VERDICTS

Heidegger’s Map

Daniel Bonevac

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Richard Rorty listsMartin Heidegger among the three greatest philosophers of

the twentieth century, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Dewey.1 Even

those who would propose a very different list would agree that Heidegger has

been among the most influential philosophers of the past century. His thought

underlies later developments in Continental philosophy, from existentialism to

postmodernism, and has influenced analytic philosophers such as Wilfrid

Sellars, Rorty, and Robert Brandom. It has had an even more sweeping impact

on developments in other parts of the humanities, which have abandoned

traditional humanistic pursuits in favor of “theory” and embraced a kind of

anti-intellectualism dressed in a garb of elaborate verbiage ultimately

inspired by and derived from Heidegger. Finally, it has shaped our political

discourse and culture, altering our conceptions of ideologies throughout the

political spectrum.

I will focus here on some concepts central to Being and Time (1927),

Heidegger’s greatest and most influential work.2 They constitute important

Acad. Quest.DOI 10.1007/s12129-014-9417-4

1Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).2Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Forschung,VIII (Halle, Germany: Max Niemeyer, 1927). Quotations are taken from Being and Time: A Translation ofSein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1953; Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1996). All further references are cited parenthetically within the text; pagereferences are to the German edition.

Daniel Bonevac is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78713-8926;bonevac@mail.utexas.edu. His latest books are Ideas of the Twentieth Century (University of Texas Press,2014) and Introduction to World Philosophy, co-authored with Stephen Phillips (Oxford University Press,2009).

and original contributions to philosophy. They can lead to a more profound

understanding of humanity and the world. They can also lead to intellectual

and political disaster, as Heidegger’s own involvement with National

Socialism illustrates. But it would be too quick to dismiss Heidegger as a

result of this, not least because it would make so much contemporary thought

unintelligible. As Heidegger scholar Charles Guignon writes, “[W]hile there

is no way to play down the moral worries raised by Heidegger’s thought,

there is also no way to deny that this at times mystifying man from the

backwoods of Germany more than once redrew the philosophical map of the

twentieth century, laying out lines of questioning for generations to come.”3 I

will argue that Heidegger’s map is revealing, but that some follow it to

unfortunate destinations.

Dasein4

Heidegger begins Being and Time by raising the question of

being—specifically, of the meaning of being. He sees Plato and the

pre-Socratic philosophers as having raised a fundamental question that the

entire Western philosophical tradition from Aristotle through Hegel

proceeded to misconstrue or, more precisely, ignore. What is there? That is

the most fundamental ontological question, according to that Aristotelian

tradition. Aristotle’s answer, substance, or really, substances, turns meta-

physics into a discipline dedicated to outlining the categories of things that

are, or, in Russell’s famous phrase, cataloguing the furniture of the universe.5

That answer suggests that we look to the sciences and their assertions about

existence. From Heidegger’s perspective, however, this project, which he

terms ontic, or a matter of vulgar ontology, neglects the question of what

“being” means, of what it is to be, of what it is to deserve designation as

being among the furniture of the universe. He realizes that many are bound to

think his project hopeless, on the ground that the meaning of “being” is

self-evident, primitive, obvious, or impossible to articulate. After all,

3Charles B. Guignon, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 33.4I have removed the hyphen from “Da-sein” to conform to the usual practice.5Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” in Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901–1956,ed. Robert M. Marsh (New York: Macmillan, 1956).

Bonevac

everything’s doing it, all the time! But being is not a genus under which

everything falls, Heidegger insists. The question of being is transcendental; it

“aims at the condition of the possibility of the ontologies which precede the

ontic sciences and found them” (11).6

Heidegger calls his project fundamental ontology, and turns his attention

to Dasein, “being there,” the peculiarly human way of being. “Dasein is a

being that does not simply occur among other beings. Rather it is ontically

distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its

very being” (12). Heidegger puts the point in a classically Hegelian

formulation: “Thus it is constitutive of the being of Dasein to have, in its

very being, a relation of being to this being” (12).7

Dasein “always understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms of its

possibility to be itself or not to be itself” (12). “To be or not to be”—that is

the central question for Dasein. It is what Heidegger calls the existential

question, and Dasein’s understanding of itself in these terms is existential

understanding, to be achieved by limning the structure of existence and its

constituents.8 The issue is not only Hamlet’s question of life or death, but a

broader question of what to be, or whether to be this or not to be this. It is, in

short, the question of freedom.

The opening pages of Being and Time thus give birth to existentialism. As

Jean-Paul Sartre defines it, existentialism is the thesis that existence precedes

essence—that human beings have no predetermined essence, that their lives

have no predetermined goal or purpose, and that they are thus radically free

6The extent to which Heidegger’s project is transcendental is controversial. For extended treatments, seeHerman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1998), 121–51, and Béatrice Han-Pile, “Early Heidegger’s Appropriation of Kant,” in ACompanion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005),80–101.7Compare Hegel: “Spirit is essence, or that which has being in itself, and relates itself to itself andis determinate,” and Kierkegaard: “The self is a relation that relates itself to its own self.” G.W.F.Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 14;Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), 147. For discussion, see Richard Bernstein,Praxis and Action: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1971), 100–105, and Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel andKierkegaard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 144. The Hegelian/Kierkegaardiandefinition of the self as the relation R that relates itself to itself—R (R, R)—is nonsense in anyversion of type theory, but makes sense in type-free theories, of which there are now manyversions.8Strictly speaking, Heidegger distinguishes between the existentielle and the existential, where existentiellequestions pertain to everything, but existential questions pertain only to Dasein.

Heidegger’s Map

to define themselves and their existence.9 It would be too quick, however, to

say that Heidegger himself counts as an existentialist. Indeed, he rejects the

label. For Dasein does have an essence: “being in a world belongs essentially

to Dasein” (13). Dasein does not exist in isolation; it is essentially in a world.

As we shall see, many other things are essential to Dasein as a result.

Dasein’s freedom, moreover, is not as radical as Sartre seems to think.

Being-in-the-World

Understanding Dasein requires understanding what it is to be in a world,

and that requires some understanding of what a world is, as well as an

understanding of the beings that might populate such a world. It appears to

follow that worlds and the objects we might find in them are prior to Dasein,

at least in the order of understanding. Aristotle, for example, would think

they are prior in the order of being as well; consciousness must be

consciousness of something—a sensation, for instance, is always a sensation

of something, and that something must be prior to and independent of the

sensation.10 But Heidegger sees it differently. He asks about the worldliness

of a world—what a world is, or what it is to be a world—and concludes that

a world is the kind of thing that Dasein can be in. The essence of a world, in

other words, is its ability to relate to Dasein. This turns Aristotle’s picture on

its head; what consciousness is consciousness of depends on consciousness,

not the other way around.

So far, we seem to have a Hegelian idealism, in which the world itself

emerges as dependent on the mind—in this case, on Dasein. A world is a

characteristic of Dasein (64). But Heidegger changes the usual philosophical

understanding of the relationship between us and the world. He thinks of it

not primarily as a relation of perceiving or knowing but instead as a relation

of caring. Dasein’s relation to the world is essentially one of taking care of

things (57, 67). Things thus present themselves to us not primarily as objects

of perception or knowledge but as useful or valuable, as things we can use.

Our basic relation to the world is not epistemic, but pragmatic (68).

Things—his favorite example is a hammer—are handy, and their handiness is

9Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (Gallimard, 1943;English trans., New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). The parallel between Heidegger’s title andSartre’s is not accidental.10Aristotle, Metaphysics 1010b35–1011a2.

Bonevac

not something revealed to us theoretically through reflection but

pre-theoretically by action. This means that our chief relation to things is

teleological. The hammer is for driving nails. The shoes are for wearing on

the feet. The clock is for telling time. Their being consists in their handiness,

their Zuhandenheit (71), “being ready-to-hand.” This departs from the

traditional understanding, according to which things are what they are, and

their usability is an extrinsic property of them, a matter of their relation to us

and our various purposes. For Heidegger, handiness defines things in the

world as they are in themselves (72). Objects come already related to us. And

we are essentially absorbed in the world (113).11

One might object to this, even given Heidegger’s idealistic starting point.

We have to figure out what things are for. The baby in the nursery does not

immediately recognize the shoes as for wearing and the hammer as for

hammering; their handiness has to be learned. The same is true collectively:

people had to learn what things could be used as tools or eaten. Things did

not immediately present themselves as useful. To some degree, they had to

be classified and understood before being perceived as useful. But that would

give reflection priority over action, and being present priority over being

ready-to-hand.

There is another important difference between Heidegger’s idealism and

idealism as it is often understood. His method is phenomenology, which he

summarizes in the Husserlian slogan, “To the things themselves!” Things in

the world make themselves manifest; they present themselves. They are not

“appearances,” to use Kant’s favored term, for that suggests that they are

appearances of something else—things-in-themselves, in Kant, or collections

of entities of the scientific image, in Sellars.12 Heidegger rejects the

terminology because he rejects the underlying implication. Things in the

world—objects of the manifest image, as Sellars, following Heidegger, calls

them—are not appearances of something else, but are what they are. They are

the primary constituents of the world. Things that do not present themselves

to us as usable, or at all, are secondary, defined in terms of the manifest,

ready-to-hand objects. The world of our experience is the world, in the

11For an explanation of Heidegger’s arguments for this position, see Harrison Hall, “Intentionality andWorld: Division I of Being and Time,” in Guignon, Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 122–40, 129–30, and Steven Galt Crowell, “Heidegger and Husserl: The Matter and Method of Philosophy,” in Dreyfusand Wrathall, Companion to Heidegger, 49–64.12See “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, ed. RobertColodny (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), 35–78; reprinted in Wilfrid Sellars,Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 1–40.

Heidegger’s Map

primary sense, and its objects are the fundamental objects, irreducible to

anything else. (Whether we can make sense of the scientific image on this

ground remains an open question. Heidegger has little to say about science or

the objects it postulates in Being and Time.)

That doesn’t mean we cannot be wrong, suffer illusions, and so on. The

navy blue pants can look black in poor lighting. But that is because the true

character of objects can be obscured; we can seek to uncover, or discover,

their true nature. That is how Heidegger understands truth: the uncovering or

disclosure of what had been concealed. As we shall see, this leads him to a

distinctive method, interpretation or hermeneutics, dedicated to such

uncovering.

The Social Character of Being-in-the-World

We are not, of course, alone in the world. We encounter other people,

other selves, other Daseins. Our being-in-the-world is a Mitdasein,

being-with-others-in-the-world. We use things to produce objects for others as

well as for ourselves. We encounter objects as usable, most often, because

someone else has made them for us. The shoes, the hammer, the clock, the

tended field—all point to the existence of other people who stand in some

relation to the things at hand. “The world of Dasein is a with-world. Being-in is

being-with others” (118). If our basic relation to the things of the world is taking

care of, our basic relation to others is concern, a kind of caring, to be sure, but a

kind different from that directed at objects. Concern is part of our very being.

Ethics doesn’t just follow from what we are; it’s an intrinsic part of what we are.

Heidegger’s concept of concern is extremely broad. Opposing, fighting,

not mattering are all forms of concern (121). If so, one might object, the

concept is vacuous. But Heidegger puts it as he does because he wants to

stress that the primary issue confronting us when dealing with others is the

issue of concern: What concern should I have for this person, and what form

should it take? Other people do not present themselves to me in terms of their

mere existence, as a rock might, or in terms of usability, as a hammer

might—indeed, as Kant observed, treating people as mere objects to be used

is the paradigm of immorality—but instead as other Daseins, others who are

with me in the world and who merit concern in roughly the way I merit

concern from myself. This concern may take negative forms, such as hostility

or indifference, but it may also take positive forms.

Bonevac

Heidegger distinguishes two positive forms of concern for others. First,

my concern for someone might take the form of taking care of the things they

would otherwise take care of, doing things for them, as a nurse might care for

a sick patient or a parent might care for a child. Second, my concern might

take the form of giving care-taking back to someone, enabling that person to

take care of things rather than taking care of them myself. That, Heidegger

says, is authentic care (122). It restores the other person’s essential role in

relation to things in the world. The parent and the nurse ideally do this as

well, taking care of things for someone and substituting their care-taking for

that person’s care-taking as a temporary measure designed to produce or

restore an ability to take care of things. Even the hospice nurse and the parent

of a severely disabled child may exhibit authentic care in the sense that they

try to enable their charge to take care of things within his capacities, and to

expand those capacities whenever possible. The simple test is this.

Inauthentic care encourages and produces dependence; authentic care

encourages and produces, to the extent that it can, independence. The former

dominates; the latter liberates.

Heidegger has sometimes been called a conservative, and, indeed, he here

sounds an important conservative theme. Caring for someone, directly or

through the medium of government, can produce dependence or independence,

and it is vital to be able to distinguish those forms of caring from one another.

Caring should aim at expanding capacities and enabling others to take care of

things on their own.

Freedom and Thrownness

Dasein does not relate to itself as it relates to other Daseins. Dasein is

disclosed to itself in moods. I experience my being in various ways, but

always within the framework of a mood. I may be bored, depressed, elevated,

excited, etc., but I am always something.

The underlying circumstance that makes this so is that I am, essentially, in

the world, but not in a way of my own making. I experience myself as having

been thrown into the world. My thrownness (Geworfenheit) gives me the

sense that I have been delivered over, that the most basic aspect of my life,

my being, is not under my control (135). That I was born at a given time and

in a given place, indeed, that I was born at all, was not under my control. The

past in its entirety is not under my control. The past is facticity, unchangeable

Heidegger’s Map

fact, a given. As Dasein, I am in the world at a certain place—there

(Da)—but my control over that place is limited. I have no control over time.

And my life is finite, headed toward my own death. From this point of view,

Dasein experiences its own being as a burden.

Though my thrownness and my existence is not under my control, I can reactto it in different ways, expressed in different moods. Mostly, I experiencethrownness as a burden and turn away from it. That turning away, that evasion, isessential to Dasein in the sense that I can face my thrownness only briefly andoccasionally. But I may try to master my own moods. I cannot experience theworld mood-free, but I can perhaps replace one mood with another.

Does the inevitability of mood preclude the possibility of objectiveknowledge? Does my mood always shape my thinking, making its resultssubjective? Heidegger thinks that the answer is no, though he rejects the viewof most of the philosophical tradition that we have a special, theoretical wayof approaching the world that escapes the problem of mood and allows us tointeract with the world in a purely objective fashion. His model is Aristotle’sRhetoric rather than the De Anima. The objective is what emerges from aprocess of interested inquiry in which every participant has moods, desires,and emotions shaping his contribution to the inquiry. Our being with oneanother can produce objectivity through a structured process even though noone of us approaches the task in a completely objective way.

My thrownness does not contradict my freedom, though it does, of course,limit it. AsDasein I face a field of possibilities. I am located within such a field,and my location determines the possibilities that are alive for me. Because of thecircumstances of my birth, I cannot choose to become a Roman Senator or astarship captain. Because of my previous choices, I cannot choose to be alifelong bachelor or a child movie star. Indeed, I cannot even try to attain thesegoals. There are no paths connecting my current place in the field of possibilitieswith those goals. Every choice I make further limits my possibilities, leading mefurther on one set of paths but excluding others.

My freedom and my thrownness shape my understanding of myself as abeing who chooses, who selects from among a given field of possibilities. Ifeel myself tossed into a world not of my own making, but I project myselfinto the future by choosing and, in that way, shaping to a greater and greaterextent the nature of the possibilities I face. I structure my choices in terms ofprojects—some consciously conceived, thought out, and planned, and othersunconscious—and thus come to structure my existence and develop anunderstanding of myself and my life.

Bonevac

Dasein is always, in a sense, more than it is, paradoxical as that sounds,

because it consists not only of its actual choices but also of the possibilities it

faces. We are, in other words, not only what we have been but what we could

be. “‘Become what you are!’ But who are ‘you’? The one who lets go—and

becomes” (145). Heidegger here sounds like the first motivational

speaker—inspiring, but on reflection vacuous, since this reduces to

“Become one who becomes,” and you already are.13

It follows that I can understand myself only by understanding the

world around me well enough to understand the possibilities that lie

before me. I can understand myself authentically by recognizing my

position as a free agent within a realm of possibilities determined partly by

my own choices, or I can understand myself inauthentically by refusing to

recognize my own degree of responsibility, by seeing myself and my

possibilities as given to me solely by something outside myself. We see here

the roots of Sartre’s idea of bad faith.

That is not enough. I need to take responsibility for my own choices and

understand the range of choices before me. But I also need to accept my

thrownness and embrace my being in the world in the ways that are not under

my control. I need to appropriate them into my identity, to affirm them as

mine. Dasein attunes itself to the world by identifying with the Da as well as

the Sein. The sense of thrownness leads to alienation, confusion, and the kind

of experience that later existentialist writers call a “confrontation with the

absurd.” (Heidegger offers the philosophical basis for absurdism in literature,

though Luigi Pirandello got there first; Six Characters in Search of an Author

preceded Being and Time by six years.) We must overcome our sense of

alienation, Heidegger insists, affirming what we are in all its aspects,

including those contingent features that stem from the circumstances of our

being born at a particular time and place into a particular kind of world.

Heidegger raises an important issue: To what extent should I affirm the purely

contingent features of my existence that are not under my control? When Albert

Camus summarizes his existentialist attitude in terms of “my revolt, my

freedom, and my passion,” he implies that I am bound to rebel against my

thrownness, against those features from which I feel alienation.14 Heidegger’s

13Thanks to Carol Iannone for putting it this way.14Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955). See alsoAlbert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), andResistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).

Heidegger’s Map

call to accept them, taken to an extreme, can lead to his own embrace of National

Socialism, not because it was a form of socialism, but because it was national.

Somewhere between Camus’s wholesale rejection and Heidegger’s

wholesale acceptance lies a more sensible reaction, to embrace those aspects

of my thrownness that I do not have good reason to reject. That, of course,

requires a higher or at least independent standard for accepting or rejecting

contingent features of my existence. In his conceptions of caring and

concern, Heidegger might have had the materials from which he might have

constructed such a standard. But he frames those ideas so broadly they

provide little help.

Heidegger’s framing of this issue has had an enormous impact on political

ideologies. Right and Left, as traditionally understood, have something to do

with the size and scope of government, but also with advocacy of or

resistance to change. As governments have expanded in size and scope

throughout the past two centuries, these considerations have come apart.

Advocates of limited government are increasingly the ones demanding

change, and advocates of expanded government insist on continuation of the

status quo, their rhetoric notwithstanding. Heidegger locates a more

perspicuous divide, between those who reject their thrownness and those

who appropriate it. Roger Scruton has defined conservatism as a philosophy

of oikophilia, of love of one’s own, love of home and inheritance, love of the

contingent features of one’s existence—an embrace of thrownness, in

Heidegger’s terminology—and has characterized the Left in terms of its

oikophobia, its repudiation of inheritance and home.15 Conservatives

embrace the familiar just because it is familiar, feel patriotic toward their

country just because it is their country, and identify with contingent features

of their existence just because they are contingent features of their existence.

This is not to say that conservatives embrace every contingent feature, every

aspect of their country, and everything familiar, no matter how ridiculous or

unjust. The moral core of oikophilia is that of friendship. Friends do not have

to embrace every feature and action of one another to be friends. But they do

have to feel affection for one another and wish one another well. Just so,

conservatives feel affection for what is theirs, even by accident, and they

wish it well. Leftists see this attitude as irrational, but they reject the familiar

15Roger H. Scruton, England and the Need for Nations (London: Civitas, 2004), and How to ThinkSeriously about the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2012).

Bonevac

just because it is familiar, reject their country just because it is their country,

and reject the contingent features of their existence just because they are

contingent features of their existence. Again, they need not reject everything

about what is theirs. But their basic attitude toward it is dissatisfaction,

disaffection, and repudiation. They wish it well only to the extent that they

can change it to conform to what they wish it were. There is no difference in

rational justification between these attitudes. The oikophile and the

oikophobe alike can adopt these attitudes critically or uncritically. The

difference is one of defaults. Is the default attitude to be an embrace or a

rejection of the familiar?

Heidegger sees an important distinction between these attitudes, not on the

basis of rationality, but on the basis of the progression of Dasein. To reject

the familiar is to reject one’s thrownness and remain mired in a swamp of

confusion and alienation. (Confusion, because there are many alternatives to

the familiar; alienation, because Dasein, in rejecting the familiar, must in a

sense reject itself.) It is to prevent Dasein from embracing its own being in

the world and attaining maturity. There is also a political danger: rejection of

contingent features of existence promotes Utopian, ahistorical thinking, for it

pushes aside the limitations imposed by circumstances and even the

historical, temporal nature of Dasein itself.

The Fall and the Plunge

The chief enemy of authenticity—and the chief way of being

inauthentic—is falling prey to the ordinary patterns of the world, its

everydayness. This is not merely a contingent danger, like falling into a

manhole; it is an essential part of what Dasein is. It is part of its ontological

structure. Dasein is engaged and even entangled with the world. It is

absorbed in taking care of the things around it and interacting with other

people. Dasein falls easily into the pattern of letting the things and the other

people set the agenda, of getting “lost in the publicness of the they” (175), of

being “taken in by the world and the Mitdasein of the others” (176). This is

what it is to fall prey to the world, being “guided by idle talk, curiosity, and

ambiguity” (175). Our engagement with the world readily slides into

absorption by the world. Our being in the world is fraught with temptation,

the temptation to lose ourselves in the everyday and fall prey to being

completely directed by it. That suggests passivity, but people who are

Heidegger’s Map

inauthentic in this way do not look passive; indeed, they look busy, doing

this and doing that, deeply entangled with the world and its affairs. The

danger is that they pay no attention to their own goals, their own identities,

their own projects, and thus lose sight of their own freedom. Following the

world’s lead, Dasein finds itself torn away from itself. Sooner or later, that

experience becomes alienating.

Alienation, in turn, can produce a reaction against this kind of

entanglement with the world, when Dasein realizes that it is becoming lost

in the world, and can turn into self-entanglement, a sort of self-dissection or

introspection that also separates Dasein from its true possibilities, which of

course pertain to its relation to the world, not merely to itself. Heidegger calls

this “taking the plunge,” the plunge into oneself. The plunge “constantly

tears understanding away from projecting authentic possibilities, and into the

tranquillized supposition of possessing or attaining everything” (178). It

leads to the illusion of understanding things completely because Dasein no

longer confronts the world as it is, but only as it imagines it to be.

Anyone familiar with Hegel will see in Heidegger’s account of the fall and

the plunge an echo of the stages of consciousness in The Phenomenology of

Spirit, in particular, those of sense-consciousness and perception. The former

treats consciousness in Heraclitean fashion as constantly changing, driven by

something outside consciousness itself, while the latter treats it as unified in a

nearly Parmenidean fashion. That leads to an expectation that soon to follow

must be consciousness’s transformation into self-consciousness by way of the

master/slave struggle and the dialectic of unhappy consciousness, ultimately

resolving in mutual recognition with another. Anyone approaching

Heidegger from a postmodern point of view will try to link his conceptions

of inauthenticity to oppression, taking the master/slave conflict literally and

assuming that, if we fall or plunge, we must somehow have been pushed.

Heidegger, however, disappoints these expectations. As in Hegel, the

dialectic here does not result from social and political forces of oppression,

domination, hegemony, marginalization, etc. It is intrinsic to Dasein. In

contrast to Hegel, there is no master/slave dichotomy. We do not have to

struggle or be struggled against to gain mutual recognition. Our way of being

in the world is inherently Mitdasein, being in the world with others, in

community. Our relation to others is, intrinsically, one of concern. To be in

community with others, to care for others, to be cared for by them, to feel and

display concern—these are not achievements, much less Utopian visions.

Bonevac

These are natural for us. They are part of Dasein’s ontological structure, part

of its essence.

This, perhaps, is why we can embrace home, the familiar, our communal

and cultural inheritance, and the other contingent aspects of our existence. At

the risk of trivializing the point: at home, we are at home. We naturally form

part of a community with which we share not only the essential features of

Dasein, but, in large measure, the contingent features of our existences that

constitute our thrownness.

Interpretation

How is understanding possible? We perceive things as something: this as a

book to be read, that as a hammer to be used, and so on. We do not lay a

conceptual structure or a structure of significance on an objective, value-free

world; Dasein encounters the world as already structured and already having

significance in relation to Dasein itself. Our interpretation of the world rests

on these sorts of small fore-interpretations. It does not proceed all at once,

but consists in putting them together. And it is therefore not presupposition-free,

but rests on interpretations already present. We start with the “undisputed

prejudice of the interpreter” (150). Things have meaning from the start. But their

meaning is not intrinsic to them; it consists in their relation to Dasein. Only

Dasein has meaning in itself.

Heidegger reflects on the Socratic puzzle that, to try to understand

something, we must already in some sense understand it, for we must know

what it is we are trying to understand. If, as in the Meno, we inquire into the

nature of virtue, how could we recognize a successful account unless we

already know what virtue is? This appears to be a vicious circle, Heidegger

says, because we misunderstand understanding. The problem is not getting

out of the circle, but getting into it in the right way by realizing that

understanding rests on fore-understanding. We already perceive objects as

something, and as ready-to-hand, as usable. That does not mean that we can

give anything like an account that would please Socrates. But we encounter

the world with rough-and-ready meanings already attached.

These are prejudices, true, and later postmodern thinkers have used

Heidegger’s analysis to undermine the idea of objectivity altogether.

Heidegger himself, however, does not see any of this as precluding scientific

understanding. We can start with preconceptions, everyday ideas, what Aristotle

Heidegger’s Map

would term the opinions of the many, and we often do. But we can also

develop interpretations scientifically by looking to the things themselves.

We cannot have a presupposition-free science or even a presupposition-free

mathematics. They develop historically, starting from meanings and interpre-

tations already there. But we can try to rest them on narrower and narrower

foundations, extracting the arbitrary, the variable, and the merely historical or

cultural. We can think of the objective as the limit of this process. It can

never be achieved fully, but it can be approximated, and objectivity can serve

a useful function as a regulative ideal. Heidegger rejects both the Hegelian

thought that science proceeds in a fully rational, predictable way and also the

Nietzschean thought that science proceeds according to no rational pattern at

all. His view is pragmatic, closer to that of C.S. Peirce then to others in the

Continental tradition. Science’s rationality stems not from its starting points,

but from its self-corrective methods, and its universality and objectivity are

not automatic but instead the ideals at which those methods aim.

We express our judgments in language, which, like any form of

communication, is essentially social. So, in articulating interpretations, we

face another source of prejudice. We rest our articulated interpretations not

only on the fore-interpretations of experience, but on the conceptual structure

of our language, which embodies a system of interpretation with presuppo-

sitions of its own. It is not an accident that Heidegger introduces a new

philosophical vocabulary and uses words in so many unusual ways. He

worries about the possibility of communicating the interpretation of being in

the world that he wants to communicate in terms of a conceptual scheme,

already there in the language, which is incompatible with the perspective he

wants to convey. It is similarly not an accident that science and mathematics

introduce new vocabularies and use familiar terms in new, technical ways.

We face a problem analogous to Heidegger’s in constructing any interpretation,

inside or outside of science. Language can conceal as well as reveal.

The interpretive method Heidegger recommends for revealing what lies

hidden and thus attaining truth is hermeneutics. The metaphors of covering

and uncovering, hiding and revealing, suggest a methodology exploited by

thinkers from Marx to Freud to the postmodernists, a hermeneutic of

suspicion that discounts what people say and alleges other, unconscious

meanings and motivations. That has provoked the entirely justified response

that the alleged meanings and motivations stem from the theory the

interpreter brings to the task and have little or nothing to do with the text

Bonevac

being interpreted and everything to do with the interpreter’s agenda or desire

to control discourse, etc. But Heidegger means something different. He takes

the manifest image for what it is; he does not reduce it to some other level with

true causal and explanatory power. So, he has nothing corresponding to Marx’s

material level of economic and class struggle, Freud’s subconscious, Levi-

Strauss’s or Foucault’s anthropology, Gramsci’s cultural hegemony, and so on.

Heidegger’s own metaphors aside, his conception of hermeneutics is more

like putting together a puzzle than pushing aside a curtain. We piece together

the fore-interpretations we have into local and then global interpretations that

make sense. He sometimes speaks as a holist; we can recognize something as

a piece of equipment only by seeing it as part of a system of things taken as

equipment. This supports the puzzle analogy: I find it very difficult to put a

puzzle together if I don’t know anything about what the overall puzzle looks

like. But I don’t have to understand exactly where any particular piece goes. I

begin by grouping some pieces together, finding chunks that fit with one

another, searching for other pieces that fit, and eventually putting large

sections together. Hermeneutics is not a license to interpret anything however

one likes. Still less does it involve a commitment to a structure that underlies

the world as it is manifest to us, for that would turn it into a mere appearance.

Hermeneutics, for Heidegger, is a matter of refining and piecing together our

local fore-conceptions and fore-understandings into an overall understanding,

one that, ideally, remains stable in the face of further challenges.

Self-Adjudication

Robert Brandom develops an insightful way to grasp Heidegger’s

project.16 That project divides things, broadly speaking, into three categories:

the ready-to-hand (e.g., the book, the hammer), the present (e.g., the objects

of the natural sciences), and the social. We can ask a meta-question: Is that

categorization itself ready-to-hand, present, or social? The general form of

the question is this. Suppose we use concepts (or institutions, or practices,

etc.) to draw distinctions. We can then ask whether any of those concepts is

16Robert B. Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Sein und Zeit,” Monist 66, no. 3 (July 1983): 387–409;reprinted in Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics ofIntentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 298–323, and in Dreyfus and Wrathall,Companion to Heidegger, 214–32.

Heidegger’s Map

self-adjudicating in the sense that it applies to what distinguishes things

falling under it from the rest.

This kind of question is familiar from modal logic, which distinguishes the

necessary from the contingent. (Say, for simplicity, that by “contingent” we

simply mean “not necessary.”) We can ask whether the judgment that

something is necessary is itself necessary. If it is necessary that p, is it

necessary that it is necessary that p? If so, the necessary is self-adjudicating.

We can ask this kind of question about all sorts of distinctions and theses.

Philosophers, for example, are fond of distinguishing the a priori from the a

posteriori—what is independent of experience from what depends on

experience. We can then ask, is that distinction itself a priori or a posteriori?

More precisely: Is the judgment that a given judgment is a priori itself a

priori? If so, the a priori is self-adjudicating. It determines its own

boundaries. Judgments about aprioricity are themselves a priori. Similarly,

we can ask whether the judgment that a given judgment is analytic or

synthetic is itself analytic or synthetic, whether the distinction between the

mental and the physical is itself mental or physical, and so on.

Brandom interprets Heidegger as asking this question, first, with respect to

the distinction between the ready-to-hand and the present. He argues that the

ready-to-hand is self-adjudicating; we judge what is ready-to-hand and what

is merely present to Dasein from within the sphere of the ready-to-hand.

This, Brandom contends, is what Heidegger means in saying that

fundamental ontology is the regional ontology of Dasein.

Brandom takes this one step further. Once we include the social in ourcategorization, it becomes self-adjudicating, and the ready-to-hand loses itsprivileged status. Interpretation and understanding are articulated inlanguage, which is essentially social. In submitting myself to communicationI submit myself to an authority outside myself, for language’s socialcharacter means that the rules of usage depend on something outside me,on us instead of me, on Mitdasein rather than Dasein alone. It follows that, inthis three-fold classification, the social is self-adjudicating. Whethersomething counts as ready-to-hand, present, or social is ultimately a socialquestion to be settled by appeal to social authority and practice.

Brandom cares about what is self-adjudicating because he sees it asdetermining what is basic for fundamental ontology. If the ready-to-hand isself-adjudicating, it is ontologically basic, relative to the merely present. Ifthe social is self-adjudicating, it is basic relative to both. Dasein ends upyielding its position to Mitdasein, and fundamental ontology becomes the

Bonevac

regional ontology of the community. Brandom embraces that conclusion. But,reflecting on Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism, it seems reasonable to worryabout both the regional and the communal aspects of this formulation.Friendship toward the familiar must not be allowed to become hostility towardthe unfamiliar. And orientation toward the community must not be allowed tobecome subjugation of the individual.

It seems to many a small step from this position to the idea that all

conceptualization, all judgment, all inference, and all “truth” is socially

determined, relative to a community of people who recognize one another as

members of the community and share the same language. If Brandom is

right, then, moving from Heidegger to postmodernism merely elaborates the

implications of the self-adjudicating nature of the social, sketching more fully

the picture that Heidegger had already drawn.

I have introduced Brandom’s interpretation because the idea that the

social is self-adjudicating and therefore fundamental has become

pervasive in certain areas of the humanities and social sciences.

Whether or not it interprets Heidegger correctly, it interprets him in a

powerful and influential way. It leads to a two-step inference:

The social is self-adjudicating.

Therefore, the social is ontologically fundamental.

Therefore, everything is a social construction.

Heidegger’s thought has undoubtedly led others to this inference, whether or

not he would have accepted it himself. Once one grants that everything is a

social construction, moreover, truth, objectivity, and other kinds of rational

constraints appear to go out the window.

I am not at all convinced, however, that Heidegger would have

accepted any of these propositions. If he ultimately takes the social as

fundamental, why focus Being and Time on Dasein? Why construct a

conception of understanding and interpretation on other grounds, and

then connect them to language and thus to the social by way of

communication, rather than begin by arguing that understanding and

interpretation are essentially linguistic? Why take the fundamental

relation to others to be concern rather than something more directly

connected to authority and social practice?

Heidegger speaks throughout Being and Time of the ontological structure

of Dasein, of things that are essential to Dasein: its being-in-the-world, its

Heidegger’s Map

thrownness, its grappling with fallenness and even the plunge, its freedom,

and its temporality.17 He never relativizes those claims to a set of social

practices. They are part of what it is to be in the world, full stop. They are

presuppositions of any set of social practices.

Another argument against the social interpretation is that it misses the

transcendental character of Heidegger’s project. Kant searched for the ground

of the possibility of experience; Heidegger searches for the ground of the

possibility of being in the world with others. Consider Heidegger’s

proclamation in the final paragraph of Being and Time:

The preliminary disclosure of being, although it is unconceptual, makes

it possible for Dasein as existing being-in-the-world to be related to

beings, to those it encounters in the world as well as to itself as existing.

(p. 437)

The goal is not to show that everything depends on social practices, but to

uncover the ground of those practices—to reveal the fundamental nature of

being in the world by asking what must be the case if those social practices

are to be possible.

Whether or not it is Heidegger’s view, I see an adequate pragmatism as

incompatible with all three propositions. The social is not self-adjudicating in

the sense of being able to determine its own boundaries. If it were, it could

decree itself as having dominion over everything, at every level, and make

talk of refinement, adjustment, stability, and the like otiose. But social

practices cannot decree that everything is to be settled according to social

practices alone. Those social practices cannot survive. King Canute can

command the seas to obey him, and social practices can defer to his

assertion, but the waves will not submit. Dissenters can of course be sent to

concentration camps. But eventually the clash between social practices and

reality takes a toll on those social practices.

Social practices, ultimately, have to respond to the Gods of the Copybook

Headings. They have to respond to reality. They also have to respond to

human nature—in Heidegger’s language, to the underlying structures of

Dasein. Sorting things into the ready-to-hand, the present, and the social may

itself be a social practice—or not, since who before Heidegger thought of

17On the last, see William D. Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge and New York:Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Bonevac

it?—but social practices are not free to eliminate any of the three categories,

or, Heidegger thinks, to subordinate the ready-to-hand to the merely present.

Even if the social is self-adjudicating, it is not clear what follows. Suppose

that the a priori is self-adjudicating, so that the judgment “‘2+2=4’ is a

priori” is itself a priori. It does not follow that everything is a priori. Perhaps

it follows that aprioricity is in some sense epistemologically basic. The a

posteriori becomes dependent in the sense that the judgment “‘the sky is

blue’ is a posteriori” is itself a priori. But that is a very weak sense of

dependence; “the sky is blue” is still a posteriori, and the a priori truths, taken

together, do not determine its truth. Similarly, suppose that analyticity is

self-adjudicating: “‘bachelors are unmarried’ is analytic” is itself analytic.

The analytic truths, taken together, do not determine the synthetic truths. Nor

does everything end up analytic.

So, even if we grant that the social is self-adjudicating, nothing much

follows. It does not follow, in particular, that everything is social. Nor do

truths about social practices determine the truths about the ready-to-hand

and the present. The ontological status of these categories has nothing to

do with self-adjudication.

Conclusion

I have argued that Heidegger develops important insights into the human

condition in Being and Time. But his philosophical map also misdescribes

certain areas, leading himself and his followers to some unfortunate places.

Idealism itself is a dangerous doctrine; by holding that everything is

mind-dependent, it risks cutting the mind off from anything that might serve

as a check on its fancies. Taking things ready-to-hand as basic seems to get

things backwards, treating meanings as given but objects, including the objects

of science, as constructed and secondary. It is hard to see, on his account, how

science is even possible. Heidegger’s notions of care and concern place

normativity at the heart ofDasein’s being-in-the-world, but the concepts remain

so attenuated that they generate no substantive ethical constraints. His

conceptions of hermeneutics and social practices encourage postmodern

practices of interpretation that undermine not only the concepts of truth and of

individual rights and liberties, but also the practice of intellectual inquiry itself.

These aspects of his thought made Heidegger’s affinity for Nazism

possible, but that affinity itself has its roots, I suspect, in aspects of his

Heidegger’s Map

thought that I have not discussed. Heidegger puts philosophy first, giving it

priority over scientific investigation. Philosophy, he thinks, tells us that our

being is finite, temporal, and historical. Heidegger interprets authenticity,

ultimately, as being oriented toward our finitude, that is, toward death. Death

is our individual destiny, but Dasein also has a collective, regional, historical

destiny, he insists, and a true leader identifies that destiny and brings it about.

When Adolf Hitler offered just such a vision, and offered himself as the

leader to bring it about, Heidegger was all too ready to help.

Bonevac