The Heideggerian Engine: A Glimpse Under the Hood

In four days I shall begin taking another group of students through Heidegger's epic book, Being and Time.  What should they know when beginning the journey?  What words of wisdom do I have as they embark?

I think that the best thing I might say is that reading Heidegger is not about imparting knowledge at all. It is not a book fundamentally about things, but a book that happens in its reading. One might say that it is a text that happens in the happening of reading itself. 

The philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is often thought to be exceedingly difficult to grasp. Heidegger is a philosopher using the language of the philosophical tradition, but using it in ways that many regard as strikingly idiosyncratic. Clearly, we all know what being is, or at least we thought we knew before reading Heidegger. In fact, prior to reading Heidegger we might be tempted to believe some explanation is occurring in the following: 

• X asks, "What is being?" 
• Y responds, "That which is."  

If we have read Plato and Aristotle, we perhaps are prone to contrast the realm of being somehow with that of becoming. Plato thought being was stable and eternal, the kind of thing that can be known as something discrete and definite.  Aristotle regarded primary substances as the locus classicus of being. There are things that are, that are stable enough to carry properties, sometimes contrary properties over time. This particular cat is now hungry and later is sated. Bill is in Florence and now in Athens. The United States once had 13 states and now has 50. This seems simple enough, but Heidegger exposes the complexity of such simplicity.  

As a boy on an Iowa farm, I went into the barn and experienced life with animals. I experienced animals eating, drinking, congregating and defecating. Often they would be curious or frightened by me. Their life was part of the life of my five-year-old self.  I had not yet come to regard these animals as having some being apart from their basic intelligibility to me in the little world in which I dwelt. 

I don't know when it happened exactly, but at some point I came to recognize the animals in my world as beings existing apart from me with particular properties that didn't depend upon me.  Heidegger would say that I now had fallen, that I had, in fact, adopted a pretty complex and ultimately unsupported view on things.  But I knew nothing then about the Verfallenheit in which I now found myself.  

My father taught me that steers and heifers had to achieve a certain rate of gain in order for their lives among us to be profitable to us.  After all, we were farming, and we had to cashflow the animals.  Somehow we needed the market price of our animals to be greater than the feed we fed them, plus the labor we expended upon them, plus the costs of medical treatment for them, and some percentage of the cost of barns, fences and feeding mechanisms, manure spreaders, tractors and all of the rest of it. 

Farm kids soon learn that different breeds of animals have different properties, e.g., temperaments, disease resistance, ease of birth, propensities to convert feed into weight gain. It is important in livestock husbandry that one knows the properties animals have apart from us because the very profitability of one's enterprise depends upon such knowledge. I learned many things on the farm about animals, machinery, tilling practices and efficiencies, mechanical qualities of machinery, and the nature of the greatest variable for successful farming: the weather.  

I learned about cold and warm fronts, low and high pressure systems, and the related possibilities of precipitation and storms when lows, highs and fronts were located in particular places and had particular qualities. I thought about the conditions leading to drought and the possibilities of those conditions manifesting themselves given the current macro conditions. I wanted to know about the processes of weather in themselves. I had adopted a view of things, in which things were the more real the less meaningful they were to me. 

Maybe all of this led me to want at an earlier time in my life to be a scientist, actually I dreamt of becoming a physicist. I was deeply intrigued about the in itself of things, and believed that mathematics could describe that in itself and predict future changes in it. I remember watching the Feynman Lectures on Physics in my Honors Physics class as a college freshman.  I was intrigued about special and general relativity, about cosmology, about the fundamental laws of nature that determine the very contour of the in itself.  

Perhaps all of this made my first reading of Heidegger difficult.  Although I did not know it, I was deeply committed to a substance ontology quite early in life.  I thought the world consisted of objects that somehow self-identify as the objects they are, and I believed that these self-identifying objects (substances) could possess modifications while still being the substances they were.  In other words, I believed that substances could contingently take on differing properties while remaining what they essentially were.  

Early on in life, I already bought the distinction between necessary essential properties and contingent accidental properties. There was something that made me who I was -- or so I thought -- and that which made me who I was continued to perform its function apart from whether I wore my hair long or short, or whether I even had hair.  

It seemed the most natural thing to me that the world would be what it is apart from me, and that my dealings with the world, particularly my knowing of it, did not change the world. The worldhood of the world was, accordingly, logically, ontologically and epistemically independent from my subjective apprehension of it -- or so I assumed. 

Accordingly, I was from a rather early age committed to the subject/object dichotomy.  As a knowing substance, I was that upon which the objectivity of the world manifested its effects.  The world was filled with substances being themselves, I was a substance being myself, and my substance was the subject in relationship to objects apart from me being substances in themselves.  As I said, all of this made my early reading of Heidegger difficult.  

What, after all, was Heidegger getting at in his phenomenological description of the world? Was he not finally describing the color, the projection of my subjectivity on the objects of a quite colorless world?  When I first read Heidegger I thought, "How can he escape idealism?  How can he not be committed to the assertion that the properties of my substance -- of the substance if one is an objective idealist -- are what they are, and that these properties determine the contour of the world so encountered?  Is this not simply another rerun of Kant's "Copernican Revolution?" 

But I will admit that I missed what was fundamental. By looking for something profoundly transcendental, I simply could not see what was before my eyes.  The mystique of Heidegger, the engine propelling his thinking, is nothing transcendental or profound at all. I could not see under the hood in those days, and had I seen I might have judged then that the car had no engine at all! 

I had to go back to my five-year-old self to see it, and those steps backwards did not seem to me to be steps forward at all.  I struggled with Heidegger's technical German vocabulary, hoping to find in his technical philosophical terms something foundantional, some ground upon which his philosophy was based. I searched for some deep ontological commitment or some fundamental presupposition that would explain what he was saying and why he was saying it. In all of this, I simply overlooked the fact that my five-year-old self would not have searched for, nor understood, what an ontological commitment or a fundamental presupposition even was.  

What Heidegger was inviting me to do in Being and Time was simply to look around me and notice everything I constantly overlooked and ignored. If there is any fundamental presupposition he has, it is simply this: Notice where you are and what you are doing. Even at five, I knew the way of the farm; I knew the smells, the rhythms, the places I could walk and the things I could do. These comprised my world, the world in which I found myself and the world in which I dwelt. I knew the way to the house, to the table, to my bedroom. When it rained I found myself under a roof, and when it snowed I wore my boots and mittens. String from mom's sewing box was that which made the barn cats excited. Barn hay was that in which new kittens were encountered.The rock on the barn ledge next to the milk cow was that by which ice in the pan was broken.  

How effortlessly I navigated the complexities of it all! I could "get around" on the farm; I knew how to deal with things. Of course, I did not abstractly know that there was a context that allowed my dealings, and I did not conceive that this context was part of my culture which itself was related to history.  My five-year-old self had neither read Dilthey nor Troeltsch -- I did not read much in those days -- so was unaware of the "historical problem" as a problem, but that did not matter.  I had agency, I could act and somehow my actions made sense in my farm world.  

My reading of Being and Time began to give me language to talk about my more primordial "gettings around" in the world, my facility to deal with the wholly meaningful world in which I found myself.  Heidegger taught me that human be-ing is that be-ing in and for which be-ing is at issue.  The word 'Dasein' even connotes this; I am being 'there' or 'here'.  Prior to any grown-up conception of the world in which I am a subject confronted by objects, I live a world of meaning and purpose.  It is only when reflecting on this world of meaning and purpose that I am aware of the clearing that is my being and the world's worldness all together. Heidegger calls all of this being-in-the-world, meaning that my be-ing, is a be-ing that already has a world. There is no world without be-ing in it, and there is no be-ing without a world to be in.  The 'in' is not a spatial term, but is what Heidegger terms an existential.  I am a being, who in my be-ing, is be-ing-in-the- world.  Accordingly, my being is being-in-the-world.  

Before I read Heidegger seriously, I had read books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the Crack in the Cosmic Egg.  It is probably the case that I never did understand exactly what it was to "overcome the subject-object dichotomy" recommended in those books because I simply already knew that there were subjects and objects.  How does one overcome that which is?  I had also read Eliade on Eastern religious traditions and knew that moksha and nirvana got us to places where we were no longer isolated subjects, but could somehow become simply a "drop in the cosmic ocean."  But none of this actually dislodged my own commitment to substance ontology. One might say that such a commitment only dies with violence.  These texts were not violent enough. 

But I see it, and Heidegger wants you to see it as well. He wants you to look under the hood of your commitments about being, to the be-ing that is be-ing in and through your commitments about being. Heidegger wants to give you an "a ha" experience, and the koan he chants is substance ontology itself. So what is the sound of one hand clapping? So how can an isolated subject build a bridge to the external world?  How indeed?  

Read Being and Time freshly by taking off your glasses of substance ontology. Look and see what it is to be.  To be is actually everything we do in the everyday.  We get around pretty well, and there must be some structure to this getting around. What are then the ontological possibilities of our being which allow any of our concretely actual gettings around in the world?  It is here, I admit, that the smell of the transcendental returns.  

Heidegger is a philosopher, after all, and his description of getting around in A-fashion or getting around in B-fashion finally must lead him to ask what is common to A-fashion getting around and B-fashion getting around.  In a faint echo of Kant who asked about the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience as such, Heidegger asks about the ontological conditions which make possible the actuality of what he calls the ontic, the actual and concrete what is in which one deals in one's world.  What might it be to uncover the conditions for the possibility of any dealings, conditions which are endemic to experience as such, conditions which are deeper than person X or Y or fashion A or B?  

I will write more later, but for now simply enjoy reading Being and Time, my students, and be ready for adventure!