This is KZSU Stanford. Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison and we're
coming to you from the Stanford campus.
When you tune into entitled opinions you set keeled a breakers forth on the godly
sea towards some island archipelago or continent in the far flung reaches of intellectual
history. Today however we're heading home to Ithaca. What does it mean to return to Ithaca?
For Odysseus it meant reclaiming his place in the genealogy of generations. He returned
to his father Lyertes, the past, his wife Penelope the present, and his son Tala Makus,
future. During the years he spent with cheer chain Calypso Odysseus was without these
ecstatic coordinates of his human identity. In some he was worldless. It didn't matter
that Calypso was a shining goddess or that her island was an earthly paradise. When we're
deprived of world and the bounded time that make us human we long for our homecoming,
however mortal its condition may be. Yet the question remains where is Ithaca and what exactly
does it mean to be at home there?
The reason I ask what it means to be at home in Ithaca is because I just
Odysseus' homecoming is not fully achieved once he returns. Remember the visit to the
underworld in Book Eleven of the Odyssey? There Odysseus had been told by the prophet
Tyresseus that once he makes it back to Ithaca he must take off on yet another journey.
With an ore on his shoulder he must travel to a saltless land where people know nothing
of the sea. Say Tyresseus, quote, "When another wayfare on meeting you shall say that
you have a winnowing fan on your stout shoulder, then you must fix in the earth your
shapely ore and make goodly offerings to Poseidon, and death will come to you far from
the sea, a death so gentle that it will lay you low when you are overcome with sleek
old age." So just when you thought you had returned you have to take up your ore again
and leave. Only this time your ore is no longer a means of locomotion. It no longer serves
the practical purpose it was designed for. The ore now becomes a ritualistic object that
you place on your shoulder carrying it into a place where its instrumentality is misrecognized
or misidentified. In that region of unlikeness far from home he was planted in the earth,
the ground of your mortality, and thereby come to terms with your death. Only when
Ithaca is undertaken this second journey into a foreign land to make peace with his own
dying can he finally return to Ithaca and make himself at home there for the first time.
Those who stay at home without undergoing this estrangement are not at home in their own
home lands. Let Homer's fable serve as the allegorical introduction to our show today, which
deals with Martin Heidegger's being in time. This is a book that in the ponderous prose
of German high philosophy analyzes the kind of being that belongs to Odysseus in so far
as he is resourceful, in so far as he is mortal, in so far as he is human. It is a book that
probes the underlying strangeness of the familiar and penetrates the ground in which Odysseus
plants his ore, which by the time he reaches that destination is neither an ore nor a winnowing
fan, but a marker of our being unto death in the mode of anticipatory resolve. Being in time
is a book that undertakes that second journey, dislodging the ore from his familiar context,
and following its hero who goes by the name of Dazain into that uncanny region where human
existence is revealed in its fundamental determinations. With my guest today we will probe
and try to put into relief those fundamental determinations of Dazain's mode of being
as Heidegger understands them and to share with you our reasons for believing that being
in time is one of the most important events in the history of western philosophy. My guest
today is Professor Thomas Shein, a wafer who has passed through entitled opinions before
on two previous occasions. Tom is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford
and the author of several books, as well as a host of articles on Martin Heidegger, most
recently he has translated into English Martin Heidegger's 1925-26 Lectures on Truth entitled
Logic the Question of Truth. This book, which has just come out with Indiana University
Press, is central to Heidegger's overall project of reinterpreting western thought in terms
of time and truth. Tom, welcome to the program. Thank you very much Robert. To start with
this new translation that has been published, Logic the Question of Truth, these lectures were
given almost at the same time that being in time came out, certainly Heidegger probably
would have finished with the bulk of the writing. What relation is there between this book
that you've translated yourself and being in time?
Well chronologically it's the last course that Heidegger taught before he took off for his
mountain cabin to write being in time and that would have been in March of 1926. So it's
the last course before that. And it's also significant that in the middle of this course,
the Dean of the Philosophy faculty approached Heidegger and said, "You must publish something
now." Well, as it turns out Heidegger had a bunch of courses, this was one of them that
he could put together into what became eventually being in time, the most important book
that he published really in his lifetime and a real classic of course. So this logic is a first
draft of being in time is in a sense? It's a first draft of parts of being in time. He had
already worked out other parts in the courses in the 20s before this. But Logic the
Question of Truth is it's a difficult book, especially in his latter and in his last
third where he deals with Kant, but a very rewarding one. I would say that it's divided into
three sections. One is Heidegger's very close reading of Psychologism and his critique of that.
What is Psychologism? Psychologism is the reduction of all the rules of logic to just the
workings of the mind. So that if we could anthropomorphically study what the mind is doing
when it thinks we would have all of the laws of logic so that they're no longer universal,
they're no longer free of human reasoning. They are simply dependent upon human reasoning
itself. So it's critique of that. And then in its second part, a very fruitful part, I think,
you have an analysis of law goss. That's the word that underlies Logic, the question
of truth. An analysis of law goss as the human beings, a priori need to make sense of things.
Law goss is not language, it's not binding things together, it's making sense as Heidegger makes
clear. And also in that second part is best analysis of meaning by reference that is
I say Alathea itself by reference to Aristotle's metaphysics book Theta chapter 10. So we've
got Psychologism, we've got Law goss and Alathea, and then thirdly, and stunningly good,
I think, is his best statement of what he means by time. And he defines time as the need
to make things meaningfully present. So he focuses on the present moment of time. Anyway,
does this by a close and I must say difficult analysis of Kant and Scamatism, which turned
out to be the first draft of his 1929 book on Kant. And in the whole book, he anticipates
what he would later say, namely that time is only a stand-in for Alathea, whatever this
Greek word means incorrectly translated as truth. So it's an important text, it underlies
a certain shift that's taking place in the profession these days. I would call it a paradigm
shift that's settling in among the younger scholars, among the best graduate students,
as well as among some of us oldies. And where the paradigm shift consisting in, and it's
clear from part two of this book, that Heidegger interprets being as meaning, but Deutzant
Kite, as he calls it, but Deutzant or Zen. So meaning significance, etc., is what he means
by being, which is no surprise, because being is always the meaningful presence of something
to one in the practical or the theoretical order. So the emphasis on being as meaning
is, I think, crucial to the text.
We can talk about how the last few years these days going back to this determination,
but first on Psychologism, when he, that first part of logic, when he's dealing with
Psychologism, he's taking up, I presume, Husserl's own polemic against Psychologism that,
in a certain sense, his phenomenology is not, that is predicated on the critique of
Psychologism, but the critique of Psychologism in Husserl's phenomenology was crucial.
How do you understand Heidegger's relationship to Husserlian phenomenology in being
in time now? Yeah, that's a, that's a big and very, very important topic. And I think that
part of the shift of emphasis these days has been the rediscovery of phenomenology as the
very basis of Heidegger's work being in time and all the rest. He said in 1969, shortly
before he died, that his work was phenomenological through and through. Both phenomenological
and hermeneutic, so perhaps we have to say something about both of those, in the early 70s,
about five years before he died, I had the opportunity to meet with Heidegger in his home
in Phyborg for a long conversation, one afternoon in April of 1971. And the topic that
we mostly discussed, we discussed phenomenology in Aristotle, phenomenology, comma, and
Aristotle, two separate topics, but it was phenomenology that he put his emphasis on,
and he made it utterly clear to me, I was just a young PhD at the time, that there is no
understanding Heidegger without understanding phenomenology. And he walked me through some
of the sections of logical investigations on sensual and categoryal intuition.
That's what the rules may know, those rules mean book. The first volume of which was
was critique of psychologism, as you mentioned. And he emphasized that phenomenology is not
about things out there. That's what he calls uzia, stuff that is. But phenomenology rather
is about the meaning of things in our world of use of practical orientation, the significance
of things. It's precisely meaning that changes things out there into phenomenon, that
as to say, things that are meaningfully appear to us and that we can engage with. So as
he made clear, phenomenology is exclusively about meaning, sense, significance, what Heidegger
calls on vis and height, a German word that means presence to you in a meaningful way.
So he was never about things out there now as they're real and so on. He was always
about their interface, their correlation with human being, and human beings correlation with
meaning. So phenomenology is the search for the last word on meaning. But Heidegger, as
you know, always uses the word being, except in his later years he sort of came out and
said, and I quote, "I no longer use the word being gladly or Gern." I no longer like to use
the word being would be the way to translate it. He said in his later writings that being
was only a preliminary word, he said that basically being was to be surpassed into the
phenomenological correlation, which he called erigness in his own interpretation. So I would
say with citing Woody Allen that being is just another way of saying meaning.
Yeah, can I take issue with that, not issue disagreement philosophically, but the heavy emphasis
you put on the word meaning, and I know your work and your interpretation of Heidegger's
corpus as a whole, that by privileging that one word, you gave a number of other possible
words. You said interface correlation, you said the way things appear to you and the sense
that they have. When we use the word meaning, there are connotations to that that there's
something humanly dependent on meaningfulness, and that the meaningfulness can reach an order
of having a larger meaning to life, for example. Why not just stick at the moment when
we're talking about phenomenology with the fact that things appear to us in ways that
are accessible. That can be in the realm of visibility, it can be in the realm of intelligibility,
it can be in the realm of practicality, the practical use, or any number of modes. And I
think that the word meaning doesn't encompass the full array of possibilities of how things
are given over to us as phenomena. Well, except that Heidegger insisted in being in time
on the word badoethom kite, which means meaningfulness. The first name for being in Heidegger's
work is world, the meaning giving context, as He calls it, the badoethom kite. So he did not
shy away from discussing being in terms of meaning, on vase in height, presence to accessibility,
as you say. But he does use the word badoethom kite, badoethom call through his analysis
of world in being in time. And he makes it clear that the central, as we say, determination
of human being of dasin is being in the world, being in meaning in badoethom kite. So is that
way? Is world reducible to the meaning? Yes. I mean, he actually defines world as the
structure of world is badoethom kite. What goes on inside of world is badoethom. As he says,
when things are discovered along with human being, that is to say, when they've been
understood, we say they have meaning. We have zinn, badoethom, in this case it's zinn, the
word he uses. So really what he's saying is that the human being is a hermeneut, that's
not an add-on to some sort of plain old existence. Our existence is the obligation, the need,
the throne is into making sense of things. In fact, the first meaning of the word alaethia
is meaning. It's not truth. You know, a sight of your points out. So if we're embedded
in hermeneutics, if he is using the word badoethom kite, I think that we can actually retrieve
from this plain old common white bread word being, we can retrieve the urgency that
hide-a-gir feels, the things are in your face. He says in one point in his first course
after the war, great war, in February of 1919, he asks his students, what is it that you first
encounter in your lived world? Is it things? Is it objects? Is it beings? No, he says.
It's das badoethama, the meaningful. He says, that's what's in your face all over the
place. It's coming at you. So we don't want to lose him to traditional ontology, which
just talks about the inner substance of things, as our colleague, Gumbrach, says, no, we want
to have him on this side of phenomenology as he insisted. And one way of constantly recognizing
that is to say that being is being in your face, being is meaning.
Well, okay. We're not going to resolve that only because of the connotations of the word
meaning associated for me, very much with analytic philosophy, which is an analysis of meaning
making in propositions and that the meaning making activity is one that is very cerebral. It
seems to be related back to subjectivity. The great excitement of being in time was that
it was such an existentialist sort of treatise. And he didn't call it being and meaning.
He called it being in time. And time is something which would you agree that it would
be the kind of ground of meaning as you're referring to it. And if so, there's a way in
which being temporal includes all sorts of things that don't enter into the usual connotation
of the word meaning, namely thrown us into the world and being ahead of oneself and self
transcendence and being under death and all these great existential categories that seem
to take us away from this otherwise cerebral activity of making sense of everything.
Right. Well, there's a lot of, a lot in what you said there, a number of questions and implicit
questions and what you said. So maybe we should start by asking why he even called his main
work being and time. And that's where the 1925-6 course, logic, the question of truth comes
in because the whole last third of it through an analysis of this came atism is an effort
to give a statement on what he means by time. And it's clear throughout Heidegger's work
that the source of His meditations on temporality are not Aristotle. It's not the time
of the cosmos, it's not the spread of moments across a certain arc. Rather, His focus
in understanding time is a gustan and Plotinus. In other words, time is a characteristic
of human existence. So it takes it out of the cosmos and precisely puts it into the realm
of human existence. So time occurs only with the human being, both Aristotle and Augustine
and Plotinus would agree with that. But time occurs only with the human being. It's
a basic characteristic of the human being. And time, he says, he says this in 1949, he
says this in the logic book that I translated, time is only a preliminary way of saying
a laethia openness, uncloseness, disclosure, which is something that is the primary determinant
of human being. It's the existential that determines human being, which is that we're constantly
embedded in the meaning-making process, which is not a subject's sort of casting of meaning
over things. It's rather an interplay, a correlation between meaning and man. When I use
a man, of course, I use it in the generic sense, not male-female sense. I'm using it as
translating entroposs in Greek human being. So his motto in being in time is without being
no dasine, own a zine, kind dasine. But what he's really talking about is the interface
of human being and meaning, own a zine, kind dasine without dasine. There is no place for
meaning to occur. This is clear throughout the text that what time temporality means is being
present to things not passively, just receiving them, but actively, actively making sense
of them. That's not simply painting them a certain color, because we're always already
involved with familiar with, engaged with, meaning as such.
Being in time is in two parts. So in the first part, there's a distinction between dasine
in its inauthentic modes of being, and then in the second division, the authentic mode
of being of dasine. I presume that meaning-making is pertains to both modes.
But let's, if I can ask you the meaning of some fundamental terms that he uses in part
one especially, because he says that dasine, that there are three particular modes of
being of dasine, facticity, existentiality, and fallenness. Can you very briefly go through
what these three determinations of dasine amount to, starting with facticity?
Right. He gives different names to the triads. One would be throneness, projectedness,
and being meaningfully present to, zine by. So what if we take it in, first of all, in the
take facticity in this sense of one's throneness, as you and your audience knows, his
way of denominating the determinations of human being, the a priori determinations is to
call them existential characteristics or existentials, just like that. And the most basic
existential of them all is dasine's throneness. All the others derive from it, even
dasines a lethic function of making sense of things. So the basic existential characteristic
is called throneness, eventually it will be called facticity, but throneness into what? He
says throneness into the world, the world of Bedoitsamkite, the world of making sense.
And what he means from the very first page of being in time is that you have to be yourself.
The question becomes, what is this self? This self is hermeneutical. This self is intrinsically
sense-making. So I have to be a hermeneous. I have to make sense of things is the first
characteristic of human being. So when throneness is being thrown into a world without my having
chosen to be in the world, and it's I'm thrown as I also projected beyond myself, is
that the dimension of existentiality or the crisp, your throne in so far as you're
thrown with a past, but also you're out ahead of yourself reaching out into your future.
And then you are also then present among other people as well as things, and you're kind
of fallen in and among things in a way that you might be making sense of them, but in a
fallen mode by just using them instrumentally. And how does this projection, what, how does
projection relate to throneness? Right. The human being is divided against itself, or is
disjunctive in relation to itself. It's not all self contained. It's not closed in
upon itself like the Aristotelian God who thinks of nothing but itself. Right. The self-thinking
thought as we sometimes translate it. So what we're thrown into rather is our openness.
I sometimes like to put the two terms, throneness in projection, facticity in existentiality,
put them together as throne openness, openness referring to one's a lethic function of making
sense of things. But openness really means the opposite of the Greek closure. So it's a
sign of finitude, a fragility of the need to strive, the sense of future, etc. And the
the the disjunction that we're thrown into is that we cannot take things immediately and
understand what their meaning is, their significance, their being, if you want to use that term.
Rather we always have to take them in terms of something else. It's a discursive, a step-by-step
kind of knowledge. Unlike, we'll say the knowledge of God, where God just opens his eyes,
if I could put it that way. And understand exactly what the thing is. No, we have to,
we have the labor of the concept in Hegel's sense. We have to work in order to put together
this in terms of that. And that is the dimension of meaning of this particular object. I'm
holding a cup in my hand here. It could be used to contain water, this in terms of water
container. It could be used as a missile to throw at somebody, this in terms of weapon.
It could be used as a paperweight, for example, this in terms of holding down paper. So that
this junction at the core of human sense-making is what will eventually be called temporality
human openness as such. But when we're thrown into projectiveness, we're thrown in the
do the need to reach ahead as it were and into the meaning of something in order to understand
it for what it is.
Well, Tom, can I ask about the fallenness? Because we're almost speaking about design
in its authentic mode or something that's not necessarily related to its inauthenticity. But
heitiger makes a clear time and again that for the most part, design exists inauthentically,
in a state of fallenness. What does he mean by that?
Okay. If I could take one step back because you refer to being with other people, things
ourselves, even, designed by Shay in French, Dá in Italian, I'm with things. It's always
important to remember that the issue of being with is not simply a physical coming up
against, but rather a relationship of meaningfulness in relation to things, to people,
to myself, et cetera. Heitiger bifurcates, designed by being with things meaningfully into
two forms, into two modes, we might say. One is inauthentic and one is authentic. And the
principle of difference between that is whether or not one relates to things in terms
of one's full human nature, or if one instead treats oneself and other things, other
people, as just out there, as to be kind of bumped up against. That would be an inauthentic
way, because one's not reflecting upon or bringing to bear one's whole human nature, finite,
mortal, and all of that. So authentic, actually the Greek word authentic, authentic cost
means the one who commits the murder, believe it or not, the one who's responsible for the
murder. So to be responsible for one's whole human nature is to be authentic. That is to
say, to have accepted oneself as thrown, as disjunctive, as finite, as going to die.
So inauthentic is all the opposite of that.
I used to be much more fascinated by the authenticity side of the two, because I thought
that's where it all happened. Now I have to say that his analysis of inauthenticity
interests me a lot more than his analysis of authenticity, because to begin with, we are
authentic only in privileged moments where we have these moments that break us out of the continuum,
but for the most part, our home, where we live, where we are in Ithaca, as it is in the
inauthentic world. Now, of course, in my little allegorical introduction, I said that
Odysseus, if he's really going to make himself at home, he's going to have to strange
himself within the familiar, and he's going to have to undertake this journey into the
strange land, and his ore will no longer be this instrument that he uses in an everyday functionality
mode, but it becomes something that becomes a marker for his own death and his own mortality.
So it's a thing of authenticity, but after that he can go back to Ithaca and actually
make himself at home in a kind of world that is now not just the place where he's from,
he's taken full possession, he's repossessed that world of his. Now, inauthenticity,
the reason I'm very intrigued by, especially these days is because I think it's become so
much more of an inevitable reality in our own world than it was even when Heidegger was
writing, Bemoaning Mass Society, and the Dasman, and so forth, he speaks about three
different determinations for inauthenticity. Eidle chatter, is it, no, he calls it idle curiosity,
gossip, and is it diversion or entertainment, there's something along these lines. It's like
the perfect age of the internet where you have a thing which is completely open to idle curiosity,
and here I actually am persuaded by something that Bert Dreyfus said once at a conference here at
Stanford that the internet and the idle curiosity that what it does not allow for is an infinite
passion or that's Kierkegaard's term by the way, an infinite passion, or let's, we could call it
an unconditional commitment, but Heidegger seemed to be prescient when he said that idle curiosity
is one dominant mode of, you know, authenticity, gossip, or the desire to know what your neighbor is
doing enough to see other and then entertainment. Is it entertainment or diversion? I don't know what
the third one is, but... Well, that raises a very good point and Bert Dreyfus's reference of the
internet I think is very well done, and it could lead us if we wanted to to Heidegger's effort to
pierce through that fallenness and that sense of immediacy that we get from the internet and the
answer, the name rather, of that piercing through the experience of being estranged from
that kind of estrangement of oneself is called dread and He intimates, he has a small section of that
and being in time and then he has a much longer and discursive treatment of it in the wonderful essay
called What Is Metaphysics, two years after being in time. Phenomenology, by the way, besides being
about meaning and significance is always about first-person experience of that. So it really puts the
burden on the one responsible for oneself, right? And we me, I. So he walks us through this wonderful,
wonderfully worked out a phenomenological analysis which he's inviting us to experience
of having your whole world, everything that gives meaning to you fall apart. It's not just that a
particular thing no longer makes sense, but it would be as if the internet crashed and all of
a sudden you have nothing to do, you have nothing but your own idleness and your insignificance.
What Heidegger describes dread as is the experience of the whole world filled with its meanings that
we're familiar with and we forget about ourselves as we move through this world, what if it were
suddenly to collapse? Satsha writes this up, of course, novelistically in nausea, noze, where he
describes Rokon-Tans, experience of his whole world collapsing. Heidegger does it briefly,
more succinctly and philosophically. When your whole world collapses, you realize that you are so much
a hermeneut, a maker of sense, but so finitely a maker of sense that sooner or later this is going
to die. It's an anticipation of one's death, the experience of dread is because there is an alternative
to making sense and that is to be dead. So in the experience of dread, you move right to that frontier
between nothingness, absurdity, your own death and making sense. And Heidegger says, the experience
is not one that pulls you into your death or encourages you to commit suicide or to fall into
nothingness. He actually says that the experience of dread of that thin line that separates you
from nothingness, that what I would call being ever at the point of death throws you back. The word
he uses is "obvising." It directs you back into the sense-making world. Now with the awareness
that there is no ground under your feet, you're doing this on your own. You alone are
leer-héspal-sab-la, the person who's responsible for it too, are the responsible.
And that's what he means also by the call of conscience. The experience of dread, the call of conscience,
are two different ways of talking about experiencing the internet, the world of meaning,
crashing and finding out that I am alone. I am dreadfully alone in the midst of all this. Do I have
the courage to accept that in an active decision or resolve, to accept that that's what all of
meaning is about, that I'm bound into a correlation that will finally just disappear when I die?
Well again, the one could say that the risk one takes by emphasizing so heavily on the word meaning
is that it creates a difficulty to understand this moment of awakening through the experience of
angst or dread, where I realize that every-all my meaning-making activity is fundamentally meaningless
or absurd. And that meaninglessness is the ground for the possibility of meaning, and therefore
being has to mean more than meaning. It has to mean my being at that edge of my finitude where
everything slips into a kind of nothingness, and I realize that I am the nullity of
all my projects and meaning-making is a highly circumscribed activity, and it does not exhaust
my potential- the potentiality of my being. Well, I would disagree, and I'm only trying to explain
not convince, explain why some of us see this a different way. Heidegger says in the 1925-26 course
that human beings are embedded in meaning. It's weakly. There is no way out of this when there is no
exit from that. Making sense of one's own life, that's what it means by having to be, having to,
it doesn't mean just having to tik-tok, tik-tok your way through life. It means actually to,
is there any meaning in my life? And it's true what you said as far as I can see,
that the real source of all meaning-making is absurdity. It's death. We're constantly pushing back
that moment, or it's pushing us back into sense, and that's our experience, but the moment of dread,
like the moment of conscience, the call of conscience, the moment of dread is experiencing yourself
as right at the point of death. I don't like the phrase being towards death, as if we're going down
a road in some day at the end, the road will end. No, it's about right here and now,
soon in German, can be right here and now at your death. And that death is the realm of absurdity,
because there will be no more sense to your life. There will be no more life. But I don't see,
as you, I think, do see this hermeneutical side as an add-on to existence. It is rather the
definition of existing. It's what making human beings different. Human being is the animal that
has logos, or that is possessed by logos, which is making sense. Well, again, can I ask,
well, can I put it in another way? Please, you're bringing up angst and the role that angst plays in
authenticity. Anxed, he describes as an emotion or a mood, and one of the original contributions,
as I see it in being in time in the history of philosophy, is that he, Heidegger actually proposes what
we might call a philosophy of moods, or he redeems, retrieves things like state of mind and mood,
and the emotional life as legitimate grounds for philosophical sense-making. So that, in what,
now I can go along with you that moods are always meaningful, but there's something in the
the fact of moods, which seems to escape the ordinary understanding of meaning as something that we
can reduce to conceptualization. So that's why I, and so what do you make of the Heidegger's
redemption of mood as a philosophical opening? Right. Both earlier and just now,
you seem to look upon meaning as what you say analytic philosophers deal with, or as you put it
now, meaning reducible to conceptuality. Well, that's not exactly what Heidegger means by meaning.
By meaning, he means making your way, unto vegs, zine, being on a way, a path, where things open up and
give you a world where that you can live in, that you can feel familiar with, rather than anything
like a conceptuality. He doesn't mean that at all by meaning, because he's not talking about it in
a, we would say, an on-tech sense of the mind that is generated by your brain as it were.
No, for him, it is a way of being. It's a way of being on your way opening up a territory of meaning.
But back to mood, mood is for him a schimunk, which means a resonance. It's like two tuning forks.
If you hit one, the other will start to resonate with it. So it's a familiarity with meaning where
both of them are resonating, both are on the same terms as it were. I would call that,
that correlation between these two resonating some things. I would call that
what heitogre calls, erreignus. It's the correlation whereby man needs meaning and can't exist without it.
That would be the second part of, that would be the first part of being in time, the unpublished part
being, meaning needs man. Meaning appears only with dasine in various configurations. So that
this resonance between the two, even uses a German word that says that, the word gagan schfung,
which means to go back and forth, resonate back and forth. That's the core of
thronus into meaning, is that we can't separate ourselves from that buzz as it were, which gives us
our meaning, our being, and makes meaning able to appear. If you consider, if I may with the
the question of being, I once asked a friend of mine who was holding a position similar to yours.
I asked him, when the meteorite hits and we're all dead, will there still be being?
And he answered, well of course there will be. There will be the moon, the sky, the earth itself.
We won't be there, but there will be things in existence. I would say no though.
Now I would say no, of course we would say no, because being is only in correlation with human being.
So now we've moved entirely away from the tradition of being as being out there, out there now
real as Lonergan puts it. Rather it's the importance of this to me, this thing that I'm holding to me,
that is what being is. It's my use the phrase, in my face. I can't escape that
relationality. And mood is the primary way in which we feel the significance of this.
When I raise a cup to my lip to drink some water, I don't even have to conceptualize anything.
I simply know how to do it. And that would be the primary instantiation of B-stimong,
namely that I'm in resonance with that world of meaning. So that's what I'm thrown into. I'm
thrown into a mood, which is a relationship to a whole world of meaning giving relationships that
surround me. And that's going to be gone, as you say. There will be no being when there's no
a dozen. There will be no meaning when there's no dozen. Well, in fact, Heidegger says in being in time that the laws of Newton were not true prior to Newton's discovery of them. They did not, in a certain sense, did not have a, they're being. It's only in their uncovering that they come into play. Do you
think that designs temporal constitution that makes it always ahead of itself and gives it a certain anticipatory access to its own death, which by which it means more than just demise, but means a certain kind of
nullity that is always operative in the my experience of being in time that this is what
discloses for the first time the intelligible world that gives us access to things. Yes, I do. I think you said that very well.
And in being in time, as you know, there's a step-by-step as it were reduction to the basis of everything. So you have being in the world
in the first part of being in time that gets defined as concern for meaning Zorga, Bezorgen, Thirzorga. Right. So from being in the world to care is it sometimes as translated to temporality ultimately as the meaning of care and of being in the world. So that temporality, that anticipation of death is the core of meaning. It is the ultimate source of meaning, one might say.
But I like to look at that word anticipation for a moment because as we have discussed many times, I think that the down the road up ahead death is the wrong way to look upon being on to death. The anticipation means to grab ahead of time.
So before I die, I can actually understand and be attuned to my mortality. And that's what the moment of dread is about. That's what the call of conscience is about.
conscience, the call of one's own nature as it were, conscience says to you in in German, Schöldig. Now, it's usually translated as guilty, your guilty for whatever. But another translation of a Schöldig is responsible for your responsible for your nothingness, your nullity as you put it earlier. You know, you are in the driver's seat when you confront this experience. What are you going to do with it? You can run from it.
You can pretend it's not there. You can be proofrock. You can just say no. I'm not up for that. Or you can embrace it, understand it and say even if only in momentary experiences, as you point out, authentic experiences where we lift our face out of the mud and realize what we are, even if only in renewable moments, that is the basis on which I'm going to live my life.
That would be the act of what he calls resolve and truth by anticipating one's death by understanding one's mortality. Death is death after which there's not a, but to anticipate it is to really feel resonate with the mortality that you are with the utter finitude of what you are.
Now, hide a girl of course stops there. We won't go into the discussion of how he learned to apply this or didn't apply this in his own decisions, etc. But at least he sets up that model for being a human being on the basis of which everything else can be built. That's why it calls it a fundamental ontology. It would be the basis for an ethics or a nice thatics or anything after that.
So we have a cluster of terms, angst, the call of conscience and guilt and they're all intimately interrelated.
Anx is something that has an awakening, it awakens me to the fact that there's not a stable foundation, there's not a positive foundation to exist in the, there's rather a nothingness and a destiny.
The no thing rather than a thing, the call of conscience is one that comes that I, if I heed the call of conscience, it's when's is also the wither, hide a girl says it's coming to me from where I will be going.
Namely this, a finitude that I am and it calls me, it awakens me also to my guilt in the German sense of debt as not just sinfulness, but the sense that I owe something.
I mean obligation. And do you believe that design can ever discharge that debt or is the most we can do when we resolve authentically on who we are that we can just acknowledge that this is a debt that is undist
still to be in debt as you have put it. And yeah, so I would, I would think that's the case indeed.
And Tom, can I ask just a follow up question because the interesting thing there in being in time is after he's talked about anticipatory resolve, he goes away from the individualistic emphasis of design and he starts speaking about the fact that design is also an air to a tradition.
And that through the moment of authenticity, you can authentically retrieve possibilities in your heritage and renew them or recasts them and reappropriate them in an authentic mode.
And then you become not just a temporal being, but you become a authentically historical agent.
And you belong not only to yourself, but now you belong also to your tribe, your community, your nation, your species and so forth.
That is a very important move, I think, towards the end of being in time that perhaps was could have been further developed but was not.
Right. Some of course would accuse him of developing it in a nefarious direction saying that the community is Germany and all of that.
The way that that retrieval takes place that you're describing where one goes into one's corporate past, one's individual past, it all depends what you're retrieving and brings it into something explosive, useful,
of futural is by as he says, passing it under the eyes of death, dramatic phrase, going into the teeth of death is another way that he says.
In other words, take all of those possibilities that are yours that are on your shoulder and choose among them which you want to live with in the light of your mortality, passing it under the eyes of death as it were.
And there's lots of things in our past that we would prefer to just let go and rightly so.
But if we're able to take possibilities and renew them in a finite mortal way, that would give one a sense of one's historicalness, connection with a past and one's ability to renew that in a future that is a mortal finite future.
But you would agree that there is no ethical prescriptions possible even when one embraces, resolutely, your own mortality does not provide standards for making choices that are right rather than wrong, which is troubling to a lot of moral philosophers when they look to hide a girl and say, well, on the one hand he's suggesting that there is a way of making authentic decisions in an authentic mode, but he will not tell us.
What kinds of things would be right and wrong to choose? Right. It's up to you to choose.
And I think that that failure to provide any kind of standards that would as it were channel the passionate authenticity that he calls one to.
He in section 74, he says, give up, shirking your duty, give up being lazy.
He has three or four categories there. But the fact that he couldn't work out some sort of ethics, even at a meta level, is probably the fault or the weakness of his philosophy.
In so far as it can't take the next step, it can even begin to think the next step and it put up no bulwarks for him in self in his choices in the future.
So yeah, I do think that that really with Heidegger, you do need a compliment.
I wouldn't, well, some people would say, a leavenossean compliment. I would look to more enlightenment compliments to that sense of equality of people and so on rather than.
Do you believe like some people believe that if a philosopher can make the kind of mistakes that Heidegger made after he wrote being in time, that it goes a long way in neutralizing the validity of the philosophy itself?
It's really quite astonishing that someone who could author being in time and be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, one of the greatest philosophers in the Western tradition, would have such a colossal failure of judgment when it came to historical events that he was embroiled with.
I remember the first day I arrived in five-borg in an attempt to visit with Heidegger. I had a wait for another year to visit him. I had a letter of introduction, but he was ill.
I met a former professor of mine who lived in five-borg and he said to me, "I will have nothing to do with someone who has been a Nazi."
I figured, "Wow, that was the first time I had been confronted with that because the American story put forth by Haarent was no that was just a passing mistake, an adventure on his part."
It is utterly astonishing to me that he could write such a brilliant text, calling one to responsibility, and then find himself not only in the political order, but as we now know through the letters to his wife, in his own personal life, to be a man who was entirely irresponsible.
These are the other people, not to mention his sense of German nationalism and what that led to. On the other hand, we do have this text that is written prior to his work.
We have plenty of texts written after his sympathy for Nazism waned in the later 30s, but we do, as in Montewell Faye, as pointed out in his very flawed book, Haidegger, the introduction of Nazism and to philosophy, a very flawed text.
We do have, he has discovered texts that show Haidegger to have basically been a million sort of the useful idiot of Hitler and Nazism, and it's just absolutely shocking.
And even later on, tries to locate it in 1936. He says, "My whole notion of historicity is what led me in this direction."
Well, Herbert Mark Uza read being in time and said, "On the contrary, it leads in the direction of sociality and a community of authentic human beings."
So, you know, the doctors are divided, doctors are skinned on tour, but we still have the paradox of a brilliant set of texts and a flawed man.
Do you think a lot of his subsequent thinking is so-called later thinking is a rethinking of the role that responsibility plays and what philosophies role is in assuming responsibility.
For example, the letter on humanism which he writes right after the end of the war, it's all about the relationship between thought and action, and he's making it very clear there that he thinks that thought is responsible to itself only as a form of thinking, not as something that can translate into action as we understand it politically and socially.
And there we get a very different sort of not a contrite heidiger per se, but a chastened one who now has disappeared of philosophies' relevance to the larger world.
I find his repentance if we can even call it that because he was very cherry about putting forth any apologies at all, but in his private correspondence with Yasper's, for example, he points out that he was utterly devastated by his own guilt over this thing he was so ashamed as he puts it.
I must say that in the later writings I don't find him coming to grips with his Nazi period at all, rather he comes to grips and meaningfully so with something like the spread of fallenness throughout civilization and culture in the form of technology and so on.
Personally I don't feel that he ever stepped up and took responsibility for the 30s.
Well I agree with that I, but at the same time if the 20th century did tell us something about philosophies, fecklessness, even when it becomes ethical philosophy or percriptive philosophy, it's fecklessness to really intervene in a decisive way into the course of history and perhaps there's something there about Heidegger's realization that thinking has to take care of itself and hope that in mysterious ways,
the relationship between thinking and action will work itself out in ways that we perhaps cannot even suspect being operative, but it's not going to be an immediate sort of connection.
Go back to phenomenology, there's the failure of phenomenology in Heidegger I would think. Phenomenology is about first person experience taking things concretely and Heidegger got more and more abstract as he moved back into the Greeks, etc.
And favored writing about poetry and so it was sort of like a retreat from the not the abstract but the concreteness that phenomenology wants to be about.
Yeah that's why I like to go back to the early stuff in the phenomenology. Yeah it's really alive there as Hannah Arendt says it was thought he thought came alive again.
Passionate thinking and doing it.
We've been speaking with Professor Thomas Chi and from the Department of Religious Studies on entitled opinions about Martin Heidegger.
If you would like to access our other shows please just log on to the website of the Department of French and Italian at Stanford and click on entitled opinions you can get almost about 100 shows now believe it or not Tom.
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So thanks for coming on.
You're welcome and we'll be with you next week.
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