A Primer to Heideggerian Phenomenology
Hermeneutic phenomenological fundamental existential ontology?
Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976) is considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. The German philosopher revolutionized Continental philosophy in the mid-20th century with his groundbreaking work, notably ‘Being and Time’ (1927). It is this ‘early’ Heidegger whose thoughts will be evaluated here. Much of his work covered lots of territory, including – but not limited to – ontology, phenomenology, language, and more. While his life and work has remained marked by infamy regarding his relationship with Nazism, he nevertheless exerted and continues to exert an immense aura of influence within the bounds of philosophy.
Fundamentally, Heidegger sought to philosophize about the way in which life is directly experienced. In order to address the most fundamental experiences and ways in which we interact with the world, he constructed a whole system of elaborate thought and jargon meant to indicate that which could not be indicated by common language or even philosophical terminology. He wishes to construct a way to interact with the world in a pretheoretical, prephilosophical, prescientific manner – free from the prejudices and ways of conceptualizing that are invisibly embedded in the aforementioned. In the same way that one cannot see what is closest to the eye, Heidegger postulates that Western thinkers have neglected that which is most fundamental and even most dear – Being itself. It is in ‘Being and Time’ that Heidegger presents his project of reclaiming the true purpose of Western philosophy – answering (or at the very least addressing) the question of Being, or seinsfrage. For Heidegger, Western philosophy lost its way through centuries of addressing ‘Being’ as itself another ‘being’ or entity to be discussed. Despite defining the self as a ‘thinking, unextended being’, Descartes failed to actually discuss the meaning of ‘being’ itself. This in itself is characteristic of the neglect of the study of Being. He famously makes what he calls the ontological difference: the clear distinction between beings and Being (the Being of all beings). Beings are entities that exist, whereas Being is the ground or the condition for their existence. Heidegger’s project can be defined as phenomenological ontology – an inquiry into one’s immediate experience in order to address the question of Being. He never does get an answer to the seinsfrage, but his work in ‘Being and Time’ is indispensable, nevertheless, in the approach he takes and the theories he comes up with along the way.
What is phenomenology for Heidegger? Phenomenology is a philosophical method originally devised by Heidegger’s mentor Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938), however, it branched out and evolved into different variations of the same idea over time. Phenomenology, for Heidegger, is the method of perceiving entities in the way that they appear to us – not only perceiving them as they are, but perceiving them as what they mean to us. Perceiving beings as they show themselves, as they are given. This emphasis on meaning and interpretation makes Heidegger’s phenomenology a hermeneutic enterprise; a project determined to uncover the meanings that various beings carry to dasein (human being). By phenomenology we are able to uncover the hidden meanings beneath the surface of entities. The ultimate hiddenness of all beings is Being itself, therefore Heidegger’s phenomenology is concerned with revealing the nature of Being. It seeks to analyze dasein and human existence phenomenologically to uncover the nature of Being. That is why Heidegger says “Only as phenomenology is ontology possible.”
One of the central ideas of Husserl’s conception of phenomenology is intentionality. Intentionality, simply put, is the idea that consciousness is only ever consciousness of something. Consciousness is always ‘about’ something and therefore the relationship between consciousness and its contents are inseparable. Heidegger extrapolates this idea to further his attack on subject-object duality, stating that experience doesn’t start with either the self or the world but with both of them in union. This is how his approach defies both naturalistic approaches (in which consciousness arises from the world) and idealistic approaches (in which the world arises from consciousness) by taking a phenomenological approach.
In Heidegger, the desire to rid oneself of the baggage of Western philosophy led to the creation / adoption of neologisms. Perhaps the most notable is dasein. Dasein literally means ‘there-being’ in German, but for Heidegger it more or less refers to human being. According to Heidegger, the definition of dasein is the being for which its own Being is an issue. This definition is so because it is humans who seek the meaning of their existence; humans are the beings for whom their own Being is an issue.
The rationale behind the neologisms and near-irreverence that courses through Heidegger also has its roots in his abandonment of and disdain for the traditional subject-object duality that has plagued Western philosophy. Particularly from Descartes onwards, Western philosophy has been trapped in the dichotomy of subjectivity and objectivity. For Heidegger, however, this is fallacious.
According to Heidegger, human existence cannot be viewed as impartial, detached conscious minds interacting with and imposing upon a world separate from them. Rather, a more accurate understanding of human existence acknowledges that there is no subject separate from the experience of being-in-the-world (in-der-welt-sein). Dasein thus differs from the cogito of Descartes. The cogito is a conception of a thinking, unextended subject which interacts with a world outside of it. Heidegger points out that there is no way to conceive of a human existence that is not grounded in and shaped by the world in which it finds itself. When Descartes sits to question and ponder over his existence, he does so while situated firmly in the world. However much he may believe himself to be a detached, thinking substance, he is ultimately and originally conducting his very thinking from an existence which has an inseparable relationship with the world. Thus, says Heidegger, dasein’s being-in-the-world presupposes any such distinction of subject and object / world. It is Heidegger’s choice to eschew terms like consciousness, mind, etc. in his attempt to discard himself of the baggage that these philosophical terms carry.
Dasein, says Heidegger, is ‘thrown projection’. Dasein is always-already found in the world; its Being is disclosed to itself in the ‘there’ of the world (this is the ‘there’ of ‘there-being’, or ‘dasein’). It finds itself in various moods (stimmung), be they fear, boredom, or other moods. ‘Thrownness’ (geworfenheit) describes the fact that dasein has no control over the circumstances into which it finds itself. No one can choose the time or place into which they are born. Dasein is thus ‘thrown’ into being-in-the-world. Moreover, the Being of dasein is situated temporally; it projects itself in time, into the future. Dasein is Being in time – it has a past that informs its present and always projects itself into the future through its various moods.
One of the most crucial distinctions Heidegger makes in discussing the being-in-the-world of dasein is that between the attitudes of presence-at-hand (vorhandenheit) and readiness-to-hand (zuhandenheit). Present-at-handness refers to the attitude assumed by scientists and other theorists. A scientist might inspect a hammer and dissect it down to its fundamental particles and analyze it as such an object. It is an attitude that creates distance between dasein and other entities. Ready-to-handness, however, is the attitude that everyone assumes almost always in regard to other entities. It is the natural attitude that one has in regard to another entity. If one were to use that hammer – rather than inspect it – one would at some point lose the cognizance of the hammer as an entity separate from one’s own hand. One would then cease to perceive the hammer as anything outside of one’s own being. The attitude would only change to present-at-handness when, for instance, the hammer breaks and ceases to work.
This analysis goes to show that dasein does not naturally chop up entities neatly as subjects or objects. Rather, something as inanimate as a piece of clothing becomes one with its wearer when worn. Dasein interacts with things in their being as they carry specific meanings for it. So it is with the entities that are encountered in the world: the keyboard upon which one types, the chair in which one is seated, the utensil with which one eats, and so on. The idea of subject-object duality only arises from the attitude of present-at-handness, which is not the natural way of being-in-the-world for dasein.
A blog article cannot hope to legitimately scratch the surface of his thought; this was a doomed enterprise to begin with. Nevertheless, I hoped to give at least a primer into the mind and work of one of the greatest Western philosophers. It is evident that Martin Heidegger sought to philosophize about everyday life in a novel way that described human being in ways never done before. In doing so, he gave rise to a new era in Continental philosophy, inspiring the likes of Herbert Marcuse, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and many more. Though his sphere of thought broadened greatly throughout the span of his long and controversial life, his early work in phenomenological ontology became the basis for a whole new set of philosophical approaches.
Photo by Digne Meller Marcovicz