Act V: Existential Analytics and Torturing Chambers (§§9-11)

As I turn the key (Named: The Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein) on the lock of the door above which it says: "This way first", I begin to tremble. This far I have only been to the waiting halls and antechambers of the Citadel Being and Time, or Citadel BAT, for short. The horrors witnessed there have at times nearly crushed my mind, but it might be nothing in comparison to what lies ahead. Among the perils there lies the mystical, foul demons of Sorge and fearsome dragons of Fallenness. But in the process I have also gained confidence, courage and friends. There is hope yet.

The door opens with a reluctant squeal. We half expect to see bloodthirsty beasts of the BAT spring at us, but the hallway before us is quiet and empty. In the furthest corner I think I see movement within the shadows, but when I blink, all is still. Must be my imagination, I think as I remind myself to remain calm. We enter the hallway in expectant silence.

We have taken only a few steps into the corridor when the door behind us clangs shut with a deafening boom of grim finality. There is no turning back now, I think as we advance further into the eerie corridor that soon starts its ominous descend ever deeper and deeper into the Citadel.

Part I, Chapter I, §§9-11

The first chapter intends to expose the existential analysis of Dasein and to show how this relates to other similar studies.

§9

First Heidegger states that we will here analyse that being that we ourselves always are: Dasein, “here-being” or “there-being”. This sort of being, Dasein, has a relation to its own being: to it its being is like something. According to Heidegger, this brings forth two things:

(1) The essence of this being is included in that it must be. Therefore the what-being (essence) of Dasein is to be determined from its being (existence), if we wish to speak of essence at all. Therefore Dasein’s essence is not in its properties, but in its way of being, it’s mode of being. I think this is to be taken as saying that the essence of man is not any set of properties, but in the way man is: as something that has the ability to have a view on its own being, to question it and to try to understand it. Dasein does not, therefore, express some object such as a table, but a way in which something is – no matter what the actual object that has this mode of being happens to be. I take this to mean that a computer can be Dasein, if it can question its own being, and a human can be non-Dasein, and actually is just that when turned into a corpse (or a vegetable - like me).

(2) Dasein is always my being. I take this to mean not that Heidegger is saying that all Daseins are him, but that of every Dasein we must use a personal pronoun: me, you, him etc. Basically, I understand this as a similar thing to Kant’s Transcendental Unity of Apperception, that is, the necessary condition for a subject to be a subject is that he is able to say “I think” of every perception that he has. Heidegger is saying, I believe, that every Dasein can say of himself that “I am”, so to speak. Every Dasein is “I”, for himself. Heidegger then differentiates between Dasein and Vorhandensein, that being a sort of “present-to-hand-being”, as it is sometimes translated. Things that are not Dasein can be present to hand, that is, as something that is before us, accessible and present - a mere object that cannot be a subject. To these present-to-hand-beings their being is irrelevant (as it is, assumably, irrelevant to a table that it exists). But for Dasein, as explained before, his being cannot be irrelevant.

Heidegger says that Dasein is always its own possibility. This possibility is not something it owns like something that is present-to-hand. It is not an object. This possibility is Dasein. But what does Heidegger mean by “possibility”? In the introduction we saw that possibility for Heidegger is something that the Dasein can be. This is: the horizon it sees before itself. I think that I can be a philosopher. It is possible for me, and it is something that I can reach. I can become a philosopher, if I choose to. Now the totality of these possibilities is for Heidegger the Dasein’s possibility, and this possibility is what the Dasein is – of course, this Dasein is a particular Dasein, like me, not Dasein in general. Dasein is in the world, with all his desires, dreams, wants and principles. This totality of what the Dasein sees is his possibility, and it is this totality that determines what the particular Dasein is. In non-Heideggerian: I am the totality of my dreams, beliefs, desires, thoughts and so on and so on. That is, as me. Of course, I am also a body, but that body is not the Dasein. When I speak of me, I speak of me-as-a-subject: me-as-a-Dasein. It is not, for Heidegger, just that I have dreams and beliefs, but that I am those. This is a strong claim, but I think it holds. As long as this “possibility” is defined broadly enough (as it is now: it is simply the totality of all that I consider myself to be in relation with), it spans the whole of my subjectivity. And as a subject, I am these subjective notions. As an object I might be a body, but as a subject I am something that has a relation to his body. I think of my body in a certain way. This which in me thinks of things in a certain way is the Dasein.

It should be made clear that this is in a sense Heidegger’s philosophy of mind. Heidegger seems to think that being a subject is simply to “be there”, to have a relation to where one is. This returns us directly to the common notion that for a subject, for a consciousness, things are like something. For a table the floor on which it stands is not like anything, but for me it is. This like-being, so to speak, is not something that the object itself has, but what the subject projects to it. Therefore Heidegger says that being a conscious subject is to have this like-relation to things. And what is then this subject? It is the totality of these like-relations. Why? Perhaps – I am just speculating here – because if we take away all these like-relations, what do we have left? Nothing at least that would make the thing we are left with conscious (there is nothing that is like something to it). Perhaps the only thing that he has is the potentiality of being in like-relation to something. That is, the Dasein. Is the Dasein then the necessary condition for being a subject? An impersonal subjectivity? Those of you that know of these things must have already guessed what I am aiming at: is the Dasein the transcendental subject? That same limit of subjectivity that for Kant was the transcendental subject, for Wittgenstein the eye, and for Husserl the transcendental ego? It seems plausible.

But I am not through with Heidegger's philosophy of mind yet. What is known as Brentano’s thesis is that being a subject is about being an intentional being – that is, having intentional states of mind. Intentionality means having a certain directed relation to things. Basically: my states of mind are directed at things. Either things within my consciousness, within my body or totally external to me. Is Heidegger an intentionalist? I cannot see why he would not be. After all, the whole point of Dasein is that he can ask questions. What are questions? They are something that have the one who asks it (the subject) and the question itself that is directed to something of which it is asked (the object). This ability to ask questions is then equivalent with the ability to have a certain directed relation to objects. Also, the like-relation is such a relation: something (object) is like something to something (subject). The being-like-something is intentional, because the state of mind is directed at an object of which the being-like-something is said. I think this is enough to prove that Heidegger is an intentionalist. Let the demons of the Citadel Being and Time strike me down, if they will to oppose my judgment!

In any case, it is important to understand that for Dasein existence comes before essence (Heidegger is an existentialist) - because the essence is a way of being - and that it is always egocentric (this has unwanted connotations – it would perhaps be better to say me-centred).

Heidegger says that Dasein must be exposed through existential analysis of its existence (that is, through analysing the formal structure of Dasein’s existence), but in this we must not start by postulating a certain kind of existence, but we must start from the vague generality of Dasein’s existence: averageness. This everyday averageness of Dasein is the foundation of its ontic being (ontic, remember, was about things that are, in opposition to the way things are in general), and as such it is the closest to us in the ontic sense. But that which is closest to us ontically is the furthest away from us ontologically (That which is closest to us has a structure that is hardest to determine, because we cannot detach ourselves from it to see it in its totality) . Therefore, according to Heidegger, this averageness can now be “passed by”. I am rather baffled at this. Reading again and again what Heidegger is saying about this does not make it any clearer, to my utter annoyance. It seems to me that Heidegger might be trying to say that the averageness is something that we always are, but what is not something directly associated with the structure of being. That is, averageness is a name for all the vague additional stuff in our lives that obstructs our being, even though it is in a sense a foundation for our being (in the ontic sense). But this does not open up for me, and I will have to look at this later, if I can.

Nonetheless, the explications gained from analysing Dasein are called existentials. They are the ways Dasein can be – in this they share a relation to categories (for Aristotle: ways for objects to be, for Kant: ways to think of objects). Therefore existentials are the specific ways in which the Dasein is – apart from other beings. Categories explicate the ways non-Dasein-beings can be. For Heidegger existentials and categories are both the fundamental possibilities for things to be. The existentials pertain to beings that are who (existence) and categories to beings that are what (being present-at-hand in general – objects). How these two are related together can be resolved only after the horizon of asking the question about being has been uncovered.

§10

We come by two metal doors on both sides of the corridor. Looking at my fellows for support, I swallow and turn the handle on the door on the right side.

The door opens silently and reveals a horrid sight. The special sciences known as Anthropology, Psychology and Biology are caged in a room filled with torturing devices. On the wall it reads in letters of blood: "The special sciences work within the Being and cannot explain it. Thus as slaves to Fundamental Analysis of Dasein, they must forever succumb to my rule." In horror I realize that these poor bastards are of no use in finding the meaning of Being and are therefore abandoned in this torturing chamber of particular sciences. The meaning of Being can only be exposed through fundamental analysis on the existentiality of Dasein, and never through the special sciences that only explicate empirical matters within the framework of existentiality of Dasein. I hastily close the door, grieving for the fate of these sciences.

§11

As I open the other door, I find myself face to face with another torturing chamber. I hear some muffled screams about the difference between primitivity (as studied in anthropology and ethnology, a level of sophistication of a culture) and averageness. A bloody iron maiden of “natural world” (which has been at least in part constructed by the Dasein himself) is also seen in the corner. I feel sick, and gagging I close the door and hope that the next corridor will expose something else than mere cruelty of massacred empirical sciences.