Act III: From Being to Time

Preliminary Considerations

I have now travelled through the corridor that leads from the entrance to the antechamber of Being and Time. I have both gained great insight, and experienced utter confusion. I have understood the terminology of Heidegger to some extent, and in the process started to speak in Heideggerian as well. The spell that is the Being and Time is potent indeed, and I must take better care not to fall totally under its influence. The tome twists my mind into this and that direction, leading me on to believe that I understand, and then in a single show of power strike me into spinning amidst the endless maze of concepts. Is this the good cop – bad cop strategy at work here? You know that one where the bad cop intimidates the interrogated and then the good cop steps in, so that the contrast is made clear. This has been noted to work: the interrogated will succumb to the good cop after being treated by the bad cop, simply because he is so relieved. Perhaps Being and Time is doing the same thing?

I do not know. There is yet the antechamber before me, and in there perhaps things will become clear at last.

On the door to the antechamber there is a picture of a snake turning onto itself, eating its own tail and forming a circle. This I recognize as the ancient, mythical Oroborus. Perhaps it is chosen as the sign of this place, for it seems to me that Being is like this serpent. It is not only a mere circle, but its own meaning turns back onto itself – its whole essence is that of an endless circle, where one can travel on forever. The true Being cannot be seen from within the circle, for one will only see endless repeat, questions turning back into themselves in a never ending cycle. The truth of Being, the essence of it, is only understood as the circle itself. Perhaps this makes sense, perhaps not. I put my musings aside, and turn the handle of the door to the antechamber and enter, fearful of what will await me there.

Introduction, Part II, §§5-6

§5

In the preceding clauses Heidegger purported to show that examination of Dasein is primary to examination of Being itself. Now the problem then naturally arises: how to examine the Dasein? First Heidegger notes that Dasein is ontically the nearest to us, but ontologically furthest away. What does he mean? Well, as we factually are the Dasein, we are not only close to it, but as close to it as we can get. Basically I think this can be analogized to our subjectivity, which is something that is present in everything we do, because we arethat subjectivity. But it too is ontologically the furthest away, because precisely due to this ontic closeness it is so difficult to see the structure of our subjectivity. What is it to be a subject? How to explain this, if one has no experience of ever being anything else? How does one set out to recognize that which is our subjectivity in our experience, to say what is it like? What is a colour like? Or an emotion? We are too close to Dasein to see it clearly.

And so Heidegger says that Dasein is trying to understand its own being through understanding what it is not, by reflecting on the non-Dasein, that being the world itself. The world is our mirror through which we try to understand ourselves. So it is only through that being into which the Dasein is always in relation (the world) that any understanding can arise. Dasein is always understood as being already in a relation to the world, and it is understood only through understanding this relation, and for each Dasein this relation is individual.

Heidegger says that we have a huge amount of different interpretations of Dasein at our disposal. He lists for example psychology, anthropology, ethics and history as such interpretations, and then asks whether the existential analysis of these fields is done carefully enough. By this he means that if these are ways to see the Dasein, have we sufficiently studied the structure of these ways: have we determined the foundations of these disciplines clearly enough to see how they really purport to explain Dasein?

Heidegger says, in my opinion, that Dasein should not be examined theoretically, but practically. It should be studied through examining its everyday mode of being. We must try to understand how Dasein really is in its everyday being – not idealise it through some semi-arbitrary theoretical structure. He then states that we shall find out that meaning of Dasein is its temporality. He does not explicate further what this means here; that will be done later. But instead he says that this interpretation of Dasein sets the foundation from which we stand a chance to find the answer to the meaning of Being in general.

Time is not time in its ordinary sense for Heidegger. (Surprise, surprise.) Time is that from which the Dasein attempts to understand itself. It is the horizon of interpretation of Being. I do not claim to understand what Heidegger is saying here, because I don’t believe it is understandable as of yet. But it seems that he is trying to get from the ordinary conception of time as a sort of dimension into a more fundamental conception: in which time is a sort of basis from which any understanding is possible. I will call this conception of time here Time, for it seems to me that there is still need for the ordinary sense of understanding time, for it is something that is derived from Time itself. I am not doing this to sound mystical, but only to differentiate between these two. I will also at times speak of Time as temporality. By this I try to express that this is not about certain moments of time, or how it expresses itself in reality, but about the phenomenon of Time in general, temporality. The basic difference Heidegger is explicating here is that between time itself and things that are in time. Form and content.

This is important to see: being in time presupposes Being, but Time itself does not presuppose Being for Heidegger, but indeed takes part in its determination. Heidegger calls this meaning of Being that is determined by Time its “temporal qualification/determination”. The meaning of Being must then be partly exposed through examination of temporality.

Fair enough, Heidegger, although I do not really understand why this is so. It seems to me as vaguely acceptable that Time is something that understanding requires, but I am unable to explicate my sentiments, and as Heidegger himself leaves this more or less open for the time being (no pun intended), perhaps we should too. Being is always temporal, let us remember this, and also bear in mind that Heidegger is not speaking of some naïve conception of time as physical time, but as something far more fundamental. Whatever that is, we will probably find out later.

This leads us then to considerations of history, as Heidegger says that the meaning of Being cannot be stationary, but is always understood through Time, and thus as something dynamic, more or less. To understand Being, we must understand historiality (again, this is not the same thing as history), which is the manifestation of Time. So, let us move on.

§6

Historiality is the form of Dasein’s being as something “happening”. Well, this is strange, but I think he means that Dasein is acting in the world, and this way of being as something that happens, or acts, is called historiality. History then is the succession of these happenings, or events. The historiality of Dasein is hard to grasp. Heidegger is saying that the past of Dasein is not something that comes behind it, but that always already goes before it. But this sounds totally incomprehensible. How can past go before anything, as it is something that is behind? I think this is only understandable as follows: Dasein is always temporal, and is therefore always determined by its historiality. That is, Dasein understands itself as a temporal being, and as a continuum, so to speak. Now it is in a sense true that past goes before us, because my past does not only tell me what I have done, but also where I am coming from, and thus where I am heading. It is like looking at a car’s path to a single point, and seeing that this path determines the future of the car to some extent. If the history of a car includes coming to a corner too fast, its future consists of sliding off the road. So the past in this sense does go before the Dasein, not only behind it.

But there is also another aspect to the historiality of Dasein: it cannot be understood merely as the history of one Dasein, but as the history of a whole culture. Culture is something that arises from tradition, and thus arises from the past. But this culture is also something that in a most profound way affects the way we will continue to do things. We are always within a culture, and thus within a history, and this history forms a context for us to develop in. In this sense the past determines Dasein and its future, and goes before the Dasein as well as behind it.

This temporality of Dasein has been ignored, according to Heidegger. It is to be understood that questions are always temporal, and are partly determined by the context of the culture they rise in. This is, I think, very understandable, because the questions we tend to ask in our culture are based on our culture itself: for example the scientific knowledge we possess. Questions concerning environment arise only when the relationship between our culture and its environment become problematic. Now Heidegger notes that the question about Being is of course itself also temporal, and this has been forgotten. He speaks of tradition that hides its own foundations. So Heidegger arrives at his most peculiar idea: the whole history of Western philosophy has been a certain line of interpretation, and now we must return to the roots to reinterpret the Ancients. But not just because they were somehow far wiser than us, but because they had the context in which the question about Being arose, and that context has been hidden by the tradition that forgot the problems and instead concentrated on the answers. And here Heidegger exposes his idea of destruction – the tradition must be broken into pieces to find out that which it has hidden. In this sense we must travel back through the history of philosophy to its roots to once again give philosophy some meaning. And it is this that must be done to expose the meaning of Being.

Destruction is not negative, but positive. It is supposed to recover something, not to make it obsolete. Heidegger then says something delightful: Kant is the first one to expose the problem of time. But Kant couldn’t have understood Time, because he bypassed, as Heidegger says, the ontological analysis of subject’s subjectivity. He then gives a demonstration of his destruction by tracing Kant’s error into Cartesian conception of subjectivity, that Kant used (I do not strictly agree: I am sure Kant’s idea of subjectivity is affected by Cartesian subjectivity, but for Kant subjectivity is very different from the Cartesian one – but I believe Heidegger’s idea is simply to show that Kant is still attached to Cartesian principles and this makes it impossible for him to see what he should see: that he never ever asked about the meaning of being itself). This Cartesian conception is then retraced to his usage of Medieval concepts and so forth back into the Ancients themselves.

He says that for the Ancients the meaning of Being included its temporality (its mode of being was linked to the present), and that for one Plato understood the essence of human as something that speaks – unlike other beings. Therefore his philosophy is dialectical. Thus Heidegger ends the clause by saying that indeed, the search for meaning of Being must be started from this sort of destruction that takes us to the “spring” of the question itself.

The next clause is the longest by far, and I will have to rest before entering its wonders. After the next analysis I believe I have finished the Introduction as a whole. I am starting to calm down and get a better handle on Heidegger. I think I understand the basic idea that he is aiming at, and this makes it easier for me to get a hold onto the details. There is still much in his philosophy that I do not understand. It also always makes me wary if I agree too much. It is often a sign of not understanding. What sounds good is not always good, but if one does not grasp the ideas properly enough, it is nigh impossible to really criticise the validity of the ideas. My whole brainpower is going into understanding what he is trying to say. In that very little energy is left to actually appraise this what he is saying, and also there is the possibility of reading too much into Heidegger. Assuming that he makes sense, but that I just don’t understand it, makes me look for possible ways to explain his words. In this it might be that I am inserting ideas into them that do not really exist there.

But I am confident that if I get it wrong, Heidegger will mob the floor with my misconceptions sooner or later. In any case, it will be a long and arduous summer.