blackheath philosophy forum

ROBERT SINNERBRINK'S PAPER ON HEIDEGGER
DELIVERED ON SATURDAY 2 MAY, 2009 AT THE BLACKHEATH FORUM

Sinnerbrink at the Forum lectern

MARTIN HEIDEGGER (1889-1976)
Speaker: Robert Sinnerbrink, Macquarie University

Heidegger's profound influence on the development of modern European philosophy-as well as his curious relationship with 20C analytic and post-analytic philosophy-is becoming increasingly palpable today. Perhaps the most well-known representative of 20C phenomenology (along with his teacher Edmund Husserl), Heidegger's impact can be discerned in a variety of movements of modern thought: existentialism, for example, claims him as a founding thinker (though Heidegger himself eschewed the term); 20C philosophical hermeneutics, as developed by Heidegger's student Hans-Georg Gadamer, grows directly from his method of interpretation; post-War French philosophy, including Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but also post-phenomenological thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, would not be thinkable without Heidegger. He was hailed as a philosophical genius by many (Hannah Arendt, his former student, lifelong lover, and important political philosopher in her own right, hailed him as a 'hidden king' who had made thought possible again). He has also been dismissed as a metaphysical charlatan by others (Rudolf Carnap famously rejected Heidegger's reflections on "the Nothing" as a prime instance of metaphysical non-sense to be dispelled by appropriate logical analysis). Wittgenstein even commented that he could understand the pathos of Heidegger's reflections on the meaning of "being", his ruminations on Angst and das Nichts, but thought that in the end this was precisely a case where philosophy runs up against the limits of our language.

Heidegger continues to generate controversy today, not least for his infamous engagement with Nazism during the early to mid 1930s, during which time he briefly served as Rector of the University of Freiburg and brought the University 'into line' with the edicts of the Nazi regime. This Nazi taint led a generation of German philosophers to reject his thought out of hand, arguing that it led down the slippery slope to fascism (Jürgen Habermas not only blames Heidegger (and Nietzsche) for the excesses of French post-structuralist thought, but charges Heidegger with the undermining of Western rationalism as such).

Against such alarmist warnings, however, it should be remembered that Heidegger was read by the likes of Gilbert Ryle (who reviewed Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, in the journal Mind, no less, back in 1928); and he remains a key thinker for more recent Anglophone philosophers such Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, and Robert Brandom. There is even a lively Heideggerian strain of phenomenological cognitive science, pioneered by Hubert Dreyfus but continued in the work of Shaun Gallagher and others. Indeed Dreyfus's lectures on the first part of Heidegger's Being and Time, interpreted along the lines of a Wittgensteinian pragmatism, did much to dispel the mythology surrounding Heidegger's thought. After his initial reception as an 'existentialist', and reputation as an obscurantist, irrationalist, even a mystic, Heidegger's legacy is alive and well today, not only in 'Continental' philosophy but also in what we might call post-analytic philosophy.

Heidegger had studied theology and philosophy before discovering the revolutionary approach of Edmund Husserl, founder of modern phenomenology. As Husserl's most brilliant student, Heidegger absorbed Husserl's path-breaking work on phenomenological method, the importance of concrete description of phenomena, and steadfast focus on capturing and analysing the complexity and hidden structure of basic elements of our conscious experience. Drawing upon but also challenging Husserlian phenomenology, Heidegger's best known work, Being and Time, was published in 1927 and immediately hailed as a philosophical classic. To be very schematic, Heidegger was concerned in that work to raise the fundamental question of philosophy, a question that has been forgotten in the history of modern philosophy: namely the question of Being. As Heidegger notes, we must presuppose a vague understanding of "Being" [Sein] in our everyday experience; we must presuppose the concept of "Being" in our most basic use of language; yet the philosophical concept of "Being" remains obscure or indefinable.

What, then, is the sense or meaning of Being? We need to answer this question, Heidegger contends, if we wish to ground the various sciences that deal with particular kinds of beings (mathematical, biological, and so on). Without understanding the meaning of "being" at issue in any of our ontological claims, Heidegger claims, our investigations of particular kinds of beings, whether through the natural or the human sciences, remains without an adequately clarified foundation. This is the task that Being and Time sets for itself, a preparatory investigation that considers the question of the meaning of "being". But which "being" should we investigate? Should we analyse the concept alone? Should we select one particular kind of being for consideration?

To answer this question properly, Heidegger argued, we should begin with a phenomenological analysis of the kind of being that we ourselves are: beings are capable of questioning our own way of Being. At the same time, we should avoid presupposing the traditional, philosophically loaded concept of the "human being" (with its various definitions such as "rational animal", "speaking being," "consciousness," and so on). Instead, Heidegger proposes that we designate ourselves more neutrally as "Da-sein," that is, as 'existence' or, more literally, as 'being-there'.

Who are we? We are beings whose way of Being Heidegger defines as "existence" [Existenz], which means that we dwell in a meaningful world in a finite, temporal, and self-interpreting manner such that our own Being is an issue for us-something about which we care fundamentally. Heidegger thus proceeds to analyse Da-sein in its average everyday existence, which he calls our "being-in-the-world," and to describe the complex structure of our temporal existence. By analysing the holistic structure of our being-in-the-world, we can show that we are defined by an existential care for our own Being; and more originarily, we defined by the experience of temporality in our existence as finite beings aware of our own finitude (our contingent, finite, 'ungrounded' existence as individuals thrown into a pre-given, shared world).

On the question of temporality, Heidegger rejects the traditional philosophical understanding of time as a succession of 'now' moments (the analysis of internal time-consciousness undertaken by Heidegger's teacher, Edmund Husserl, was an important philosophical source as well as a target of Heidegger's critique). In Being and Time, Heidegger claims that the phenomenological structure of human temporality involves a primary projection towards a future horizon of possibilities, against an inherited background of past facticities (given circumstances and options), which together allow the present to be disclosed as comprising a meaningful shared world in which we can engage in practical activities oriented towards the future.

Heidegger's Being-in-the-world

So much by way of general summary! In the remainder of this talk I would like to explore Heidegger's preliminary analysis of our average everyday experience, what Heidegger calls our "being-in-the-world". To do so, however, requires that we take a brief detour to outline the basic elements of phenomenology, and to discuss the ways Heidegger responds to the phenomenological method of his teacher Edmund Husserl.

Husserl's phenomenological analysis of consciousness provides a paradigmatic case, for Heidegger, of the modern philosophy of consciousness (or what he called the 'metaphysics of subjectivity'), centred on the analysis of consciousness, or the conditions of our cognitive experience of the world. Commencing with Descartes' famous analysis of the cogito (the I think) as foundation of knowledge, and stretching through Kantian idealism, with its account of pure self-consciousness as the condition of the possibility of objective knowledge (but also Locke, Hume, and empiricism more generally), modern philosophy has been focused on questions such as how we acquire knowledge of external reality, and what is the nature of consciousness. At the same time, modern thought has battled the spectre of scepticism, which looms large once we inquire into the possibility of knowledge of the external world, of other minds, or how we know our representations match up with reality, and so on. Husserl's phenomenology attempted to provide a foundation for such philosophical inquiry by analysing the basic structures of consciousness that allow us to have coherent experience of the world. So let me begin with a brief tour of Husserl's phenomenology in order to show how Heidegger both appropriates and transforms the phenomenological approach to understanding who we are.

1) Introduction to Husserl's phenomenology (the science of phenomena)

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) introduced phenomenology in the early 20C as a radical new method in philosophy. His aim was to describe the way phenomena appear to consciousness, and to analyse the essential structures of consciousness. Husserl thus defined phenomenology as the "science of the essence of consciousness," and claimed that it could provide a foundation for the other sciences, both natural and humanistic.

At its most basic level, phenomenology emerged as a reaction to the Platonic prejudice in philosophy: the view that the world of appearance is illusory as compared with real world of ideas or pure essences. On the contrary, argued Husserl, whatever is given to us in conscious experience is constituted and encountered in certain ways; in clarifying and analysing how phenomena are given to us in consciousness we can provide a more secure foundation for our inquiries into knowledge. For example, we might say that we encounter objects through perception. But in order to make sense of what we mean by "object" we must begin by clarifying the 'givenness' of what we call objects in experience (that they are perceived as real, that they show certain aspects, that we intend more than is immediately apparent to the senses, that our perception of the object is accompanied by certain beliefs, that perception is temporal, and so on).

In analysing how objects appear-or phenomena more generally, meaning whatever is given in, or appears to us, in our cognitive experience-phenomenology does not posit abstract theories of perception, or presuppose inherited assumptions about the nature of mind, consciousness, reality, and so on. To this extent, it provides an alternative to Cartesian mind/body dualism (the view that mind is independent of, even better known than the body). Rather than assume the distinction between, hence the problem of the relation of mind and world, we commence with a phenomenological description of our own conscious experience. To use Husserl's motto, we have to return "to the things themselves": focusing our attention on how phenomena are given to us in consciousness, providing a rich concrete description of these phenomena, and then analysing the invariant structures of experience that allow us clarify our cognitive experience of the world.

Phenomenology is thus a response to the profound philosophical questions raised by the contrast between the 'scientific image of the world' and the 'manifest image of the world' (as Wilfrid Sellars put it). How do we reconcile the scientific explanation of the causal structure or mechanisms constituting natural phenomena with our ordinary experience of the world? Does the scientific image of the world-for all its epistemic power-drain our subjective experience (but also perhaps morality) of meaning and value? What is the appropriate relation between philosophy and science in the modern world? Such were the questions that phenomenology sought to address, hoping to provide a genuine foundation for objective knowledge by reconnecting it with its pre-theoretical ground in our experience of the world.

The phenomenological movement is doubtless one of the richest and most interesting to have emerged in 20C philosophy. Although developed by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, other important practitioners included Maurice-Merleau Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Emmanuel Levinas. Phenomenology, with its focus of a descriptive analysis of lived experience, was also closely allied with existentialism (which is concerned centrally with the question of human existence), with hermeneutics (concerned with the interpretation of meaning, particularly in cultural artefacts), and later, with deconstruction (which took its inspiration from Husserl's analytical dismantling of the basic structures of consciousness as well as Heidegger's project of 'deconstructing' the history of ontology).

2) Heidegger's critique of Husserl and new approach to phenomenology

Husserl claimed (following Brentano) that the mind is defined by intentionality, by always being directed towards objects under different aspects (perception, beliefs, desires, etc). This 'directedness' of the mind always has a content (intentional content), a basic description of reality that enables us to perceive objects under different aspects. This intentional content, whatever the status of the object I am aware of, provides an indubitable foundation for our knowledge of the world. But how do we gain access to this intentional content of consciousness? For this we require an appropriate method, Husserl argued, the phenomenological method.

Phenomenological Method ('phenomenological reduction')

To analyse consciousness properly, Husserl claimed, we should 'bracket' our multifarious beliefs about the world, suspend our ontological commitments as far as possible, and focus just on how objects are actually given to us in consciousness. Here it is important that we distinguish between the act of mental awareness (noesis), and the content or object of that mental act (noema): we can't reduce one to the other! Indeed in order to clarify how, precisely, phenomena are given to us in experience, we have to distinguish what we actually experience from the vastly complex network of beliefs and assumptions that give sense, meaning, and coherence to what we experience.

But what method should we adopt if we are to distil our cognitive experience down to pure phenomena? Husserl's answer was that we need to perform what he called a phenomenological "reduction": distilling consciousness down to how pure phenomena are given to us, while bracketing or neutralising, as far as possible, our beliefs and ontological assumptions about what we are experiencing. Husserl argued that if I perform this phenomenological 'bracketing' of the world properly, I can have direct, self-evident experience of the intentionality or directedness of consciousness. Assuming this all goes well, what I encounter is the living flow of intentional contents of consciousness; layers of meaning that constitute the intelligibility of the world for me. This is Husserl's phenomenological version of the 'Cartesian' foundation for our understanding and knowledge of reality.

Husserl's phenomenology is clearly allied with the Descartes-Hume-Kant tradition of the philosophy of consciousness (the human subject conscious of being confronted by a world of objects). Consciousness provides the focal point for our philosophical investigations of knowledge of the external world. Heidegger challenges this 'philosophy of consciousness,' questioning whether the subject-object model of consciousness provides the right description of human existence. Are Husserl's method ('bracketing' the world) and conclusion (intentional consciousness as the foundation of knowledge) phenomenologically correct? Although Husserl claims to be engaging in a genuinely foundational inquiry, suspending all presuppositions and commencing with the pure intentional phenomena of consciousness, there are still crucial ontological terms and assumptions that come into play in his phenomenological analyses. Chief among these is the notion of "consciousness" itself. What do we mean by it? How is it related to the world? Doesn't the notion of "consciousness" import epistemological and ontological baggage that would taint the purity of the phenomenological analysis? To begin our phenomenological analysis with "consciousness," then, is to presuppose a theoretical picture of what the mind is and how it relates to the world-and this is what phenomenology, as a descriptive method, is at pains to avoid.

Against Husserl and the philosophy of consciousness, Heidegger argued that we need to describe phenomenologically the way in which we ordinarily exist in the world, our "average everydayness". If we are to do phenomenology properly we must avoid importing various theoretically laden assumptions about "mind," "world," or what "human beings" are (e.g. rational animals, knowing subjects, etc.). But why so? What's wrong with philosophical talk of 'mind', 'consciousness', and so on?

Against the subject-object model of consciousness

The basic problem, according to Heidegger, is that philosophy has traditionally tended to privilege theoretical knowledge as the definitive feature of human beings (Cf. Plato and Descartes). Philosophers have, in the main, assumed an image or model of the mind as defined by its activities directed toward acquiring theoretical knowledge of objects in a world external to our consciousness. This account of the mind as a set of inner representations of external objects has firmly taken hold in modern philosophy (at least until the middle of the 20C!). It raises the now familiar epistemic questions: Is our knowledge reliable? Can I know if there is an external world? Are there other minds? Such questions clearly also raise the spectre of scepticism as their accompanying shadow-the idea that perhaps we have no reliable knowledge of reality, or no way of knowing whether what we know in fact matches up to the way reality is, or that we cannot disprove that we are radically mistaken in our most fundamental beliefs, etc.

Now these questions and their sceptical counterpoints, Heidegger claims, belong to a derivative way of relating to the world (what Husserl called the 'theoretical attitude"). They arise when we engage in explicit reflection on objects, or our knowledge of the world, or on the nature of our knowledge of reality; but they do not really arise in, let alone definitively capture, our most basic way of existing, which for the most part involves us engaging in more or less routine, non-reflective activities, what Heidegger calls "comportments" towards available beings or entities (e.g. using tools and equipment, engaging in practical activities, co-ordinating our actions with others in shared tasks, and so on). Such engaged activity is for the most part a matter of "routine coping" rather than explicitly self-conscious reflection (e.g. driving a car, if we have the 'know how', as opposed to learning how to drive, or wondering what to do if the car won't start). The uncritical assumption that disengaged knowing-the theoretical attitude of a distanced observer-is paradigmatic for human experience distorts the phenomenological picture of our distinctively human ways of being.

3) Heidegger's Being-in-the-world

Instead of a disembodied mind contemplating objects in a disengaged way, what Thomas Nagel famously called the "view from nowhere", we should consider ourselves as we are everyday, which is to say as absorbed in practical activities with available beings or entities in the world. What Heidegger thus calls our "being-in-the-world" is a hyphenated term of art that is meant to express the holistic, engaged nexus of relations between mind, or better mindedness, and world, the meaningful shared world of our everyday activity (cf. Plato's cave - the point is that there is no outside, and the cave is really no bad place to be!).

Being-in-the-world is meant to provide a more phenomenologically accurate and presupposition-less starting point than Husserl's account of intentional consciousness. Indeed Heidegger challenges Husserl's claim that all consciousness is intentional (moods, for example, are not intentional in any obvious sense; I can be frightened by a specific object (like a speeding car), but my melancholy mood has no direct intentional object, apart from my own existence or 'being-in-the-world' (to which it lends a certain affective colouring or 'attunement')). From a phenomenological point of view, we aren't usually or typically engaged in the directed consciousness of objects or explicitly reflective acts that Husserl claims are distinctive of the human mind. Instead of observing our own conscious states in a disengaged manner, we generally find ourselves immersed in a familiar context of practical activities that we pursue against a complex background of shared meanings (language, moral norms, social practices, etc.).

Such average everyday existence is defined by what Hubert Dreyfus calls, following Heidegger, "absorbed coping". For the most part, our absorbed, routine activity-or everyday comportments towards beings-proceeds in a more or less non-reflective way, unless there is an interruption or breakdown in my habitual and familiar routines of perception and action (such as driving in an unfamiliar neighbourhood). Heidegger thereby rejects the view that consciousness is fundamentally intentional (involving mental states such as beliefs and desires). In fact most of our experience involves 'non-mental' practical activity (e.g. hammering, walking, driving, chatting, working, etc.). This ongoing practical coping is what Heidegger calls "comportment": Dasein is always comporting itself towards various beings through its embodied practical activity.

Heidegger's critique of 'disinterested knowledge'

Ever since Plato, philosophy has traditionally assumed the priority and superiority of disinterested theoretical knowledge of the world. But Heidegger, along with a number of other philosophers (like Wittgenstein), questions this priority of theoretical knowledge over practical understanding. One way of capturing this difference between practical understanding and theoretical knowledge is to use Gilbert Ryle's (quite Heideggerian!) distinction between and 'knowing-how' and 'knowing-that'. Heidegger too criticises the traditional view of knowledge, claiming that disinterested knowledge ('knowing-that') presupposes a more basic understanding of being: our engaged being-in-the-world ('knowing-how'). It is only because we are always already engaged in practical comportments with entities within our shared world that we can also engage in the high-level reflective activity required for theoretical knowledge of reality. This is Heidegger's phenomenological way of showing that 'knowing that' presupposes 'knowing how'; of showing how the 'scientific image of the world' can be brought together again with the 'manifest image' familiar from our everyday existence.

Existence or 'being-there'

But this kind of everyday routine coping is of only part of the story. To deepen the analysis of our being-in-the-world Heidegger turns to those more 'existential' phenomena where our ordinary being-in-the-world is interrupted or put into question. To this end, Heidegger makes the methodological proposal that should choose a neutral term to describe our way of being: he nominates the ordinary German word Dasein (existence or 'being-there'), reserving this for our way of being. Dasein exists in the world as a self-interpreting being (we always make sense of ourselves within a shared form of life). The way we exist differs from the ways in which other beings do (e.g. tables and chairs, and perhaps animals too). To put it simply, our existence or being matters to us: I care about my life, about others; things matter to me, or leave me indifferent; I am aware of my mortality, and acknowledge this in how I live, or else I avoid this awareness by conforming to 'what everyone does'. Existence, as Heidegger puts it, is an issue for us: only human beings (understood as Dasein or existence) related to their own existence in a way that makes it an issue for us, something we question, realise, risk, throw away, experience anxiety about, or question philosophically.

What else can we say about existence in this decidedly 'existential' sense? Clearly Dasein or existence is temporal and finite: I ordinarily exist as engaged and absorbed in present activities, which make sense because I am directed towards the future against the background of the past (my own past and that of my culture), both of which open up a meaningful context for my present action and sense of possibilities. But all this practical activity and 'busy-ness,' Heidegger observes, is oriented by a basic existential fact: that awareness of my existence as finite, as contingent, as limited, as something of which I have to make sense in and through time. The fact of death and my awareness of it give a qualitative wholeness to my present existence. My existence is finite not only in the obvious sense that I was born and will die, and that I am aware of that fact (at least abstractly); but also in the deeper existential sense that the possibility of my own death is an ever present possibility that defines every moment of my contingent and 'groundless' existence (the possibility of my own death-the possibility of my own impossibility-is the 'nothingness' that marks, contours, hollows out, every moment of my waking life). Normally we are blissfully unaware of, or try to avoid, this basic existential fact (death is imminent, yes, I know, but not yet!); yet under certain circumstances we become powerfully, even traumatically aware of it (as when I am diagnosed with a terminal illness, and every moment becomes profoundly precious and significant-for Heidegger, this realisation brought on by illness is an ever present possibility; it is always the case that I am dying, so to speak, or 'being-toward-death' in Heidegger's language, if only I authentically acknowledge the finite nature of my own existence, of my own mortality). This is what Heidegger means by saying that for us as Dasein, our own Being is an issue for us-the only one that really matters.

To make sense of this we need to be clear about what we are not. We must distinguish our way of being (existence or Dasein) from the way of being of other entities or things, whether practical things that I use or theoretical objects upon which I reflect. The practical things I encounter in my immediate world as familiar and useful items of equipment are disclosed to me as 'ready-to-hand' (e.g. a hammer, a phone, a computer). These are things of use, handy tools or available equipment that define a meaningful nexus of interconnected items that together make up my familiar environment or context of practical activity. This is the way we primarily encounter beings or entities in our shared familiar world; as more or less useful items of practical use (the cave, the tree, the car) embedded in a complex network of relations and meanings (involving language, shared practices, and forms of understanding).

Then there are the things that present themselves to me as objects removed or abstracted from their meaningful context of use; these are objects of theoretical contemplation, objects that we reflect upon or analyse in order to understand their constitution, their causal properties, or underlying constituents. Such objects of theoretical reflection are disclosed to us as 'present-at-hand' or objectively 'occurrent' (Dreyfus); the sort of objects we investigate through theoretical or scientific inquiries (the patient being diagnosed, the out-of-tune engine, the particle chamber tracks, etc.).

It is important to note that one and the same being or entity can be revealed in different ways. It can be disclosed primarily as a useful item of equipment (the car that I drive and experience as though it were an extension of my body), or as a stubbornly opaque object that resists my will and thus piques my theoretical curiosity (why won't it start?).

One of Heidegger's most startling claims, highly relevant for understanding how philosophy has traditionally interpreted what we are, is that as human beings or Dasein we generally misinterpret our own existence, modelling our understanding of what we are on what we most frequently encounter in the world. Hence we assume that we too must have the characteristics either of available things for use (the way I encounter the supermarket checkout operator), of 'objectively occurrent' objects of theoretical observation (the way the surgeon encounters my anatomy via the X-ray image). This explains, Heidegger argues, the prevailing model of consciousness as an isolated subject confronting a world of objects: a kind of thinking substance or inner set of representations relating itself to objects independent of it; a disembodied mind observing, representing, and somehow knowing the external world-with all the sceptical doubts to which such a position is prone.

A) What is meant by 'being-in'?

If this critique of traditional conceptions of consciousness is correct, we clearly require another way of describing our experience of the world. As I have discussed, Heidegger phenomenologically describes our everyday existence as 'being-in-the-world,' a unified phenomenon uniting 'being-in' and 'world'. But what, exactly, does this mean? Clearly we need to analyse the formal structure of 'being-in-the-world,' but this implies we also have to distinguish our way of being from that of occurrent objects or ready-to-hand things. This also suggests, moreover, that we must take care with our selection of appropriate concepts or categories to accurately describe our existence as distinct from that of handy things or theoretically construed objects. We can describe the characteristics of the latter, of occurent objects, using the traditional term 'categories' (e.g. physical inclusion), whereas the characteristics of Dasein are better called 'existentials' (e.g. caring involvement). Indeed the most common way of ontologically misinterpreting ourselves is to apply inappropriate categories pertaining to handy things or to theoretical objects to our own distinctive way of being-in-the-world, for which Heidegger reserves the term "existence" [Existenz].

The Existential sense of 'being-in': involvement

A powerful example of this confusion can be found in the use of the term "in". The existential sense of 'being-in,' Heidegger points out, differs markedly from the more typical categorial or spatial sense of 'being in' that belongs to descriptions of objects ("The water is in the glass." "The people are in the hall."). This sense of being-in expresses spatial relations in which the relation has no particular bearing on the objects related. Contrast this with the sense of "in" that we mean when talking about our involvement in something or with someone ("I am in business." "I am in love." "I am in (or even 'into') philosophy!). Although we take this as a metaphorical turn of phrase, for Heidegger the existential sense of being involved is the more basic or originary sense of "being-in" as far as our own existence is concerned. It is true that I am familiar with the spatial sense of 'in' because I am generally perceptually engaged with familiar things and objects of interest in my environment. But this overlooks the more basic existential sense of involvement in the world that provides the intelligible background to any of my doings or observings. It is from this phenomenologically most basic way of being-in, our involvement in world, that the familiar spatial sense is derived, but then also applied back to our own way of existing, often in phenomenologically misleading ways (We are 'in the hall' today because we are 'in (or into) philosophy'-not the other way around!).

2) What is meant by 'world'?

Likewise for the intriguing concept of "world": there is the categorial sense of world as the totality of objects. Then there is the existential sense of world as a meaningful context of involvements (the world of music, of science, of sport). While we are familiar with the sense of world that refers to objects, facts, states of affairs, and so on, this 'theoreticist' conception of world makes sense only because we are already familiar with the existential sense of world as mattering to us, as a shared context of involvements and engagements comprising a 'form of life' (Wittgenstein). This more basic existential sense of world describes the shared background of meanings and practices that enable things to show up as meaningful for us. It is only against this background intelligibility-what Heidegger calls our pre-ontological "understanding of being"-that we can adopt the practical attitude of comporting ourselves with handy things or the theoretical attitude of knowing the world of occurent objects.

4) Existence understood as 'care'

Being-in-the-world or existence, however, is not only about absorbed coping or practical comportments. We engage in activities that have a point or meaning, and ultimately do so for the sake of our own being and indeed for the sake of existence or being itself (of my own life, of the future, of what will survive us when we are gone, of humanity …).

Still, much of what we do is routine, following shared rules or norms that we just pick up by living in a shared world. We generally do what 'one does' (follow tacit norms), think what 'one thinks' (assuming tacit knowledge). Does this mean we all blindly conform? Or is it just part of existing in a familiar shared world with others? For Heidegger, a purely 'pragmatic' understanding of being-in-the-world must press further; for we also want to understand these more 'existential' issues that arise from our very existence as finite, temporal beings-in-the-world and all that this entails.

Inauthentic and authentic existence

'Being-in-the-world' means we are always existentially involved in the world: we care about our being, about our own being but also that of others, even about the being of the planet. I am oriented to the future, engaging in present activities, via possibilities inherited from the past. When I exist in a habitual, conforming way, just doing 'what one does,' then I exist inauthentically. For Heidegger, this means I exist as absorbed in the present, in present activities, without really acknowledging my own finite nature, the contingency of my existence, or how this awareness necessarily colours my sense of existence and its possibilities. When I 'own up' to my existential situation, realising that I exist as contingently 'thrown' into a certain world-context, and that what I do in my absorbed activities is radically 'ungrounded, doesn't have any ultimate ground other than my own existence (and that of others in my world), then I exist authentically. This means taking over my 'thrownness' (acknowledging the contingency of my existence), and living in light of this acknowledgment of my finite, contingent, groundless existence (my being-toward-death). This existential decision or resolution is the only 'ground' (in groundless world) for my existing in an authentic manner; it is the most proper mode of existence that would accord with our nature as finite, self-interpreting, temporalising beings. Clearly, however, this is not always how we-either individually or collectively-exist in the world, which is mostly inauthentically, absorbed in our practical activities, but also as lacking care, in an existential sense, for our own existence or Being as such.

How does this self-questioning about existence or reflection on the meaning of Being relate to philosophy? In one sense, philosophical questioning, for Heidegger, is simply a radicalization of the kind of questioning of beings or entities that defines our ordinary relations with beings in the world. At the same time, philosophy, as the Greeks knew, begins in wonder-wonder that there is a world, that we exist, that there is something rather than nothing. It begins in startled perplexity at the questionable nature of existence. Philosophy begins when our familiar ways of going on in the world suddenly breakdown or no longer seem obvious; it begins when our shared horizon of meaning no longer makes sense or when our own existence stands before us as a question.

For all that, philosophical reflection in this more traditional sense is but a prelude, for Heidegger, to thought in its deepest sense. What is thinking? Thinking in the fullest sense means thinking about the meaning of Being; it is what the later Heidegger contrasts with 'metaphysics' (the various attempts to theorise beings or entities in general and as a whole, which comprises a whole history of essential ontological interpretations of the meaning of Being, e.g. Plato's Ideas, Aristotle's substance, Kant's self-consciousness, Hegel's Spirit, Nietzsche's Will to Power, positivism's verification principle, modern technology's construal of all entities as available resources …).

We should note Heidegger's important contrast here between beings or entities and their way of Being: beings or entities are to be distinguished from what Heidegger called "the clearing of Being"-the opening up of a shared horizon of intelligibility through which we first can encounter or relate ourselves to such entities, whether through language, thought, or action. Indeed, we can only 'get over' metaphysics, Heidegger suggests, through non-metaphysical thinking; a meditative attempt to reflect upon Being, the event or happening of world, the familiar yet mysterious way that it shows up for us. It is an attempt to think the 'background' intelligibility of our familiar sense of world-if such a thing is possible. Such thinking does not find answers or accrue results; it requires meditative reflection, poetic evocation, an openness towards Being. It is philosophy modulated in a questioning key. For "questioning is the piety of thought".