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"Resolute Dasein, then, has a future that ends with its death, a past that extends back to its birth and perhaps beyond, and a present. Heidegger calls these ‘ecstases’, from a Greek word meaning literally ‘standing outside, forth’, hence ‘removal, displacement’, and, later, ‘being beside oneself, or out of one’s mind, in an ecstatic mental state’. (‘Ecstasis’ is related to ‘existence’ and has the same root meaning.) Temporality, Heidegger argues, essentially involves these ecstases. They figure either not at all, or only as later additions, in the conception of time as a series of instants. What matters to Galileo as a physicist is how long two balls of different weights take to roll down a slope, not whether they do so in the past, present, or future. But Galileo had to decide to perform this experiment, and this decision involved the ecstatic temporality of resolute Dasein, with a past, a present, and a future."

"Why does Dasein go wrong? Apparently for a variety of reasons. Because Dasein is primarily engrossed in things in the world, it tends to regard itself as a thing, as zuhanden or, more likely, as vorhanden in the way that the things it deals with are. (Heidegger calls this the ‘ontological reflection back of world understanding onto Dasein-interpretation’ (BT, 16).) For the same reason, it tends to overlook the obvious, what is too close to be conspicuous, not only its own nature, but its own being-in-the-world, in contrast to the entities it deals with. Again, Dasein submits to the power of the ‘they’, it does, says, feels, and thinks things simply because that is what ‘they’ do, say, feel, or think. Related to this is the philosopher’s, but not only the philosopher’s, tendency to succumb to tradition, to accept inherited concepts, doctrines, and ways of looking at things without subjecting them to adequate independent scrutiny. Heidegger groups these apparently distinct ways of going wrong under the heading of Verfallen, ‘falling’, falling away from oneself into the world.

In BT falling is introduced by way of an account of the further career of assertion. Assertions are essentially communicable to others. The originator of the assertion makes it in the presence of the entities that the assertion is about. But as the assertion is passed on from one person to another, it is accepted by people who are unfamiliar with the original evidence for it, but who accept it and pass it on to others simply because it is what ‘they’say. Talk (Rede) has become idle talk or chatter (Gerede). A close relative of chatter is curiosity, the German word for which, Neugier, means literally ‘lust for novelty’. The inquisitive chatterbox is constantly on the lookout for the latest news. One sees and reads what ‘one’ or ‘they’ has to have seen and read. Chatter and curiosity give rise to ambiguity or duplicity – the German Zweideutigkeit has both meanings. When everyone chatters about everything there is no way of telling who really understands what – except perhaps that someone who is really onto something does not chatter about it. Questions are presented as settled when they are really open. But ambiguity and duplicity also infects our relations with one another: ‘Under the mask of “for-one-another”, an “against-one-another” is in play’ (BT, 175). All this, and more, stems from falling:

Dasein is proximally and for the most part alongside the ‘world’ of its concern. This ‘absorption in…’ has mostly the character of Being-lost in the publicness of the ‘they’. Dasein has, in the first instance, always already fallen away from itself as an authentic ability to be its Self, and has fallen into the ‘world’. ‘Fallenness’ into the ‘world’ means an absorption in Being-with-one-another, in so far as the latter is guided by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity (BT, 175)"

"Truth is uncovering and uncoveredness, shedding light and light shed. Someone who simply accepts and passes on the current chatter, even if the chatter happens to be in some sense correct, sheds no light of his own. A great philosopher, by contrast, sheds light even if his views are mistaken. Such errors as he makes are likely, Heidegger believes, to stem from his having taken over something of the tradition without adequate inspection. But in any case the thought of great philosophers is never flatly false. It is never solidified into something simply false or simply true; it is always, as Heidegger said of himself, ‘on the way’, in transit, never at its destination. It always sheds enough light to guide us in the right direction, even if that leads away from the philosopher himself. Chatter does not do that. Chatter is inert and self-enclosed. It ‘tranquillizes’ us into thinking that matters are entirely settled and disinclines us to look further."

'Care’, as Heidegger uses the word, involves both these senses, but its meaning is more fundamental than either. Even one who is, in the ordinary senses of the words, uncaring, carefree, or careless, is, in Heidegger’s sense, caring or careful. It is because Dasein’s being-in-the-world is care that we can speak of its concern (Besorgen) about the ready-to-hand, such as shoes and hammers, and its solicitude (Fürsorge) for other people. But again concern and solicitude are compatible with neglect, contempt, and hatred; the only entities that lack care, concern, and solicitude are those that are wholly incapable of them, such as stones, trees, and animals. Care is distinct from specific attitudes such as willing, wishing, striving, or knowing. To will, wish, or strive for anything whatsoever one must in advance already care. One must care in order to acquire knowledge. In extreme depression or anxiety, the closest that we come in our waking state to lacking care, we find it hard to will or to wish for anything, even for release from our condition.

"But this is not the end of the story. I might not have existed. What then? Not much. Things would have gone on much as they do now. But Dasein too might not have existed, there might have been no human beings at all, as there were once presumably no human beings (BT, 227; cf. xxvi. 216). What would there be in such a ‘world’? There would be beings, but no being:

"Entities are, quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed, the acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their nature is ascertained. But Being ‘is’ only in the understanding of those entities to whose Being something like an understanding of Being belongs. (BT, 183; cf. xxvi. 194)""

"Might not a hammer be only or really a collection of molecules, even if we do not usually view it in that way? It cannot be only a collection of molecules, as statement 3 claims. A collection of molecules that is understood or interpreted by Dasein as a hammer is not only a collection of molecules and nothing more. Dasein makes a difference. Something may not be, in a world with Dasein, precisely what it would be in a Dasein-less world. Might it be really or in itself a collection of molecules and only a hammer superficially or for us?"

"A second reason for introducing death is that death separates, especially sharply, the sheep from the goats, the authentic from the inauthentic. The inauthentic, lost in the anonymity of the ‘they’, agree that ‘one dies’. This is something they chatter about, and chatter ambiguously, referring to suicide, for example, as ‘doing something silly’. But they obscure the ever-present possibility, and even the imminence, of my own death. They treat dying as a remote possibility, as something that happens to others but not to myself – as long, that is, as I do not smoke tobacco, go to war, or ‘do something silly’. The authentic person, by contrast, has a constant awareness of the possibility of his own death; he is anxious, though not fearful, in the face of it. He sees his situation and the possibilities it presents to him, and makes a decision among them, in the light of this awareness. Awareness of one’s own death snatches one from the clutches of the ‘they’: since Dasein must die on its own – dying is not a joint or communal enterprise – death ‘lays claim to it as an individual Dasein … individualizes Dasein down to itself’ (BT, 263). This confers on Dasein a peculiar sort of freedom, ‘freedom towards death’ (BT, 266)."

"Heidegger does not allow Dasein enough knowledge to exist as care. But what it requires to exist as care need not be knowledge. If I believe that I have about £100,000 available, I may manage my funds prudently – even if in fact and unbeknown to myself I have £10 billion or even an infinity of wealth. Likewise, Dasein may exist as care if it thinks it will die at around 75, even if it will in fact live far longer or even forever. Unlike the prudent fund manager, Dasein is bound to realize sooner or later that it has far more years available than it originally supposed (unless it is subject to periodic memory loss), though it need never establish that it is immortal. What matters for care is not so much that Dasein will die, but that it believes that it will die. Heidegger need not disagree with this: the important thing for him is ‘dying’, one’s being towards death, not dying or death in the ordinary senses."

"The problem is this. If Dasein runs ahead to its own death, then it can escape the clutches of the ‘they’ and make an authentic choice about its own way of being, not simply accept the limited range of possibilities allowed it by ‘them’. But how can it do that? ‘They’ already cater for death. They tell me not to worry about it, it’s a remote possibility. So Dasein remains in the embrace of the ‘they’. In this condition Dasein does not really have a conscience, it is not responsible for what it is and does, and it is not guilty of anything. ‘They’ take responsibility for things, since all I am and do I am and do because it is what ‘one’ is and does. Guilt and responsibility are placed on ‘their’shoulders. I do not even make real choices: I just follow the routines that ‘they’ prescribe.

Conscience in the traditional sense commands or forbids certain actions on moral grounds. Often it is regarded as a voice that calls to one, sometimes, though not invariably, the voice of God. In this sense of ‘conscience’, someone mired in the they-self lacks a conscience. Conscience tells me what to do and what not to do, me as an individual self, not the they-self. It may tell me not to do what they do, or to do what they do not do. If I have not yet eluded the they-self, I cannot have a conscience in this sense: I do not view myself as an individual distinct from others, making choices on his own account. Heidegger uses the same word, Gewissen, both for conscience in this traditional sense and for conscience in his own more fundamental sense, but it will be convenient to distinguish them as, respectively, ‘conscience’ and ‘Conscience’. Not everyone has a traditional conscience, but everyone has a Conscience. A Conscience tells me not what specific choices to make or avoid, what actions to take or omit, but calls on me to make a choice, to take action, and to bear my own responsibility for it. Before I can choose, I have to choose to choose, and it is to this choice that Conscience calls me. Only when I have chosen choice, answered the call of Conscience, can I have a conscience. If I hear the call of Conscience, it is because I want to have a Conscience. Everyone has a Conscience and it calls to them continuously. But not everyone responds to it, and no one responds all the time. That is why the call of conscience is only intermittent.

If I am wholly in thrall to the ‘they’, how can I ever hear the call of Conscience? How can there be a call of Conscience? The call does not come from God, nor from any third party. This would not help to answer our question. We could still ask: Why do some hear God’s call and others not? Does he call louder to some and more softly to others? Or are some heavier sleepers than others? Then the call of Conscience would be like an alarm-clock ringing just loud enough to wake light sleepers. But the call does not come from outside. It comes from Dasein itself; Dasein calls to Dasein. It can come from Dasein itself, because Dasein is never wholly and irretrievably lost in the they. Dasein retreats into the security of the they owing to a ‘fleeing of Dasein in the face of itself – of itself as an authentic ability to be it Self’ (BT, 184). But Dasein must have a glimpse of that from which it flees. It is this residual awareness of its authentic self that enables Dasein both to call to itself and on occasion to respond to the call."

"Paul is in the same world after seeing the light on the road to Damascus as he was before, but everything looks different. Resoluteness confers on Dasein’s decisions a fateful necessity despite the nullity of its projection: Luther says not ‘Perhaps this is what I should do’, but ‘Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise.’ In resoluteness Dasein pulls itself together as well as opens itself up. Later in BT Heidegger uses the term Augenblick– literally ‘eye-glance’, but the ordinary German for ‘instant’ or ‘moment’ – for the ‘moment of vision’ in which resolute Dasein assesses the possibilities implicit in its situation and makes a decisive choice."

"Everyday fallen Dasein tends, as we have seen, to misinterpret itself: ‘the entity which we ourselves are, is ontologically that which is farthest’ (BT, 311; cf. BT, 15). (Cf. lxiii. 32: ‘Dasein speaks of itself, it sees itself in a certain way, and yet it is only a mask, which it holds before itself so that it does not terrify itself.’) We need to look at resolute Dasein to see what Dasein is really like. But this begs several questions. Does Heidegger suppose that resolute Dasein is really Dasein in a way that irresolute Dasein is not? If so, with what right? Most of us for most of the time are irresolute. Why assume that we come into our own only when we are resolute? Or that only resolute Dasein sees itself as it really is? If irresolute Dasein interprets itself as a thing among other things or as one of the crowd, why assume that it is wrong to do so? Resolute Dasein may not be a thing, but perhaps irresolute Dasein is."

"Throughout his life, Heidegger was influenced by Plato’s allegory in the Republic: ordinary men are prisoners in a cave, looking at shadows on the wall; some of them escape into the world above, where they see real objects and eventually the sun itself; they return into the cave to persuade the other prisoners to escape. Only one who has escaped from the cave can give a proper account of the condition in the cave, as well as of what is outside the cave. Similarly only the resolute can give an account of irresolution or of resoluteness. To be a philosopher one must be resolute. One must, first, withdraw from the round of everydayness. And secondly, one must rise above the current philosophical situation and the tradition that lies behind it. One cannot, if one wants to do more than humdrum routine philosophy, simply absorb the concepts, doctrines, and problems handed down by the philosophical tradition. One has to run ahead to one’s own death and return to the past, back to the source of the philosophical tradition. Then one masters the tradition and is not mastered by it. And one has left them far behind. Or as Heidegger puts it: ‘the research which wants to develop and conceptualize that kind of Being which belongs to existence, is itself a kind of Being which disclosive Dasein possesses; can such research be denied this projecting which is essential to Dasein?’ (BT, 315). No more, surely, than Dasein can be expected to philosophize in its sleep."

"Truth by contrast consists in uncovering things. It consists in illuminating things or shedding light on them. It is a matter of degree, of more and less, rather than of either–or. Illumination is never complete, nor ever wholly absent. (Cf. xxvi. 95: ‘every philosophy, as a human thing, intrinsically fails; and God needs no philosophy’.) Thus Heidegger rarely speaks of his own views as true and those of his opponents, by contrast, as false. The light he casts reaches only so far, and his opponents are never, and never leave us, wholly in the dark. More often he describes his opponents’ views as insufficiently ‘original’ or ‘primordial’ (ursprünglich), in the sense that they do not get close enough to the ‘source’ (Ursprung) or the bottom of things. Such light as they shed does not reach far enough. They may of course also cover things up, not only by showing things in a false light but also by casting light in the wrong direction.

Heidegger refrains from condemning his opponents’ views as false for another reason. Dasein is in (the) truth. Otherwise it could not be in the world. But it is also in untruth. Not only because beings have to be uncovered or illuminated by Dasein and are only ever imperfectly so, but because Dasein has an essential tendency to misinterpret both itself and other beings. A philosopher is also Dasein and is thus prone to the same misinterpretations. Philosophical mistakes are not sheer mistakes; philosophers go wrong because Dasein goes wrong. Philosophers’ mistakes disclose a fundamental feature of Dasein."

"Dasein’s ability at any moment to traverse its whole life – to run ahead to its death, return to its birth, and rebound into the present – is what makes it a unified self: Dasein bursts asunder into past, present, and future and then pulls itself together again – more like a piece, of elastic than beads on a string. The triadic structure of temporality corresponds to various other triads that we have come across in our earlier account of Dasein. Heidegger thus ‘repeats’ or reworks the earlier results in view of their temporality. Care has, as we have seen, a threefold structure: it is ‘[1] ahead-of-itself-[2] Being-already-in-(the-world) as [3] Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world)’ (BT, 192). The first element, being ahead of oneself, involves primarily the future. Every Dasein is ahead of itself, is up to something. In resoluteness this takes the form of running ahead to death, while in inauthenticity it is diluted to a mere ‘awaiting’, waiting to see what will happen and being ready to deal with it. The future also corresponds to understanding, which is essentially directed to the future: it is knowing how to cope with things and, in its most authentic form, knowing how to live. With the future too belongs existence, Dasein’s supervision of its own being. The second element of care, being already in the world, involves the past. Dasein has been ‘thrown’ into the world, it is encumbered with ‘facticity’, contingent features of itself and of its situation that are not its doing and that it simply has to make the most of. Thrownness and facticity are disclosed by moods such as anxiety, which are primarily directed to the past. (Anxiety is past-directed, since it is ‘anxious about naked Dasein as something that has been thrown into uncanniness’ (BT, 343). Anxiety’s inauthentic counterpart, fear, is also past-directed, since it involves having ‘forgotten oneself’ in one’s bewilderment (BT, 342).) The third element, being alongside entities encountered within the world, primarily involves the present, ‘making present’, in the sense of ‘letting oneself be encountered by’, things in one’s current situation. Falling too pertains to the present: fallen Dasein concerns itself with what is present, its immediate business or the current gossip, rather than with the long-term past or future. Talk or discourse, which ranks alongside understanding, mood, and falling as a central feature of Dasein, does not belong to any ecstasis, but ranges over all three of them; tenses are essential to discourse."

"So Dasein transcends to world and Dasein transcends in temporality. These ways of transcending look similar in structure. But why should we agree with Heidegger that they are essentially connected, that Dasein transcends temporally if, and only if, it transcends to world, let alone that its worldly transcendence is based on its temporal transcendence? No doubt there could be no world, in Heidegger’s sense, without temporality. But might there not be temporality without a world? There could not, for at least two reasons. First, there cannot be temporality without entities, other entities, that is, than Dasein itself. Time is not just a series of nows. It is time for doing things with things. Time is dated by reference to things and events, the time of my birth, for example, or the time of so-and-so’s death. Moreover, things and events cannot simply be strung out along time without belonging, even at a single time, to a world. The nails I shall need later are even now in a box in the cupboard. The town of Messkirch, where I was once born and where one day I shall be buried, is there even now, though I have not been there for some time. Time spills over into the world. Secondly, Dasein’s freedom, which is secured by its temporality, requires, as we have seen, being-in-a-world. Given that there are beings, Dasein must transcend them, place them in a world, and keep them at a distance."

"Is Dasein really free? Are its choices and actions not caused by, or grounded in, other things and events out of its control? Not on Heidegger’s view. In later works he argues that grounds presuppose Dasein’s freedom rather than eradicate it (xxvi; xxxi; ER). If entities were regarded as simply actual, we would not ask after their grounds. We only ask for the ground or cause of something, the French Revolution, say, or Stonehenge, if we regard it as possibly otherwise, as only one possibility among others. But it is Dasein’s freedom and transcendence that enables, indeed requires, it to view entities as possibilities rather than sheer actualities. Hence Dasein asks for the grounds of things. It asks ‘why?’: ‘Man is not primarily the no-sayer …, nor is he the yes-sayer; he is the why-asker’ (xxvi. 280). Dasein regards any particular being as a possibility and asks for its ground. It can also ask for the ground of all beings together. It can ask: ‘Why is there anything at all rather than nothing?’ (xxvi; IM). It asks this, because in its resolute, anxious moments, it views the whole of beings as a possibility rather than a sheer actuality. Thus not only empirical science, but metaphysics – philosophy in the grand manner of Leibniz and Schelling – is deeply rooted in Dasein’s freedom: ‘metaphysics belongs to the nature of man … to exist is already to philosophize’ (xxvi. 274)."

(Ong & Hartley 2013)The philosopher is always a beginner

"The philosopher is always a ‘beginner’ (lxi. 13). Nor are there any evident truths discernible without regard to our historical context. Husserl’s distinction between ‘factuality’ and ‘validity’ is a ‘banal platonism’ (xvii. 94). It ignores the fact that our present situation, the situation in which we discern whatever truths we do, is steeped in the historical tradition. History is not dead and gone, history is what we are (xvii. 114). Hence the contrast between systematic philosophy and the history of philosophy is spurious. The history of philosophy essentially concerns the present. We need to study it to free ourselves of the inadequate categories that it has bequeathed to us. Conversely, we need to engage in systematic philosophy too, to equip ourselves with a fore-having, a fore-sight, and a fore-conception, if we are to make sense of the history of philosophy. This applies to history of any kind. I need some prior view of the past if I am to appreciate a historical source, such as a document or a coin (lviii. 204). Historical remnants alone do not make us historians: we must be equipped to see them as evidence of some past event. This prior equipment belongs to the present."

"Another significant figure, whom Heidegger often mentions in his early lectures though not in BT itself, is Oswald Spengler (1880–1936). In The Decline of the West (2 vols, 1918, 1922) Spengler presented the past as a series of distinct, self-contained cultures, each of which undergoes, like a living organism, a process of growth, maturity, and decay. Thought and values are, on Spengler’s view, always relative to a specific culture and have no universal validity. Even mathematics is culturally determined: ancient Greek mathematics is significantly different from modern mathematics, and not simply an incomplete fragment of it.

This problem of historical relativism concerned Heidegger as well as many other philosophers of the time. In his early lectures he quotes Eduard Spranger:

All of us – Rickert, the phenomenologists, the tendency that starts with Dilthey – we all come together in the great struggle over the timeless in the historical, over the realm of sense and its expression in a concrete culture that has arisen, over a theory of values which leads beyond the merely subjective to objective validity."

"Only someone who has a fate in this sense can suffer at the hands of fate in the external sense. An irresolute person who drifts with the tide may have bad luck, but he cannot suffer the blows of fate. ‘Fate’ is different from ‘destiny’:

"But if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Being with Others, its historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as destiny. This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people." (BT, 384)

Destiny is not simply the aggregate of the fates of separate individuals. Our fates are orchestrated into a single destiny by our interaction in a common world with a shared history:

"Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘generation’ goes to make up the full authentic historizing of Dasein." (BT, 384f.)

Heidegger tries to steer a course between extreme individualism and complete absorption in the they."

"In another sense ‘world-history’ refers not to the historicality of Dasein, but to the historicality of items within the world – of tools, books, buildings, even nature ‘as a countryside, as an area that has been colonized or exploited, as a battlefield, or as the site of a cult’ (BT, 388f.). As ever, inauthentic, fallen Dasein is dispersed in the world of the present: ‘Lost in the making present of the “today”, it understands the “past” in terms of the “Present”’ (BT, 391) – and not, as authentic Dasein does, in terms of the future, of its own fate."

...

"‘With the inconstancy of the theyself Dasein makes present its “today”. In awaiting the next new thing, it has already forgotten the old one’ (BT, 391). He is oblivious to the history of current ideas: ‘it is loaded down with the legacy of a “past” which has become unrecognizable, and it seeks the modern’ (BT, 391). On the other hand, an inauthentically historical philosopher may be interested in the history of philosophy, in the texts of past philosophers. An interest in history is no guarantee of authentic historicality. To see why this is so, we need to look at Heidegger’s account of Historie, of ‘historiology’."

"How does the authentically historical historian approach the past? Dasein exists, it chooses its way of being from the possibilities available to it. This is how the historian views himself, and it is how he views the past Dasein that he studies. He will be concerned not simply with what past Dasein actually did or did not do, but with the possibilities available to it, what it could have chosen as well as what it did choose, and also with the possibilities that it hands down to us. The authentic historian tells us not simply that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and what resulted from this. He tells us that Caesar faces at this stage of his career three possibilities. He can remain in Gaul with his army; then his enemies in Rome will ensure that he receives no more supplies and reinforcements, so that he will eventually be reduced to impotence. He can return to Rome without his army; then his enemies will kill him. Or he can illegally cross into Italy with his army; then there will be a civil war."

"[...] Nietzsche distinguished three types of historiology: the monumental (which portrays the glories of the past as an inspiration to the present and the future), the antiquarian (which records the past for its own sake), and the critical (which censures the blemishes of the past). Why just three possibilities? And are they alternatives? Nietzsche, Heidegger suggests, ‘understood more than he has made known to us’ (BT, 396), and in view of Dasein’s temporality all three are involved in authentic historiology. As resolutely futural, Dasein is ‘open for the “monumental” possibilities of human existence’ (BT, 396), and this gives rise to monumental historiology. But since Dasein is also ‘thrown’, it has the ‘possibility of reverently preserving the existence that has-been-there’, the existence which revealed to it the possibility it has chosen. This is antiquarian historiology. Dasein also has to make its choice in the present, but not the present as they interpret it. Authentic historiology is ‘a way of painfully detaching oneself from the falling publicness of the “today”’, and so, as well as being monumental and antiquarian, it is also a ‘critique of the “Present”’ (BT, 397). Nietzsche, when read in the right way, confirms Heidegger’s own account of history."

"Time is ‘significant’. Dasein needs time for doing things, it takes time to do things, it can ‘lose’ or waste time. This depends on Dasein’s being as care, its temporality, and its finitude:

"The ‘there’ is disclosed in a way which is grounded in Dasein’s own temporality as ecstatically stretched along, and with this disclosure a ‘time’ is allotted to Dasein; only because of this can Dasein, as factically thrown, ‘take’ its time and lose it." (BT, 410)

The significance of time is more fundamental than time-reckoning or time-measurement. I look at my watch because I need to get to a meeting on time. I look at my diary because I am wondering whether I shall meet my deadline. I would not consult watches or diaries if I did not need time to do things, if I did not need to do things on time."

"A work, Heidegger has said, is not a thing or a tool with something added; things, stuffs, are inconspicuous in equipment and revealed only in works. But what about the artist? Must not he know about nature, about the things and tools he portrays, before he creates art? No. It is the work that draws out the rift (Riss) and draws the sketch (Riss) (OWA, 70). The artist does not first have a clear view of things and then embody it in a work: nature is opened up for him, as well as for us, only in the work. The work needs creators, who ‘put truth into the work’, and also preservers, who ‘put it to work’, actualize it, that is, in their communal knowing-willing (OWA, 71). But the work also makes creators, as well as preservers, possible. Creators are agents of a force larger than themselves: art."

"Different entities in the room or the workshop refer to each other, and because they do so they form a significant whole – a complete workshop or room – rather than just a random collection of entities. Objects refer to each other in these ways and thus constitute a realm of ‘significance’ most obviously and easily if they are objects of use – ‘ready to hand’, as Heidegger puts it, zuhanden, in contrast to entities that are merely present at hand, vorhanden. Neither the workshop nor the room is a self-enclosed environment. The workshop and its contents refers beyond itself to customers, cows, and meadows. The room too refers to the carpenter who made the table, the tradesmen who supply food, the publishers who print books, and so on. In each case the immediate world around us points to a larger world beyond, but a world that is still anchored in Dasein, its needs and purposes."

"Or, to take a case that goes beyond the confines of Aristotle’s categories, while the mathematician studies the ‘what’ of numbers, asking such questions as whether every even number is the sum of two primes, the philosopher asks about the being of numbers, about how they are or their way of being (cf. xxii. 8, 43; xx. 149). He may answer, as Husserl did, that numbers are neither physical nor psychological entities, but are ‘ideal’ rather than ‘real’ entities. In that case, their mode of being is one of ideality rather than reality."

"In particular, Aristotle implies, despite his several categories, that the being of genuinely existent entities is all of a piece, that everything – God, men, plants, animals, statues, and chisels – is a substance with qualities, a quantity, relations, and so on. All entities are regarded as vorhanden, ‘present at hand’, as appropriate objects of disinterested description. Heidegger will argue in BT that not all entities are of this type. A hammer, for example, is properly seen as an object of use, to be described, if at all, as ‘too heavy’ or ‘just right’, rather than in terms of its physical dimensions and properties. The token that the lover offers to his beloved is a flower, not a plant, not an object of botanical enquiry. 

"Why do philosophers tend to homogenize the being of entities? One reason, Heidegger implies, is that they focus on individual entities or types of entity to the exclusion of the context in which they lie. It is, for example, easier to see a hammer as vorhanden, as a thing with certain properties or a bearer of predicates, if one ignores the engrossed carpenter hammering in a nail. We need to consider then not simply the being of entities within the world, but the being of their surrounding context, and ultimately the being of the world as a whole. We also need to look at being as such, to see how and why it branches out into different varieties."

"But Heidegger rejected the link between ontology and theology that Aristotle thereby established, and he does not suggest, at any rate explicitly, that Dasein is an exemplary or paradigmatic entity. What he does say is that it is Dasein that asks the question ‘What is Being?’ But, we interject, any question whatsoever is asked by Dasein. Are we to suppose that to answer, say, the question ‘What are the mating habits of giraffes?’ we need first to explore the being of the human being who asks the question? In a sense we do. For to ask and to set about answering any question we need a preliminary understanding, however vague, of the subject-matter of the question and of the direction in which the answer is to be sought."

"Being is everywhere: everything is – people, hammers, towns, theories, planets, galaxies. Being is nowhere: it does not inhere in entities as a readily discernible property; if it is to be discerned, we need continuous guidance from our preliminary understanding of being, and, whatever adjustments we may make to it, we can never wholly abandon it for, or test it against, a stark encounter with being itself. The being of beings, of other entities as well as of Dasein itself, is not independent of Dasein: theories, questions, tools, cities – all these depend for their existence, and for their mode of being, on the fact that they are produced, asked, used, inhabited, and interpreted by human beings. Dasein is essentially in the world, not simply in the sense that it occupies a place in the world together with other things, but in the sense that it continually interprets and engages with other entities and the context in which they lie, the ‘environment’ or the ‘world around us’. It is, in a way, only because Dasein does this that there is a unitary world at all rather than a collection of entities. Dasein is not just one thing among others; it is at the centre of the world, drawing together its threads. Thus in selecting Dasein as the starting-point for his enquiry Heidegger does not focus on one type of entity to the exclusion of others; Dasein brings the whole world along with it."

"

‘Dasein’ is Heidegger’s way of referring both to the human being and to the type of being that humans have. It comes from the verb dasein, which means ‘to exist’ or ‘to be there, to be here’. The noun Dasein is used by other philosophers, by Kant for example, for the existence of any entity. But Heidegger restricts it to human beings. He also stresses the root meaning of the noun, namely ‘being there’ or ‘being here’. Da in ordinary German is appropriately translated sometimes as ‘there’ and sometimes as ‘here’, depending on the context. (Heidegger occasionally suggests that while ‘here’ (hier) is where I, the speaker, am, and ‘there’ (dort) is where he or she, the person spoken about, is, da is where you, the addressee of my remarks, are (xx. 343). But he does not usually think of Dasein as you rather than I) The word sein means ‘to be’ and, as a noun (Sein), ‘being’ in the abstract sense. Sometimes, but not always, Heidegger hyphenates the word, ‘Da-sein’, to stress the sense of ‘being (t)here’.

Why does he speak of the human being in this way? The being of humans is strikingly different from that of other entities in the world. ‘Dasein is an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue’ (BT, 191). Unlike other entities, it has no definite essence:

The essence of Dasein lies in its existence. Accordingly those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not ‘properties’ present-at-hand of some entity which ‘looks’so and so and is itself present-at-hand; they are in each case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that…. So when we designate this entity with the term ‘Dasein’, we are expressing not its ‘what’ (as if it were a table, house, or tree) but its Being. (Being and Time, 42)"

"Heidegger marks this special character by saying that Dasein, alone of all entities, exists or has existence. The verb existieren and the noun Existenz, like their English equivalents, stem from Latin words meaning literally ‘to stand forth’ and ‘standing forth’. Dasein stands forth, creating its own ways of being, in a way that no other entity does. This feature of Dasein is so crucial that Heidegger decides that instead of speaking of ‘categories’, as we do when we examine the being of other entities, we should speak rather of ‘existentials’ (Existenzialien), to mark the basic features of Dasein’s being (BT, 44)."

"Heidegger does not of course argue that Dasein can become whatever it wants. Circumstances place restrictions on what I can do: ‘Existentiality is always determined by facticity’ (BT, 192). But my circumstances and my condition are never simply ‘present-at-hand properties’: I can always respond to them in various ways. If I become bald, I may refuse to accept that I am bald, continuing to insist that I have a full head of hair; I may wallow in my baldness, and let it drive me to despair; I may wear a wig; I may simply ignore it; or I may gladly accept my baldness, flaunt it, and perhaps make it the basis of a successful career as a lover or an actor. Which option I take is not determined solely by my baldness, but is freely chosen by me."

"But is it freely chosen by me? The fact that baldness is a significant, and disagreeable, feature of a person requiring some special response depends on social conventions that I did not initiate, and so too does the range of appropriate responses to it. Wearing a wig is an acceptable response, whereas attempting to shave the heads of everyone else so that I am no longer exceptional is not. ‘One does not do such things’, I think, and in doing so I exclude this as an option, to such an extent that I am unlikely even to consider the possibility. In so far as I refuse or fail to consider certain options for the reason that ‘they’, ‘one’, or ‘we’ do not do such things, my condition is one of ‘inauthenticity’ rather than ‘authenticity’, and I have ceded my decision to ‘others’ or rather to the anonymous ‘they’.

Heidegger’s word for ‘authentic’ is eigentlich, which in ordinary German means ‘real’ or ‘proper’. From it he forms the word Eigentlichkeit, ‘authenticity’. ‘Inauthentic’ is uneigentlich–which usually means ‘not literal, figurative’ and ‘inauthenticity’ is Uneigentlichkeit. Dasein is sometimes authentic and sometimes not. Does Heidegger mean that only authentic Dasein is really Dasein, is really a human being? That inauthentic Dasein is not properly human? No. He associates eigentlich with the adjective eigen, ‘own’, which is used in such contexts as ‘having a room of one’s own’, ‘having a mind of one’s own’, and ‘being one’s own master’. To be authentic is to be true to one’s own self, to be one’s own person, to do one’s own thing.

What then is inauthenticity? Whose mind might I have, whose person might I be, if not my own? ‘Own’ usually contrasts with ‘(an)other’s’, and eigen contrasts with fremd, ‘alien, another’s’. I might emulate some other person or group – Heidegger, my spouse, or my academic colleagues – doing and thinking what they do and think. But more often, Heidegger believes, I conform to what the ‘they’ does and thinks. Here he exploits a simple German pronoun, man, ‘one’, as in ‘One pays one’s debts’, though English often uses ‘we’, ‘they’, ‘you, or ‘people’ where German uses man. Heidegger turns this pronoun into a definite noun, das Man, the ‘one’ or the ‘they’. The ‘they’ is others, but it also includes myself in so far as I do, think, and feel what ‘they’ do, think, and feel. It is not definite named others, it is everyone and no one. I am writing in English, because that is what one does. I grieve at funerals because that is what one does. In so far as I conform to the ‘they’, I am not my own individual self, but the ‘they-self: ‘The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self’ (BT, 129). Dasein is inauthentic in so far as it does things simply because that is what one does. It is authentic in so far as it makes up its own mind, is its own person, or true to its own self. Authenticity need not of course imply eccentricity. Eccentricity can be inauthentic, while conformity to standard practices can be authentically chosen.

Inauthenticity is by no means an unqualified blemish. It is the normal condition of most of us for most of the time, and without it we could not make decisions at all. I could not decide to write a book, had I not acquired a language such as English. Then, given that my intended audience is anglophone, it does not occur to me to wonder whether I should write it in ancient Greek rather than English, whether to write from left to right or from right to left, or whether to use the word ‘good’ in the sense of ‘bad’. On the other hand, the fact that I am bound to write in English does not commit me to repeating sentences and phrases used by others, ‘clichés’ and stock expressions; if I do this, without trying to work out my own ideas or to find an apt, if hitherto unused, expression for them, my authenticity is out of place. Still, whether my inauthenticity is inappropriate or not, the question arises: can I, to the extent that I am inauthentic, be said to decide my own being? Heidegger’s answer is that if I am inauthentic, if I have ceded my decisions to the ‘they’, I have, implicitly, decided to do so. At any rate it is always possible for me to reclaim my choice; it is not necessarily very easy to do so, but it is at least possible. And if I can by my decision escape from inauthenticity, then my failure to do so depends on a decision, however implicit, not to make my escape. Dasein’s inauthenticity then does not mean that Dasein does not ‘exist’, dispose, that is, over its own being."

Life-world (Husserl), Welt (Heidegger), Umwelt (Uexküll)

"Husserl later called this world, the world in which we naturally and normally live, the Lebenswelt or ‘life-world’. But Heidegger simply called it the world (Welt), the wider world beyond the immediate ‘world around us’ (Umwelt), the world of the workplace."

See (von Uexküll 1992).

"Philosophers have tended to neglect the world in this sense. They assume that the world Dasein inhabits consists of extended natural entities. Descartes, in the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy, begins by doubting the reality of the life-world, the fire before him, the cloak wrapped around him, the pen in his hand, and the paper on his lap. When later in the work he overcomes his doubt and restores his belief in the external world, it is the world of mathematical physics, of measurable extended things that wins his assent, not the humble Umwelt of the fire, the cloak, the pen, and the paper. But even philosophers who try to give the life-world its due tend to misdescribe it. A phenomenologist such as Husserl, ‘abstracting at first from all “significance” predicates and restricting himself purely to the “res extensa”’ (CM, 47), describes the experience of seeing a table in the following way. As I walk round a table, it presents to me various visual aspects which, though not identical in shape and colour, are systematically related to each other in such a way that I can, by ‘retaining’ or remembering the aspects of the table that I have already seen, eventually ‘synthesize’ them or piece them together to form a conception of the table as it objectively is, a brown rectangular top based on four legs. Heidegger gives, in his early Freiburg lectures on ontology (lxiii. 88–92), a quite different account. What I see is not just a table, but the table, the table in this room. The table is for writing on, or for eating at. I see it as for something. I do not first see it as an extended object and then only later as for something. I hardly take note of the geometrical dimensions of the table or its spatial location with respect to the points of the compass. I see it as well or badly positioned, as, say, too far from the light for reading. I notice scratches on the table, not just interruptions of its uniform colour, but damage done by the children. I think back to the past and recall that it is the table at which we used to discuss politics or at which I wrote my first book."

"He agreed with Aristotle that there were different types of Being, if not exactly different senses of ‘being’. He introduces for this a third term alongside ‘that’-being, the fact that something is or exists, and ‘what’-being, what that thing is: ‘how’-being, the mode, manner, or type of an entity’s Being."

"(Peasants in Greece often used to express the distance from one place to another in terms of the number of cigarettes one would smoke on the journey. A village close by was, say, two cigarettes away, while a long walk was a whole packet.) Time too is, for Heidegger, a matter of ‘significance’. The table points ahead to the uses that will be made of it, and back to past events – the scratches made by the boys, the book he wrote at it, and so on. The craftsman too, absorbed in his hammering, looks ahead implicitly to the shoe he will have made, to the fresh supply of leather that he needs to order, and back perhaps to his youth when he was taught his skills by his father, from whom he inherited the workshop."

"It has been a persistent mistake of past philosophers to make things too conspicuous: ‘when direction on an object is taken as the basic structure of consciousness, being in the world is characterized far too explicitly and sharply’ (xvii. 318)."

"Heidegger gives a similar account of our relations with other people. Philosophers, especially though not exclusively those philosophers who, like Husserl, regard a human being as primarily acquainted with its own mental states, present our awareness of others in the following way. First I become aware of my own existence and of other non-human entities. I get to know the shape, appearance, and doings of my own body and I am also aware of the inner experiences I have. Then I notice that there are other entities that are of a similar appearance to myself and behave in broadly similar ways when subjected to similar stimuli. The philosopher then wonders how it is possible – intelligible and justifiable – for me to attribute to these beings inner mental states similar to my own. Is it by empathy? How is empathy possible?

This way of looking at the matter is, Heidegger believes, quite mistaken. It ignores both Dasein’s understanding of being and its being-in-the-world. As long as it exists Dasein is ‘with others’. It knows what another person is as well as it knows itself, or any other entity. It does not need to inspect the details of a person’s physique to discover that it is a person; we are often aware of the presence of others, of what they are doing and of their attitude towards us, without being aware of the details of their appearance. Even when there are no other people around – the workshop is empty, for example, or the desert is uninhabited – others are conspicuous by their absence: ‘Even Dasein’s being alone is being-with in the world’ (xx. 328). Heidegger is not simply describing the phenomenal character of our experience of others. He is, he believes, describing a structural feature of Dasein. Dasein alone is incomplete, it has no nature of its own in which to bask, but has to decide how to be. But then virtually everything Dasein does or is cries out for others, as suppliers of its raw materials, as purchasers of its products, as hearers, or as readers. Dasein’s world is essentially a public world, accessible to others as well as itself."

"Moods are often supposed to be mental things, inner feelings that play at best a subdued role in our engagement with the world. But that is not how Heidegger sees them. To be in a certain mood is to view the world in a certain way, and it crucially affects our engagement with the world and the ways in which we respond to entities within it. Moods differ from emotions. Emotions concern particular entities. I am angry about something and usually with someone. But if I am in an irritable mood, I need not be irritable about anything in particular, though I am more likely to get angry about particular things than I usually do. If moods are directed at anything they are directed at the world rather than at entities in the world. Anxiety, objectless Angst, or boredom (to take Heidegger’s examples) cast a pall over the world, in contrast to fear in the face of a specific threat or boredom with some specific thing, such as the minister’s speech."

"The craftsman catches a glimpse of his world, of the worldly character of his world, when he finds a tool missing; he notices the whole in the conspicuously absent part. But a mood such as Bunyan’s discloses the world more forcibly and memorably: it reveals the worldliness of the world and, by contrast, the everyday unobtrusiveness of the world. Heidegger believes that such moods (or at least less extreme cases such as boredom and Angst) are a vital source of insight for the philosopher. But they are not of course the exclusive preserve of the philosopher. Unphilosophical, everyday Dasein is prone to them too, and so moods play a part in Heidegger’s attempt to explain how Dasein becomes a philosopher."

"What Dasein understands is not so much any particular item in its environment, as its environment as a whole and its own place in it. But Dasein does not simply understand its environment as one might understand an alien text or culture from which one is entirely disengaged. It understands it as presenting to it a range of possibilities. If it did not understand it in this way it could not understand its environment as ‘significant’. Although Heidegger speaks of understanding’s ‘projection’ of Dasein on its possibilities, he has in mind nothing so definite and deliberate as a ‘project’ or plan, but simply that ‘as long as it is, Dasein always has understood itself and always will understand itself in terms of possibilities’ (BT, 145). The shoemaker sees his workshop as a field of possibilities for him, and is perhaps wondering what to do next. Even the carefree sunbather understands himself in terms of the possibilities of continuing to lie where he is, taking a dip in the sea, or going to refill his glass. Dasein is ‘constantly more than it factually is’ (BT, 145), always (unless it is asleep) poised between alternative possible ways of continuing. Man is not a passive creature, roused to activity only by external stimuli; he is constantly up to something."

"Heidegger insists that when I interpret something as a hammer I do not first see the entity as simply present at hand, as a length of wood with a piece of iron attached to it, and then interpret this as a hammer. I implicitly understand it as zuhanden, as equipment, from the start:

"In interpreting, we do not, so to speak, throw a ‘signification’ over some naked thing which is present-at-hand, we do not stick a value on it; but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world, and this involvement is one which gets laid out by the interpretation." (BT, 150)

Any interpretation involves, on Heidegger’s view, a ‘fore-having’ (Vorhabe), a ‘fore-sight’ (Vorsicht), and a ‘fore-conception’ (Vorgriff) (BT, 150). The interpreter has in advance the, object of his interpretation; Heidegger, for example, has a preliminary understanding of Dasein, before he begins to interpret it. He views the object in a certain way; Heidegger views Dasein with regard to its being. He has preconceptions, concepts in terms of which he proposes to interpret the object; Heidegger will interpret Dasein with such concepts as ‘existence’. All interpretation, from the everyday to the philosophical, involves such a ‘fore-structure’."

"I am most likely to make my interpretation of something explicit, if it is broken, malfunctioning, initially unavailable, or needs to be explained to a novice. But language emerges from interpretation and the meanings or significations that it lays out: ‘To significations, words accrue’ (BT, 161)."

"One of Heidegger’s most striking doctrines is his rejection of this view of his truth. Truth, he claims, is unconcealment or uncovering. Dasein itself is the primary locus of truth: ‘there is truth only in so far as Dasein is and as long as Dasein is’ (BT, 227). He does not of course condemn or forgo the making of assertions; they are an essential part of the philosopher’s repertoire. An assertion such as ‘The hammer is heavy’ involves three aspects (BT, 154ff.). First, it points out something, the hammer. It points it out as a hammer and is thus related to the ‘as’ of interpretation. But the hammer is now a present-at-hand thing, detached from its involvements with its environment. Second, it predicates something, heaviness, of the hammer. Third, it communicates this to another. Why then are assertions not the primary locus of truth?"

"But we do not, Heidegger says, hear pure sounds:

"What we first hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking wagon, the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling. It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to hear a pure noise … Likewise, when we are explicitly hearing the discourse of another, we proximally understand what is said, or – to put it more exactly – we’ re already with him, in advance, alongside the entity which the discourse is about … Even in cases where the speech is indistinct or in a foreign language, what we proximally hear is unintelligible words, and not a multiplicity of tone-data"" (BT, 163f.)

"Might words have meanings independent of the things they apply to and refer to, so that we can say that what corresponds to a fact is a meaningful sentence or a proposition? No. A word such as ‘hammer’ or ‘culture’ does not have a single determinate meaning or connotation; its meaning depends on, and varies with, the world in which it is used. He expresses this dramatically in his Nietzsche lectures:

The life of actual language consists in multiplicity of meaning. To relegate the animated, vigorous word to the immobility of a univocal, mechanically programmed sequence of signs would mean the death of language and the petrifaction and devastation of Dasein. (N i.144;cf.xxiv.280f.)"