Notes on Heidegger Part 1

Ever looked up into the starry sky on a clear night? The effect can be jarring. The sight of countless burning balls of matter occupying infinite space soon forces us to begin considering our own finitude. Our world, Earth, is just a tiny rock circling one of these stars. We occupy but a small fragment of Earth, which itself is less than a blip in the history of the universe. Our whole lives; past, present and future; begin to seem like a fleeting moment.

Beyond that, we may begin to understand ourselves as an amalgamation of atomic particles, somehow formed into a human being. Somehow, from within these particles, a mind exists. Which, in turn, is able to grapple with its own insignificance.

Socrates would have been satisfied with such a view. His famous adage, "the unexamined life is not worth living" calls on us to ponder the limitations of our existence from the perspective of disinterested objectivity. Socrates thought this made him the smartest man in Athens, because while others let themselves be consumed with everyday trivialities, confident that they had mastered their own worlds, Socrates maintained that what they had mastered was not really much at all, and the true significance of the world was so infinitely vast that the wisest approach was to celebrate what you didn't--or couldn't-- know.

For Heidegger, this kind of approach to existence is a fundamentally flawed one. We do not enter into the world as disinterested beings, groping for an objective understanding of our situation. The starting point for Heidegger instead is the human being engaged and occupied by the world around them. Positing ourselves as atomic particles, existing on a rock in infinite space is a perfectly valid scientific view, but it should not be where philosophy begins. Rather, it entails a stepping back, out of our own active and engaged lives. The establishment of some kind of separation between what we are most of the time and the ponderous attitude of the scientific mind.

The more fundamental question for Heidegger, before we start thinking about how we contemplate the world from the sort of God's eye view that this entails, is the view we start with, as active beings thrown into our worlds and engaged with them throughout our life. Heidegger called this view the view of Dasein, the point of view of a being who is in the world, not standing apart from it.

So what does Dasein do? Dasein exists in a world of possibilities. The objects Dasein encounters are not inanimate clumps of matter, rather they are embodied possibilities for action, the other humans Dasein encounters are not organic lifeforms, rather they are other Daseins, with possibilities all of their own. Dasein is thus faced with choices. Dasein must also make these choices from the situation it finds itself in. The situation, for Dasein, opens out like a field of possibility rather than a plane of objects.

There also comes the point when Dasein must come to terms with itself. For the most part, we live our lives engaged with the world around us, making use of them as tools of our everyday existence and never stopping to contemplate. Sometimes, however, this breaks down. Maybe our tools don't fit the task at hand, maybe the things aren't as clear as they seem. This forces Dasein to confont itself and understand its role as Dasein. In the moments when Dasein understands itself, it is forced to make choices about its own actions. It is forced to make choices about its own choices.

Connected to this is Heidegger's consideration of authenticity and inauthenticity. We are thrown, for the most part, into inauthentic lives, that is, we make our choices based on what fits convention and social expectation. When Dasein confronts itself however, the potential opens up to make a choice based not on what is socially acceptable but on what is true to our own being. In effect, we can choose to make authentic choices.

This is why the night sky is so jarring. Not because it forces us to confront our Dasein, on the contrary, it separates us from our Dasein. In our contemplation, we leave our embodied everyday lives, our world as possibilities and our choices for action, and begin to understand the world as inert and objective, determined by the movements of atoms and the laws of physics. This kind of view is perfectly valid, Heidegger would say, but it takes place after the fact of our everyday being. It is the exception rather than the rule. A more fundamental understanding of our existence cannot start from this point, rather it begins where we are aware of it least. Where we a doing without even thinking. This is the basis of our lives.