| The Gist of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In 1927, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) published
a revolutionary study of personhood called 'Sein und Zeit' (Being and
Time in English). His original intention in the Sein und Zeit project
was to come to grips with the meaning of Being. Being is always the
Being of some entity; here is a tree being what it is, there is a cow
being what it is, and so on. This means that the only way to get at the
meaning of Being is to interrogate some entity. Persons are entities
that lend themselves to such interrogation particularly well because we
deal with Being directly. A snail, for example, may crawl all over a
spade, a cat may sniff it and a dog may piss on it, but only persons
disclose its Being as a spade, that is, as a tool having a particular
function in the world. The persons who were accessible to interrogation
by Heidegger were human. The human part of a human person is an animal
of the species homo sapiens. Being human is not the subject of Being
and Time because it is not the human part of the human person that
discloses the Being of things. Being a person, however, is something
that humans (and, perhaps, other species) do; it's a way of relating to
the world understandingly. It is only the activity of being a person
that Heidegger interrogates in Being and Time because only
persons disclose Being and persons have to disclose Being
simply to be persons.
The Being of entities is an issue for persons, but our own Being as
persons is itself not clear to us, and Heidegger actually devotes
nearly all of Being and Time to making the Being of persons clear. The
biggest barrier to doing this is not ignorance but misunderstanding -
especially in the form of historical assumptions which stop us asking
the right questions. If, for instance, you categorise someone as being
of a certain psychological or political type, then you tend to stop
asking questions about their Being because you wrongly assume that you
understand why they act as you do. This is very much what has happened
with the human understanding of being a person. For thousands and
thousands of years, humans have tried to understand themselves as a
special kind of thing that is placed in a world of other things. This
leads to all sorts of weird problems and implausible theories (see
Appendix 2). So you must put all of this religious and scientific
theory aside if you want to clearly disclose your own Being. Do not
assume that you are a product of evolution, socialisation, the 'market
place,' biology, alien interaction, spiritual forces, gods, or
whatever. Just pay attention to how you are actually going about the
business of being a person in the world. If you do this, you may well
begin to notice that being a person is not a matter of being some thing
but of undertaking an activity. It is the activity of being a person
which Heidegger interrogates [analyses] as 'being-there.' AN INTRODUCTORY OVERVIEW OF BEING-THERE Humans exist as persons by repeatedly choosing possibilities for existing with at least some understanding that actualising different possibilities is significant for being whatever kind of person they are choosing to be. In the process of existing in one way or another, you create and maintain a character for yourself by working with the equipment [tools and materials] for character-making which you find in a 'workshop' of character-creation (i.e., the world). So whereas a sparrow, for example, builds and maintains nests in a way dictated by its species-structure, persons build, buy or rent, shelters of many different kinds, neglect or care for them to different degrees, and contribute to the realisation of the kinds of person they are by the kind of shelter they choose to live in and how they live in it. Keeping a tidy and well-kept home, for example, realises one kind of character; keeping an untidy and unclean home realises a different kind of occupier. Both of these are possibilities that have to be, and are, chosen by persons. Being a person [being-there] is always somebody's 'mine'; we don't
share the experience of being-there but each live our own lives for
ourselves. This is why I do not, and cannot, know what it is to be you,
and you cannot know what it is to be anyone but yourself. Each person
chooses her or his own way of going about the business of being a
person. We each make various possibilities, that may well be common to
many persons, into our particular actuality. Your personal 'ownership'
of your being-there is your 'mineness'. Being is always and only manifest as individual
beings [entities]. There is no 'universal Being' in which everything
somehow shares; there is only this tree being the tree it is, that
river being the river it is, and so on. In the same way, all
being-there is manifest as the personal life being lived by an actual
person in an actual world. Being-there is never abstract and not
shared; there is only this particular person living her individual life
there, that particular person living his individual life there, and so
on. An irony of mineness is that, although we are each living our own
lives, and cannot do otherwise, we can lose the ownership of our own
'mineness' by becoming absorbed in an habitual daily round and/or
following a cultural community's preferred way of life. This indeed is
our normal mode of existence; we are born into or join a community and
accept a pre-existing mode of daily existence that is considered
appropriate for us by that community; becoming lawyers by doing what
lawyers do, being nonconformist by doing what nonconformists do, and so
on. So say, for instance, that you have been born into or joined a
community in which it is normal for adolescents to rebel against their
parents. If you then rebel against your parents just because you are a
teenager then you are losing ownership of your mineness even though
each rebellious act is itself still your choice. Alternately, you may
be involved in a religion or occupation. In following this religion or
occupation, day after day, you become more and more like everyone else
who is similarly involved. Losing ownership of your mineness in
cultural normality (which is strongest in small, rural, and/or
primitive communities, but nevertheless still endemic in even the
largest and most sophisticated ones) is still being-there but is doing
so inauthentically. To exist inauthentically is a matter of not taking
hold of [individually owning] the mineness of your whole existence
(including your guilt and death). This is the normal human way of
being-there in which various communally-established ways of existing
are conformed with (and often accepted as natural). It is important to
stress here that there is no ethical implication to the term
'inauthentic' - no suggestion that the inauthentic life is somehow
inferior to an authentic life [one in which you own the whole of your
existence]. All existence is fundamentally inauthentic simply because
it is inevitably owned to a great extent by the culture, society, and
everyday being-there within which it is lived. The only issue with
existing inauthentically, as we all do, it that it doesn't disclose
your Being so much as hide from your awareness.
Being-in-the-world is the basic, necessary, and only, way of
being-there; it is how you go about being a person. This is because
being-there [being a person] is an activity that can be undertaken only
by variously exploiting or neglecting the possibilities which only a
world can provide. In the process of being-there you realise a personal
character for yourself by existing in various possible ways. Only in a
world where both lying and being honest are possible, for example, can
you make yourself honest or dishonest by existing honestly or
dishonestly. The idea that you could be 'essentially' honest, without
living an honest life, is simply incoherent. You create an honest or
dishonest character for yourself by being-in-the-world and by
being-in-the-world.
At the time Kiri Te Kanawa began her voice training, she was a young
Maori woman who wanted to be an operatic soprano. Being young, Maori,
and female, were part of her facticity. Wanting to be an operatic
soprano made her concerned with the possibilities for training and work
in New Zealand at that time and with caring for her voice. Concern is
an aspect of Care. The Founding Mode of Being-in. One of the most common philosophical pictures of personhood is that of
a thing-like mind, soul, or essence, that, unlike non-persons, has
beliefs about the world. In this case, knowing about the world is the
founding mode [way] of being a person. The big issue for such an entity
is that it is trapped inside a body and/or consciousness and can never
know for sure that the objective world [seen as the collection of
things outside of the person's mind] is as it seems to be. If
Heidegger's observations are right, however, the founding issue for
being a person is that of choosing what kind of existence to live and,
thereby, what kind of person to be. You want to know stuff only
because, and in so far as, it matters to this. If you want to be [exist
as] a hunter then you need to know about the location and vulnerability
of game animals, if you want to exist as [be] a gardener then you need
to know what plants will grow in your environment and how to grow them
successfully. Being a hunter, gardener, neither, or both, are
possibilities for existing. Having to choose an existence is why you
Care. Knowledge arises from caring about your existence, so knowledge
is not actually your founding mode of being a person in the world. If you want to disclose the Being of a teacher's existence then you need to know what the teacher's world contains and how its components are arranged. The same goes for disclosing the Being of a person's existence. If you assume that a person is basically some kind of mind, soul, or consciousness trapped in a body, then you are going to begin any inquiry into being a person by considering this consciousness or whatever. Only then would you move on to how it relates to the world. If, however, your understand personhood as essentially a matter of being-in-the-world, as a teacher is in a teacher's world, then you are going to start with the world because the Being of that world will disclose the activity of being-in it. There are four senses in which folk commonly understand the phrase 'the world'. Your ordinary experience of being a person soon discloses that the world is not just s1 because it is a working environment for being one kind of person or another (just as a school is a working environment for being a teacher or student). The feature of the world, which enables it to play this role in your existence, is its worldhood. Just as the worldhood of a teaching environment is not the desks and so on but a complex of rule-governed behaviours by which persons, desks, books, and such like, relate to each other as equipment for a way of existing, so the worldhood of the world is the whole complex of roles, concepts, projects, assignments, significance, functions and functional interrelations, that arises from the fact that persons care about objects in the world for the possibilities with which they present us for existing in different ways. The worldhood of a desk, for example, is the web of concepts, assignments and activities within which it is being a tool with an assigned function. The worldhood of the world is what makes the things around us cohere as an integrity [a world]. It is also what allows and invites us to encounter objects as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. To get the worldhood of the world into view, we must locate a personal interaction with entities in a world that casts light on its own environment. Our everyday use of utensils (doorknobs, plates, playing fields, etc) is just such an interaction. In the everyday process of being-in-the-world, you encounter objects,
including other persons, as variously relevant or irrelevant to your
chosen existence. These - called 'ready-to-hand' and 'present-at-hand'
respectively - are the two basic, and widest, categories of Being for
the objects that you encounter in the world. Things present-at-hand are
in the world but of no immediate relevance to what you are doing.
Ready-to-hand things, events, persons, and situations, on the other
hand, are relevant to someone's existence either as a help or as a
hindrance (e.g., playing fields are ready-to-hand for sports, bad
weather can be ready-to-hand as an obstacle to certain sports). The
Being of entities that are ready-to-hand is defined by the practices in
which they are employed, and their properties are established in
relation to the norms of those practices. Areas of land, for example,
are ready-to-hand in relation to their being actual or possible playing
fields, gardens, building sites, nature reserves, sources of danger or
disease, and so on. Ready-to-hand objects can be assets or liabilities. Heidegger calls the
ready-to-hand assets which you use 'equipment' to highlight the fact
that their Being is that of tools and/or resources for serving a
possible existence. We have desks, for instance, and use them, only
because using desks in various ways serves projects that have to do
with possible ways of existing. Equipment [a ready-to-hand asset]
includes anything that is assigned a purpose - e.g., schools [equipment
for teaching and learning], rooms or houses [equipment for residing],
farms [equipment for growing food]; parks, the seaside, reserves, or
hills [equipment for rice paddies, recreation, and/or wildlife
preservation]; parking spaces [equipment for parking vehicles], and so
on. Items of equipment are always used in-order-to (qv)
achieve some purpose [project] which serves an existence; a parking
space, for example, is created in order to park vehicles,
and make sense only within a totality of equipment [all the
ready-to-hand assets in the world]; a parking space is only a parking
space in relation to a totality of vehicles, roads, places of work,
shopping regions, and so on. The in-order-to of a piece of equipment is its Being in terms of what
it is for. A hammer, for example, may be used 'in order to' build
something, break something, or attack someone. Because equipment is
always used in-order-to do something, there are a multitude of
person-generated relations which define its place within both the total
sum of equipment and the practices of its employment. These relations
all begin and end with a person or persons using equipment for some
project that has to do with what kinds of existence they are living
and, thereby, what kinds of persons they are being. As we have seen
above, the worldhood of a teaching world consists of a set of
rule-governed relationships between a piece of equipment and various
persons. Likewise, the worldhood of the world generally is made up of
an interrelated web of assignments and references, that is; a set of
rule-governed relationships between a piece of equipment and various
persons (the reference) and person-related in-order-to tasks (the
assignment), within which it has meaning. To disclose the Being of a
school, for instance, you need to know the tasks to which it has been
or can be assigned, the materials it works with, and the
existence-serving projects in which it is or can be used. In this there
are numerous 'towards-which' relations involved. A towards-which
relationship is that part of equipment's Being that is disclosed in
terms of its having an assigned purpose within the totality of
equipment. The Being of a school desk, for example, arises from its
being in towards-which relationships with other things, purposes and
people. This 'placing in relationships' with other tools and projects
is its assignment, the persons whose existence these tools and projects
serve is its reference. Towards-which is related to equipment's
serviceability (qv) for a given task. For example, a desk's ability to
support equipment for various tasks gives it a towards-which that makes
it relevant in-order-to undertake those tasks - it makes the desk
serviceable for the task to which it is assigned. Worldhood is generated and sustained by the activities of persons being-there, and is the integrity, within which things and activities are meaningful, that is integrated around and by persons being-in-the-world. Persons, for example, need various kinds of shelter both for themselves and many of the projects which they undertake in the process of being persons. This need is met by equipment - clothing, tents, timber, bricks, apartment blocks, hammers and saws, caves, suburban housing, animal skins, blocks of cut rock or snow, castles, and so on. Each of these pieces of equipment has its Being, as something ready-to-hand for serving an existence, through being part of a complex within which it is assigned different purposes and ways of being used (a piece of rock, for example, becomes ready-to-hand equipment by being assigned to a purpose; e.g., as a building material, weapon, source of minerals, aesthetic item or something to be shaped into an aesthetic item, and so on). All the things in this integrated complex are, together, the totality of equipment. This totality has its whole Being in terms of the needs, rules and wants of persons - it is we who assign a purpose to this object in that circumstances, etc. - and persons have to have at least some understanding of the whole complex before they get to grips with its components (see being-already-in). The first person to make a knife out of flint, for example, had to have some grasp of the notion of tool-making before she saw the possibilities of flint for cutting. Similarly, an archeologist who finds flint blades millennia later, has to have some idea of persons making things to use before she could disclose the Being of some piece of flint as shaped by persons rather than nature. The Being of equipment can be disclosed only in 'dealings cut to its
own measure' (e.g., teaching at a school, digging with a spade, parking
in a space). This dealing discloses its Being - you don't disclose a
desk's Being by thinking about it but by using it. It is, for example,
the hunter who is hunting that notices the hidden animal, not the
theoretician who has studied books on hunting. The reason that the
hunter notices the animal (especially if she's hungry) is because she's
on the lookout for it. This being-in-the-world on the lookout for
equipment is circumspection; that is, is a way of looking at or for
things as potential equipment. Circumspection is your normal way of
being-in-the-world. If, for example, you go into a shop looking for
socks then your awareness of your environment is circumspective - you
are looking with a purpose, 'keeping an eye out' for socks. You can explore the assignment and reference relations of equipment
being-for some purpose by going, say, from the use of a desk in
teaching to the existence of mining and smelting as a source of metal
for nails, screws, and hinges, and forestry as a source of wood, forms
of transport, design, manufacture and sale, oil refining as a source of
glues, plastics and paints, so on. At all points of this journey you
disclose not only ready-to-hand things and their context but the
persons who use them (and, of course, the making of desks in the first
place is only something you do because people have a use for various
kind of desk according to their chosen existence). Thus it is that,
through these referential relations, the public world pervades every
use of equipment. Part of Heidegger's project, in Being and Time, is to explain why
persons, who could be disclosing the Being of things, mostly fail to do so. One explanation for this is that the Being of
equipment is normally inconspicuous, unobtrusive and manipulable
because if you are using a brush to paint with, for instance, you tend
to ignore the Being of the brush and simply use it to get on with the
painting. You normally notice the Being of handy objects only when they
become 'unhandy' in some way (e.g., they break down, become lost, or
become obstacles to something else you are doing). If this happens, and
the brush is considered reflectively, it becomes deprived of its
worldhood so that its being ready-to-hand is lost (i.e., the
ready-to-hand becomes unready-to-hand - the traditional, and flawed,
mode in which thinkers have tried to understand things). This means
that:
Heidegger interrogates being a person precisely because the activity of personally being-there discloses Being. The problem is that we tend not to disclose Being in our everyday existence, and the normal alternative [reflection] doesn't disclose it authentically. If you tend to notice the Being of objects only in a reflective state, when they are detached from their everyday Being, then what you think that you have disclosed is not, in fact, the real Being of the object (disclosing a brush as bristles and a handle is not the same as disclosing it as equipment for painting). If you notice the Being of entities in your daily world only when they are not being used towards some end (e.g., when they break and/or when you reflect on them), then you not only lose sight of their Being but also of your Being as a entity who uses equipment according to an existence by which you realise yourself as one kind of person or another. It's almost as if you start making yourself a function of worldly facts (a thing) instead of deliberately choosing an existence because it realises the kind of person you want to be. Signs
are probably the clearest disclosure of worldhood in action. You
cannot, for example, disclose the Being of a paint brush outside of its
'towards' connection with surfaces, paints, and painting, as a way of
serving various projects of being-there. This is because every
ready-to-hand object is being towards various other objects of
attention. Signs are equipment that are specifically made and
maintained to make a 'towards' relationship explicit. Worldhood is a
web of assignments and references within which each objects, in effect,
'points away to' another object. A sign such as OFFICE >>
discloses this kind of towards relation particularly well because it is
has been explicitly assigned to the job of pointing. So signs, in
effect, show us how worldhood works as an integrity of items
[equipment] that are being-towards other items (such as projects). Signs 'light up' the worldhood within which an
activity of being-there takes place. The indicators on a car, for
example, light up a working environment [world] which people on foot or
in vehicles share and within which indicators make sense. This world is
not just a collection of entities but a collection of entities within a
web of socially or culturally constituted assignments within which
they disclose their Being, but must be
disclosed as within the web of assignments and references [the
worldhood of the world] before you disclose their Being and, without
which, signs wouldn't make sense. So, for example, the Being of a
flashing indicator on a car is that of equipment for indicating
intention. 'Reading' such a light as an indicator of intention requires
understanding in advance the established 'world' of
signing, the relation of the light to the driver's
intention, the space that has been, is and will be occupied
by the car, the direction in which the vehicle will be
turning, other vehicles and people, road rules,
and so on. This 'knowing in advance' is most clearly shown when you
establish something as a sign; as when, for example, you
add >> to the word OFFICE in the knowledge that persons will
understand it as a sign. The freeing of objects to be encountered as equipment is a function of
the worldhood of the world. If a person subsequently sights a freed
item as equipment then he or she 'lets it be' what it is. When you
encounter a desk as ready-to-hand (i.e., as equipment assigned to a
purpose) you let it be a desk rather than just some present-at-hand
thing that is laying about. This, in turn, requires at least some
disclosure of the 'totality of equipment' in which desks are equipment
rather than just bits of junk. This 'letting be' points to the aspect
of being-there which is concern (qv). Letting be is a matter of
disclosing and accepting the worldly character of equipment. For
example, using a telephone as a telephone requires letting it be a
telephone (i.e., letting it be for the tasks to which it has been
assigned). Freeing is what the worldhood of the world allows, letting
be is what you do in the light of the worldhood of the world. So if,
for instance, a cobbler's workshop frees things in the workshop to be
encountered as equipment for repairing shoes, you have let those things
be what the workshop frees them to be, before you personally can
disclose their Being to yourself. To illustrate all of this, imagine entering an unfamiliar kitchen with
the intention of making toast. Making toast is a project which serves
your existence. Regardless of how different this kitchen is to what you
are used to, and what kind of device it has for making toast, you are
able to find the relevant device because you enter the kitchen
circumspectively. So say, for instance, that you are used to using a
electric toaster and this kitchen uses a gas grill. The kitchen, as a
region for cooking, frees the grill to be sighted as equipment for
making toast (qv. the 'as' structure). Sighting a grill as a toaster
entails understanding it as equipment that is ready-to-hand for use in
a kitchen project that serves an existence. This in turn entails
already understanding the 'context of relations' within
which some things are equipment, and this
particular thing has been assigned to the purpose of someone making
toast. You disclose, in other words, not only that a certain item has a
certain Being [a particular assigned purpose] but also the whole frame
of reference within which things are assigned for various
person-serving purposes. It is this frame of reference [the world]
which frees a grill with which you are not familiar to be encountered
as equipment which has an assigned function. You must, moreover,
yourself be being-in this frame of reference, before you can 'let' an
unfamiliar object be equipment for making toast, because at least some
understanding of tool-using in general has to precede any use of
anything as a tool. On the basis of the foregoing analysis it can be seen that:
One way of putting this is to say that the worldhood of the world is
the integrity of everything within the horizon (qv) of significance. An
horizon is any limiting framework within which certain entities are
being what they are and/or various activities take place. Significance
is the towards-this (qv) interconnection (sign-ificance) of objects and
persons in the world. The significance of things is disclosed by
understanding what they are for [their
'for-the-sake-of-which'] and how they fit into the overall
arrangement of assignments and references. Towards-this is the aspect
of a ready-to-hand entity's significance - derived from the
being-towards of persons - whereby you understand its Being in terms of
its specific function within an equipmental context. Two hammers used
for related but different purposes in panel beating, for example, have
a different 'towards this' within the general towards-which (qv) of
hammers in panel beating. For-the-sake-of-which is the aspects of
equipment's significance whereby you understand its Being in terms of
the project for which it is used. The 'for-sake-of-which' of tools is
always a project of persons. Thus, whether you are talking of building
a shelter, re-shaping the panels of a damaged car, or hitting an enemy
over the head, hammers are always used as hammers for the sake of some
existence-defining project.5 To summarise the different kinds of worldly being we have been
considering: Ready-to-hand is the Being of those entities within the
world - tools, utensils, obstacles, and the like - which are relevant
to your existence and you encounter most often in your immediate
environment. Present-at-hand is the Being of things that are not
relevant to your existence. Between them, being ready-to-hand and
present-at-hand account for the two basic categories of Being found
among things in the world. Worldhood is the Being of the world as the
condition which makes it possible for us to discover things as
ready-to-hand within the world. Worldhood is a function of significance
and is what integrates persons and the ready-to-hand into a whole. Spatiality. If you start with any kind of thingish ontology then your inquiry is bound to end up in abstractions that close off the Being you want to disclose. The objective notion of space is an example of this. Existentially, space is your home, and you live in space not as the mathematical matrix of geography or physics but as a set of real and meaningful relationships of which you are the heart and your interests are the measure. Only the existential understanding discloses the true Being of space while the categorial [mathematic] understanding closes it off. So what Heidegger describes in Being and Time is the existential [existence-centred] foundation of the categorial spatiality which humans typically mis-take as foundational. This existence-centred spatiality is neither objective nor subjective; it is, rather, a function of your practical, everyday, engagement with the world. Again the point is that, for persons, nothing (including space) is merely 'there'. Space, distance and direction are for us personal and meaningful in terms of our engagements with the world and its contents (i.e., for our being-in-the-world). Indeed, it is only when you consider space non-existentially that it is 'neutralised' as mere dimension. Disclosing the true Being of space begins with spatiality, that is; the
aspect of being-there whereby persons arrange the world [the 'workshop'
of being-there] in much the same way that, in temporality (qv) we
arrange the work of being-there. The existential spatiality of being a
person is organised according to the relevance that various entities
have for your existence. A worker at work in a workplace such as a
kitchen for example, does not relate to entities in the work space in
terms of mathematical coordinates. The space is arranged, rather, in
terms of items being clustered as ready-to-hand according to their
relevance for the work being done in the space - toaster there,
utensils here, frequently used items closer to hand than less used
items, and so on. As a person, the whole world is a workplace of
being-there and your being-in space is that of a worker being-in
workspace. Like the cook in a kitchen, persons arrange and experience
the space of the world in practical terms according to which items are
used for what projects; medical equipment is clustered in hospitals,
religious equipment in churches and temples, domestic equipment in
homes, and so on. For being-there, space is where you exist, and your
existential spatiality is a practical matter of closeness and distance
being determined by the relevance of various objects for your projects.
To someone measuring distances and angles between objects in a plan of
a kitchen, all space is equal; all centimetres, for example, are the
same length and the observer is equally remote [detached] from the
objects being located in mathematical space. To a cook engaged in food
preparation in a kitchen, however, all objects are spatially related to
your body when engaged in the project of preparing food. The measures
of this existential spatiality are relevance [closeness] and
irrelevance [remoteness]. As most objects in the world are not of
immediate concern to us, remoteness is the normal state of everyday
spatiality and has to be overcome when you bring objects of concern
into a close relationship. The spatiality of ready-to-hand entities is manifested in two ways. Together, closeness and direction give equipment a place in the scheme
of things (the equipmental-referential totality). A place is where
something belongs in the arrangement of your working environment. Place
is existential, not categorial. So the place for kitchen utensils, for
example, is in a kitchen (which is, in turn, a 'region' (qv) set aside
for the performing of certain projects to do with preparing food for
eating or display). Having a place is different from being at certain
navigational coordinates because it has to do with the object having a
function. The place of the steering wheel in a car, for instance, is
determined by its function in the project of driving a car. If an item
doesn't have a place in the scheme of things then its position is just
a 'random occurring', a 'lying around' as something present-at-hand. All places are part of a 'zone of operations' or 'whereabouts'
['wither'] assigned to a related set of activities - e.g., kitchens,
workplaces, homes, schools, or marketplaces. Spatially, these areas of
your environment are regions. The existential spatiality of a region is
made up of the use which makes it relevant to you,
and its direction and range relative to where you are. In
defining range and direction you are the locus from which
direction and range are measured and range is defined in
terms of the regions relevance to your existence (qv, closeness). So
regions make up the wider existential (existence-related) spatiality of
the world around us. If you want to prepare some food, for example,
your 'here' [where you are] is defined by you in terms of distance
[range] and direction to the food-preparation region (kitchen) which is
'yonder.' One of the ironies of being a person is that, although the process of being-there discloses Being, our own Being as persons is obscure to us. Regions reveal the spatiality of persons. But regions are themselves ready-to-hand and like other ready-to-hand things, they have the character of inconspicuous familiarity. If we notice them at all then it is when we, in effect, 'turn off' our normal concern and 'stand back' from our usual way of being-in-the-world. The regions, in this case, take on the Being of present-at-hand items which is not their true Being. If we tend mostly to ignore them, and to regard them inauthentically when we notice them at all, then of course we will tend to misunderstand both their Being and ours. As you might except, your immediate spatiality as a person derives from
the world that you are being-in. You are not in the world in the
passive way that things are in a container because your way of being in
the world is one of engagement, familiarity and concern (qv). Concern
overcomes the remoteness of things - the 'severance' from them brought
about by your indifference to things that are not immediately relevant
to your existence - by bringing them closer in 'de-severance'.
Deseverance is a matter of bringing of something close in the
existential sense (its more like people being close friends than two
strangers standing next to each other); it is that part of
being-in-the-world by which you simultaneously disclose remoteness and
overcome it. So desevering [de-distancing] is a circumspective bringing
close of an equipment. Say, for example, that you travel to work down
the same road day after day without paying any particular attention to
the buildings that line it (existentially, you are severed from them).
Then, one day, a newsworthy event happens in one of the buildings and
your interest in [concern with] this event means that you now travel
down this road circumspectly [keeping an eye out for the relevant
building]. This circumspective concern overcomes your normal remoteness
- it de-severs you from objects that do not normally engage your
attention. This desevering is possible because being a person entails
being concerned about objects that are relevant for your existence. Where the existential spatiality of equipment is experienced in terms
of remoteness/closeness and direction, your own spatiality as a person
is enacted in terms of desevering (qv) and directionality.
Directionality is the way in which you are always being-towards (qv)
the places and regions that are currently relevant to whatever you are
doing. When you are using your computer, for example, you face towards
it and away from your kitchen or bedroom or whatever. Directionality
is, in other words, defined by your spatial and temporal position - the
way you 'face ahead' both physically and in time - and your projects.
The 'compass points' of directionality are Left, Right, Up, Down, In
front, Alongside, and Behind, in relation to where someone is standing
and facing (i.e., the kind of directions you would give someone who was
looking for something). As touched on above, your 'here' is your place (qv) in the world as an individual - a place defined in relation to the 'yonder' (qv) of relevant items and regions in the world. Your locatedness in the world is, in other words, a function of the equipment in your environment. Being a person is a matter of engaging with the possibilities inherent in facts that you treat as equipment for existing in one way or another. This equipment provides the existential landmarks [yonder'] by which you locate yourself in the 'workshop' of the world. You are not self-located at GPS coordinates but 'in the kitchen', 'at work', 'in hospital', or 'watching TV.' These places are regions wherein certain activities take place and which are relevant to you because of the activities which take place in them. It is your being-towards these activities and their regions which enables you to locate your 'here' in relation to their 'yonder'. As with signs, which disclose the 'towards' nature of assignments and references, so your spatial directionality discloses a being-towards relationship with items in your environment. Your existence is never static in the way a thing can be because you are always being-towards, or being-away-from, objects of interest, fear or desire, and so on, such as lovers, enemies, or chores. Being a person [being-there] is always someone's 'mine.' So if you ask
who is being-there, the answer will be an individual 'her,' 'him,' or
'me.' This 'me' who is being-there is your Self. Like so much else
about being a person, the self is normally considered in thingish terms
as a soul, ego, personality, or whatever. There is no denying that your
self seems to be like this in reflection (qv), and can be talked of in
this way. But seeing your self this way obscures the important fact
that your Self is a character [who you are] which maintains herself as
the same identity while being a person over time. This is because,
whereas the character of a thing [what it is] is maintained by its
material essence, your individual character as a particular self is
created and maintained by your existence. Who you are [your self] is
not maintained by your human biology or environment but by how you keep
on choosing to live day after day. So say, for example, that you
readily take offence at what you see as sexist or racist slurs. This
existence is not forced on you by your biology but chosen by you and,
to be offended, you must keep on choosing this existence at every
opportunity in which you are faced with a possibility for being
offended or not. So being-a-self is an ongoing project of maintaining a
character whether that character is stable or fickle and whether you
maintain it deliberately or carelessly out of habit. It is important not to confuse the existential self [the 'me' who is maintaining itself as a particular character over time] with the kind of categorial self that seems evident to reflective attention. This reflected-on 'me' is a bunch of thingish characteristics (shyness, self-confidence, kindness, indifference, patience, short-temperedness, or whatever) which hide the activity of being-a-self which is creating and maintaining that moral and psychological character by existing in a certain way. When you are involved in being-in the everyday world you tend to lose sight of your self. If you are doing a job, for instance, you are absorbed in the job - you are not thinking "Here I am being a certain kind of person by undertaking this task". But if you 'stand back' from your everyday being-in-the-world, to think about the 'I' who is being-in-the-world, then the self you reflect on is not the self who is absorbed in the world but a kind of present-at-hand thing which sits before you as an object of attention. This reflected-on self is not the 'me' which is actually living the ongoing daily life of a person being-in-the-world. So the reflected-on self, the self of tradition, is a false representation of the existential self. Being a self is a matter of the life-long and everyday project of
being-in-the-world. This task [being your self] is an activity which
you, and you alone, undertake for yourself. But, although every self is
being its self for itself, it does so in an essentially public world.
Language, for instance, is essential equipment for being a self. But
there is no such thing as a purely denotative language in which you can
think completely without bias. You learned your language, and its
biases, from others. And even when you are apart from others, you think
in a language which you learned from them. This has a profound effect
on how you go about being yourself because the forms and biases of your
linguistic community shape the way you think even when you are on your
own. This means that being-a-self unavoidably includes certain social
structures of being-with and being-there-with other persons in
community - even if that community is no more than one of a shared
language. Being-a-self is something you do at every waking moment by treating
entities in your environment as possible equipment for being who you
are. Equipment has its Being by reference to persons whose projects are
served by it. But you do not invent the equipment you use, such as
language, schools, kitchens, and the like; you discover it in a world
which already has its worldhood only because other persons were already
being-there in it before you came along. This means that Others are not
incidental to the world but necessary for its being a world. Others
(upper case 'O') are persons whose having been what they were led to
the tools, materials, and processes, that you use in your everyday
life, having the Being that they have. I say 'having been' here
because, even if you are pioneering a new process, device, art form or
religion, you can do so only on the basis of what Others have already
done. The Others are distinguished from others (lower case 'o') by
being normally unknown to you. And your being-with-Others precedes your
specific being with others because it is Others who make the world into
the 'workshop' of being-there in which you can meet other persons as
persons (i.e., as 'fellow workers' in the workshop of being a person). What you must always keep in mind is that the essence of being a person is the activity of being-in-the-world. The temptation to violate the integrity of your being-in-the-world, into you 'here inside' and the world 'there outside', must be resisted if you are to understand what it is to be a self in a world. Being-there is not a mind-thing, soul-thing, or body-thing, but an activity in an environment which makes undertaking that activity possible and is created and maintained as an environment by the activity it enables. None of the above entails either that persons need constant company or that you cannot be alone in the company of others. All it means is that the Being of being-there cannot be disclosed except as existing in a world that it shares with beings who, like itself, exist as well as live. Others can be absent only for someone to whom they can present. So being alone [being-without] is a deficient (qv) mode of being-with (i.e, the concept of being-without is parasitic on the concept of being-with). And feeling alone in the presence of others is actually a being-with them in a mode of indifference or alienation; once again, being-with is primary and essential - being-with provides the norm - all other relationships with other persons are variations on this theme. As we have already seen, being a person (being-there) involves concern
about objects in the world. This concern is an aspect of Care (qv). In
the face of being-with other persons, the process of being-there must
be interpreted in terms of caring about others and what they do or
don't do - where caring about non-persons can be called 'concern',
caring about persons can be called 'solicitude'. You can be indifferent to others only because you can care about them;
you can hate only because you can love (whereas a tree, for example,
can do neither). Nevertheless, uncaring modes of solicitude such as
indifference are the 'average everyday' human mode of being-with one
another. Such modes reduce others to 'things' and their Being becomes
inconspicuous in the manner of equipment (to a sexist woman, for
instance, no man is disclosed as being-there because he appears to her
only as a man-thing). As with being alone in the presence of others,
even your average everyday mode of care [indifference] is not like that
of two things that are merely in each other's presence. Two plants
side-by-side in the ground are neither concerned with nor indifferent
to each other. Persons, however, are always variously one or the other. None of this suggests that you ought or ought not to care about others, all it means is that, like it or not, you are mutually engaged with other persons in a way that matters to you. Even a hermit impacts on, and is impacted on by, other persons in the world in a way that matters to him. His solicitude may be one of active hostility and/or contempt for others, but he is still never free from the being-in-the-world of others. Indeed, he carries it with him wherever he goes in the same way that he carries the world within him even as he tries to renounce it. And the point here is that you are never truly don't care; you always relate to others according to a range of measures derived from your own projects (our own being-in-the-world). This is why, when people meet, they always 'eye each other up and down' as potential friends, allies, enemies, resources and/or sexual partners. Sometimes the other folk whose existence influences you are people you
can name. Mostly, however, they are just 'they.' The 'they' is no
particular set of people but a set of communal values to which you
conform in fact (and usually without even noticing that you are doing
so). They are public opinion; the social norm or 'done way of doing
things' which determines your behaviour and your understanding of your
possibilities; the undifferentiated 'everyone' in "Everyone's doing it"
or "Everyone's got one." The 'they' are everywhere and nowhere, and we
are all members of 'they'. The 'they' is not a 'them' but an 'us'; it
is the abstract 'everyone' acting as a social norm. As you are busy about your everyday life and being-with 'they', so you
become concerned with conforming [averageness] and with the cultural
differences ['distance'] between yourself and others. Social
distantiality has to do with how
closely you fit into a 'they.' It is measured by any differences
between yourself and 'they' which threatens your acceptance by your
cultural community (e.g., your family, neighbours, peers, or whoever).
Distantiality is why you feel uncomfortable wearing out-of-fashion
clothes or 'being different' (too tall, too short, too intelligent, too
sober, not violent enough, making a fuss about wrongs that others don't
care about, and so on). It is also evident in concerns for status. Our
compulsive concern for status is such that we are barely aware of it,
if we are aware of it at all, and as our unawareness of it deepens so
our determination to 'keep up with the Jones'' increases. We don't say
to ourselves "I must attend this ritual, buy this gadget, join that
club, say these prayers, or start talking like this, because, if I
don't, I will become separated from the herd", we just find ourselves
adopting the manners and fashions of whatever group we are being with
in our everyday lives. Regardless of which everyday group you are being-with - racial, cultural, professional, political, social, religious, or whatever - it will coerce conformity with a group paradigm of how you should go about being a person. This conformity is 'averageness' because everyday being-there-with others concerns itself with 'fitting in' or 'being a team player' at the expense of personal integrity and individuality. This does not entail being less 'real' as a person than you would be otherwise because, in averageness, you still understand the world in terms of its possibilities for being one kind of person or another, and select some possibilities over others on the basis of what kind of person you are being. It's just that, by being-with any group which allows possibilities for being one kind of person or another, your possibilities are 'levelled down' to a norm (or, at best, a kind of acceptable nonconformity) that avoids anything which might alienate you from the group. Levelling is a kind of homogenisation that goes with fitting in. It is usually a matter of levelling off or levelling down because levelling tends towards averageness. An important feature of all the above is that it is not imposed from
outside. The 'they' is a communal dictatorship which you internalise so
that what you think of as your 'privateness' is actually more a
'publicness.' Publicness is internalised averageness; an unknowingly
self-inflicted distantiality and levelling down which controls the way
in which you interpret the world. It is the set of 'normal'
assumptions, beliefs and attitudes which dictates the process of being
your self in ways and to an extent of which you are normally unaware.
It is the way that the public 'they' world infects your personal
being-a-self. When you engage with the world, you do so in terms of
internalised public assumptions - you take it for granted that
goodness, success, gender, citizenship, personhood, and so on, are as
you are conditioned to believe by 'they'. Publicness thus rules not
only on what you consider is right and wrong but also what is possible
for you - it is publicness that sends people into a trade, off to
university, or a life of crime, because that's what 'people like us' do. An important reason for losing ourselves in a 'they' is the way in
which 'they' disburden us of ourselves; it takes away - or, more
accurately, we surrender to it - the responsibility for being-a-self
for ourselves. Through publicness, your 'who I am' becomes an 'anyone'
as you let your society, job, race, gender, or membership of some
group, define your existence and thereby your character. Moreover, just
by doing this in publicness [your own internalising of 'they'
attitudes] the 'they' creates its own invisibility; the 'they' is not
something you can take a hold of, it is just 'how things are'. Being a they-self obscures the Being of being a person. This is because your essence as a person is not dictated by membership of and/or conformity with, any 'they' category but is a matter of doing what you are choosing to do with your possibilities. And, in your average everyday way of being-in-the-world [your 'doing' of what makes you who you are], your existence is dictated by public expectation - you behave as 'people like us' are expected to behave (and this is as true of 'radicals' as it is of conservatives, of rebels as it is of middle-class conformists). This is not a matter of us each choosing our own considered values - which is what taking responsibility for being-a-self is all about - but of absorbing the values of the 'they'. You have then 'lost' your self. Lostness is the fact that, when you let yourself, your existence and
your possibilities, be defined by publicness then you lose sight (qv)
of your Being as an individual self. Our lostness in the 'they'
explains why, even though being-there as a person necessitates
disclosing Being, persons fail to disclose Being authentically. We have
lost our own Being in everydayness. This means that the normal 'average
everyday' mode of human being-there closes you off from the true Being
of your own self. You interpret both yourself and the world wholly in
terms of what the 'they' makes available to you, and thus interpret
your own nature in terms of the categories (woman, teacher, worker,
employer, muslim, manager, maori, mum, extrovert, successful, gang
member, criminal, and so on) that lie closest to hand in your local
culture. Before leaving this, three points should be iterated:
'Coming to grips with being a person' is a matter of disclosing your
Being, as a person, that has been lost in everydayness. There are
different ways of disclosing the Being of different phenomena. You
disclose your own being-there by your moods, your understanding, and
discourse [talking about the world and being-in it]. These could
disclose the true Being of the 'there' were it not that your average
everyday mode of being-in-the-world is given over to idle talk,
curiosity, and ambiguity, which together constitute the state of
'fallenness' in which you obscure [close off, qv] the Being of being a
person. Being-there is more like 'being at the game' or 'at work' than being at
certain geographic coordinates. And the there of being-there is where
and how you personally find yourself, both spatially and temporally, in
the 'workshop' of being a person. This aspect of being-there is
essentially integrated with being-in and the disclosure of Being
precisely because you are personally being-there in the way that a
worker is in a workshop. It is being-in-the-world in this manner that
discloses the Being of objects around you such as equipment for being
who you are in that environment. States of Mind. Emotions constitute the most fundamental disclosure of finding yourself having to be-in a 'there'. All sorts of emotions may come and go during a day. But, underlying these, there is a more basic and enduring state of mind which is a kind of overall 'emotional attunement' to being-in-the-world as you find it. The world as you find it has been brought about by past events over which you have no control. Your state of mind discloses the way that you find yourself 'thrown' into a past-defined 'there' over which you have no control (see thrownness). As such, your emotional state of mind discloses your being-in-the-world as a matter of concern to you. That is why persons, and only person, are assailed by moods (qv). Moods are not merely subjective or chemical - not something which gurgles up from within you and then prejudices your perceptions of the world. Your moods disclose (or betray) your state-of-mind. That is why moods are an existentiale and persons are never free of them; you don't cease to feel, you just feel differently, and even apathy is a mood. Traditionally, moods have been thought of as entirely subjective -
something solely to do with the individual's psychology rather than the
world. But if you put traditional theories aside, and simply pay
careful attention to your own experience, then you may observe that
your moods disclose the Being of finding yourself 'thrown' into the
world as who you find yourself having to be. Thrownness is not a 'once for all time' event but an ongoing fact of
your existence; you are always creating who you are on the basis of a
facticity with which you are landed. If, for example, an oppressive
and/or exploitive government, that you don't like and didn't vote for,
gets into power next year then you will have to cope with that fact as
part of the world into which you find yourself thrown. Whenever you
make a choice, having to live with the consequences of that choice
becomes a part of your thrownness as soon as the choice is made.
Obligations, debts, good luck, and bad choices that you are living with
now, are the most obvious examples of this fact. The fact of being a particular individual, in a particular world,
matters to you. There are possibilities for pleasure and pain, success
and failure, in the world; there are choices to make without knowing
enough to be certain that you are choosing well; there are resources
you don't have and resources that you have but are not sure what to do
with. The Being of all these facts is disclosed by the moods [your
attunement to being-in-the-world] which announce (qv) and disclose your
state-of-mind. Indeed, if you think about it, moods just are a
disclosedness. They are not feelings that belong to the lower
irrational and 'appetitive' faculty of the soul, and lead 'rational
adults' astray from intellectual contemplation and deliberate conduct.
They disclose how you are coping with being-there-in-the-world. They
are one of the fundamental ways in which you encounter your
being-in-the-world. In doing this (i.e., disclosing the Being of your
being-in-the-world), your moods bring you before yourself as a being
who is being-there. Given the chance, you may well prefer to exist in a
more congenial 'there'. You may prefer to have been born in a different
place or time, to have made different choices in your life, to have a
different body, or even not to have been as a person at all. The fact,
however, is that you find you are 'thrown' into the task of being who
you are in the world as you find it - and the Being of that is what is
disclosed by your state of mind. This happens not only prior to
intellectual cognition (often, in fact, providing the frame of
reference within which cognition takes place) but also often in ways
that are beyond cognition. States of mind do this most often by an
emotional turning away from [evading] the reality of your thrownness.
Your state-of-mind actually discloses the Being of your being-there in
two basic attitudes: that in which you emotionally 'turn towards' a
fact, and that in which you emotionally 'turn away' from it (see
closing off). Turning away discloses your being-there by trying to
disavow some aspect of it in some way. If you turn away from a fact of
your past or present existence, for example, then you disclose it as
distasteful, embarrassing, and/or a threat to who you are trying to be
(see also fleeing). If you think about it, you may observe that your emotional state of
mind actually discloses (1) the Being of your thrownness into the
world, (2) your current being-in-the-world as a whole, and (3) your
submission to the world. 1. As already touched on, a state-of-mind discloses the Being of thrownness. Indeed, the very Being of moods is one of disclosing your attitude towards finding yourself having to be who you are where you are. What they reveal first is the Being of your own personal thrownness. Being thrown into the world, as what and who you are, includes the general burden of being a person, the facts of being who and what you are in particular [your 'there'], and how well or badly you are getting along with the task of being you. Your moods further disclose that you have no choice but to be what and who you are in your circumstance; you are unavoidably landed with being you (and even if you attempt to escape in suicide, it is still your life that is being ended by you as the person you are). In disclosing this fact, your mood doesn't create an attitude which you can adopt towards being who you are but simply reveals a fact about being what and who you are. There is no 'un-thrown' way of life that you could have in place of your actual one. We are all 'thrown' prior to any specific 'there' in which we may happen to find ourselves. Your thrownness is into your facticity, and facticity of some kind is essential and unavoidable. Finally, mood discloses how you are getting along, that is; the extent to which you are coping with being who you are in the world as you find it. 2. Your state-of-mind discloses the Being of your being-in-the-world as a whole. This fact is disclosed when you consider the source of your feelings. An emotion such as love or fear comes neither from 'outside' nor from 'inside' but arises out of being-in-the-world. You may, for example, experience excitement on one occasion, fear on another, sympathy or desire at a third, and so on. Each of these feelings is directed at a particular 'thereness' as it relates to who you are being and, without that relationship, the feeling would not arise. The state of mind disclosed by the general mood which underlies your ever-changing emotions shows how you are faring as a whole in your 'there' as a whole. 3. What you feel not only discloses what matters to you but is a
primordial way of letting what matters to you matter in the way it
does. As part of your being-in-the-world, objects of attention matter
to you and, in your concern with objects and events which are
ready-to-hand, you become affected by their character of as assets or
threats to your existence. You may not know, for example, just how
valuable being alive is to you until you discover a fear of being
killed when your life is threatened. This feeling is not just a matter
of discovering what you really value, and how much, but of letting it
matter according to your values. So fearing something doesn't just
disclose its fearfulness, it is how you allow it to be fearful. Noting
a threat intellectually doesn't capture the aspect of 'mattering' -
which is why you can acknowledge a threat to others without fearing it
ourselves. In the same way, desiring something doesn't just disclose
its desirability, it is how you allow it to be desirable to you. In disclosing the Being of your being-there, emotional states of mind
mediate between an object in the world before-which you are and the
Being about which you care. Using fear as an example, the object
before-which (in the face of which) you are fearful [the fearsome] is
some thing, event, or person, that is encountered in the world, that
matters to who you are being, and has the 'way of mattering' of being
threatening to your existence. The object about-which you are fearful
is your being-there (fearing for others derives from this because it is
only if others matter to who you are being that you fear for them). The
structure of the about-which itself consists of two parts: the entity that the mood is about is always a person, whether this be
the person who has the mood or someone else, and this
person is disclosed as affected by the before-which. The way in which
she is affected correlates to the way in which the before-which matters
to her. Say, for example, that strangers move in next door to you. If
the before-which (new neighbours) matters in the way of being
threatening, then the about-which (you and your preferred way of life)
is disclosed as threatened, if the before-which matters in the way of
being boring then the about-which is disclosed as bored, and so on. The
mood itself (the actual emotional experience) discloses the Being of
the before-which (i.e., the entity that matters to you in a certain
way) and the about-which. Feeling fearful, for example, discloses the
fearsome and allows it to matter to you. You do not first ascertain a
possible evil and then fear it. Rather, fear itself discloses the
fearsomeness that this or that entity may possess. For each modality of
the 'mood itself', there is a disclosure of a corresponding way in
which an entity can matter. For example, fear discloses that the
'there' can be threatening, sadness discloses that it can be saddening,
boredom discloses that it can be boring, and so on. Because your being-in-the-world includes being-with others, sates of mind have a measure of publicness about them. Your basic attitude towards being a person, in other words, is often an expression of the 'they' - you feel elated, depressed, cynical, angry or self-righteous because that is how those around us are feeling. This means that moods arise out of and disclose your being-in-the-world, this world consists not just of facts but of socially-defined attitudes, roles and concepts, and the influence of the world on us is such that even your most private feelings are informed by 'they'. Understanding. Whereas mood discloses the being-towards-the-past aspect of your
being-there, understanding discloses the being-towards-the-future
aspect. Put simply, mood looks backwards to the past that defines how
you are being-in the present, understanding looks forward to the future
which defines how you are being-in the present. In the same way that you use equipment for the sake of being one kind
of person or another after the equipment has been used, so you act as
you do for the sake of who you will be after the action is completed.8
To a faithful lover, for instance, the possibility of cheating on a
partner is understood, and treated, as a possibility for staying
faithful. And it is for the sake of the future faithful self - the self
that will exist after the choice is made - that the present self acts
as he does and doesn't. Understanding any object of attention, including yourself, is a matter
of knowing how to actualise its possibilities by using it. Persons
understand the Being of things by projecting (qv) their own
potentiality-for-being onto the things in question. It is, for example,
the possibility of being a learner that leads you to understand certain
states-of-affairs as possibilities for learning. Understanding
discloses the being-towards the future aspect of being-there because
possibility is all about grasping the potential of the present for
realisation in the future after you act on it. Understanding a hammer,
for instance, discloses not only the significance of hammers - you get
the point of there being hammers in the world - but also your
significance as a potential [future-oriented] hammer user. Persons understand things, as potential equipment for character-making, because the world, as a totality of involvements, frees them to be so understood. Once you understand an object as a ready-to-hand possibility for being one kind of person or another, you can then discover your own potentiality-for-being, and the serviceability, usability, and/or detrimentality, of the object in question. This kind of discovery (qv) can come about only if circumspection has first disclosed the usable or detrimental object as ready-to-hand for a project - a disclosure which can be made only within the context of a totality of involvements having to do with persons being-there in a world. This means that even the possibility of using natural products as equipment could not be discovered except for the fact that persons have to use the world as a workshop for making themselves into one kind of person or another. When you understand an object in terms of its possibilities, you let it be what it is (see letting be). The same applies when you understand yourself as a person; understanding your own potentiality-for-being, however vaguely, opens up your possibilities and lets them be possibilities for you. Understanding can not only be variously accurate or mistaken but also
authentic or inauthentic. Authentic understanding never loses sight of
the process whereby the possibilities presented by objects of attention
has its Being through the projection of your potentiality-for-being. Interpretation. Understanding not only discloses possibilities but has possibilities of its own. So imagine, for example, that one day a visitor to your place of work points to a device that you use in your everyday job and asks "What's that for?". The answer to that question discloses the in-order-to of the device; what the device is for is performing such-and-such a function in order to undertake some project. This answer is based on, and expands, understanding because you have to have interpreted (qv) what you understand as something with an in-order-to before you can explain how the device fits into the projects you perform. Interpretation is the intellectual process by which you evaluate something as having a function [an 'in order to', qv]. If you use a hammer for driving a peg into the ground, for example, then you understand the 'driving pegs into the ground' aspect of it's Being. Understanding is purely practical know-how. You interpret the hammer if you intellectually evaluate it as belonging to some class of functions; you can, for example, be looking for something to drive a peg into the ground and evaluate a hammer as belonging to a class of objects that are appropriate [serviceable] in-order-to do this. You could also evaluate [interpret] the hammer as an aesthetic item, financial asset, or as a possible weapon. To understand a builder's hammer, all you have to do is pick it up and use it, but you have to have interpreted its 'in order to' before you know to put a hammer in your bag before you set out on project that requires banging pegs into the ground. The ultimate in-order-to is the character-defining existence of a person or persons. So interpretation locates an understood object in a region (qv) at least. You may have noticed, in the above example, that interpretation has an '...as...' structure; you interpret a hammer 'as' equipment in-order-to do some task, you interpret persons 'as' accountants, teachers, sales staff, and so on. This is because, by being-in-the-world in the way that workers are in a workshop (i.e., by relating everything in the world to the projects you are undertaking in it) persons deal directly and immediately with the Being of objects; we encounter gates as gates or wheels as wheels, and disclose what we don't know as unknown, and so on. Interpretation is a step away from practical understanding and towards
an intellectual conceptualisation of Being. It precedes any judgement
as to an object's serviceability, usability or detrimentality because
you have to have some idea of what an object is for before you can
judge how useful or not it is for the job. But if you continue this
development, begun with interpretation, then the next step is
articulation [taking something apart, either literally or by thinking
your way through it]. When you interpret an object, you bring its
function into view - you disclose its involvement (qv) as equipment for
some existence-related project such as teaching, travelling,
communicating, or whatever. This interpretation is not a function of
your fancy - as post-modernists would have it - but of the thing
itself. You cannot, for instance, interpret a train as a train by
giving it any signification you like; you only interpret it as a train
when you interpret it as equipment for transporting goods and/or
passengers within a general system of transportation which serves the
existences of various persons - i.e., as being assigned to a specific
function in the world. Interpretation overcomes the usual
inconspicuousness of the Being of equipment in order to focus your
attention on the thing itself. This most commonly happens when you have
to interrupt a project (e.g., a passenger transport system) to fix a
broken tool (e.g. a train) or adapt something for a purpose (e.g.,
bring in buses to move passengers stranded by a broken train). Say, for
example, that you use a service or device in your daily life. This
entity is normally inconspicuous; you use stuff without really noticing
it because you are actually focussed of the project that you are using
it for. Then one days it breaks. Now you notice it. So say now that, in
order to find and fix the fault which caused the breakdown, you trace
the connections within the entity. This 'tracing of connection'
articulates the system. Ordinary understanding grasps the Being of objects in a strictly practical way. You understand a doorknob if you use it to open or close a door; theory needn't come into it. With interpretation, however, you are moving away from practical being-in-the-world and into intellectualisation. This is because interpretation entails a grasp of how an object fits into the worldhood of the world (i.e., the role it plays in the 'workshop' of being-there). As such, it has a cultural fore-structure which grasps the worldhood (qv) of the world according to your historical-cultural context ['there']. The fore-structure of any interpretation is a culturally-affected frame of reference (which is, itself, an interpretation of the worldhood (qv) of the world). You carry this intellectual/intellectual baggage with you to your interpretation of objects in the world. It is having a fore-structure which enables you to interpret and articulate the objects that you use. So say, for example, that you are trying to figure your way around a device that you haven't used before and isn't working as you expected it to. To figure out what's going on, you have to have some notion of what it is supposed to do and how the devices like it generally work. This notion, which depends on and reflects your historical and cultural 'there', is the fore-structure which you bring to your encounter with the device. Such a fore-structure will be inherited from your cultural community. So if your 'they' is agricultural, for example, then you will bring an agricultural fore-structure to your interpretation of the world by using agricultural metaphors and/or similes. Articulating the internal and external relationships an of entity
discloses its meaning. Meaning is where and how an object fits
within the articulation of whatever integrity of involvements it plays
a role. The meaning of a word, for example, is how it fits into the
world of language (i.e., the task to which it is assigned in a
language). The meaning of an event is where it fits into the world of
events; the whole notion of cause and effect, for instance, articulates
the meaning of events by relating them sequentially in terms of energy
transfers from one object to another. The articulation of meaning is a
matter of projecting your own potentiality-for-being onto things in the
wider context of the world [the whole natural-social environment within
which things have possibilities]. This is why things and events can be
meaningful only as part of a world.
What we have here is a continuation of the process by which the Being
of objects, which is disclosed by use but made inconspicuous by
familiarity, is slowly being buried by the very process by which we
think that we are making their Being conspicuous. In the first place,
assertions share the same historical/cultural fore-structure as
interpretation. In the second place, assertions obscure the
ready-to-handness of objects and replaces it with a kind of
present-at-handness. This obscurity isn't 'bad' - so long as it is
understood - but it can be misleading if you come to believe that you
are disclosing the Being of an object when you can articulate the
physics of its structure when, in fact, its Being is not disclosed by
its physical constitution but by its use in various projects that serve
various modes of existence. You do not disclose the Being of a desk by
taking it apart and/or listing its physical properties; you disclose
its Being by noticing how you use it. Discourse is a matter of persons talking with and listening to each
other, verbally, pictorially, or in various printed forms, as a way of
disclosing their own Being and the Being of entities which they
encounter in the world.10 Its base is ordinary face-to-face discussion
and it has always been the primary way in which persons disclose and
communicate the Being of things, especially in the sense of revealing
what is there but has been hitherto unnoticed (gestures beckoning
others to 'come and have a look at this' may well have been the
earliest forms of human discourse). As we have seen, assertions alone
can be misleading because they close off the totality of involvements
and signification that alone discloses the Being of objects. Discourse
achieves a more authentic disclosure because telling stories about
objects can include the totality that is lost in merely making
assertions. Saying that Charles loves Camilla, for example, asserts a
predicate of Charles, but only talking about [discussing] love can
disclose what love is [its Being as a possible mode of existence]. To
'define' love with a "Love is...' assertion simply cannot capture the
Being of love in all its many facets. What you need instead is a
discourse - a give-and-take of reasoned narratives which capture all
the meanings of various kinds of love in their actual settings. Language - the totality of signs, figures of speech and rules of
grammar - is the equipment that you use for the project of discoursing.
But it is discourse [the project], rather than language [equipment],
that provides the framework within which speech acts take place and
from which they draw their being as speech acts. You could not, for
example, ask "What is love?" unless the term 'love' already had a
meaning in the world of language. And you couldn't check the truth or
informative value of any answer to that question unless you
understood what was being said in the answer and then had a
world against which to check it. The fact that you need to understand
what words, assertions, and discourses, say before you can check them
against the world, shows that their meaning does not and cannot derive
from an investigation of the world. Once again, however, you must be
careful not to let this fact drive a wedge between you and the world.
In the first place, your understanding of words can come only from a
prior acquaintance with discourse (which is a public phenomenon
requiring a world in which other entities are being persons), but it is
also true that the conceptual framework of discourse is integrated with
the world in that to understand the criteria for using the word
'hammer' just is to understand what a hammer is - to know what must be
true of something in order for it to be a hammer - which, in turn,
entails having a grasp of hammers as part of the world. At this level,
linguistic meaning and the meaning [Being] of entities are merged
because linguistic meaning derives from the meaning of entities which
it discloses in word-pictures of actual and possible states of affairs
as persons experience them. It follows from this that discourse discloses your 'there' just as much
as do states of mind and understanding. Moreover, in your discourse,
you disclose your understanding and your mood. So discourse, mood and
understanding are three internally integrated aspects of your
existential constitution as a person - three equally fundamental
aspects of your being disclosive. In your average everyday mode of being a person you maintain yourself as a they-self (qv). So articulating average everydayness entails asking how the they-self lives - a task which also entails asking why humans are normally so unaware of their own Being. Heidegger answers this last question in terms of idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity, and falling. Putting it briefly, what happens is that, in your everyday being-with each other, your conversations drift away from the actual Being of the objects you talk about, and such talk closes Being off rather than disclosing it. This drifting leads to curiosity, in the form of seeking for novelty, and an ambiguity whereby you no longer distinguish true disclosure from what is merely engaging and/or fashionable. All of these together help to institutionalise the fallenness in which you lose your selves in publicness rather than disclosing your own Being in your dealings with the world. This means that your everyday being-in-the-world doesn't disclose the being-towards-the-present Being of the 'there' so much as close it off.11 Idle Talk. All communication involves talk about an object in a world. In everyday spoken or written talk our concern for what is said typically overcomes our concern for the object in such a way that we take what is said for granted, allowing it to 'infect' our understanding of the subject; we then tend to simply accept and pass on what is said as true. In this process, we think that we are learning something about objects in the world at the very same time as we are actually losing touch with them. By losing touch with the supposed objects of our talk, what we hear and say becomes groundless and, by mistakenly thinking that we are gaining in understanding, we close off the objects of our talk, rather than disclosing them, and close off the possibilities of further discovery about them. So if, for instance, folk in your everyday world talk about ethnicity as determinative to character-definition then you will begin to interpret human Being just as if ethnicity mattered in the way 'they' say it does. Consequently, a kind of pseudo-disclosure of Being - the 'received wisdom' of the 'they' - comes to dominate your everyday relations with the world and other persons (in the case of ethnicity, as an often violent barrier to relationship). Discourse is engaged with Being. Idle talk, however, is idle by being
disengaged; it has a life of its own that, in effect, floats on top of
the world. The kind of celebrity gossip found especially in women's
magazines is a good illustration of this, but popular nature or
historical documentaries are almost certainly more damaging. Idle Talk
is everyday discourse in which what is said about a subject, and how
it is said, takes precedence over the true disclosure of Being. In idle
talk you receive, discuss and pass on, what is said without checking
the veracity of the claims. Idle talk takes on a life of its own which
becomes increasingly detached from what it is supposed to be about. The
claims of such talk then become the interpretations and half-truths
which 'everyone knows' as you are 'delivered over' to them. Most of
what you hear, say, read, or write, in your lifetime is idle talk or
'scribbling' [the written mode of idle talk, found mostly in
newspapers, magazines, 'self help' books, and paperback popularisations
of science, religion, and so on]. This kind of verbal activity doesn't
disclose the world so much as close it off by covering up Being with
assumptions, half-truths, unsubstantiated claims, gossip, and
conventional prejudice. The irony of this is that we take idle talk as
teaching us something about an object at the very same time as we are
actually losing touch with it. This doesn't just counterfeit the
disclosedness of discourse, it perverts the very act of disclosing into
an act of closing off because what is said in idle talk is understood
as disclosing something. By losing touch with Being, what we believe
becomes groundless (qv). And, by mistakenly thinking that we are
gaining in understanding, we close off the possibilities of authentic
disclosure. All understanding, interpreting and communicating flows out of and back into the 'average intelligibility' established by everyday talk. This is not an alien environment, it is your 'home' which you carry with you like a snail carries its shell. Idle talk is not deliberately or maliciously misleading, nevertheless it is mischievous because it permeates your entire understanding of what it is to be a person. The pseudo-disclosure instituted by idle talk and scribbling entails that unlearning what you have supposedly learned from them becomes necessary for any attempt at truly disclosing Being. This is far from easy.
Ambiguity. Idle talk and curiosity inform and motivate each other. And the blend
of the two, with its allure of supposedly unlimited possibilities, is
profoundly seductive. But, perhaps more importantly, by being
systematically detached from the true disclosure of Being by idle talk,
we lose the important ability to distinguish genuine disclosedness from
its counterfeit. This ambiguity is a condition in which truth,
half-truth and untruth become so mixed that you cannot pick your way
between them. Everyday ambiguity comes about because idle
talk is more attached to what 'they' say than the actual world,
and the authority of the 'they' carries more weight with us
than does your own intelligence and understanding. So when, for
example, books like The Last Cabbalist in Lisbon or The Da Vinci Code
come along, purporting to be historically disclosive, then the very
people who are sceptical of the historical eyewitness accounts they
have of the events in question will accept as reliable the
misrepresentations of a highly biassed novelist some centuries removed
from those events. Fallenness is the mode of being a person into which you were born and within which you exist in your everyday life. In this mode of existence you are cut off from authentic concern for the world, and authentic solicitude for your fellow humans, by your absorption in your everyday world. And, because your Being as a person is one of being-in-the-world, this dislocation entails that you are cut off from any authentic understanding of yourself and the possibilities that are actually yours as opposed to those dimmed down possibilities which the 'they' applauds. This 'falling' from authentic being-there explains why persons, to whom an understanding of Being belongs, nevertheless cherish social, religious, philosophical and scientific traditions which systematically misrepresent the existence of persons by interpreting our Being in a way more fitting for things. Our inherent sociability, and subsequent tendency to lose ourselves in the 'they', means that misleading they-truths become embedded in the idle talk from which our religious, philosophical and scientific 'experts' take their cue. Because experts are held in high esteem, this pseudo-expertise then gains the over-inflated authority of what 'they' know. Moreover, our curiosity and ambiguity means that the only serious challenge to this comes from trendy ideologues and pseudo-philosophers who offer novel theories which basically assault commonsense with complicated and/or mischievous nonsense. None of this is accidental because falling is built into our social absorption into the 'they' and thereby into being the they-self that we normally are. This being the case, falling is not just an historical fact of human personhood but a definite existential characteristic of being-there itself. Being-with and being-there-with the 'they' is an unavoidable aspect of your everyday life that contains within it a being-towards fallenness by which you are tempted to flee from the anxiety and uncanniness of having to be a person. Temptation is the ground of fallenness that is itself prepared by idle talk and the way things have been publicly interpreted by 'they.' Temptation is thus a predisposition to fallenness that comes built into your being-with others. And the important fact about temptation is that you are not tempted by any possibilities for being a self unless you are already being-towards the kind of self for whom the possibilities in question are relevant and/or, not being resolute about being-towards some other kind of self. So to be tempted by a desire to overeat, for example, you are either being-towards being an overeater or, at least, not resolutely being-towards being a sensible eater. This is why any temptation by which you are tempted discloses something about who you are choosing to be. In this case, the ease with which, and the degree to which, 'they' absorbs human persons discloses a personal turning away from authentic being-in-the-world which tempts us to escape from the responsibility of being ourselves for ourselves. By its very nature, the everyday social environment in which you find
yourself thrown tempts you to 'fall away' from being yourself for
yourself. Part of this being-fallen is the unthinking assumption that
fallenness just is the right and normal way of being a person. In doing
this, average intelligibility 'tranquillises' your Being as a person;
it, in effect, puts it to sleep. Tranquillising is not a serene or
tranquil state but the way in which our confidence in the authority of
'they' replaces authentic being-there with a confident engagement with
missing the point. By being absorbed in the 'they' we accept an
inauthentic narrative of ourselves and our possibilities; we think that
the life we are living is the right one for people like us. An
unthinking confidence that 'they' have the world figured out and that
the 'they' way of life is the right one, or at least superior to any
realistic alternative, is a significant characteristic of being-there
as fallen into the world. When you buy into this, as we all do to some
extent, then you 'tranquillise' yourself into thinking that you
understand your existence; you become confident that 'everyone knows'
that the values of your 'they' are all there is to it. Fallenness is a snare with which we willingly ensnare ourselves, in
part because it absolves us from the anxiety of authentically choosing
a self for ourselves (see temptation). However, in enjoying the
confidence and convenience of being a they-self, you inevitably
alienate yourself from your own being-there. This is not, as 'they'
have it, a matter of being cut off from your cultural roots. Rather,
alienation is a condition in which you are cut off from your own
potentiality-for-being by the average intelligibility that goes with
idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity and what 'they' think. Alienation -
which is really self-alienation - closes you off from authenticity and
possibility as you accept an averaged definition of yourself and your
possibilities. To summarise. The leading question of this chapter is about the Being of the 'there' in 'being-there'. Part of the Being of being-there is its ability to disclose, or uncover, the Being of itself and the world. Disclosing the Being of your personal 'there' is achieved by states-of-mind [moods], understanding and discourse. States of mind disclose the being-towards-the-past aspect of your 'there,' and understanding (which is projective) discloses its being-towards-the-future aspect. Just being a person could be enough to disclose the Being of your 'there'. However, the everyday being-towards-the-present aspect of your 'there' is characterised by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. These catch you in the movement of falling which has temptation, tranquillising, alienation and self-entanglement as its essential characteristics. Fallenness has to do with falling away from being your own self-owning person. Because fallenness is your normal everyday mode of being-in-the-world, it is this, inauthentic, mode of being a person which you mistake as disclosing the Being of your own personal 'there.' This explains why the everyday existence of persons, to whom Being is an issue, closes off the being-towards-the-present Being of the 'there' in being-there. This means that getting at the Being closed off by everydayness has become the theme that we must pursue. 2.5 CAREWhat we have considered so far are the many aspects of everyday being-in-the-world. This average everydayness actually hides the project of being a person from you. Disclosing this hidden Being will be a matter of 'looking through' all the multiple activities of being-there, which cover it up, to sight a 'unitary phenomenon' which explains all of them. This integrating factor is Care (qv) - a phenomenon which announces itself in the form of anxiety. We have already seen that our moods give us the most straightforward disclosure of our being-in-the-world to ourselves. However, and because being-there is mostly lost in the 'they' and fallen into the world, most of your moods disclose only your Being as a they-self. One striking exception to this is the kind of anxiety you experience when your everyday being-in-the-world breaks down and you are suddenly brought face-to-face with the need to choose a new form of existence for yourself. A careful consideration of this kind of anxiety discloses a primordial unity for all the activities involved in being a person in Care [the aspect of being a person whereby various possibilities matter to us in various ways]. Fear discloses the fearful. This is significant because
the universal human temptation (qv) to turn away from the task of being
persons, and let a 'they' define us as things, discloses that we fear
something about our own personhood. The human tendency to turn away
(qv) from having to authentically choose an existence, and thereby a
character, is so compulsive as to have the form of fleeing from
something fearful. In fleeing, the burden of being-a-self for yourself
gets 'thrust aside' so that you simply accept thing-like ways of Being.
What we turn way from is always revealing and, in this case, what
humans flee from is having to be a person. This fear explains why
falling (qv) is self-willed. Although fleeing that before-which you are
fearing discloses the object as fearful, it doesn't fully grasp its
Being (see grasping Being). There is, however, one state of mind that
does grasp the Being of that which you fear about having to be a
person, and that is the kind of existential anxiety which Kierkegaard
called 'dread' and Heidegger calls 'angst.' This kind of anxiety is not
the fear which is being-towards some thing in the world (such as an
upcoming exam or confrontation), but the uneasiness or dread which you
experience if your everyday being-in-the-world breaks down and
confronts you with the need to choose a new existence for yourself.
What is particularly scary, and revealing, about this anxiety is its
Being as a primordial state-of-mind which discloses the 'notness'
[nullity, qv] on which your existence stands. All moods and emotions
have an emotional object. The emotional object of anxiety, that
before-which you are anxious, is the fact that you have to
choose an existence for yourself by actualising possibilities,
and the world of possibilities, by which you choose a
possible existence, is itself a product of the existence you choose (it
is only the potentiality of being-there to exist as a builder, for
example, that discloses the possibilities for building, in the world,
that are valuable to the person who is being a builder). There is,
therefore, no final foundation to being-in-the-world, no fact which
determines your values. In the normal course of events we potter along, being-there without really understanding that our existence depends on possibilities which depend on our existence. Sometimes, however, this pottering along can break down due to something going wrong - a serious illness or injury, the loss of a job or loved one, a brush with death, a failure, some insight or just an awareness of the fatuousness of everyday life. In such situations you seem to run out of worthwhile possibilities. Your anxiety at running out of possibilities confronts you with the fact that you always face the question of how to live your life; you simply haven't been facing that fact. This is an unpleasant confrontation which persons normally flee. But, because it forces us to face ourselves as truly being-in-the-world, it can free us to be ourselves rather than a they-self. Because being a person stands on nothing, and anxiety discloses this
fact, anxiety is not a fear of some thing so much as a fear of nothing
(our mothers were right, there is nothing to be afraid of). Whereas
fear, for example, has a specific object - some thing or person in the
world which threatens your existence - the object of anxiety is not an
object in the world but the very Being of your existence as a person -
an existence which stands on possibilities rather than any actuality.
So say, for example, that you have spent years being a driver. At work
you drive a taxi, bus, delivery van, or whatever, while outside of work
you drive yourself and/or your family to shops, sports grounds, the
countryside and so on. Then one day something happens and you can no
longer drive. The sudden 'vacuum' in your existence and
character-realisation leaves you confronting the fact that you realise a character for yourself by actualising possibilities,
and the possibilities, by which you have been defining
yourself, have themselves been a product of how you were choosing to
exist. The emotional effect of this 'confrontation with nothingness' is
anxiety. This anxiety has no specific object and consequently no
specific remedy; the object in-the-face of which you are anxious is not
something specific but the lack of anything specific (in this case, the
existence through which you both discovered and utilised possibilities
for realising that existence). This matters because being-there
realises itself from the possibilities which it discloses by realising
itself, so anxiety gets you 'where you live.' If a familiar existence
becomes untenable then you have to invent the possibility of
discovering new possibilities by existing in a new way. In between the
loss of an old existence, and the invention of a new one, you are faced
with a kind of 'nothingness' in which the possibilities disclosed by
your old existence are no longer open to you and other possibilities
(of the kind that 'helpful' folk suggest) are meaningless; you have
literally run out of meaningful possibilities. After all, possibilities
become meaningful only when you project the Being defined by your
existence onto them. If the existence you would normally project breaks
down then what have you to project!? That before-which you are anxious,
in this case, is not possibilities in the world so much as yourself as
a potentiality-for-being - the before-which and about-which of your
state of mind (anxiety) are the same (i.e., they are both you). Life
seems meaningless because you can no longer rely on your hitherto
normal existence to make sense of being-in-the-world. The notness you confront in anxiety is, as it were, 'raw' - it has not
been distanced or tamed by intellectualising or the confidence of the
'they'. It is the disclosure of this 'raw nothing' that you
confront when your everyday being-in-the-world breaks down. So anxiety
throws you back on your own potentiality-for-being - not your humanity
or 'they' or circumstances, but your Being as possibility. Anxiety
reveals that you don't have to be a teacher or builder or Presbyterian;
you don't even have to go on surviving if you choose not to. This
doesn't bring anything new into your being-there but simply turns you
towards what you have been turning away from even though it has always
been the case. This may well be why the kinds of killing sprees that
occurred at Aramoana or Port Arthur always follow a breakdown in the
killer's existence; the anxiety attendant on such a breakdown discloses
that he needn't go on struggling to be a decent citizen but can do
anything he likes. But this is also what can make anxiety a tonic for
being-there; it faces us with ourselves as what we are and always have
been. This is doubly so in that being with others is normally such an
important part of being-in-the-world but, in anxiety, others lose their
significance [meaning] for us - they are still 'there' but you don't
'connect' any more. In anxiety, pleasing folk in your everyday
environment becomes meaningless. What's the point in having tried to be
a safe and courteous driver when, all of a sudden, you can't drive
anymore? What you are anxious about if your everyday existence breaks down is your own personhood; your own individual, potentiality-for-being. So the anxiety which folk normally treat as a 'bad' feeling, to be overcome or avoided, is the very feeling which can most motivate you to 'get real' as a person by finding, and actualising, your own possibilities for being who you are. By doing this, anxiety individualises you. In everydayness you hide in the 'they', but when you are thrown before your Being as possibility - as you are in anxiety - then you are alone before the world. This individualisation is the disclosure of your aloneness before the world as a potentiality-for-being who has to choose the existence that will disclose possibilities for that existence to you. So to say that anxiety individualises you is not to say that it reveals some sort of real you. This cannot be the case because the real you is and always has been continually defined and redefined by your ongoing existence - and it is precisely the meaning of your character-defining existence which is stripped off you in anxiety. So what anxiety discloses is not you as some thing but as an individual 'nothing' awaiting a definition that it must choose for itself. It calls you, in other words, to 'take a stand' on who you are being by exposing the hollowness of your supposed foundation in facts about you and your circumstances [the 'there']. In everydayness, humans take it for granted that what and who they are is settled by belonging to a 'they' such as workers, men, Nigerians, Buddhists, Left Wingers. or whatever. Anxiety strips you of that illusion; it discloses that the only way to be 'a Nigerian', for example, is to be constantly choosing a Nigerian existence and constantly choosing a Nigerian existence. So in individualisation you don't 'discover' who you really are, you discover that, as a person, you are not really anyone except who you personally choose who to be, and go on being, by how you choose to exist in the world. In unambiguously disclosing being a person as what it truly is, anxiety discloses that, contrary to the sense of belonging which you assiduously cultivate in everyday life, you are not really 'at home' in the world. Heidegger calls the disturbing feeling of not being 'at home' in the world being 'unheimlich' ['un-home-like'] The German unheimlich is usually translated as 'spooky' or 'eerie' but is rendered as 'uncanniness' in the English translation of Being and Time. Uncanniness describes how the normally comfortable and familiar world feels to us when stripped of its normal possibilities in our moments of existential anxiety. Average everydayness makes us feel 'at home' in the world - a feeling apparently validated by the tranquillising confidence of publicness (qv). You are encouraged, by your acceptance into a society, to feel comfortable with being a they-self in a they-world of average intelligibility. Anxiety, however, jerks us out of our absorption; the world no longer feels comfortably familiar, our tranquillisation fails. Anxiety awaits you at any time that you stop fleeing. In anxiety,
actualities in the world fade into the background while the real world
- the world of possibilities - becomes the 'fearful before-which' that
you face. Thus, instead of fleeing away from your Being into
everydayness - as you do in fallenness - you are turned from
everydayness to face authentic being-in-the-world (this may well be why
anxiety most often afflicts us in the dark, when the everyday world's
details are less obtrusive). This disclosure not only individualises
you as your ownmost potentiality-for-being but also confronts you with
your own Being as thrown projection, that is; your Being as a specific
individual, alone before a world of possibilities (some of them
terrifying) who is personally confronted with a 'having to choose' that
you are landed with whether you like it or not.
Through the experience of uncanniness [not being 'at home'] which it
brings, anxiety discloses the basis of your existence as thrown
projection fallen into the world. The 'thrown' part of this, disclosed
by states-of-mind, shows you to already be in a world that is not of
your choosing (something which is defined by its past). The
'projection' part, disclosed by your capacity for understanding, shows
you to be simultaneously 'ahead of yourself' - heading into the future
where your possibilities will be realised. The 'fallen' part,
meanwhile, shows you to be presently preoccupied [absorbed] with the
everyday world. What you can note here is the temporality of thrownness
[past], projection [future] and fallenness [present]. It is this
tripartite unity of Being and temporality (qv) that discloses the unity
of your Being as Care. So say, for instance, that you are facing a risk
and decide to take it while being careful. In such a case you are
acting in the present, as who you have been so far, and for the sake of
who you will be after the careful risk has been taken. If you decided
not to take the risk, or to take it carelessly, then you would create a
different character for yourself by how you act [exist]. In such cases,
however, you would still be acting now, as who you have been, for the
sake of one of the potential characters you will be. Thus it is that
your Being a Care not only encompasses being-alongside [in the midst
of] the world in the present but also being-already-in the world
[having a past] and being-ahead-of-yourself [having a future]. Each of
these three aspects of Care relates specifically to one of the aspects
of being-there that you have already noted above. Your facticity (qv)
is determined by your being-already-in the world. Falling (qv) is how
and why you are being-alongside the world in the everyday mode of
caring about the present. Existence (qv) is how you are being-ahead of
yourself by projecting your personhood into the future. Because the character of persons is defined by their existence, you are an integrity of the possible and the actual. This integrity is temporal because who you actually are at any given time is defined by a past while your possibilities will be realised [actualised] in a future by your present choices. There is, therefore, a sense in which your 'now' behaviour is always moving towards a character that is not yet realised but will be in the future. It is this constant, present tense, stepping away from who you are now, which is a product of your past, and towards who ceteris paribus you will be in the future, that Heidegger evokes by talking of your Being as a person always being-ahead of itself. Your being-there is always being-towards the future by 'reaching' for someone who, with any sort of luck, you will be but are not yet. However, this 'being-ahead-of-yourself' is integrated with your thrownness - your already being-in a world - which is why Heidegger talks of being-there as 'thrown' projection. You are an integrity of the actual ['being-already-in'] and the possible ['being-ahead']. It is only within this integrity that your 'being-already-in' in effect buries your 'being-ahead' - your potentiality-for-being - in the world. Thus, fallenness is the mode of being-there into which you 'flee' from the anxiety of being-ahead. This, in turn, is the very mode from which you can find yourself freed by anxiety. Care is enacted in and as all the aspects of being-there which we have looked at so far. It is, for example, Care which explains both moods and understanding because if you didn't care then you wouldn't be affected by the world and wouldn't be motivated to understand it. Care also explains the difference between things ready-to-hand (those that immediately matter to us) and present-at-hand (those that do not immediately matter to us). Care explains your interest in other folk and what they do (solicitude) and your concern for things in the environment. Indeed, every aspect of being-there hitherto encountered 'grows' from Care. Your Being as Care 'faces' [is being-towards] your facticity
[thrownness] and possibility [existence] which, together, disclose that
you are always being-there alongside other beings within the world
[fallenness]. Although Care integrates these three 'faces' or
'directions', your being fallen into the world can distort this
integrity so that you are, for example, being-towards the past at the
expense of being towards the future or even the present (you can see
this sometimes when someone whose existence has broken down stops
planning for the future or taking care of themselves). In addiction,
for instance, Care is so modified that the addict puts all of her
potentiality-for-being into the service of what she craves - her
existence increasingly revolves in a narrow orbit around maintaining
her habit. Addicts can become extremely inventive in pursuing a single
matter of Care to which all their energies are devoted. This is still
an expression of Care, but it is an expression that has become
seriously inauthentic and lopsided. Authentic Care, however, has a
complex structure which is not bound to one temporal dimension but free
to all; Care is simultaneously being-towards the past [being-there as
being-already-in the world], the present [being-there as
being-alongside the world], and the future [being-there as
being-ahead-of-itself]. The unity of this complex is similar to that of
a triangle which can be talked about in terms of individual sides even
though neither triangles nor their sides could exist as such without
each other.
There are four facts that, together, articulate [spell out] persons being 'in the truth'.
It is important to keep in mind that, although truth is an uncovering
of states of affairs, it is not a function of things (it is not
objective) or of persons (it is not subjective) but of
persons-being-in-the-world. Some people are fond of talking as if truth
was some sort of thing-like essence that exists independently of us;
some kind of meta-narrative 'lurking' in worlds or states of affairs
which you may or may not discover. This is not so. There is no Truth
with a capital 'T' somehow hanging around 'out there' - there are only
states of affairs which being-there may disclose more or less
accurately. Truth itself is, and can only be, a function of
being-in-the-world because truth is a function of
disclosure which is a function of being-there, and truth
discloses the Being of entities and, without a world, there are no
entities to disclose. So it is only persons being-in-the-world that
makes truth possible and talk of truth meaningful. There may be eternal or absolute truths but, because truth is relative to persons in worlds, such truths would require eternal or absolute persons in eternal and absolute worlds (although I am not sure what an 'absolute' world would be). The fact that truth is relative to being-there, however, does not mean that truth is relative in the sense of "It's true if it's true to you". Truth is disclosure, and what is true is what is disclosed in the world - not what you would like to believe has been disclosed. There is, in other words, 'a truth of the matter' that depends on us to disclose it. Humans presuppose that there must be truths in the same way that, in
thinking about truth, you presuppose that you must be persons. After
all, if you weren't persons then you wouldn't be presupposing anything.
This is why scepticism is like taking a deep breath to argue that you
don't breathe. You cannot doubt anything unless you are a person (i.e.,
someone for whom doubt is a possibility). Truth is meaningful only to
persons; and truth, as a disclosedness of the Being of things, is a
necessary part of persons being persons. An actual sceptic, therefore -
one who genuinely lived the sceptical thesis - couldn't be a person
even though only persons can be sceptical (cows, for example, are not
sceptical about anything because they neither deal with nor articulate
the Being of anything). It is only the mistaken idea of the idealised
subject [the 'pure I'] being 'in here' while objects of knowledge are
'out there' in a world of which you are not essentially part, that
makes scepticism even thinkable. 3. BEING-A-WHOLE, BEING-TOWARDS-DEATH Everyday fallenness does not disclose the whole of being a person. If we are going to get the whole of being-there into view then we need to consider the aspects of being-there that everyday fallenness closes off. This is not as easy as might first appear. Take your death for example. It seems obvious that you cannot describe the whole of your existence and Being without including your death somewhere in the description. The problem here, however, is that, although death will end your being-in-the-world, there is no time, alive or dead, when you will actually be whole or complete. Because your Being is one of actualising possibilities, you are necessarily incomplete for as long as you live and any possibility at all remains open to you. However, coming to an end of your possibilities at death doesn't complete you; it merely brings your potentiality-for-being to an end. This being the case, death doesn't seem to give a whole picture of being a person so much as simply stop being-there from ever being whole. So, if you are going to account for the role of death in being-there, you are going to have to look at the role it plays in your existence before you die (your being-towards-death as the way in which your existence is affected by your knowledge that it is going to end).13 The idea of death has many everyday variations, but the important one for persons is surely that of death as the end of your possibilities for being one kind of person or another by being-in-the-world. Death, in this sense, typically coincides with perishing [the end of biological life], but these need to be distinguished. Just as many beings live but only persons exist as well as living so, for the purposes of getting the Being of death into view, we can say that all living things perish but only persons die as well as perishing. Being-with-others is part of being-in-the-world, and it is from the deaths of others that most of us take our understanding of death. However, even being alongside the dead in mourning and remembrance cannot really disclose the Being of death because it is not your being-in-the-world that has come to an end in these cases. Just as existence is always someone's 'mine', so too is death - only the individual person can die her own death just as only she can live her own life. This means that the Being of your death cannot be grasped via the deaths of others. To even hope to disclose the Being of death you must focus on what your death means to you. The biggest differences between beings that perish and those who die
are that (a) being-there is aware of [is being-towards] its own
death, death 'impends' for you in a way that it doesn't for non-persons
(there is no evidence that birds or bees know that they are going to
die), and (b) because of the nature of being-there as ongoing
potentiality-for-being, the death of persons has no sense of
completion, fulfilment, or the end of a cycle. Being-there just is
possibility, so to end that possibility is not to achieve any kind of
fulfilment but simply to terminate a process. An ontological analysis of death focuses on the meaning
of death for
the individual. Death, in this case, is a privation, a taking away, of
existence [the project of being a person in the world]. This needs to
be distinguished from perishing [the end of biological life] because,
for persons, biological life is not the whole
story. Your death will mean not just the end of a human but the end of
being a person (death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility
of being-there). Your death, as the end of your possibilities,
'impends' as an ever-present possibility - you have a lived
[existential] being-towards relationship with the limits of your
possibilities. Your being-toward relationship with your own death is
one of understanding. This understanding is inauthentic if you think of
your death as something in the future with which you will deal only at
the time. Changing the focus, from considering death as a 'some day'
actuality to considering the end of possibilities as a 'today'
possibility, enables you to disclose what death means to your as part
of your existence. The existential focus of death, therefore, is on a
relationship with the limits of your possibilities - a relationship
which you are realising authentically or not right now. The non-relational aspect of death is such that, in your being-towards-death, you stand before your 'ownmost' potentiality-for-being; the esteem of others, and what they expect of you, is irrelevant. Moreover, facing your death highlights your being-towards all your existential possibilities because there is nothing quite like the end of possibilities to show you just how important they are to your being as person. In other words, an authentic being-towards-death indicates an authentic being-towards existence. Being something that dies, and knows that it dies, is part of your thrownness (qv). This means that being-towards-death is a state of Being which is built right into your existence as a person: it belongs primordially to your being-in-the-world. This state is part of your finitude, that is; the limits to your possibilities arising from (a) your mortality, (b) your circumstances, (c) what you are [a particular human being], (d) the nature of world in which you exist (cf; facticity), and (e) the fact that actualising some possibilities always entails waiving others. These limits are variously logical, physical, psychological and temporal; you cannot, for example, escape death, the 'laws' of logic or nature, your physical limitations, or your social-historical context [the past]. Despite this, your attitude towards the end of your possibilities - your being-towards-death - can be variously authentic or inauthentic and is usually the latter as you 'flee' from death just as you flee from your existence as a person.14 The possibility of death is just one among all the other possibilities of being-there from which humans flee in our inauthenticity. Being-towards-death is, however, an inescapable aspect of our existence - our being-in-the-world - whereby we are hedged about by the limits of possibility from the moment we are born. Being thrown into death is not a matter of living first and then dying 'later' but of living the life of a finite person. This is a fraught state because your being-there is a being-towards possibilities [a potentiality-for-being]. Death, however, is a state of not-being-in-the-world, of having no possibilities, so being-towards-death is a being-towards the ever-present possibility of impossibility. Because being-towards-death is each person's 'mine', it relates directly to each person's individual potentiality-for-being - the unavoidable fact that only you can die your own death highlights the neglected fact that only you can live your own life. For this reason, your being-towards-death can be authentic even though it is normally inauthentic. Inauthentic being-towards-death turns away from it by merely awaiting it as a 'someday' eventuality. Only facing death as what it is - the ever-present possibility of impossibility - is authentic. Our average everyday being-towards-death is, like our average everyday
being-towards life, basically one of evasion, concealment and idle
talk. you act as if only other people die, you 'console' the dying with
lies and euphemisms, death is sanitised with talk of 'sleep' or life
after death. This is all part of your they-self in which the 'they'
provides tranquillisation about death. This public tranquillity is
shown in the way that death is so often seen more as a kind of social
inconvenience, a nuisance, rather than the uttermost end of
potentiality. All
of the above enables Heidegger to give an existential projection of
what an authentic being-towards-death might be like. Death is not only your ownmost, and non-relational, possibility; it is
also absolutely certain (qv). The certainty of death is not the kind
that you get through the gathering of evidence. It is of a more
primordial kind than intellectual certainty because it is part of your
existential certainty of being-in-the-world. The idea here is that your
existential certainty of death, like your existential certainty of
life, and unlike your theoretical certainty of death, is not inductive
("Everyone dies, I am part of everyone, therefore I too will die"). It
is more that you know that your possibilities are limited because it is
possibilities that you live by; there is, if you like, a primordial
understanding of death 'built into' your being existent. It is only
when you are certain then you act with conviction. Conviction is a
form of certainty in which you let the truth be the sole determinant of
your being-towards it understandingly (see letting be). There is a world of difference between acknowledging that your
possibilities will end 'one day' - assuming that your honesty goes that
far - and living in awareness that all of your possibilities are
vulnerable to impossibility all the time. The first is vague and
indefinite, it changes nothing; the second is concrete, and it changes
your understanding of who and what you are as potentiality-for-being.
An ontical interpretation of death simply tells us what perishing is -
it gives us a medical or legal definition of someone else being dead.
Only an existential and ontological understanding of death allows us to
grasp what it means to your being-there. This existential-ontological
understanding reveals death to be a kind of 'uttermost' possibility -
the ultimate, intimate [ownmost], and ever-present possibility of final
and utter impossibility which frames your life
and you are being-towards at every moment of your
existence. This matters because you define yourself as a person by your
possibilities; your whole being as a person is 'ahead-of-itself' -
oriented towards the possible, the 'not yet' - while, all the time, the
ultimate 'ahead of itself' towards which you are heading is an
implacable 'nothing ahead'. This is what you turn away from in
inauthenticity. But, because inauthenticity is based on the possibility
of authenticity, you can turn back to an authentic being-towards-death.
This authentic being-towards-death would not be abstract or 'spiritual'
but a practical orientation towards everyday existence; it would affect
what matters to you, and thus show its connection with Care that it
must have if everything to do with being a person really is an
expression of Care. An initial description of authentic being-towards-death is necessarily in negative terms - we speculate that it will not evade reality, will not cover it up, and so on. This is because the lack of authentic being-towards-death in human experience makes describing the authentic Being difficult. But if your everyday being-towards-death is inauthentic because it flees anxiety, etc., then you can start working out what an authentic attitude might be like from what the inauthentic attitude is not. Taking this approach discloses a distinction between anticipating death [be prepared for it] or simply awaiting it. What you anticipate (or try to avoid anticipating by merely awaiting) is the state of no longer having anything to actualise. This negation of possibility is precisely what throws the possibilities of your life into such sharp relief. To return to the Musical Chairs analogy, being aware that you could be 'out' at any moment makes merely conforming to the latest dance steps rather unimportant. So, far from making life pointless, authentic being-towards-death offers support for becoming intent on something. The anticipation of death 'switches on' your ownmost and uttermost potentiality-for-being; it provides the impetus for living life authentically. Anticipation is a response to death, as the end to possibilities, in
which you stop merely awaiting it as a 'someday' [future] actuality and
begin to deal with it as what it means for your present existence. We
can get a sense of what anticipation entails by thinking of the way
that intelligent boaties anticipate the possibility of bad weather by
always being prepared for it; bad weather is not 'a bridge that we will
cross when you come to it' but a possibility for which they are
prepared right now. Human beings noramlly avoid facing death as what it is. Even irreligious folk harbour some kind of vague belief that we will survive death in some form. But death is not to be 'outstripped', so authentic being-towards-death would not try; instead, authentic anticipation would accept death as the end of possibility. This can be liberating because accepting the end of possibilities at face value entails accepting that you simply are your possibilities. This shatters the assumption that the 'they' life that you have been living is somehow natural or obligatory - that you have to behave as you do because that is how men or women, or Italians or working folk or whatever, behave. This is an uncomfortable place to be because giving up your they-self can itself feel like dying, but it will alter how you select which of your possibilities to actualise. This can free you to be who you are. Anticipating your death does not somehow strip away your 'masks' and put you in touch with who you 'really' are. What it does, rather, is strip away your misunderstanding of the project of being-there and put you in touch with 'how' you are. People will talk and act as if being a lawyer or Basque or lesbian or whatever is a fact that dictates their existence. Moreover, they cling to this tenaciously - almost as if breaking the habits of a lifetime would destroy them. An authentic understanding of being-there (which equates with anticipation) contradicts this commitment because you realise that being who you have been is not a given fact but a constantly iterated choice. Having responded to a stimulus all of your life - be it an alarm clock, an insult, call to prayer, or urge to gamble - does not entail that you have to respond to it in the same way next time it occurs. Realising this fact really does shatter the illusion that you stand on a secure foundation in choosing your existence; your personal character is not something actual to be discovered but someone possible who you invent and reinvent on an ongoing basis as you live your life. To summarise. Simply awaiting your death in everydayness suppresses your own awareness of your own Being; anticipating your death reveals to you your lostness in the they-self, and brings you face to face with the possibility of being yourself for yourself (unsupported by others), in a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the 'they', and is factical, certain of itself, and anxious. This means that, if you stop trying to evade the reality of your existence as a person [an existence defined by possibilities] then you free yourself from the 'they' and for the possibility of truly defining your own self by your own chosen values as realised in your choices. This freedom entails authentic being-towards-death in which there is no self-deception, no hiding from or denial of any reality - including your reality as a possibility-defined person. The 'symptoms' of an authentic being-towards-death are self-government, the acceptance of anxiety, and a commitment to yourself as wholly responsible for being who you are. This is not about discovering who you are or the 'real values' in life but about how you invent yourself and your values by means of whatever possibilities are open to you. It cannot be anything else because what anxiety and death confront you with is not the 'ultimate meaning of life' but the ultimate 'nothingness' [nullity, qv] of being-there as a possibility that realises its Being by actualising the possibilities that it brings into being by being a possibility. 3.1 AUTHENTIC POTENTIALITY-FOR-BEING, RESOLUTENESSThe description of authenticity up until this point has been based on a logical projection of the phenomena of being-there - somewhat like extending a graph from known data to predicted data. This is perfectly in order if you are trying to establish a religion, but it is dangerously abstract for a description of being a person in the world. To ground this projection in everyday being-in-the-world requires some evidence that will attest to our potentiality-for-being-authentic. This evidence is found in the fact that only persons have a conscience. Conscience is a suspicion that you are failing some standard and/or the discharge of some obligation. It doesn't matter, for our purposes, what the particular content of your conscience is. What matters is that only persons have a conscience, and the fundamental structure of conscience is the same in all moral, social, political, religious, settings. If you put aside variations in intensity and content of conscience for individuals, and simply describe its basic structure, you can note that, whatever the content, conscience is always experienced as saying something to you about your existence. This makes conscience a form of discourse (qv). Discourse is always addressed by someone to someone, it has a subject [that which is talked about] and, if heard, it discloses the Being of the subject (2.3). In the case of your conscience the someone it addresses is you personally, and what it discloses is something about your particular being-in-the-world. In doing this, your conscience makes the 'they' irrelevant and calls you to awareness of your own being-there. What your conscience tries to tell you is usually clouded by publicness and/or popular mythology. But, again, if you look past the local details and towards what all your experiences of conscience have in common, you may notice that, in one way or another, your conscience always 'summons' you to yourself from out of your lostness in the 'they' and all the compromises that lostness entails. So conscience is always a call; a kind of summons to be a 'my self' rather than a they-self. This strongly suggests that, under all the obscuring detail, your conscience is the lurking awareness you retain, in the background of your everyday inauthenticity, that being authentic is possible. To speak of conscience as a 'call' implies the existence of a caller -
the 'someone' who is addressing you in discoursing. The call of
conscience originates within you, but the caller is obviously not who
you are as a they-self; after all, conscience 'calls' against the
expectations and wishes of your everyday self; the 'voice' of
conscience 'speaks' to you individually but tells you what you don't
want to hear. This is where the folk-psychology of conscience as the
voice of God or social conditioning comes from; people don't like the
call to authenticity and disown it as coming from outside of them.
Examining the lived experience of having a conscience, however, shows
that the 'caller' in conscience is yourself as the anxious
potentiality-for-being from which you are hiding in everydayness. You
find yourself thrown as a particular person into a world where you must
realise your potentiality-for-being by actualising possibilities that
are possibilities only because of your potentiality-for-being. You make
yourself at home in this world by hiding in everydayness. Your
conscience, however, manifests the uncanniness [not-at-home-ness] which
is disclosed by anxiety. So the 'caller' of conscience just is this
suppressed [closed off] potentiality for being-there which doesn't feel
'at home' in the world. Understanding the Call of Conscience; Guilt. Something always 'follows' from the call of conscience - it is either
suppressed or acted on. Both suppression and acting on show
some understanding of the call of conscience, and require a
certain way of being who you are. In particular, both suppression and
acting show an understanding that conscience is telling you something.
And you need no more than your own experience to tell you that, when
conscience 'speaks', it always tells you that you are guilty of
something. This being the case, you need to know what you are guilty
of. Once again, this is not an existentiell question - each instance of
guilty conscience will be focussed on something different and
particular to a person in each case. It is, rather, an existential
question; a question to which one answer can be given to us all. To
answer this question requires getting past the differences in various
individual appearances of conscience and down to the common structure
of guiltworthiness in general. Heidegger argues that the condition of being-there which is the ground of guilt-talk and guilt-behaviour in persons is our being-guilty. If being-guilty is built right into being-there then that would explain why persons have a conscience. Such a universal being-guilty cannot be a moral condition but must simply be a fact of being a person. The most obvious kind of being-guilty, which cannot be avoided by any ethic, is the fact that, whenever you make any choice whatsoever, you waive other possibilities and, thereby, other persons you could have been. Even if you try to get around this, by realising as many possibilities as you can, you still waive, for instance, the possibility of choosing a stable existence and committing to it. This kind of being-guilty has, however, still a different content for each person. To really get down to the ground of conscience, we need something of which all persons are guilty just by being persons. We can try to do this by noting that, regardless of the person or society, guilt is always an indebtedness which arises from being responsible for some kind of negation, not, or nullity (qv). This nullity is a 'not' of some kind. It may be an absence [lack], a contradiction, an inability, or simply some fact that is not there (a possibility, for example, is a nullity by not yet being actual). If another attributes guilt to you, or you attribute it to yourself, then, regardless of what ethic is invoked, the claim is that there is some nullity for which you are responsible. If you are looking for a universal and factual nullity of being-there as the ground for the phenomenon of guilt as an aspect of being-there, then you can find it in the groundlessness of your existence that arises from the fact that you have to choose an existence for yourself by actualising possibilities, and the possibilities, from among which you choose an existence, are themselves a product of the existence you choose. There is no final foundation to your Being; your existence depends on possibilities which depend on your existence. The point here is that we normally give guilt a moral, social, or
religious, spin. But no they-relative value will explain conscience,
only a universal fact of existence that gives rise to the experience of
conscience in all cultures. We find this fact in the nullity of being a
thrown projection. 1. The Nullity of Thrownness - The nullity for which you are responsible, and which arises from the fact of being thrown, is grounded on the fact that you didn't choose to be what, who, where, or when, you are. You simply awoke to being-there to find yourself already thrown into existing as who you are in a particular set of circumstances. This existence, and most of those circumstances, are the result of past actions by other persons. You are, moreover, thrown into a cultural-historical context in which Others determine your existence. You did not bring any of this about, but you are responsible for it. As a person, you realise your possibilities within the state of affairs into which you simply find yourself thrown. This state of affairs - which includes your biological and psychological makeup - is not of your making. So having to realise possibilities is based in a state of affairs that is not your fault but which you must 'take over' and carry with you as the basis of being-there. Being-the-basis is a matter of being the cause of. You are not the cause of your own existence. However, in order to be what you are thrown into being, you must 'take over' being what you are and become the basis of the projective [forwards looking] existence with which you are landed. This 'takeover' of inherited being-in-the-world which has, so to speak, been thrust on you, is what is involved in being-the-basis of your own being-there. 2. The Nullity of Projection - Nullity (the 'not-ness' for which you
are responsible) is also built into your Being as projection. In the
first place, this is because possibilities are not some kind of
incomplete or lower-class actualities; a possibility is literally
no-thing. So being thrown into responsibility for being a possibility
means being-the-basis of a whole bunch of no-things. Indeed, as a
possible builder, teacher, killer, etc., who realises possibilities for
various kinds of existence just by being a possible builder, etc., you
are the null basis of a nullity (i.e., your potentiality-for-being,
which is not some thing, is the null ('nothing') basis of your
possibilities which are also a nullity by not being any thing). In the
second place, in actualising any one possibility you thereby waive all
sorts of other possibilities - the time spent at a job, for example,
cannot be spent in other ways at the same time. So another nullity
arises, from projection, in the form of all the possibilities that are
not realised because you choose an alternative. Perhaps more to the
point, and as a result of this, there are all the possible selves that
you could have been but are not because you choose to be the self you
are. This means that your primordial being-guilty as a person has nothing to
do with any kind of moral, political, or religious, failure. You tend
to think it does only because, just as your primordial conscience is
fallen into average intelligibility as social conscience (i.e., you
cover over an awareness that authentic being-there is possible with
feelings that you have failed some they-specific moral or political
code), so your primordial guilt is fallen into average intelligibility
as social or religious guilt. The fact, however, is that being-guilty
is more primordial than any religious, political, or moral, ideologies
founded on it and it is this primordial being-guilty that conscience
discloses. In the uncanniness disclosed by anxiety, you come
face-to-face with the fact that, as something thrown and projective,
you are responsible for several kinds of 'not' at every step of your
existence. This doesn't invalidate ethics but discloses that you alone
are responsible for whatever ethic you follow. Your primordial guilt
[your being the null basis of a nullity] cannot be avoided by any form
of existence; you must chose and you must choose according to an ethic
[set of values] that you choose just by choosing (we cannot escape
ethics because the very process of being-there necessarily creates a
values-system out of nothing). So the call of conscience is not a call
to an ethic or none but to authentic being-guilty. Put simply, you can
be the basis of your existence as a they-self or as a self-owning self,
and it is to the second of these that your own conscience calls you. You can own your own existence only if you deliberately choose which
possibilities of existence to realise in an understanding of what you
are and what you are doing - you turn away from being a communally
owned they-self and stand as a self-owning my-self in-the-world. This
is a matter of projecting your ownmost potentiality-for-being onto your
circumstances - whatever you and they may be. There is, in this, not an
escape from guilt but a kind of freedom to own you own guilt - there is
no "It's the fault of society," "I can't help it, I'm just made that
way," or "It's her fault for making me angry" in your being-guilty. So
say, for example, that you want to justify your everyday ethic on the
grounds of being a businessperson (or Brazilian, woman, atheist,
lawyer, homosexual, 'practical bloke' or whatever). This justification
is inauthentic (as is the choice) to the extent that it assumes that
being a businessperson is a fact with which you are simply
landed, and dictates or determines your ethics. Being a
businessperson is not a fact with which anyone is landed but a possible
way of existing that is chosen as valuable by some folk according to
the kind of person they are choosing to be. And this is always the
case; you choose a possible existence by choosing to actualise
possibilities that are valuable to the character [self] that is created
and maintained by that existence. This is a circular process in which
the kind of person you are choosing to be discloses certain
possibilities as possible and valuable to the kind of person you are
choosing to be by actualising the possibilities that are valuable to
it. If humans were businesspeople in the way that cows are cows or
trees are trees then all businesspeople would have exactly the same
ethics and way of life - and that simply isn't the case.
This is a circle without a foundation (the schema could start with any of the arrowheads). Your self is not its ground because your self is being created by its choices, and the choices are not the ground because they are chosen as valuable to the self they are creating - there is nowhere that you can break into this circle with a fact that will settle who you should be. The circle is driven by values, and you are free precisely because there is nowhere in the circle to ground the values which drive it. If you don't fully understand the circularity of the being-there project, and the exercise of sheer freedom which it demands, then you are still being-guilty, it's just that you're being-guilty inauthentically. Authentic being-guilty entails accepting responsibility for being thrown (i.e., your facticity) and for being projection (i.e., your possibilities). As part of your normal inauthenticity, you implicitly or explicitly give responsibility for your existence away to circumstances - you allow facts to excuse you from having chosen your own existence for yourself. Authenticity, however, demands that you project your potentiality-for-being on your being-guilty. This makes the inescapable guilt of your existence 'mine' instead of 'theirs' [your community's] or 'its' [your race, gender, nationality, star sign, or whatever]. It's a way of 'facing facts', and being yourself for yourself, rather than using the facts as a hiding place. A readiness to take responsibility for your being-there in this way amounts to choosing to want a conscience rather than repressing it. So authentic being-guilty is not a matter of condemning yourself under any moral or political scheme but of accepting authentic self-government by, in effect, putting yourself under the rule of your own capacity for choosing your own existence. Because your fallenness, your hiding in the 'they', is a matter of avoiding the anxiety and responsibility of authentic self-ownership, the everyday they-self does not want to listen to the 'voice' that alerts it to its own guilt. The commonsense of the 'they' knows only the satisfying of, or failure to satisfy, manipulable rules and public norms. It reckons up infractions of them and tries to balance them off. In doing this it has slunk away from its ownmost being-guilty so as to be able to talk more loudly about making 'mistakes.' But in the appeal of conscience, the they-self gets called to its ownmost being-guilty, and understanding the call is choosing. This is because understanding the appeal [call] of conscience is a matter of accepting its verdict which, in turn, means acting on it. Acting on the call of conscience cannot be a matter of choosing to have a conscience because you already have a conscience whether you want it or not. What is chosen, if you understand the call of conscience, is wanting to have a conscience in the sense of being willing to freely accept your own responsibility for the projective existence into which you find yourself thrown. Wanting to have a Conscience doesn't mean embracing any particular ethic but choosing to turn away from everyday fallenness and towards the authenticity that beckons through your conscience (a turning which involves choosing your ethic understandingly, sticking to it, and being truly responsible for it). We have already seen that the 'call' of conscience is the call of Care. Authentic Care involves owning your own reasons, for acting as you do, by choosing the self that is the reason for those reasons being chosen. This, in turn, entails wrenching your own potentiality-for-being off 'they' and taking it over for yourself. So your conscience actually calls you to your ownmost being-guilty [responsibility for choosing what does and does not matter]. Being responsible for yourself requires an authentic understanding of your own potentiality-for-being one kind of self or another. So 'hearing' the call of conscience, and understanding it, is a matter of 'taking over' [taking personal ownership of] your own potentiality-for-being-guilty - wrenching it away from the 'they' - in such a way that you become genuinely responsible for living your own life. You become, if you like, a servant of your own potentiality-for-being. Although the 'call' of conscience is experienced as critical [negative]
it is, in fact, a positive phenomenon in that the disclosure of
unrealised possibilities confronts you with your being as a
possibility-realising entity. This is the attestation to [evidence for]
a suppressed authenticity that we have been seeking. If having a conscience attests to the possibility of authentic potentiality-for-being then it should give us some idea of what authentic being-there is like. And this is, indeed, the case. For example, conscience is a 'call' and, in understanding that call, you take action on your own cognisance and take responsibility for that. This indicates that behaving in this way is an aspect of authentic being-there. Understanding the call of conscience in this manner is a matter of being self-responsible [wanting to have a conscience]. In wanting to have a conscience (taking ownership of your own being-there), you disclose the Being from which you have been hiding in everydayness. In everydayness, the disclosedness of being-there is constituted by state-of-mind, understanding, fallenness, and discourse. If you take ownership of your own being-there, however, fallenness drops away and you disclose an authentic state-of-mind (anxiety), an authentic understanding (self-projection upon your ownmost being-guilty), and an authentic discourse (reticence, qv). Reticence is a resolute resistance to idle talk (qv). They-selves are confident only because idle talk is adrift from the strict discipline of having to adhere to the truth (it's folk who don't understand an issue that are always most confident that they have its resolution). Authentic persons, however, lack this false confidence and so are reticent - cautious, inclined to reserve judgment and to 'hang back' from idle talk or scribbling. Reticence is an 'echo' of the uncanniness which you experience in anxiety. So the discourse of conscience is calling you out of your everyday wordiness - it 'takes the words away' from the idle talk of the 'they'. The Being of being a person is hidden [closed off] by everydayness.
Everyday being-alongside the world is irresolute [tossed about by
changes in public opinion]. Resoluteness is the alternative to this
turbulence (qv); it is the kind of resolve required to exist
authentically despite your need for the 'they' (see the addiction
analogy above). The authentic Being of being-there is disclosed by
resoluteness. Resoluteness does not entail responding to your being-guilty with self-condemnation but by accepting personal responsibility for being who you are. Folk who are short-tempered, for example, normally blame their temper on some fact rather than admitting that they have taught themselves to be short-tempered for what it does for them. A resolutely authentic person might not stop using her temper in this way but, even if that is the case, she will understand that she is choosing a short-tempered existence because doing so serves the character that she is choosing to create and maintain. You can see from this example that owning your own self in resoluteness is not a matter of finding your 'true' self and being that person - especially as it is precisely your self in this sense which can be overtaken by circumstances and/or 'die' to itself in anxiety. Rather, to own yourself is a matter of understanding what is actually possible and choosing to be who you are on that ground - even if that is no longer the ground on which you have been defining yourself. So say that you have felt 'flattened' by a sense of futility. This sense undermines your sense of self; life seems meaningless. In such a state you have three broad alternatives: you give up, you bullshit yourself, or you accept the state of affairs, seize whatever possibilities remain open to you, and forge ahead with the fraught process of being you in spite of the nullity around you. Taking this last alternative is resoluteness. Resoluteness and disclosedness are intimately related. Disclosedness is primordial truth. You are 'in the truth' in that you disclose Being just by being-there as a person. The primordial disclosure, in this case, is that you are a person - i.e., an entity whose character is being created and maintained by an existence chosen from among more than one possibility. In resoluteness, you arrive at the truth of being-there which is most primordial because it is authentic - only in resoluteness are you truly being a person. Authentic being-oneself is utterly contrary to the kind of detachment
from the world which many 'spiritualities' teach - you don't move 'out'
of the world but from being lost and fragmented in the 'they' to being
solidly located in-the-world. Resoluteness 'returns' you to your
particular place in the world, to specific concernful relations with
actual entities and solicitous relationships with other persons, in
order that you may discover what your possibilities really are and
seize upon them in a way that is genuinely your own rather than
dictated to you by the 'they'. Being resolute will not tell you what to
do because your actual possibilities will depend wholly on
what existence you freely choose in your particular situation,
and it is only through the disclosive understanding that
comes about through acting resolutely that your actual Situation -
hitherto obscured by the ambiguity, curiosity, and pursuit of novelty
of the they-self - is given clear definition. Resoluteness, in other
words, is about facing your possibilities; it is not a prescription for
dealing with them. Your actual Situation is concealed by 'they' narratives but disclosed
by resoluteness in the same way that swimming against the current
discloses the current which is not apparent when you are just drifting
along with it. Normally, in everyday being-there, you interpret your
'there' in public terms which 'close off' your actual possibilities.
Only the true 'there', disclosed by resoluteness, is the Situation to
which your conscience calls you. Every action you take is
an expression of your Being as Care, and takes place within
a world. The everyday world in which you act normally includes
possibilities which you are not disclosing. This is because, in your
everydayness, you are in idle talk [untruth] more than in truth and
your world is a mix of 'they' beliefs and wishing. Being resolute is
not a matter of first taking note of the world and then acting in it;
rather, it discloses, and thrusts you into, your Situation by acting
concernfully in the world - you disclose the 'current' by trying to go
where you want to go rather than where it is taking you. Resoluteness,
in other words, reveals the context of its own activity. This means
that a state of affairs becomes a Situation only when you are
being-in-the-world authentically (going where you want to go). You cannot authentically confront your actual choices unless you grasp
the full extent of your finitude - i.e., the emphatic limits of your
power (the various kinds of 'not' with which you are surrounded;
including, for instance, the possibility that all your efforts could
come to naught in an instance). This is not a matter of merely
projecting yourself upon whatever possibilities happen to lie closest
to hand, but of acting like a person whose choices are limited both in
number and in the time you have to make them. In other words, you
abandon your 'they' half-truths and wishful thinking in order to 'get
real' about what you are doing when you live the lives of a person.
Here we get back to the insight that being-there is a 'null basis of its own nullity'.
We saw, in Chapter 3, that authentically being a whole person entails
anticipating your death rather than merely awaiting it. We are now in a
position to link that with resoluteness. Trying to be resolute
confronts the truth of your existence as a person. You are thrown
projection, that is; you are a self-defining and forward-looking being
who is saddled with a self and circumstances that you didn't choose,
but who must own this. Being resolute is a not 'once for all time'
choice because being a person means always being free to select from
among possibilities. This means that if you are resolute then you are
always free not to be resolute. This, in turn, means that you have to
keep resolutely choosing to be resolute - as with all the choices which
define who you are, you have to keep repeating the choice. So the
choice to anticipate the end of your possibilities isn't made 'once and
for all' but needs to be made every time that the opportunity to
anticipate or await death arises (i.e., at virtually every waking
moment of your lives). The result of this is two-fold: (1) it
undermines [subverts] your normal irresoluteness [turbulence], and (2)
it sets your whole being as persons free because it is not just
something that slips into fixity but something which needs to be
constantly iterated. With the notion of 'anticipatory resoluteness' we get back to the theme
of wholeness with which Chapter Three began. The 'anticipation' part
understands that the end of possibilities is an ever-threatening fact
of existence. Resoluteness entails accepting, and taking personal
ownership of, your Situation as it is. Together, these two call you to
an authenticity which involves and affects your whole Being as a person
throughout your whole lifetime. The title of Heidegger's great masterwork is Being and Time because his inquiry into Being had led him to the conviction that we simply cannot understand the project of being a person unless we detoxify ourselves of the thingish scientific notion of time long enough to notice our existential [lived] temporality (qv). If we think back to what has been disclosed about everydayness, we can
recall that human being-there is disclosed in terms of existentiality,
facticity, and fallenness. • Existentiality is the fact that your character as a
person is realised by the ongoing process of actualising various
possibilities for existing that you disclose as possibilities by
projecting • Facticity is the fact that you have an inherited
constitution and context which you carry with you and as which you
project yourself in your character-realisation. • Fallenness is the fact that, because of your social
embeddeness, you normally define yourself in 'they' terms. Fallenness
is everybody's normal everyday way of being a person. It is the unity, or integrity, of these three which constitute the self
through which you express your Being as Care (qv). Existentiality,
facticity and fallenness, are, however, not enough to account for the
wholeness of your existence unless you note the temporal element of
each. To wit: • your existence is being-towards the future (being-ahead), • your facticity is being-towards the past (being-already-in) and • your fallenness is being-towards the present (being-alongside). Being-ahead of yourself is the aspect of being-there which, like existentiality, is related to possibility. Persons are a living integrity of the actual and the possible; you simply cannot understand being a person without reference to the dual role that thrownness [actuality] and projection [possibility] play in your existence. This integrity is part of your temporality because who you actually are at any given time is defined by a past - your being-already-in-the-world - while your possibilities are realised [actualised] in a future by your present choices (which, in everydayness, are determined by your being fallen into a 'they'). This means that your 'now' behaviour is always that of someone, who you have been so far, being-towards a character, and a world, that is not yet realised. This is your being-ahead of yourself. Your being-alongside the world is a matter of being 'at home' in the world as part of your normal fallen state. The tripartite integrity of existence with being-ahead, facticity with being-already-in, and fallenness with being-alongside, describes the whole phenomenon of being-there by locating your Being as Care both in the world and in time. The 'Time' part of Being and Time exactly expands the 'Being' part. The Being part analysed the Being of being-there as Care in terms of existence, facticity and fallenness; the 'Time' part discloses your Being as care in terms of being-ahead, being-already in, and being-alongside. In each case the first (Being) and second (Time) tripartite structure exactly 'fits' with, and enables, the other - one in the world, one in time. Thus:
The way that persons deal with things in the everyday world makes it
all too easy to interpret the self in thingish terms. Being a self,
however, is not a matter of being a thing but of existing in a certain
way. This way of existing is one of an entity who Cares because she or
he has to choose a possible existence at the expense of other
possibilities. Such an existence is not possible unless it unites the
future, past, and present, into all the ways it variously cares and
doesn't care. Temporality provides the constancy of the self - the aspect of 'I' that
remains 'me' throughout various times, events and changes. The chosen
self-constancy of the authentic self signifies her or his anticipatory
resoluteness. Self-constancy is the fact that you maintain yourself as
a particular character over time (see 2.1). This self-maintenance
arises from the essence of persons being a chosen existence rather than
a material structure. Say, for instance, that you have been fickle all
your life. This existence is chosen, and has to go on being chosen
every time that you face the possibility of being fickle or constant.
This means that you maintain you own Being as a constantly changing
self for whatever advantage it gives you. Inauthentic folk do this
largely without realising what they are doing or why they are doing it.
To exist authentically, however, you have to resolutely stick to
knowingly choosing a preferred existence, and thereby a character, even
if that existence is itself one of constantly flip-flopping from one
loyalty to another (see repetition). Temporality as the Meaning of Care. Meaning is a matter of how something fits into the worldhood of the world (i.e., the overall integrity of yourself and Others being-in-the-world). You disclose meaning by projecting your potentiality-for-being on entities in the world. This projection not only discloses the Being of the object (although this is the primary signification of meaning) but also your own being-there as a person.16 The meaning of objects discloses their Being, and it is only because persons deal with Being that the question of meaning even arises. This means that when we seek the meaning of Care - i.e., that which unifies your being-there as a person - we are touching on the whole integrity of your being-in-the-world. So when we inquire about the meaning of Care, we are asking what makes being-in-the-world possible. The answer, it turns out, is temporality. The link between Care as an existential unity and Care as a temporal
unity - the link by which temporality is the meaning of Care - is best
disclosed in resoluteness (qv) because resoluteness has to do with
knowingly turning your potential for authentic being-there into an
actuality. This 'turning' presupposes an openness to time because any
such transformation is, and must be, oriented towards the future -
i.e., being-towards a future character which you have decided to be -
as you who have been so far.17 To this linking of future and past,
resoluteness further discloses the current moment of your existence and
presupposes your openness to it; so the present is its existential
context [its 'there']. To say that temporality is the meaning of Care is to observe that your capacity for holding the past, present and future together is what makes Care possible. Without your innate temporality, you couldn't be-in-the-world as an entity that Cares. Care, constituted of existence (the future being-ahead-of-itself), facticity (the past being-already-in) and falling (the present being-alongside), is how persons exist in such a way that things and events in the world matter to us because it is through them that we realise our different possibilities and thereby our different characters. What this mean is that we simply couldn't exist as Care - as beings who, from a basis informed by the past, define their character by choosing present possibilities aimed at future states of affairs - if we didn't unite the past, present and future in the process of being persons. The tripartite temporal unity of Care has already been disclosed as
being-ahead-of-itself, being-already in, and being-alongside; these are
your being-towards the future, past, and present, respectively (see the
Care structure). So this is the essential (qv) link between being a
person and time. You should not interpret this link in thingish terms.
In particular, four points should be noted:
The unity of temporality is more radical than might first appear because, in your temporalising, the past, present and future do not come in a succession; the future is not 'later' than your 'now' and your past is not 'earlier'. Rather, they are all present in your experience at the same time (temporality temporalises itself as a future which makes itself present in the process of having been). So if you try to understand something, for example, the understanding you grope for in the present is itself in the future while being informed by the past - you are simultaneously in the future and the past just by being in the present as a person. This being the case, the future, past, and present, are, in effect, 'outgrowths' [ecstases] of the temporalising which unites your being as Care. The ecstases [outgrowths] of time are the future, past and present (taken together/ecstases or singly/ecstasis), seen as 'outgrowths' of the temporalising which being-there institutes just by being what it is. In the original Greek, 'ecstasis' literally means 'standing outside' (ex stasis). Although the ecstases of future, present, and past, actively pull us towards different temporal horizons (qv), they 'stand out' from the primordial unity of the future and past in a present temporality. You can get an idea of Heidegger's insight here if you think of temporality as analogous with a tree and the ecstasies [past, present and future] as analogous to branches of that tree. A tree is not created by finding branches that are then cobbled together as a whole. What happens is that the tree is a unity of the trunk, branches, and leaves, which it grows, supports, unifies, and is. Temporality is likewise not created by having three ecstasies which are then cobbled together. Instead, the tree [temporality] comes first and grows the branches [ecstasies] which sprout from it. The future, past, and present, are not separate 'things' that are cobbled together in temporality but outgrowths of the same organic unity. What Heidegger describes in Being and Time is the unity of past, present and future as it is actually lived by persons. The common and artificial measures of time - clock time or historical dating - come after this existential phenomenon as socially useful adjuncts which, for all their usefulness, hide the true Being of temporality (i.e., temporality as it really is). We have conditioned ourselves to think of time as a kind of tape-measure made up of moments that we are alongside one at a time. But existential time is actually a lived unity of past, present and future which you create, within which you live your life as a person, and which unites your life into a whole. In other words, the categorising of events as past, present and future is merely something that you do with your temporality. Because persons are possibilities who define themselves as persons by the possibilities they actualise, you are primordially being-towards the future. Because the possibilities which you actualise, and which define you as who you are, are not actual either 'now' or in the past, this openness to the future is actually a 'coming towards yourself' - i.e., a being-towards who you are becoming by the realisation of your possibilities. Being-towards the future includes being-towards-death (qv). Being-towards-death, in turn, has to do with your finitude because being 'thrown' into death does not mean that you live and then you die but that you 'exist finitely' - you live your daily life as a finite being. This finitude includes a limited temporal being-in-the-world. Thus, although 'time' goes on even when you are dead, temporality - your past, present and future - is the horizon of your being-there.19 This entails that, unlike abstract scientific time, lived human time is seriously finite. 4.1 TEMPORALITY AND EVERYDAYNESS Because your Being as a person is one of Care, an analysis of everyday temporalising needs to be done in terms of Care. In your average everyday mode of Care, understanding is being-towards the future, states-of-mind are being-towards the past, fallenness is your everyday mode of being in the present, while discourse articulates your fallen states-of-mind and understanding in terms of the past, present, and future. State-of-mind - States-of-mind [emotions] are being-towards the past because they disclose how you Care about what is already the case. Contrary to states of mind like fear, authentically temporal moods such as anxiety provoke a temporal grasp of your own existence as thrown into the world. In anxiety, you do not face a specific threat but a kind of 'nothing' which confronts you with the uncanniness of being thrown into the world as projective [as having to choose an existence]. As we saw in Chapter 2.4, that before which you are anxious is not encountered as something definite with which you can concern yourself. The threatening does not come from what is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand, but rather from the fact that neither of these 'says' anything any longer. The world in which you have existed is sunk into insignificance. When you find yourself adrift in a world whose contents have momentarily lost their involvement for you, two facts are disclosed; namely that (1) no fact dictates your existence and (2) you are already thrown into a world as a person and are thereby thrown into having to choose from among various possibilities. For this reason, anxiety embodies the authentic temporality of states-of-mind. This does not mean that anxiety is the only mood that is being-towards the past. It just means that anxiety is being authentically towards the past in a way that other everyday moods are not. Understanding - Understanding is being-towards the future because you understand what
it is to be a person only when you understand, however
pre-ontologically, the role of possibilities in your definition. This
corresponds to the being-ahead-of-yourself aspect of Care. Whenever you disclose a possibility, you thereby relate understandingly to your own existence as being-there. In your normal everydayness, however, this understanding is flawed because you allow yourself to be defined by circumstances, convention and wishful thinking rather than by knowingly taking charge of your actual possibilities for yourself. On the face of it, this would seem to indicate that everyday temporalising lacks a future because, although inauthentic persons usually believe that they are living in the present, by being defined by what already exists, they actually live in the past. Heidegger, however, argues that your everyday temporalising of the future merely takes oblique forms - namely that of awaiting the future. Awaiting is a passive, and inauthentic, alternative to anticipation (qv). Anticipation is a matter of actively 'going out to meet' the future. In awaiting, however, you simply let the future come towards you. Inauthentic futurality is a temporalising that awaits the future instead of anticipating it - the future is not something with which you are actively and responsibly involved in creating right now. You are, in effect, postponing your own potentiality-for-being. Persons will, for example, wait for the weekend or holidays or retirement, or a journey or whatever, as a time when they will really be able to 'just be themselves.' Their potentiality-for-being in these cases is not being-towards the future but simply waiting for it to arrive. The point here is that your temporalising is disclosed even in inauthentic everyday understanding. Authentic temporalising anticipates the future right now, inauthentic temporalising merely awaits it; these two are different but, in neither case, does the temporalising go away. To sum up, your understanding is inauthentic when you await the future and forget the past while busying yourself with what is merely 'at hand' in the present. You understand authentically only when you anticipate the future and are true to your past while sighting the present as a moment of authentic choice [a 'moment of vision,' qv]. Falling - Fallenness is being-towards the present in your everyday mode of
being-alongside the world (i.e., your normal mode of inauthentic Care). When you make a choice, in the present, you are being-towards the future (when what is presently a possibility will have become an actuality) as who you have been up until the moment of choice. Who you have been so far is the person who has been living your chosen existence. In everyday life both your existence and your character are substantially owned by the 'they.' But being resolute entails knowingly sticking by your chosen existence and character. This is not a matter of slavish conservativism but of understanding the process of being-there and owning the instance of being-there into which you have been personally thrown. If you are tempted by laziness, for example, but have resolved not to be lazy, then even keeping that resolve for years does not change the fact that being lazy is a possibility that remains open to you all the time. If you are being resolute then the present is an opportunity to repeat your past resolve - to 'hand it down' to yourself. This handing your resolve down to yourself is repetition. So repetition is a mode of resoluteness which hands itself down - the mode by which being-there exists explicitly as fate (qv). Bringing the above concepts together discloses authentic being-towards
the present as the forwards-looking anticipation and backwards-looking
repetition that maintains the temporal integrity of who you have been
with who you are in the moment of vision. In contrast to this, an
inauthentic being-towards the present is a mode of making present in
which you remain caught up [absorbed] in your immediate
environment, disclose the world as determined by the
'they', and thereby endure an inauthentic mode of
projection. In doing this you 'forget' your past commitments to
yourself. In this context, forgetting is the inauthentic everyday
alternative to repetition. Existential forgetting is not a lapse of
memory but a turning away from who you have resolved to be. A classic
instance of this is someone who gets sick or in trouble through a
behaviour, promises herself never to behave like that again, and then
forgets that promise when a new opportunity to behave that way presents
itself. Discourse - Discourse does not temporalise itself in any one ecstasis but, through
the use of temporal tenses, articulates them all. Thrownness and
state-of-mind are the past being in the present, fallenness dwells
among the everyday present, understanding and being projective both
point to the future, while you unite all of these in your discourse. 4.2 TEMPORALITY AND HISTORICALITY One fact of being a person, which humans have always fled, is that of
our being abandoned (qv) to our fate. The thought that some parent-like
force outside of us - be it aliens, God or evolution - has a 'plan' is
very comforting because it absolves us from having to decide our
existence, and thereby our fate, for ourselves. In fact, however, there
is nothing determining your fate except history and what you do with
it. History discloses past modes of existence that have been tried
at various times. Your own life is a history in this sense because you
don't have to have lived very long at to have tried different ways of
being who you are. You are always relating to history but can do so
authentically or inauthentically (pretending that 'history is bunk'
merely relates to it inauthentically). As a thrown being, you are
embedded in an historical circumstance by which some possibilities are
open to you and some are not; being born in the 20th Century, for
example, means that you can be a car driver but cannot be a mediaeval
witch. This means that you inherit an historical context which dictates
a kind of 'menu' from which you must select your possibilities.
Obviously you must 'read' this menu in order to understand your
possibilities. This is extremely difficult given that your inherited
ways of understanding yourself is in terms of a 'they' interpretation.
If you remain lost in the 'they' then the best that you can do is
inherit the destiny of that 'they.' Destiny is the
historically-determined facticity of a community that comes about
because the structures and values of any society or culture are shaped by the past actions and ongoing choices of its members
and determine the range of your own possibilities in much
the same way as do your own individual past choices. Fate is always that of a specific individual,
and never about a pre-determined future. The only
determining force in fate is that of a having been which is part of
your present character and situation. Thus, to say "It is my fate to be
faced with such-and-such a problem" does not imply any sort of
extra-human agency or 'plan' - only that you are a finite being facing
a world in which past events have resulted in circumstances with which
you must now deal. Your past is fixed, but your fate - your
confrontation with the past - is something you can variously accept,
avoid, or distort. You grasp your fate once you own the thrownness of
your Situation and act resolutely within it (as Heidegger puts it,
'fate is that powerless superior power which puts itself in readiness
for adversities - the power of projecting oneself upon one's own
being-guilty, and of doing so reticently, with readiness for anxiety').
An example of this would be someone who has been born into a despised
race. The person who surrenders to this has no choice but to share in
the destiny of her people. But the person who determines to decide her
value for herself, despite her thrown facticity, creates her fate for
herself. Your past-defined facticity has power over you. The 'powerless superior
power' with which you face those facts is that of your freedom to do as
you choose with what you have. You cannot, for example, change your
birth facts - race, gender, social-historical context, genetic
inheritance, and so on - but you can and do choose what to do with
them. Your only 'fate' in this case is the Situation within which you
exercise your freedom; it is this Situation which must be grasped
resolutely if you are to exist [live the life of a person] authentically. Where resolute individuals have a fate, normal [irresolute] individuals can only have a destiny because the effect of the past on them is decided for them by their absorption in the 'they'. This does not, however, imply that fate and destiny are entire alternatives; your personal fate is necessarily bound up with the destiny of your society - as the fate of ordinary folk caught up in economic or political turmoil demonstrates. Because being-with others is a necessary part of being-in-the-world, your authentic historizing includes a degree of co-historizing. The world you inherit is, after all, a social one in which the possibilities you inherit come down to us through various shared structures and practices. These possibilities are, moreover, typically taken up by us only with the cooperation of others. It is not possible, for example, to have a musical society unless lots of people maintain an involvement with music. And such a society can persist over time only if individual persons repeatedly choose to be involved with the possibilities it embodies (repetition, qv). If they do this authentically then they renew the vitality of these choices and, thereby, the culture of which they are a part. This means that any culture will persist in a vital way only so long as individuals grasp the possibilities chosen in the past and, if they don't, the culture will wither away. In short, your historizing is both an individual and communal affair and, to the individual, there corresponds a community; to individual fate, there corresponds communal destiny. So authentic historizing includes what Heidegger calls 'fateful destiny.'
Appendix 1: Addiction (temporally unbalanced Care). Our Being as Care 'faces' [is being-towards] our facticity
[thrownness], possibility [existence], and everyday being-alongside the
world [fallenness]. Although Care integrates these three 'faces' or
'directions', our being fallen into the world can distort this
integrity so that we are, for example, being-towards the past at the
expense of being towards the future or even the present (you can see
this sometimes when someone whose existence has broken down stops
planning for the future or taking care of themselves). To illustrate
this kind of distortion, Heidegger tracks the way that wanting an
object can slip through willing to hankering after it to being addicted
to its possession. All of these are expressions of Care that are more
and more inauthentic through being increasingly detached from the
three-part temporal integrity of Care.
These are all temporal aspects of Care which keep willing 'anchored' in the world. And the important difference between willing and wishing, etc., is that, in willing, you show an understanding of Care while, in wishing, hankering after, and so on, this understanding is absent. Willing itself becomes less than authentic if you understand your
possibilities for being a person as they have been interpreted for you
by a culture. Such interpretation restricts the possibilities that you
will entertain to the familiar, the attainable, the respected, and
'that which is fitting and proper' according to 'they.' This doesn't
take away your potentiality-for-being, but 'dims' it down and, for the
most part, willing lapses into mere wishing while you go about your
everyday life. When this happens, you are not projecting your
being-there onto the real world but onto a wish world (qv). Returning from an imaginary wish-world, back into the thrown world, is
always disappointing because what you actually are or have, in the
actual world, is never enough for you to be what you would be if the
actual world was different. If you hanker after 'psychic powers,' for
example, having to admit that they don't exist outside of fiction can
be a real let-down. This let-down can all too easily become a motive
for seeking new kinds of occult ability in, perhaps, a different way
(turning, perhaps, from Wicca to Muti or other 'more occult' shamanism). Hankering is not a benign mode of Care, and has led to numerous
violences such as theft, rape, compulsive gambling, drunkenness, and
military/political/religious dominance. But between hankering and
addiction (qv) there is the urge to possess which not only 'crowds out'
other possibilities (something that hankering also does) but can also
'outrun' your current state-of-mind and understanding (as hankering
after wealth and/or power has repeatedly shown). Appendix 2: The History of Occidental Ontology. An ontology (qv) is a theory of Being. Everybody has an ontology, but most human ontologies are functional rather than theoretical; we simply act as if an ontology was true rather than thinking through its implications (most 'New Age' beliefs, for example, just fall down flat if you ask yourself what the world would have to be like for them to be true). The oldest, and still dominant, human ontology is dualism. Dualism is the ontological or pre-ontological belief that reality consists of two kinds of Being: the material [natural, objective] and the immaterial or non-natural [spiritual, cultural, mental, subjective]. This has its roots in ancient religion and probably arose from the uncanniness (qv) that early humans must have felt by being conscious of the world and, therefore, of being somehow 'other' than from the world (consciousness of the world entails consciousness that you are not the world of which you are conscious). In dualist conceptions of human personhood the 'essential you' is some kind of immaterial thing or substance - a soul, mind, spirit, or consciousness - that is materially embodied. A problem with this picture is that of explaining how the non-natural aspects of personhood - the spirit, soul or mind - fit into the natural aspects. This problem takes two main forms: the mind-body problem [how do mind and body interact?] and the knowability problem [how can the mind or soul, trapped within the body, really know that the world outside is as it seems to be?]. The mind-body problem is the 'rock and the hard place' of dualism and has still not been resolved by dualist philosophers. The knowability problem, which seems inescapable for Dualism, led to what Kant called 'the scandal of philosophy' by which dualists (i.e., most humans) cannot prove the existence of an external world. Some form or another of dualism is and always has been pretty much
taken for granted by most humans - if only in their everyday way of
talking (even materialists and idealists talk as if dualism was real).
But the problems of dualism were not rigorously spelled out until the
17th Century when Rene Descartes (1596-1650) tried to address them.
Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy (published in Latin in 1641)
is widely considered to be the beginning of Modern philosophy
because it stimulated a immense and fruitful body of study
and, virtually all Occidental20 philosophy, from then until
now, was and is, in one way or another, a response to the problems that
Descartes brought to light and was unable to solve satisfactorily. Although a direct heir of the German tradition that followed Kant, and being very familiar with his thought, Heidegger was not convinced by German Idealism and was more in the tradition of Husserl - who argued that dualism was flawed in dichotomizing consciousness [mind or soul] from the world just as if you could be conscious without conscious-of objects which, just by being objects of consciousness, constituted a world (see Appendix 3). In Being and Time, Heidegger replaces dualism with his observation that being-there is a being-in-the-world. This is a radical extension of Husserl (Heidegger saw Husserl's later works as smuggling a de facto dualism back into the interpretation of human Being). What is so radical about Heidegger's phenomenology is his uncompromising emphasis on being a person as an activity. All dualism explicitly or implicitly dichotomises personhood, as some sort of thing [mind, soul, Descartes' 'thinking substance', or whatever], from the world as another thing [matter, nature, Descartes 'extended substance', and so on]. Unlike other philosophers of the European tradition, Heidegger didn't tinker with this but rejected it outright. All thingishness is gone; being a person is an activity [project] undertaken in a 'workshop' [the world], and has to be-in that workshop in order to undertake that project (i.e., just to be what it is). On this basis he rejects the dualist dichotomy as simply a misrepresentation of what is, in fact, a single [unified] phenomenon (i.e., being-in-the-world, see especially the 'sheet of paper' analogy given for being-in-the-world). Appendix 3: Husserl, Edmund (1859-1938). Edmund Husserl, who had a huge influence on Martin Heidegger both
intellectually and personally, was the principle founder of the
phenomenological method which Heidegger exploits and extends in Being
and Time. The object of Husserl's method was to revitalise European
philosophy by putting aside the historical-academic accretions with
which it had become bogged down and getting 'back to the things
themselves'. Considering an old issue with fresh eyes is not just a
method of doing philosophy (or science) but also an attitude of mind.
Over time, all inquiries tend to become bogged down with so much detail
and history that more and more effort goes into achieving less and
less. The difficulty with escaping this stultification is that it is
not just the subject of inquiry that gets obscured; even your everyday
experience of the world is ossified and distorted by what 'everyone'
thinks, learns, and teaches. So escaping your inherited mind-set was
very much a part of the phenomenological method. Appendix 4: Heidegger and the Nazis. For reasons best known to themselves, a number of folk seem to delight in missing the point of Heidegger's philosophy by arguing about how much or how little he supported the Nazis during his brief tenure as Rector of Freiburg University in 1933 (at the beginning of Germany's 'honeymoon' with Hitler). On a scale of relevance to understanding the important insights of Being and Time, this issue is roughly on a par with the matter of how often or little he trimmed his moustache. I sincerely hope that any readers of this introduction to Being and Time (published in 1927) have better things to do with their intellectual abilities than waste them on such irrelevancies. Appendix 5: Heidegger's Method (Phenomenology). Phenomenology is a philosophical method, developed by Edmund Husserl (qv), of disclosing phenomena by describing them directly as they appear to consciousness (i.e., with your descriptions stripped of the theorising, intellectual prejudices, historical assumptions, and so on, which so often get between us and the things you which you wish to disclose). A phenomenon [singular] is any thing, fact or occurrence which is detectable by human persons, alone or with the help of instruments. The original Greek use of the term - which Heidegger invokes - was of that which shows itself in itself; a spade, for instance, is a phenomenon when encountered as a spade (i.e., as a tool having a purpose). Phenomena [plural] are the totality of what lies in the light of day or can be brought to the light (qv). An important feature of phenomena is that they appear to us within a context of meaning that derives from the process of being-there. When you encounter a tree, for example, you don't simply sense a myriad of meaningless differences in light, shape and colour; you encounter the tree as an entity with a Being that is distinct from the things around it (a phenomenon in the phenomenological sense is that which shows itself as Being and as a structure of Being). The '-ology' part of phenomenology derives from the Greek logos which means 'discourse' (qv). So a phenomenology (as Heidegger understood it) is a Being-disclosing discourse about phenomenon.^^ In order to disclose phenomena directly, the phenomenological method
requires that you put aside ['bracket'] all of your theories about the
phenomenon in question and simply describe it as you experience. If the
nature documentaries on TV were phenomenological, for example, then
instead of mixing evolutionary theory and anthropomorphism with what is
observed, they would simply describe what is observed. This would make
them into discourse instead of idle talk (which is what they are in
fact). As you have seen from what Heidegger observed about the
phenomenon of being a person, phenomenological observation is not at
all superficial but penetrating and very careful.
Abandonment - An aspect of your thrownness (qv) by which part of being a person is the fact of being left wholly to your own, finite, devices in choosing an existence and thereby a character for yourself. Alienation - The normal everyday condition in which you are cut off from your own potentiality by the average intelligibility that goes with belonging to a community (a 'they'). Alienation - which is really self-alienation - closes you off from authenticity (qv) and possibility as you accept a public definition of yourself and your possibilities. Ambiguity - A condition of idle talk (qv) in which truth, half-truth and untruth become so mixed that you cannot pick your way between them. Ambiguity comes about because idle talk is more attached to what 'they' say than the actual world, and the authority of the 'they' carries more weight with us than does our own intelligence and understanding. Anticipation - A response to death, as the end to possibilities, in which you stop merely awaiting it as a 'someday' [future] actuality and begin to deal with it as an ever-present possibility of life. Anticipatory resoluteness - A way of being a person [being-there], related to existing authentically, in which you face death [the ever-present possibility of impossibility] with understanding (this is the 'anticipation' part) and take responsibility for your Situation (qv) and what you do or don't do with it (this is the 'resolute' part). Anxiety - The kind of uneasiness or dread which you experience if your everyday being-in-the-world breaks down and confronts you with the need to choose a new existence for yourself. Articulation - Literally or metaphorically laying out a complex integrity into the linked parts from which it is constituted. This usage does not equate articulation with spelling out what has been articulated in words (that is the function of assertion, qv) but simply with the interpretation of objects in terms of parts joined into a whole. the 'as' structure - If you sight (qv) a tree then you don't first gather up a chaos of sense impressions (colour, shape, etc) which your mind then synthesises as 'a tree.' You sight the tree as a tree right from the word 'go.' The structure of the tree as a tree comes after this when you interpret (qv) it. Assignment and Reference - The cultural and rule-governed relationships between a piece of equipment (qv) and various persons (the reference) and person-related in-order-to tasks (the assignment), within which it has meaning. The worldhood (qv) of the world is instituted as a web of assignments and references. Attestation - When you attest to something you provide evidence for or stand as witness of the truth about a moot claim. So, in putting conscience (qv) forward as an attestation of authenticity - as he does in Being and Time - Heidegger is saying that the presence of conscience in the experience of persons is the evidence you all have that authenticity, as he describes it, 'beckons' us. Authenticity (authentic being-there) - A modification of average
everydayness in which you take ownership of your own existence in
anticipation of your own death. This is a matter of turning
away from idle talk (qv), sighting (qv) your
being-in-the-world as thrown projection, and acting in an
understanding of being-there as potentiality-for-being (being-there is
authentically itself in the primordial individualisation of the
reticent resoluteness which exacts anxiety of itself). All aspects of
being a person can be authentic even thought they are normally
inauthentic. An authentic understanding of something, for example,
understands it in terms of the possibilities that are genuinely yours
as opposed to those dimmed down possibilities which 'they' applaud. Average Everydayness - The ordinary life of human persons in their everyday situations. Heidegger wants to interrogate being-there as it really is in the real world. He adds 'average' to the notion of everydayness because what he will be interrogating are the existential (qv) structures of being-there rather then the existentiell variations of those structures in individual lives. Average everydayness is the way of being a person in which your daily life is filled with various conventional activities and inactivities which are meaningful in reference to how they serve or hinder person-related interests. Average everydayness is the normal way of being a person (out of this kind of Being - and back into it again - is all existing, such as it is). Your everyday behaviours disclose the nature of being-there as being-in-the-world because your average everyday life is one of involvement in various practical activities. Average intelligibility - The world of public opinion and understanding as a frame of reference which we all carry around with us. Average intelligibility is the social-cultural environment [worldhood, qv] with which you are most familiar, the world in which you feel 'at home'. Averageness - A mode [way] of being a person in which you accept a loss of self-ownership and your character becomes largely interchangeable with that of other folk in your community. The more Hindu you are, for instance, the more your existence is interchangeable with every other Hindu. The same goes for being a farm worker, a doctor, or a soccer hooligan. Awaiting - A passive, and inauthentic, alternative to anticipation (qv). Anticipation is a matter of actively 'meeting' the future. In awaiting, however, you simply let the future come towards you. This difference is particularly disclosed in the way some folk anticipate death while others merely await it. Basic concept - The starting hypothesis or 'vague understanding' which
initially founds a circle of understanding (cf. fore-structure). Being - Being (upper case 'B') is simply the fact that (a) something
is, and (b) in its being as it is. The Being of a hammer, for example,
is not just the fact that it 'is' but also its character, function,
location (in space, time, and/or imagination) and way of being what it
is. The word 'being' is a form of the verb 'is', so the Being of a
tree, for example, is just whatever it is doing when it is being a tree. Being-the-basis - The basis of your existence is the set of facts which you did not bring about but into which you simply find yourself thrown. In order to be what you are thrown into being, however, you must 'take over' being what you are and become the basis of the existence with which you are landed. This 'takeover' of inherited being-in-the-world which has, so to speak, been thrust on you, is what is involved in being-the-basis of your own personhood. Being-ahead (being-there being-ahead-of-itself) - The aspect of being a person which is related to possibility (qv) and your being-towards the future. Being-alongside - Your normal, everyday, way of being-in-the-world. The phrase 'being-alongside' has two connotations: that of your being more passive than active, letting yourself be alongside what is at-hand without being actively engaged in defining yourself by what is possible, and that of being 'at home' in the world by being familiar with it. Being-already-in - The fact that you awoke to personhood to find yourself already in a world (qv) that is as it is. Being-a-self - The ongoing task [project, qv] of maintaining a character; be it deliberately or carelessly out of habit (see self). Being-a-self is a life-long activity which you personally undertake, badly or well, using public ['they', qv] paradigms of existence, selfhood, language, reasoning, and so on. Being-guilty - The unavoidable fact of being responsible for various kinds of 'not' [nullity] such as your own existence which you did not bring about. Being-guilty, which is not a moral condition but simply a fact of being a person, is the condition of being-there which is the ground of guilt-talk and guilt-behaviour in persons. The fact that being-guilty is built right into being-there explains why persons have a conscience. Being-in - The way in which persons behave towards the workshop [world] which provides them with equipment (qv) for being one kind of person or another. Being-in is way of relating. Being in the truth - That aspect of being-there whereby you cover, uncover, discover or are mistaken about, the Being of entities. Being in the truth does not mean that whatever you believe is true but only that the disclosure of truth is an essential aspect of being-there. A tree, for example, cannot have false beliefs about itself or the world because it cannot have true beliefs about itself and the world. Persons, on the other hand, can have true or false beliefs about themselves, the world and each other. Being in the truth is an existentiale (qv) of being a person. Being-in-the-world - The fundamental and necessary existential condition of being a person. In the same way that you cannot be a driver without driving something, or a gardener without growing something, so you cannot be a person without being-in-a-world. Being-in-the-world is a matter of being meaningfully engaged with the possibilities manifest in the world as a workshop ['wherein', qv] of character-making-making - an engagement which is unique to being-there, defines the world as a world [the workshop of being-there], and defines an individually chosen existence which thereby realises your character. Being-there-with - The Being for which others are freed (qv) by your being-in-the-world. The world frees equipment to be there for you; it frees other persons to be-there with you. Being-towards - An essential (qv) aspect of being-in-the-world whereby persons are always oriented towards various objects of attention that are of concern to their existence. Being-there is always being-towards comprehendingly - i.e., unlike things, persons variously understand or misunderstand what their attention is 'pointing at' (see intentionality in Appendix 3). Being-towards-death - The way in which your existence is affected by your knowledge that it is finite. Being-with - The fact that being-in-the-world as a person always and essentially (qv) entails the input of other persons. The fact of being-with others is hugely influential on the project of being-a-self (qv). Care - A fundamental existentiale (qv) of being a person whereby facts, and the possibilities they represent, all matter to persons in various ways - you desire or fear them, value them highly, or couldn't care less. Care, which arises from the fact that Being is a issue for you, is expressed as, and explains, all the other aspects of your being-in-the-world. Care about things is concern (qv), Care about persons is solicitude. The Care Structure - The three–part temporality (qv) of simultaneously being-ahead-of-yourself [existence], being already-in the world [facticity] and being-alongside the world [fallenness] as the ways in which Care is articulated (qv). Category - A class of Being that applies to non-persons; e.g., the classes animate/inanimate, or none/some/all, are categories. Categorial - The interpretation of what various entities are or are not it terms of which categories to which they belong. Traditional scientific description is categorial but, because thingish categories do not describe existence (qv), the description of being a person [being-there] must be existential (qv). Certainty - Certainty has a double signification. Primordially, 'certainty' means 'being-certain' as a state of Being; it is, in other words, a property of persons. To say that a state of affairs is 'a certainty' is derivative of this. Circumspection - A way of being-in the world by looking at or for things as potential equipment (qv); the contrary to reflection (qv). Being a person is circumspective because we do not sense all things equally but are always on the lookout for fact or possibilities that are relevant to our existence.. Circumspection is interested sight (qv); the kind of perceptual framework you get when you have a need or project in mind; it is not disinterested and not contemplative. The way in which superstitious folk are always alert to events that can be interpreted as supporting their superstition is an extension of this Circumspection is related to disclosedness and is what turns seeing objects into perception (qv, seeing). The Circle of Understanding - A process of gaining knowledge by starting with a basic concept (qv) which guides an inquiry, the conclusions of which refine or modify the basic concept into a new starting point for continuing inquiry. Clearing - A metaphor for the fact that, just by being-in-the-world as possibilities, persons encounter and disclose entities as meaningful (a clearing lets in the 'light of understanding' and discloses Being). Because persons are in the world circumspectively (qv), it is as if we each carrying a little ‘pool of light' [an openness to understanding] with us as we go about existing. Because understanding (qv) is an essential aspect [existentiale] of being a person, you always understand or misunderstand Being where nonpersons do neither (to a cow, for example, nothing is disclosed or closed off because cows do not encounter things in that way - disclosedness is not an existentiale of their Being). Closeness (spatial)- An achievement in which you bring what is normally remote (qv) to your own attention by being concerned (qv) with possibilities that are relevant to your existence. This existential closeness is measured in terms of relevance rather than yards or metres. Closing off - The contrary of disclosing (qv). You close off the Being of entities off when you turn away from them emotionally (see turning) and/or cover them up with misunderstandings, half-truths, and/or false theory. Closing off (emotional) - The emotional disclosure of your thrownness has two primary modes [ways of being what it is]: the positive mode in which you 'turn towards' your thrown Being and a deficient (qv) mode in which you 'turn away' from it. Turning away is not the 'opposite' of disclosure but a deficient mode of it. Turning away also discloses because, in order to turn away from something, the 'something' must be 'there' as something you can turn away from. To 'turn a blind eye' to the child abuse in the world, for example, clearly discloses your particular being-towards it; the phenomenon is disclosed as that which you are turning away from (cf; untruth (qv) as the presence of a false belief [semblance, qv] rather than the absence of any disclosure whatsoever). Cogito - The self (qv) as a thinking thing [mind]. The reference is to the summary of Descartes' thesis cogito ergo sum ('I think, therefore I am') and 'cogito', or 'the cogito', has come to stand for any concept of the self as an immaterial mind or soul which is in the world basically as an epistemological [belief forming] subject (see dualism). Comport - To comport is to relate yourself to something in a particular way. The German word (verhalten) refers pretty much to any kind of behaviour or way of conducting ourselves, including the ways in which you relate to objects or person and the ways you refrain or hold back from relationship. More technically, to comport yourself is behave in a particular way towards of the object of your behaviour because of who or what that object means to your existence (e.g., you 'comport' yourself in a particular way towards a lover because she or he is your lover and thereby has a particular role in the way of life by which you are defining who you are). Concern - Your relationship with objects in the world, including your own body and abilities, according to their relevance for the project of being a certain kind of person. Concern is the existentiale of Care (qv) as expressed concerning things (cf. solicitude for Care about persons). Heidegger's use of this word does not imply that persons are always concerned for objects but only that we are concerned with them; they matter to us in various ways. Conscience - The suspicion that you are failing a personal standard,
and/or the discharge of some obligation, that matters to who you are
being. An example of conscience would be if you feel uncomfortable with
some behaviour that is technically justified within the manipulable
rules of your peers. The importance of such an experience is that it
reveals that you have the potentiality to be your own person rather
than a socially defined person-thing (see potentiality-for-being). In
Being and Time Heidegger interprets this is terms of your conscience
calling you away from being owned by your community and towards taking
ownership of your own existence. Conscience as a Call - The way in which your conscience seems to call you away from an activity and towards noticing an alternative possibility for existing. This call reveals that you harbour a capacity for living authentically (qv). Conviction - A form of certainty (qv) in which you let the testimony of 'the thing itself' - its truth in its secondary sense of that which is disclosed (qv, truth) - be the sole determinant of your being-towards it understandingly (see letting be). Curiosity - The search for novelty as a distraction from the burden of authentically being-in-the-world for yourself. Curiosity comes into play when authentic circumspection (qv) becomes detached from being-in-the-world and attached instead to idle talk (qv). Dasein (being-there) - The way of being in the world that is peculiar to persons. The German word literally means 'there-being' (da, there; sein, being), and is capitalised by Heidegger to stress that what he is investigating is not what persons are but how they go about the project of being a person in the world (the Being of persons is the activity of being-there). Death - The end of being-in-the-world (qv), that is; the end of your
possibilities for being one kind of person or another. In Being and
Time Heidegger distinguishes the end of your being a person [death]
from the biological perishing (qv) of your body, to bring out the fact
that, existentially (qv), your death is lived-with as the ever-present
possibility of the impossibility of being-there when you finally and
permanently 'run out' of possibilities for being one kind of person or
another. Deficient - Derived from a more primordial form. The experience of being alone, for example, derives from, and is dependent on, the experience of being in the company of others. This means that being-with others is primordial and being alone is a deficient [derived] mode of being-with. Deseverance (spatiality) - The bringing of something close (qv) in the existential sense. Remoteness (qv) is the default spatial relationship of persons and things in the world - you are 'severed' from them by your indifference - and de-severance [de-distancing] is that part of the remoteness-deseverance existentiale by which you simultaneously disclose remoteness and overcome it by your concern (qv) with possibilities for being who you are. Destiny - The historically-determined facticity of a community; the communal 'they' equivalent of individual fate (qv). Destiny comes about because the structures and values of any society or culture are shaped by the past actions and ongoing choices of its members and determine the range of your own possibilities in much the same way as do your own individual past choices. Determinism - The thesis that our actions are not freely chosen.
Traditional determinism appeals to external forces such as fate, karma,
the will of the gods, and so on. Scientistic determinism appeals to
claims that all events are caused by prior events and that what we
think of a free will is an illusion because we do not escape the web of
cause and effect. Detrimentality - The condition of something ready-to-hand (qv) being a threat, obstacle, or liability. A glue that gives off toxic fumes which cause headaches, for example, has detrimentality as its kind of involvement (qv); so does a dishonest or incompetent accountant, a cowardly soldier, and an untrustworthy friend or colleague. The detrimentality threatened by events, possibilities, and other people, is what we fear. Directionality - An existential being-towards (qv) that has to do with spatial regions (qv) what geographical direction has to do with mathematical space. Directionality is derived from the fact that you are being-in-the-world as a worker in a workshop rather than like a can in a cupboard. It is, in other words, defined not by a compass and some fixed landmark but by (a) your spatial and temporal position - you way you 'face ahead' both physically and in time - and (b) your interests and projects. The 'compass points' of directionality are Left, Right, Up, Down, Before, After, In front, Alongside, and Behind, in relation to where someone is standing and facing (i.e., the kind of directions you would give someone who was looking for something). Disclosedness - Uncovering and revealing ['laying open'] the Being (qv) of phenomena. You disclose the Being of a tree or spade, for instance, when you understand it as (a) 'fitting in' to, and having significance for, the 'overall scheme of things' which is the world, and (b) having certain possibilities for use in various projects that have to do with existing in one way or another in the world. Similarly, you disclose the Being of an action when you act as you do because of the effect it has (if you tell the truth in order to preserve your integrity, for example, then you thereby disclose [reveal] the Being of honesty). Disclosing the Being of phenomena in this way does not require that you have any detailed or theoretical knowledge of what is thus 'laid open', only that it's Being has been 'opened up' to your attention. Discourse - A matter of persons talking with and listening to each other, verbally, pictorially, or in various printed forms, as a way of disclosing their own Being and the Being entities which they encounter in the world. Discourse is not a matter of simply trading information [making assertions, qv] but of making manifest what you are talking about (qv, disclosedness). This is why hearing and keeping silent are both modes of discourse; you can, for example, disclose Being quite effectively by not saying anything (qv. reticence). Discourse manifests itself in the narrative use of verbal, pictorial, or other, signs (i.e., it uses language as its equipment) and, together with mood (qv), understanding (qv), and fallenness (qv) discloses the world to us. Distantiality - Any differences, between yourself and a 'they' (qv), which threatens your acceptance by your cultural community. We decrease distantiality by conforming to various fashionable modes of attitude, jargon, dress and taste. Ecstasis [sing], ecstases [plur] - The future, past and present (taken together/ecstases or singly/ecstasis), seen as 'outgrowths' of the temporalising which being-there institutes just by being what it is. The use of this word captures that fact that, for persons, the future and past are an essential part of the present as we experience it. As persons, we live in a unity of past, present, and future, from which the future, present, and past 'stand out' as offshoots or outgrowths. See temporality Entanglement - An absorption with 'discovering' yourself as a thing. Entanglement shows itself in attempts to categorise persons by gender, race, psychological or astrological type, and so on. Like all other aspects of being fallen (qv) into the world, self-entanglement is a defence against the anxiety of having to choose your own existence for yourself. Entity - Any object of attention which can be distinguished from another object of attention. All material things are entities, but so are immaterial objects of attention such as time, space or the activity of being a person; so the word 'entity' means more than just a material thing. All Being is the Being of some entity. Environment - That part of the world which is most immediately around you in your everyday existence - your home, places of work, play, or socialising, etc. It is your environment that you deal with on an everyday basis. Equipment - Ready-to-hand (qv) objects that are used or useful towards some end (eating, shelter, good works, sewing, writing, measuring, transport, crime, music making, building and so on) which ultimately has to do with a way of existing. A bed, for example, is equipment for rest, comfort, and/or intimacy; a holiday is equipment for rest and/or recreation. Essence - That without which an entity (qv) could not be the entity it
is. If you lose your head, you will not survive because having a head
is essential to the survival of a human animal; it is part of your
essence as a human. If you lose a leg, however, you can survive because
having two legs is not essential to your survival as a human animal. Essential - Being part of something's essence (qv). In modern English, the word 'essential' is often misused to mean 'important to.' But an essence is that without which an entity simply could not be the entity it is, and the word 'essential' is used throughout this book in its literal denotation of 'that without an entity would not be what it is'. Existence - The way of life involved in the process [project, qv] of being a person [being-there]. Existence is more than the life of a human animal because all that is essential for human life are certain biological processes integrated in and as a body. The process of being a person, however, requires particular kinds of ongoing engagements with the sorts of possibilities that only a world can provide. This way of life [existence] entails relating to the world as a kind of workshop for realising one kind of personal character or another. Existentiale (sing; plural = existentialia) - A class of choice which applies only to existence (qv). Being honest and dishonest, for example, are existentialia because only persons can and must choose to exist [be-there] in one of these ways or the other. Existential analysis - The analysis of existence (qv). Existential analysis is to existence what categorial analysis is to things. Such analysis is ontological (qv), and spells out the meaningful structures [forms] of existence common to persons without specific reference to any one individual's way of life in particular (the analysis of a single person's way of life is 'existentiell', qv). Existentiality - The common lived structures [existentialia, qv] that constitute existence. Existentiality has particularly to do with fact that your character as a person is realised by the process of living your life towards the future rather than being pre-determined by some essence or force outside of you. Existentiell - Having to do with the particular existence of an actual individual in a particular circumstance. Dealing with possibilities in certain ways is existential (above) through being a universal fact of existence (qv). The way that any one person deals with the specific possibilities of her or his situation is a existentiell fact of her or his existence. So whereas you can analyse the existential structures of being-there even for persons you don't know, an existentiell analysis of any given person's existence must await the evidence of that person's life. Facticity - All the facts about you and your circumstances that are actual in the present because of past events and choices (cf. thrownness). These include natural facts such as your present weight, height, and skin colour; social facts such as race, class, and nationality; psychological facts such as your current web of belief, desires, and character traits; historical facts such as your past actions, family background, and broader historical milieu; and so on. You carry you facticity with you out of the past and into the future. Fallenness (also 'falling prey to', 'falling into', etc.) - The normal form of everyday existence in which we become absorbed with being-with-others, idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity, to the extent that we lose sight (qv) of our own potentiality-for-being. There are no moral, religious, or political, connotations to being fallen; it is a purely technical terms for describing a normal aspect of our everyday lives. Fate - How the past constrains the present for individuals who authentically own their Situation (qv). The alternative to taking personal ownership of your Situation as fate is to be owned by the destiny (qv) of your society. Finding yourself - Becoming aware that you have lost ownership of the process of being a person to a communal group (cf. lostness) and disclosing who your fallen existence has been turning you into. There are no connotations of a 'real self' being found; what is found is a process which you have lost sight of and/or for which you have not been exercising ownership. Finitude - The limits to your possibilities arising from your mortality, your circumstances, what you are [a particular human being], and the nature of world in which you exist (cf; facticity). These limits are variously logical, physical, psychological and temporal; you cannot, for example, escape death, the 'laws' of logic or nature, your physical limitations, or your social-historical context [the past]. The most fundamental finitude of being a person arises from the fact that every choice of a possibility thereby closes off the possibilities which are not chosen. You could, for example, live a young and healthy life for a million years, but every time you chose to, say, tell a lie in that time, you would thereby necessarily waive the possibility of having chosen to tell the truth on that occasion. This means that your finitude is not, as is usually thought, primarily a product of a limited lifespan. It is, rather, simply a fact of being a person of any kind (even God would have to be finite in this sense because if, for example, he choose to reveal Himself to a person He would thereby waive the possibility of not having revealed Himself). Fore-structure - The historical/intellectual background of an
interpretation (qv); a culturally-affected grasp of the worldhood (qv)
of the world which you carry with you to your encounters with objects
in the world (cf. hermeneutical situation). You cannot avoid having a
fore-structure to all your interpretations of things and events; the
best you can do is to try to be aware of your fore-structures and check
them for flaws. Fore-structure has three components. Forgetting - Acting as if you haven't acted as, in fact, you previously have; the everyday and inauthentic alternative to repetition (qv). Existential forgetting is not a lapse of memory but a turning away from who you have been. A classic instance of this is someone who gets sick or in trouble through a behaviour, promises herself never to behave like that again, and the forgets that promise to herself as soon as she encounters a new opportunity to behave that way. For-the-sake-of (and for-the-sake-of-which) - The aspects of equipment's significance whereby you understand its Being in terms of the project for which it is used. The 'for-sake-of-which' of tools is always a project of persons. Thus, for example, whether you are talking of building a shelter, re-shaping the panels of a damaged car, or hitting an enemy over the head, hammers are always used as hammers for-the-sake-of some person-defined project. Freedom (existential) - The ability to be one kind of person or another by choosing from among various possible modes of existence are open to you. All freedom is limited to the particular possibilities that are open to a particular person. Over-defining freedom, as a matter of simply being able to do whatever you want, overlooks the facticity into which you are thrown. The particular freedom attested to by conscience (qv) is the possibility of being-there authentically (a possibility which the universality of conscience attests to as being open to every person). Freeing, Freeing for - The way in which the environmental context [worldhood] of something ready-to-hand allows its Being to be perceived - the worldhood of a plumber's workshop, for example, frees the equipment and materials in it to be understood as being there for the project of making gas, water, and waste management systems available to serve human existences. Similarly, the worldhood of certain art galleries frees pretentious trash to be seen as art. Grasping Being - Understanding something in terms of its Being (qv).
When you use a hammer as equipment for driving nails, a spade as
equipment for digging, or a cat as a pet [equipment for fellowship],
then you are grasping their Being by understanding them in terms of
person-relevant and person-invented categories. Non-persons do not do
this; a snail, for example, may crawl all over a spade, a cat may sniff
it and a dog may piss on it, but none relate to it as equipment for
existing in one way or another because using objects to be a good
snail, bad dog, or successful cat, is not an issue to them. Guilt - An indebtedness which arises from being responsible for some kind of negation, not, or nullity (qv). When Heidegger speaks of guilt, he is not implying the breach of some kind of moral law but a primordial phenomenon which concepts of moral, political, or religious, guilt express in an imperfect manner. Having been - Your present relationship with your past and who you have been up until the present (being-there constantly is as having been). Right now, for example, you are the child you were in the mode of having been her or him. the 'Here' - Your place (qv) in the world as a individual person - a place defined in relation to the 'yonder' (qv) of relevant items and regions in the world as a web of assignments and references (qv). If, for example, someone 'phones and asks "Where are you?" it does not help to say "Here" - you reply in terms of 'at home', 'in the lounge' or 'at the game.' These places in the world (home, lounge, the game) are a 'yonder' from which you derive your 'here'. Hermeneutic - Having to do with the philosophy or science of interpretation (qv). Historicality - The aspect of being a person whereby persons create a history (i.e., relate to the past as meaningful) just by existing as they have to if they are going to be persons at all. Horizon - The framework within which certain entities are being what
they are and/or various activities take place. An horizon is the limit
of a 'world' (qv). A human person - An animal that engages with the world understandingly (i.e., objects in the world have a meaning for us). A human - An animal of the species homo sapiens. Although humans are persons (qv), being human is not the subject of Being and Time. In-order-to - The aspect of equipment's (qv) significance (qv) whereby you understand its Being in terms of what it is for. The Being of a hammer, for example, arises from the fact that it may be used 'in order to' build something, break something, or attack someone. Inauthentic - Not taking hold of [individually owning] the mineness (qv) of your whole existence. The word is not pejorative but is a strictly technical term for describing the normal way of being a person in which various communally-established ways of existing are conformed with and often accepted as natural. Idle Talk - Everyday conversation in which what is said about a subject, and how it is said, takes precedence over the true disclosure of Being. In idle talk you receive, discuss and pass on, what is said about a subject without checking the veracity of the claims or, in most cases, even understanding what it is that you pass on. Idle talk takes on a life of its own which becomes increasingly detached from what it is supposed to be about. The claims of such talk then become the interpretations and half-truths which 'everyone knows' as you are 'delivered over' to them. Most of what you hear, say, read, or write, in your lifetime is idle talk or 'scribbling' [the written form of idle talk]. This kind of verbal activity doesn't disclose the world so much as close it off by covering up Being with assumptions, half-truths, unsubstantiated claims, gossip, and conventional prejudice. Individualisation - The disclosure of your aloneness before the world as a possibility [potentiality-for-being] who has to choose the possibility [existence] that will disclose possibilities for that existence to you. Intelligibility - The totality-of-significations (qv) by which you make sense of things (i.e., interpret them in the light of assignments and references which give them their meaning in terms of persons being-in-the-world). Interpretation - The intellectual activity in which you evaluate something as having a function [an 'in order to', qv]. Consider a builder's hammer, for example. If you use such a hammer for driving nails then you understand (qv) it's Being. Understanding is purely practical know-how. You interpret the hammer if you intellectually comprehend it as nail-driving equipment (qv) that can be used in order to, say, make a shoe or build a shelter (qv. the 'as' structure). Similarly, you can interpret being a person as an evolutionary biology or as a way of existing. To understand a builder's hammer, all you have to do is pick it up and use it for driving nails, but you have to have interpreted its 'in order to' before you know to put a hammer in your tool kit before you set out on another building project. So interpretation is a development of understanding-as-use in which you disclose the in-order-to connections by which an object serves a project or projects which is/are relevant to someone's being who they are. Investigating - In the context of an inquiry such as Being and Time, working out the theoretical groundwork for an inquiry; the preparation which is concerned with clarifying the question or questions to be asked (i.e., a kind of preparatory 'What is it that you want to understand?' question). Involvement - Being engaged in or with something to do with the projects and interests of persons - and it is the 'with' or 'in' relationship that is invoked by the terms 'assignment' (qv) and 'reference' (qv). Being a teacher, for example, entaiks an involvement with teaching and learning as ways of being a person. Letting be - Disclosing and accepting the a priori nature of some item as equipment (its 'worldly character' as ready-to-hand). For example, using a telephone as a telephone requires letting it be a telephone (i.e., letting it be freed for the tasks to which telephones have been assigned). Freeing (qv) is what the worldhood of the world allows, letting be is what a person does in the light of the worldhood of the world. Levelling (usually levelling off or levelling down) - The kind of homogenisation that goes with belonging to, and fitting in with, a group of persons who are existing in similar ways. The qualifications '...off' and '...down' refer to the fact that levelling tends towards averageness (qv) simplification, devaluation, and 'lowest common denominator' thinking. Lit up, brought to light - A metaphor used to picture the way that being-in-the-world, as an occasion for existing in one way or another, discloses the Being of objects in the world as relevant or irrelevant for the purpose [project] of being who you are (cf. clearing). Lostness - The fact that, when you let yourself, your life and your possibilities, be defined by publicness (qv) then you lose sight (qv) of your Being as an individual self. You simply exist as 'people like me' exist. 'Finding' your being-there, is an alternative to lostness. Making present - The everyday being-towards the present in which, by busying ourselves with what is immediately at hand, we merely happen to be there at the same time as our possibilities (cf. being-alongside). Meaning - Where and how an object fits within the articulation (qv) of whatever integrity of involvements it plays a role. Mineness - The fact that each and every instance of being-there belongs to a specific, concretely realised, individual. Being-there is never abstract and never shared; there is always a particular person who can say, of any being-there, "This is mine and mine alone, no other person who will ever be who I am." Your existence, your freedom, and your death, are exclusively yours in this sense. Moment of vision - A phrase coined by Kierkegaard to describe what the present becomes if you sight (qv) it as the location of actual possibilities and, therefore, of authentic choice. The alternative to making the present a time [moment] of vision is to merely make it present (qv. making present). Mood - The emotional disclosure of you state-of-mind (qv). Moods are an existentiale (qv), and persons are never free of them; you don't cease to feel, you just feel differently, and even apathy is a mood. Emotions are feeling that quickly come and go, state-of-mind is a fundamental emotional attunement to being thrown (qv) into the world as who you are, moods are enduring emotions that disclose your state of mind. Nature - A entity which is encountered within the world. Specifically, nature is a limiting case of the Being of possible entities within-the-world. That is to say, it is nature which provides the materials out of which things in the world can be constituted. Say, for example, that you intend to exist as one who buys and sells material goods. Nature is what provides you with the only materials out of which saleable goods may be made, and limits the kinds of saleable goods you can make and trade to objects of a certain material constitution with given characteristics (it is, for instance, the nature of wood that gives wood the properties it has and which you have to take into account when using it). Nullity - An umbrella term for any absence or 'not' of any kind. A nullity may be an absence [lack], a contradiction, an inability, or simply some fact that is not there (a possibility, for example, is a nullity by not yet being actual). Being a person is a matter of being 'the null basis of a nullity' because you did not choose to be who you are in the world as you find it (your basis is null by not being yours), and you must be a person by choosing a possible existence that will give you your only reasons for choosing that existence (there is no fact which grounds your choice; you have to choose the values which give you your reasons for acting in one way rather than another). Ontical - Scientific inquiry which is devoted to the description of entities in terms of categories such as weight, size, mass, texture, and so on. Ontology - An inquiry into, or theoretical belief that purports to explain, how Being is arranged. Because meaning (qv) is a matter of figuring out where something fits into the world, ontology is always finally about the meaning of Being. The dominant human ontology is, and always has been, dualist (qv); that is, the belief or assumption that Being has both natural and non-natural [spiritual, mental, or cultural] forms (see Appendix 2). Ontological - Having to do with ontology [the meaningful arrangement of Being]. Being is meaningful only to persons and only in terms of its relevance to the project of being a person. All ontical studies, such as the sciences, pre-suppose an ontology. Even an ontical description of clothing, for example, simply does and must pre-suppose an ontology that imputes meaning to various items of clothing. This ontology is 'prior' to the ontical study because, without it, the ontical study would have no beings to study. Ontically, a shirt is described as having certain physical features (size, shape, colouring, texture, etc). Ontologically, is has a meaning that is related to a way that someone goes about the business of being a person in the world. It is this meaning that makes it a shirt rather than something else (i.e., the ontological meaning is its Being). In pre-supposing an ontology, all ontical studies pre-suppose the Being of the activity [being a person] for which ontical studies are a possible way of life. An inquiry into this Being would be ontological because it explores the ground on which the ontical inquiry stands. The issue that Heidegger had with traditional ontological inquires is that they are 'blind' by not having a clear idea of what Being itself is. It is this blindness that he hoped to cure by his ontological investigation into the Being of human persons. Others - Persons whose having been what they were has led to the tools, materials, and processes that you use in your everyday life, having the Being that they have. The identity of your Others is usually unknown. Perishing - The end of biological life as contrasted with the end of existence (qv). Heidegger makes a distinction between perishing - which all living entities come to - and death [the personal end of someone's specific being-in-the-world] as a way of bringing out the Being of death which is obscured by the everyday, and inauthentic, conflation of death with perishing. Just as the existence of persons differs from the lives of plants and animals, so too does their death. Being a person - An activity that humans (and, perhaps, other species) undertake. Being a person is a way of relating to the world understandingly (qv, existence). Although all of the functioning humans we know are being persons, and all the persons we actually know are human, the two merely coincide on this planet without being synonymous. Fictional characters such as Hobbits or Kryten (from Red Dwarf) are persons despite not being human. Folk who believe in gods, angels, and/or aliens, believe that such entities are persons without being human. Personhood [dasein or 'being-there'] - The collection of behaviours that constitute the way in which persons go about being what they are (see existence). It is only the activity of being a person that Heidegger is interested in because only this is relevant to his inquiry. It is how humans go about being persons that is spelled out in Being and Time. Possibility (categorial) - A state of 'could be but isn't yet'. As a category of Being applied to things, possibility is grouped with actuality and impossibility. Possibility (existential) - An aspect of existence (qv) whereby persons are always being-there as possible builders or destroyers, possible saints or slobs, possibly cruel or kind, and so on. The categorial possibilities of things derives wholly from the existential possibilities of person (e.g., the possibility of a rock as a building material derives from the possibility of persons using rocks to build with). Potentiality-for-being - The potential, to be any one of a number of
possible persons, that arises from always having more than one possible
existence that you could choose. You always have, for example, the
potentiality-to-be a gambler by choosing a gambler's existence, the
possibility to be loving by choosing a loving existence, and so on. Potentiality-for-being-guilty - The possibility of accepting responsibility for being who you are. Pre-ontological - The normal human condition in which we make ontological distinctions even though we lack a coherent ontology (qv). In your everyday life, you distinguish between persons and things, or the real and imaginary, in such a way that, if someone treats a person as a thing, a real object as imaginary, or vice versa, then you rule their behaviour as confused. So someone who fell in love with a hammer, for instance, or who 'parked' her children in the garage, would stand out to you as having her ontological categories awry - a judgement which indicates that you have at least some 'pre-ontological' understanding of such categories even if your ontology is not fully thought out and/or incoherent. Present-at-hand (presence-at-hand) - Something that is in the world but of no immediate relevance to what you are doing (cf. ready-to-hand). Place - Where something belongs in the spatial arrangement of your environment. Place is existential (qv), not categorial (qv). So the place for kitchen utensils, for example, is in a kitchen (which is, in turn, a 'region' (qv) set aside for the performing of certain undertakings). Primordial - Most primary or fundamental. Knowing how to feed or amuse ourselves, for example - how to tend goats, drive cars or work in a shop - is more primordial to being-there [more immediately involved in your being persons] than is having theoretical knowledge about nutrition, agriculture, mechanical engineering or retail marketing and so on. Similarly, ontological inquiries are more primordial than ontical inquiries by being about the foundations on which ontical inquiries stand. Project - As a noun, a project is any undertaking which serves your existence; getting breakfast, for instance, is a project aimed at [in-order-to] satisfying your hunger and preparing for the day ahead. As a verb, to project is to throw or extend your possibilities as a person onto states of affairs in the world in such a way as to show up [disclose] their possibilities for existence. Projection - An existentiale (qv) of being a person by which persons are always being-towards (qv) objects of attention in the world thereby disclosing the possibilities of those objects (cf. possibility, existential). If you plant vegetable seeds in expectation of a future crop, for instance, you are projecting your potentiality-for-being a future vege-eater onto a present possibility. Because possibilities become actualities only after you project your Being onto them, projection is always being-towards the future. Proximal - Most immediately at hand. Proximity in contrasted with relevance [closeness, qv]. Persons who want to investigate a human behaviour, for example, typically adopt tools or a methodology that are proximal [at hand] rather than going to the trouble of generating harder-to-get tools or methods that would actually be more relevant. This is why so many social sciences treat persons as things rather than persons and/or study rodents, poultry, primates, or statistics, rather than human being-there. Ideological presuppositions, such as racism or sexism, are examples of explanatory categories that are often adopted merely because they are proximal. This kind of behaviour is related to being-alongside (qv). Publicness - Your internalised social conformity [averageness, distantiality, and levelling down], which controls the way in which the world gets interpreted by you. Publicness is the set of social assumptions, beliefs and attitudes which dictates Being-a-self in ways and to an extent of which you are normally unaware. Ready-to-hand - Things, events, persons, and situations, that are relevant to someone's existence either as a help or as a hindrance (e.g., things, events, spaces, etc., that you can work with or which are obstacles to a project). The ontological Being of entities that are ready-to-hand is defined by the practices in which they are employed, and their properties are established in relation to the norms of those practices. Areas of land, for example, are ready-to-hand in relation to their actual or possible uses as farms, building sites, nature reserves, ski slopes, and so on (cf. assignment). Region - A place in the world that is set aside for sets of related activities. In the way that persons organise the world as a 'workshop' of character-making, a region is a 'zone of operations' or 'whereabouts' ['wither', qv] assigned to a related set of activities - e.g., a kitchen, workplace, home, school, or marketplace. Remoteness (spatial) - Your normal spatial relationship with objects in
the world in which you are detached ['severed'] from them because they
are not of immediate interest to what you are doing. Repetition - A re-choosing of previously chosen character values. If you are resolute (qv) then, rather than letting your self be tossed around by circumstances (qv, turbulence) you knowingly choose to keep maintaining who you have chosen to be (see self-constancy). Resoluteness - Sticking to who you are being despite the pressures of society. Being yourself resolutely is the authentic alternative to acting out of habit and/or going along with the crowd [turbulence, qv]. It is the kind of resolve required to exist authentically despite normally being lost in your everyday community. Resoluteness is an authentic being-yourself through your disclosive projection and understanding of what is actually possible at the moment. Genuinely 'being your own person' is difficult because you are all deeply embedded in 'they' (qv). To break the grip of the 'they' you need to understand your own existence as a person, accept your own finitude and being-guilty, accept existential anxiety, and project your self on your actual [thrown] situation as it is in responsibility for yourself and your actions (qv, certainty and conviction). This combination of understanding, acceptance, responsibility and reticent determination is 'resoluteness'. Reticence - The authentic contrary of idle talk (qv). They-selves are confident only because idle talk is adrift from the strict discipline of having to adhere to truth that is properly grounded in the world. Because authentic persons would lack this false confidence, it can be predicted that they would be reticent - cautious, inclined to reserve judgment and 'hang back' from idle talk or scribbling. Seeing - Sensory detection without understanding. Fish, for example see; persons both see and have sight (qv). The Self - Who you are as an individual who maintains herself as the same person while being-in-the-world over time (cf. self-subsistence and self-constancy). Selfhood is the way of existing as a self who is being-there. Selfhood [being your self] is essentially temporal (qv). Self-constancy - The fact that each of us maintains herself or himself as a particular character over time. This self-maintenance arises from the essence of persons being a chosen existence rather than a material structure. Things are maintained as what they are by the material structures that they didn't choose and cannot choose to change. Persons, however, choose their moral and psychological character and so have to maintain who they are being for themselves (we all do this in fact, but most of us are not aware of doing so). Serviceability - The appropriateness of a ready-to-hand object, or another person, for the project to which it/she has been, is, or can be, assigned. For example, a hammer's ability to drive nails into timber gives it a towards-which (qv) that makes it relevant in-order-to (qv) build a wood-framed shelter; this makes the hammer serviceable for the assigned task. What equipment serves in serviceability is the existence of a person or persons. Sight - Seeing-with-understanding ['seeing-as'], as a metaphor of all
circumspective awareness. Sight is meaningful by being informed by
worldhood (qv). The worldhood of the world makes circumspection
possible. Circumspection (qv), in turn, makes sight possible by
disposing us to sense objects as possible equipment for your
being-there. Sight, in other words, is 'seeing as' - e.g., seeing a
hammer 'as equipment' which has possibilities for use in-order-to
realise some possibility for being a person. Significance - A word used in a way close to its everyday sense of 'meaning' but with the accent on meaning as a function of the interconnection of objects and persons in the world (think of significance). The significance of things is disclosed by understanding what they are for [their 'for-the-sake-of-which'] and how they fit into the overall arrangement of assignments and references. the Situation (upper case 'S') - The definite range of actual possibilities which become the world in which you are authentic. Normally you exist only in a circumstance because you everyday life is absorbed everyday tasks. Your view of your environment is, in such a case, quite narrow (see remoteness) and, if expanded, is done so by wishful thinking. To be in the moment authentically, however, you need to sight (qv) your circumstances in terms of definite and actual possibilities (see Appendix 1). Solicitude - The range of Care (qv) attitudes that persons have towards
each other. Solicitude includes such modes of Care as love,
indifference, friendship, disliking and hatred (you can be uncaring or
anti-caring towards other persons only because you can be caring; a
cyclone or tree, on the other, is neither caring nor uncaring). Care is
itself composed of considerateness and forbearance. Spatiality - The aspect of being-there whereby person arrange the world [the 'workshop' of being-there] in much the same way that, in temporality (qv) they arrange the work of being-there. The existential spatiality of being-there is organised according to the relevance various entities have for your existence. Spatiality is not to be confused with the impersonal space of science. State of mind - That aspect of being-in-the-world whereby the Being of
your 'there' (qv), as 'already decided by past events over which you
have no control, is disclosed by your emotional 'attunement' to it.
Your state of mind is disclosed by the moods (qv) which reveal how you
feel about being you in your circumstances. Taking care - Authentic solicitude (qv) which it treats the needy person as a sovereign [self-governing] individual - i.e., it acknowledges the other's mineness (qv). Taking over - A form of solicitude (qv) which treats a needy person as less than the owner of his or her mineness. In the taking over mode of solicitude, you 'leap in' for another person by, in effect, taking a parental role over her or his being-there. Temporality - The way that persons have to, and do, hold the future,
past, and present, together as an horizon (qv) of their Being. Being a
person is an ongoing process of presently exploiting possibilities for
the future as who you have defined yourself by your past choices. This
process cannot be explained ontologically without reference to the way
that being a person does and must integrate the future and the past
with the present. The process of making a choice, for example, cannot
be fully understood without reference to who you have been in the past,
what possibilities are present, and who you intend to be in the future
once a present possibility has been actualised. Saying that temporality
is the horizon of being a person simply means that all your activities
as a person occur within a framework integrating past, present and
future. Temporality is not simply a matter of being in time.
It is, rather, the necessary capacity of being-there to integrate the
future and past into your present existence. It is, in other words, a
unity because, as a person you are being 'towards' the future in the
present, but only as who you have been in the past; your past is not
dead but part of the present. Except in a few cases of personal
disintegration, folk behave in ways that are consistent
with past behaviours and events, and project this
consistency into the future. This means that being-there can never be
accurately interpreted 'out of time'; that is, as any sort of
free-floating 'soul' or 'pure consciousness' or whatever. Temporalising - The process whereby persons both create and inhabit a unified past, present and future, as the horizon (qv) of their existence. Temptation - The ground of fallenness (qv) that is itself prepared by idle talk and the way things have been publically interpreted (qv) by 'they' (qv). Temptation is a predisposition to fallenness that comes built into your being-with others The 'There' - The part of the 'workshop' of personhood (i.e., the world) where you find yourself in the historical web of assignments, references, and activities, that make up the worldhood of the world. Heidegger refers to the process of being a person as being-there precisely because being a person requires a personal natural-cultural environment [part of the world] in which to be; this environment, which is always some person's 'mine' (qv) place is the 'there' of her or his personal being-there. The 'They' - The set of communal values to which you conform in fact (and usually without noticing that you are doing so); the undifferentiated 'everyone' in "Everyone's doing it" or "Everyone's got one"; public opinion; the social norm or 'done way of doing things' which determines your behaviour and your understanding of your possibilities. The They-self - The self (qv) you are maintaining by being absorbed in your everyday life and lost in the 'they' (qv). The they-self is real and of your own making (it is your self), but its values, behaviour and way of being-in-the-world are not understandingly owned by you. Virtually all of us are being they-selves for virtually all of the time. Things invested with value - Objects of attention in the world which are of value to you in the sense of being relevant to your projects either as a help or as a hindrance. Such objects are ready-to-hand (qv) as actual or potential assets or liabilities to your existence. Things that are not invested with value by you, because they play no part in your projects, are merely present-at-hand (qv). Thrownness - The fact of finding yourself landed with the task of being a person as someone you didn't choose to be in a geographical, social, and historical, 'there' that you didn't choose to be-in. What you are thrown into is your facticity (qv) both as inherited and as chosen. The notion of being thrown into the world does not imply that any external being, beings, or force, placed you in the world for some purpose. All it captures is the fact that no one starts being a person except as some particular person in a particular circumstance. You don't get to go 'behind' your thrownness to choose your body, your environment, your parents, time in history or place on the socio-economic spectrum. You simply awake to personhood to find yourself pitched into a game you don't understand, as someone you didn't choose to be. Thrown projection - The dual nature of being a person as thrown (qv) into actuality and simultaneously projecting (qv) onto possibilities. Being simultaneously thrown and projective is your nature as an integrity of actuality and possibility by which you must realise you potentiality-for-being as whoever you happen to be and from within a state of affairs that is actual and not of your making. As a person you must, in effect, keep one foot in a past-defined facticity (the 'thrown' aspect) and one in possibility-defined future (the 'projection' aspect). If you think of your existence as being-towards the future then being projective is the 'thrust' while being thrown is the 'drag.' Towards-this -The aspect of a ready-to-hand entity's significance whereby you understand its Being in terms of its specific function within an equipmental context. Two hammers used for related by different purposes in panel beating, for example, have a different 'towards this' within the general towards-which (qv) of hammers in panel beating. Towards-which - The part of equipment's Being that is disclosed in terms of its having an assigned purpose within the totality of equipment. Towards-which is related to a tool's serviceability (qv) for a given task. For example, a hammer's ability to drive nails into timber gives it a towards-which function that makes it relevant in-order-to build a wood-framed shelter - it makes the hammer serviceable for the assigned task. The towards-which of equipment derives from the being-towards (qv) of the persons who use equipment in the service of their existence. Transcendence - All of the being-towards (qv) aspects of being-in-the-world which entail that being-there cannot be disclosed merely as what is present. Transparency - The self-understanding of who you are as someone who is being-there. Transparency is not to be confused with the kind of categorial self-beliefs that are supposedly gained from psychology, astrology, sociology, and so on (cf. entanglement). To achieve transparency you have to sight (qv) yourself as a potentiality-for-being who is realising that potentiality by being-in-the-world. So transparency, as self-understanding, discloses your existential ontology as a person. Truth - A 'two storey' bye-product of persons being persons.
Turbulence - An instability of character that follows from being defined by ever-changing group dynamics rather than resolutely (qv) owning your own existence for yourself. Turning (turning away, turning towards) - An emotional rejection of a fearsome or distasteful fact. Your state-of-mind (qv) discloses your being-there in two basic attitudes: that in which you emotionally 'turn towards' a fact, and that in which you emotionally 'turn away' from it (see closing off). Turning away discloses your being-there by trying to disavow some aspect of it in some way. If you turn away from a fact of your past or present existence, for example, then you disclose it as distasteful, embarrassing, and/or a threat to who you are trying to be (see also fleeing). Uncanniness - The disturbing feeling of not being 'at home' in the world (contrast being-alongside); a translation of the German word 'unheimlich' ['un-home-like', usually translated as 'spooky' or 'eerie'] as a description of how the normally comfortable and familiar world feels to us when stripped of its normal possibilities in moments of existential anxiety. Understanding - A matter of being able to use an item as equipment for some project that has to do with realising a possible existence; you understand a garden, for example, not when you know the theoretical physics and chemistry of plant growth, but when you know what a garden is for and how to use it in a way that serves the project of being kind of person you are being. This means that understanding is not the end product of an intellectual process but your immediate and practical [pre-intellectual] grasp of objects as possibilities for being one kind of person or another. Usability - The practical purpose for which of a ready-to-hand object is assigned within a project. If you are using a glue to repair a toy, for example, the project of repairing the toy the towards-which (qv) that defines a glue's serviceability (qv), while sticking various materials together is the for-which of its usability. Wanting to have a Conscience - A choice to begin accepting responsibility for your own Being, existence, and character; the authentic alternative to your normal responsibility-avoidance. We all are, in fact, being the basis of our own thrown existence. Wanting to have a conscience simply accepts ownership of that fact. 'Wherein' - The 'home' of an activity. A kitchen, for example, is the 'wherein' of preparing food to eat (see also region). Willing (wanting) - An expression of Care (qv) whereby you 'seize upon' an entity that will serve your potentiality-for-being. Where wanting can be passive, willing is active. It involves a state of affairs which is desired and which a seized upon entity will serve to bring about hat state of affairs. This means that the entity must already be understood in terms of a for-the-sake-of-which. So if, for example, you want a new handle for a broken hammer, then you have already understood the piece of wood as ready-to-hand and the hammer as something for the sake of which the piece of wood can be used. See also Appendix 1. 'wither' - An area in the world, as a 'workshop' of self-making, that has been assigned to certain projects. Kitchens, for example, are the 'whither' [region for food preparation] in which equipment for preparing food has its assigned place. The World - The whole natural/cultural 'workshop' of character-making within which persons go about the task of being persons. The planet Earth and all it contains is made into a world by the way that persons assign roles to entities in the process of existing in one way or another. Worldhood - A widely ramifying and integrated complex of roles, concepts, projects, assignments (qv), significance (qv), functions and functional interrelations, that arises from the fact that persons care about objects in the world for the possibilities with which they present us for being or not being the kind of person you want to be. The worldhood of a hammer, for example, is that entire web of concepts, assignments and activities within which a hammer has its Being as a tool with an assigned function. The worldhood of the world is what makes the things around us cohere as an integrity [a world]. It is also what allows and invites us to encounter objects as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. Worldly character (equipment) - The Being of equipment that consists of its involvement (qv) in projects (qv) having to do with existing in the world in one way or another. Yonder - The 'not us' aspect of the world when considered existentially
in relation to ourselves as 'workers' in the 'workshop' of the world
(qv. spatiality).
1. In everyday usage, the word 'essential' usually means only 'important to.' But an entity without an essence simply couldn't be the entity it is and, throughout this file, I use the word 'essential' in its literal denotation of 'that without which an entity would not be the entity it is. 2. Dissecting anything doesn't disclose its being so much obscure it (as close it off ). Even something as simple as a hammer loses its being as a hammer (stops being a hammer) if you dissect it into ahead and a handle. 3. A wherein is the place of an activity. A kitchen, for example, is the wherein of preparing food to eat (see also region). 4. As with the term 'existence', involvement has a meaning that is referenced to the projects of being-there. A snail's shell, for instance, is not involved with safely or shelter in the way of human houses or clothing because the snail is not a person who has assigned it to that task as a way of realising a chosen character. 5. Remember here that equipment includes not only tools and machines but anything that has been assigned to a purpose. A piece of sky, for instance, becomes equipment when it is assigned to the purpose of flying a kite. 6. On a more general level, you have to already be-in a world of projects and equipment before there can be any notion of any items having a place in the world.7. Being-there also occupies a place (it's 'here'), but this occupying os a place differs from that of ready-to-hand objects through being a desevering (a bring close, qv) of the environmentally ready-to-hand into a region (qv) which has been circumspectively discovered in advance. 8. To be more exact, you act in the present for your potentiality-to-be who you will be after you act. 9. Assertions (i.e., propositions in which you predicate a character of a subject), have been and are usually taken as the paradigm use of language by human persons. Making assertions is, however, just one of many uses of language, and is misleading as a pardigm of language use for two reasons: (1) most discourse doesn't assert anything but asks questions, maintains social contact, tells jokes, tries to sell or persaude, give commands, and so on, and (2) interpretations and articulation both narrow the fous of your concern, and assertion continues this narrowing in a way that 'flattens out' and decontextualise what is spoken about. The difference here is a bit like understanding the layout of a kitchen by working in itand articulating that layout in centimetres; the first discloses the spatial Being of the kitchen, the second does not. 10. This is why hearing and keeping silent are both modes of discourse. You can, for example, disclose Being by not saying anything - especially when other folk are talking idly (see reticence). 11. The failure of fallen everydayness, to disclose the Being of being-there, is the reason why Heidegger devotes so much of Being and Time to working out what unfallen [authentic] being-there would be like. 12. Keep in mind here the difference between being a certain kind of animal and being a person (see human person). It is only for persons - the being for whom possibilities are objects of understanding - that anxiety [angst] is primordial. Animals may experience fear or stress that is chamically analogous with ours - even though they lack the belief component of human emotions, and person cannot know what animals that are not being-there are experiencing - but they can be anxious only to the extent that they are being persons because only persons have to choose an existence from possibilities that are disclosed as possibilities only by that existence. 13. Appeal to a supposed afterlife may postpone this dilemma but does not actually resolve anything because, for as long as you are a person, in any world whatsoever, you must have possibilities - that is simply what it is to be a person. This means that your self will not be complete. If this state of affairs ever ends in any way whatsoever (e.g., after several lives, or by your selfhod or consciousness being absorbed back into the 'great ocean of being,' or whatever) then you will no longer be a person. This means that, even if there was an afterlife or lives (which is unlikely) there would still be no possibility of anyone narrating an existentiell expereience of themselves as a whole because there will never be a time when the person is both complete and still existing as a person. If you find yourself harbouring a belief that some religious or metaphysical narrative offers a way out of this dilemma then, for the sake of your own understanding, you should assume that you haven't fully grasped the significance of the issue. 14. Person do not, for the most part, have any explicit knowledge that they are delivered over to death, or that death thus belongs to being-in-the-world. Thrownness into death reveals itself to persons as anxiety. Anxiety in the face of death is not the same as fear of death but is an awareness of that we have only a limited time to be who we are. 15. Here again it is tempting to read moral or political connotations into Heidegger's descriptions of as authentic [self-owning] or inauthentic [other-owned] being-towards-death. But we must never forget that he is simply struggling to describe contrasting phenomena and his is not a moral or political thesis. 16. All of your experiences of objects of attention are based on, and derive from, projections of your own potentiality - i.e., it is only because persons are in-the-world understandingly (they relate to the Being of object) that they experience objects both as what they are for and as meaningful. 17. Note here that the 'as you have been so far' involves another 'not' for which you are responsible. This is because who you have been no longer exists except in your ownership of it. 18. A person can disclose a sheep as in time, but try imagining what it would be like to be a sheep with no notion of time. 19. Saying that temporality is the horizon of being-there means that all your experiences as a person occur within a framewrok integrating the past, present, and future, of your own life. 20. Although Heidegger limits himself to Occidental (Western) philsophy, Oriental (Eastern) philosophies face the same problems and fail to solve them in much the same way. Various forms of Idealism have, for example, have remained very popular in Hinduism and its offspring and face the same issues as led to the relative rejection of Idealism in Occidental religions and secular philosophies. 21. An intentional object is whatever a thought or feeling intends [is directed at]. If you desire chocolate, for example, then chocolate is the intentional object of your desire even if there is no actual chocolate in sight. Intentional objects do not have to be real - as folk who believe in 'the goddess' or have feelings for fictional characters demonstrate. |
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| Steven Foulds - Text last modified on 25 August 2011 Feedback and comments are welcome
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