What is being? and why does that matter?
This is the talk I gave at my local U3A Philosophy Club on 6th November 2018.
Powerpoint slides for this talk are here on OneDrive:
https://tinyurl.com/wotisbeing
This is a talk about my understanding of Division 1 of Heidegger’s Being and Time, which I have mostly gleaned from reading and listening to commentaries rather than by studying the original text.
Sources — recommended reading and viewing
The commentaries and sources that I have found most helpful are:
- 2007 Lecture Series by late Prof. Hubert Dreyfus of U.C. Berkeley
- “Being and Ontotheology”, lecture by Prof Mary-Jane Rubinstein
- “Groundless Ground”, by Prof. Lee Braver
- “Heidegger’s Being and Time”, by Prof. William Blatner
- “Skilful coping”, by late Prof. Hubert Dreyfus of U.C. Berkeley
- Heideggerian terminology — Wikipedia
We tend to assume we know what these little words are doing, and what they mean. But Heidegger thinks that we don’t know what they are doing or what they mean with anything like the degree of clarity which a subject as important as this one deserves. [Heidegger calls this our “forgetfulness of being”.]
Let’s say a being is an entity — perhaps any entity at all. An object, a subject, a number, a god or The God, an event, a process, a person, you, me, them, a work of art, equipment, a mental state. As a first approximation, we can say that any entity that is, is a being. So Heidegger’s question is: what is it to be a being? What does it mean to be a being? Ok, we know what beings are, but what is being itself? That is to say, what is is?
A possible starting point that has been suggested is to use the scientific method. Surely, the argument goes, an objective viewpoint, which has all human biases and purposes cleared away from it, is a better starting point for understanding the nature of our world.
How should we understand what science is, or how science works? By doing more science, of course! People who advocate this viewpoint think of this approach as a virtuous circle, but probably they are wrong.
Instead of relying on our pre-conceived conceptualisation of what being is, Heidegger thinks we should base our conceptualisation on our ground-level, basic, everyday experience of being beings in the world which we are familiar with — as we go about our day to day business.
This does seem reasonable. If we want a conceptualisation that is consistent with regular day-to-day experience, a conceptualisation which does not lead to conclusions that we find jarring, it makes a kind of sense to use that day-to-day experience as our starting place.
The philosophical tradition either says or assumes that to be is to be a substance; and two things determine what it is to be a substance:
(1) The being of substances is self-sufficient — independent of circumstances, environments and human contexts.
(2) The properties of substances are themselves thought of as being somehow self-sufficient / self-contained / independent of other properties.
At least according to Heidegger, the philosophical tradition conceptualises all being as self-sufficient substances expressing self-sufficient properties. What it is to be a being is to be a self-sufficient substance. Thinkers don’t necessarily need to think this for Heidegger’s assertion to be valid. It could just be that everything thinkers think is consistent with this conceptualisation of being. In other words, we assume that being is self-sufficient substances, and everything we think is consistent with that.
Before saying what Heidegger wants to tell us that being is, lets say what Heidegger wants to tell us that being is not.
Being is not a being, and especially not the supreme being. Being is not beingness. Being is not only self-sufficient substances.
When he was writing being and time, Heidegger roughly speaking thinks that there are 3 types of being: (1) self-sufficient substances (as per philosophical tradition since the greeks) (2) equipment (3) ourselves. Heidegger is not saying that there couldn't a priori be other types of being - just that these are the three types that he thinks our experience and behaviour indicate. [In later writings Heidegger expands this list to perhaps 7 types, including works of art as having their own kind of being.]
My favourite example to illustrate how equipment occurs in a way that is quite distinct from substances, is the clutch pedal on a manual geared car. But you can use just about any piece of equipment that you like. Those of us who drive manual geared cars, know that we use the clutch pedal every time we change gear. When you were first learning how to drive, it was a big deal pushing the clutch down at the right time, and releasing it to engage the gear. Now when you drive to the shops and back it is barely something you even notice. So the first phenomenon to notice about equipment is that it becomes transparent as our compentence increases.
Another thing to notice is that the clutch pedal is significant only in respect of its role in driving your car, and your car is only useful because there is a road network to drive it on. And none of this would have any kind of significance if you didn’t want to go places. So Heidegger wants us to consider that the being of equipment is an equipmental totality in which all equipment has its place, only by virtue of all other equipment. And this equipmental totality is only significant because it meshes with human activity.
Couldn’t we just add function-properties to substances to get equipment. No, not if we want to genuinely and adequately capture the phenomena of equipment as equipment actually is for us in our day-to-day experience.
The experience of being ourselves is typically not the “me in-here / external world out-there” conception that the philosophical tradition likes to assume. You only get to have that kind of experience when you go somewhere unfamiliar. For most of us, most of the time, we find ourselves already in the world, engaged in activities, essentially being a (or the) world which we are concerned about. We experience ourselves as being that world. Heidegger says we experience ourselves as the world in which we are living — we are always already in-the-world, familiar with our world and being that world.
Being-in-the-world is not the relationship of one object being inside another object — rather it is involved familiarity. My computer is in my office, but it doesn’t experience the office as “my” office in the way that I do. If I take my iPad to work in the Borough Gardens I experience the gardens as my local park… not because I legally own the park, but because I am familiar with it. This kind of mineness / being-in / involved familiarity mostly goes unnoticed and comes to our attention only by its absense — when I go places I am not familiar with and feel the consequent sense of disorientation.
Heidegger points out that the phenomenology of “dasein” destroys any coherent distinction between self and world. The phenomena of dasein is wholstic. Dasein is its world. No conceptual notion of me-in-here/the-world-out-there subjects and objects can stand up to sustained attention being paid to our experience of being as it actually occurs for us.
Dasein is the being whose being is a concern/issue for itself. Heidegger calls this condition “existence”. (Kierkegard says: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself.”) But noting that “dasein is its world” — we can conclude that dasein is a world of significance that is concerned about its own significance.
So Heidegger thinks we have two kinds of “taken-for-granted”:
We have a taken-for-granted way of conceptualizing the world, and we have a taken-for-granted way of behaving in and experiencing the world — and the first of these is not consistent with the second of these.
Heidegger thinks the first of these assumes that there is one kind of being — namely self-sufficient substances. And the second of these implies three kinds of being, which are described on the next slide.
So the transformation in our thinking that Heidegger is advocating is to move from a conceptualisation of being in which all beings are self-sufficient substances (and since everything is that, the question mostly doesn’t even arise or occur to anyone), to a conceptualisation in which there are multiple types of being (in B&T Heidegger basically thinks there are 3 types). Since these types of being each have a unique conceptualisation, which in the case of both equipment and ourselves is wholistic, we can see how we might have previously been getting confused when we conceptualised all beings as though they are self-sufficient substances.
So what’s the big deal about wholism? The thing that is significant about wholistic perspectives is not that the whole is greater than the sum of that parts.
“That’s true about a pile of bricks, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That’s not interesting.” Hubert Dreyfus.
The significant thing about wholistic perspectics is that the whole makes the part what it is. The meaning of the part is the consequence of being a part of the whole that it is a part of.
So roughly speaking Heidegger is saying that the reason why philosophers find the world so confusing and paradoxical, is because they have conceptualised the world in an incorrect way at a very basic level. And when you follow the implications of that fundamental conceptual error through to its conclusions, you get all kinds of paradoxes.
It is a fundamental misunderstanding that:
(1) firstly all beings are substances and that
(2a) secondly self can be easily separated from the wholism it shares with the world, and that
(2b) thirdly equipment can be easily isolated from the equipmental totality or easily understood as objects with properties.
Heidegger thinks these three inadequate assumptions are shaping our thinking without us realising it, and consequently giving rise to baffling philosophical puzzles.
Consequently Heidegger is advocating using the phenomena of day-to-day experience as the basis on which to construct our fundamental understandings of being.
Once we stop putting the square pegs of equipment and ourselves into the round hole of self-sufficient substances, we are freed up to understand these other types of being in terms of the wholistic phenomena as it actually presents itself to us. And consequently the conceptualisation we draw from this, and conclusions we draw from that conceptualisation, are much easier to square with the phenomena of our everyday lives that we are basing them on.
Let’s distinguish two types of knowing:
Knowing that: I know that the earth orbits the sun. I know that F=ma. I know that the rules of football are xyz. I know the highway code in the UK requires you to drive less than 30 mph where there are streetlights unless there is signage to tell you otherwise.
Knowing how: My friend Caroline knows how to use a telescope. I know how to ride a bicycle. I know how to drive a car.
Heidegger says on page 150 : “being is that on the basis of which, beings are already understood”.
However the rest of the text makes it clear that when Heidegger says “understood” here, he is not talking about understood in a cognitive way. He is not talking about “know-that”. Rather he is talking about “know-how”. He is talking about the way our actions and experience have an <<<already having made-sense of the situation we are in>>> built into them — an embedded intelligibility — analogously like water is to a fish — although as we will see shortly, Heidegger thinks we swim in three different kinds of water.
Having established the world we experience and act in as being characterised by these three distinct kinds of being, Heidegger goes on to illucidate science as being a process of using skilful activity to isolate self-sufficient substances by means of ready-to-hand equipment and resources.
A more detailed article about Heidegger’s Being and Time is here:
Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Reader’s Guides) — shorter version