HUHI 7330
Fall 2003
Prof. Bambach
J.P. Fassler
The Noiseless, Patient Spider as Da-sein
Heidegger set out in Being and Time to overturn the subject-object duality of Descartes, whose foundational influence on modern philosophy had lead to the dominance of a view of the individual being as something that could be meaningfully talked about independent of the world itself. For Heidegger, this is not only problematic in that it founds knowledge on a false dichotomy of the thinking thing, Descartes’ res cogitans, and the world that is external to it, but effectively refuses to face the question of what the being of the human being actually is. With the rejection of Cartesianism, he wants also to roll back the philosophical tradition that grew out of Descartes.
While reassessing the wisdom received from the past is the indispensable task of philosophers, Heidegger’s radicalism seems morbid and unproductive. Much worthy labor has been done since Descartes which if we were to abandon we would only find ourselves scrambling to recover. Would it not be possible to take a more Hegelian approach, or as they say in the philosophy of science, to save the phenomenon?
In his Meditations on the First Philosophy, Descartes retreats to his chamber, and even into himself, supposing all else to be illusion except that which it is not possible to doubt – his own existence. He perceives the necessity of his being with an immediacy that he explains through the absurdity that he could question his own existence if he did not exist. So there he places the fundament of all knowledge – the sure knowledge of one’s own being. And from there he builds bridges to the external world.
For Heidegger, a mistake has already been committed, one which will be repeated throughout the tradition that is rooted in Descartes’ method of doubt. Whatever this res cogitans is, it is not a human being, if by that we mean something that can be separated from the world. There is no being prior to that beings’ relationship to the world.
In his rejection of this radical subjectivity, Heidegger coins the term Dasein, meaning “being-in-the-world,” so that instead of talking about human beings as thinking things that confront an external world of extensible objects, he can talk about beings that are by definition wrapped up on the world, without which world they are not. He takes it as granted that Dasein has to be, but against the grain of the Cartesian tradition, he does not treat this as obviating the need to question the meaning of Dasein’s being. Nor does Heidegger want to make the mistake of treating Dasein as a type of being. Since its place in the world is definitive of Dasein, it is necessarily unique.
The presumption that Dasein exists may be deemed as suspiciously tautological. As Magda King interprets it, Heidegger’s statement that “Dasein exists,” if it didn’t exist, it wouldn’t be Dasein. This is reminiscent of the tautology that arises in the ontological argument for the existence of God, which Descartes himself takes on in his Meditations. It turns out that if God does not exist, then this is not what Descartes means by “God.” A similar vexation occurs, as perhaps always occurs when attempting to expound first principles, in the way that logicians will argue whether the truncated syllogism “Cogito, ergo sum” is missing a premise, and whether that premise weakens the argument.
By way of addressing this possible confusion, Heidegger divides the notion of existence into two different types – the kind of being that Dasein has and the objective presence of all things that are not Dasein. With this distinction, Heidegger opens himself up to an accusation of subjectivity. How different is this proposition from Descartes’ subject-object dualism?
The distinction seems necessary, certainly. Objects in the world are not aware of themselves, or conscious of their own being. It is more than most of us want to hazard that a chair knows itself, or that we are manifest to it. Yet this is not unlike the distinction Descartes raises between res cognitans and res extensa. What will ultimately get Heidegger out of this bind is the development of Dasein not as a thing that thinks, but as a being-in-the-world that cares. It exists not simply as another object to bump into, but for the sake of something.
The world in question is not the Cartesian realm of extensive things whose existence can be treated as independent of that of the individual perceiving them. For Heidegger, this is to be understood phenomenally. The world, for the being-in-the-world, is that which is made manifest to it. This is not an ontological skepticism, but a limitation imposed by what it is Heidegger is trying to work out – the being of Dasein.
Dasein has, as constituent to its being, a thrownness. It is thrown into the world ahead of a past which it has no power to shape, but can only retrieve. From there it attempts to project itself into the future. That projection is limited by Dasein’s possibilities, which are themselves a function of Dasein’s own sense of those possibilities. Unlike a chair, or a ball, Dasein isn’t simply what it is. Dasein is capable of imagining what it could be. Thus Dasein is like Whitman’s Spider – thrown into the world, seeking after its own possibilities:
A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
This powerful image, from an American poet as famous for his nationalism as Heidegger for his, though perhaps not as infamous, invokes a sense of Dasein in which we can recognize ourselves. We are thrown into the world, and we spin and throw and reel our webbing to project our possibilities into the world.
In projecting its possibility, Dasein may be authentic or inauthentic. The terms translated here are Eigentlicheit and Uneigenlicheit. Eigen means own in the German, and carries the same sense as the Greek prefix auto – one’s own, one’s self. Dasein is authentic when its projected possibility is its own, and inauthentic when it is not. The common sense of these English terms can be a foil for understanding what Heidegger means. The distinction is not real as opposed to fake, but more like owned as opposed to disowned. Dasein may project possibilities that are disowned from itself.
Heidegger reserves the term ‘existence’ for Dasein, which he sees as standing out (ek – sistere) from the past and projecting into the future. Because of this, he refers to those ontological qualities possessed by Dasein as existentials, while those possessed by the things of the world are called categories – a term that would be familiar to students of Aristotle and Kant. Both categories and existentials are a priori properties of the beings they predicate. As Magda King indicates, a close reading of Being and Time teases out an important distinction that existentials are active in character, whereas categories are passive. One of these existentials has been mentioned earlier – that of being aware of one’s self.
Categories themselves may be understood as divided among “things at hand” and “things objectively present.” Dasein is in a care relationship with things that are not Dasein. Some of these things are objectively present, part of the world manifest to Dasein, but are not usable, or may even be obstructive. Things at hand are useful in working out the relationship of care that Dasein has to the world.
Descartes’ project is fundamentally epistemological. He wants to know what it is possible to know. We could say that on the other hand Heidegger, or more to the point, Dasein, wants to know what it’s possible to be. That’s why Heidegger wants to replace Descartes’ knowing relationship to the world with a caring relationship. For him truth is not correspondence to some set of objective facts, but is tied up in the disclosedness of Dasein.
The Greek word for truth retrieved by Heidegger is aletheia, as in the mythical river Lethe which had the power to make people forget. Truth is the unforgetting, the disclosedness. Dasein may disclose itself many ways, authentically or inauthentically, in understanding or discourse. The first disclosure of Dasein’s being is in his relationship to the world, which Heidegger takes as essential to talking about Dasein’s being. The world, whatever it is, must always be the case, if we’re to make any sense of it. If we try to pull away from the world, as in the Meditations, then we have no grounds for ontological claims.
In this way, Heidegger’s ontological project seems very similar to the epistemological project of Descartes. They both attempt to build what can be said about the world from a proposed rock bottom. Out of Descartes’ doubt arises an epistemological metaphysics that Heidegger abhors. But out of Heidegger arises an ontological epistemology founded in the self-evidence of the disclosure of the world to Dasein.
Heidegger proposes three basic means by which the disclosure of Dasein to itself occurs – attunement, understanding, and discourse. Attunement is the finding of one’s self, not in a place but in something more like a mood or a feeling. In finding itself in a state of mind, Dasein is drawn to disclosure of its being and its possibilities. In understanding, the meaning of being-in-the world is disclosed to Dasein. In discourse, what is intelligible about Dasein can be disseminated.
Attunement is, among other things, the means by which Dasein is always already aware of its being. By being attuned, finding one’s self in a state of mind, thrown into a world and in a care relationship to that world, Dasein finds its being disclosed to it. Thus attunement is fundamental to the ability of Dasein to ask ontological questions.
One mode of attunement that Heidegger calls attention to is that of fear. Fear is an anxienty over a jeopardization of our care relation to the world. We find, by varying degrees, our place in the world, the ‘da’ of Dasein, disclosed to us in particular when it is threatened. To the extend that we fear for others, the Mitdasein, we are attuned with them.
Dasein’s ‘da’ is not disclosed only in its attunement, but also in the understanding of that attunement. What’s more, it discloses what is at stake in Dasein’s being, and the possibilities that unfold from Dasein’s thrownness, and its projection. The development of understanding is interpretation. Interpretation is grounded in prejudice, in the neutral sense of presuppositions, in comparison to which we can interpret things. We bring our own prejudices into our readings of the world. Heidegger is aware that he opens himself up to stern reproof from the rational tradition for presenting a vicious circle. The circle may in fact be inevitable, but Heidegger doesn’t want to consider it vicious even in a necessary and tolerated way. For him, the fact that the prejudices we bring to interpretation come ultimately from Dasein’s existential fore-structure – that is, from the disclosedness of Dasein’s own relationship to his being – rather than some arbitrary starting point means that the circle is not a vicious one.
Discourse is possible because it is equiprimordial with understanding. Words arise as manifestations of intelligibility with no essential connection to the significations they represent. Words don’t require it, because in discourse they aren’t perceived as sounds or markings to be interpreted, but are perceived as intelligible discourse. The intelligibility is already there when the words arise to express it. Interpretation is built into the act of discourse from both the speaker and the listener. Listening itself is an appeal not to the physical representation of significance, but to the harkening to primordial discoursiveness of Dasein, of which language is a manifestation.
In language, discourse finds expression, and the understanding of that discourse is equiprimordial with attunement – with Dasein’s finding its being made manifest in feelings. This expression is of an interpretation of Dasein’s understanding.
Language has an immediacy of intelligibility that it derives from its being an expression of discourse equiprimordial with understanding and attunement. However, it is at a level of abstraction away from the primordial understanding of Dasein, and carries with it the “look and feel” of understanding, so that it tends to distract from discourse about genuine understanding. Heidegger refers to this as “idle talk” -- it is language running in circles within its own internal intelligibility, ungrounded in genuine understanding.
Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, the being thrown into the world, being-there and being with others is of a being rooted in the world and among the Mitdasein – the other human beings of the world. Importantly, the relationship of care that Dasein has with the world is one of care – caring for and taking care of. Heidegger frets that when the caring part of our relationship to the world has been attended to, in idleness we drift toward a tendency to superficiality.
We use the term “seeing” as a general term for all manner of understanding, although it also carries a specific meaning with respect to a particulat kind of sense perception. There is a seeing without understanding – it is possible to just-percieve. Where the care relationship to the world of Dasein is one of understanding, just-percieving arises from curiosity in idleness. It is a kind of knowing divorced from understanding, where understanding is for Heidegger tied intimately with the attunement of Dasein. By following the whims of curiousity, Dasein finds itself constantly uprooted.