Framing our being in a different way - Martin Heidegger

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So, if I wanted to set myself up for failure here today, I’d tell you I was going to explain all of Heidegger to you in about 30 minutes. Luckily, I’m too old to make that mistake, and you’re too old to be believing it anyway.

But one thing I can hope to do today is to tell you something I think is very jarring—and pretty awesome—about Heidegger’s work. As well as something significant that will help you place him in however you think about the history of philosophy.

Heidegger was one of the most important members of a movement in philosophy that was trying to question metaphysics.

This is around the 1920s—it’s the beginning of his career—and in many ways, as a German thinker himself, he’s reacting to the ripple effect created by the work of another German thinker: a guy we’ve been talking about lately named Friedrich Nietzsche.

If you’ve read the last few posts then you know Nietzsche thought his work was the twilight of the idols from the history of philosophy. That one of the things included in that list of idols was the long set of traditions philosophers had built up in the field of metaphysics.

Nietzsche says we’re going to stop all this unverifiable speculation about ideal, other-worldly stuff. To just focus on the here and now— he really thinks his work is moving beyond this whole metaphysical tradition.

Well Heidegger was someone who agreed with Nietzsche that we have to get away from metaphysics, but he ultimately said that Nietzsche didn’t go far enough. Heidegger makes the claim that every piece of philosophy Nietzsche ever wrote was built on top of a metaphysical foundation that is completely wrong about the nature of being.

What was he talking about there?

He’s talking about making the assumption that as human beings: we are primarily subjects, that are living in a world of objects.

Now trust me: I get that your first response to reading that might be, “Well, what’s wrong with that? I mean aren’t we?”

My goal here if I can do anything in this post is to explain three things: One, where Heidegger’s coming from with this critique. Two, how this critique from his book Being and Time completely changed the way a lot of philosophers even think about the task of philosophy. And three, how ultimately Heidegger thinks a very easy trap to fall into if you’re an intelligent person in the modern world is to get trapped in Plato’s cave.

But not trapped in Plato’s cave like it’s typically said! Where all you see are the shadows on the cave wall. That’s the old version of this trap.

The trap for a lot of people in the modern world, for Heidegger, is to get yourself stuck in the allegory of the cave—or to think of yourself as a person who just needs to remove the cultural bias, the linguistic or historical biases that are in your way– and that if only you can do that fully, then you’ll eventually get access to the truth that lies on the other side of all these barriers.

Heidegger thinks this is nonsense and that it misunderstands a fuller picture of what human existence is. By the end of this today you’ll understand why.

It should be said that to him: it’s not just Nietzsche that’s building his philosophy on faulty metaphysics—it’s essentially the entire history of philosophy.

And if you’re someone reading this post who thinks of yourself as a subject in a world of objects; one person from the history of philosophy you can send a thank-you card to for that is René Descartes.

Cartesian subjectivity, as it’s called: “I think, therefore I am.” The assumption is that that’s the starting point of any further analysis we’re going to do.

Assumptions like: I am a self, a subject, a mind. I exist in a spatial realm of objects that is outside of me. And that one of the big tasks of philosophy is going to be to figure out what the relationship is between me, as a subject, and all the objects out there—or for that matter all the other subjects out there.

This is the dualistic set of assumptions that a lot of Western thinking is built upon.

And to some people this may not even seem like an assumption. But Heidegger says that while this may be the level at which we normally analyze things in philosophy or in the sciences, this isn’t the primary way we experience what it is to be.

If you wanted philosophical terms here: Heidegger’s going to make a case that there is something ontologically prior to any claim we make about how subjects relate to objects.

That any claim about how things relate to other things is ultimately a secondary, theoretical abstraction we’re making. That there’s something to our existence that comes before any of this—something that makes abstractions like science or the history of philosophy even possible.

The first thing he wants us to do is try to throw out all the philosophical terms people have used throughout history when they’ve tried to describe what being is. Because these are all created by philosophers who haven’t really taken the question of being as seriously as they could have.

So out go terms like subject, consciousness, person, the self as they’ve typically been used— out goes the mind/body distinction.

And for the sake of Heidegger’s point here: try as hard as you can for a minute to forget any of these terms. What he wants to do is to open our minds to the possibility of an entirely different framing of what human existence is at bottom.

The word Heidegger uses to describe our existence in his early work is Dasein. The English translation of this word is being-there.

Think of Dasein not as a mind with a detached material body in the way Descartes and many other philosophers assume, but as a type of existence that is always spatially situated in the world.

Heads up this section is going to need to be a bit mind-bending because it’s calling into question things fundamental to the way we see everything. It’s also something that exists beyond language for reasons we’ll get to. Just saying: I’ll do my best to offer metaphors when I can.

And one metaphor here that the philosopher Simon Critchley uses in his work on Heidegger is he asks his readers to try thinking of the “substance” of Dasein as existence itself—though of course, at some other level: we’re not talking about substance at all here; this is just a way to try to help shift your thinking about metaphysics.

The point of this metaphor is that, for Heidegger, before we ever identify ourselves as a self or a subject, before we ever even start talking, using words about the relationships between external things—there’s a more fundamental being going on that makes any of these abstractions possible.

Dasein is Heidegger’s name for the kinds of beings we are. And Dasein is something that can be understood not in terms of studying the atoms that make it up. But in terms of the existential structures that make up what it is for this type of existence to be.

Another metaphor that can be helpful here is that when it comes to the kinds of beings we are: Dasein, is more of a who than it is a what.

We are not a being that is in the world. We are: being-in-the-world.

But being-in-the-world is just one existential structure of many that constitute the kinds of beings we are. Heidegger gives others like: understanding, temporality, care, thrownness—each one of these things and more is an important existential structure of the type of being Dasein is.

Let me give examples of each of these as another way of opening up this alternative framing of our being. I’ll use the kind of example Heidegger uses in the book; I’ll just make it a bit more modern.

Again Heidegger says despite how natural it can seem to think of yourself as a detached subject analyzing things external to you— this isn’t how you spend most of your life interacting with the world. Most of your time is spent in the world.

When you walk across the floor interacting with the “external” world– you’re not thinking about the floor as an external object with properties you can study.

No, your experience is that you just walk on the floor to get somewhere you need to go; the floor as a theoretical object you could study fades into the background.

Another example: when you type on a keyboard writing an email, you aren’t thinking about the keyboard as an external thing.

In your existential experience of this “thing”, the keyboard becomes a type of equipment that fades into the background as you accomplish a task that matters to you. The keyboard becomes an extension of you, not some abstract thing.

Now to Heidegger, this is the primary level that we experience the world: being-in-the-world. And the point is, if you were trying to describe what type of being we are— we’re not isolated subjects who, every now and then, decide to pay attention to the world and reflect on things.

No, Dasein is a type of being that is always already in a world, involved, immersed in a kind of fascination and care for the things in that world. Dasein is a fundamentally relational being, that exists in a giant network of meaning—or as he puts it: a referential totality.

What he’s saying is that there is no objective, ultimate metaphysical separation between mind and body, or between who you are—whatever that means—and what the world is.

Being and world are fundamentally unified. They have never not been unified. And when you try to split mind and body, subject and object, as though these things are separate— well, this leads to a whole bunch of problems in philosophy that, unsurprisingly to Heidegger, the greatest minds haven’t been able to solve for thousands of years now.

Because consider another common way we categorize things like that keyboard in a different set of circumstances.

Like I said: when the keyboard is just an extension of us—when you’re using it to type an email and not thinking of it as a separate object—Heidegger calls that keyboard something ready-to-hand. It’s the equipment of Dasein in the world.

But when something happens to that keyboard—say it breaks—and we take a step back and see the keyboard in a more abstract, theoretical way as an object; it becomes something different to us at that point: something present-at-hand. It becomes part of this category of things that are abstract, theoretical concepts.

So if our primary experience of the world is with things that are ready-to-hand. The more abstract, theoretical framing of science and classical philosophy turns the world into a collection of things that are present-at-hand.

Now to be clear (and forgive me for repeating this point a bit throughout the rest of this because I think it’s really important and one of the big misunderstandings of Heidegger): none of this is saying that looking at things in an abstract, theoretical way is bad. Science and philosophy are enormously good and should be done.

Heidegger’s point here is descriptive: he’s saying this is a level of abstraction that is secondary—that there is something to our being that is ontologically prior, something that makes important abstractions like this even possible.

The most common way to view things in the world these days if you’re a philosopher or a scientist is to look for naturalistic explanations for things.

If something exists “out there,” outside of me—then the best way to understand it is to find its origins in nature and then explain how it fits into that naturalistic framework.

And as important as this is for doing many things, for Heidegger, this is not the only way to frame reality. It is certainly not the final word on what reality is.

In his terminology: this is always a study of the ontic, rather than the ontological. The ontic is the study of beings—how things like trees, asteroids, volcanoes relate to each other. The ontological is the study of being itself.

And a key mistake he’s going to say many people make when they get too caught up in the subject/object framing is that they try to explain everything through categories that only make sense when discussing how things relate to other things—or the ontic.

For example, the philosophical problem of free will and determinism only really seems like a big problem when you’re trapped in the framing that everything is an object requiring a causal explanation— where people are just another object in some giant science experiment.

The thinking goes: if I can tell where a rock will be on the other side of the galaxy simply by knowing its position and the laws of the universe, then if I had total knowledge of everything—like Laplace’s demon—why shouldn’t I be able to predict everything somebody is going to do before they do it?

But to Martin Heidegger: this is a category error– this is like asking how much the number three weighs, or what does justice taste like when it’s administered properly.

It tries to apply causal explanations that work at the ontic level to something like Dasein, which exists ontologically.

Quick aside: he’d actually have a lot to ask about the assumptions someone brings in about causality in the first place—talking as though there’s a single causal chain that can’t be broken, constantly moving into the future, like gravity. That’s a huge assumption. Secondly, to use scientific language for a second, is it possible to be totally caused by forces that are themselves unpredictable? This obsession with turning human beings into computers that can be studied and predicted like rocks in the universe is something he’d expect from a framing that treats people this way, leading to these outcomes in society.

Dasein, on the other hand, is the type of being that exists temporally, or in time. Part of what makes it the type of being it is, is that it is first thrown into a world not of its own creation. Where then via time it projects itself into the future based on the possibilities available to it.

What this means is that agency is just a part of the structure of what makes Dasein the type of being it is; Dasein is always intimately tied to past, present, and future. And if Heidegger is successful in his philosophy: then the problem of free will as it’s traditionally been discussed in Cartesian dualism just dissolves.

Another problem from the history of philosophy that starts to lose staying power is the seemingly impossible task of deriving meaning from a cold, disinterested universe.

Because seeing that as a problem is always starting your analysis from a place where you’re capable of framing the universe as abstract, cold, and disinterested—but the only way you can ever reach that judgment requires you to be embedded in the existential structures of Dasein that make anything intelligible or meaningful at all.

See to him, as Dasein, when I look out at the world and understand anything about it— that is not me accessing the truth of the universe; that is being revealing itself through me in some very partial way–- where the language, culture, and historical biases I carry are not barriers in the way of me seeing the truth like in Plato’s cave, but they’re the very things that make it even possible for me to experience being, even partially.

A common metaphor used to nudge your thinking in this direction is to compare Dasein to a beam of light that’s cast into a dark room—where it partially reveals what’s inside, but it also is existentially connected to the things it’s revealing.

It’s in this sense that Dasein is the kind of being that reveals a world that is meaningful and significant. There’s no “view from nowhere” where we can have perfect protocols and get objective knowledge. And for him obviously any way that being is partially revealed to Dasein will require an analysis from the perspective of Dasein.

This point from Heidegger is one of many from around this time that mark a shift in the history of philosophy: from typical questions about epistemology to now questions of ontology.

Instead of asking as earlier philosophers did: How do we know that our knowledge is the objective truth? What rational protocols make our knowledge as objective as possible?

Many philosophers around this time are starting to ask: What is it about someone’s experience that reveals the world in this way? How do the very structures of our phenomenological experience make any claim to truth possible in the first place?

This is a very important shift it turns out.

So obviously, if you completely bypassed your existence at this ontological level and started from the place that you are a subject who’s taking a step back examining a world of objects–- then of course it’s possible to reduce things to a collection of cold, meaningless objects.

But would that be a complete picture of your existence? Or is there more to it than that?

What would I be focusing on if I wanted to get more in touch with pre-theoretical human experience?

These sorts of questions are what make Heidegger think that philosophers need a new level of appreciation for examining not elaborate systems, but average, every day, lived experience—phenomenologically.

When you focus on lived experience, when you stop doing so much abstract, theoretical thinking about what life is, you start noticing just how important two things are to the kind of existence you’re living every day: being and time—hence the name of this book.

In fact: he thinks it becomes much more possible to notice all of those existential structures of Dasein we talked about and how impossible it becomes to see things through this framing in a cold disinterested sort of way. Space is a great example/metaphor to open this point up more.

On the one hand: when you make an abstraction out of the world; you can view something like space in terms of cold, disinterested units: feet, centimeters, kilometers, miles. You can do that.

But on the other hand, at this pre-theoretical level, for Dasein: space is always already imbued with meaning and significance.

Four miles is not always just four miles. If there’s a donut shop four miles away from you—and donuts aren’t important to you—then four miles is too far. But if that donut is your favorite donut, and they’re going out of business, and this is the last time you’ll ever taste that sprinkley-chocolately goodness— four miles isn’t far at all.

That is how Dasein interacts with space—not just in cold, calculable units.

When you’re in your living room and see the stuff around you: that stuff isn’t just cold, meaningless stuff. That’s your stuff. That’s your living room that you made in a way that means something to you and the projects you engage in.

It’s not until we make space into an abstract theoretical that it can ever become meaningless to us. Or lack enough of a “reason” behind it. Under the framing of Dasein: meaning and purpose dissolve as “problems,” at least as they’ve been presented traditionally throughout the history of philosophy.

Consider time as another example of this. Time in one sense could be viewed as just an endless linear progression of seconds grouped into minutes, hours, days.

But time, in the world of Dasein, grounds the meaning of anything we choose to do.

Heidegger says there are philosophers who talk about discovering who they really are through a confrontation with God, but in his work it’s more through a confrontation with time. Because by confronting death, and more importantly the finite nature of the time you have here as a being—you disclose what Heidegger calls your “ownmost possibility.”

As I said at the start, I can’t explain Heidegger in 30 minutes. There’s much more to Dasein—not least how we are always in relation to other Daseins and what that means.

But having done the work we have so far let me try to make point number three about this modern trap that’s easy to fall into for an intelligent person, as well as the trap he thinks society in general has fallen into.

Imagine being born into our world, inheriting a lot of Enlightenment optimism, Christian idealism, believing you are a mind inside a body. You imagine that there’s one way the universe reveals itself, and that getting to that objective truth should be one of our biggest priorities.

You look around for inspiration. You see scientists, philosophers—the people committed to finding the truth. And what do they generally say to do?

“Study objects out there and how they relate to each other. Find the best ways to know exactly what these objects are and then manipulate them to your advantage. Because not only will that get us closer to the truth, but it will also produce technology that can do miraculous stuff and make people’s lives better—more efficient, more optimized. This is what we have to do!”

And imagine hearing this and thinking, “Yeah, I’m on board. I’m going to remove my cultural bias, make sure language doesn’t get in the way of truth, remove how history shades my thinking. If only I can do all this fully I’ll finally get out of Plato’s cave and see truth rather than shadows.”

But if Heidegger’s right here then we can guess the outcomes this sole framing of the world will lead to for this person.

They’ll struggle with nihilism because they’ve bypassed the ontological level and are trying to create meaning out of theoretical abstractions. They’ll live in confusion about subjectivity, consciousness, free will, and determinism because they’re always committing a category error. They’ll see culture and language as barriers to truth rather than things that make their experience of being even possible to be revealed.

And for the last time in this post: none of Heidegger’s work is saying that we shouldn’t view things in terms of subjects and objects. This isn’t about finding some ultimate framing that does everything.

He’s saying maybe framing the world in a singular way was always going to be incomplete. That maybe certain elements of being are described better or worse with different framings. And that ultimately, we might need multiple framings to understand the complexity of our world.

Perhaps if you over-index on any one of these framings you’ll inevitably run into predictable problems when that way of framing things reaches its limits.

You can see where he agrees with Nietzsche here while also critiquing him: Heidegger definitely thinks we need to move away from concepts like the ideal— from abstract metaphysical concepts that we build a philosophy on top of. But he also thinks that Nietzsche, when he creates concepts like the will to power, the Übermensch, the transvaluation of all values, to Heidegger this is him obviously building an approach that’s overly rooted in the subject/object framing.

Last episode, we talked about Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche—where Deleuze in many ways rescues Nietzsche’s work from this critique by turning it into a metaphysics of forces instead of the subject.

But think of what Heidegger’s critique means about the state of the world if it’s true. We’ve been talking about capitalism, communism, corporatism, and how to construct societies in a way that maximizes well-being or flourishing—so many cliché words we’ve been throwing around lately.

Well, if Heidegger is right, then this whole way of framing our world in terms of maximizing outcomes—any mode of governing like this—will likely be corrupted by what he calls a technological enframing of people and society.

See technology, for Heidegger, is not smartphones and rocketships; technology is a way of thinking that dominates our modern world. We always look at people and things as objects, present-at-hand; people that are ripe to be understood, manipulated, and optimized for some outcome that someone has come up with.

In other words, if we ask, “What is the role of capitalism in the problems people face? Would the world be better without capitalism?” It’s not that Heidegger wouldn’t have thoughts on capitalism or specific policies, but zoomed out enough, he would likely see capitalism as just a symptom of a larger sickness at the level of being.

Because if you remove capitalism and then replace it with another system—it would still be a system created by people overly indexed in the subject/object framing. We’d likely see similar negative outcomes until we can view people and the world not as just a warehouse of stuff to manipulate.

A couple of clarifications. By the end of Heidegger’s career, Dasein and his work in Being and Time were not the primary way he thinks we should look at our relationship to being.

If anything, Being and Time is a proof of concept—it's an exercise in reframing what the concept of being is in one potential way that, by doing this work, bending our minds and seeing through our set of metaphysical assumptions: this can loosen us from framing things only through a singular way.

By the end of his work, Heidegger accepts how truly mysterious certain aspects of being are—things practically impossible to categorize in language or rational arguments.

He gives a lot of interesting thoughts during this phase of his life: That Being is something that reveals and conceals itself simultaneously. That Being is something we are a part of in ways deeply mysterious compared to our average experience. But then at the same time: starting with our average experience is ironically the only way to reach this place.

Lot of interesting thoughts— but what is he even talking about? I mean truthfully: if you’re saying this stuff and it’s apparently so crazy it defies language so you can’t even tell me about it: how can I, as a reader, ever tell the difference between a legitimate point and needless obscurity?

You can find plenty of insecure people in this world obscuring things just to sound deep.

Next post, we’ll dive into this whole sector of being Heidegger’s talking about, but we’re going to do it through an examination of Mysticism.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you next time.

Recommended Reading

• Michael Inwood, Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2019).

• Mark Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005).

• Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (Other Press, 2016).