“Who’s Asking?” - Spelling out the Question of Being (Being and Time, §2)

Our previous post was a members-only post exploring the connections between Heidegger's understanding of the "ready-to-hand" and the Dreyfus Skill Model. Today we are back on track with our section-by-section reading of Being and Time.

Review

Heidegger aims to reawaken our wonder and perplexity about the strange fact of existence. He wants this perplexity to motivate a fresh look at the fundamental question of being: What is being? What does it mean to be? The old answers to such questions have grown stale and stultifying.

In the previous Heidegger posts (e.g., here), we started to notice our familiarity with the everyday world. We have a know-how for dealing with and distinguishing between various kinds of familiar entities: ourselves, other people, knives, forks, toast, avocados, cats, numbers, and so on. We also easily understand different uses of the verb to be: “It was her,” “I am the drummer,” “The toast is gone,” “The cat is in the kitchen,” and “2 plus 5 is 7.”

This know-how is brimming with ontological significance. With this know-how, Heidegger says, entities “get provisionally articulated in their being.”

Even so, our everyday know-how is not yet an explicit theory of being. Heidegger refers to it as an “everyday, average understanding of being.” This understanding quietly guides us in our interactions with the various kinds of entities we encounter, just as our familiarity with our home kitchen enables us to get around in it and make toast without needing to think about it.

In Heidegger’s picture, philosophers need to draw upon and articulate this “average understanding of being” whenever they set out to produce a formal theory of being—an ontology. This is the project of Being and Time itself.

We understand and relate to being, first of all, in dealing with the things in our familiar, everyday world. Being itself, however, is not a thing, and it is not separate from the world. It resides neither in heaven nor in a realm of pure ideas. Philosophers and theologians before Heidegger, however, conceptualized being as some kind of special, out-of-this-world thing.

In sum, for Heidegger, being is always the being of an entity, even though being is not itself an entity. These observations can start to make you dizzy, but the point is pretty simple: you are an entity with a certain way of being, as are your cat, your toaster, and your cutlery. What are we talking about when we talk about being? An entity's way of being. Grasp this, and you are on the way to being a novice ontologist.

Questioning the Questioner

If being is always the being of an entity, then to investigate being, we need to investigate entities. But where is a budding ontologist supposed to start?

Which entities should be the primary target of our investigation? And how do we access their way of being? Is an entity's way of being something we can just see? Do we need a microscope? Do we need to meditate?

Scientific scrutiny and meditative detachment both fail to give us access to the scope of being that we experience in our everyday lives. They both fail to capture that "everyday familiarity" we keep talking about.

Heidegger also makes a decisive stand about which particular entity should be the primary target of our ontological investigation: ourselves.

After all, we are the strange entities that bother to inquire into being. We are the entities who get bothered by being. Being gets to us. We don’t do ontology just because it’s fun! Some of us, somehow, can’t help it.

Our tendency to inquire into being is continuous with our tendency to wonder whether life has any meaning.

In any case, inquiring into the meaning of being is one of our peculiar possibilities. Heidegger sees this as a strong clue that our own way of being is the right starting point for an ontological inquiry.

In his words: “Thus, to work out the question of being adequately, we must make an entity—the inquirer—transparent in its own being. The very asking of this question is [this] entity’s mode of being.”

Introducing... Us?

Heidegger refuses to refer to us as human beings, Homo sapiens, subjects, or even persons. As we will see, he is convinced that all such traditional terms are bogged down in bad ontological baggage. So, he proposes to refer to us as Dasein. This is one of the typical German words for “existence,” but Heidegger uses it as a technical term. We leave it untranslated.

Dasein is made up of two components: Da, meaning “there,” and Sein, meaning "being." So Dasein means “being-there.” Being where? In the familiar world. In the kitchen making toast. In the workshop hammering nails. Heidegger makes a big deal out of this in future sections, where he also drives home the utter groundlessness and contingency of the familiar. It all hangs by a thread.

At this point, the term Dasein is a placeholder. It refers to that entity (namely, us) that gets weirded out by existing and poses the question of being.

The only other ontological characteristic of Dasein that we have on the table so far is its aforementioned "everyday familiarity" or “average understanding" of being. Answering the question of being will involve tapping into Dasein's average understanding of being.

Who knew that the humble act of making toast could be so slathered with ontological significance?

We are now complete with Being and Time, section 2.

What questions, thoughts, 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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