Martin Heidegger: The forgetfulness of Being
Martin Heidegger’s writings owe their fascination to their fusion of radical criticism of the Western philosophical tradition with a dark, trenchant diagnosis of the “homelessness” and “destitute” condition of human beings in modernity. Heidegger’s work has enjoyed unrivalled influence in a wide range of twentieth-century philosophical movements or fields – phenomenology and existentialism, pragmatism and postmodernism, hermeneutics and poetics, theology and environmental ethics. Phenomenologists and pragmatists could applaud his “destruction” of Cartesian rationalism, existentialists his call to “authenticity”, and environmentalists his reflections on “the devastation of the earth”. Heidegger’s influence might have been greater still if potential admirers had not been deterred by his challenging vocabulary or by his connection to Nazism.
With the exception of his Nazi association, Heidegger’s life was relatively uneventful. Born in the Black Forest region, to which he would always remain strongly attached, he studied Theology at Freiburg University with entry into the priesthood in mind, but switched to Philosophy when he judged Catholicism to be “problematic”. He became the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s assistant, succeeding to his mentor’s Chair in 1928. In 1933 Heidegger joined the Nazi party, a few days after being made Rector of his university, a position he resigned from a year later. Although he was to become disillusioned with the Nazis, his behaviour during the 1930s – including his treatment of Jewish colleagues – was often self-serving. His recently published Black Notebooks, moreover, suggest a sympathy for anti-Semitic attitudes that he always denied. Heidegger continued to teach at Freiburg until the end of the Second World War, when he was banned from doing so for his support of the Nazis. Made an Emeritus Professor in 1951, he continued until the 1970s to give lectures, to write, often in his “mountain hut” in the Black Forest, and to enjoy his growing international reputation as a sage. Heidegger died in 1976.
That Heidegger’s writings were so diversely influential might suggest that they are a hodgepodge of discussions on unrelated topics. While the hundred or so volumes of his Collected Works indeed address many issues, there is nonetheless a considerable unity to them, for they revolve around a central question. Is it possible to reconcile the uniqueness of human existence with being “at home” in the world? Can we live authentically human lives – ones fundamentally different from those of any other beings – without being compelled to regard ourselves as “aliens”, set apart from the rest of reality? To this question, Heidegger gave a single answer throughout his career, albeit one that was significantly modified. This answer was that we must overcome “the forgetfulness of Being”, for to “recall” and reflect on Being (Sein) enables us both to appreciate our uniqueness and to feel at home in the world.
This talk of Being may sound obscure, but at least in his most famous work, Being and Time (1927), what he means by it is fairly straightforward. The Being of entities is “that on the basis of which they are already understood” by us, however implicitly and inchoately. In other words, the Being of an entity is the condition under which we can recognize it as an entity of a certain kind. For example, as we’ll soon see, it is only on the basis of forms of human practice that entities like hammers can be recognized and understood. To “forget” Being is, therefore, to ignore the conditions – forms of practice, for instance – that make it possible for us to experience things, for anything to “show up” for us. This failure of attention, Heidegger argues, is endemic in Western philosophical tradition, most strikingly in the Cartesian picture that, he maintains, nearly all philosophers since Descartes have broadly endorsed.
With its strict division between selves and the world, subjects and objects, or mind and nature, this picture sets us against the world, in effect treating it as alien to us. And it is a bad picture, since in reality, Heidegger argues, we and the world cannot, even notionally, exist without one another: “self and world” are not “two beings”, but mutually dependent. The Cartesian picture results from viewing us in an over-intellectual way – as, essentially, “thinking things” who observe objects and mentally represent them. Phenomenological attention, undistorted by theory, to “things themselves” yields a very different picture of how we relate to the world, however. We do so, not as “spectators” or “thinkers”, but “primordially” as agents, for whom things are revealed as “equipment”, as things – like hammers – that we use and which owe their identity to their place in purposive human activities, such as carpentry. The world is intelligible to us, in the first instance, as a “relational totality” of “ready-to-hand equipment”, in which each thing has significance for us through its location in this “sign-like” whole. The hammer is implicated in a whole form of life – of working, building, bringing up a family and so on.
To be sure, it is possible to stand back from this practical involvement and simply look at and examine objects. But this detached standpoint is parasitic on practical engagement. Nothing would show up for examination unless it had first been “uncovered” through our everyday practices. Necessarily, then, we are beings-in-the-world, integrally connected with the world through our skilful “coping” with it.
This account of our being-in-the-world, Heidegger recognizes, does not do justice to the unique character of human existence: after all, animals also cope with, and to a degree understand, their environments. What is missing is the appreciation that creatures with our kind of Being (Dasein) are not only “absorbed” in everyday practices, but are able to regard their lives as an “issue” for them – to take stock of these lives and make them “their own”, by giving them sense and direction. only when we choose to do this are our lives “authentic”, and no longer the “inauthentic” ones we lead when we allow, as we do for the most part, our practices, tastes and interests to be dictated by “Them” (Das Man), the faceless “public” that dominates in the “average everydayness” of human life. The capacity for authentically seizing hold of one’s life is intimated by Angst – an “uncanny” mood in which “everyday familiarity collapses”, so that previously entrenched convictions lose their hold. Precisely because Angst is a disturbing mood, however, people are more than ready to suppress or “flee from” it, back into the reassuring arms of “Them”.
The authentic life, for Heidegger, is not – as it was for some later existentialists – one of making groundless “commitments” in an “absurd” world and accepting responsibility for them. It is, instead, “anticipatory resoluteness” – a quiet readiness to respond to one’s “situation”, free from “Their” facile opinions and “idle chatter”. How a person should respond, Heidegger proposes, is to be guided by “heritage”, by the authority of traditions that can be recalled and pitted against the “comfortable shirking” ways of “Them”. It is through heritage, the tried and tested “source” of the “possibilities” available to us – through, for example, recalling the past “heroes” of that heritage – that we obtain a “clear vision” of our historical situation and achieve distance from the conventions and diktats of the present.
The call for a people to “take over” its heritage helps to explain Heidegger’s perception of Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 as a “new dawn”. Hitler liked to compare himself with past heroes of German history, such as Siegfried, and in the nostalgic, bucolic ideology of many of his supporters, Heidegger – always happier in the countryside than in the city – discerned an antidote to the “enfeeblement of the spirit” caused by Bolshevism and American-style capitalism. His subsequent disillusion with National Socialism in turn helps to explain the recessive character of the theme of a people’s heritage in Heidegger’s later writings. But this left a gap in his ambition to reconcile the ability of people to be at home in their world with their living authentically human lives. For without the appeal to heritage as the authority for the decisions I must make, it seems I must choose between inauthentic submersion in the ways of “Them” and anxious, unresolvable fretting about my situation and the direction of my life.
There were other developments in Heidegger’s thinking during the 1930s, which also led him to reconsider the question of “homelessness” and the “forgetfulness of Being”. For one thing, he now recognises that the kinds of Being described in Being and Time were not exhaustive. Art works, for example, are neither “equipment” nor mere physical objects. Their form of Being is to “open up” significant aspects of the world, or even – as in the case of Greek temples – to inspire a people’s understanding of their environment and themselves. Moreover, he now sees that none of the ways in which things are revealed to people – none of the conditions that enable experience and understanding – is universal or timeless.
There has, Heidegger argues, been a long “history of Being”: in effect, a history of the ways in which the world has, in different epochs, been revealed to and experienced by people, from Presocratic Greeks to medieval Christians to Cartesian scientists to ourselves. “Being” has now become the name of something more recessive than the conditions under which things are encountered and understood. Alongside other terms that Heidegger sometimes prefers, such as “The Event”, “The Giving” or simply “It”, “Being” refers to the ineffable source of all the various ways in which the world is revealed. In a remark that indicates Heidegger’s debt to Asian thought, especially Daoism, this source is called the Way or Dao that “gives all ways” and “makes way for everything”.
Heidegger’s history of Being has a direction. It is the story of our increasing forgetfulness of Being and, correspondingly, of the increasingly powerful “stamp” of human purposes and predilections on how the world is conceived. one episode, for example, was the Cartesian picture of the world as one whose only objective properties – such as extension – are those that are scientifically measurable. The world was, in effect, determined by a “ground plan”, a pre-emptive determination to allow only certain entities as real.
But it is the final episode in his history on which Heidegger focuses, the epoch of “technology”. By this term, he does not mean technological enterprises, but a way of revealing the world that is manifest in such activities. Technology reveals the world as “standing reserve” that is “on tap” for humankind to exploit. “The earth reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit”, the Rhine as both a “water power supplier” and a tourist attraction. With technology, the forgetfulness of Being is complete. For, with the world experienced as stuff for human use, all sense of its source in something mysterious and beyond human control is lost. The very idea that technology is only one way of revealing is itself suppressed.
Homelessness, too, is complete in the age of technology. It is not simply that technological frenzy uproots populations from “their native soil”, but that nothing guides the whole process. The only aim is “maximum yield at minimum expense”, but no one knows what is supposed to be the yield, so that “man stumbles aimlessly about” in a world that he does not understand and cannot feel secure in. Several of Heidegger’s essays in the 1950s and 60s – elusive, haunting, beautiful – ask how we might respond to technology and retrieve a sense of Being so as to enable an authentically human existence within this “monstrous” epoch. There is no prospect, of course, of putting a stop to technology, so it is pointless to rail against it as “the work of the devil”. This resignation is confirmed, rather than countered, by his famous remark that “only a God can save us”.
Heidegger does, however, think it possible for individual men and women, “here and now and in humble things”, to loosen the grip of technology on their lives. This is to be achieved by what he calls “releasement” (Gelassenheit) to “things”. The word “thing” now has a special resonance. A “thing” – a jug, a Black Forest farmhouse, a tree or a heron – is something experienced in its power to “gather” various dimensions of the world. A jug, say, is a “gathering” of what Heidegger poetically refers to as the “fourfold” of “earth, sky, mortals and gods”. To be “released” to the jug – to “let it be” and experience it for what it essentially is – is to step back from the technological perspective and to see the jug in its rich array of relationships to nature, social and family life, ritual and the life of the spirit.
There are echoes here of the earlier talk of “ready-to-hand” entities, like hammers, as “sign-like” items that have meaning through their place in a network of practices and “equipment”. But the meaning of a “thing” is richer and wider – its role in “gathering” all dimensions of the world. There are echoes, too, of the idea of authenticity as liberation from prevailing interpretations and perspectives, so as to stand receptive to heritage. The “releasement” Heidegger now envisages, however, is openness to Being itself. In an authentically human existence, a person is “the shepherd of Being”, a “clearing” in which “things” show themselves for what they are, no longer regimented and distorted by technology or any other anthropocentric way of revealing.
Heidegger’s final name for an authentic comportment towards a world in which one feels at home is “dwelling” – “the basic character of Being in keeping with which mortals exist”. To “dwell” is to “protect and care for”, not only in the sense of tending, but in that of honouring the integrity of “things” and “setting them free” from all-too-human preconceptions. It is to do so, moreover, in the quiet confidence that “things” – and, indeed, human beings – have their “source” in an ineffable “hidden stream that makes way for everything”. To “dwell” is to have overcome the forgetfulness of Being and cultivated a sense of the “source”.
The language here is strikingly close to that of the Daoist sages, for whom the special destiny of humankind is to “nourish” the things whose source, like its own, is the Dao. on a wall of Heidegger’s study hung a scroll with words from the Daodejing, a work on whose translation, later abandoned, he once embarked. “Heidegger the existentialist”, “Heidegger the pragmatist”, “Heidegger the postmodernist” . . . these titles are not without warrant. But it is “Heidegger the latter-day Daoist” that best captures the tone of his final reflections on mystery, homelessness and the only salvation to which, in the absence of a God, we might aspire. The long “path of thinking”, as he called it, that led to these final reflections is, many readers have found, at once an intellectual adventure and a journey of personal transformation.
David E. Cooper is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the University Of Durham