Abbreviations

Being and Time

There are two English translations of Being and Time. One, by Macquarrie and Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), and the other by Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). I shall be using the first translation with the abbreviation BT throughout.

No commentary can hope to substitute for the reading of the text itself, but it can provide a helping hand. Being and Time is probably one of the most important books written in the twentieth century. It has influenced not only philosophers, but a wide range of people from writers and poets to psychiatrists and scientists. Like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, it announces a fundamental shift in the way we under- stand ourselves and the world, and we are perhaps still wrestling today with all its ramifications and consequences. This book is meant only to provide assistance for the student and the general reader and does not engage in any detailed way with the scholarship surrounding this work (which the reader might imagine is quite vast).

Unlike the other commentaries on Being and Time, however, it does come from a different background. Nearly all the introductory books in English on this work are heavily influenced by Dreyfus’ great work Being-in-the-World. There are probably two reasons for this: firstly, one of the great strengths of this book is that it tries to explain Heidegger rather than just imitate him; and secondly, it springs from the analytic tradition (at least the ‘soft’ kind of Wittgenstein, Austin and Searle) which is dominant both in the US and the UK. There is nothing wrong with this, but it does tend to ignore the manner in which the book was first received, in France, and I believe has quite a different way of reading Heidegger which does not so much focus on episte- mological questions (even if they are always overturned in relation to ontology) and the first division of Being and Time. This present book comes from a serious engagement with the French Heideggerians for many years, and I have indicated what some of the debates are within this reception in the end notes to the chapters. Still it is meant to be only a guide and I keep most of the material out of the main text and

simply explain Heidegger’s argument as well as I can. It gives this book, I believe, a different flavour and style from the other commen- taries on Being and Time.

Many introductions to Being and Time begin with a paragraph listing significant dates in Heidegger’s biography (when he was born, went to university and died). I think these are a waste of time in the modern world where the Web can provide information about everyone in an instant. More importantly, however, I do not think any of these facts can tell us anything at all about the meaning and importance of a phi- losophy, however titillating they may be. None the less, there is one important exception in the case of Heidegger and that is his involve- ment with the Nazi party. There has been a furore about this matter throughout the academic community and across the world. The details of Heidegger’s complicity can be found in any serious biogra- phy (and I refer to Safranski’s Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil in the text), but what is more significant is if it should stop us reading and teaching his work and if it infects his philosophy as a whole. To the first, I would say ‘no’, because for the very reasons above, I do not think we should conflate the meaning of text with the author’s life. To the second, however, I would say, ‘yes’, because I maintain what is lacking in Being and Time, and perhaps all of Heidegger’s work, is a serious engagement with ethics. No one more than the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has shown us how important this absence is. Such a topic is well beyond the scope of a guide, but I have indicated its seriousness in some of the end notes to the chapters.

This book is organised in three parts: introduction and historical context; commentary; and study aids. The general reader may wish to skip the last part, although the glossary and further reading may be useful.

From Phenomenology to Ontology

Heidegger famously began a lecture series on Aristotle with this state- ment: ‘He was born at such and such a time, he worked and he died.’1 Such is true of all philosophers. What is important about them, their only serious achievement, is their philosophy. Everything else is quite meaningless and trivial. Nothing about their lives tells us anything significant about their philosophy. The only way to understand the beginning of a philosophy is to understand how it begins itself; that is to say, philosophically. Being and Time begins with the question of Being, but it does so almost as though there were no context, as though it had dropped from the heavens. I believe that to make sense of this question, we first of all have to begin with its method, how and why it is asked.

This method is phenomenology. It is not my ambition, here, to explain it completely. All we need to do is to understand its basic prin- ciples (how is it different from other ways of doing philosophy, for example) and how Heidegger himself understood this method and applied it to Being and Time. This introduction is, therefore, divided into three parts. The first describes very briefly and succinctly Husserl’s explanation of phenomenology (Husserl was Heidegger’s teacher and inventor of this method). The second, what Heidegger thought (even though he was to use this method in all his philosophi- cal work) was deficient in Husserl’s application of phenomenology. And finally, the third, how specifically Heidegger illustrates and puts into practice this method in Being and Time. Once we have done this work we will be ready to begin the actual first pages of the book itself in the next chapter.

Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Method

No one should underestimate the influence of Husserl on Heidegger, both personally and intellectually. Indeed, it is not possible at all to understand one word of Being and Time unless one has at least some grasp of the phenomenological method. Luckily for us we do not need to understand the whole of this movement, but only what is relevant to our own reading, and we give here only the briefest of explanations, since this is all we need for our purposes. What is at the heart of phenome- nology is first of all a refusal of metaphysics and academic philosophy. This is the meaning of the famous slogan of the phenomenologists ‘Back to the things themselves!’ This is not just a method of doing phi- losophy, but also an attitude of mind. Throughout the history of phi- losophy, there are moments when it grinds to a dead halt; becomes ossified and lifeless. What matters at these times is not that one is doing philosophy but rather that one knows a lot about philosophy. Doing and knowing about philosophy, however, are very different things. You can know a lot about Plato, Aristotle and Kant, for example, but be unable to utter a single philosophical sentence. When Husserl told his students that they should get back to the things themselves, what he meant was that he was not interested in what they knew about philosophy, what they had learnt at school or university, but whether they could talk philo- sophically about what they saw – the table in front of them, for example. ‘What do I see?’ This seems a very simple question, but the more I think about it the more complex and difficult it becomes (especially when I am not allowed to be clever by referring to anything I have read but only to describe what I see). This phenomenological attitude is very important to take into our reading of Being and Time. For all the difficulty and jargon (which has more to do with the translation, than the German itself) of this book, what matters to Heidegger is our everyday experience of the world. Unfortunately what is closest to us is also what is hardest to see precisely because of what we have learnt at school and university, whether consciously or not, which acts as a screen between the world and ourselves and distorts our experience. For Husserl, what I discover when I look at things is that what deter- mines my relation to them is an ‘intention’. There is no doubt inten- tionality is not new to phenomenology. Husserl borrowed the expression from his teacher Brentano, and he probably took it from the Scholastics. But it is not enough to know this, as we said above, for

no amount of reading books tells me about my experience. What I have to do is to apply it to what I see. I have to ask myself not ‘Where does this word come from?’, as though this was doing philosophy, but ‘Does this word help me understand what I am seeing?’

What, then, is Husserl trying to get at by using this word? Simply put, what he is saying is that when I look at something, let us say a tree, I do not just see something, but always see it as something: never the tree, but always the tree as a tree. We shall see later that this phe- nomenological ‘as’, becomes very important to Being and Time in explaining how we relate to the world generally.2 Contained in this ‘as’ is the meaning of Husserl’s intentionality. First of all, we have to stop thinking of consciousness as an empty sack which in some mys- terious way I take out into the world and fill with my experience of things. For Husserl, on the contrary, and experience teaches us this, consciousness is already outside of itself, already related to things in the world from the very beginning.3 The world is not something out there, rather we are our world.

This idea that consciousness is already outside of itself in the world, Husserl explains as ‘consciousness of . . .’. There is no such thing as ‘consciousness’, if one understands this word to refer to some kind of mysterious thing like the ‘I’ or the self, rather there is only a relation. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, never just con- sciousness. Try it for yourself. Try and perceive without perceiving something, or think without thinking something, or imagine without imagining something. There can be no consciousness without con- sciousness of something, and it does not matter whether this ‘some- thing’ is real or not. I can have a consciousness of a unicorn, for example, without there being a real unicorn. What is important are not claims about reality (a metaphysical problem, not a phenomeno- logical one), but how consciousness experiences the world, and how in relating to things these exist now as something perceived, now as something imagined, now as something useful, and so on. There is not a subject and object separate from one another, which then, through some kind of unexplainable and unknowable process, have to become linked or attached. Rather, they are already intertwined in our direct experience of the world. This is what is meant by ‘consciousness’ when we no longer think of it as a philosophical word, but as our experience of the world.

We are not interested in Husserl, however, for his own sake, but for his impact, great as it was, on the young Heidegger. Here our guide can be a set of lectures which were the first draft of Being and Time, and which were published after his death. These lectures are called the History of the Concept of Time and they are by far the best introduc- tion and context to this work not only because they are its immediate origin, but also (as many of his students testify) because Heidegger was a remarkable teacher and presented his thought in the most direct and vivid way in his classes.4

The History of the Concept of Time

The first two chapters of the History of the Concept of Time follow our description of the phenomenology, but in greater detail than we need for our first reading of Being and Time. They also provide the first version of Heidegger’s explanation of the word ‘phenomenology’, which he puts forward for the second time in the book itself, and which we will look at in the next section. What specifically interests us at this moment, however, is Heidegger’s break with some aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology in the third chapter of the History of the Concept of Time, which is a kind of immanent critique. The difference between them will explain to us more clearly the specific nature of phenomenology that underpins Being and Time, as opposed to its general definition.

Heidegger tells us, in the opening pages of this chapter, that what has been left unquestioned in phenomenology till now is the question of Being. This does not mean that the question is not present and that we require a completely different method in order to uncover it. Rather, phenomenology presupposes it, and for this reason is the only method we can hope will answer it. This way into the question of Being is quite different from the opening of Being and Time, which is historical in nature, in the sense of a history of philosophy. None the less Heidegger’s criticism of the traditional way of asking the ques- tion of Being already presupposes this phenomenological approach. We need to leave aside, at the moment, just how Being and Time opens, and also what exactly the question of Being might be.5 This might appear quite strange, because usually when we think about what a question is we are convinced the right way to approach it is through its answer. Thus, I understand the question of Being, if I know what

is asked about in this question, which would be, in this case, the meaning of Being itself.

Philosophical questions, however, are quite different; for if I knew the answer to this question, why would I bother asking it in the first place? Heidegger’s problem is that we think we know the answer only because we are asking the question in the wrong way. The problem of the question of Being, therefore, at least at first, is not to know the answer, but how to ask the question correctly in the first place. This is why we have to go through the detour of understanding phenome- nology first, before we can even begin to read Being and Time, other- wise our expectations will already destroy the possibility of us getting anything worthwhile from our reading. We might think, for example, that a true understanding of Being is to supply its definition, and we might wonder why Heidegger does not do so; or, as Heidegger sug- gests at the start of the book, that it is not a serious question at all because everyone knows the answer already.

What, then, are Heidegger’s problems with phenomenology as it is traditionally conceived? When it first began, it restricted itself to the problems of logic and epistemology. In other words, how can I know objects in the world and that I am making true statements about them? It saw this relation primarily in scientific terms. As I have already remarked, the key notion of phenomenology is intentionality, but what concerns Heidegger here is the kind of consciousness it pre- sumes. Not what is intentionality, but how does intentionality, as a certain kind of behaviour or conduct, come about. We can speak about chairs and tables, and the structures of perception and judge- ment which make our shared experience of them possible, but what Heidegger wants us to ask is why or how we relate to things like this initially. Who or what are we such that we relate to the world inten- tionally? It is this question of Being which is presupposed by tradi- tional phenomenology but is left unquestioned. Is this question not more fundamental than intentionality (understood in the restricted sense), for if we did not relate to the world in this way, then there would be no meaning of things at all to think about? Meaning is not in the things themselves but in the way we speak and talk about or even judge them.

Heidegger claims Husserl’s first answer to this question is what he calls the ‘natural attitude’, and in this attitude I think of myself like

any other object in the world, such as trees, houses and cars. I am as ‘real’ as they are. The main thrust of phenomenology, however, is to show that I am not the same as other things. One way in which I am different is that I not only relate to things in the world (I am conscious of them in a way they are not conscious of me), but can also relate to this relation. I not only perceive the table, but also reflect upon myself perceiving the table. The difference between the two relations is that in the latter the object is immanent to reflection, whereas in the former it is transcendent. When I think about something I perceive, then the object must be internal to the thinking itself, whereas it is quite obvious that the chair I perceive is external. Thus, what is truly mine is only what I am conscious of as part of my consciousness, and the ‘material world,’ as Heidegger writes, ‘is alien and other’, even though as a real human being, I must belong to it.6 I, as a concrete living thing, seem to be part of nature, but at the same time, as con- scious, absolutely separate from it.

The supreme paradox of phenomenology, Heidegger argues, is that this absolute split between myself and the world is the very condition of objectivity. For it arises not from the transcendent perception (the external world), but the immanent reflection on this perception (thought). If there were only transcendent perceptions, then there would be no objectivity at all. I would experience this tree, then that one and so on. The concept ‘tree’, which unifies my experience, comes from my side of the reflection on perception, which is internal to con- sciousness, and not from the transcendence of the world.

The performance of the phenomenology reduction, Heidegger explains, is when I focus my attention not on the object of perception itself (my involvement with it in the real world) but on the act of per- ceiving as it is reflected upon, and only in this way is the objectivity of the object of perception given to me. This is what Husserl means when he says that we must ‘bracket the world’ in order to reflect upon what we are doing when we perceive something. I say ‘I see a tree’ and the ‘I’ and the ‘tree’ belong to the real world. But if I think about it, this is not what I am doing at all. What in fact is going on is that I am thinking about the act of perceiving as something immanent to reflection, and not the object perceived as external. When I now think about the object in this act of perception (which has become part of my reflection), then it too has become immanent, and Heidegger tells

us this is where all phenomenological analysis begins. He is keen to underline that this does not mean the rejection of the object, but a change of our orientation towards it: how it appears to us through our perceiving it, rather than what it is in the natural attitude.7

The tree is not part of my consciousness. It is something ‘alien’ and ‘other’, but the tree as immanent to the act of reflection on my per- ception is. Thus, we can distinguish between the tree as ‘real’ (exter- nal to consciousness) and as ‘objective’ (internal to consciousness). If it is internal to consciousness, then it must have the same Being as consciousness, and then, Heidegger adds, it must be ‘absolutely given’. The real tree can change. I go to the park, and it is no longer there, but if I reflect upon my perception of that tree it must be absolutely present in it. It would be absurd to say it does not exist in this way, even if the material world has changed. How Husserl envi- sions phenomenology, therefore, (and which makes his method very similar to Descartes) is that there must be an absolute split between the world and consciousness. But how is this division, Heidegger asks, possible, when the very beings for whom this separation occurs (our- selves as concrete living beings) also belong to the world?

The Being of that being which is consciousness is taken for granted by the traditional method of phenomenology, and yet without it, it could not function at all. But why should we, first of all, be thought of in terms of consciousness? Does this way of relating to the world sum up who or what we are, and is it the only way in which we relate to the world? It is not only that traditional phenomenology does not have any answers to these questions, but it does not even ask them. It takes it for granted that we are nothing but ‘consciousness’, and being conscious is to be directly understood through intentionality as objec- tivity. It does not ask about this because it fails to follow its own maxim, ‘Back to the things themselves’. It finds the Being of things in the world in the objectivity of consciousness, but it does not investi- gate the Being of consciousness with the same rigour. Rather than being true to the Being of consciousness (in the way in which it has been true to the Being of things, describing how and what appears), it has imported a metaphysical meaning of consciousness from the history of philosophy (essentially Cartesian).

What is important for Heidegger is not the definition of the struc- ture of intentionality as such, but the Being of that being who relates

to the world intentionally. In other words, you and I, as real, existing, individuals, and not as abstract poles of a relation of knowledge in which we speak of tables and chairs in philosophy lectures or books. Even though Husserl, like Descartes and Kant, understands the Being of the object through the subject, its Being is in fact only interpreted through this relation and not as it appears in itself. The subject van- ishes in the very objectivity of knowledge, and just as the real chair is purified of any material being, so too is the consciousness which intentionally relates to it. Knowledge takes precedence over the terms in the relation, and they both evaporate in its abstraction. This is why Husserl’s notion of consciousness can in fact tell us nothing about that being which is conscious (ourselves as concrete living beings). Our lives have completely disappeared in thought, and there is no way of getting back to them through this way of doing phenomenology.

When we come to our reading of Being and Time, we shall see that Husserl’s understanding of consciousness is in fact general to the history of philosophy as a whole. It takes knowledge to be the primary way of relating to the world, and understands conscious- ness through this relation. Heidegger’s orientation is quite different. He asks who that being which is conscious is and should we take its way of relating to itself and the world primarily to be one of knowl- edge? Is there not a more fundamental and practical way of engag- ing with the world from which this objective relation is in fact derived? This rejection of the letter of Husserl’s phenomenology, however, is not a repudiation of its spirit, for we can only get back to this more elemental meaning of our lives (which has disappeared in the history of philosophy because of its obsession with knowledge) by being true to our own experience of ourselves and the world. Heidegger’s method in Being and Time, then, could be described as a double reduction. It seeks to get behind what Husserl’s reduction takes for granted, the life of the individual consciousness, and thereby uncover a more fundamental ontological basis to any possi- ble epistemology, which cannot, in its turn, be reduced to an abstrac- tion of thought. For though it might make sense to claim that the objectivity of the chair is only ideal, and its factual existence does not matter in order for it to be thought, it is absurd also to claim that the existence of the person who thinks this thought is of no concern for them or others.

For Heidegger, Husserl’s phenomenology goes astray not because of the reduction, but because of its conception of the natural attitude, which is anything but natural. This is because it is not sufficiently philosophical enough. It takes what is a commonplace point of view to be a philosophical truth without sufficiently questioning whether it is or not. It assumes we first of all encounter things in the world as what Heidegger calls ‘objectively on hand’ and we ourselves also belong to this same relation.8 Is it true to say we experience ourselves as merely one more natural object in a world of natural objects? There is no doubt, in a restricted sense, we can. So for example, when I am ill, the doctor treats my symptoms and not myself (though we can imagine a good doctor would do both). But even here we can see the difference between a mere thing and a human being. For we all know the difference between a disease and being healthy. The first is merely bio- logical, whereas the second involves the whole of someone’s life, such that two people could have the same illness, the one being healthy and the other not. The natural attitude, rather than being natural is some- thing we have actively to decide to have. It is not, except for philoso- phers, the ordinary way in which human beings experience the world, but only a possible one and not the most fundamental.

It might seem a long detour to read these pages of the History of the Concept of Time before we go on to Being and Time itself, but they are important to understanding what is at stake in the latter. First of all, and most importantly, we must realise it is a work of phenomenology.

Heidegger’s way into the question of Being is phenomenological. We can grasp this in two ways: first, it is impossible fully to comprehend this work without any knowledge of the influence and impact of Husserl’s method on Heidegger’s thought; but also secondly (and perhaps more importantly), he takes further what Husserl has given him by laying bare its hidden ontology. It is through this critique that Heidegger discovers his own ontology. Beyond the relationship between Heidegger and Husserl, however, this immanent critique of phenomenology also explains the opening of Being and Time. For although, as we shall see in the next chapter, it begins with the ques- tion of Being, this question can only be approached through the ques- tion of what it means to be a human being. The reason why Husserl did not, or could not, ask what it meant to be a human being, or could only understand it in a restricted way, is that he himself did not have

a sufficient understanding of Being. The question of Being and the different but related question of what it means to be a human being are, therefore, inextricably bound together.9

Phenomenology in Being and Time

It is not until the seventh section of the introduction of Being and Time that Heidegger actually explains what he understands phenomenol- ogy to be. It is clear from reading this section it is not merely a his- torical curiosity, but a real and essential way of doing philosophy. Indeed, for Heidegger, it is the only way in which the question of Being is going to be reawakened and possibly revealed to us. As a method, if it is properly practised, it is true to the phenomena them- selves, and allows us, therefore, to escape the distorting vision of tra- dition, which, as we have just seen, even affected the way Husserl understood, or failed to understand, consciousness.

This is why Heidegger can say, in the History of the Concept of Time, that Husserl’s phenomenology, properly speaking, is ‘unphenomeno- logical’, even though Husserl himself invented this method, because he is still caught up within a dominant tradition of philosophy which is essentially Cartesian.10 As we shall see, this is not a stupid error on Husserl’s part, as though if he were only cleverer he might have broken out of this prejudice, but it belongs to the very Being of human beings that we are always captured and enslaved by our past. Indeed, such indebtedness to the past is one important way we are very different from other beings in the world. Our past is not external to our present, but belongs intimately to it. We live the past through the present, and the present through the past.11

Phenomenology must first of all be understood as a method and this is what distinguishes it from theology, sociology or biology, whose modes of inquiry are determined by what they study (God, society or life), rather than how they investigate their subject matter (BT: 58–9). As I have already stated, Heidegger understands this method through the famous slogan ‘Back to the things themselves’. This gives us the first clue (perhaps the most important) to his definition of phenome- nology. It is a descriptive philosophy which attempts to describe how things appear without placing upon them extraneous matter. Here, Heidegger is no different from Husserl, who writes in his Ideas the following important maxim:

Throughout phenomenology one must have the courage to accept what is really to be seen in the phenomenon precisely as it presents itself rather than interpreting it away, and honestly describe it. All theories must be directed accordingly.12

Where they part company is that Husserl takes it as obvious that it is simple to begin in this way but just ends up repeating the very meta- physics phenomenology was meant not to presuppose. In Heidegger’s terms, he does just ‘interpret away’ the phenomenon.

We cannot turn our backs on the past, but we can uncover possibil- ities within it which have been buried by the majority point of view. We have forgotten ‘what is really to be seen’, because we already inter- pret it through a given theory. But there must have been a time when people really did see things as they were and their words described what they saw.13 For us such a people were the ancient Greeks, whose words contain their original experience of the world, and form the basis of our philosophical vocabulary (although these have become stale and hackneyed through thoughtless repetition). This is not a question of etymology for the sake of it; or even of discovering the ‘truth’ about the Greeks, as though we could experience their world in exactly the same way as they did; for we can only have access to the past from our present, even though this past shapes and determines it. Rather, by coming to these words again, trying to understand them on their own terms, we can win back our own experience of ‘what is really to be seen’. This also explains the peculiar nature of Heidegger’s ety- mologies. His aim is not to be correct, as in a dictionary definition, but to make us think again and not accept our tradition naively.

When we come to Heidegger’s etymology of the word ‘phenome- nology’, he reminds us that it is made of two Greek words: ‘phenom- enon’ and ‘logos’ (in Greek, phainomenon and logos) (BT: 58). Why he specifically wants us to go back to the Greek is in order to dislodge us from understanding ‘phenomenon’ as appearance, where the word (in the Kantian tradition) means an object of consciousness, as opposed to the thing in itself: the tree as it appears to me, rather than what it really is. In some interpretations of Kant, the relation between the appearance and the ‘thing in itself ’ (or in the Kantian vocabulary, the noumenon) is causal. The ‘thing in itself ’ is the mys- terious cause of what we see, but we ourselves can only experience it

through our kind of consciousness (for Kant, a combination of the categories of the understanding, and the pure forms of intuition, time and space). Heidegger uses the analogy of an illness to describe the same causal understanding of appearance (BT: 52). My temperature is merely a symptom or indication of an illness which is in fact hidden. Such an understanding of phenomenon as appearance is merely derivative. For the notion of ‘hiddenness’ or ‘being concealed’ is dependent first of all on there being something visible. What is present is ‘indicated’ in what shows itself. There must be something visible before I can make a judgement about it as mere appearance or symptom. This is what we discover when we go back to the original etymological meaning of the word. For ‘phenomenon’ derives from the present middle infinitive phainesthai, ‘to show itself ’ or ‘to bring itself to light’.14 The word ‘phenomenon’ should be translated, there- fore, as ‘that which shows itself in itself ’, and not first of all as ‘appear- ance’. Phenomena, therefore, are those things which can be brought into the light, which the Greeks called ‘beings’ (ta onta). This meaning of the word ‘phenomenon’ is more primordial and original than the definition of appearance as an ‘object of consciousness’. In other words, there are only objects of consciousness because first of all there are visible things in the light of the day, and not the other way around. If the other half of the Greek etymology of phenomenology is logos, then the proper meaning of this word has been concealed in the history of philosophy. It is interpreted as ‘positing’, or ‘judging’, and thus as ‘reason’, ‘judgement’, ‘conceptuality’, ‘definition’, ‘ground’ or ‘relation’ (BT: 55).15 In both cases, we need to return to a more fun- damental experience of things which has been covered over by our metaphysics; not by deducing the meaning of experience from our theoretical categories, but by digging deeper into our everyday lives and finding what is already there. Only a truly descriptive phenome-

nology can actually break out of this metaphysical tradition.

If logos does not mean all these above definitions, then what does it mean? It is not primarily to be understood as judgement, but as a ‘making clear’ (Offenbarmachen) of something (BT: 56). Here we can see that the etymology of two stems of ‘phenomenology’ are very close, since ‘phenomenon’, as we have just seen, means ‘manifestation’ (Offenbare). To speak about something is to make that thing present, to ‘bring it to light’, as we might say in English, and the logical forms of

judgement are not original but dependent on this first ‘making some- thing clear’. To speak the truth about something, in the original Greek meaning of the word, is not first of all to assert a true judgement, as opposed to a false one, but to make it clear what we are talking about, so that some judgement could be made about it. It is to bring to light, when we speak to one another, what was in the dark, so that the listener can grasp what is being talking about.

This notion of ‘unconcealment’, Heidegger argues, is a literal translation of the Greek word for truth, aletheia, which will be central to his re-interpretation of ‘truth’ later in Being and Time (BT: 256– 73).16 It is also an important gauge of how we are to take what Heidegger himself writes in Being and Time. What is written here is not argued for, if we understand ‘arguing’ as derived from some principle of logic. On the contrary, it is revealed or made visible. It appeals to readers’ own experience of themselves and their world. Its status as ‘true’ is whether it shows our experience in a new light so that we can grasp it in a more radical manner. Perhaps some people’s exaspera- tion in reading Heidegger is that they want a logical argument rather than a description. For Heidegger, logical arguments are always deriv- ative and never the place to begin a philosophical investigation.

In combining these two etymological definitions, Heidegger can arrive at an initial conception of phenomenology as follows: ‘To let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself ’ (BT: 58). This should not be confused with naiveté. Just because we do not import a theory from the outside in order to understand the phenomena before us, does not mean they are just lying there simply to be investigated. On the contrary, they are always concealed from us, and this is precisely why phenomenology is required. But what is it that remains hidden? Heidegger’s answer is their Being. In terms of our own reading of Being and Time, we do not know, at this stage, what this question of Being means, but what is sought here already tells us how Heidegger will fashion his own phenomenology.

Every phenomenology is ontology. It looks to the meaning of the Being of phenomena. This meaning is hidden, but we should not take this to imply that it lies somewhere else or exists behind things, as in the Kantian definition of appearance. It shows itself, so to speak, in their ‘showing’, but rather than being simply available and present to

us, we have to look for it. Heidegger also tells us at the end of this section, and again we will have to wait till the next chapter for a full explanation of why this is so, that there is one being whose Being is crucial to this investigation, and this is ourselves, or what Heidegger calls in German, Dasein, which most translators leave untranslated (BT: 61–2).

Why are we more significant than any other being? Because we are the only beings for whom the question of Being can be a question at all. Stones, trees and lizards do not ask what it means to be, only our- selves. Thus, our being will be the way into the question of Being in general. Heidegger calls this method ‘fundamental ontology’, and the specific interpretation of Dasein ‘the analytic of the existentiality of existence’ (BT: 62). All of this will become clearer to us as we go on, but he leaves us one last tantalising, yet very important and decisive clue to the overall argument of Being and Time (and why some have been critical of fundamental ontology as a whole) as to how he will pursue Dasein’s Being.17

He writes at the beginning of Being and Time that Being should not

be thought through the categories of genus or class, as has been tra- ditionally the case (as though Being were the mere definition of some- thing) but rather is something higher which he calls ‘transcendens’ (BT: 22). More specifically, the transcendence of Dasein lies in its ‘radical individuation’ (BT: 62). What makes Dasein different from any other being, and allows it to be our way into the question of Being, is that it, amongst all other beings, can be an individual. We will have to wait to see what this ‘being an individual’ means as we go through this book, and how it differs from what we might ordinarily understand from this expression.

Notes

As reported by Kisiel in The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1993: 287).
Heidegger makes a distinction between the ‘as’ of assertion and the ‘as’ of interpretation in s. 33 (BT: 195–203). His argument is that I already have to understand the world before I can make judgements about things in the world. I discuss this difference in 3, ‘Moods, Understanding and Language’, pp. 56–63.
Heidegger will repeat this manoeuvre in Being and Time, when he criti- cises the Cartesian explanation of the world, which places us externally to a world we already exist within (BT: 122–34). I discuss Heidegger’s critique of Descartes in detail in ‘Descartes and Space’, pp. 46–51.
Gadamer (one of Heidegger’s most important students) writes a won- derful testimony of the effect of his teaching on his students. See Gadamer 1994: 61–7.
I discuss this in the section ‘From Beings to Being’ on, pp. 20–6.
History of the Concept of Time (1985), p. 97.
This reduction can go through a further step, which is called the eidec- tic reduction, where I now no longer focus on my own individual acts (my perceiving this tree at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, for instance) but what is true in every act of perceiving, judging or imagining, and so on.
History of the Concept of Time, p. 111. ‘Objectively on hand’, becomes ‘present-to-hand’ in Being and Time, which I will explain in the section ‘The World’, pp. 39–46.
In fact, Being and Time is a preliminary work, since it deals with the Being of human beings only as clue to the meaning of Being in general and not Being as such.
History of the Concept of Time, p. 128.
Heidegger calls this relation to the past ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) (BT: 219–24). To free ourselves from the past is not to disown it, but to make its possibilities our own. I shall discuss this relation between the past and history in the section ‘History’, pp. 94–7.
Husserl 1982: 257.
There is a double appeal in Being and Time. One is to experience and the other to history which preserves the truth of this experience. We no longer have a direct access to the truth of this experience (though we, so to speak, experience it every day), because of a fateful decision within this history which means we have lost this truth. We therefore need to reclaim it for ourselves. This is the purpose of Being and Time, and also explains Heidegger’s invocation to a time before the ‘fall’ (the Pre- Socratics), marginalia with the dominant history of Western thought, other ways of the thinking (the ‘East’) and speaking of the truth (poetry in the broadest sense of the word), after its publication.
The verb is the middle form of phain¯o, which means ‘to bring to light’, whose stem, according to Heidegger, is pha- from which the Greek word for light or daylight, ph¯os, also derives.
In fact, the interpretation of phenomenon as appearance goes hand in hand with this translation, for objects of consciousness are things about which I make judgements, and for Kant their existence is deduced from such judgements. See Kant 2003: 104–99.
I shall examine the important of Heidegger’s notion of truth in the section, ‘Truth and Reality’, pp. 63–6.
I am thinking especially of Levinas here, who would argue this empha- sis on the self in Being and Time seriously distorts our ethical relation to others. For his early critique of Heidegger, see his essay, ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’.