|
Martin Heidegger, the 20th-century German philosopher, introduced to the world a large body of work that represented a profound change of direction for philosophy. Such was the depth of change that he found himself needing to introduce a number of neologisms and adapted vocabulary, often connected to idiomatic words and phrases in the German language. Two of his most basic neologisms, present-at-hand and ready-to-hand, are used to describe various attitudes toward to things in the world. For Heidegger, such an "attitudes" are prior to, i.e. more basic than, the various sciences of the individual items in the world. Science itself is an attitude, one that attempts a kind neutral investigation. Other related terms are also explained below. However, Heidegger's overall analysis is quite involved, taking in a lot of the history of philosophy. See Being and Time for a description of his overall project, and to give some context to these technical terms. Aletheia (Ancient Greek: αληθεια) Heidegger's sense of Aletheia is an attempt to understand the meaning of truth in a completely new, or rediscovered manner. See main article on Aletheia for more information. Being-in-the-World (German: In-der-Welt-sein) Being-in-the-world is Heidegger's replacement for terms such as subject, object, consciousness, world. For him, the split of things into subject/object, as we find in the Western tradition and even in our language, must be overcome, as is indicated by the root structure of Husserl and Brentano's concept of intentionality, ie, that all consciousness is consciousness of something, that there is no consciousness, as such, cut off from an object (be it the matter of a thought, or of a perception). Nor are there objects without some consciousness beholding or being involved with them. See intentionality. At the most basic level of being-in-the-world Heidegger notes that there is always a mood, a mood "assails us" in our unreflecting devotion to the world. A mood comes neither from the "outside" nor the "inside," but arises from being-in-the-world. One may turn away from a mood, but that is only to another mood, it is part of our facticity. Only with a mood are we permitted to encounter things in the world. Dasein (a co-term for being-in-the-world) has an openness to the world that is constituted by the attunement of a mood or state of mind. As such, Dasein is a "thrown" "projection," projecting itself onto the possibilities that lie before it or may be hidden, and interpreting and understanding the world in terms of possibilities. Such projecting has nothing to do with comporting oneself toward a plan that has been thought out. It is not a plan, since Dasein has, as Dasein, already projected itself. Dasein always understands itself in terms of possibilities. As projecting, the understanding of Dasein is its possibilities as possibilities. One can take up the possibilities of "The They" self and merely follow along or make some more authentic understanding. Being-towards-death (German: Sein-zum-tode) Being-towards-death is not an orientation that brings Dasein closer to its end, in terms of clinical death, but is rather a way of being. In the analysis of time, it is revealed as a threefold condition of Being. Time, the present and the notion of the "eternal", are modes of temporality. Temporality is the way we see time. For Heidegger, it is very different to the mistaken view of time as being a linear series of past, present and future. Instead he sees it as being an ecstasy, an outside-of-itself, of futural projections (possibilities) and one's place in history as a part of one's generation. Possibilities, then, are integral to our understanding of time, our projects both one's ongoing or created are what abosrb and direct us. The future is a primary mode of Dasein's temporality. Death is that possibility which is the absolute impossibility of Dasein. As such, it cannot be compared to any other kind of ending or "running out" of something. Eg, one's death is not an empirical event. For Heidegger, it is non-relational, that is nobody can take one's death away from one, it is one's own; the "not-yet" of life is, in a sense, already a part of Dasein, "as soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die." The threefold condition is thus simultaneously one's "ownmost potentiality-for-being, non-relational, and not to be out-stripped". Here, Heidegger describes a "way of being" that is completely one's own (that is, it entirely encompasses Dasein's world), not able to be understood or experienced by observation of another's experience or understanding, and totally inevitable. With average, everyday (normal) discussion of death, all this is concealed. The "they-self" talks about it in a fugitive manner, passes it off as something that occurs at some time but is not yet "present-at-hand" as an actuality, and hides its character as one's ownmost possibility, presenting it as belonging to no one in particular. It becomes devalued - redefined as a neutral and mundane aspect of existence that merits no authentic consideration. "One dies" is interpreted as a fact, and comes to mean "nobody dies". On the other hand, authenticity negates the effect of the "They". Heidegger states that Authentic being-towards-death erupts Dasein out from its "they-self", and frees it to re-evaluate life from the standpoint of finitude. In so doing, Dasein opens itself up for "angst" which throws Dasein into shocking individuation, in turn allowing the "call of the conscience" to lead Dasein into living resolutely in un-concealment. As a result, the question "Why do something rather than nothing?" is answered by this projection towards one's own impossibility, and meaning may be given to the resoluteness of our action. Being-with (German: mitsein) Both modes of "present-at-hand" and "ready-to-hand," are distinguished from how other things are primarily encountered. While all entities (non-Dasein, other Daseins, and itself) are encountered in these modes, the mode of "being-with" and all the emotion, loneliness and togetherness that it implies, is a unifying mode of being for Dasein and its world. Being-with is a nuanced concept for Heidegger, made especially difficult for readers because of his writing style and the challenge of translating his works into English. However, in describing the Dasein's fundamental mode of being-in-the-world as Care (German: Sorge), for example "Dasein cares about its own Being", it could be said that being-with is a fundamental way of understanding Dasein's character as a being that is interested in its world; it is not a secondary role, but a descriptive characteristic. Equipment (German: das Zeug) A nearly un-translatable term, Heidegger's equipment can be thought of as a collective noun, so that it is never appropriate to call something 'an equipment'. Instead, its use often reflects it to mean a tool, or as an "in-order-to" for Dasein. Tools, in this collective sense, and in being ready-to-hand, always exist in a network of other tools and organisations, eg, the paper is on a desk in a room at a university. It is inappropriate usually to see such equipment on its own or as something present-at-hand Existence Simply put, Heidegger uses this word only to denote the noun - that something is. The two related words, Existentiell and Existentiale, are used as descriptive characteristics of Being. An "existentiell" is a categorically or ontically characteristic while an "existentiale" is an ontologically characteristic. Ontic Heidegger uses the term ontic when he typified a descriptive characteristic of a thing as either dealing primarily with existence and plain facts of the world. A thing is ontic if it deals with what is apparent in reality. For example, the objects that are studied by physics or chemistry are ontical, they are certain given things in the world that are studied without necessarily raising more global questions. Ontological As opposed to "ontic", ontological is used when the nature, or meaningful structure of existence is at issue. Ontology, a discipline of metaphysics, focuses on the formal study of Being. Thus, something that is ontological is concerned with understanding and investigating Being, the ground of Being, or the concept of Being itself. Present-at-Hand (German: vorhanden, presence-at-hand: vorhandenheit) With the present-to-hand one has an attitude, like that of a scientist, of merely looking at or observing something - concerned only with the bare facts of a thing as they are present and in order to theorise about it. It is disinterested in the concern it may hold for Dasein, its history or usefulness. This attitude is often described as existing in neutral space without any particular mood or subjectivity. However, for Heidegger, it is not completely disinterested or neutral, it has a mood, and is part of the metaphysics of presence. The deconstruction of which Heidegger sets out to accomplish. Presence-at-hand is not the way things in the world are usually encountered, and it is only revealed as a deficient mode, eg, when a hammer breaks it loses its usefulness and appears as merely there, present-at-hand. When a thing is revealed to have presence-at-hand, it is stands apart from any useful set of equipment. Ready-to-Hand (German: zuhanden, readiness-to-hand, handiness: zuhandenheit) However, in almost all cases we are involved in the world in a much deeper way. We are usually doing things with a view to achieving something. Take for example, a hammer, it is ready-to-hand, we use it without theorising, in fact, if we were to look at it as present-at-hand, we might easily make a mistake. Only when it breaks or something goes wrong might we see the hammer as present-at-hand, just lying there. Even then however, it may be not fully present-to-hand, as it is now showing itself as something to be replaced or disposed. If the hammer were in a glass case in a museum it would be essentially different. Importantly, the present-to-hand only emerges from the prior attitude in which we care about what is going on and we see the hammer in a context or world of equipment that is handy or remote, and that is there "in order to" do something or is obstructive. In this sense the ready-to-hand is primordial compared to that of the present-at-hand. Primordial here refers to Heidegger's idea that Being is understood better in what is always with us, in what is everyday and "close" to us, thus getting at the all embracingness of Being as opposed to the beings of individual things that might be studied by the different areas of science, such as physics, chemistry or biology. For Heidegger in Being and Time this illustrates, in a very practical way, the way the present-to-hand, as a present in a "now" or a present eternally (as, for example, a scientific law or a Platonic Form), has come to dominate intellectual thought, especially since the Enlightenment. To understand the question of being one must be careful not to fall into this levelling off, or forgetfulness of being, that has come to assail Western thought since Socrates, see the metaphysics of presence. The They (German: Das Man) Heidegger refers to the concept of The They in explaining inauthentic modes of being, in which Dasein, instead of truly choosing to do something, does it because "That is what one does," where the German equivalent of one as used in this way is man, hence das Man. In this way Heidegger contrasts "the authentic self" (myself) with "the they self". Ereignis Translated often as meaning, an event. It comes from the German prefix, er-, comparable to 're-' in English and Eigen, one's own. It is a noun coming from a reflexive verb. Note that the German prefix er- also can connote an end or a fatality. Ereignis appears in Heidegger's later works and is not easily summarised. Here he associates it with the fundamental idea of concern from Being and Time, the English etymology of con-cern is similar to that of the German: ...we must return to what we call a concern. The word Ereignis (concern) has been lifted from organically developing language. Er-eignen (to concern) means, originally, to distinguish or discern which one's eyes, see, and in seeing calling to oneself, ap-propriate. The word con-cern we shall now harness as a theme word in the service of thought... Clearing A translation of the German word lichtung. In English it is usually translated as, "clearing", but sometimes as "lighting", it refers in Heidegger to the clearing necessary such that anything can appear or that anything or idea can unconceal itself. Worldhood Concern See also | |||||||
|
| ||||||||
 |
|
| |