Being And Time

These early chapters of Being and Time give some important substance to the initial sketch of Dasein outlined in the Introduction. Nevertheless, a critical and basic question remains unanswered. Namely, why “Dasein”? Why does Heidegger insist on using this term to describe both the reader of the text and what might be more loosely described as “human being” or “reality” (as Henry Corbin rendered Dasein when translating it into French). Why not either use more standard philosophical terms such as “consciousness” or “subjectivity”? The explanation goes back to the nature of the phenomenological method and to the kind of radical phenomenology Heidegger believed he was pursuing.

Phenomenology had, from its inception, a fraught relationship with both existing philosophical terminology and ordinary language. On the one hand, both were indispensable to any attempt to describe the world and contained important clues about how we experienced it. At the same time, such language also cemented and encouraged simplistic or misleading ways of thinking and seeing. Heidegger sums this up at the end of his Introduction. He says that for the task of properly grasping the being of entities, “we lack not only most of the words but, above all, the ‘grammar’” (63). In other words, to make as few assumptions about what is being described, and its being, as possible, new words are needed, or at least modifications of existing terms are. This is the case if we are to destabilize and defamiliarize ingrained, and often unrecognized, assumptions about the phenomena.

For Heidegger, moreover, this task is no more necessary than in the case of “human being.” Such familiar locutions as “subject,” “consciousness,” and “mind” may seem innocent enough, but they seduce us into accepting an ontological picture whose influence becomes both ubiquitous and almost impossible to escape. We are here talking about the “subject-object-relationship” (86). As touched on, this is the view that there is a subject or consciousness looking out over, and distinct from, a world of indifferent objects that it then attempts to “know.” It is the ontology of the “inside” and the “outside”; it is the ontology of the “here” and the “there.” As Heidegger acknowledges, it is also the most obvious and natural way of theorizing about the world, but for that very reason, it is the concept that needs most holding in check. That is, it is the assumption whose insinuating force needs most holding in abeyance if we are to conduct a thorough-going phenomenological ontology.

There is something deeper going on for Heidegger here, however. It is not merely that using “Dasein” is required to ward off the ever-present threat of the subject-object notion, which terms such as “consciousness” perpetually evoke. It is also to unsettle a more fundamental and problematic assumption underpinning the subject-object relation itself. This is the assumption of “presence.” As Heidegger says, in the philosophical tradition, human being has been interpreted as a “special case of some genus of entities as things that are present-at-hand” (68). That is, underscoring both the subject-object relation and our essential ideas about the human is an ontology of presence, or the “present-at-hand.”

At its most general, “presence” refers to a full ontological self-sufficiency and self-identity. That which is “present-at-hand” may then stand in relations to other entities. However, these entities are external and not essentially constitutive of what it is. For instance, the pool ball has relations to other balls that move it, but these do not affect its essential being. In contrast, for an ontology of non-being or non-presence, relations are constitutive. This idea is captured by Sartre’s claim that human being “must necessarily be what it is not and not be what it is” (Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, trans by. H. Barnes. London: Routledge. 1958). In its very being, then, the not-present-at-hand is constituted by that which is other than, or “not,” it. To put it another way, a being like Dasein has ontological status such that it does not merely “have” a relation to the world; rather, it is that relation. Dasein is unthinkable without it.

As these efforts go to show, formulating a concept of “non-being” within existing grammar and language is difficult. For example, it is seemingly obvious to think that a relation, by definition, must be a connection between two distinct entities—hence the idea of something being a relation, without something “behind” it, sounds strange. Nonetheless, an intuitive sense of what is meant can still be found. As discussed in Chapter 1, if Dasein is its possibilities, its choice of itself, then it is that which is “not yet.” We can, and in some ways do, think of ourselves, then, as constituted by a relation to an as-yet-unknown and unrealized future. Similarly, we feel we are constituted by the absence, the non-presence, of others in the experiences of grief or longing. Heidegger will build on these points in subsequent chapters. For their proper meaning to be unpacked, and the ontology of presence to be fully challenged, a deeper analysis of our everyday world will be required.