A few, rather random notes on Being and Time

These notes are sketchy; just some thoughts about various features of B&T. Remember my warning that my own perspective is as a metaphysician, so I give too little attention to the historical and historicist notions in Heidegger's work.

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Section 9

• Dasein is in each case mine -- that is, it is always a who, a someone.
• The essence of Dasein lies in its "to be." Dasein is different than "present-at-hand" things like tables and chairs. It is instead a thing which has to become something.
• This term "present-at-hand" is crucial. It replaces traditional terms like existing-thing, or object.
• So, to study Dasein, we study how it acts and encounters the world, and its responsibilities -- not any properties it has like weight or somesuch thing.
• Dasein is not an instance of some genus of present-at-hand things -- an instance of the genus ape, for example. That kind of investigation is reserved for present-at-hand things.
• One special feature of Dasein will be authenticity. Dasein is its possibilities, and as such it is responsible for what it is and does. This means it can be something authentically or inauthentically. We will find out what this means later.
• To understand Dasein, we won't focus on some particular way of being (being a student, for example). Instead, we aim for the general "undifferentiated" character of its average everyday existence, or average everydayness.
• But our average everydayness is obscure to us, it is wholly taken for granted and lost in our other concerns.
• Our analysis will be ontological: we will always ask about Dasein in terms of its relation to Being. We will not ask about its "categories," by which Heidegger means a traditional kind of analysis of something present-at-hand.
• So: Dasein's features are existential features, which he calls here existentialia. Present at hand things have properties which we might call categories. Dasein is a who. Present at hand things are a what.

Section 10

• Contrast this investigation with Descartes. Descartes studied thinking (cogitare) and the self (ego) but not the being of Dasein.
• Heidegger promises to show us that if you start with the idea that Dasein is a present-at-hand thing, you'll miss its most important features. You'll miss it completely.
• Scheler and Husserl (contemporary philosophers) don't do any better. They simply treat Dasein as the subject having phenomenal contents.
• Two traditions are worthy of note. Man is a rational animal. Man is that which, because it has reason, strives towards the divine.
• But all these sciences, and these traditions, treat Dasein as another object ammong objects.

Section 14

• Dasein is being-in-the-world, so we need an analysis of World.
• World (in the existential sense) cannot be understood as a collection of entities. Worldhood is an existentiale.
• Heidegger reviews four notions of world. (Collection of present-at-hand things; the being of present-at-hand things with a particular purpose or towards-which; the situation of Dasein; and then worldhood.)
• Worldhood is more fundamental than space. This is in contrast to Descartes, who takes world as space, and human being as an object which has a body in that space. Heidegger's view of worldhood will be most clear when contrasted with Descartes.

Section 15

• We will start by looking at the kinds of dealings which are "closest to us," and these are putting things (entities within the world) to use.
• The way we first or primarily encounter things in the world is not with a theoretical attitude.
• Indeed, when we interpret, or turn to theory, we lose the phenomenology of our concernful dealings.
• What do we deal with, in our concern? Things. Pragmata. This Greek word is related to praxis, practice. Heidegger sees this as a hint of something covered over: we primarily encounter things as ready-to-hand; these things are equipment, in a totality of equipment, where each thing has its in-order-to.
• The kind of understanding that accompanies our use of ready-to-hand things is circumspection (Heidegger uses Umsicht, which allows an evocation of Sicht, sight.)
• A very challenging aspect of this discussion is that ready-to-hand things have their own kind of being. There is something of a puzzle to understand how the chair can be present-at-hand and ready-to-hand and the same chair. Something like perspectivalism is at play here, where perspective (way of encountering might be more accurate) shapes the kind of being.
• Ready-to-hand things play a role in work. They have a towards-which.
• We even encounter materials that constitute ready-to-hand things as ready-to-hand.
• "Readiness-to-hand is the way in which entities as they are 'in themselves' are defined ontologico-ceategorially. Yet only be reason of something present-at-hand, 'is there' anything ready to hand." (M&R translation)
• We've gotten some concepts that will help us understand world, but the collection of ready-to-hand (and present-at-hand) things is not the world. We need to dig deeper then to discover the ontological nature of world.

Section 16

• Conspicuousness
• Obtrusiveness
• Obstinancy
• These cases where something becomes unready-to-hand, where circumspection reveals the thing is not useful, reveal the thing as present-at-hand; and also reveal the in-order-to and toward-which of the thing. The in-order-to and toward-which were there in circumspection when we used the equipment, but we do not attend to it. When the equipment fails to be useful, the whole totality of references starts to come to our attention.
• So far then we have: "Being-in-the-world... amounts to a non-thematic circumspective absorption in references or assignments constitutive for the readiness-to-hand of a totality of equipment." (M&R translation)

Section 17

• Signs are special kinds of equipment, they draw attention to the totality of equipment: "A sign is something ontically ready-to-hand, which functions both as this definite equipment and as something indicative of the ontological structure of readiness-to-hand, of referential totalities, and of worldhood." (M&R translation)
• "Reference" here is used as a technical term only loosely related to the semantic notion of reference. Reference is what constitutes the ready-to-hand, and constitutes worldhood.

Section 18

• A ready-to-hand things has the character of involvement.
• Involvement arises from the towards-which and the for-which of some ready-to-hand thing. The hammer's towards-which might be to hammer nails; and hammering of nails might have a towards-which of affixing the roof; and so on.
• The end of such a chain of towards-which is a for-the-sake-of-which. Only Dasein has a for-the-sake-of-which.
• Dasein lets things be ready-to-hand (it "frees" them to be ready-to-hand) by already having a totality of involvements. These must exist before the thing can be encountered as ready-to-hand. World is this understanding that must come first.
• World as "an act of understanding which assigns or refers itself, is that for which one lets entities be encountered in the kind of Being that belongs to involvements." (M&R translation)
• Heidegger introduces a term, signifying, for the way Dasein understands these relationships of involvement.
• Remember that we are concerned with Being. Worldhood is essentially to this greater project because Worldhood is what allows beings to be encountered as ready to hand. "Dasein, in its familiarity with significance, is the ontical condition for the possibility of discovering entities which are encountered in a world with involvement (readiness-to-hand) as their kind of Being, and which can thus make themselves known as they are in themselves." (M&R translation)
• Heidegger raises a question. Isn't this idealism, then? Is he saying that ready-to-hand things are "thoughts" of Dasein? In the following sections, Heidegger will argue no. He is trying to wend a path between realism and idealism.
• A caution. It is not the case that Heidegger is offering a kind of anthropology identifying humans with pre- or non-cognitive skills. In a later lecture, Heidegger explicitly aims to ward this off:

  In contrast to [a] historical path toward an understanding of the concept of world, I attempted in Being and Time to provide a preliminary characterization of the phenomenon of world by interpreting the way in which we at first and for the most part move about in our everyday world. There I took my departure from what lies to hand in the everyday realm, from those things that we use and pursue, indeed in such a way that we don not really know of the peculiar character proper to such activity at all, and when we do try to describe it we immediately misinterpret it by applying concepts and questions that have their source elsewhere. That which is so close and intelligible to us in our everyday dealings is actually and fundamentally remote and unintelligible to us. In and through this initial characterization of the phenomenon of world the task is to press on and point out the phenomenon of world as a problem. It never occured to me, however, to try and claim or prove with this interpretation that the essence of man consists in the fact that he knows how to handle knives and forks or use the tram.
  (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Indiana University Press, McNeill and Walker translators, 1995: 177)

  Assuming Heidegger did not change his mind between B&T and this lecture, I think we should read this as not denying that world is significance, but rather as denying that the world is just ready-to-hand stuff, or that Dasein is only concerned with the ready-to-hand, or should only be so concerned, or is authentic only when it is so concerned. Furthermore, we must conclude that identifying world with significance is only a first step towards understanding world -- we could develop a more radical understanding with additional phenomenological work.