David Egan Philosophy

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, published in 1927, is approaching its hundredth birthday. It has a strong claim to being the most important work of philosophy published in the last hundred years. Working through it in the classroom with students this fall, I’m being reminded why.

The book we have weighs in at over four hundred pages filled with sentences like this: “Both bringing-close and the estimating and measurement of distances within that which has been de-severed and is present-at-hand within-the-world, are grounded in a making-present belonging to the unity of that temporality in which directionality too becomes possible.” I literally just jumped to a random page in the text and found that sentence. The whole book reads like that.

We should maybe count ourselves lucky that Being and Time isn’t longer. The book we have amounts to only a third of the project Heidegger envisioned. He had been developing and rehearsing his ideas in lectures at the universities of Freiburg and Marburg through the 1920s. People who heard the lectures were dazzled. Hannah Arendt, who was both Heidegger’s student and his lover at the time, later commented that Heidegger’s reputation was spreading through Germany “like the rumour of a hidden king.” But the king couldn’t remain hidden if he wanted job security. The publication pressures of academia forced Heidegger to hurry Being and Time into print before he felt it was ready. What we have are “Division One” and “Division Two” of “Part One” of a book that was supposed to consist of two parts with three divisions each.

To understand what’s so revolutionary about Heidegger’s project, it helps to say something about the picture he’s pushing back against. It’s a picture of our relation to the world that’s been dominant since at least the seventeenth century. This picture is so deeply ingrained in modern thought that it can be hard to even notice it’s there.

In very rough outline, the picture is this. There’s the external world of physical reality and the internal world of the mind. These two worlds come into contact at the interface of the senses. Light waves of particular frequencies irradiate the retina, sound waves of particular frequencies set up vibrations in the ear, and so on, and the mind interprets these stimuli and builds a representation of the external world in the mind. When the mind accurately represents the world external to it, we call it knowledge. We have developed systematic methods for accurately representing the world, and we call this science.

Two features of this picture are especially relevant to Heidegger’s critique. The first is the division between the inner and the outer, which styles us as minds striving to reach across the barrier of the senses to know a world that’s essentially external to us. The second is the idea that our fundamental way of relating to this external world is in terms of knowledge.

Heidegger has a story to tell about how this picture comes about. When philosophers philosophize and scientists do their science, they typically step back from a direct engagement with the world. Philosophy is known as an “armchair” discipline because it doesn’t require us to do anything. Instead, it requires careful, deliberate reflection about the sorts of things we normally do unreflectively. Science can involve a bit more doing but that doing typically happens in a lab. Scientists generate knowledge through controlled experiments that are carefully cordoned off from the mess of ordinary life.

When you’re contemplating in your armchair or studying things under a microscope, it really can feel like you’re a mind carefully examining the world at some remove. But this isn’t the ordinary shape of human experience, Heidegger cautions. For the most part, we’re actively engaged in the world: taking care of chores, working at our jobs, riding the bus, eating lunch, shopping, talking, walking. In these contexts, our clothes, cars, smartphones, shopping bags, and ramen bowls aren’t first and foremost objects of knowledge but rather objects of use.

More to the point, clothes show up to us as clothes, cars as cars, and so on, in these contexts of use. You could imagine someone from a culture without vehicles seeing a bicycle for the first time and being totally baffled about what kind of thing they’re looking at. For the most part, we don’t encounter the stuff in the world as inscrutable things, and that’s because we have a ready familiarity with the world and the stuff in it.

That ready familiarity with the world comes with a basic understanding of what our lives are about. I understand what I’m supposed to do with clothes and cars and so on, and that understanding is tied to a deeper understanding of what I’m doing in my life more generally. For the most part, we don’t reflect on that deeper understanding but it’s hovering in the background of everything we do.

The example I give in class is the whiteboard marker I tend to have in my hand as I lecture. The whiteboard marker shows up to me as a whiteboard marker and not some inscrutable thing because I know what whiteboard markers are for. I exhibit that knowledge, for the most part, not by talking about the marker but simply by using it. What’s more, my writing has a point: I’m teaching a class on Heidegger. And teaching a class on Heidegger has a point: it’s one of the things I’m doing as a philosophy professor. And being a philosophy professor has a point… I think. it’s just that, the farther I get from the immediate context or writing on the whiteboard, the harder it is to say exactly what the point is.

On one hand, I have some understanding of the point of it all hovering in the background. But on the other hand, I don’t very often get down to the rock bottom question of what the point of it all is. The danger of not digging down is that I might just settle into a kind of autopilot mode, where the things I do and the life I make for myself conform to whatever defaults my immediate social context has set for me. Heidegger calls this autopilot mode “inauthentic.”

Whether we do so authentically or inauthentically, we’re (almost) always moving about in a world that makes sense to us and engaging in activities that have some sort of a point. What’s more, these two things—the world making sense to us and our activities having a point—are connected, on Heidegger’s telling. It’s because we have some understanding of what we’re doing in the world that the world makes sense to us in the way that it does. If I suddenly lost all sense of what the point was of teaching philosophy, the whiteboard marker might suddenly show up to me as strange: what the hell is this thing and why did I think there was some useful purpose in handling it? Heidegger calls that strange experience of the world ceasing to make sense anxiety. It’s a topic I’ve written about elsewhere.

One of the things anxiety can teach us is that we shouldn’t take our non-anxious experience of the world for granted. That the world ordinarily makes sense to us—that we operate in a familiar way with a world made up of clothes and cars and whiteboard markers and so on rather than an unintelligible array of bare things—is a remarkable achievement. The intelligibility of the world goes hand in hand with our intelligibility to ourselves: the world makes sense to us because, and only in so far as, our lives make sense to us.

Heidegger uses the expression “being-in-the-world” to characterize this coupling of self and world. Contrary to the picture I sketched before, he argues that we can’t make sense of ourselves independent of the world we find our way about in and we can’t make sense of the world independent of our understanding of ourselves. On that other picture, I said that our primary mode of encounter with the world takes the form of knowledge. On Heidegger’s account, that primary mode of encounter is what he calls care. It’s because, in some deep way, my being-in-the-world matters to me that the world takes the shape that it does at all.

That’s as far as Heidegger gets in Division One. Division Two starts by complicating this picture. How can I make sense of my life in terms of activities that have a point when all of those activities lose their point in death? His analysis of death and then conscience lead him into an account of our existence as structured by time. Contrary to Popeye’s claim that “I am what I am,” Heidegger asserts that I also am what I have been and I am what I am not yet: human existence is always extended in time and so what we are can never be understood solely in what we are right now.

But spelling out those ideas would extend a newsletter that’s already getting a bit long in the word count. Part of what’s so enthralling about Heidegger’s work is that he connects very abstract and technical questions about the nature of being, knowledge, and intelligibility, to a passionate conception of life as something that’s made sense of in the living of it. And paired with that conception is a caution that we mostly live in ways that are unthinking and negligent. When we do that, he warns, the sense we make of our lives is no real sense at all. 

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6. The British military was using lances as weapons until 1927. (source)
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8. Due to rapid deforestation, Brazil’s Amazon has about the same carbon emissions per capita as the petrostate of Qatar, with less than 10% of Qatar’s per capita GDP. (source)
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10. Human milk has long been thought to be the most chemically complex milk of all mammals (which is a rough proxy for its nutritional value). But it turns out that seals have us beat. (source)
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