Heidegger: An Introduction - Softcover

Polt, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801485649 ISBN 13: 9780801485640

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Richard Polt provides a lively and accessible introduction to one of the most influential and intellectually demanding philosophers of the modern era. Covering the entire range of Heidegger's thought, Polt skillfully communicates the essence of the philosopher, enabling readers, especially those new to his writings, to approach his works with confidence and insight. Polt presents the questions Heidegger grappled with and the positions he adopted, and also analyzes persistent points of difference between competing schools of interpretation. The book begins by exploring Heidegger's central concern, the question of Being, and his way of doing philosophy. After considering his environment, personality, and early thought, it carefully takes readers through his best-known work, Being and Time. Heidegger concludes with highlights of its subject's later thought, providing guidelines for understanding Contributions to Philosophy and other important texts. It gives special attention to the philosopher's political involvement with the Nazis in the 1930s, indicating the strengths and weaknesses of the reactions to his politics, reactions ranging from exculpation to complete condemnation.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Polt is Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University, Cincinnati. He is the author of Heidegger: An Introduction and The Emergency of Being, both from Cornell.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Heidegger

An IntroductionBy Richard Polt

Cornell University Press

Copyright © 1999 Richard Polt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780801485640

Chapter One

The Question

Celebration ... is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder -- the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.

--Martin Heidegger

Why is there something rather than nothing? Strange as this question is, it seemsoddly familiar. Puzzling though it is, it has a certain unique simplicity.

    This is not to say that it can be answered in the way we might answer thequestion, "Why do birds migrate to the same place every winter?" or "Why isthere more crime in the United States than in Japan?" These questions stand achance of being resolved by scientific research. But no scientific investigationcan tell us why there is something rather than nothing. Science describes thethings we find around us, and it explains how some of these things are causedby others, but it cannot say why the whole exists. The Big Bang theory may becorrect -- but it does not answer why there was a Big Bang rather than' nothing.We might say that God made the Big Bang. But then, why is there God? PerhapsGod exists by necessity. However, few thinkers these days accept theidea of a necessary being whose existence we can know and prove. Mostwould agree that whatever we may propose as the cause of everything is itselfsomething whose existence stands in need of explanation. It looks very muchas if our question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" reachesbeyond the power of human reason. It is beginning to seem that our questionsimply cannot be answered at all.

    Does this imply that it is meaningless? Some philosophers think so. Wecan construct arguments to show that the question never signified anythingto begin with. We can argue that the word "nothing" in our question meansprecisely that -- it means nothing at all. But when the arguments are done, thequestion sneaks back and seems significant after all. As cosmologist StephenHawking writes, once science has described how everything works, we willstill want to ask: "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes auniverse for them to describe ... Why does the universe go to all the botherof existing?"

    For Heidegger, our question is deeply meaningful. He ends his 1929 essay"What is Metaphysics?" with it, and it opens his lecture course Introduction toMetaphysics (1935). More precisely, Heidegger asks: "Why are there beings atall, and not rather nothing?"

    The term "beings" translates das Seiende, more literally "that which is"."Beings", and its synonym "entities", refer to anything at all that has existenceof some sort. Clearly atoms and molecules are beings. Humans and dogs arebeings, as are their properties and activities. Mathematical objects -- hexagons,numbers, equations -- are beings of some kind, although philosophers disagreeon whether these beings exist apart from human thought or behavior. Evendragons are connected to beings -- they themselves do not exist, but we cantalk about dragons only because myths, images and concepts of dragons doexist, as do dragonlike animals, such as lizards. In fact, it seems that anythingwe can think about, speak about, or deal with involves beings in some way.

    But if the question of why there are beings rather than nothing cannot beanswered by pointing to any particular being as a cause, then how can it haveany meaning? Maybe its meaning comes from the special character of its "why".Maybe the "why" in this question is not a search for a cause, but an act ofcelebration. When we ask the question, we celebrate the fact that anythingexists at all. We notice this amazing fact. Normally the existence of things is sofamiliar to us that we take it for granted. But at certain moments, this mostfamiliar of facts can become surprising. Ludwig Wittgenstein describes theexperience this way: "I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am theninclined to use such phrases as `how extraordinary that anything should exist'or `how extraordinary that the world should exist'."

    Once we have noticed and celebrated the fact that beings are, we can takea step further -- and everything depends on this step. We can ask: what does this"are" mean? What is it to be? Now we are asking what makes a being countas a being, instead of as nothing: on what basis do we understand beings asbeings? Now we are asking not about beings, but about Being.

    "Being" is our counterpart to the German expression das Sein, literally "theto-be". In English, the word being can refer either to something that is (an entity)or to the to-be (what it means for entities to exist). So, like many translators ofHeidegger, I will capitalize "Being" in order to distinguish Being clearly from abeing. (This is not Heidegger's practice, for in German, all nouns are capitalized-- and one should beware of confusing Being with the supreme being, God.)

    Being is not a being at all; it is what marks beings out as beings rather thannonbeings -- what makes the difference, so to speak, between something andnothing. Another, similar phrase may serve just as well: Being is the differenceit makes that there is something rather than nothing. Even if we cannot find acause for the totality of beings, we can investigate the meaning of Being, for itdoes make a difference that there are beings rather than nothing. We can payattention to this difference and describe it.

    However, this question of the meaning of Being looks deceptively simple:to say that something "is" just seems to mean that it is there, given, on hand.In short, it is present instead of absent. Being is simply presence. Presenceappears to be a very straightforward fact, so it may seem that the Being of athing has next to no content, and is quite uninteresting.

    But is the difference between presence and absence so trivial? If my houseburns down, its absence is overwhelming. At the death of those we love, theirabsence attacks and gnaws at us. Are these just "subjective" responses that havenothing to do with the "objective" question of Being -- or are they moments inwhich we realize that there are, in fact, crucial and rich distinctions betweensomething and nothing?

    We can also ask whether all the sorts of beings we have mentioned exist inthe same way. Is a dog present in the same way as the dog's act of running ispresent? Is a myth present just as an atom is present, or a number is present?The particular difference it makes that there is a being rather than nothing maydepend on what sort of being is in question. Presence begins to look complex-- and puzzling.

    And maybe some beings are not present at all. For instance, we constantlyrelate to possibilities -- whenever we think of what we might do, consider whatmay happen to us or see where we can go. A possibility is something in thefuture, something that is not yet present and may never be present. However,we would hardly want to say that a possibility is nothing, since surely we areconsidering something when we consider possibilities. Similarly, we rememberand investigate the past. The past is not present either. But if it were nothingwhatsoever, it would make no sense for us to describe it, argue about it, rejectit or long for it.

    It turns out, then, that the meaning of Being is unclear, and it is very hard todefine the boundary between beings and nothing. It also seems that in orderto think about Being, we will have to think about temporality -- for beingsmake a difference to us not only when they are present in the present, but alsowhen they are in the past and future dimensions of the mysterious phenomenoncalled time.

    Our initial question -- why is there something rather than nothing? -- hastaken us to a second question: what does it mean to be? Now we can ask athird question: what is it about our condition that lets Being have a meaningfor us? In other words, why does it make a difference to us that there issomething rather than nothing? This is a crucial question about ourselves -- forif we were indifferent to the difference between something and nothing, wewould be sunk in oblivion. We constantly distinguish between something andnothing, by recognizing countless things as real while rejecting falsehoods andillusions. The process is at work not only in philosophy, but in the simplesteveryday tasks: I recognize a pitcher as a being simply by reaching for itshandle. It is clear that without our sensitivity to Being, we would not behuman at all. Even for the most apathetic or shellshocked individual, Beingmeans something -- although it is hard to put this meaning into words.

    We are now traveling the path of Heidegger's thought. For Heidegger,these three questions belong together in such a way that they can be calledthe question of Being: he wants to notice the wonder that there is somethingrather than nothing, to ask what difference this makes, and to ask how it canmake a difference to us.

    How does Heidegger answer the question of Being, then? What is his philosophy? Hereplies, "I have no philosophy at all." But he is a philosophernonetheless -- because philosophy, for him, is not something one has, butsomething one does. It is not a theory or a set of principles, but the relentlessand passionate devotion to a question. In a Heideggerian formula: "questioningis the piety of thought". For Heidegger, providing an answer to the questionof Being is less important than awakening us to it, and using it to bring usface to face with the riddles of our own history: "My essential intention isto first pose the problem and work it out in such a way that the essentials ofthe entire Western tradition will be concentrated in the simplicity of a basicproblem." Heidegger is remarkable not for his consistent answers, but for hispersistent inquiry.

    Having said this, we must add that he does try to respond to the question ofBeing in a particular direction. His thought develops throughout his life, butearly in his philosophical career he seizes on some enduring guidelines.

    First, as we implied above, Heidegger holds that presence is a rich andcomplex phenomenon -- and even so, the meaning of Being is not exhaustedby presence, or at least by any traditional understanding of presence. Roughlyspeaking, for ancient and medieval philosophy, to be is to be an enduringlypresent substance, or one of the attributes of such a substance. The most realbeing is an eternal substance -- God. For much of modern philosophy, to be isto be either an object present in space and time as measured by quantitativenatural science, or a subject, a mind, that is capable of self-consciousness, orself-presence. According to Heidegger, these traditional approaches may beappropriate to some beings, but they misinterpret others. In particular, they failto describe our own Being. We are neither present substances, nor presentobjects, nor present subjects: we are beings whose past and future collaborateto let us deal with all the other beings we encounter around us. (Readers ofHeidegger have come to use the expression "metaphysics of presence" todescribe the philosophical tradition that Heidegger is criticizing.)

    But if Being is not presence, what is it? Being and Time, which was supposedto answer this question, faltered and was left unfinished. Later, Heideggerincreasingly stressed that the meaning of Being evolves in the course of history.Furthermore, Being is intrinsically mysterious and self-concealing. For thesereasons, he does not provide us with a straightforward answer to the questionof the meaning of Being.

    He does, however, believe that we must call into question the metaphysicsof presence -- for this tradition has pernicious consequences. It dulls us to thedepth of experience and restricts us to impoverished ways of thinking andacting. In particular, if we identify Being with presence, we can becomeobsessed with getting beings to present themselves to us perfectly and in adefinitive way -- with representing beings accurately and effectively. We try, bymeans of philosophy, science or technology, to achieve complete insight intothings and thereby gain complete control over them. According to Heidegger,this ideal is incompatible with the nature of understanding; understanding isalways a finite, historically situated interpretation. Heidegger does affirm thatthere is truth, and he does hold that some interpretations (including his own)are better than others -- but no interpretation is final. Heidegger is a relentlessenemy of ahistorical, absolutist concepts of truth.

    This brings us to his most important guideline of all: it is our own temporalitythat makes us sensitive to Being. "Temporal" in Heidegger does not mean"temporary". He is not interested in the fact that we are impermanent so muchas in the fact that we are historical: we are rooted in a past and thrust into afuture. We inherit a past tradition that we share with others, and we pursuefuture possibilities that define us as individuals. As we do so, the world opensup for us, and beings get understood; it makes a difference to us that there issomething rather than nothing. Our historicity, then, does not cut us off fromreality -- to the contrary, it opens us up to the meaning of Being.

    But according to Heidegger, many of the philosophical errors he combatsare rooted in a tendency we have to ignore our historicity. It can be difficultand disturbing to face our own temporality and to experience the mystery ofBeing. It is easier to slip back into an everyday state of complacency androutine. Rather than wrestling with who we are and what it means to be, wewould prefer to concentrate on manipulating and measuring present beings.In philosophy, this self-deceptive absorption in the present leads to a metaphysicsof presence, which only encourages the self-deception. Heidegger consistentlypoints to the difference between this everyday state of oblivion anda state in which we genuinely face up to our condition. In Being and Time, hecalls this the difference between inauthenticity and authenticity.

    We have now touched on Heidegger's basic question, the question ofBeing, and on some of the enduring guidelines that orient his response tothat question. But no less distinctive than his questions and answers is his styleof philosophizing.

    Heidegger is steeped in the Western philosophical tradition and is capableof erudite textual and conceptual analysis. But he also recognizes thatreal life may elude traditional concepts. Like Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,or Unamuno, Heidegger senses that the philosophical tradition is out of touchwith life as it is lived. These other thinkers, however, have tended to makewholesale attacks on the tradition without descending to a detailed and thoroughcritique of it. They have been deliberately unsystematic, in an attempt tobreak free of the dead weight of traditional concepts. Heidegger shares thesethinkers' desire to capture the concrete textures and tensions of experience -- buthe also respects the tradition with which he is struggling. He is willingand able to carry out painstaking, close readings of Aristotle or Kant, forexample. In Being and Time he weaves an intricate conceptual web in orderto address what may be the oldest philosophical topic of all -- Being. Heideggeris convinced that matters of vital importance are at stake in the tradition. Ifwe think tenaciously until we uncover the roots of traditional problems andconcepts, we can bring philosophy back to the basic and urgent realities ofour human condition.

    In this way, Heidegger unites historical research with original thinking. InEnglish-speaking countries, doing "history of philosophy" is often distinguishedfrom working on "problems". The first involves reconstructing the argumentsthat philosophers have made in the past; the second involves developing one'sown arguments and responding to the arguments of one's contemporaries.Heidegger undercuts this opposition in two ways.

    First, he insists that in order to understand the history of philosophy properly,we have to philosophize. For instance, when interpreting a Platonic dialogue,he explains that his goal is to "see the content that is genuinely andultimately at issue, so that from it as from a unitary source the understandingof every single sentence will be nourished". Understanding what a text isabout requires us to think for ourselves about the topic under discussion. Infact, it may mean that we have to think farther than the original author did.Heidegger's goal is to discover what lies "unsaid" and "unthought" in the backgroundof what an author says and thinks.

    Conversely, he holds that in order to philosophize properly, we have tounderstand the history of philosophy. Otherwise, we will just reproduce hackneyed,traditional patterns of thought. In philosophy, it is especially true thatto be ignorant of history is to be condemned to repeat it. When we return tothe historical sources of our concepts and our concerns, we become awareof the motivations behind these concepts and the alternatives to them. Webecome more, not less, capable of original thinking.

    Heidegger titles one collection of his essays Holzwege (Woodpaths). InGerman, to be on a Holzweg is to be on a dead-end trail. But dead ends arenot worthless. If we follow a path to its end and are forced to return, we aredifferent, even wiser, than we were before we took this path. We have cometo know the lay of the land and our own capacities. We know much moreabout the woods, even if we have never gotten out of them.

    One may disagree with every claim found in Heidegger's writings. Theymay all be dead ends. But they are still worth reading, because they havethe potential to reveal a host of fundamental, interconnected problems. AsHeidegger likes to put it, the task of a philosopher is to alert us to what isworthy of questioning. That he certainly does.

Continues...

Excerpted from Heideggerby Richard Polt Copyright © 1999 by Richard Polt. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801485649
• ISBN 13: 9780801485640
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328