Heidegger's sorge (care)
So I've been slowly getting through Being and TIme for awhile now, mainly because I have been reading other books. I've noticed how others try to interpret him in esoteric ways because of the strange words he uses. However, I think when he says "taking care of the world" he means love, plain and simple. On a single page towards the end of the book (in my edition) he defines care as 1) being together with 2) the ownmost potentiality-of-being of Dasein. Now our most fundamental ability psychologically, ontologically, and spiritually is love. So I've been reading this great work as a work of love about love. It's about community, work for the community, and love of family and community. He speaks in strange ways about rapture and ecstatic categories but I interpret them as the horizons of the inner sense as it faces time and the unity of the past and future. This gives me a psychological and a philosophical understanding as well of this book and my hope is that this interpretation will make sense to people who are trying to understand it too abstractly. He does throw hard sentences at us like "being relevant constitutes itself in the unity of awaiting and retaining in such a way that the making present arising from this makes the characteristic absorption in taking care in the world of its useful things possible."
I believe the words are translated into very appropriate English words for us and that this work of Heidegger is not so much about "abstract nothings", but instead to about applying our own abstract nothings to our community with a focus that will make it fruitful and beneficial to others then, therefore, to us
I believe the words are translated into very appropriate English words for us and that this work of Heidegger is not so much about "abstract nothings", but instead to about applying our own abstract nothings to our community with a focus that will make it fruitful and beneficial to others then, therefore, to us
Comments (81)
I think it’s best to start from what we can understand about Heidegger. Just take the title: Being and Time. That gives us a clue.
There’s been a lot of analysis about Sorge, but I think it’s best to place it in the context of his entire thesis. What he’s doing is asking about being. He does so by interrogating an entity: us, dasein. This entity has the basic state of being-in-the-world, which he goes on to discuss at length.
Later, he ties many of these aspects to “care” as their existential meaning. I used to think of it as a kind of willing, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it has more to do with Husserl’s intentionality—our directed activity, our concernful engagement with the world.
But it’s not that important in my view. What’s more important is the ontological interpretation of care, which turns out to be temporality. Dasein is care in the sense of embodied time, which is the horizon for interpreting or understanding being (including ourselves) — hence “Being and Time.” He’ll also go through a long history of how we’ve traditionally understood ourselves, time, and being generally, starting with the Greeks. This is the main thrust of his work.
So is care that important? Not really, and it can often be mistaken as being emotional somehow because of the connotations of the word, when it’s more akin with directed activity or more related to awareness/attentional behavior.
Quoting Gregory
Heidegger isn’t talking g about love or any other particular sentiment but of the pre-condition for any sentiment , or experience, whatsoever.
Care is the pragmatic relational structure of relevance that holds between self and world at all times. We o lu experience anything in the extent to which it matters to us, is significant to us relative to our ongoing concerns.
Care is just as much about hate and indifference as it is about love. If you want to locate a primordial ‘affect’ underlying all others for Heidegger, it’s anxiety, not love.
Love as you mean it is an ‘ ontic’ concern, shears Care is an ontological theme. What’s the difference. The o rival level has to do with how I relate to specific objects in my world, including how I feel about them. The ontological perspective has to do with what makes possible the relation between self and world in general.
Heidegger in Zollikon seminars:
“ would Binswanger's "psychiatric Daseinanalysis" form a section of Heidegger's analytic of Dasein? But as Binswanger himself had to admit a few years ago, he misunderstood the analytic of Dasein, albeit by a "productive misunderstanding," as he calls it. You can see this from the fact that there is a "supplement" to Heidegger's "gloomy care" [diistere Sorge] in Binswanger's lengthy book on the fundamental forms of Dasein.t It is essentially a treatise on love, a topic that Heidegger has supposedly neglected.
What was Binswanger expressing in his endeavor to develop a supplement? What is lacking in reference to the thinking in Being and Time, when Binswanger attempts to make such a supplement? In Being and Time it is said that Da-sein is essentially an issue for itself. At the same time, this Da-sein is defined as originary being-with-one-another. Therefore, Da-sein is also always concerned with others. Thus, the analytic of Da-sein has nothing whatsoever to do with solipsism or subjectivism. But Binswanger's misunderstanding consists not so much of the fact that he wants to supplement "care" with love, but that he does not see that care has an existential, that is, ontological sense. Therefore, the analytic of Da-sein asks for Da-sein's basic ontological (existential) constitution [ Verfassung] and does not wish to give a mere description of the ontic phenomena of Da-sein. The all-determining projection of being human as ecstatic Da-sein is already ontological so that the idea of the human being as "subjectivity of consciousness" is overcome. This projection renders manifest the understanding of being as the basic constitution of Da-sein. It is necessary to look at it in order even to discuss the question of the relationship of the human being as existing to the being of beings (of the non-human being and of existing Da-sein itself). But this question is a result of the question of the meaning of being in general.”
Quoting Xtrix
I like your summary of Being and Time but I have a quibble about the importance of Care. I agree that it is misinterpreted as being about emotionality. The difference between Husserl’s intentionality and Heidegger’s Care is that the entirety of one’s history as a totality of relevance comes into play in the supposedly simplest acts of perception for Heidegger. For instance, according to Husserl, in constituting a spatial object , that is an objectivizing intention striving for the harmonious fulfillment of the object as a total unity. And each adumbrated moment of the object constitution affects and attracts ( or repellent) the ego.
Notice that the motivation directed toward the object from the ego and from the object to the ego is restore yes to the intentional act of object constitution. Other motivations can be brought to bear , but via shifts of interest. For Heidegger, by contrast, the entirety of Dasein’s past comes into play in any experience, and this is what Care expresses. We care about each minutia of experience in a totalistic way in relation to our past goals, desires, understandings as a unity. Relevance isnt circumscribed for him in the way it is for Husserl.
“The for-the-sake-of -which signifies an in-order-to, the in-order-to signifies a what-for, the what-for signifies a what-in of letting something be relevant, and the latter a what-with of relevance. These relations are interlocked among themselves as a primordial totality. They are what they are as this signifying in which Da-sein gives itself to understand its being-in-the -world beforehand. We shall call this relational totality of signification significance. It is what constitutes the structure of the world, of that in which Da-sein as such always already is.”( Being and Time).
Before one can love or hate anything, or have any particular affective response to the world, one must be affected by the world. If you want to think of Dasein in terms of intentionality (although that is Husserl’s concept, not Heidegger’s) one intends an object of experience, which in Heidegger’s
terms means that Dasein projects ahead of itself. You can think of this as the way that each moment of time is an anticipating beyond itself. At the same time, each moment is my being affected by what I project myself into. So there is an aspect of familiarity and astonishment in each new experience. You could say there is an aspect of love and joy here in this structure, as well as wonder and awe, and that is all implied by primordial anxiety. Heidegger also calls it uncanniness.
“Angst individualizes and thus discloses Da-sein as "solus ipse." This existential "solipsism," however, is so far from transposing an isolated subject-thing into the harmless vacuum of a worldless occurrence that it brings Da-sein in an extreme sense precisely before its world as world, and thus itself before itself as being-in-the-world.“ "Together with the sober Angst that brings us before our individualized potentiality-of-being, goes the unshakable joy in this possibility.”
“Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment-being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.”
Citation from B&T from Section VI (Care as the Being of Dasein) subchapter 41. "Dasein's Being as Care" (the preceding chapter 40 has the title: "The basic state of mind of anxiety as distinctive way in which Dasein is disclosed") :
"The formally existential totality of Dasein's ontological structural whole must therefore be grasped in the following structure: the Being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world). This Being fills in the signification of the term "care" [Sorge], which is used in a purely ontologico-existential manner. From this signification every tendency of Being which one might have in mind ontically, such as worry [Besorgnis] or carefreeness [Sorglosigkeit], is ruled out."
So, Care (as the Being of Dasein) is the temporally stretched structural whole: ahead = future = existentiality, already = past = facticity, alongside = present = falling.
Interesting, that little later Heidegger has to specifically stress that Care is not just existentiality (future aspect) but also facticity (past) and falling (present):
"Care does not characterize just existentiality, let us say, as detached from facticity and falling ; on the contrary, it embraces the unity of these ways in which Being may be characterized."
For the most part the "subject" of this Care is the "They" (i.e. the current society and its ways of thinking, its norms).
More:
"Care, as a primordial structural totality, lies 'before' ["vor"] every factical 'attitude' and 'situation' of Dasein, and it does so existentially a priori; this means that it always lies in them. So this phenomenon by no means expresses a priority of the 'practical' attitude over the theoretical. When we ascertain something present-at-hand by merely beholding it, this activity has the character of care just as much as does a 'political action' or taking a rest and enjoying oneself. 'Theory' and 'practice' are possibilities of Being for an entity whose Being must be defined as "care".
The phenomenon of care in its totality is essentially something that cannot be tom asunder; so any attempts to trace it back to special acts or drives like willing and wishing or urge and addiction, or to construct it out of these, will be unsuccessful. " p.193-194
Care is an a priori structural totality cf. Heidegger's "methodology" as "phenomenological ontology".
This isn’t right. You’d have to cite something to back this up, but the very distinction between “self” and “world” is very much antithetical to Heidegger.
I read it more as: Man, who understands being, is time.
Yes— thanks for citing this passage.
Again, I think it’s best not to dwell on care. I see care as a bridge between the analysis of being-in-the-world and temporality. We “care” about the world by default— we can’t help it. Just as we can’t help being (or having) a world. What’s more important is the structure of time that emerges from the analysis. After all, it’s not “Being and Care”, it’s being and time.
You’re absolutely correct. Heidegger does not view Dasein from the vantage of a subject-object binary. If one instead speaks of self and world, then Dasein belongs to both poles. Specifically , the self is a constantly changing creation. It exists in unveiling itself by projecting itself on a possibility. What it projects itself on is its world. So the self is its world as the possibility that it projects itself into. Put differently , the self is the tripartite structure of temporality as the past anticipating itself into the future.
Heidegger understands that to be radically, irreducibly, primordially situated in a world is to be guaranteed , at every moment, a world that feelingly creatively impinges on me anew as foreign in some aspect. And it is simultaneously, to feel a belonging familiarity) to what impinges on me in its foreignness due to the anticipative, projective futural aspect of temporality. Heidegger's being-in -the world is always characterized by a pragmatic self-belongingness that he articulates as a heedful circumspective relevance that events always have for Dasein in its world. For Heidegger, self is Dasein, Dasein is attuned understanding , attuned understanding is projection, projection is a happening, an action, historicality, temporality, the over and beyond, self as transcendence, the unveiling of a specific possibility.
Yes, but how has Heidegger radicalized the concept of time so that it can be understood as heedful circumspective relevance? Why can’t we help caring about the world? Temporality is at the heart of Husserl’s model also but Care doesn’t apply to his approach. Why not? Because the structure of temporality for Heidegger describes an intimacy between past present and future missing from Husserl. Care is this intimate pragmatic relevance, this for-the-sake-of which orients all experience with respect to the immediate past.
But any human willing can be torn asunder. The only thing that can't be torn asunder is matter which can't be created or destroyed. So care would be the substance of the world which holds us in existence and allows us to care, love, and will. That's where I'm at at this point in the discussion.
Quoting Joshs
Heidegger says the present arises from and is held up by the future because the future is the past. He doesn't see time as a succession of moments. He says "Time makes itself time as a future that makes the present temporal". Now I just wanted to point out that I think he was highly influenced by Einstein on this.
Quoting Xtrix
I like where this is going. Is man time or being?
It's very tricky to talk about, and I myself often fail to explain it without falling into contradictions. But let me nit-pick a little here: saying "belongs to both" is correct, I think, but notice that "both" also implies that two separate things exist, and that dasein belongs to both of them -- a self and a world. Or perhaps a mind and a body. But another way to say it would be, confusingly, that both are distinctions made by dasein as present-at-hand entities: the present-at-hand entity (the being) of "self" and the present-at-hand entity of "world."
I think you probably agree with this, but it's worth pointing out -- Descartes creeps into even our very way of speaking.
Quoting Joshs
True, but Sorge is the word that ties together various aspects of being-in-the-world, which is more fo pragmatic the nitty-gritty of dasein's "average everydayness." So while Care is the skeleton, the real analytical meat on the bones comes from the first 5 sections, where he analyzes being-in, worldhood in general, talks about the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, use of equipment (hammering), etc. I personally find that stuff more interesting and insightful, but to each his own.
But just the way you're describing it betrays a kind of Cartesian way of looking at things. Matter is the only thing that can't be created or destroyed? Why invoke matter? That's already two steps removed from what Heidegger is talking about, because now you're bringing concepts from natural philosophy (science) into the equation -- namely, of physics and chemistry.
Equating care with "substance" is also completely off track, in my view. Substance ontology is another example of something Heidegger is trying to overcome -- he feels Descartes inherits a substance ontology from the middle ages (and thus from the Greeks): "He [Descartes] defined the res cogitans ontologically as an ens; and in the medieval ontology the meaning of Being for such an ens had been fixed by understanding it as an ens creatum. God, as ens infinitum, was the ens increatum." (B/T 46/25)
To say that care is substance or matter, and allows us to love/will is like saying "care allows us to care," which is tautological, and is furthermore treating "care" as some kind of entity that isn't dasein (a substance). But care is dasein.
Also, we have no clue what "love" is. If you want to switch "care" for "love," you can of course, but I think that leads to the potential for huge misunderstandings given the connotations -- for example, that love is a kind of desire or an emotion (as distinct from "hatred"), etc. You can completely hate something or be disgusted by something or be "absorbed" by something or fascinated by something, etc., and that's all care. To subsume all of this under "love" is just a mistake.
Man is time (temporality). Man also exists, of course, and so is a "being" -- but he is the being (entity) for which "being" is even an issue -- he exists with an understanding of being. In other words, he exists and has an understanding of existence. That's how I would say it. But don't take my word for it:
"We have already intimated that Dasein has a pre-ontological Being as its ontically constitutive state. Dasein is in such a way as to be something which understands something like Being. Keeping this interconnection firmly in mind, we shall show that whenever Dasein tacitly understands and interprets something like Being, it does so with time as its standpoint. Time must be brought to light -- and genuinely conceived -- as the horizon for all understanding of Being and for any way of interpreting it. In order for us to discern this, time needs to be explicated primordially as the horizon for the understanding of Being, and in terms of temporality as the Being of Dasein, which understands being." (B/T 39/17)
[Italics are Heidegger's, the underlined part is mine]
If this passage makes sense to you differently, I'm interested in hearing why.
What type of being does Man understand? The material world? I haven't seen where Heidegger explicitly denies this, although he focuses on hammering for example instead of hammers. Also, do you believe Heidegger is saying more than Aristotle and Augustine in putting time in the soul of Dasein?
I agree with Xtrix. Heidegger’s account is an explicit critique of materiality and objective causality on which science is based, including Relativity. The material object in modern science is derived from Descartes’ notion of substance as res extentia, a thing which is identical
with itself , purely present to itself. The geometrical description of time and space as mathematical grids independent of what takes place in them is made possible by this notion of object as substance. This fall under the mode of the present to hand.
I got a line from Heidegger: "We can this further clarify the temporality of taking care if we pay attention to the modes of circumspectly letting something be encountered that were characterized before as conspicuousness, obstructiveness, and obstinacy."
The self is open, closed, and resistant to non-existence as is inanimate objects.
Again, forgive my nit-picking, but when you say "type" of being, do you mean how Man interprets being? I'm taking you to mean this.
So yes, seeing the world as material is a good example. That's certainly one interpretation. In this view the world is a substance -- ousia, in Greek (or how it's traditionally translated, anyway). That substance ontology goes right through Descartes, according to Heidegger. His mind/body dualism is really the res cogitans and the res extensa, in Latin. The res is basically a substance -- the conscious/thinking substance and the extended substance. So here we have a split between our consciousness and the contents of our consciousness, the objects of the "outside world." Seems very natural to most of us. Does this ring true to you as well?
In Kant, the formulation becomes more of a subject with representations about the objects of experience, objects which "pass through" the forms of space and time. But he's still taking up Descartes' ontology. As for his analysis of time, it dates back to Aristotle's essay in his Physics, where time is treated as a present-at-hand being.
But there are many ways of interpreting the world. He argues that the early Greeks interpreted it much differently than those in the middle ages, or even the later Greeks like Plato and Aristotle. He's trying to find the "horizon" for any understanding or interpretation of being at all, and he does so by analyzing us -- dasein. But not in the way we've usually been analyzed and thought of -- in terms of our "reason" or "mind" or "subjectivity" (after all, with an interpretation of being comes an interpretation of human being -- in the West, mostly "echon zoon logon" (the rational animal)). This is why he comes up with this name (dasein), and why he insists on analyzing dasein in its "average everydayness" in a phenomenological manner -- without invoking traditional assumptions, beliefs, prejudices, frameworks, concepts, etc, but letting things speak for themselves, especially that which is "hidden."
As you know, he concludes that time is the horizon for any interception of being, but not "time" in the traditional sense, but in the sense of temporality. Temporality is simply another way of interpretation Sorge, which is a way of tying together our basic state of being-in-the-world.
So you see the different layers here. It's a complicated work, and hard to see it all unless you've read it all (and several times over), studied other texts of his (I recommend Intro to Metaphysics and Basic Problems of Phenomenology), etc.
Quoting Gregory
I'm not sure what you mean by this. He does quote from both, and has a long analysis of Aristotle in particular. I'm not sure about his position on Augustine, but with Aristotle he'll go on to say that Aristotle treats "time" as an object, something present-at-hand, and explains it as such in his essay in the Physics. I could go into it more if you're interested, but I'm out of time right now.
To my eyes Heidegger's ontic is dualistic (me and a hammer) but his ontology is not so, and is even onto-theological in a sense. If you have more on how Dasein understands itself as not separate from matter but not lost in the ocean of matter i'd be interested. The next books I wanted to read from him are his essays on Heraclitus and Parmenides. You clearly have read a lot of Heidegger
Remember that "ontic" refers to entities, and "ontological" to being. It's not that Heidegger discounts the fact that at times we consider ourselves "selves" or even "subjects" apart from an outside world -- that is certainly the case, sometimes. But precisely in moments of absorbed coping (as Dreyfus puts it), the ready-to-hand moments of skilled action, like hammering, we're not a subject wielding a hammer. Another example is driving, or maybe even walking or opening a door. There's little memory of most of these things, we can be talking or on the phone or thinking about all kinds of things -- most of it is unconscious and not guided by any conscious rule-following. In moments like this, we're not subjects or objects.
Quoting Gregory
It's worth keeping in mind that "matter" is a scientific concept from physics and chemistry. So from this perspective, which seems to be true for sure, we're atoms and molecules and cells. We have bodies, brains, eyes, organs, flesh, tissue, muscles and bones and blood, etc. But remember the "perspective" part -- just as a hammer can be thought of as a wooden stick with a metal piece on the end of it, weighing a certain amount and of a certain dimension or having other properties, but isn't thought of such when we're absorbed in the activity of hammering, likewise the world isn't simply "material." That's a strong perspective, the perspective of natural science, but it's limiting and, basically, derivative. It leaves out the "world," and our typical being in the world. It's an abstraction which, while true, isn't the whole truth, and isn't even the primary truth. Even as Kant pointed out, rightly, it forgets the "subject" and our contributions to the "outside world" of matter. In a sense, there would be no matter without human beings.
Does this make sense?
That does makes sense, I like that. Maybe *time* is the haze that *being enters* where it no longer knows what is at hand but simply knows the activity as an ontological subject in its own right (and man is then time)
https://philosophynow.org/media/images/issues/121/Heidegger%20with%20Nazis.jpg
Does that mean for Heidegger the world is more than material, that it is at least material? Is a material thing
something that has a countable duration i. time and an extension in space? Does Heidegger accept this description and only want to remind us that the subjective aspect contributes such notions as usefulness to what an object is? How are duration and extension derived? Do they presuppose some basis on which to measure duration and extension, that is , some feature that remains constant and self-identical such that it can be counted?
To Heidegger the present at hand object is assumed by empirical science to be self-identical. It persists as itself. Only in this way can it have duration and extension , so that it ‘occupies’ time and space, with its fixed properties. . But Heidegger says that understood most fundamentally , nothing Dasein discloses ‘occupies’ time and space as enduring and extending itself. Why not? Because each moment of time changes the sense of what it ‘is’ we are experiencing. There are no countable moments of a being. If that is the case, the. how did modern science end up with the notion of self-identical objects in causal interaction in a mathematical-geometric time-space grid?Heidegger derives the present-to-hand from the ready-to-hand as an impoverished modification, where our relevant pragmatic engagement with beings becomes leveled down and distorted ,to ‘just staring at’ something, which he calls a failure to understand. “ “When we just stare at something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to understand it any more".
In other words , we create out of our constantly transforming relevant engagement with beings an empty abstraction cut off from its origin as relevant engagement in order to produce the method of mathematically based objective science.
We are discussing his work from the 20's
Perhaps it took some time for him to find a community/family he could love and work for, then. Consider it a kind of family portrait.
Even my philosopher teacher in college had a lot of trouble reading Heidegger I think. His long sentences are well crafted but take some stamina to get through. We who can read it have a certain gift I guess.
But on Heidegger himself, it's seeming to me that he puts activity prior to substance. If this is true it radically changes the position of materialism. It is not matter that acts, but action as a substantial verb encountering a world of matter
I think this is true. I find Husserl helpful here. He said that a so-called real spatial object is a continually changing flowing series of adumbrated perspectives. It appears to us a a singular unity , an ‘it’ , because we form an objectivating intention whereby we convince ourselves
that each new perspective belongs to the ‘same’ object. We never actually attain this perfectly unitary ‘it’ but for all intents and purposes we can treat this flowing series of experiences as aspects of a single object that endures as self-indentical over time. So the object is an ongoing idealization that forms the glue tieing together a series of intentional acts into a synthetic unity. Self-sameness is the derived product of activity.
“ We are continuously directed toward the object itself; we execute the uninterrupted consciousness of experiencing it. The consciousness of its existence is here a belief in act; by virtue of the accord in which the perceptive appearances flow off in original presentation, retention, and protention, an accord of continuous self-affirmation, belief is continuous certainty of belief, which has its certainty in this originality of the object in its living being-present.”(Experience and Judgement)
Husserl sounds awesome! It is as if we know experience, willing, and thinking first and then subsequently figure that it comes from the brain, but the knowledge of our actions is prior too and primary over any knowledge of brains and matter and so any materialism in our belief would be a posterior encountering of the world and can never answer to full question of what we are *for us* because we have always encountered ourselves before any ensembly of scientific facts about us
"A Swabian peasant trying to sound like me" is what Dewey is reputed to have said about everyone's favorite Nazi. I've read a good deal of Dewey ; not so much Heidi. But when it comes to the latter, his fans like to draw a distinction between the man and his work, so you may comfort yourself by doing the same.
Dewey sounds arrogant
That particular quote strikes me as uncharacteristic, as Dewey was generally quite mild in his assessment of other philosophers, including Bertrand Russell who was very vocal in his criticism of Pragmatism (which he seemed incapable of understanding, a problem Russell also had with Wittgenstein's work). The American philosopher Joseph Margolis claimed Dewey said this after Margolis asked him to read Heidi.
But it seems that others have noted that Dewey anticipated Heidi in various respects, as an Internet search will reveal.
I once got one of his books from the library. Dewey sounds very interesting but I didn't get through the whole book before i needed to return it.
But Pragmatism says we know things only in a practical way. The practical, the cultural, and the social are primary. That's how I understand it. Russell thought some things were always true. It's a tricky subject
It sounds like you think some of them are his fans independently of his work. Are you a fan of Woody Allen’s early work? Is it a comfort to you to draw a distinction between his work and his personal life? Personally, I’m not interested in comfort. I’m interested in philosophy. How about you? So let’s cut the sanctimony and talk philosophy.
Your take on Heidegger would be much more interesting if you maintained your conviction that he was a full-fledged anti-semitic Nazi but nevertheless considered his philosophy to be among the most advanced of all Western thought. Your current stance is too convenient. You can dismiss him out of hand and lose nothing.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
I’m a great admirer of Dewey, but Heidegger’s work, along with Derrida, Gendlin and a few others , moves a step or two beyond Pragmatism. Dewey connects affect and intention-cognition , but still retains a distinction between the two that Heidegger was able to transcend. His analysis of the relation between the self
and the social is also more advanced.
Dewey opposed what has been described as the "spectator" view of truth (or knowledge). He saw us as living organisms which are parts of an environment. What we learn, experience and know are the results of our interaction with that environment. We don't merely observe the world; we're a part of it. Generally, our interaction with the world isn't analytic. We only think when confronted with problems--very broadly defined to include any situation where we are dissatisfied and wish to change--which must be resolved. Otherwise, we act from habit and unthinking reaction.
What we call "true" is what intelligent inquiry and analysis determines to be the case based on the best evidence available. That can be discovered in various ways, through application of the scientific method, trial and error, the consequences of action taken to resolve problems, experience. We're warranted in asserting that to be the case until the evidence discovered indicates otherwise. He came to prefer "warranted assertibility" to "true" because "true" and "truth" carried too much baggage, or so he thought.
His early work, yes. His later work, it seems, was all about his personal life, so I'm not sure there's that much of a distinction between one and the other. But in all honesty, I prefer the silly Allen to the serious Allen.
Quoting Joshs
Well, I rather like the approach of Dewey and G.H. Mead when it comes to the self and society. Heidegger seems to me to have a fundamentally romantic, even mystical, view of society and culture I find disagreeable. I'm thinking of his Question Concerning Technology in particular.
But I get carried away when it comes to H, all too easily, I confess.
Dewey position appears to lend itself to materialism and it was this that Heidegger wanted to avoid.
I would call his position naturalism rather than materialism. He certainly thought we are wholly natural beings which developed in the natural world and are not supernatural, but "nature" can cover a lot of ground. The Stoics are considered materialists, but they believed that the world an all that's in it is infused with a special pneuma, a kind of breath or fire which is the generative principle that moves the world and humans as part of the world (the Stoic God or Logos).
There are constituents of Nature that remain unknown to us, and may not be "material" as commonly defined.
Interesting. Ye is spiritual a continuum from matter or discretely different. How can we know
I read "What is called thinking?", which is a 1951lecture of an example of how to investigate deeply into a subject and the pitfalls of our initial assumptions and desires, so I see Heidegger not just describing the state of us over time but our duty and responsibilities as well. So when he talks about "awaiting and retaining" or "the making present"or "taking care in the world", I don't think it is accurate to say this is a feeling or emotion, but, also, equally a mistake to think this is a theory about the structure, or explaination, of our being in relation to time. We have an obligation for our posture, our action, our reaction. He will say to let the world lie before us, to look for what calls us, to be grateful in remembering, to let ourselves be attracted to (fall in love with?) the world. If we are also asked to be "awaiting", "retaining", "making present", "taking care", are these not ethical admonishions?
I actually bought that book for a friend and now I think I want to borrow it lol. Heidegger wrote in a tradition that does talk about ethics, so I think you're right. For me the best part of his philosophy is the implicit concept that science describes a second order aspect of the world while philosophy describes the primary way it must be seen
It would certainly be a mistake to think this is a theory about being in relation to time understood in any conventional sense. It is a theory about Being understood as temporality. This notion of time presupposes Attunement , Care and Understanding. Put differently , if one comprehends what Heidegger is getting at with temporality , then one is grasping the ethical thrust of Heidegger’s philosophy. Temporality is in itself already an ethics
I think that science studies beings, not Being or Time in their most real sense
Yes, Heidegger believed that science is unable to make explicit the presuppositions governing it.
As I am starting to understand, science is about mathematical correlations between objects and the dividing up of objects to find what is inside. But perhaps the whole is prior to its parts. My room has a bed, pictures, and books. I can't say I have "electrons" in my room with the same, first level, understanding of what that place represents
yes I agree
I agree with the sentiment, but I wouldn't want it thought of as an argument ("primary" "must"). One way to look at it, on the grounds of this OP, is to say that our cares matter. Say, with science, we value certainty and have an inate fear of our, call it, frailty. For example, in Thinking: letting our subject (the "object") come to us and not reaching with our desires and fears and predispositions, even our skeptical desire to ignore ourselves, to rid us of ourselves; have science be our guide and substitute for us. Heidegger's insight is that philosophy is not initial--though Emerson's and Wittgenstein's admonition is to start (facing) correctly--nor is philosophy fundamental, but he urgently calls us to wait for it, it's secrets and discoveries, nonetheless.
Maybe you could elaborate what you mean by fundamental. Heidegger’s does make his brand of philosophy fundamental
ontologically , as the ground of Being.
“ Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, beginning with a hermeneutic of Da-sein which, as an
analytic of existence, has made fast the guideline for all philosophical questioning at the point where it arises and to which it returns. Of course, this thesis must not be taken dogmatically, but as a formulation of the fundamental problem still "veiled": Can ontology be grounded ontologically or does it also need for this an ontic foundation, and which being must take over the function of this foundation?”(Being and Time)
So... a theory (as opposed to a plea), just special?
Quoting Joshs
An explanation of our human experience that assumes our ethical posture? (takes it for granted?)
Quoting Joshs
I don't have enough here to understand--to follow from or know where it connects to or is making a distinction from my comment. I could guess that you feel it is necessary to point out that our experience in time (or our knowledge of that), I hazard to say: creates us, or is more fundamental than, maybe, the ontology others argue for; e.g., an explanation of our nature in stasis. And so he is not entreating for a particular better nature, but, as you say, presupposing "an ethics"; that our being, as ethical, perhaps at all, begins and journeys. Or leaving the question open: against what is Heidegger arguing? and for what purpose?
If any of that is close, I would think that, as an explanation of our experience, our understanding of him is more similar than not. Who we are, what we will be, is, and yet, becomes. I only wanted to ask (conjecture) if that is not an ethical argument in (or through) an ontological one.
This is a good question. Let me elaborate on this and then see if that helps us figure out what to do with the word ‘ethics’ in regard to Heideggerian Time.Heidegger lays out the ‘equiprimoridal’relationship between Temporality, Care , Attunement and Understanding , showing how all experiences disclose
themselves as belonging to Dasein via heedful circumspective relevance ( how they matter to us in our pragmatic functioning). Then he introduces various modes of comportment , and how they modify Dasein’s way of being in the world. He introduces the distinction between authentic and inauthentic models of comportment, and within the inauthentic he explains how average everydayness , propositional statements and empirical science emerges as impoverished modes of experiencing. For instance , about average everyday discourse he says that in the mode of average everydayness Dasein disguises, covers over, conceals, obscures its genuine self, a genuine understanding, an originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, “getting to the heart of the matter,” primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mit-dasein, toward being-in itself. Similarly, he describes the objectivity characteristic of present to hand thinking as flattened, confused , leveled down , etc. This forms the basis of his later critique of technological thinking and Sartre’s humanism. So it seems that we see the ethical bound up Dasein’s tendency to fall
prey to the world , to get caught up in beings and lose sight of , and cut itself off from , the richer totality of relevance that underlies but is obscured by such modes. Perhaps one could say that if there is an ethical injunction for Heidegger it is to make explicit what is usually only implicit in one’s relation to time.
When I said that for Hedeigger philosophy is not fundamental, what I was trying to say is that it is not trying to be support or make certain or remove doubt in the traditional sense of a philosophical ground or foundation; not fixing our nature, but leaving it as an open question. We begin, we are, yet we return to ourselves; it is not our dogmatism about human nature but our analysis of ourselves that is our grounding, our founding and building. He may be making an argument about our human situation, but not as a basis the way other philosophers had for something in particular or as an argument against skepticism. Thus the importance of what we do and say and align ourselves with (what do we call this if not ethical? as in, what matters to us, our interests, what we care about), as our being is both historical and "veiled" (in front, Emerson would say).
I don't know enough about Being in Time to comment on the reading, but, if this accurate, I think in his later work he moves away from a focus on an (abstract) endpoint (@Gregory) and is pointing to more practical (ethical) ways of being, such as: our letting being draw us in, listening before jumping to naming/judging, and other approaches which may make the dead word alive again in our voice, our self able to be uncompleted. That is to say that maybe he misses the mark early on in taking Being as a replacement for a static self, as Marx does (or a reading of Marx does) in skipping over the revelation that we are produced (by means we may not control), to a belief that we can get to a point of being unproduced, rather than choosing or going against the means--that the nature of the proletariat is pure (as is Plato's hope for the forms). This is to say that maybe Heidegger's way to ethics is bringing historicity (temporality?) to our ontology to fight against dogmatism, much as Nietszche brought it to our morals to combat moralism, or as Wittgenstein's ethical argument is considering our part in epistemology. Thus the act, the fight, the considering--not "falling prey", getting "caught up", "cut off"--is of greater consequence than the knowledge of Being; that the explicit hides the implicit, as well as that intuition must become "tuition" (as Emerson puts it), but it is the looking and the becoming that are important.
I agree with your points. Philosophy is messy. Trying to fix everything with a nail to a wall is false compartamentalism. I think Heidegger addresses aspects of life that interested him, but they are not the end and all of the subject. I also like Schelling, Fitche, and Hegel and they had a lot to say about ethics. Mr Heidegger was reformulating those philosophies into a modern idiom to bring phenomenology to new generations. Although he doesn't get into specific "do's and dont's" he tries to make alive philosophical thinking such that thinking in those ways becomes normal for us. He was a great teacher
Also, it's interesting that you mention Emerson. He is not much talked about on this forum
I do think you would find some specifics in "What is Called Thinking?" and "Language, Poetry, and Thought", particularly as to what thought is and should be. Because Thinking is a lecture, it allows him to draw out a subject as he would want us to be drawn towards the world.
I don’t see an abstract endpoint in Being and Time. Thinking Being fundamentally, primordially, is not stepping out of time and history , or beginning before history. Thinking Being thematic , making it a problem rather than a given , is historical through and through. This means that my thinking of Being exists. To exist is to surpass, to be is to be in transition.” “ex-sists, is an exiting from itself in the essence of its being, yet without abandoning itself.” Being isn’t a concept in history. It is history itself as historicizing.
Quoting Antony Nickles
What happens when we don’t let being draw us in, when we don’t listen before jumping to naming/ judging? Is the word dead then? Heidegger isn’t arguing that we break away from the pragmatic relation of heedful relevance the world has for us under such circumstances. It is impossible to do because a totality of relevance is always already implied and intrinsic to any experience, regardless of our mode of comportment toward the world. So it’s not a question of experiencing the world pragmatically or not , but of whether or not we are aware of this always underlying mattering.
“ Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the “as”—in a pure sensation, for example—can be carried out only “reductively,” by “pulling back” from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the “as”— which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from."(Logic,The Question)
Quoting Antony Nickles
But we are not simply produced. Dasein projects a world that it can be surprised by. We don’t simply interject or internalize from an outside. Our own past projects a future that our present occurs into. What occurs occurs into an implying. This is what give Dasein its pragmatic self-intimacy , it’s ‘for the sake of- in order to’ .
Quoting Antony Nickles I agree here
Quoting Antony Nickles
But the knowledge of being is always an existing , a transit , We always already understand Being in that we always are projecting ourselves into a future. Understanding is this forehaving that is affected by what it projects itself into.
I will read those and start a thread about them sometime. Thanks.
Heidegger ends Being and Time with Hegel, and he was also influenced by Schelling. The latter wrote "If one understands (by intellectual intuition) an intuition that corresponds to the content of the subject-object, one can speak of an intellectual intuition, not of the subject, but of reason itself... Reason is there the intuiting and the intuited." Heidegger knows that there is something preconceptual (transcendent) which Dasein has a dialectic with in reasoning that is always mysterious but allows us to reason. Schelling says, "What is the beginning of all thinking is not thinking and what comes before all power also comes before all thought! And certainly, Being, which anticipates all power, we must also call being that is un-thinkable-in-advance as preceding all thinking." Schelling and Rosmini (who wrote in Italy in that time) said God was the ground of Being, Thought, and Time in man, as Hegel seemed to agree with (panentheism?), although Heidegger didn't think this a necessary conclusion (as far as I can see)
Heidegger on God:
GA 73.2: 991
2. Of Being
The lightest of the slight is beyng.
The most entity-like of entities is God.
In beyng, the distinction between beings and being (in the sense of beingness) comes into its own.
Being means: presence.
Seyn never lets itself be identified with God. It also always remains doubtful whether the proposition, God is the most being-like of beings, speaks of God according to divinity.
As the most being-like, God is the first cause and the last goal of all beings. God is represented as the most being-like of beings, and so God essentially occurs out of beyng. Nevertheless, God is not primordially linked to beyng; because beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.”
I'm going to have to analyze that latter, since I'm going to lunch and that quotation doesn't make sense to me
The key phrase is “beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.”
I don't see pantheism, panentheism, and theism as contradictory. They are aspects of the same thing. However, Hegel thought an Absolute Idea logically uses syllogisms to "make" (or rather, is) phenomena and our consciousness. Hegel agreed we have will, but thought logic was the ground of everything. I don't think Hegel thought God was a person. Heidegger seems to share this agnosticism. But what bothered all these German thinkers was that they couldn't figure themselves out. It's as if they felt someone else was behind the scenes in their private noumena with them, but knew not who it was
I don’t see Heidegger as an agnostic. It seems to me that God is only a coherent concept if it implies the good, and the good is only coherent if it can be located as a a stably self-identical sense. But I don’t see that the good is any particular sense, feeling, meaning that continues to be itself over time for Heidegger. The basis of Being is difference , difference destroys the ability to locate the ‘good’ as a coherent notion whose meaning we can locate, and this makes the notion of god , whether as a person or force or energy or inner self , incoherent.
I don't know what "at least material" means.
Heidegger is saying that our present-at-hand mode of being is very different from our more absorbed coping with the world, as exemplified by equipment (like hammers). When we're doing philosophy and science, we see things as objects -- mass, material, weight, dimensions, time as a number line, etc. When we're engaged with activities, or are in "flow," we're not in the same mode and so not seeing things in the same way. The hammer no longer is a material object with properties, it's something for hammering. That's not to say it's not also material, but that materialism is privative.
Sartre says something like this near the beginning of Being and Nothingness. I think we all, however, struggle with some sense of someone else telling us what to do with our conscience, something foreign to us in our own consciousness. So I don't think we should numb this out but instead be open to all possibilities about what the truth of reality might be
This is where Wittgenstein helps in showing that knowledge and practice are different for every different thing. There's the criteria by which we identify a hammer, and what counts as hammering (that it might be done with a rock). These concepts and their criteria are not material but are also not preconceptual--simply unexamined, unconscious, forgotten. In each case it does not take presence, but remembering, making explicit; in each case, in each context.
So are there 3 positions?
1) being is source
2) being is knowledge
3) being is something else
Let me give another brief synopsis of Heidegger, if you don't mind. Bear with me, because it's slightly longer than normal, but it'll give perhaps an overview that'll help flush out the details. This is my reading, of course, so please push me for citations and details if you're skeptical about any particular claim.
Being can be interpreted in many ways. That's exactly the point. It has been interpreted as phusis, as idea, as ousia, as substantia, as God, as nature, and so on...it has also been called a "vapor" (Nietzsche) and an empty word. All of which are true in their own way.
What Heidegger does is try to show that this spectrum of interpretations in the Western world, beginning with the Greeks, shares something in common -- as one would expect, given that we're all not only part of the "Western" tradition (I like to think along the lines of languages, in this case Proto-Indo-European) but also human beings, and so can't help but do some things similarly.
That common feature, according to Heidegger, is presence. Derrida calls this the "metaphysics of presence," and he's right.
Presence, of course, implies "time" -- the present. But if we take "time" to mean what the tradition has meant by it (starting with Aristotle), or even how it's "ordinarily" understood, we're right back on to the wrong track. Why? Because the perspective which guided Aristotle's interpretation of time was itself rooted in presence -- it was itself one part of this tradition. Therefore, time itself also gets interpreted as something present -- as a series or sequence of "now-points."
This is why Heidegger tries to come up with a new understanding of time as "ecstatic openness," as temporality. To do so, he also has to re-interpret the human being; not as rational animal, which the tradition holds, but as dasein -- a "here," a "clearing," etc. Why? Because we're the one's raising this question to begin with. We're the ones interpreting "being" at all, or are even concerned with it. So it's important to understand ourselves, and if it turns out that this "clearing" is the point where everything gets interpreted from, then we cannot use the traditional perspective to understand it. If we did, we'd simply be using the traditional concepts of "nature," "material," "substance," "time," "reason," "animal," etc.
So we need to re-interpret the human being, ourselves, without bringing in concepts from the past. This is why he calls us "dasein," why he calls time "temporality," and all the other weird terms he uses. It's also why he emphasizes phenomenology as the method for analysis. When he analyzes dasein, he goes through various layers until he arrives at the interpretation of us as this embodied time -- temporality.
Dasein, who cares about, understands, and interprets being = being-in-the-world = care = temporality. The "da," the here, is an openness which in later Heidegger becomes more aligned with "aletheia," the concept of un-concealment or disclosure. He'll say that this is what Parmenides was talking about in the famous "thinking and being are one" fragment -- that he really is saying "apprehension and being are one," apprehension/perceiving in the sense of un-concealment. But the point remains.
How any of this is relevant to the real world, to our lives, to politics, etc., is another question. :lol:
Note: I wrote this before seeing Xtrix’s comment. It sounds like we’re on the same page.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Quoting Antony Nickles
In this quote, Heidegger is distinguishing between the traditional understanding of Being and Beyng. In the mid 1930’s he began using this term ‘Beyng’ to further differentiate Dasein from being as presence.
“beyng occurs essentially not as cause and never as ground.”
Awareness for Heidegger isnt presence , it’s transit, an absencing, precisely a not being present to oneself. It is thrownness.
“Thus thrown in this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of occurrence. Man is history, or better, history is man. Man is enraptured in this transition and therefore essentially 'absent'. Absent in a fundamental sense-never simply at hand, but absent in his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and future-essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence. Transposed into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment-being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.”
Derrida declared his indebtedness to Heidegger for inspiring his project of the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence.Early on in Being and Time Heidegger takes on the genealogical history of being as presence in Western philosophy.
“ Mathematical knowledge is regarded as the one way of apprehending beings which can always be certain of the secure possession of the being of the beings which it apprehends. Whatever has the kind of being adequate to the being accessible in mathematical knowledge is in the true sense. This being is what always is what it is. Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, as remanens capax mutationem, constitutes the true being of beings which can be experienced in the world. What enduringly remains truly is. This is the sort of thing that mathematics knows. What mathematics makes accessible in beings constitutes their being. Thus the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated. Thus it is not primarily his dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that determines his
ontology of the world, rather his ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.* In this way Descartes explicitly switches over philosophically from the development of traditional ontology to modem mathematical physics and its transcendental
foundations.” (Being and Time)
I meant those as examples, not as alternative explanation. The specific type of answer is not the problem, it is the desire for a particular, certain, or universal answer of Being or the explanation of the structure of Being that is the same type of obsession which led to metaphysical solutions like Plato (and that Kant was trying to get around). The appearance and the real turned into the appearing doesn't get us out of the original desire, which Heidegger falls away from only in the later work.
Can you cite the page and translation please?
Quoting Antony Nickles
For Heidegger, that which ‘appears’ is not an outside which shows itself to a self, an inside. In the first
place , Heidegger does not view Dasein from the vantage of a subject-object binary. If one instead speaks of self and world, then Dasein belongs to both poles. Specifically , the self is constantly changing creation. It exists in unveiling itself by projecting itself on a possibility. What it projects itself on is its world. So the self is its world as the possibility that it projects itself into. Put differently , the self is the tripartite structure of temporality as the past anticipating itself into the future.
“The phenomenological concept of phenomenon, as self-showing, means the being of beings-its meaning, modifications, and derivatives. This self-showing is nothing arbitrary, nor is it something like an appearing. The being of beings can least of all be something "behind which" something else stands, something that "does not appear”.”
Appreciate that -- very different from Robinson translation, which is why I didn't recognize it.
B&T end with Hegel. This is interesting because the first 4 sections of Phenomenology of Spirit (Sense, Perception, Understanding, Self-Consciousness) are a forerunner to what Heidegger stood for