Heidegger's Being & Time

the reason I ask what it means to be at home in Ithaca is because Odysseus's homecoming is not fully achieved once he returns remember the visit to the underworld in book 11 of the Odyssey there Odysseus had been told by the prophet Tiresias set once he makes it back to Ithaca he must take off on yet another journey with an oar on his shoulder he must travel to a saltless land where people know nothing of the sea says-- Tiresias quote when another Wayfarer 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 deaths 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 oar again and leave only this time your oar 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 Mis recognized or misidentified in that region of unlike miss far from home you must plant it in the earth the ground of your mortality and thereby come to terms with your death only when Odysseus has undertaken the 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 homelands that homers fate will 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 Highfill Asif II analyzes the kind of being that belongs to Odysseus insofar as he is resourceful insofar as he is mortal insofar 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 a nor nor a winnowing fan but a marker of our being unto death in the mode of anticipatory resolved being in time is a book that undertakes that second journey dislodging the ore from its familiar context and following its hero who goes by the name of design 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 designs 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 Sheehan a Wayfarer 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 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 you've translated yourself and the in time well chronologically it's the last course that Heidegger taught before he took off for his mountain cabin - right 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 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 the most important book that he published really in his lifetime and a real classic of course so this logic is a is a first draft of being in time as any sense it's a draft 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 its ladder and in his last third where he deals with Conte but a very rewarding one I would say that it's divided into three sections one is Heidegger's very close reading of psychologists and his critique of that what a psychologist and psychologism is the reduction of all the rules of logic to just the workings of the mind so though if we could answer the Morpher and enter pelagic lis study what the mind is doing in when it thinks we would have all of the laws of logic so they're no longer universal they're no longer free of human reasoning they are simply dependent upon human reasoning itself so as critique of that and then in its second part a very fruitful part I think you have an analysis of logos that's the word that underlies logic the question of truth and analysis of logos as the human beings a priori need to make sense of things Lagos 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 Meeny by reference that is say ilithyia itself by reference to Aristotle's metaphysics book theta chapter 10 so we've got psychologism we've got Lagos and aleisea 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 he does this by a close and I must say difficult analysis of contents gamut ISM which turned out to be the first draft of his 1929 book on Kant's and in the whole book he anticipates what he would later say namely that time is only a stand-in for Alethea 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 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 Deutz on kite as he calls it Peduto Gore's in 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 that I think crucial to the text we can talk about how philosophy is these days going back to this determination but first on psychologism when he that first part of logic when he was dealing with psychologism he's taking up I presume who Cyril zone polemic against psychologism that in a certain sense his phenomenology is thought 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 cusco sara lee in 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 Freiburg for a long conversation one afternoon in April of 1971 and the topic that we mostly discussed we discussed phenomenology and Aristotle phenomenology , 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 categorical intuition so surles they may know cosa was main book the first volume of which was a literal Stratego psychologism as you mentioned and he emphasized that phenomenology is not about things out there that's what he calls Asya 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 phenomena that is to say things that have meaningfully appeared to us and that we can engage with so as you made clear phenomenology is exclusively about meaning sense significance what Heidegger calls unreason height a German word that means presence to you in a meaning full 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 the the last word on meaning but Heidegger as you know always uses the word being accepted in his later years he sort of came out and said and I quote I no longer use the word being gladly or Garin cuz 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 a tightness 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 as philosophically but the heavy emphasis you put on the word meaning and I know your work and your interpretation of Heidegger corpus as a whole that went by privileges that one word you gave a number of other possible words you said interface correlation you said the way things appear to you the sense that they have when we use the word meaning there are connotations to that that there is 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 for the moment when we're talking about phenomenology with the fact that things appear to us in ways that are accessible and 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 and as phenomena well except that Heidegger insisted in being in time on the word Bedoya Tom Kyte which means meaningfulness the first name for being in Heidegger's work is world the meaning giving context as he calls it the Bedoya Tom Kyte so he did not shy away from discussing being in terms of meaning on these and high presents to accessibility as you say but he does use the word betoid Tom Kyte but oi Tong call through his analysis of world in being in time and he makes it clear that the central rush we say determination of human being of design is being in the world being in meaning in Bedoya Tom Kyte so is that way a fellow is world reducible to the meaning yes I mean he actually defines world as the structure of world is Bedoya Tom Kyte what goes on inside of world is Bedoya Tom 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 Xin but don't in this case it's in the the word he uses so really what he's saying is that the human being is a her Manute that's not an add-on to some sort of plain old existence our existence is the obligation the need the thrown this into making sense of things in fact the first meaning of the word aleisea is meaning it's not truth you know exciteder points out so if we're if we're embedded in hermeneutics if he is using the word Bedoya Tom Kyte I think that we can actually retrieve from this plain old common white bread word being we can entry we can retrieve the urgency that Heidegger feels that 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 dust beloit Zama 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 gum Weston says no we want to have him on this side of phenomenology as he and self insisted and one way of constantly recognizing that is to say that being is being in your face being is meaning well okay well we're not going to resolve that only because of the connotations of the word meaning associated for me very much with analytic philosophy with such 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 what the great excitement of being in time we said it was such an existentialist sort of treatise and he didn't call it being an meaning he called it being in time and time is something which would would you agree that it would be the 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 throwing us into the world and being ahead of oneself and self transcendence and being unto 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 are a number of questions and implicit questions in what you said so maybe we should start by asking why even called his main work being and time and that's where the 1925 six-course logic the question of truth comes in because the whole last third of it through an analysis of this gamut ISM 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 augustine 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 Agustin and latinas would agree with that but time occurs only what 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 the logic book that I translated time is only a preliminary way of saying aleisea openness unclosed 'no squid something that is the primary determinant of human being it's the D existential it determines human being which is that we're constantly embedded in the me making process which is not a subjects of sort of casting of meaning over things that's rather an interplay a correlation between meanie and man when I use man of course I use it in the generic sense not not the male/female sense I'm using it as translating on purpose in Greek human being so his motto in being in time is without being no design own a design kind design but what he's really talking about is the interface of human being and meaning own as in kind DAWs in without without dodging there is no place for meaning to occur this is clear throughout the 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 in the first part he there's a distinction between design in its inauthentic modes of being and then in the second division under the the authentic mode of being of design and I presume that meaning-making is pertains to both modes sure 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 design that there are three particular modes being of design facticity existential 'ti and fallenness can we can you very briefly go through what these three determinations of design amount to effect starting with facticity right he gives different names to the Triads one would be throne projected 'no sand being meaningfully present to design by so what if we take it in first of all in the take facticity in the sense of one's throne this as 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 existential 'he's just like that and the most basic existential of them all is designs throne s all the others derive from it even designs elec function of making sense of things so the basic existential characteristic is called throne this eventually it will be called facticity but throne this into what he says thrown us into the world the world of birds on kite the world of making sense and what he means from the very first page of being in time is you have to be yourself the question becomes what is this self the self is hermeneutical the self is intrinsically sense-making so i have to be ahem in use i have to make sense of things is the first characteristic of human being so when he thrown this is a being thrown into a world without my having chosen to be in the world and it's I'm thrown as as is also projected beyond myself is that the dimension of existential 'ti or the you know the career thrown in insofar as you you're thrown with a past but also you're out ahead of yourself at reaching out into your future to a future sure and then you are also then present among other people as well as things and you're kind of falling in and among things in a way that you might be making sense of them but in a in a fallen mode by just using them instrumentally and how does this projection what how does projection relate to thrown this 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 thrown this in projection facticity and existential tea put them together as thrown openness openness referring to one's elec function of making sense of things but openness really means the opposite of the Greek closure so it's a sign of Cinna to dove fragility of the need to strive hence the 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 understands exactly what the thing is no we have to we have the labor of the concept in Hegel 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 disjunction at the core of human sense-making is what will eventually be called temporality human openness as such but when we're thrown into projective Ness we're thrown into 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 following this because we're almost speaking about a design in this authentic mode or something that's not necessarily related to its inauthenticity but Heidegger makes it clear time and again that for the most part design exists in authentic in authentically 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 da in a tie and I'm with things it's always important to remember that the issue of being with E is not simply a physical coming up against but rather a relationship of meaningfulness in relation to things to people to myself etc Heidegger 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 one self and other things other people as just out there as to be kind of bumped up against that would be an inauthentic word way because one's not reflecting upon or bringing to bear one 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 throne as disjunctive as finite as going to die man 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 this analysis of authenticity because to begin with we are authentic only in privileged moments writer we 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 were 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 estranged himself within the familiar and he's going to have to undertake this journey into the strange land and his or 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 but he's taken full possession he's repossessed that world of his now inauthenticity I the reason I'm very intrigued by especially these days is because I think it's become so much more of a in inevitable reality in our own world than it was even when Heidegger was writing bemoaning masked society and the dust man and so forth he speaks about three different deep determinations for inauthenticity idle chatter is it no he calls it idle curiosity gossip and is it diversion or entertainment there's a 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 Burt Dreyfus said once at a conference here at Stanford that the the internet and the idle curiosity is that it 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 seem to be prescient when he said that idle curiosity is one motive dominant motive in authenticity gossip or the desire to know what your neighbor is doing enough to the other and then entertainment I tonight is it entertainment or diversion I don't know what the third one is but well that raises and that's a very good point and Burke Dreyfus is a 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 that sense of immediacy that we get from the internet and the answered 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 as 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 significant is always about first-person experience of that so it really puts the burden on the one responsible for oneself right namely 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 Samsa writes this up of course novelistic aliy in nausea than those day where he describes your hometowns 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 her Manute 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 when the experience of dread you 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 advising 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 little a small table the person who's responsible for to 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 frontways 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 act of 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 if I'd let that mean my my 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 we clue 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 being having to be having to doesn't mean just having to tick-tock-tick-tock your way through life it means actually to is there any meaning in my life and the it's true what you said as far as I can see and that the real source of all meaning making is absurdity its death we're constantly pushing back that moment or it's pushing us back into 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 be 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 and some day at the end the road will end no it's about right here and now some in German can mean 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 get I think do see this hermeneutical sight as an add-on to existence it is rather the definition of existing it's what making human beings different the human being is the animal that has log offs or that is compose s by logiss which is making sense well again can I ask yeah but can I put it in another way please you're bringing up angst and the role that angst plays in authenticity angst 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 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 it now I I can go along with you that moods are always meaningful but there's something in 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 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 conceptual tea well that's not exactly what Heidegger means by meaning by meaning he means making your way into vagues design being on a way a path where things open up and give you a world where that you can live in that you could be familiar with rather than anything like a conceptuality doesn't mean that at all by meaning because he's not talking about it in a we would say an antic sense of you know the mind that is generated by your brain as it were you know 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 dim monk 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 something's I would call that what Heidegger calls a tightness it's the correlation whereby man needs meaning and can't exist without it that would be the 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 design and various configurations so that this resonance between the two the even uses a German word that says that the word Gaghan Shuang which means to go back and forth resonate back and forth that's the core of thoroughness 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 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 were 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 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 and out there now real as Lonnegan 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 I use the phrase in my face it 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 the stim bunk namely that I'm in resonance with that 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 Daza and there will be no meaning when there's no design 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 there being it's only in their uncovering that they come into into play do you think that designs temporal Constitution that makes it always ahead of itself and hat gives it a certain anticipatory access to its own death which by which means more than just demise but means a certain kind of nullity that is always operative in the 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 meanings or Keveza organs fears Olga right so from being in from being in the world to care as it sometimes it is 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've discussed many times I think that the down the road up ahead death is the wrong way to look upon being unto 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 sure dig now it's usually translated as guilty you're guilty for whatever but another translation of a short dig is responsible for you're responsible for your nothingness your nullity as you put it earlier you know you are the 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 prufrock 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 nada but to anticipate it is to really feel resonate with the mortality that you are with the utter finitude of what you are now Heidegger 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 as way calls it a fundamental ontology it would be the basis for an ethics or an aesthetics or anything after that so we have a cluster of terms banks the call of conscience and guilt and they're all intimately interrelated angst is something that has an awakening made awakens me to the fact that I there is not a stable foundation there's not a positive foundation to existence with others rather rather a nothingness and destiny the know thing rather than a thing the call of conscience is one that comes that I if I heed the call of conscience its whence is also the whither Heidegger says it's coming to me from where I will be going namely this 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 undischarged ball in full in full awareness right and i would say a responsibility that even when you choose not to notice and not to live with is nonetheless your responsibility to choose to not be responsible as still to be responsible still to be in debt as of as you have have put it and yes so i would i would think that's the case indeed and and Tom can I ask just a follow-up question because the the interesting thing there and being in time is after he's talked about anticipate ory resolved he he goes away from the individualistic emphasis of design and he starts speaking about the fact that design is also an heir to a tradition and that through the moment of authenticity you can authentically retrieve possibilities in your heritage and renew them or recast them and reappropriation 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 your tribe your community your nation your you know your 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 right 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 in to something explosive useful Futura is by as he says passing it under the eyes of death dramatic phrase you know 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 we 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 historic Syst auric ness one connection with a past and one's ability to renew that in a future that is immortal finite future but you would agree that there is no ethical prescriptions possible even when in one embraces resolutely you know 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 Heidegger 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 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 you know he has three or four categories there but the fact that he couldn't a work out some sort of ethics even at a meta level is probably the fault of the the weakness of his philosophy insofar as it can't take the next step it can't even begin to take the next step and it Pro got put up no bulwarks for him himself 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 eleven Ossian compliment I would look to more enlightenment compliments to that a 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 how that that it goes a long way neutralizing the validity of the philosophy itself I mean it's really actually 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 right I remember the first day I arrived in Freiburg in in an attempt to visit with Hydra out of 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 Freiburg and he said to me I will have nothing to do with someone who has been a Nazi I figured whoa that was the first time I've been confronted with that because the American story put forth by ha audience was no that was just a passing mistake kind of a adventure on his part it is utterly astonishing to me that he could write such a brilliant text calling one two responsibilities 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 that is written prior to his work we have plenty of text written after his sympathy for Nazism waned in the later 30s but we do as in mine UFA has pointed out in his very flawed book Heidegger the introduction of Nazism into philosophy a very flawed text we do have he has discovered texts that show Heidegger to have basically been a minyan 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 traces my whole notion of historicity is what led me in this direction well Herbert Marcuse a read being in time and said on the contrary leads in the direction of sociality and a community of authentic human beings so you know if the doctors are divided doctores skin don't or 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 other letter on humanism which he writes right after the end of the war it's all about the relationship between thought action and he's making it very clear 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 Heidegger per se but a chastened one who now has despaired of philosophies relevance to the larger world I 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 hospice 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 but 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 but personally I don't feel that he ever stepped up and took responsibility for the 30s yeah well I agree with that I I but at the same time the 20th century did tell us something about the philosophies fecklessness even when it becomes ethical philosophy or prescriptive philosophy is 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 and going back to phenomenology there's the failure of phenomenology and Heidegger I would think phenomenology is about first-person experience taking things concretely and Heidegger got more and more abstract as he moves 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 Han Arendt's as it was thought he thought came alive in a passionate thinking and yeah we've been speaking with Professor Thomas Sheehan 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 a hundred shows now believe it or not Tom it's been about 70 shows between the last time you were on and now congrat are all available either on iTunes or on our web page so thanks for coming on you're welcome

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 114,181

Rating: 4.836452 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Dasein, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Husserl, Being, Authenticity, Death, Sartre, Meaningless, Nothingness, Sein und Zeit, Metaphysics, Ontology, Existential Phenomenology, Meaning of Being, Heideggerian, German Philosophy

Id: _MNC5iWVne0

Length: 56min 13sec (3373 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 14 2017