Ontology, What is it Good For? (Being and Time, §3)

Our previous post was a members-only post where I shared my strategy for making sense of developments in the field of artificial intelligence. Today we are back onto our section-by-section reading of Being and Time.

Revisiting Ontology

Ontology, you will recall, asks the question of being; it asks about what exists (what kinds of entities are there) and how we can distinguish between the various kinds of entity that are in existence.

To do ontology, one has to notice and say things that might seem so obvious that they aren't worth mentioning. But that is what good philosophy does: it reveals the questions lurking in the obvious.

Everything that exists is an entity. I'm an entity, you're an entity. The appliances in my kitchen are entities. My cat is an entity. The gas in my car is an entity. The molecules of benzene in the gas are entities. Numbers are entities.

Every entity has a particular mode or way of being. Ontology asks if we can discern different classes or patterns among the various modes of being. Past ontologists have distinguished between:

• material entities (this number "1" right here on your screen) vs. non-material entities (the number 1 itself);
• entities that change (this particular democracy) vs. entities that do not change (the idea of democracy)
• finite, created entities (creatures of God) vs. infinite, creator entities (God)
• natural entities (a tree) vs. artificial entities (a wristwatch).
• causally determined entities (whose motions are completely determined by the laws of physics) vs. causally undetermined entities (that can responsibly act on their own without a prior cause)

Some ontologists have contended that there is only one way of being and that all such seeming distinctions are illusory. Philosophers call this kind of view "ontological monism." Hence, Heraclitus was gripped by the idea that fire (and its constant change) is the fundamental material of reality.

Heidegger aims to reinvent ontology and revitalize philosophy. He is convinced that all of the traditional approaches to ontology have grown stale and stultifying.

The first step in Heidegger's reinvention of ontology is to draw our attention to features of our experience that we usually overlook. He aims to reveal new fundamental distinctions in the realm of being. Although Heidegger does not lay this out in Being and Time §3, we have already come across the three main modes of being he distinguishes in the book:

• Entities that are "ready-to-hand," such as tools and kitchen appliances who have a way of being we encounter when we are not thinking theoretically about them but just using them in the flow of familiarity.
• Entities that are "present-at-hand," such as molecules of benzene, who have a way of being we encounter when we are holding back from engagement in our familiar world and regarding entities as objects of measurement and knowledge.
• Entities that are perplexed by the fact that they are entities. These entities ask the Question of Being. Heidegger calls them Dasein. That's us.

Ontology and Phenomenology

Phenomenology is Heidegger's name for the method he employs to reveal overlooked features of our experience, and their underlying enabling structures. No philosopher before Heidegger noticed the significance of our remarkable ability for getting around in our familiar world without having to think about it. This familiarity is hard to notice because it only works when we don't explicitly pay attention to it.

Imagine you need to explain to someone all the individual steps involved in making one of your "go-to" meals, one you can make in your sleep. You might need to actually go through the motions of making the meal so you can pay direct attention to the steps while breaking the process down into a recipe. But this will be of an entirely different kind of experience than what happens when you make the meal for yourself in the flow of familiarity.

So we need a special observational method (phenomenology) to help us notice dimensions of our experience that we normally don't notice. These overlooked or hidden dimensions of our engagement with entities can reveal new modes of being that previous ontologists have missed (for example, readiness-to-hand).

This is why Heidegger says later that "only as phenomenology is ontology possible." That is, only through this special method of careful attention to our experience (of entities) can we access the otherwise hidden modes of being of those entities.

Why Do Ontology?

What's the point of doing this all of this ontology? Section 3 of Being and Time offers some (but not all) of Heidegger's justifications for the undertaking. Heidegger's stated aims here are wildly ambitious. They connect up with his characterization of his philosophy in §4 as providing a "fundamental ontology."

The following discussion is a little bit "out there." It is the kind of argument, strangely placed in the "Introduction," that you can really only grasp after reading most of the book. Happily, it is not necessary to absorb what is going on here to get deeper into Heidegger's project. Indeed, when Hubert Dreyfus taught Being and Time for decades at UC Berkeley, he saved these introductory sections for the end of the semester.

So, what's supposedly so fundamental about Heidegger's ontology? Digging into this will also explain the title §3: "The Ontological Priority of the Question of Being." What kind of priority is ontological priority?

What is "Fundamental Ontology"?

Heidegger contends that the Question of Being is necessary to secure the foundations of all other modes of systematic inquiry, those areas of inquiry that aspire for the label of "science." Heidegger mentions mathematics, physics, biology, the social sciences (such as history, psychology, anthropology), and theology.

Any science must delineate its subject matter—the particular region of entities it studies. For Heidegger, this is an ontological question, as it requires distinguishing modes of being. Physics presupposes an understanding of physical being, biology of living being, history of historical being.

That is, each of these above-mentioned sciences presupposes its own "regional" or "small scale" ontology. Physics presupposes some understanding of the being of the physical. Biology presupposes some understanding of the being of life. History presupposes some understanding of the being of the historical. Any such region of entities that becomes relevant for systematic study must also show up somehow in human experience and gain traction in human understanding.

But how do we know these "regional ontologies" of the particular sciences are legitimate? How do we know they are operating with a workable conception of what it means to be, in general? It looks like we need some overarching study of the meaning of being as such to evaluate and secure these smaller-scale ontologies.

Of course, such an overarching study of the meaning of being in general ("The Question of Being") is what Heidegger claims to be offering in Being and Time. You need to get this straight, Heidegger contends, before you can know what you are talking about when you distinguish among physical being, living being, and historical being.

Clarifying the structures of experience that enable Dasein to encounter entities of different kinds (which is what pursuing the "question of being" and the ontology of Dasein are supposed to do) will enable us to ground the distinctions between these different regional ontologies.

Thus, the ontology Heidegger presents in Being and Time is supposed to be foundational for these other smaller-scale ontologies: it will be fundamental ontology.

Science and Ontology

Heidegger's ambition to make his brand of ontology reign over all other fields of systematic inquiry partakes in the pretensions of old-fashioned, traditional metaphysics. For example, Immanuel Kant imagined philosophy as the "Queen of the Sciences" in his Critique of Pure Reason, published in the 1780s. (This is the reference for the prompt that generated the image at the top of this post.)

In the period following Being and Time, Heidegger would give up on this grand foundational aspiration—the idea that there could be one unified account of the meaning of being to ground all other sciences—recognizing it as a holdover from the philosophical tradition he was committed to radically transforming.

Heidegger did not, however, ever give up on the crucial point that all scientific inquiry involves a some experience of entities and thus certain ontological presuppositions.

At the level of the basic concepts and experiences that define a field of scientific inquiry, ontological and metaphysical issues are bound to arise.

Hence, early theories in biology took for granted a "vitalist" ontology of life—the view that characteristics of life depend on a special, non-physical vital force. Researchers assumed, as a matter of ontological principle, that organic compounds could only be produced by something with vital force. Today, a mechanistic ontology of life is assumed, even though, within these parameters, there is still no universally accepted definition of what life is.

As another example, when the fields of AI and cognitive science began, as Hubert Dreyfus pointed out, researchers simply took for granted a certain ontology of the mind (that it functions like a computer, processing symbols according to rules) and of reality itself (that it consists of independent facts that can be represented in symbols).

Ontical vs. Ontological

There is one final important detail from §3 we need to get on the table before moving on.

The sciences mentioned above all deal with entities. Heidegger sometimes calls them "ontical" sciences. Ontical is an important technical term that Heidegger introduces here in §3.

"Ontical" pertains to entities, while "ontological" pertains to the being of entities.

Heidegger's investigation deals with the being of these entities. Heidegger thus claims that he is engaged in an "ontological" science.

What questions, thoughts, observations, or perplexities does all of this bring up for you? Let me know in the comments or by sending me a message!

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