Being and Time and After

Heidegger's first approach, in his Being and Time of 1927, was radical and novel in one sense, conventionally philosophical in another. Even as he reacted against his mentor, Husserl, he took over not only Husserl's phenomenological method but also something of Husserl's sense of cultural priorities. At this point Heidegger assumed that some sort of universal phenomenological science was possible—and what was most needed.^[14]

Earlier approaches to the problem of being had been too abstract, so Heidegger adapted Husserl's phenomenological method in an effort to begin with concrete human existence instead. By attending without presuppositions to the "things themselves," to naked human experience, it should be possible to identify the pervasive categories or structures "underlying" a variety of experiences, grounding them and making them possible.^[15] Such structures lie on the "ontological" level, beneath the level of phenomenological or merely "ontical" description of what is in fact the case. So Heidegger's inquiry in Being and Time was still "transcendental" in seeking to specify the conditions necessary for such and such to be possible.

But Heidegger started with a radically different set of phenomena, or experiences, than Husserl had. Indeed, he reacted strongly against Husserl's theoretical, ahistorical view of consciousness. Our natural viewpoint is not as an observer but as "being-there," Da-sein , thrown into some particular situation. Knowing is not transcendent and detached but embedded and fundamentally practical.

To identify the transcendent conditions or underlying structures was to encounter especially the temporal character of human being and the instrumental character of human activity. In adapting Husserl's phenomenology, Heidegger was seeking to develop a rigorous philosophy of human being in its historicity, a fundamental ontology wound around the inherent finitude and particularity of human existence. In a sense, Heidegger was offering a painstaking analysis of some of what Nietzsche and Croce had simply taken for granted. No longer could we think things through by starting with some sovereign ego or transcendent consciousness, or with the a priori subjectivity of the subject. Human being is fundamentally being-there, Dasein, thrown into some historically specific situation and projected, with it, into the future.

Although Heidegger hoped to proceed from this fundamental ontology to a

[14] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. John Macquerrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962; orig. German ed. 1927). See also Heidegger, "My Way to Phenomenology," and John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 83.

[15] Karsten Harries, "Fundamental Ontology and the Search for Man's Place," in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays , ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 66. See also John M. Anderson, Introduction to Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, Torchbook, 1969), 15–16.

new understanding of being, his analysis in Being and Time operated especially on the level of individual experience. We as individuals all find ourselves within some historically specific situation, which affords the horizon from within which we live our lives. And we are never complete but always projected into the future. Yet for the individual, the future is not endlessly open but finite, to be closed by death.

Because we are temporal and finite, our choices are for keeps. We find ourselves to be creatures who care for the world, for others, and for our own place in the scheme of things. But we are also subject to the anxiety that Heidegger, in Being and Time , found to be the core human experience. Such anxiety is not fear of anything in particular but simply the reverse side of care, our involvement with and concern for the world.^[16] The immediate imperative that followed from this overall understanding of the human situation was authenticity on the individual level. Authentic existence grasps its own historical specificity, projection, and finitude and takes responsibility for itself in light of that understanding.

The categories like anxiety, authenticity, and commitment that emerged from Heidegger's analysis in Being and Time became popular during the forties and fifties with French existentialism, which resulted especially from Jean-Paul Sartre's way of adapting Heidegger. But Heidegger's subsequent career made it clear that the existentialist reading obscured his deepest purposes.^[17] Care remained fundamental, but as Heidegger moved beyond Being and Time , he no longer emphasized the personal anxiety that attends being toward death.

Although his phenomenological analysis of being-there constituted an important break in Western thought, Heidegger in Being and Time was still doing philosophy in a traditional, suprahistorical mode. His manner of questioning was "transcendental," in the sense that he was approaching the matter at hand as a detached observer, from the outside. Even if we fully embrace historicity, accepting it as constitutive of human being, we can specify an ontology sufficiently fundamental to get at the ahistorical structures of human being.

But even as he was writing Being and Time , Heidegger came to sense that a new ontology was not the cultural priority. He had shown that human being in general is being-there, but what mattered was that we are here , in this historically specific situation of darkening and loss. To specify a fundamental ontology, however rigorously, was still too abstract to respond to the experience of loss that had stimulated his quest from the beginning—and that even pervaded Being and Time . Rather than a new kind of philosophy, a new way of approaching history seemed necessary. Moreover, much like Croce at the end

[16] See Heidegger, Being and Time , secs. 40, 53, and 62, on anxiety; and secs. 39–44 and 65 on care. See especially sec. 44 on truth.

[17] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics , trans. David E. Linge (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1977), 124–125, 139–141, is especially good on the sense in which emphasis on the existentialist element in Being and Time concealed Heidegger's real aims.

of his Philosophy of the Practical , Heidegger recognized that there will be something historically specific even about any determination of the structures. Thus the reflexivity that forced Heidegger to ask: why these accents now ?^[18]

Much has been written about the Kehre , or "turn," in Heidegger's thinking by the later 1930s, and though there is disagreement about the sharpness of the break, there is general agreement about the new direction it involved.^[19] For Gianni Vattimo, for example, it was to move from a plain on which there is only "man," or finite, thrown, individual human being, to a plain on which there is principally being. And the "being" at issue was somehow historical, or coterminous with its history. For Zimmerman, Heidegger turned from the structure of Dasein to focus on the historical play of being itself. Thus authenticity, for example, pertained not to individuals and their decisions but to entire historical epochs and cultures.^[20]

The new imperative was to consider "the history of being"—and this implied two levels of analysis. On the one hand, Heidegger wanted to probe the general sense in which being is historical and to consider what is necessary for that to be the case. On the other hand, he was concerned with the particular history in which we ourselves are caught up—the history that had resulted, so far, in this . In Heidegger's move beyond Being and Time , the general or theoretical concern came together with the more immediate, even personal concern; examination of being as historical converged with examination of the present situation of forgetting and loss that had resulted from our particular history.