Heidegger, Being and Time

[Pages:185]Heidegger's Being and Time

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Karsten Harries

Heidegger's Being and Time

Seminar Notes Spring Semester 2014

Yale University

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Copyright Karsten Harries karsten.harries@yale.edu

Heidegger's Being and Time Contents 1. Introduction 2. Ontology and Fundamental Ontology 3. Methodological Considerations 4. Being-in-the-World 5. The World 6. Who am I? 7. Understanding, Interpretation, Language 8. Care and Truth 9. The Entirety of Dasein 10. Conscience, Guilt, Resolve 11. Time and Subjectivity 12. History and the Hero 13. Conclusion

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4 16 30 43 55 69 82 96 113 128 145 158 169

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1. Introduction

1 In this seminar I shall be concerned with Heidegger's Being and Time. I shall refer to other works by Heidegger, but the discussion will center on Being and Time. In reading the book, some of you, especially those with a reading knowledge of German, may find the lectures of the twenties helpful, which have appeared now as volumes of the Gesamtausgabe. Many of these have by now been translated. I am thinking especially of GA 17 Einf?hrung in die ph?nomenologische Forschung (1923/24); Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005) GA 20 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (1925); History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1985) GA 21 Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (1925/26). Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan GA 24 Die Grundprobleme der Ph?nomenologie (1927); The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982) GA 26 Metaphysische Anfangsgr?nde der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (1928); The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984) GA 29/30 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (1929/30); The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995. GA 60 Ph?nomenologie des religi?sen Lebens (1920/21); The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2004) But I do not expect most of you to read any of these. Being and Time is quite enough. I am not recommending any secondary literature, at least not initially. If you want an overview of Heidegger's development, I recommend R?diger Safranski's Ein Meister aus Deutschland, translated as Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Walter Biemel's

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Martin Heidegger, translated into English as Martin Heidegger: An Illustrated Study is helpful. I prefer Otto P?ggeler's Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking. I cannot really recommend any of the commentaries on Being and Time. I considered ordering Stephen Munhall's recently revised commentary1 and making you write a review. It is clear and responsible, but it does not dig very deeply. So I gave up on that idea. You do better to concentrate on the text. Genuinely helpful is Theodore Kisiel's Genesis of Being and Time. But more important than consulting the secondary literature would be turning to the sources of Heidegger's thinking, above all to Aristotle, but also to Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and, of course, Husserl.

2 In approaching Being and Time it is helpful to keep in mind that the book, as we have it, contains only the first two sections of part one, that is to say roughly one third of the envisioned work. That the book we have is only a fragment of the work envisioned at the time is made clear in paragraph 8, which presents us with a sketch of the "Design of the Treatise" (SZ 39-40)2 -- with its rushed publication Heidegger responded to pressure by the dean of the philosophical faculty at Marburg, which had chosen him to succeed Nicolai Hartmann, but was informed by the ministry in Berlin that a major publication was needed (GA14, 99)3. That "Design" tells us that the book we now have contains only the first two sections of Part One, that is to say roughly one third of the envisioned two part work. As Heidegger explains the overall design:

If we are to arrive at the basic concept of `Being' and to outline the ontological conceptions which it requires and the variations which it necessarily undergoes, we need a clue which is concrete. We shall proceed towards the concept of Being by way of an Interpretation of a

1 Stephen Munhall, Heidegger;'s Being and Time, 2nd. ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) . 2 GA2 Sein und Zeit (1927); Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). Page references are to the 7th edition of SZ, 1953. 3 GA14 Zur Saches des Denkens (1969); Tr. On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972)

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certain special entity, Dasein, in which we shall arrive at the horizon for the understanding of Being and for the possibility of interpreting it; the universality of the concept of Being is not belied by the relatively `special' characteristic of our investigation. But this very entity, Dasein, is in itself `historical', so its ownmost ontological elucidation necessarily becomes an `historiological' (`historischen') Interpretation." (SZ 39) This tells us that the projected third section of Part One would have returned to the task of determining the concept of Being, after an analysis of the temporality of Dasein had provided the necessary horizon. Heidegger's "design" also suggests that such a determination could still only have been provisional in that an adequate determination of the concept of Being is said to call for the three step destruction of the history of philosophy that Part Two of Being and Time was supposed to accomplish, a destruction that would have led the reader back to the origin of Greek ontology and thus to the limit of philosophy as we know it, and with it to a more original understanding of both time and Being than allowed for by the phenomenological-transcendental approach adopted in Being and Time. Such a "destruction" has to call into question the phenomenological method for which Heidegger thanks his mentor Edmund Husserl in a footnote (SZ 39), a method that remains rooted in the tradition to be "destroyed." Already here then we get a premonition of the collision between the claim of phenomenology to lay firm foundations and an ever growing awareness of the historical embeddedness of thought, a collision that, as we shall see, dooms any attempt to arrive at an adequate determination of the concept of Being. That impossibility becomes explicit in subsequent works: there is indeed tension already in the very expression "concept of Being" in that Being resists being assigned its place in logical or linguistic space. Much of the destruction of the history of philosophy promised for the projected Part Two is now available in one form or another, both in Heidegger's lectures and in his published essays. But what about the third section of Part One of Being and Time? Paragraph 8 gives only its title, "Time and Being." What strikes the reader immediately is the reversal that has taken place: instead of journeying from Being to time we now are to return from time to Being, raising the question of whether the much discussed Kehre in Heidegger's path of thinking, supposed to have taken place several years after the

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publication of Being and Time, had in fact already been anticipated in the original projection of the work.

3 It has become customary to contrast Being and Time and the immediately following published works, The Essence of Reasons, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and What is Metaphysics? -- and we can now add to these The Basic Problems of Phenomenology and other lectures -- with the later works, beginning with the Introduction to Metaphysics and The Origin of the Work of Art (1935). P?ggeler and von Herrmann have celebrated the Beitr?ge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936 - 38), Contributions to Philosophy, published posthumously some years ago as GA 65, as Heidegger's second main work, which makes the turn from a Dasein-centered explication of the problem of time as horizon of the question of Being to a restatement of this question in terms of the history of Being (Cf. von Herrmann's essay in Martin Heidegger, Politics, Art, and Technology.4 But such talk of the famous Kehre or turning is misleading in at least two ways: 1. The later works should not be lumped together. As P?ggeler points out in the Concluding Discussion in Politics, Art, and Technology,5 there are at least two important breaks in Heidegger's development, one comes in 1929/30, the second in 1938. P?ggeler is right to point out that 1933 does not represent an important turn in Heidegger's philosophical development, although I would question his claim that therefore there is no deep connection between Heidegger's political engagement and his philosophical development. It is possible to argue that it was precisely Heidegger's need to confront, not just National Socialism, but also his own involvement with it, that called for the move to the third stage. In this sense the Rekotoratsrede does hold a central place in that stage which lasts from 1929/30 to 1938. I treated this in some detail in my seminar on Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art," which now has appeared as a book with

4 Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, "Technology, Politics, and Art in Heidegger's Beitr?ge zur Philosophie, trans. Karsten Harries and Parvis Emad, Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology, ed. Karsten Harries an d Christoph Jamme (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994), p. 55-70 5 Politics, Art, and Technology, p. 247.

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Springer.6 The chapter dealing with the Rectorial Address has also appeared in a French translation by Christian Sommer.7

2. More importantly, Being and Time is not Heidegger's first work. Anyone who wants to have an adequate understanding of Heidegger's development should be familiar with his dissertation of 1914, Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus and the Habilitationsschrift of 1916, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (GA 1), should also be aware of his difficult movement away from Catholicism, first to a free Protestantism and finally beyond Christianity altogether. I recommend Hugo Ott's "Heidegger's Catholic Origins" in Politics, Art, and Technology8 and especially his Martin Heidegger.9 And, as more and more volumes of the GA have appeared and still continue to appear, the importance of Aristotle for Heidegger's appropriation of Husserl's phenomenological project has become ever more apparent. But here I shall focus on Being and Time.

4 Still, by way of an introduction let me briefly and very roughly and therefore misleadingly sketch Heidegger's development and the place of Being and Time in that development. I want to do so by drawing a parallel between Heidegger's development and that of Wittgenstein. I would like to mark the latter with some quotations:

Tractatus 4.003. Language disguises the thought: so that from the external forms of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.10 On this view language hides its essential structure, just as the body hides the spirit.

6 Karsten Harries, Art Matters: A Critical Commentary on Heidegger's The Origin of the

Work of Art (New York: Springer, 2009). 7 "Le Discours de rectorat et le `national-socialisme priv?' de Heidegger," ?tudes

Philosophiques, 2010 - N? 2 Presses Universitaires de France - PUF; (26 mai 2010) 8 Hugo Ott, "Heidegger's Catholic Origins", Politics, Art, and Technology, ed. Karsten Harries and Christoph Jamme (New Yirk: Holmes and Meier, 1994, pp. 18-33. 9 Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1988). 10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958),.

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