Insight into that which is heidegger

Although Macquarrie and Robinson, in their Blackwell English edition, produced one of the classics of modern philosophical translation, reading Being and Time can sometimes feel like wading through a conceptual mud of baroque and unfamiliar concepts. That said, the basic idea of Being and Time is extremely simple: being is time. That is, what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death.

Being is time and time is finite, it comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death, what Heidegger calls "being-towards-death".

Crudely stated, for thinkers like St Paul, St Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard, it is through the relation to God that the self finds itself.

For Heidegger, the question of God's existence or non-existence has no philosophical relevance. The self can only become what it truly is through the confrontation with death, by making a meaning out of our finitude.

If our being is finite, then what it means to be human consists in grasping this finitude, in "becoming who one is" in words of Nietzsche's that Heidegger liked to cite. We will show how this insight into finitude is deepened in later entries in relation to Heidegger's concepts of conscience and what he calls "ecstatic temporality". Being and Time begins with a long, systematic introduction, followed by two divisions, each containing six chapters.

I have just finished teaching the whole book in a week lecture course at the New School for Social Research in New York and I estimate that I spoke for about 2 hours a week. As they say here in New York, just do the math! Therefore, in the following 7 short blog entries, I can only give a taste of the book and offer some signposts for readers who would like to explore further. Cif belief Philosophy books. And if time and space do not make two otherwise identical constellations different as for Leibniz they do not , such two things would really be only one thing.

Heidegger terms this aspect of the scientific approach its basic "mathematical" character. He calls modern science mathematical, not because it so widely employs mathematics but because this basic plan of uniform units makes it possible to quantify everything one studies. It makes everything amenable to mathematics. Heidegger discusses two related reasons for calling the basic scientific approach "mathematical," i. Furthermore, Heidegger argues that the model copies our own thought procedures.

Its uniform units are uniform thought steps transformed into a ground plan postulated as the basic structure of things.

Here these two lines of argument will be discussed in turn:. Seventeen consists of [Page ] the same units as fourteen, only there are three more of them. Since the units are the same, it would not matter which three of the seventeen units were considered to be three more than fourteen. There is a serial procedure employed in counting. In this procedure we obtain various numbers because we always keep in mind the units already counted.

Our counting "synthesizes" puts together fourteen and another, another, and another. We keep what we have with us as we add another same unit. Our own continuity as we count gets us to the higher number. As Kant phrased it, without the unity of the "I think," there would be only the one unit counted now, and no composition of numbers. We get from fourteen to seventeen by taking fourteen with us as we go on to add another, another, and another.

Thus, our activity of thinking provides both the series of uniform steps and the uniting of them into quantities. These units and numbers are our own notches, our own "another," our own unity, and our own steps. Why do two plus two equal four? The steps are always the same; hence, the second two involves steps of the same sort as the first two, and both are the same uniform steps as counting to four.

Thus, the basic mathematical composing gives science its uniform unitlike "things" and derivable compositions , 5 4. Therefore, everything so viewed becomes amenable to mathematics , He argues that "mathematical" means "axiomatic": the basic nature of things has been posited as identical to the steps of our own proceeding, our own pure reasoning.

The laws of things are the logical necessity of reason's own steps , 75 posited as laws of nature. It is this that makes the model "mathematical" and explains why mathematics acquired such an important role. The everywhere-equal units of the space of uniform motion of basically uniform bodies are really only posited axioms.

They are the uniform steps of pure, rational thought, put up as axioms [Page ] of nature. Descartes had said it at its "coldest" , 78 and most extreme: Only a method of reducing everything to the clear and distinct steps of rational thinking grasps nature. Is not such an approach simply unfounded? Everything may follow from the starting assumptions, but what are they based upon?

How can that be a valid method? Heidegger says that the axiomatic method lays its own ground 98, He thus gives the term "axiomatic" a meaning it does not always have: he makes it reflexive as Descartes' method was. Rather, Heidegger emphasizes that the axioms that rational thought posits assert the nature of rational thought itself.

Axiomatic thought posits itself as the world's outline. It is based on itself. It creates the model of the world, not only by but as its own steps of thought. As we have seen, it is rational thought that has uniform unit steps and their composits, logical necessity and so forth. The axiomatic ground-plan of nature is simply the plan of the nature of rational thought asserted of nature.

This, then, is the basic "mathematical" character of modern science. It is founded on the "axiomatic" method of "pure reason," which, as we shall see, Kant retains but limits. Heidegger now shows the extent to which science's axiomatic thought-plan had reigned. Even God was subject to it. Philosophically explicated Descartes and Leibniz , the lawful character of nature meant that God's thinking the thinking that creates nature was axiomatic, logical thought. The power of axiomatic thought is thus limitless.

It creates nature. And so it was held that God himself could not act otherwise than he does and that he is subservient to logical thought. Nature could not possibly be otherwise than along the lines of that which follows logically. Heidegger recalls that medieval philosophy had be- [Page ] queathed three different main topics of philosophy: God theology , world cosmology , and man psychology , 86 , which are similar to Heidegger's three sorts of "things" 6, 5.

All three now became determined by man's axiomatic thought. There was thus a "rational theology," a "rational psychology," and a "rational cosmology. Using pure reason, man could conclude not only about man, world, and God but about what was possible and impossible in any possible reality.

This unlimited power of pure reason leads to Kant's task of setting its limits. We must notice, however, not only the vast extent of this power and the evident need to limit it but that this power is founded on the role that thought has in generating the basic scientific ground-plan, unity, and lawfulness of things! Kant limits the power of reason only by showing more exactly how its power is legitimately founded.

He shows how thought legitimately participates in the formation of anything we experience. But first, Heidegger prepares for his discussion of Kant by reopening the question of the time: Why is the axiomatic model applicable to nature? Heidegger shows the vast role that came to be assigned to rational thought. Then Kant limits it by showing the roles of thinking in the experience of things, the generating of space, time, units, the unity of anything, and the lawfulness of events.

We recall Heidegger's earlier discussion of the need for the thing to be an underlying "bearer of traits. Something must stand steady: it is the thing, which underlies all its visible and changing traits. This view goes back to Aristotle, for whom the thing was analogous to the subject of the sentence and the traits were the predicates.

The Greek term for matter means "what underlies," and its Latin translation is "subject. With the rise of modern science the axiomatic method of purely logical steps of thought has replaced the underlying matter that holds the traits together and explains how they change.

For instance, in Descartes' example Meditations , II , a piece of wax is first white and then charred. The scientific explanation requires that the wax really be an underlying analytical framework. Both the perceived white and charred must be reduced to these underlying thought-dimension.

Heidegger points to the change in meaning that the word "subject" underwent from being "what underlies" as the subject of the sentence and the matter of the thing to its modern meaning as the "person" and "subjective" thought. The thing that underlies is now our own thought! For Kant, too, the unity of things and of space and time in fact, all necessary connective unity comes from "I think.

The oneness of our thinking is "what underlies" as, for example, when we count units we take them along and thereby unite them as we go on counting. Thus, the subject that "bears" the traits or predicates is the thought unity of the experiencer. But this "I think" is not an object; it is only the unity of our process in knowing sensory objects.

For Kant, rational logic is no longer valid independent of sensation. Sensation is no longer simply "confused" thought that must be reduced to analytic clarity derivable from axioms. Rather, the sensory given and rational thought are two different ingredients of any experience. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason considers axiomatic thought to be only our human, finite thinking rather than world-constituting rationality. This fundamentally alters the whole approach , As human and finite, our axiomatic thinking is limited to its roles in the make- [Page ] up of sensory experience.

Alone it does not constitute an object. Thereby, rational metaphysics comes to be seen as invalid speculation. With Kant and Heidegger , this valid, limited role of our thinking has always already occurred whenever we experience. It is not something we "get from" or "add to" experience. Thus, the mathematical aspects of nature are not some grid that we place over what we experience, but our approach to sensible things.

Only with some approach does one encounter anything. Kant thought only the Newtonian approach was really basic to human experience; Heidegger views this as historically variable. But they agree that things are never experienced except as some approach has already played its role.

Only then is anything such as "experience" rendered possible, for experience is always already organized for example, laid out, sequential, quantifiable, predictable, and understood as whatever it is an experience of. We never experience something totally unrecognizable, unidentifiable, and out of context. Even if we were to have such an experience, we would identify it by time, place, and what led up to it.

Thus, the Kantian Critique , and Heidegger too, will do nothing to overthrow those aspects of the axiomatic method that imply that experience is made partly by thought. The best example of this is the scientific experiment. Heidegger argues that the basic character of modern science is missed if one says that it differs from earlier science by being experimental.

For Heidegger, the fact that modern science is "experimental" is only another result of its being basically axiomatic: an experiment is no mere observing. An experiment in the modern sense always first sets up a hypothetical framework.

We set up the conditions and procedures in advance; only within them is nature allowed to answer, and it can say only yes or no. It must respond within our framework , 93; 52, Bacon had said that it is not enough to observe [Page ] nature.

We must "torture" nature and see what then happens under the circumstances we set up and put into action. And Kant cites Bacon's point in his Preface. Heidegger argues that objects in science are made in a way similar to the way we make tools. Again, here he provides the broader, ordinary man-world context within which science and all else arise.

The use of a tool is known in advance and determines the structure we give it when we invent and make it , A context of culture and use is always already implicit when anything is made. As tools are made, the things of science and the results of experiments are also made and involve a prior cultural knowing—a pre-existing context of man and world in which the thing is made as and can then be taken as that kind of thing.

For the Greeks there was a basic difference between made things and things of nature 83, Only natural things had their own nature and internal origin of motion. Something artificially made had its being moved only from the outside, by being made. For axiomatic science all things are only as we mathematically "make" them.

Later in this analysis we will discuss Heidegger's attempts to move beyond the current technological situation, in which nature is something we make. Heidegger sees vast dangers in it, just as he criticizes the view of human nature, art, and life as "things. Will man the maker reduce himself to an axiomatically made "nature" that can say only yes or no within a framework set in advance?

Of course this making of nature works only when nature says "yes" to the framework and apparatus we devise. But nature and reality are "working forces" 93, Nature "works" for us within the terms we pre-set. Thus, the experimental character of modern science is [Page ] another aspect of its "axiomatic" character: our determining what things are. As we will see now, Kant explained and limited this puzzling fact.

Kant accepts the axiomatic character of thought , , as can be seen from his own axiomatic way of proceeding. He sets up a "system" and derives experience from the principles he sets up , Kant also retains the mathematical approach to experience: as we still often do, Kant views experience in terms of units. The mathematical method has been applied to break things up into sense-data units—felt pressure sensations, heard bits of sounds, seen color bits, etc.

But for Kant these are not experience. Experience is never had except as it involves much more than such unit sensations. For example: I am hit on the arm by a rock.

The sensations are the pressure, the sound thud, and the gray, etc. However, these sensations occur here on my left arm , now while the sun is shining , and at a certain, given, measurable intensity.

For Kant, sensations never occur without being definitely located in space and time, nor do they occur without a certain intensity. Finally, sensations are never experienced except as connected to other events. I would not consider it "possible" that I am being hit, but not by anything related to anything previous if I had only this momentary appearance of pressure and a floating gray shape. If a rock hit me I would wonder who threw it. Someone "must have.

It "could not" have popped out of nowhere just in front of my arm. Experience is only "possible" as a tissue of already connected events. Of course we may not as yet know who threw it, or [Page ] even if it was a rock.

If it looks very strange we may not yet know what it is. But we know it cannot be just a "sensory datum" of grayness and pressure, floating and unconnected to any other observable events. Thus, the explanatory connective relations are always already necessarily involved in any sensory experience, and even if we do not yet know what they are we flatly insist that they are there and that we must study until we find them.

It may require long and highly specific empirical study to determine what the object is, i. Say we eventually discover that it is a meteor, a leftover bit from a planetary explosion attracted to Earth by gravitation. We do not just invent the specific conceptual relations that explain and tie together the appearances we sense. But in advance of determining what a given connection is, we already know and insist that some necessary objective connections do obtain.

The general system of necessary relations is set in advance. Without it the pressure and gray shape could be purely floating appearances, but we consider that "impossible.

We work until we discover them specifically. Thus, in the scientific approach any experience always already involves definiteness in spatio-temporal quantitative and intensity respects, and necessary conceptual connections between events. The peculiar twist here is that it is just the conceptual connections of thought that make sensations into objects rather than mere subjective appearances.

This Kantian puzzle is resolved when we realize that "connections" are not possible without that which they connect. Therefore, these are valid thought-connections only as they are the connections of sensory givens.

Kant begins with the interplay. There is no human subject except as a receiver and thinker of experience. There are no things except as received and thought in experiencing.

As Heidegger views it, German nineteenth-century Idealism, although later than Kant, failed to absorb this insight of Kant's: that the whole experiential interplay is already involved in anything like a self. Similarly, Positivism failed to absorb Kant's insight: that the experiential interplay is already involved in anything like a separate thing. Only as a result of the much later neo- Kantianism was Kant understood, says Heidegger 60, It was one hundred years late 57, 43 , as Kant himself predicted.

An "object" is really sensations. But sensations have a definite size and duration in space and time Categories, group I and intensity group II , and Kant calls such determinate sensations appearances. Sensations never actually appear any other way. And, when such determinate sensations are further determined by explanatory conceptual connections group III so that their occurrence follows from laws, Kant calls such sensations objects.

As unconnected, such appearances could only be subjective. We really see only the gray shape, even when we see it now and here, so large and as a rock, which must have been thrown.

Thus, objects are sensations, but the conceptual connectives have always already functioned in any actual experience. Kant calls this conceptual tying together of sensations into objects "synthesis. Only the framework of the type [Page ] of measures and questions is conceptual. It was in this same sense that we said earlier than an experiment poses the hypothetical framework in advance of the results, and only within this framework does the experiment have precise results.

Only within the framework does it provide objective, empirical answers. But such science raises the basic question: In what way does the given exert control over the specific conceptual connections?

Thought steps such as in logic or counting must be such that sensory givens can control them! When and why? Thus, Kant alters the basic view that until then had been held traditionally, concerning what such a thought step, a "judgment," is. As had been discussed by Descartes and Leibniz, a judgment was only a connection between two concepts the subject and the predicate in a sentence. Heidegger's example, "The board is black" , A judgment was viewed as a connection between two concepts , a merely logical step from one to the other, tying the two.

Now Kant shows that there is a type of thought step that connects not only concepts but, in the same act, connects the grid "realm," Bereich , manifold in which any possible sensations will occur. Heidegger emphasizes that for Kant the view of judgments as mere connections between two concepts Subject and Predicate is insufficient.

Kant seeks the sort of connection between two concepts that simultaneously organizes whatever sensory givens can occur. Kant calls such a connection "synthetic. The question of judgment is now not "On what basis are a subject and a predicate tied together S-P? But there are four ways in which synthetic thought [Page ] connections work in an experience of objects. These are the four principles, the Kantian demonstrations, which Heidegger discusses in the last part of the book:.

For Kant, "two plus two equals four" is a "synthetic" judgment. By explaining his view on this, we can best shed light on the first role conceptual connections play in making up experience "The Axioms of Intuition," , Judgments are "analytic" when the subject already means the predicate. Thus, the principle of non-contradiction is the "top principle of all analytic judgments.

Mathematics first involves a synthesis that is necessary for all experience. Synthetic judgments involve a further step of thought not given by non-contradiction alone. But the "top principle of synthetic judgments" involves not merely the two concepts of this step of thought but also imagination and the unity of the thinker.

But we are concerned with how the concepts are formed in the first place, and we are concerned with how, in being formed, they also synthesize the realm for all objects. In forming the concept of "two" and of "four" we must add, count, and keep or unify the steps to form the number.

Similarly, if we imagine drawing a line, we keep what we have imagined drawing as we draw further, or we would get no line, only momentary bits. The unity of one activity of thought provides the connective union. Kant calls the judgment "synthetic" because in the connection of the steps of counting we generate the continuous quantifiable grid for all possible objects. We generate the quantifiable space as we draw lines and the sequence of time as we [Page ] count.

Space and time are basically those of imagined drawing and counting units. Hence, the connections between our steps of thought "synthesize" the imagined "schemata" of space and time. Thus, conceptual connections are involved in the generation of the continuous imagined grid of units of space and time, and anything ever sensed or imagined must appear within them.

Because of this synthesis or composition of units, we can also define the purely analytic relationships of the concepts. But, for Kant, the synthesis the making of concepts always precedes their analytic relationships. Concept formation precedes the analysis of already formed concepts. The origin of the connections in a concept must first be shown. And concept formation must be so accounted for that we can see how the experience of object is thereby patterned.

In this instance we have seen the formation of numbers and the thought steps of counting in such a way that the uniform unit composition of experience in space and time was also shown.

Heidegger, too, shows how time, space, and unit things are generated in the interplay between man and thing. We are our concerns, fears, and hopes, and, because we are a projection into the future, we generate time. Hence we must not think of ourselves as "things" present in time.

For Heidegger, we generate space in the context of pointing to and distancing objects as over there, plotting out a system of orientations in a social interaction with others amid things 25, But the uniform, quantitative grid of size and duration is only one of the ways that connections between conceptual steps also connect experience.

Let us turn to a second. Quantitative measurement is applicable, not only to space and time locations and durations of sensations, but also to their intensity.

Kant's "anticipations of perception" , concern this second and different way. Why is degree of intensity a different sort of thought connection? Because something actually sensed must appear. But even before it appears we know it must have a measurable "intensity. This is the second way in which connections between concepts also thereby synthesize a connective continuum for sensory experience. The first two have been Kant's "mathematical" principles. In these the thought steps and connections are inherent in the sensory appearance itself.

In contrast, the third concerns connections between different occurences of givens , Kant calls the third and fourth "dynamical. Let us say we know that the inferred always had happened whenever this sort of thing first happened.

But our sequential memory alone cannot ensure that it must happen in the same sequence again. If we do not know why this always happens when that does, we may well be wrong or we may have neglected to account for some intervening change. At any rate, we did not yet have the objective connection. Only if we know why this makes that happen can we say that it "must" happen again. Thus, explanatory conceptual connections just as Descartes said provide the objective scientific connections of any possible appearances.

But, even so, we might be wrong. We are sure only that the general structure of experience is along these lines.

There is some explanation connecting events. The specific explanations are constantly discovered, improved, and extended. They must be found from experience. When we find that we were wrong, we find that what we thought was an "objective" explanation really was not.

Finally , , since experience is possible only with us, not for objects apart from us, what can rational thought conclude in advance as to what is possible or impossible? For Kant, God, nature, and man are no longer subject to the logical laws of rational thought. Logical possibility is not experiential possibility.

Except as thought connections also synthesize actual sensory experience, thought alone is not decisive about what is possible or impossible. In these four principles, Heidegger shows that Kant "demonstrates" the role of each conceptual principle in experience by a syllogistic sequence.

The first major premise tells something that is the case in all experience. The second minor premise states that this aspect of experience is possible only as a certain conceptual connection has already participated. The principle Kant is proving then follows by logical necessity. But despite this elegant method of proof, the proofs are all "circular": the principle that is concluded proven is really merely shown to have been already involved in the first premise.

In short, the demonstration shows how the principles are already involved in experience. This "circle" , ; , is of great importance to Heidegger and lies in the very nature of ontology the study of how what is is constituted. Whatever is is always already patterned in interplay with us before we ever make explicit what and how it is. Our "understanding" prestructures everything in those respects we have outlined.

We have always already been involved in anything we have experienced. Our approach has functioned already. To make it explicit is what Kant calls the "transcendental" task. We can show only circularly how we are [Page ] always already involved.

The human subject's process is always already involved implicitly and thought along with the thing when the thing is approached as a separate entity out there. Thus, the roles of thought in synthesizing what things are "leap ahead of" things in Heidegger's way of putting what Kant called "transcendental. But such explicating can alter how we approach things. Therein, Heidegger sees the power of philosophy. One reason, among others, that it was necessary to go so exactly into Kant's approach is that Heidegger's philosophy follows Kant's in so many basic ways—with this difference: Heidegger begins with man in the context of the ordinary world rather than in the context of science.

This difference gives a very different ring to everything Heidegger says. We will take up here how Kant's "transcendental" roles that thought plays in what objects are become Heidegger's "transcendence"—the way human beings' feeling, explication, language, and action "sketch" out the world, set up situations, and thereby partly create what the things are.

Heidegger, like Kant, views time's order as generated by us in our interplay with things. For Heidegger, however, this is not the linear time generated by mathematical thought but a time generated by the broader human process of "being-in-the-world," feeling, speaking, and acting in situations. Hence, it is a time in which the import of the past is being modified by how one is now concerned about what one is about to do.

Just as for Kant the human subject the "I think" that provides the synthesizing and steps of thought is not [Page ] itself an object, so for Heidegger the human being is not a thing, but rather the process of approaching things. A human person is a being-in and a being-toward, always a caring for, worrying about, trying to avoid, striving for, being afraid of, hoping for, etc. To ask other readers questions about Bremen and Freiburg Lectures , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about Bremen and Freiburg Lectures.

Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Jun 20, Dan Raghinaru rated it it was amazing. These two lectures show the transition of Heidegger's thinking to the later topics and style; along with his return to the public sphere after the prohibition against his teaching. Moreover, the Event of appropriation and the history of Beyng — as developed in his personal books during WW2 — are explicitly present in these two lectures.

Thing - as gather These two lectures show the transition of Heidegger's thinking to the later topics and style; along with his return to the public sphere after the prohibition against his teaching. Thing - as gathering and appropriating the fourfold i.

Its meaning changes according to the interpretation of that which is; that is of beings. Recently and as understood by Kant for example, a thing is an object that opposes a subject. These days a thing is rather understood as standing reserve. As object or standing reserve and encountered in representation, the thing no longer things and presences itself as a thing; and even more fundamentally, the Event of appropriation refuses itself.

Positionality where constant is understood as continuous orderability within a standing reserve conscription , as the essence of technology, ensue; and everything - including humans and even God - is such ordered.

For early Greeks and up to Aristotle, thinking - understood as logos - was the gathering that lays before such that is able to bring something to the fore; or the letting of what presences from itself appear here.

Even more fundamentally, for Parmenides Being belongs with thinking in the Same. But in order to experience the belonging-together of Being and human thinking, a leap into the Event of appropriation is needed. Metaphysics — especially as science with its subject-object and mathematical setting and as modern technology understood as positionality — does not recognize the Event and the possibility of such a leap.

Dec 16, Jacques Antoine added it. Excellent example of Heidegger's later style of thinking and writing. The Bremen lectures are a deeper and more extended treatment of the material sketched out in "The Question Concerning Technology.

Feb 14, Ilja Celine rated it it was amazing. Time to find out more about das Gestell for the thesis. Nov 01, Nick Poulos rated it it was amazing. Sep 18, Edward Moran rated it it was amazing Shelves: heidegger , heidegger-on-analytic-of-principles. Meditation on nearness, positionality, technology, and "The Danger. Sep 17, Xiiz rated it really liked it.