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Lemma I. Sartre’s notorious statement, “existence precedes essence,” epitomizes Heidegger’s critique of Sartre’s rationalism. Following Aristotle, Heidegger argues that precedence must be defined by genus and difference – a rationalistic formulation that contrasts two differentiated forms of Being. If A precedes B, then the essence of A lies in B, and B is ontologically differentiated from A (Heidegger, 1962). It is thus that if the essence of man lies in his existence (but not necessarily any quality of it, like, for instance, rationalism, which would be derivative of the existence), he cannot be differentiated from Being and is thus falsely identified with it. If no such differentiation is found in the definition of man, then man himself is (just as Being is) transparent to metaphysics in the same way that the “epoche” makes other phenomena so transparently epiphenomenal. In conclusion, man as a metaphysical being would be other then he is – a contradiction of his supposed essence. Heidegger ascribes the term “ek-sistence” to man as opposed to artefacts, tools, or other manifestations of Being – “ek-sistence” is said of the essence of man as phenom. “Ek-sistence” is not, for Heidegger, a metaphysical theme – to “ek-sist” cannot answer the question of whether one exists, but rather the question of the essence of one’s existence (Heidegger, 1962). Thus, the “cogito,” for Heidegger, is at best incapable of fully describing “ek-sistence” as a quality of man and is at worst an attribution of the essence of man as cognitive-mental as opposed to instrumental or, as Heidegger might say, “ek-sistential.” This “aporia” would fix man as a concept held by man himself and thus, to some extent, render him as the fiction of ideology or idea as opposed to Being. Heidegger further argues that Sartre’s “cogito” is an abuse of language, in the sense that articulating “existentia and essentia…according to their metaphysical meaning” is opposed to their status in “ek-sistence.” The “cogito” thus defies the inarticulability of the essence of man by lowering it to the level of language as opposed to experience.
Lemma II. Derrida, Levinas, and Rorty, among other great thinkers, have appropriated the Heideggerian Dasein and his modes of being as leitmotifs in their philosophies of human nature. Perhaps more than any other 20th century thinker, Heidegger has explored the human condition and its attendant consequences in ethics, politics, and social life (Dreyfus, 2005). Human nature and human language are two concepts which almost always populate Heidegger’s philosophical accounts (Dreyfus, 2005). These interests underpin his life-long critique of the Cartesian ontology of subject. For Heidegger, it is improper to regard the human being (Dasein) as derivative of some “move of thought,” or “cogito” in Cartesian terms (Heidegger, 1962). Such a position necessarily implies that human beings are somehow removed from, or alienated from, the objects and worlds in which they are immersed. Consequently, Heidegger also rejects traditional post-Cartesian accounts of language as a “mediator between…subject and object,” since he vehemently protests the existence of such “ontological categories” in the first instance (Heidegger, 1962). He constructs, throughout his vast corpus, a relatively consistent conception of Dasein as an ontic (present-within-Being) sort of being, as opposed to an ontological (e.g. conceptual or intellective) one. For Heidegger, Dasein is neither a cognitive move (“epoche” as in Husserl), nor is he an “eidetic” category (as in Descartes and Sartre) defined principally by rationality (as in Plato, Aristotle, and Kant) – rather Dasein is a transcendent being, one that can disclose and dwell among Being (Heidegger, 1962).
Lemma III. In his earlier writings, and in Being and Time in particular, Heidegger argues that Dasein has two modes of “being…himself”: authenticity and inauthenticity. He defines authenticity as a particular Dasein’s resoluteness to “take…a stand on his own being” through goal-directed mechanisms of activity, and inauthenticity as a lack of willingness to engage in such states (Heidegger, 1962). Thus, for Heidegger, authenticity is not an intellective status but a lived willingness – namely, an “Entschlossenheit” (stamina) to act according to his nature as a being. Heidegger’s later writings abandon this concept altogether and turn more readily toward a description of the modalities of Entschlossenheit that authentic Dasein undertakes in his lived activities and social circumstances.
Lemma IV. With respect to language, Heidegger rejects the representative ontology of traditional semiotics– namely, that signs are laden with pre-constructed meanings and relay these meanings to humans during intellective reflection (Heidegger, 1962). In his masterpiece “Being and Time,” Heidegger treats language quite sparsely, rather attempting to engage in the production of an existential analytic of Dasein. Much later in his career, Heidegger admitted that “language…remained in the shadows” in Being and Time but nonetheless was “present…the whole time.” It is natural that Heidegger would have asserted this, since his later lectures after “the turn” of the early 1930’s focus quite extensively upon language as a “primordial…element of Dasein’s…experience.” He explores language in relation to Dasein and calls it “the…dwelling of Being” (Heidegger, 1962) Borrowing from Vico’s critique of Descartes, he argues that language is the genesis of poetic thinking and poetic reason, disclosive mechanisms that Dasein uses in his pursuit of poetry and art (Heidegger, 1977). He vehemently rejects the Cartesian account of language as solely descriptive, arguing that language, like art, is not a prisoner of reason and that the Cartesian dichotomy cannot constrain language as a poetic mechanism for Dasein. In the “Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger presents language as the central mechanism in the disclosure of Dasein to himself across historical epochs. “Authentic” language is the sort which renders the preservation of meaning possible, and is thus as transcendent as Dasein (Heidegger, 2000). Again borrowing from Vico, Dasein’s primordial poetry is that deployment of language that facilitates the continuance of transcendent meaning through time. Because language is itself unbounded as entity, it is consequently un-created. For Heidegger, language is the central element that makes Dasein able to engage in a history and a culture; language itself is “equiprimordial” with Dasein and thus “eternal” (Heidegger, 2000).
Lemma V. Heidegger’s views upon language evolved quite substantially throughout his life. By entering upon primordial poetry, Heidegger completely ignores questions of authenticity and practice as well as discussion of inauthenticity in language. While Heidegger defines Dasein’s authenticity as arising from language, he never undertakes a complete analysis of the role of inauthenticity in Dasein’s practices in facilitating inauthenticity in language or culture. Throughout his entire life, however, Heidegger does postulate that language is the vehicle for poetic realization, responsible for constituting and preserving the world and history (Heidegger, 2000). For Heidegger, language is truly disclosive, just as Dasein’s practices are disclosive of the matrix of embodies social experiences (“praxes”) in which he is present as Being-in-the-world (“in-de-welt sein”). More specifically, language is the mechanism which renders beings present and intelligible to Dasein – through the act of naming, entities are rendered present. Consequently, it should be recognized that Heidegger is for the most part concerned with the transcendental question of what stands at the heart of language and allows it to signify entities and beings and to create signification itself (Heidegger, 1977).
Lemma VI. Heidegger strives not to reify language as an ontological or conceptual category – an approach which, to him, would occasion a return to the roots of Cartesian metaphysics and language. As is typical for him, he seeks to understand language as a praxis – to entertain it while it acts upon Dasein, and not to remove it to a conceptual plane away from the proximal experiences that Dasein has with it. Language is, for Heidegger, a fabric that connects every entity. Dasein is part and parcel of this fabric and, in fact, are constituted by it. Just as present-at-hand-being beckons Dasein to engage skillfully and meaningfully with it, present-at-hand language speaks Dasein’s world into existence. When Dasein speaks authentically of language, he is moved toward it – and language becomes speech and motion in which Dasein participates through the disclosive act of naming.
Lemma VII. Heidegger also presents language as constitutive among the interactions of earth, sky, mortals, and gods, the so-called “Gievert.” The “Gievert” is present in everything and fashions the essence of everything (Heidegger, 1977). By “things,” Heidegger does not mean “forms” or “physical things” as one might take from Plato or Descartes; rather “thingness” for Heidegger is constituted in a relativized understanding that no entity is completely disclosive of all forms of Being. Things derive their essences from the “Gievert” according to their functions as equipment in Dasein’s lived experiences (Heidegger, 1979). Things, for Heidegger, render the world meaningful for Dasein, and language renders such meaning intelligible through Being and modes of Being; languages are conditioned by things and worldhood, but also the wordhood of things that call toward Dasein.
Lemma VIII. Whereas Heidegger’s man becomes himself by a stand-taking immersion in the experience of Being, Sartre’s thinking also provides an aporetic account of what man is. For Sartre, man can never have an essence, because in being what he is, he is the author and constructor of his own essence – a move which requires a volition that precedes intentionality (Sartre, 1938). Man is always more than any perceptible or definable essence because in his participation in being through freedom he defies the possibility of making himself a product. Sartre employs the “cogito” in a manner analogous to Heidegger’s development of Dasein – namely, as a being which participates in goal-oriented (teleological) activities – either of self-making or participation in Being. For Sartre, however, the “cogito” is not, as it was for Descartes, a measure for determining whether extended substances or worlds exist; the existence of the “cogito” is pre-factual and primordial; the “cogito” is not a process for determining objective properties of the natural world, but rather for demonstrating that nothingness is that which is and that, consequently, no human essence could ever be other than nothingness (Sartre, 1946). “Being-For-Itself” has an ontological substance only to the extent that the For-Itself recognizes the breadth of its freedom to be – a freedom which is complete and without cardinality or direction. There is no evidence that Sartre had attempted to establish a mental-physical dualism based upon Cartesian categories – in fact, Sartre argues that the transcendence of the ‘nothinglessness’ of freedom is so complete that the only necessary and sufficient truth of the cogito is that freedom is inescapable (Sartre 1965). This truth differs fundamentally and profoundly from Descartes’ account in which the self is established according to the principle of “ex nihilo nihil fit” – instead of being bound by the consequences of possibly specious “existentia” (evil geniuses; the unreliability of the senses; or the unreliability of induction), “Being-For-Itself” is as boundless and inarticulable as freedom itself. In this sense, the “cogito” is, for Sartre, a technology of emptying the self and defining its selfhood in accordance with freedom. The ego emerges from Sartre’s freedom as an entity ontologically derivative of freedom; and it is here that Heidegger’s assertion of the “primacy of the ego” is flawed. For Sartre, the ego could not be prior to that which defines it (Sartre, 1965). Sartre fundamentally disagrees with the Heideggerian position of Dasein as a shepherd of Being beyond cogitation as a constitutive act, as if the truth of Being were transcendent for Dasein to grasp (Heidegger, 2000). For Sartre, all forms of truth, whether propositional, metaphysical, ontological, or ethical, are interpretable from the freedom of “Being-For-Itself” and derive from this freedom. It is not, as Heidegger claims, that the truth of Being could derive from Being itself – for Being, as an entity, could only be chosen according to the freedom of “Being-For-Itself;” such truth must be chosen as well.
Lemma IX. Heidegger severely criticizes Western humanism and Western metaphysics of humanity which, as he holds, has occasioned a fundamental misinterpretation of what Being is and what, in relation to Being, Dasein is (Heidegger, 2000). This misinterpretation has, as Heidegger claims, obscured the true philosophical import of humanism Heidegger explores the boundaries of Western historical and philosophical humanism in order to reinstate a humanistic metaphysics in such manner as would be appropriate to the proper dignity of man. For Heidegger, the West has, since the time of Plato, searched for a metaphysics of the human within the world of the “forms” – that is, metaphysics has sought what the human being is in the abstract – as opposed to what a human is in lived existence. This “abstracting” trend accelerated quite profoundly with the ascent of Cartesian metaphysics and ontology in Western thought in the 17th century (Heidegger, 2000).
Lemma X. Just as in Sartre’s Humanism, the “Letter on a Humanism” is devoted to re-discovering in the re-discovery of humanism as a human endeavor, as opposed to an abstract or eidetic one (Heidegger, 2000). Not surprisingly, Heidegger’s first arguments focus quite extensively on the primacy of the “cogito” in metaphysics. For Heidegger, cogitation is an action of Dasein, but it is not the generative locus of Dasein’s existence or essence (Heidegger, 2000). As Heidegger argues, if Dasein did not possess a “primordial” or pre-ontological comprehension of what the proximal world signifies, then phenomenal existence would be impenetrable and incomprehensible to humans. Similarly, if Dasein did not possess a similar comprehension of what living signifies, humans would not be able to exist in societies, or “comport [themselves]…toward living…beings” (Heidegger, 2000) Thinking is, furthermore, a locative act – it is a “bringing forth” of Being in ontological presence, and a motion of Being undertaken by Being itself, and not principally by Dasein. Heidegger’s designation for Being is “es gibt,” meaning “it is giving” – Being presents itself to Dasein, not Dasein to Being (Heidegger, 2000).
Lemma XI. Sartre would have none of this – in fact, he vehemently opposes the notion that Dasein could take a stand on anything other than his own freedom, let alone Being in the abstract (Sartre, 1946). Indeed, for Heidegger, Being is prior to Dasein; for Sartre, the For-Itself is prior to Being itself. The a-priority of Being is such a fundamental component of his argument that Dasein – the primary partaker in Being, could not be said to have ontological content whatever without being. For Dasein, Being exists ontologically only to the extent that Being presents itself (Heidegger, 2000). It is to the extent that Being gives itself that thinking is the mode in which Dasein interprets the donative nature of Being. However, Heidegger demands that Dasein does not understand the giving of Being or Dasein’s “thinking” as causal activities out of which Dasein’s selfhood emerges. Heidegger conceptualizes the “es gibt” as an excess of gift, and comprehension of the gift is accomplished in the mode of “sorge” (caring-about) (Heidegger, 2000). For Heidegger, thinking is an “epoche” that permits the “es gibt” be given by Being in order to express the existential truth of Being—it is not, in particular, a Cartesian or Platonic one that directs mental substance toward concepts or forms, rather than of beings that are ontological consequences of Being. Heidegger desires to distance himself from this Cartesian tradition, and to regard thinking not only as a mechanism or “tool” for understanding (Heidegger, 2000). In fact, it is largely to the extent that philosophy has attempted to fashion itself into scientific (or as in Being and Time, “present-at-hand”) modes of thinking that metaphysics has become lost. For Heidegger, the “remedy” that philosophy needs is to be “re-claimed” by Being so that Dasein can re-experience the unmediated presence of language and Being, so that, in such acts, homo sapiens may have dwelling in the veracity of Being (Heidegger, 2000). The “homelessness” of modern humans has been occasioned by humanity’s departure from irruption of Being in history (Heidegger, 2000). The principal mission for humanism is thus to perceive the modes by which Being regards Dasein’s state, so that Dasein may return to a “home among Being.” Thinking, then is derivative of Being is being derivative of Being, while simultaneously being heir to the ontic and ontological gifts of Being.
Lemma XII. For Sartre, humans have always been and will always be homeless – a condition of human freedom is undifferentiated homelessness, driven by the will of self-fashioning. Humans are by nature beings whose concernful dealings with the world cannot be judged except by subjectivity (Sartre 1965). Heidegger vehemently rejects this premise as the epitome of Cartesian dualism. According to Heidegger, as it should be properly perceived, Dasein’s thinking participates in das Mögliche, or “could be”; thus, thinking participates is possibility and with the beings engendered by possibility. Thus, thinking is not of itself a generative process but a participatory one, in which Being’s disclosure to Dasein is conceived through possibility. For Heidegger, one main ontological problem for modern Dasein is that Möglichkeit (“possibilization”) has been subordinated to the scientism of the empirical, due to the hegemonizing influences of logic in ontology (Heidegger, 1962). Baconian certainty has become the primary mode by which Dasein experiences beings, and the cogito has centered Being around the intellective moves of Dasein. Thus, for Dasein, the “encountering” of beings in Being is logical and mathematical, relying on scientific understanding and logic to “explain” beings instead of experiencing them (Heidegger, 1962). Heidegger’s humanism is precisely to elevate Being toward a humanism, instead of centering humanism on the being of Dasein. For Heidegger, Dasein is not Being, but is a being participatory in making Being intelligible. The “humanitas” of Dasein is precisely the inversion of Descartes’s characterization of the human as thinking substance.
Lemma XIII. For Heidegger, it is a considerable understatement to say that the human being exists; rather, one should say that the human being “ek-sists.” Within this ostensibly aporetic statement one can find the core of Heidegger’s solution to problems occasioned by Cartesian metaphysics. In terms of content “ek-sistence” means standing out into the truth of Being … in “ek-sisting,” man sustains Da-sein and takes the Da, the clearing of Being, into care (“sorge”) (Heidegger, 1945). But Dasein’s condition is not that of the eidetic present-at-hand manipulation of Being through reason; Dasein is, for Heidegger, “thrown.” One is “given over” to Being and “takes a stand…on Being” in the being of Dasein, which is that being for whom Being is a question (Heidegger, 1962). The “cogito” misses the point of being because it never ceases to seek abstract representations of beings; it seeks always to “know” beings by making them objects of representation instead of residing in the epochal dialectic of Being – namely to step back from Being (Heidegger, 1962) For Heidegger, “cogito ergo sum” propagates the lie that in intentionality Dasein’s representations of beings derive from a violent act of self-creation or the objectification of abstract representation. “Ek-sistence” is the essence of Dasein’s being, for in “ek-sistence” Dasein becomes the being for whom being is a question. Dasein’s essentiality as “ek-sistent” is also the teleological end toward which Dasein tends – the “for-the-sake-of-which” (Heidegger, 1979). Ek-sistence is the “clearing out” of being which Being presents and sends to Dasein. But Dasein’s essence is not resident in his existence (in a Sartrean sense) – rather, “ek-sistence” is participatory in the sending and receiving of the truth of Being, and one which is dialogical and of which Dasein is, uniquely among beings, the inheritor. “Ek-sistence” belongs solely to Dasein, but it does not stem from any ontological move Dasein makes respecting Being; Being is beyond the human being and thus beyond “ek-sistence” (Heidegger, 1971).
Lemma XIV. Sartre’s tacit rejection of “ek-sistence” as an ontological category is due to his contention that any humanism is by nature a subjectivism – “ek-sistence” pre-supposes a being before the For-Itself, which, for Sartre, is merely nothingness (Sartre, 1974). This nothingness is absolute, because it is primordial – before all being. In Heidegger’s terms, it is possible for Sartre to locate some shadows of Being in thinking; but this inversion confuses the human essence with that of the essence of Being – and, as such, renders man an ideological and necessarily cultural construct as opposed to the essence of Being. In a word, for Heidegger, Sartre confuses a spark with the Sun; Sartre robs man of his rightful place as the heir apparent of Dasein. Rather than being “a man,” the human becomes an instantiation of the conceptual category of Man and is no longer a pure phenomenon. The phenomenological enterprise ends, once again, in the tragedy of ideology.
Lemma XV. For Heidegger, the ontology of “ek-stasis” (human existence) proves aporetic. If the essence of the human being is “ek-static” in Dasein‘s being, then human being stands in relation to his essence in Dasein through thinking (which includes, inter-alia, reason). “Ekstasis” is an emergence from Being, but also a contemplative inheritor of the truths of Being (Heidegger, 1962). Arguing by “modus tollens,” if man had an essence (namely something he could properly be said to be), then through “ek-stasis,” his unique mode of being, he facilitates a departure from, and concomitant return to Being (Heidegger, 1985). This is because “ek-stasis” by nature involves questions of Being and the development of ontologies thereof; and the subsequent realization that such ontologies fail to measure up to being on the level of “phenom,” or lived\perceived experience (Heidegger, 1977). Thus, man may be brought to recognize that his essence is by nature a contradiction “vis” meeting with and departing from Being. For Heidegger, in a word, forming an inquisitive ontology of Being (e.g. based upon questions of its meaning or substance, as opposed to the meaning and substance of specific beings) reveals the ineffability of Being, and consequently the realization that any ontological question regarding it must engender further questions which cause Being to manifest itself.
Works Consulted in the Series.
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