Who should we ask about the “is”?

(this post was written by Kyle on December 27, 2005, and it concerns being & dasein & heidegger & wittgenstein)

In preparation for reading Levinas, I’m reading sections from Heidegger’s Being and Time, and since I plan on blogging my reading experience with Levinas, I’ve decided to practice on Heidegger. Not more than a few minutes ago, I finished “The Necessity, Structure, and Priority of the Question of Being,” which is the first part of the introduction, “Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being.”

Though the question of the meaning of Being “provided a stimulus for the researches of Plato and Aristotle,” Heidegger’s introduction tries to establish that modern philosophy has long considered the question to be “superfluous.” Its very universality determines its indefinability. As Bill Clinton said, “It depends upon what your definition of is is.” The ridicule that question found in the mainstream is the same ridicule the philosopher faces who chances to ask such a question.

It is assumed that the question of the meaning of being is superfluous because everyone already understands it. After all, the meaning of being is something that we use in almost every moment of our lives. As Wittgenstein might suggest, looking for meaning without looking at its meaning in deed is to look for nothing. The meaning of the chair can be determined by the way we act toward it. The meaning of the human can be determined by the way we act toward her.

But Heidegger suggests that in such instances, we only have “an average kind of intelligibility, which merely demonstrates that this is unintelligible…The very fact that we already live in an understanding of Being and that the meaning of Being is still veiled in darkness proves that it is necessary in principle to raise this question again.”

The formulation of this question, however, is a bit tricky. The question of Being, as Clinton made clear, contains itself within itself: what is is?, or as Heidegger writes, “[E]ven if we ask, ‘What is Being?’, we keep within an understanding of the is, though we are unable able to fix conceptionally what the ‘is’ signifies.”

Heidegger suggests that we shouldn’t let this stop us from asking the question, however. Whatever the “is” is, our average understanding of it is a Fact, and we can work with this fact because it can be used a source for our inquiry. Though we may not be familiar with what it means, we may use the average and opaque understanding of the “is” to understand why the illumined understanding of the “is” is obscured. In other words, the average understanding of Being can be used to understand why we can or cannot have knowledge of the meaning of Being.

What Heidegger is asking about Being is not what it is. The Being he questions is not an entity. It is “that which determines entities as entities.” Since it is not an entity, the question of its meaning cannot be put to it; instead, it is entities themselves that must be interrogated. The genus of entities – the genus of beings (little “b”) – , as we all know, is huge. “Everything that we talk about, everything that we have in view, everything towards which we comport ourselves in any way, is being; what we are is being, and so is how we are.” From such a huge array of beings, there must be a determination, and not an arbitrary one, as to which beings shall be interrogated. “Which entity shall we take for our example, and in what sense does it have priority?”

Heidegger selects humanity as his example. The reason comes down to the nature of the inquiry. “To work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity — the inquirer – transparent in his own Being. The very asking of this question is an entity’s mode of Being; and as such it gets its essential character from what is inquired about – namely, Being.”

It is at this point that Heidegger introduces perhaps the key concept of his entire philosophical career. He writes, “This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term ‘Dasein.’” Because of its importance, I want to include the translator’s note, just to provide you with as much information as possible in relation to it:

The word ‘Dasein’ plays so important a role in this work and is already so familiar to the English-speaking reader who has read about Heidegger, that it seems simpler to leave it untranslated except in the relatively rare passages in which Heidegger himself breaks it up with a hyphen (‘Da-Sein’) to show its etymological construction: literally, “Being-there’. Though in traditional German philosophy it may be used quite generally to stand for almost any kind of Being or ‘existence’ which we can say something has (the ‘existence’ of God, for example), in everyday usage it tends to be used more narrowly to stand for the kind of Being that belongs to persons. Heidegger follows the everyday usage in this respect, but goes somewhat further in that he often uses it to stand for any person who has such Being, and who is thus an ‘entity’ himself.

That last part is a little confusing, which is why the translators direct the reader to the following passage from a little later in the work:

Sciences in general may be defined as the totality established through an interconnection of true propositions. This definition is not complete, nor does it reach the meaning of science. As ways in which man behaves, sciences have the manner of Being which this entity – man himself – possesses. This entity we denote by the term ‘Dasein.’ Scientific research is not the only manner of Being which this entity can have, nor is it the one which lies closest. Moreover, Dasein itself has a distinctiveness as compared with other entities…Dasein is…distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it…understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being [emphases in original].

Perhaps my prima facie reading of Levinas has influenced my understanding of Heidegger’s Dasein, but I think it is fair to say that Dasein is that being that recognizes the Being-there. By restricting this concept to humanity, Heidegger gives privilege to that being which is aware, not only of its own Being, but also of the Being-there.

To understand this better, it might be useful to ask why Heidegger does not give the privilege of being the interrogated example of Being to other beings. As mentioned, the field of beings is nothing less than the field of every(thing). Examples might be keyboards, coyotes, or cucumbers. Why does Heidegger choose humanity over one of these or the infinite others? “So far, our discussion has not demonstrated whether Dasein may possibly or even necessarily serve as the primary entity to be interrogated. But indeed something like a priority has announced itself.”

As we saw above, the “understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being.” The interrogation of Being is directed at Dasein because Dasein is defined by its prior understanding of Being. Keyboards, coyotes, and cucumbers, while they may be being, are not that being that understands Being. From the way that Dasein comports itself, however, its understanding of Being is such that it recognizes it enough to inquire about it.

This is where Wittgenstein comes in. The meaning of Dasein is determined by what it does: it is that being that inquires into the meaning of Being. With such a meaning, Dasein should be the privileged being to which an interrogation into Being is put.

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Next up: My reading of the second part to the introduction, entitled,
“The Twofold Task in Working Out The Question of Being. Method and Design Of Our Investigation.”