The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (110 page)

(b) Second Characterization

Heidegger identifies the three ‘decisive discoveries’ of phenomenology as ‘intentionality, categorial intuition, and the
a priori
’ (
History of the Concept of Time
, p. 75). Intentionality we considered in §4 of the previous chapter. Categorial intuition is a species of the intuition of essences which we also considered in that section. It is the intuition of ‘logical’ essences, that is to say structural essences of the most general and most abstract kind, corresponding to such concepts as universality, number, and subjecthood.
⁷
As for the
a priori
, Heidegger believes that phenomenology has helped us beyond a conception of the
a priori
as a characteristic of certain ways of knowing to a conception of the
a priori
as a characteristic of certain ways of being. This third discovery is best understood in relation to the other two: the
a priori
, conceived ontologically, pertains to the intentional objects of categorial intuition. In fact, given the first discovery, the second and third can be regarded as variants of each other. As Heidegger himself puts it, ‘these three discoveries … are connected among themselves and ultimately grounded in the first’ (
History of the Concept of Time
, p. 75). And together, afforced by the further idea that phenomenology is a descriptive exercise
rather than an explanatory exercise (p. 59/p. 35),
⁸
they suggest a second way of characterizing phenomenology: ‘
phenomenology is the analytic description of intentionality in its
a priori’ (
History of the Concept of Time
, p. 79, emphasis in original). This too, Heidegger believes, serves to clarify the maxim ‘To the things themselves’ and is broadly in keeping with Husserl’s own conception.

(c) Third Characterization

How then does Heidegger depart from Husserl? As phenomenologists, they have the same aim: to make sense of how we make sense of things. And they have the same basic methodological conviction: that making sense of how we make sense of things cannot be an exercise in what I dubbed in the previous chapter ‘natural’ sense-making. Husserl reacted by setting aside entirely the methods and principles of natural sense-making, then trying to replace them with those of a peculiarly phenomenological sense-making. There is one reading of Heidegger on which he thinks this was already a mistake, a drastic overreaction. On this reading, Heidegger agrees with Husserl that the tools of natural sense-making are inadequate for the phenomenological task in hand, but he does not agree that they are irrelevant to it. He is prepared to allow us, when we set about making sense of how we make natural sense of things, to avail ourselves of whatever natural sense of things we make; which is as much as to say that he eschews any phenomenological reduction. Such is the way in which he is often interpreted.
⁹

This seems to me a misinterpretation.
¹⁰
The two thinkers seem to me far less opposed than that. As I see it, Heidegger accepts a version of the phenomenological reduction. He agrees with Husserl that phenomenological sense-making needs to be independent of mainstream natural sense-making. He even agrees that it can be pushed to a point of complete autonomy where it is independent of
all
other sense-making. Where he disagrees is over its field of enquiry, that is to say the transcendental Ego, the subject of all possible sense-making whose discovery Husserl takes to be the first and most important consequence of the phenomenological reduction. Heidegger does not deny that there is a subject of all possible sense-making, nor that it is in some sense the field of enquiry. But he differs from Husserl in how he construes it. For Husserl, the subject of all possible sense-making acts as a kind of limit of that of which any sense can be made: it neither need nor can be made distinctive phenomenological sense of in its own right. For Heidegger,
as we shall see, making due phenomenological sense of the subject is itself a vital part of the phenomenological enterprise. Moreover, Heidegger does not think that there is any making sense of the subject independently of what lies beyond it. For Husserl, the subject is ‘a self-contained system of Being … which has no spatio-temporal exterior, and … which cannot experience causality from anything nor exert causality upon anything’ (Husserl (
1962
), §49, emphasis removed). For Heidegger,

the idea of a subject which has intentional experiences merely inside its own sphere and is not yet outside it but encapsulated within itself is an absurdity which misconstrues the basic ontological structure of the being that we ourselves are. (
Basic Problems
, p. 64)
¹¹

It is wrong, then, to say that Heidegger eschews any phenomenological reduction. What we can say is that he eschews
Husserl’s
phenomenological reduction, understood as a reduction to the transcendental Ego, itself understood in the attenuated sense highlighted above. We who make sense of things are planted firmly in the midst of the things of which we make sense. For Heidegger, there is no escaping this fact when it comes to making sense of how we do this. It is not that he denies that we must pay special attention to ourselves and to our peculiarities
vis-à-vis
the other things of which we make sense. On the contrary. ‘We are ourselves the beings to be analyzed,’ he says (p. 67/p. 41).
¹²
What Heidegger denies is that we must, nay can, pay the special attention to ourselves that we should have to pay in a pure phenomenology of the sort envisaged by Husserl; that which involves our prescinding from anything beyond ourselves.
¹³
If we accept the first ‘decisive discovery’ of phenomenology, namely that the way in which we are given things is through relations of intentionality, then we can rely on our phenomenological sense-making to reveal both the variety of things that we are thus given and the variety of forms that their givenness takes, and thereby work towards a synoptic account of our various ways of being in the world, our various ways of engaging with the world, our various ways of making sense of things (
Being and Time
, passim, esp. Pt One, Div. One, Chs II, IV, and VI).

But what of the Husserlian ambition to go further than this, to proceed from such an account to an account of the intrinsic nature of the things of which we make sense? Heidegger shares this ambition. The slogan ‘Back to the things themselves’ indicates, for Heidegger no less than for Husserl, a concern to say, not just what it is for us to make sense of things in the various ways in which we do, but what it is for things to be the various ways we make sense of them as being. In fact, his ambition is to go further still. He distinguishes between the things of which we make sense, or at least of which we make natural sense, and their very reality,
¹⁴
that which at the most fundamental level they share with us and that which at the most fundamental level allows us to make sense of them. He distinguishes, as he himself puts it, between beings and Being (see e.g. §2).
¹⁵
And he aspires to give an account of the latter. He wants to understand what Being is, the different forms it takes, and what its significance is. That is, he wants to make sense of Being.

From the very outset of
Being and Time
he parades this as his aim:

Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word ‘being’ [‘
seiende
’]
¹⁶
? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew
the question of the meaning of Being
. But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression ‘Being’? Not at all. So first of all we must reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question. Our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the meaning of Being and to do so concretely. (p. 19/p. 1, emphasis in original; cf.
History of the Concept of Time
, p. 85)
¹⁷

Can Heidegger pursue this aim without lapsing into an idealism such as Husserl’s? We shall return to this issue in the final section. But it would certainly not be absurd to suppose that he can. For, in crucial contrast to Husserl, he will not be addressing his question within the framework
provided by the transcendental Ego, at least not as understood by Husserl. He will be addressing it in terms of the very things, including himself and other people, of which he and other people make sense.

Heidegger’s project is therefore at once more sweeping than Husserl’s and more piecemeal. It is at once more ambitious in its philosophical aims and less liable to metaphysical excess. By concerning himself with the variety of things of which we make sense, he will attempt to provide an account of Being itself. Here is his own elegant summary of how he departs from Husserl:

Being is to be laid hold of and made our theme. Being is always Being of beings and accordingly it becomes accessible at first only by starting with some being…. Apprehension of Being … always turns, at first and necessarily, to some being; but then,
in a precise way, it is led away
from that being
and back to its Being
. We call this basic component of phenomenological method …
phenomenological reduction
. We are thus adopting a central term of Husserl’s phenomenology in its literal wording though not in its substantive intent.
For Husserl
, phenomenological reduction … is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its
noetic-noematic
¹⁸
experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness.
For us
phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being … to the understanding of the Being of this being. (
Basic Problems
, p. 21, emphasis in original)
¹⁹

Heidegger is now able to give a third characterization of phenomenology: ‘
phenomenology is the science of the Being of beings
’ (p. 61/p. 37, emphasis added).
²⁰

3. The Execution of the Project.
Dasein

Heidegger’s point of departure in his quest for an understanding of Being is the recognition that not only are there different sorts of beings, there are different kinds of Being.
²¹

The ‘not only’ in this sentence may give pause. Is there any need to acknowledge differences between kinds of Being beyond whatever differences there are between sorts of beings? If the kind of Being that I enjoy is different from the kind of Being that Neptune enjoys, can this not be accounted for by differences between me and Neptune, or more generally by differences between people and planets? Or is the point that beings of the same sort, if not the very same being, can enjoy Being of more than one kind – as perhaps a living person and a dead person enjoy Being of two fundamentally different kinds?

These questions raise all manner of issues, some of them purely terminological, about how kinds of Being are individuated, about how sorts of beings are individuated, and about how beings themselves are individuated, which for current purposes we do not need to probe too deeply. (As it happens, Heidegger individuates the most fundamental sorts of beings, and indeed beings themselves, very finely. Thus reconsider the dead. Heidegger taps something at the very core of human sensibility by accounting a dead person – by which is meant here a corpse – a fundamentally different sort of being both from a living person and from a ‘mere’ physical object. And he uses that familiar philosophical device, the use of the word ‘
qua
’, to distinguish between the person
qua
living and the person
qua
dead, the former of which can be said to end when the latter begins (§47, esp. pp. 281–282/p. 238). Elsewhere he even goes as far as to distinguish between ‘the “source” which the geographer establishes for a river’ and ‘the “springhead in the dale”’ (p. 100/p. 70).
²²
) All that matters for current purposes is that we have a basic and relatively clear conception of a sort of being, likewise of a kind of Being, whereby, first, there is a plurality of each and, second, even if they are
aligned, they are nevertheless distinct. This second point is all that the ‘not only’ was intended to signal.
²³

Now any being, Heidegger says, ‘is either a
“who” …
or a
“what”
’ (p. 71/p. 45, emphasis in original). And the most fundamental difference between kinds of Being is the difference between the kinds of Being that are peculiarly enjoyed by ‘whos’ and the kinds of Being that are peculiarly enjoyed by ‘whats’.

Let us begin with ‘whos’ and the most general kind of Being that is peculiarly enjoyed by them. Heidegger’s own word for this sort of being is the German word ‘
Dasein
’.
²⁴
This is a departure both from typical philosophical usage and from more everyday usage. On each of these the word pertains to Being rather than to beings. Thus philosophers typically use it as, in effect, another word for Being (of any kind). And in its more everyday usage, it is restricted to Being of one specific kind. In fact it is restricted to Being of the very kind that now concerns us: the most general kind that is peculiarly enjoyed by ‘whos’. This makes Heidegger’s usage closer to the latter. Even so, they are not the same. On Heidegger’s usage, to repeat, the word designates, not that kind of Being, but that sort of being.
²⁵
The word does nevertheless evoke, in its own way, what that kind of Being comes to; that is, what it can be seen, after due phenomenological work, to come to. It does this through its etymology, to which Heidegger is as ever sensitive and which he occasionally registers by hyphenating the word (‘
Da-sein
’). For ‘
Dasein
’ is constructed from ‘
Sein
’, the word for Being, and ‘
da
’, meaning ‘here’ or ‘there’. And
Dasein
’s peculiar kind of Being is, in a sense, a way of being here or being there.
²⁶