomson's bridge method.
White, Haugeland and Blattner inside camp two
Thomson's second camp is not monolithic. William Blattner hears global collapse of significance akin to severe depression. John Haugeland hears collapse of an understanding of being, as in a scientific paradigm shift that can no longer be staffed. Carol J. White hears the end of a historical world that lets a new epoch begin. Thomson sides with the collapse family against mortality-only readings, then rebuilds the link to demise through formal indication so the camps stop talking past each other.
Haugeland's "fulcrum" claim remains: without death's disclosure of futurity, originary temporality and authenticity both lose their first horizon. That is why the chapter's stakes exceed a terminological squabble.
Freedom and the "Choice to Choose Oneself"
The paradox of a free but unfree Dasein
In the lectures around 1927 (GA 26, GA 29/30, The Essence of Grounds, The Essence of Freedom) freedom is identified with transcendence: "Dasein's transcendence and freedom are identical!" (GA 26). The modality is apodictic: anything in the world must be free. Yet the Dasein of Division I "ensnares itself", is "lost", "alienated", and needs "liberating". It must be free, yet phenomenology shows it is not.
The resolution uses the ontological difference. "Only a free being can be unfree" (GA 26). Ontological freedom (transcendence) is inalienable: having oneself as one's for-the-sake-of-which. It means Dasein can comport itself rather than merely behave, opens a normative space, and has alternative possibilities. It is the condition of ontic or existentiell freedom, the real topic of Being and Time.
Hubert Dreyfus saw the distinction but, Han-Pile argues, got it wrong: he called the power to press into some possibilities rather than others "ontic freedom, or transcendence", whereas GA 26 says transcendence is ontological freedom. His ontic freedom also resembles the lowest Cartesian freedom, "being able to do and not to do one and the same thing" (GA 17, following the Fourth Meditation). Even enthralled Dasein can lunch at its desk, in the cafeteria, or skip lunch to write its paper. Existentiell freedom must be more.
Why choice, and why doubled?
The vocabulary of choice is risky. On the rationalist model, choosing requires knowing that I choose, what I choose, and that the choice is mine, all of which put a premium on reflective awareness that Being and Time tries to bypass. Sartre's "radical choice" shows the danger. Dreyfus and Jane Rubin raise three objections: a world-defining choice is contradictory (no criteria to choose by); there is no one to choose except "some sort of noumenal self"; and it is unclear when the choice happens. They conclude that the "choice" of authenticity "is not a choice at all".
Anxiety and the double choice
Anxiety breaks Dasein's involvement in the world and faces it with an ultimatum: choose to choose itself, or not. "Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its being free for (propensio in ...) the authenticity of its being" (188). The Latin points to Descartes: "quo magis in unam propendeo eo liberius", the more I incline to one side, the freer I am (GA 17). Behind it stands the Augustinian idea that freedom is highest when the will inclines to the good.
The choice to choose: anxiety exposes choosing, and choosing it makes choices one's own.
This "propensio" counterweights falling, the "downward plunge" (Absturz), and offers a formal answer to why Dasein should be authentic: it is structurally inclined to it. But it costs something: an essentialism at odds with "the essence of Dasein lies in its existence", and a moral, not merely transcendental, normativity. "Perhaps Heidegger is right," Han-Pile writes, "but he provides no argument for it."
Three outcomes of the double choice that anxiety poses.
The doubling explains Heidegger's triad: Dasein is free "either for authenticity or for inauthenticity or for a mode in which neither of these has been differentiated" (232). It also shows that the ability to choose is necessary but not sufficient for freedom: after C1~(C2), Dasein still chooses, but is more deeply enthralled than before, now by its own self-deception. The self-deceiving route runs in three steps: Dasein pre-reflectively finds the choice threatening; the affect hints it is not resolute enough; to avoid this, it persuades itself it is causally determined and that there is no choice to make.
What Heidegger learned from Kierkegaard
GA 26 says Kierkegaard's "purpose is not ours", but this "obliges us to learn what he has to offer". In Either/Or II, Judge William says "this choice is freedom". Four ideas carry over: freedom is (a) a specific choice that (b) transforms the self paradoxically, (c) works through the self-ascription of responsibility, (d) in a "transparent" way. The self chosen is "absolutely different from his former self" yet "indeed 'himself'".
| Feature | Kierkegaard (Judge William) | Heidegger |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | Single choice of the self | Double choice: choosing to choose |
| Paradox solved by | Ricoeur's idem (same traits) vs ipse (new self-relation) | Dasein has no present-at-hand "qualities", so idem/ipse does not apply |
| What one owns | Capacities, drives, passions, milieu | How one deploys a possibility |
| Transparency | Reflective: "sober reflecting about oneself" | Pre-reflective existential "sight" |
| Religious frame | Repentance, the absolute | Secular |
Like Ulrich in Musil's novel, Dasein is a being "without qualities". So the paradox, and the question of who chooses, must be re-examined.
The choice as transparent self-ascription of responsibility
The theme returns in the sections on conscience and guilt. Hearing the call means performing C1: "Our understanding of the appeal unveils itself as our wanting to have a conscience ... the choosing to choose a kind of being one's self" (270). One can perform C1 and refuse C2, but cannot perform C2 without C1: understanding the call is choosing. As in Descartes, seeing the good is choosing it; the choice is not deliberation but being "in thrall" to one's ownmost possibility (287).
What is chosen is "being free for one's ownmost being guilty" (288). Heidegger moves from "having responsibility" to "making oneself responsible". Han-Pile separates third-person accountability, which ontological freedom already grounds ("Freedom makes Dasein ... responsible to itself"), from first-person responsibility, which needs the choice. Dasein becomes responsible for what it is in pressing ahead into a possibility, against its everyday tendency to treat ability-characteristics as state-characteristics (Blattner). There is no logical step from "I am not determined" to "I must take responsibility"; that is why Dasein must be called, and why answering is a leap.
Transparency (Durchsichtigkeit) is "the sight which is related primarily and on the whole to existence" (146), a pre-reflective grasp of one's ontological make-up, not inspection of "a point called 'the self'". It is not the highest degree: full transparency comes only with being-toward-death, which shows that every possibility is fragile. Existentiell freedom is therefore necessary but not sufficient for authenticity, which adds "impassioned freedom towards death" (266).
Replies to three objections
- Contradiction. The objection hits Sartre, whose original choice "creates all causes and all motives" and so becomes groundless. Neither Judge William ("in freedom he himself chooses his place") nor Heidegger invents values from nothing; the choice is "self-commitment, not to where it might not yet be, but to where and how it already is" (GA 26).
- Who chooses. Answered by the C1/C2 structure above: the mediation is logical, not chronological.
- When. Not Sartre's whole-life choice (Thomas Baldwin: "his whole life is the choice") nor Kant's timeless choice of Gesinnung, illustrated by Schopenhauer's thief whose every theft expresses one disposition. Heidegger's choice is discrete, made whenever comportment shows owning up, with no guarantee it will recur, because wholeness comes from death, not freedom.
The medio-passive choice
Heidegger denies the choice is a primordial act of will: willing depends on care, and hearing the call cannot be "cultivated voluntarily"; one must be "ready to be appealed to" (288) and let oneself be called forth. Han-Pile borrows the Greek middle voice for this: neither fully active nor passive. Understanding works the same way: whether I understand is "not up to me (alas)", but I can prepare the ground and so earn credit. Responsibility is real but limited, "up to a point, and this is as good as it gets".
The choice thickens mineness (Jemeinigkeit) from a grammatical feature into pre-reflective moral appropriation: taking the consequences of a possibility as consequences, not accidents, and standing ready to make reparation. Following Charles Taylor's expressivism, such appropriation shows in comportment, as a smile shows mood without inference.
Conclusion: freedom without mastery
Kierkegaard: "there must be no choice, even though there is a choice." The double choice does not free Dasein from thrownness or norms, nor make it autonomous. It exposes "the vacuity of the rationalist ideal of absolute mastery"; as Freud said, we are not masters in our own house. What it gives is Spielraum, room for manoeuvre, a more "experimental" life (Nietzsche) kept meaningful by responsibility. Freedom is "mostly a matter of understanding in its medio-passivity, not will", and it can fade, which also means it can be chosen again.
C1 and C2: the doubled choice
Béatrice Han-Pile reconstructs the "choice to choose oneself" as two logically related moments, not two chronological acts:
- C1: the choice to take over being-a-self as one's own (wanting to have a conscience; readiness for the call).
- C2: the existentiell choice of a concrete ability-to-be from one's own self rather than from das Man.
Anxiety restores the burden of choice that das Man had seemed to lift (268). Without C1, C2 collapses into another public option. Without C2, C1 is empty sincerity. The mediation is logical, not chronological: comportments show owning-up without a prior inner decree dated on a calendar.
Han-Pile's double choice and its Kierkegaardian backdrop.
What is borrowed from Kierkegaard (and what is not)
From Judge William and related texts Han-Pile takes the idea that the choice is "self-commitment, not to where it might not yet be, but to where and how it already is" (cf. GA 26). Unlike Sartre's original choice that "creates all causes and all motives", Heidegger does not invent values from nothing. Unlike Kant's timeless choice of Gesinnung (Schopenhauer's thief whose every theft expresses one disposition), Heidegger's choice is discrete and repeatable without guarantee: wholeness comes from death, not from freedom alone. Thomas Baldwin's Sartrean "whole life is the choice" is likewise rejected.
Middle voice, mineness and Spielraum
Heidegger denies that the choice is a primordial act of will: willing depends on care; hearing the call cannot be "cultivated voluntarily"; one must be "ready to be appealed to" (288). Han-Pile's Greek middle voice captures this medio-passivity. Understanding works the same way: whether I understand is "not up to me (alas)", yet I can prepare the ground. The choice thickens Jemeinigkeit from a grammatical feature into pre-reflective moral appropriation: taking consequences as consequences, not accidents. Following Charles Taylor's expressivism, appropriation shows in comportment as a smile shows mood.
What freedom gives is Spielraum, room for manoeuvre, a more "experimental" life (Nietzsche) kept meaningful by limited responsibility. Freedom can fade, which also means it can be chosen again. Kierkegaard's line stands: "there must be no choice, even though there is a choice."
Against Sartrean and Kantian absolute choice
Han-Pile's double choice (C1/C2) is designed to block two famous pictures:
- Sartre: an original choice that "creates all causes and all motives" and makes the whole life the choice (Thomas Baldwin's gloss). Heidegger does not invent values from nothing; thrownness supplies a basis that is owned, not authored.
- Kant/Schopenhauer Gesinnung: a timeless choice of disposition that every act expresses (the thief whose thefts are one disposition). Heidegger's choice is discrete, repeatable, without a guarantee of permanence; wholeness comes from being-toward-death, not from freedom alone.
The middle voice blocks a third picture: the sovereign will that decides to hear the call. Willing depends on care; one must be "ready to be appealed to" (288). Freedom is Spielraum under thrownness, responsibility "up to a point", and a more experimental life (Nietzsche) that can fade and be chosen again.
Han-Pile against absolute mastery pictures.
From anxiety to owned ability-to-be.
Expressivism, Taylor and owning consequences
Following Charles Taylor's expressivism without endorsing a deep hidden self, Han-Pile treats appropriation as something that shows in comportment, as a smile shows a mood. Mineness thickens from grammar into pre-reflective moral appropriation: taking consequences as consequences, not accidents. That is how C2 is visible without a dated inner decree.
Kierkegaard's line, "there must be no choice, even though there is a choice," names the paradox Han-Pile preserves: the authentic person does not perpetually stand at a decision menu, yet freedom was not nothing. Freud's "not masters in our own house" is closer than rationalist autonomy. Responsibility is real and limited; Spielraum can shrink and reopen.
Borrowed and refused from Kierkegaard.
Wanting to have a conscience as readiness
Wanting to have a conscience (Gewissenhabenwollen) is Heidegger's name for readiness for the call, not a wish for guilt feelings. It corresponds to Han-Pile's C1. The call is silent, from Dasein to itself, in uncanniness. Hearing it is already a self-understanding that pulls out of idle talk. C2 then chooses a concrete ability-to-be from that owned basis. Logical mediation means texts need not narrate two dated decisions; comportments can attest both moments at once.
Authenticity and Resoluteness
Mineness, not expressivism
Dasein is "in each case mine", so it can "choose itself and win itself", lose itself, or only "seem" to win itself (42-3). The "I" is a "non-committal formal indicator" (116): not a sphere of inwardness but whatever can own or disown existence. Blattner calls authenticity "self-ownership". Following Taylor Carman, he denies that Heidegger means the modern expressivist ideal of being true to a deep self explored by Charles Taylor, Charles Guignon and Lionel Trilling.
| Approach | Authenticity is ... | Main proponents |
|---|---|---|
| Existentialist | Lucid response to contingency, death and conscience; open style toward projects that cannot fulfil | Guignon; Dreyfus and Rubin |
| Aristotelian | A form of phronesis, seeing what the situation requires | Theodore Kisiel; Dreyfus (virtuoso innovation) |
| Christian | Secularised Pauline, Lutheran and Kierkegaardian experience of sin and redemption | John van Buren |
| Transcendental | Conscience as responsiveness to norms, a condition of agency | John Haugeland, Rebecca Kukla, Steven Crowell |
Blattner sets the Christian approach aside. Its sources are real (Heidegger's word Augenblick is Luther's rendering of "the twinkling of an eye", 1 Corinthians 15:52, and Vorlaufen in den Tod translates Luther's cursus ad mortem), but Heidegger meant his ontology as a foundation for theology, not the reverse. He synthesises the other three.
Exegetical puzzles
Authenticity is a formal mode of existence, not a way of life like the "Crow way of life" or a Southern California lifestyle, which are factical and come and go. Resoluteness is the disclosedness that attends it, and only "as running-forth" (anticipation) does resoluteness reach its full form, hence "resoluteness that runs forth". Two textual wrinkles follow:
- Anxiety or readiness for anxiety. On BT 296 the attunement of resoluteness is anxiety; one passage later, it is being "ready for anxiety". Since resolute Dasein "is already taking action" (300), anxiety can be constitutive only if it is not disabling.
- How many modes. Besides authenticity and inauthenticity, Blattner admits an "undifferentiated" mode, first spotted by Hubert Dreyfus, and anxiety itself. Inauthenticity and authenticity are both responses to anxiety.
Resoluteness as a response to existential crisis
In anxiety "the 'world' can offer nothing more, and neither can the Dasein-with of others" (187). Since to exist is to understand oneself through worldly projects, anxious Dasein cannot exist in this sense, and that is how Heidegger defines death: "the possibility of no longer being able to be-there" (250). Blattner calls this "existential death": not Iain Thomson's "terminal world collapse" but a condition one can be in, cut off, isolated, uncanny.
Dasein can flee: the Anyone (das Man) "does not permit the courage for anxiety in the face of death to arise" and turns it into fear of demise (254). Or it can run forth. This is not "living dangerously until the end", Nietzsche's imperative in The Gay Science §283 or Michel in Godard's Breathless, which relate to demise. Running forth holds on to death as a possibility, and paradoxically frees one "to choose among the factical possibilities" (264).
Blattner prefers "stubbornness" to Macquarrie and Robinson's "tenaciousness", which sounds admirable; Versteifung also means stiffening of joints. Stubbornness shows in "misinterpreting" others' possibilities and forcing them on oneself (264). Running forth breaks this rigidity and brings the whole of Dasein's possibilities into view.
Conscience, guilt and the empty self
The crisis is not a total collapse of self. Here the transcendental theme enters: conscience is responsiveness to norms of every kind, moral, epistemic, logical, social, mathematical. To "feel guilty" is to feel the pull of norms. In anxiety Dasein still faces the demand to take a stand, which it cannot meet; the call summons it "To one's own self" (272-3).
Conscience and guilt: the call says nothing, and points to being a ground one did not lay.
That self "remains indefinite and empty in its what" (274). It is not a vacuous existentialist self (Sartre, Kafka, Musil), not a "true self", not a deep self behind a façade, nothing found on a "journey of self-discovery". It is the transcendental aspect of the everyday Anyone-self: the target of norms, the one called on to understand who it is. Hence the Anyone-self is an "existentiell modification of the authentic self" (317).
Blattner's synthesis: three strands feeding one account of authenticity.
Guilt is formalised step by step: everyday guilt is "Being-the-ground for a lack of something in the existence of an other" (282), which becomes "being the null ground of a nullity". The nullity of projection: in standing in one possibility Dasein "constantly is not other possibilities" (285). Being a father excludes the unattached single life; being employed excludes "a life devoted mostly to blogging". The ground: Dasein projects from how things already matter to it, responsible for, because responsive to, who it already is. The ground is itself null because Dasein "reposes in the weight" of it and cannot choose how things matter (284).
Authenticity as self-ownership
Resoluteness is "wanting to have a conscience" (269-70): embracing one's accountability. The Anyone knows only "the general situation" (300), a generic, prepackaged version of what is happening; responding to it is diminished responsiveness. Blattner's examples are Lester Burnham in American Beauty and George Babbitt in Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel Babbitt, men who live "as one is supposed to live", with little imagination or risk.
But resoluteness cannot mean a clean break or a wild adventure, since who one is grounds who one can be. It "does not withdraw itself from 'actuality', but discovers first what is factically possible" (299). Resoluteness is a mode of living in the Anyone, an existentiell modification of it (130).
Steadfastness
This is what combats conformism. If who one already is clashes with public expectations, one needs fortitude to remain oneself: a partial overlap with expressivism, minus the deep self. Resolute Dasein is also flexible: it can "take back" commitments when one falls out of love, a community disintegrates, or a for-the-sake-of-which becomes impossible. Self-constancy is "steadiness and steadfastness" (322): not being unchanging but being loyal to the situation, surefooted in being who one is. What marks resolute Dasein is how it is who it is, not its content.
Three schools synthesised (Christian set aside)
Blattner weaves existentialist (lucid response to contingency; Guignon, Dreyfus/Rubin), Aristotelian (phronesis; Kisiel, Dreyfus on virtuoso innovation) and transcendental (conscience as responsiveness to norms; Haugeland, Kukla, Crowell) readings. He sets the Christian approach aside: Augenblick and Vorlaufen in den Tod have Pauline/Lutheran pedigrees, but Heidegger meant ontology as a foundation for theology, not the reverse. Authenticity is "self-ownership", not Taylor/Guignon/Trilling expressivism about a deep inner self. The "I" is a "non-committal formal indicator" (116).
Exegetical wrinkles: anxiety versus readiness for anxiety as the attunement of resoluteness; authenticity/inauthenticity plus Dreyfus's undifferentiated mode and anxiety itself. Resoluteness is disclosedness that, "as running-forth", becomes anticipatory resoluteness. Since resolute Dasein "is already taking action" (300), anxiety can be constitutive only if it is not simply disabling.
Blattner's path: crisis, running-forth, loyalty to who one is.
Stubbornness, guilt and the Situation
Blattner prefers "stubbornness" to Macquarrie and Robinson's "tenaciousness" for Versteifung (also stiffening of joints). Facing existential death loosens rigid identification with public possibilities. Conscience "says nothing" yet summons to one's own being-guilty: being the null ground of a nullity one did not lay. Resoluteness answers by taking over the Situation (Situation) rather than the general situation (Lage): seeing what this concrete constellation requires, in a phronesis-like lucidity, without inventing values from nothing.
Steady loyalty, not permanent heroics
Authenticity is steady and steadfast loyalty to who one factically and currently is, not a continuous peak experience. One can fall back; the undifferentiated mode can return. Blattner's synthesis makes authenticity compatible with ordinary work and Mitsein: the point is owned taking-over, not exit from the public world.
Situation as phronesis without Aristotle's metaphysics
Blattner's Aristotelian strand reads resoluteness as seeing what the concrete Situation requires. That is phronesis-like lucidity, not application of universal rules, and not Dreyfus's virtuoso as a permanent elite status. The transcendental strand (conscience as norm-responsiveness) explains why anxiety does not erase agency: the pull of norms remains when projects go inert. Loyalty to who one factically is joins the strands without expressivist inwardness.
Responses to existential crisis.
Empty self, not no self
Blattner's transcendental move: in anxiety the self is not annihilated; it is stripped to norm-responsiveness without a fulfilling project. The call summons "To one's own self" (272-3) precisely as the empty demand to take a stand. That blocks both nihilism (nothing left to be) and expressivism (a full inner essence waiting to be voiced). Resoluteness fills the emptiness with a Situation-specific ability-to-be, held in loyalty rather than in stubborn rigidity.
Running-forth is not Breathless
Blattner distinguishes Vorlaufen from Nietzsche's "live dangerously" (Gay Science §283) and from Michel's romantic death-drive in Godard's Breathless. Those images concern demise. Running-forth holds existential death as possibility, which paradoxically frees choice among factical possibilities (264) by breaking stubbornness about the life one has already achieved. The Anyone's substitute (fear of demise) is not courage but tranquilisation.
From undifferentiated to owned resoluteness.
Temporality as the Ontological Sense of Care
Two strategies, one section
Käufer rests on two "fairly uncontroversial" insights. First, Being and Time combines phenomenological description (almost all of Division I, extended in Division II to the limit cases of death and thrownness) with a transcendental argument showing that the phenomena form a necessary unity. Second, that argument is modelled on Heidegger's readings of Kant's transcendental deduction and schematism, begun in the 1925-6 Logic lectures (GA 21) and culminating in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929).
Sense, projection, primary projection
Heidegger prefers "sense" (Sinn) to "meaning" because it connotes the direction of projecting. To understand an entity is to project it onto its being: a piece of chalk shows up as chalk against the background of classrooms, blackboards and lecturing that I move through skilfully. Sense is "the upon-which of projection, in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something" (151). In §65 Heidegger adds one word: sense is the upon-which of the primary projection (324).
The primary projection is the projection of the understanding of being in general. Classrooms make sense of chalk only because they make sense to me at all, as possible ways for me to be, an academic or a student. So the sense of the being of worldly entities is the same as the sense of Dasein's being: "the sense of the being of Dasein is not a free-floating something else ... but rather the self-understanding Dasein itself" (325).
Wholeness, unity and authenticity
The question of §65: "what makes possible the wholeness of the articulated structural whole of care in the unity of its unfolded articulation?" (324). §45 demanded an "originary" interpretation that grasps the whole and its unity; hence "originary temporality". Division I covered every aspect of care but did not show these are all there is to existence. The extreme phenomenology of death and guilt does: inauthentic Dasein identifies with a role (a successful college professor, a "second-rate race-car driver"), while authentic Dasein identifies itself entirely as being-possible, beyond which "I am nothing".
Wholeness implies unity, as in organisms or narratives. The structure sought is the self-disclosure implicit in existence that makes sense of each aspect of care (future-directed understanding, past-directed disposedness, present absorption) and shows how each involves the others.
The self, though §65 never says so
The short answer is "the self". §65 never uses "self" or "selfhood" after its first sentence, but §64 ("Care and Selfhood") frames it: "Fully understood, the care structure includes the phenomenon of selfhood within it. This is clarified in the interpretation of the sense of care" (323). §64 rejects the self as subject or substance, including Kant's: "To determine the I ontologically as subject means to always already treat it as something occurrent" (320). Selfhood "can only be read off from the authentic ability-to-be-a-self" (322).
Heidegger's Kant
Reading Kant through phenomenology, Heidegger said "the scales fell from my eyes" (GA 25). Kant's A-deduction explains how a given manifold, the white rectangles and black print on a desk, requires active synthesis.
| Kant's synthesis (A-deduction) | What it does | Heidegger's time-dimension |
|---|---|---|
| Apprehension in intuition | "Running through and taking together" the manifold (A 99) | Present; forms "the now and the sequence of nows" |
| Reproduction in imagination | Reproduces preceding representations in a series | Past; "time-forming" (GA 3) |
| Recognition in the concept | Rule unifying the manifold as one object | Future; Heidegger renames it "pre-cognition" (GA 25) |
Four features of Kant's account matter. The syntheses require one another; empirical synthesis presupposes a pure synthesis; the syntheses constitute temporal order rather than sitting in it; and they presuppose an original unity, transcendental apperception ("the I think must be able to accompany all my representations", B 131). Heidegger makes the transcendental imagination the "originary time" that "lets time arise as a sequence of nows" (GA 3), paralleling §65: since everyday "time" arises from authentic temporality, "we can justify naming this temporality the originary time" (329).
His complaint: "the inner rupture in the foundation of the Kantian problem" is "the lack of a connection between time and the transcendental apperception" (GA 25). Properly understood, "time and the 'I think' ... turn out to be one and the same" (GA 3). Originary temporality "constitutes a dimension of possible belonging-to-me-ness (Mirzugehörigkeit)". The differences remain deep: Heidegger rarely speaks of "representation" or "synthesis", since our relation to the world is disclosure, not Kantian cognitivism.
Käufer's parallel: Kant's pure synthesis and apperception, Heidegger's ecstases and self.
Temporality makes care possible
The transcendental claim mirrors pure versus empirical synthesis: any comportment toward particular possibilities presupposes the general ability to disclose possibilities as possibly mine. Käufer's example is lecturing. You project your voice to fill the room, reach for chalk, pace the front, glance at the clock behind you. The originary future has two features: you hold out possibilities as possibilities, so your abilities disclose the room as large and the chalk as usable; and you let yourself come toward yourself, pressing into lecturing as your own. The originary past makes disposedness possible: "The ecstasis of having-been first makes possible finding yourself by way of being disposed" (340). So the clock shows up as inconvenient, the space by the blackboard as inviting, the students' area as impenetrable.
Why the ecstases are one, and why that is a self
First argument: mutual presupposition. "Only insofar [as] Dasein is as 'I have-been' can it futurally come toward itself in such a way that it comes back" (326), and "the having-been future releases the present". The clock appears inconvenient only if the same person both lectures and is affected by it; split ability and attunement between two people and the clock would not show up at all.
The three ecstases of temporality, unified in care.
Second, deeper argument: the ecstases are united because they are mine. Ecstatic temporality meets three criteria for selfhood:
- Connectedness of life. §75 treats the problem of gathering a life together as an inauthentic misreading; existence is already connected because temporality is "extended".
- Owning experiences. Future and past disclose possibilities already permeated by self-relating existence, Heidegger's version of the "I think" accompanying all my representations.
- Self-identification. Not cognitive, as in Kant's doubled self-consciousness (B 156-7), but existential: "The self must be able to identify itself as existing", uniting "resolve" (Entschluss) and "commitment" (Verpflichtung) (GA 25).
Finitude and the priority of the future
"Temporality 'is' not an entity at all" (328); it temporalizes (zeitigt: brings forth, ripens). It produces concrete Dasein in different modes, notably authentic and inauthentic existence. The future has priority because the self shows up first in purposive comportment: the classroom has its features because you are lecturing for the sake of being a professor. Finitude is not about time running out: Dasein "exists finitely" (329). Any possibility, being a professor included, can be lost; the only unavoidably mine is death, being-possible without safely being any possibility. "The originary and authentic future is the toward-yourself ... existing as the unsurpassable possibility of nullity" (330).
Authentic and inauthentic temporality side by side.
Originary temporality as the sense of care
Stephan Käufer (chapter 15) takes care's sense to be temporality: not clock time but the ecstatic unity of having-been, making-present and futural projection. The "ahead-of-itself" (existentiality), already-in (thrownness) and being-alongside (falling) are the care structure; their ontological meaning is the three ecstases. Ordinary time (now-sequence, measurable duration) is a leveled-off derivative that covers the ecstatic unity.
From care to originary temporality to world time.
Why the future has priority
For Dasein the future is not a later now; it is the horizon of ability-to-be. Anticipation (Vorlaufen) is the authentic futural mode; awaiting is the inauthentic. Authentic having-been is repetition (Wiederholung) of a heritage; inauthentic is forgetting. Authentic making-present is the Moment (Augenblick); inauthentic is the present of distraction. World-time and clock-time arise when the present is leveled to a pure now-point in a public sequence.
Ecstatic unity versus now-sequence
Käufer's claim is not that clocks are false. It is that the sequence of nows is intelligible only as a leveled mode of a prior ecstatic unity. When project managers treat the Gantt chart as ontological bedrock, they enact the covering-over Division II describes. Authentic temporality does not abolish schedules; it recovers why a Moment can reorganise what the schedule was for.
Authentic vs inauthentic ecstases.
Datability, spannedness and public time
Before clocks dominate, concern yields datability ("now that the water boils"), spannedness (from... until...), publicness and a world-character: time is always time for something. Käufer shows how this world-time levels into the pure now-sequence when the present is cut free from futural stake and having-been. Hegel's account of time is, in the overview's judgment that Käufer inherits, the most rigorous failure to explain how subjects inhabit such leveled time.
Why the future is "primary" without denying the past
Priority of the future means ability-to-be is the leading ecstasis for Dasein, not that having-been is unreal. Repetition retrieves heritage; forgetting covers it. Without futural projection there is nothing for retrieval to serve. Clock-time's homogeneous nows erase that asymmetry and make past, present and future look like three bins of occurrent events.
Historical Finitude
The project: making sense of sense
Heidegger's project is "to work out concretely the question of the sense of being", where being is the intelligibility of what is: "that on the basis of which entities are already understood" (6). Schear quotes A. W. Moore: the task is to consider "the truly remarkable and singular fact that sense is made of anything, and to try and make sense of that". Dasein's defining ability, understanding being, is not one ability among others like tying shoes or speaking English: "Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological" (12). "Dasein" replaces "the subject" to avoid the baggage of a self-contained "cabinet of consciousness".
Ontological understanding as holding things to standards
To understand an entity is to grasp the ways it can and cannot be: "the projection of entities onto their possibilities". Lizards and babies inhabit environments; adults understand a world, because they hold things to standards.
| Entity | Ontological standard | Violation |
|---|---|---|
| Hammer | Functional: drives nails when well wielded | A hammer made of butter: a gimmick or artwork |
| Rook | Rules of chess | Moved diagonally like a bishop |
| Ordinary thing | Substantial independence and persistence | A rock that pops in and out of existence when you look |
Ontological standards are "the 'ground rules' of the real"; to understand being is to look after the distinction between being and non-being. Being divides into regions (equipment, mere things, Dasein) and "subject-matters", each articulated by basic concepts. Heidegger's twist on the tradition is reflexive: what is the ontology of the entity whose charge is to make sense? A person typically lives several factical abilities-to-be, roughly forms of life: Schear's Sam is a chemist, an auto mechanic and a teacher. Dasein's categories are existentialia, and the guiding claim is that existence has a distinctive temporal form.
Death as ontological fragility
Death is an existentiale, "a way of being that one takes over as soon as it is" (245): not perishing ("croaking"), not the demise of the obituary, "no impending storm". To be toward death is to be oriented by the possibility of "no-longer-being-able-to-be-there" (254), the comprehensive breakdown of the understanding by which entities make sense. "Death is the essentially threatened character of human understanding." Heidegger describes the fragility as possibly having to "take it back", to "give up" on one's ability-to-be (308, 391).
Death as the fragility of one's whole way of making sense.
Kantian finitude, deepened
Kant made the finitude of the intellect the cornerstone of his system. Infinite intuition creates its objects ("Let there be light"); finite intuition must be given them. "The finitude of human cognition consists in being thrown into and onto entities" (GA 25). Heidegger uses the divine intellect only as a notional contrast, not a theological claim. He generalises finitude beyond cognition to all sense-making, from picking up a hammer to scooting past someone in a crowded pub, and he deepens it: for Kant the framework of possibilities is "complete" and "certain", but Heidegger holds that the framework itself is fragile. Kant's finitude still opens the way, since only a finite intellect distinguishes the possible from the actual, and so can be thwarted.
The mood of finitude is anxiety: "being toward death is essentially anxiety" (266). Being-at-home in the world is always shadowed by the "not-at-home", which is "always latent" (189). The anxiety of death is the anxiety of responsibility: ontological understanding "is possessed by being sustained". One's ownmost ability-to-be is to be a sustainer of intelligibility: "the sustainability of any finite intelligibility is on me", though not on me alone. The relevant "whole" is not a biographical life from birth to death but one's form of life as a whole.
General situations
Everyday situations are general situations (allgemeine Lage, 300): concrete, but each opens onto others within a form of life, as one faculty meeting ushers in a seminar. "General" means average. Schear's analogy is Kant's space: a region is a "delimitation" of the prior whole of space, and an everyday situation is a delimitation of a form of life. A hammer is understood only within a "wide" world of carpentry; others are understood through social roles within a practice, roughly das Man.
Existential situations
The existential or "limit-situation", a term from Karl Jaspers, calls on one to take over one's thrownness rather than be taken along by it. Its temporality is the moment (Augenblick), set against the "present" of the general situation (348).
Schear's contrast: from the general situation to the existential one.
Schear's example is the chemical revolution. Antoine Lavoisier deposited a sealed note on his doubts about phlogiston with the Secretary of the French Academy in 1772; by his 1777 papers, partly thanks to Joseph Priestley's experiments, he saw that a paradigm shift might be needed. Where Lavoisier saw oxygen, Priestley, resisting to the end, saw "dephlogisticated air". After the discovery Lavoisier "worked in a different world" (Kuhn).
Owning this does not require being a history maker like Lavoisier or the Crow chief Plenty Coups. Resolute responsibility is a manner of inhabiting one's form of life: being able to recognise an existential situation if it arises, not hiding in general situations, refusing to disburden oneself, and keeping a background readiness to "give up" a form of life that cannot be made to work. That is being "free for death", finite freedom (384).
Heritage, fate, historicality
Possibilities embodied in public practice have a history: they are a heritage (Erbe). Owning it means accepting its authority while asking which "repeatable possibilities of existence" it offers, so repetition is no blind deference but a "reciprocative rejoinder". Grasping finitude "snatches one back from the endless multiplicity" into "the simplicity of its fate", Dasein's originary happening (Geschehen), handing itself down "in a possibility which it has inherited and yet chosen" (384). Hence the chapter's guiding claim: "Owned being-towards-death is concealed ground of the historicality of Dasein" (383).
Historicality: heritage handed down, taken over as fate and destiny.
Making sense of sense, and ontological standards
Schear, writing in memory of John Haugeland (1945-2010), frames BT as trying to make sense of the fact that sense is made of anything (echoing A. W. Moore). To understand an entity is to project it onto possibilities and hold it to standards: a butter hammer is a gimmick; a rook moved diagonally has left chess; a rock that blinks in and out violates thinghood. Ontological standards are "the ground rules of the real". Death names the fragility of that understanding: not croaking, not the obituary, but possible total breakdown of the form of life that sustains intelligibility.
Thomas Kuhn's crises and Jonathan Lear's Crow narrative (Radical Hope, 2006) are Schear's examples: when opportunities for a form of life's central concepts cease, that understanding faces death.
Schear: from general Lage to existential Situation.
Situation versus Lage
Everyday situations are general situations (allgemeine Lage): each opens onto others within a form of life; ontological understanding is drawn upon rather than at stake. An existential Situation is one in which the viability of a whole historical form of life is in question: "the finitude of death made concrete in the midst of life". Resolute Dasein retrieves a heritage and takes over a fate (Schicksal) / destiny (Geschick) with its generation, not as mythic nationalism but as owned historical thrownness.
Plenty Coups and the coup-stick
Lear's Crow narrative, which Schear mobilises, turns on objects and concepts that lose their field of use: a coup-stick ceases to be what it was when the warrior form of life becomes unlivable. That is ontological death in Schear's sense: not the death of Plenty Coups the biological individual (he lived until 1921, buried at Arlington after speaking at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on 11 November 1921), but the collapse of a world's standards. Resolute historicality would mean retrieving possibilities from a heritage without denying the collapse.
Historicality: heritage to destiny.
Dispersal and disburdening as marks of Lage
Schear's two marks of everyday sense-making inside a general situation:
- Dispersal. The anyone-self is occupied with what needs doing; ontological understanding works in the background, drawn upon rather than at stake, with comfort (384).
- Disburdening. Public practice seems to supply intelligibility "depriving the particular Dasein of its answerability" (127); Dasein gets "lived by" the practice.
An existential Situation reverses both marks: standards are at stake, and answerability returns. That is "the finitude of death made concrete in the midst of life."
Kuhn's tottering and Heidegger's §3
Schear pairs Kuhnian crisis with Heidegger's own Introduction: sciences whose basic concepts are "tottering" (§3) already illustrate ontological fragility inside a form of life that is not yet biologically ending. The chemist Sam who is also mechanic and teacher lives several abilities-to-be; any one of them can lose its standards. Historical finitude is the generalisation of that exposure to a generation's shared destiny.
Sam's plural abilities-to-be under threat.
What If Heidegger Were a Phenomenologist?
Prelude: against "Heideggerese"
Sheehan mocks "Heideggeroids", devotees who speak only in the Master's code, what Karl Jaspers called Heideggergegacker, "Heidegger cackling", and who follow a "Doctrine of Heideggerian Exceptionalism", like the "American Derridoids" with their "oui, oui". Their talk risks what John Henry Newman called notional rather than real apprehension: shuffling terms instead of seeing the issue first-hand. Sheehan cites Paul on the Corinthian speakers in tongues ("You're blowing smoke!", 1 Corinthians 14) and T. S. Eliot's lovers who "babble the same speech without need of meaning". Heidegger even declared Dasein and Ereignis untranslatable. Only a radical rethinking of the terminology, Sheehan argues, can save the project from cultic isolation.
Being as meaning
In 1966 Heidegger called "being" a word "I no longer like to use", "the preliminary word", and said "being is no longer the proper object of thinking" (GA 14); Sein "belongs in Ereignis". In his first course after the Great War (GA 56/57) he said that what we meet first is not beings but "the meaningful" (das Bedeutsame): "everything comes at you loaded with meaning, all over the place and all the time". Things have meaning only in relation to human being as the locus (Da) of sense. So saying something "is" amounts to saying it makes sense.
Sheehan's reading: being as the meaningful presence of things.
| Heidegger's term | Sheehan's rendering |
|---|---|
| das Seiende (beings) | das Bedeutsame: the meaningful |
| die Seiendheit (beingness) | meaningfulness of something |
| das Sein selbst (being as such) | world = Bedeutsamkeit = meaning itself |
| In-der-Welt-sein | a priori engagement-with-meaning |
| Dasein | Da-sinn: the locus of meaning |
| Geworfenheit / Ereignis | thrownness / appropriation into the meaning-process |
The project has two phases: (1) show, through the structure of human existence, that meaning is the relatedness of things to human being (roughly 1919-30); (2) ask why there is meaning at all (the 1930s on).
The phenomenological reduction and its texts
The phenomenological reduction shifts from the natural attitude, things as "always-already-out-there-now-real", to their correlation with human concern. Phenomena are always correlations: object-as-experienced-by-a-subject. The young Heidegger saw that Husserl's "constitution" had been thought more originally by the Greeks as aletheia. He kept the word "being" for continuity with Greek ontology: for Aristotle humans reach things only kata ton logon, and ousia implicitly meant par-ousia, presence to us, hence Heidegger's growing preference for Anwesen.
Read with "meaning" for "being", Being and Time says plainly that "Wahrheit 'gibt es' nur, sofern und solange Dasein ist" (226): there is disclosure of meaning only as long as human being exists. "No Sinn without Da-sinn, and no Da-sinn without Sinn." The sheer fact of this reciprocity is what the early Heidegger calls thrownness and the later Heidegger Ereignis. The analysis of tools is not stuck in the natural attitude, as some claim; it is "correlation research" (Husserl's phrase): the world is "meaning-bestowing meaningfulness" (Bedeutsamkeit), and "As existing, human being is its world". Sheehan's verdict: Heideggerians should "bury the language of 'being'".
Minding the meant
Heideggerians shy from consciousness, but Heidegger only grounds it, he does not banish it. Every intentional act makes sense of something by taking it in terms of something else: tools in terms of tasks, subjects in terms of predicates. Sheehan calls this "minding the meant", minding as in minding your little brother or your manners. Mind is always body-mind: befindliches Verstehen, an embodied understanding, with "no dualism here".
The basic question
Heidegger's Grundfrage emerged in four steps: Aristotle studied the being of things without asking about being itself; under Husserl, Heidegger saw Greek ontology as phenomenology avant la lettre; in the 1920s he thematised the Greek correlation of logos and existence (techne and phronesis, episteme); in the 1930s he turned to the fact of meaning itself (es gibt Sinn, Lichtung, Wahrheit). The fourth step goes beyond the whole tradition: "How come aletheia-1 at all?"
Metaphysics or onto-theo-logy answers with an ultimate entity, Aristotle's self-thinking thought, God, even the Eternal Return. Phenomenology cannot: the furthest it reaches is our inexplicable thrownness. Contributions to Philosophy (GA 65) equates the two names: "das Da-sein ist geworfen, er-eignet". To ask for the cause of sense-making is itself sense-making, so the question is circular. "We can in principle make sense of everything, except why we can make sense of anything."
Sheehan's chain from the givenness of meaning to its forgetting.
Hiddenness, dread and mortality
The givenness of meaning is intrinsically hidden, then overlooked, then the overlooking is overlooked: die Vergessenheit des Sinnes, the forgottenness of meaning, growing "exponentially" in the age of Gestell, which Sheehan renders "the Construct" rather than "enframing". In Being and Time and "What Is Metaphysics?" (1929) the hiddenness shows in dread (Angst; Sheehan avoids "anxiety", which sounds treatable "with medication"). Dread meets "the abyss of meaninglessness" and the Abweisung, the push-back into sense-making: "nothingness = nothing". The push-back is ohne Warum, without why.
The stand-in answer is "es gibt Sinn", meaning is given, period. Even divine revelation would have to arrive within our finite sense-making. Postulates of a "saturated" phenomenon beyond the correlation (Jean-Luc Marion's term, though Sheehan does not name him) step outside phenomenology. The disclosure itself is what the later Heidegger called "the last god", the referent of "Only a god can save us", "clearly not the God of supernatural revelation".
The history of forgottenness
The later Heidegger reads aletheia as a double negative, from lethe: no-longer-unnoticed. The source of meaning is "held back", in Greek epoché (a sense quite unlike Husserl's), and metaphysics since Plato is one long epoché with its epochs: Plato named intelligibility eidos and idea; Aristotle, energeia; then esse, actualitas, monad, objectivity, Absolute Spirit, Will to Power. An "epoch" is less a period than a way of understanding meaningfulness while overlooking its source. The early remedy was dread and conscience; the later is an existentiel lightning flash (Blitz, Blick), echoing the Augenblick.
The forgetting of the clearing through the history of metaphysics.
What if Heidegger were a phenomenologist?
Thomas Sheehan's polemical title asks readers to take Heidegger at his phenomenological word rather than as a crypto-metaphysician of Being as a super-thing. The "thing itself" for Heidegger is the clearing (Lichtung) or the appropriation (Ereignis) in later vocabulary: the open in which entities can appear. Sheehan argues that much Anglophone and Continental reception reifies "Being" into what BT's method was meant to dissolve. Formal indication, destruction of the history of ontology, and the shift from Dasein to Ereignis all serve one task: exhibit the structure of intelligibility's givenness.
Sheehan's corrective: from reified Being to the clearing.
Continuity across the turn
Sheehan downplays a catastrophic Kehre that abandons BT. The turn radicalises the insight that Dasein does not master the clearing; the open "gives" (Es gibt). Authenticity, conscience and historical retrieval remain intelligible as ways of standing in that givenness without claiming authorship of it.
Formal indication as anti-reification tool
Sheehan's emphasis on formal indication is methodological: terms like Being, Dasein, world point toward phenomena to be exhibited, and harden into pseudo-objects when read as names of entities. The later vocabulary of clearing and Ereignis continues that discipline under new titles. Companion readers who treat "Being" as a character in a metaphysical drama have, on Sheehan's view, stopped doing phenomenology.
Sheehan's continuity claim across the turn.
Against the guru of Being
Sheehan's polemical edge is ethical as well as exegetical: reifying Being into a destiny-dispensing super-entity licensed political and cult readings Heidegger's worst readers wanted. The corrective is internal: read the method, not the myth.
Es gibt and the refusal of mastery
Later Heidegger's Es gibt ("there is / it gives") names the givenness of the open without a divine giver. Sheehan reads this as continuous with BT's thrownness: Dasein never masters the clearing. Authenticity is a way of standing in givenness, not a technique for owning Being. That continuity claim is the chapter's wager against narratives of a total break.
Main Points
Twenty takeaways
- Being is intelligibility, not a thing. The question of being asks what it is for entities to make sense as what they are (Carman, Sheehan).
- Practice comes before theory. We deal with available equipment inside a referential whole before we ever observe occurrent objects.
- Mood opens the world. Moods are not inner feelings but the space of mattering in which anything can count; Ratcliffe argues they go deeper than Heidegger admits.
- Death is not demise. For Thomson and Schear, existential death is the collapse of one's world or way of being, which a person can live through.
- Authenticity is owning, not escaping. Resoluteness means steady loyalty to who one factically is, answering the concrete situation rather than the generic one (Blattner).
- Temporality unifies care. The future-led unity of the three ecstases makes care possible and amounts to a self (Käufer).
- The book is a torso. Only two of six planned divisions appeared; the 1927 publication was a hurried, career-driven accident with a long genesis (Denker).
- Existentialia are exemplars. Descriptions of Dasein are neither empirical reports nor bare necessities; Martin reads them as exemplary cases.
- Space is lived closeness. Regions, de-severance and directionality explain nearness by access, though the account omits the body (Cerbone).
- The one is double-edged. Das Man levels possibilities but also articulates the shared norms that make a common world (Dreyfus).
- Assertion is derivative but continuous. Fultner places language on a continuum with practical dealings, not as a separate theoretical layer.
- The sign chapter is a polemic. §§17-18 target Cohen and Cassirer, yet leave Heidegger with an inverted idealism of practice (Gordon).
- Falsehood needs a world. Belief and error are founded modes; an isolated subject could not even be wrong, so skepticism lacks a footing (McManus).
- Freedom is medio-passive. The "choice to choose oneself" is a pre-reflective self-ascription of responsibility, neither pure act nor mere passivity (Han-Pile).
- Worlds can end. Kuhn's revolutions and the Crow nation's loss show historical finitude: heritages die, and Dasein must face that too (Schear).
- Heidegger stayed a phenomenologist. The turn is not a break; early and late, being means the meaningfulness that human openness sustains (Sheehan).
- Translation shapes doctrine. Renderings such as "available" versus "ready-to-hand" carry interpretive bets; this Companion takes the pragmatist side.
- The scholarship took sides on death. The world-collapse reading in Chapters 12 and 16 is one camp; others read death as mortality or the possibility of impossibility.
- Politics now frames reception. Since 2014 the Black Notebooks have pressed the question of how far the analytic of Dasein connects to Heidegger's antisemitism.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Available vs occurrent | Things show up first as usable within purposes, and only later as objects with properties | Explaining why practice grounds theory |
| Disclosure triad | Mood, understanding and discourse open a world together | Analysing how a situation becomes meaningful |
| Breakdown | Equipment becomes conspicuous when it fails | Noticing the background you rely on |
| Death as world collapse | Existential death is losing the possibility of being anyone in a world | Reading Division II and historical change |
| Owning vs disowning | Authenticity is a stance toward one's own existence | Separating conformity from self-ownership |
| Exemplar semantics | Existentialia describe exemplary cases | Weighing what Heidegger's descriptions claim |
| Medio-passive choice | Freedom is accepted responsibility, not sovereign willing | Thinking about agency under constraint |
Who's who
| Person | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Mark A. Wrathall | Editor; Chapters 1 (with Max Murphey) and 8 |
| Alfred Denker | Chapter 2, the genesis of the book |
| Taylor Carman | Chapter 3, the question of being |
| Wayne Martin | Chapter 4, semantics and modality |
| David R. Cerbone | Chapter 5, space and spatiality |
| Hubert L. Dreyfus | Chapter 6, being-with-others |
| Matthew Ratcliffe | Chapter 7, mood |
| Barbara Fultner | Chapter 9, language and assertion |
| Peter E. Gordon | Chapter 10, signs and idealism |
| Denis McManus | Chapter 11, skepticism and truth |
| Iain D. Thomson | Chapter 12, death and demise |
| Béatrice Han-Pile | Chapter 13, freedom |
| William Blattner | Chapter 14, authenticity and resoluteness |
| Stephan Käufer | Chapter 15, temporality |
| Joseph K. Schear | Chapter 16, historical finitude |
| Thomas Sheehan | Chapter 17, the later Heidegger |
| Husserl, Kierkegaard, Dilthey, Kant | Heidegger's main sources and foils |
| Hermann Cohen, Ernst Cassirer | Neo-Kantian targets of Chapter 10 |
Twenty takeaways (study list)
- Being names intelligibility, not a super-entity (Carman, Sheehan).
- BT is a planned accident: facticity research condensed under pressure (Denker).
- Dasein semantics changes the force of every modal claim (Martin).
- Space of regions precedes metric space; body silence is a flaw (Cerbone).
- Mitsein is equiprimordial; other minds is a pseudo-problem (Dreyfus).
- Mood sets the range of mattering before belief (Ratcliffe).
- Understanding is projection; interpretation is enactment (Wrathall).
- Language sits on a continuum from Rede to occurrent assertion (Fultner).
- Signs fight Marburg functionalisation and risk idealism (Gordon).
- Truth as uncovering founds propositional truth (McManus).
- Death ≠ demise; formal indication links them (Thomson).
- Freedom is C1+C2 in the middle voice (Han-Pile).
- Authenticity is loyal self-ownership, not expressivism (Blattner).
- Temporality is care's sense; clocks are leveled (Käufer).
- Historicality makes death concrete in a Situation (Schear).
- Das Man enables and disburdens (overview, Dreyfus).
- Guilt is null reason of a nullity (overview, Blattner).
- Equiprimordiality blocks primal-ground ontology (overview).
- Critical lenses required for Notebooks, dualism, idealism residue.
- Centenary context (2027) renews, does not settle, the disputes.
Reading order recommendation for disputes.
Cross-cutting frameworks (keep the items)
- Care structure: thrownness + projection + falling; sense = temporality (Käufer).
- Disclosedness triad: disposedness / understanding / discourse (Ratcliffe, Wrathall, Fultner).
- Worldhood: involvements, signs, regions; measured space and occurrent assertion are founded (Gordon, Cerbone, Fultner).
- Mitsein / das Man: shared intelligibility enabling and disburdening (Dreyfus).
- Death cluster: perishing / demise / dying; existential death as world-fragility (Thomson, Blattner, Schear).
- Authenticity cluster: conscience, guilt, resoluteness, Situation vs Lage, historical retrieval (Han-Pile, Blattner, Schear).
- Method: formal indication, ontological difference, phenomenological exhibition vs reified Being (Carman, Sheehan).
Seven frameworks that recur across the Companion.
Who's who (quick)
Wrathall, Kisiel, Carman, Cerbone, Dreyfus, Ratcliffe, Fultner, Gordon, McManus, Thomson, Han-Pile, Blattner, Käufer, Schear, Sheehan; foils include Cohen, Cassirer, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Edwards, Hoffman, Mulhall, Sartre, Levinas, Kuhn, Lear, Kierkegaard, Böhme.
Critical stance for readers
Keep critical-lens boxes in view: Black Notebooks and Nazism (ch02 Update/lens), subterranean dualism (Cerbone), idealist residue (Gordon), death-camp equivocation risks (Thomson vs Hoffman), expressivist misreadings (Blattner). Do not "smooth" Heidegger into a harmless therapist of authenticity; do not refuse the phenomenological analyses because of the politics. The Companion's value is the argued middle.
About this book
The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time by Mark A. Wrathall (ed.), 2013. 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 it is for entities to make sense as what they are (Carman, Sheehan).
- Practice comes before theory. We deal with available equipment inside a referential whole before we ever observe occurrent objects.
- Mood opens the world. Moods are not inner feelings but the space of mattering in which anything can count; Ratcliffe argues they go deeper than Heidegger admits.
- Death is not demise. For Thomson and Schear, existential death is the collapse of one's world or way of being, which a person can live through.
- Authenticity is owning, not escaping. Resoluteness means steady loyalty to who one factically is, answering the concrete situation rather than the generic one (Blattner).
- Temporality unifies care. The future-led unity of the three ecstases makes care possible and amounts to a self (Käufer).