Note: This is a lightly revised piece that I posted to my old site on June 9, before moving here to Substack. Since moving, I’ve accumulated a number of new followers, so I decided to share this one again as an introduction to my ongoing series on Heidegger’s Being and Time.
During the last month I have been joyfully busy teaching an intensive summer course on Being and Time at UC Berkeley (I’ll be sharing more video from that in the near future). Teaching obligations prevented me from making many regular posts. I am traveling now through early September and I’ll be back to posting regularly after returning home.
If you are new to Without Why, please check out my ongoing series on AI as well as my series on Heidegger.
Today brings a new installment in our series on Heidegger’s Being and Time. We are focused here on Section 4, “The Ontical Priority of the Question of Being.”
Review
Remember, Heidegger’s ambition in Being and Time is to rejuvenate the discipline of ontology. Ontologists ask about the meaning of being. They are interested in the different kinds of things that exist; they chart distinctions between different modes of being (traditionally, e.g., natural beings vs man made beings, changing beings vs unchanging beings, material beings vs immaterial beings, mortal beings vs immortal beings.)
But first of all, notice how strange all of this is. What kind of entity do we need to be such that we get preoccupied with asking the question of being? That is Heidegger's question in section 4 of Being and Time.
Heidegger argues that to reanimate the field of ontology, we need to first clarify the mode of being of one peculiar entity: us. We are the entity which worries about and inquires into the various ways of being. We thus have a special relationship to being.
Recall that Heidegger proposes a novel ontological label to refer to us: Dasein, a German term that etymologically evokes “being-there.” Dasein is not the same as Homo sapiens or anatomically modern human. In principle, other, non-human animals or martians could be Dasein.
“Dasein” is just a name for the entity who cares about the question of being. Hence, Dasein has what Heidegger calls “ontical priority” in Heidegger's ontological investigation. It is the most important entity to investigate, given its preoccupation with being. Remember, “ontical” is a technical term Heidegger uses to refer to particular entities, while “ontological” refers to the mode of being of those entities.
Section 4 of Being and Time introduces several key features of Dasein’s mode of being.
Dasein: The Relational Entity
Heidegger chooses “Dasein” as his label for us because he thinks traditional terms like “man” or “humanity” or “the subject” or “subjectivity” are bogged down with bad ontological baggage.
For example, especially since Descartes, “subjectivity” or “the mind” is defined in terms of consciousness and is distinguished from the “objectivity” of the mind-independent world. Descartes defined his way of being as a “thinking substance.” His consciousness of his own thinking, separate from the world around him, was all that he could be really in touch with. Hence his famous one-liner, “I think, therefore I am.”
But by taking for granted the self-evidence of conscious experience, Descartes has already built in a fundamental separation between whatever we are and whatever the world is. Such notions of consciousness, self-awareness, and subjectivity have had an ironclad grip on philosophers’ imagination for several hundred years.
What if assuming and starting from this separation between consciousness and the world actually blinds us from what we really are? Heidegger thinks that by starting with this separation between mind world, we are acting like disoriented philosophers in an unfamiliar kitchen, overlooking that primordial familiarity we normally have with our everyday circumstances.
Instead of being a self-enclosed, separate sphere of self-awareness (consciousness or subjectivity), Heidegger claims that Dasein is a fundamentally relational entity. Dasein is what it is only in being-there, that is, in its being-in-the-world.
Again, here it helps to think of that lack of separation we experience when we are in the flow of familiarity in our everyday circumstances, like when we can make our breakfast, ride our bike, or play our musical instrument without having to stop and think about it.
When I am in the flow of smoothly playing a blast beat on my drums, the sticks and the drums themselves are not experienced as separate from my body or my self-awareness. I am drumming-in-the-world. Focusing on reflective consciousness overlooks these experiences of involved flow, where the separation between self-and-world has not set in.
What else does Heidegger say about Dasein here in section 4? Well, Dasein’s relation to the world is also a relation to itself. But what kind of relation? Is this a meta-cognitive relation, like being aware that we are aware? No. That would be to drag our characterization of Dasein back into the traditional pit of subjectivity.
Dasein: What's the Matter?
We relate to our lives, and our existence, first and foremost through the fact that our existence matters to us. Existing gets to us. Our lives are at stake for us. Or, as Heidegger also puts it: Dasein is distinguished by “the fact that in its very being, that being is an issue for it.”
Let me say all of that again, with a few slight twists. Dasein is not a stable thing that happens to be, like a stone, a tire, or some other medium-sized dry good. Dasein relates to the fact of its existence. Dasein is the entity whose own existence matters to it.
This is saying more than “staying alive” matters to us. That is the wrong register in which to hear Heidegger's definition of Dasein. It is not a statement about a biological drive for self-preservation. It is about our inescapable orientation to the question of what is worthy of our care.
For an entity like Dasein, the most severe disorientation is to be a condition in which nothing matters. As we will see, this is what Heidegger understands as the mood of anxiety. It is a total breakdown of the world and the self.
We are not simply beings that happen to exist; we are beings shoved into existence as an unsettling event. Our existence arrives as a weird provocation, a burden, a call. Being hits us with a question that we have to answer by living our life.
But, we are also built in such a way that we can ignore the questionableness of our existence, burying it under the urgency of our everyday routines, identifying with the pre-given meanings that our culture, family, therapists, priests, and social media influencers suggest to us.
Our own existence matters to us, but not necessarily in the self-centered way this formulation can evoke. Here, saying that our existence matters to us is saying that things, other people, events, traditions, and the world itself matters to us.
Mattering imbues our way of being, but it is not something we actively do. We are receivers of mattering. Things matter to or for us. We cannot willfully or rationally invent or declare what matters to us. Nor is there any guarantee that we will find ourselves living a life in contact with what really matters to us.
Thus, "Dasein's own being is an issue for it" means: To be Dasein is to be intrinsically susceptible to outstanding questions of worth, care, and mattering.
Dasein: The Site of Multiple Meanings
The histories of philosophy and theology are filled with attempts to define the specific nature or the essence of what we are human beings: we are the rational animals; we are beloved creatures of God; we are calculating, self-interested egoists; we are subjects of “inner life” needing to express itself; we are the vehicles of selfish genes; we are bio-chemical machines; we are stepping-stones to superintelligent AI.
With his notion of Dasein, Heidegger cuts through all of this. Dasein is the site, the clearing, where being shows up to itself as mattering and meaningful.
Rather having a fixed nature or essence, Dasein is the entity which interprets itself as having various fixed natures or essences.
There is no one, abiding answer to the question of “What is human nature?” or “What does it mean to be human?” To be human is to be bothered by the question of what it means to be human.
We are the self-interpreting entity. Our essence lies not in a fixed property or essence, but in the receptive activity of defining what we are in our activity\ies. We are what we do, what we care about; we are what matters to us.
Heidegger’s project in Being and Time is to spell out the structures and modes of activity (e.g., moodiness, skillful purposiveness, talkativeness) that enable any given interpretation of what it means to be human. This is what he refers to as the “transcendental generality” of his account:
“The transcendental 'generality' of the phenomenon of care and of all fundamental existentialia [the ontological structures of Dasein’s being] is, on the other hand, broad enough to present a basis on which every interpretation of Dasein which is ontical and belongs to a world-view must move” (BT 244/200).
Along with this, to be Dasein is to be the recipient of an understandings of what is, an understanding of being. As Heidegger puts it:
“It is peculiar to [Dasein] that with and through its being, this being is disclosed to it. Understanding of being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s being. Dasein is ontically distinguished in that it is ontological” (BT 32/12).
When Heidegger says that Dasein is ontological, he doesn’t mean that we necessarily engage in systematic ontology.
He just means that we exist as essentially exposed to the realm of being, and the question of the meaning of being. It is this exposure that ultimately motivates the systemic questioning of philosophical ontology, as well as our own attempts to define ourselves in a specific individual identity.
We usually don’t directly experience this exposure to the question of being; but it can break in upon us in those experiences, like anxiety, when our existence and the world itself suddenly strike us as meaningless.
Being and Time seeks to articulate the background architecture of our existence, the hidden scaffolding that allows us to interpret being (and ourselves) in a marvelous plurality of ways.
Join the Conversation
Your support makes Without Why possible. If you upgrade to a paid subscription for as low as $8 per month you gain the opportunity to post and reply to comments on these pages, and to join a growing community of conversation here. Sign up today!
Interesting, "we are the receivers of matter." being open to what is. Not about solving problems but about dwelling. Stop treating the world as an object to control, but rather mindful of how our being and the world's being are intertwined.
and in each instance of engagement, I am oriented / shaped / brought forth by my sense-of-things, characterized by my sense of what matters, and along with that my sense of what's important (given what matters)
Of course, all that varies when I move from running my chainsaw to talking with my wife petting my cat