What was Heidegger about?
A review of Heidegger, A very short introduction By Michael Inwood
I’ve wanted to learn more about Heidegger for a while, but his work is notoriously difficult. When I found out Oxford’s introduction series had a book on him, that looked like a good opportunity. The book covers the basics of his thought, mostly from his magnum opus Being and Time which is focused on ontology (the study of being). I’ll take advantage of this review to organize my thoughts on the Heidegger in general, which are based on this book but may at times go beyond it, as I’ve read excerpts of BT from Cottingham’s anthology of western philosophy.
What I like about Heidegger and what made interested in his work is how he places phenomenology at the core of our existence. Influenced by Edmund Husserl, he tried to fix philosophy’s inclination to abstract, to construct metaphysics or even to ontically describe the world (the “real” factual world). According to Heidegger, this has been the standard approach except for pre-socratic philosophers. They all ignore the fundamental reality of consciousness and have implicit assumptions on what Being is. Unlikely Husserl, he wasn’t particularly interested in perception. He realized that existence isn’t the material world (which we perceive empirically) nor an isolated consciousness (which we reason what the reality is). It’s Being itself — it swims in reality and relates to all other beings.
This Being-in-the-world, as far as humans are concerned, Heidegger calls Dasein, badly translated as “to exist” or “to be there/here”. It’s not a subject, nor the similarity across subject’s minds. It’s the very act of existing in reality and being able to engage with it. The world doesn’t exist without being and being doesn’t exist without the world. Besides, being able to realize that very Being is a distinctive feature of Dasein.
Our Being is perceived and acted according to meaning, although Heidegger usually calls it “Care”. Objects aren’t in the world independent of our perception and value. They are inherently tools, part of Dasein and independent of any philosophical consideration. And those tools are trapped in a network of meaning with other Beings, but one cannot have any meaningful ontological category by focusing on what the object “really is” in isolation. In his most famous example, a hammer is a tool that we perceive and use. It doesn’t matter what it is materialistically made out of, nor can one make sense of a hammer without nails.
Dasein can be authentic or inauthentic. To be authentic, one needs to be free and aware. Each action and thought is dependent on the understanding of Being. Not just in actuality, but in potentiality. Heidegger always stresses the point that Being is a field of possibility. Being necessarily implies choosing a possibility and rejecting another. The inauthentic Dasein is one can where personal meaning has been tainted, one lives in what Heidegger calls “They” or “Them”. It’s an escape to the anonymous, the public world of anyone else. He often calls this state “Fallenness”. Rejecting this collective world, one can make authentic choices and face Dasein. This doesn’t not, however, required some sort of phenomenological knowledge that must be obtained. Rather, it’s more a way of being, a deliberate act to avoid Fallenness.
His views on time are also very interesting. As the title of “Being and Time” suggests, it’s a major theme, occupying roughly the 2nd half of the book. He calls “world-time” the human experience of time, which is different from a scientific perspective (what he calls ordinary time). The clock isn’t the grounding of “real” time, no matter how precise it is. We invented the clock as a matter of organization of time. Time is inherently tied to the world, to Being and to meaning. We categorize time for *something*. Heideggerian time isn’t linear, time is something subjective and personal. We aren’t inside time just like we aren’t inside the world.
Heidegger is complicated, but this is my interpretation of him so far. His work is hard to read, and even secondary sources are difficult. This is already a given due to the topics he tries to cover, but it’s made worse by his use of language, in which he coins countless terms to try to better describe the concepts he wants without the hidden assumptions that come with the colloquial usages of those words. As the joke goes: “Heidegger is fundamentally untranslatable, even in German.” Nevertheless, I found his work very valuable, and I think it’s well worth investigating if one is interested in phenomenology or ontology. Regarding the actual book itself (Oxford’s introduction), I think it does it justice. While still not an easy read, but it does make his thought a lot easier to digest. Although I do wish they would have included more actual quotes from Heidegger to better apprehend his thinking in his own language, I’d guess doing so is difficult due to the book’s length limit.
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Tiago V.F.
