Roger Waterhouse - A Heidegger Critique - A Critical Examination of The Existential Phenomenology of Martin Heidegger-Harvester (1981)

A HEIDEGGER
CRITIQUE
A Critical Examination of the
Existential Phenomenology of
Martin Heidegger
ROGER WATERHOUSE
Lecturer in Philosophy, Middlesex Polytechnic
HARVESTER PRESS· SUSSEX

HUMANITIES PRESS· NEW JERSEY
A HEIDEGGER CRITIQUE
A Critical Examination of the Existential
Phenomenology of Martin Heidegger

HAR VESTER PHILOSOPHY NOW
GENERAL EDITOR Roy Edgley, Professor of Philosophy, University of

Sussex.
English-speaking philosophy since the Second World War has been dominated
by the method of linguistic analysis, the latest phase of the analytical movement
started in the early years of the century.
That method is defined by certain doctrines about the nature and scope both of
philosophy and of the other subjects from which it distinguishes itself; and
those doctrines reflect the fact that in this period philosophy and other intellec-
tual activities have been increasingly monopolized by the universities, social
institutions with a special role. Though expansive in number of practitioners,
these activities have cultivated an expertise that in characteristic ways has
narrowed their field of vision. As our twentieth-century world has staggered
from crisis to crisis, English-speaking philosophy in particular has submissively
dwindled into a humble academic specialism, on its own understanding isolated
from substantive issues in other disciplines, from the practical problems facing
society, and from contemporary Continental thought.
The books in this series are united by nothing except discontent with this state
of affairs. Convinced that the analytical movement has spent its momentum, its
latest phase no doubt its last, the series seeks in one way or another to push
philosophy out of its ivory tower.
1. FREEDOM AND LIBERATION Benjamin Gibbs

2. HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY: A PHILOSOPHICAL INTRODUC-
TION Richard Norman
3. ART, AN ENEMY OFTHE PEOPLE Roger Taylor
4. PHILOSOPHY AND ITS PAST Jonathan Ree, Michael Ayers and Adam
Wcstoby
5. RULING ILLUSIONS: PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL ORDER
Anthony Skillen
6. THE WORK OF SARTRE: VOLUME 1: SEARCH FOR FREEDOM
Istvan Meszaros
7. THE WORK OF SARTRE: VOLUME 2: THE CHALLENGE OF HIS-
TOR Y Istvan Meszaros
8. THE POSSIBILITY OF NATURALISM Roy Bhaskar
9. THE REAL WORLD OF IDEOLOGY Joe McCarney
to. HEGEL, MARX AND DIALECTIC: A DEBATE Richard Norman and
Sean Sayers
11. THE DIALECTIC OF REVOLUTION Chris Arthur
12. SCIENCE AND IDEOLOGY Roy Edgley
13. THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF MERLEAU-PONTY Sonia Kruks
14. PHILOSOPHlCALIDEOLOGIES Roy Bhaskar
15. A HEIDEGGER CRITIQUE Roger Waterhouse
First published in Great Britain in 1981 by
THE HARVESTER PRESS LIMITED
Publisher: John Spiers
16 Ship Street, Brighton, Sussex
and in the USA by

HUMANITIES PRESS INC.,
Atlantic Highlands', New Jersey 07716
© Roger Waterhouse, 1981
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Waterhouse, Roger
A Heidegger critique. - (Harvester philosophy
now).
1. Heidegger, Martin
I. Title
193 B3279.H49 I I
ISBN 0-7108-0020-7
Humanities Press Inc.

ISBN 0-391-02225-3
Typeset by Inforum Ltd, Portsmouth

Printed in Great Britain by
Redwood Burn Ltd, Trowbridge and Esher
All rights reserved

for Rachel
CONTENTS
Preface IX
PART I
THE EARL Y YEARS
1 The Young Heidegger and Hermeneutics 3

2 Husserl's Development of Phenomenology 20
3 Husserl and Heidegger: the Period of
Collaboration 35
PART II
BEING AND TIME
4 Marburg and the Project of Being and Time 51

5 The Analysis of Existence 66
6 Inauthenticity and Anxiety 79
7 Death and Temporality 95
PART III
THE THIRTIES AND AFTER
8 Rector of Freiburg 115

9 Heidegger's Insights 132
PARTlY
CRITIQUE
10 Ontology versus Epistemology 149

11 Praxis and the Social World 164
12 The Vacuity of Heidegger's Authenticity 179
viii A Heidegger Critique
13 Death, Language and Art 193
14 History and Politics 206
Appendices
1 Notes on Sources 217
2 Bibliography 219
3 Heidegger's Works 222
4 Husserl's Works 231
Index 233
PREFACE
Heidegger is a difficult philosopher. Anyone coming to his writ-
ings for the first time finds clumsy, unfamiliar words, the mean-
ings of which are obscure. Even familiar words are often used in
ways which seem to change their sense. The reader can easily
spend a long time poring over a Heidegger text and still be unsure
that he has understood what it says. This difficulty convinces
many readers that whatever Heidegger is saying, it must be
profound. Others arrive at the opposite conclusion - if Heideg-
ger is so obscure, it must be because his thinking is fundamentally
confused. At this level, neither judgment is founded on a careful
appraisal ofHeidegger's writings.
Secondary works about Heidegger also tend to fall into one of
these opposed camps. Pro-Heidegger enthusiasts, convinced of
his profundity and importance, see their task as making the
thought of the great man accessible to a wider audience. These
expositions are often good: they are rarely critical. In the other
camp are the dismissive critics, who frequently garble their
account of Heidegger in order to prove how very wrong he is.
Consequently no dialogue develops. The devotees ignore the
critics on the grounds that they simply haven't understood
Heidegger. The critics ignore the devotees on the grounds that
they operate uncritically within the bounds set by Heidegger's
thought. So Heidegger becomes as controversial as he is difficult
- the controversy is singularly unproductive.
This book is both an introduction to Heidegger, and an
attempt to generate some informed, critical discussion of his
main ideas. I believe it is possible to express his insights, argu-
ments and ways of thinking in relatively simple English: which is
what I shall attempt to do. If I succeed, this should make Heideg-
ger's thought available to the reader for his own appropriation
and use. It should also enable him to have a critical engagement
with it - that is, to treat it not as revealed truth, but as a
contribution to a continuing philosophical debate.
This project involves certain problems. In coming to any
x A Heidegger Critique
thinker for the first time, the reader necessarily makes certain
assumptions about his cultural location. For example, in
approaching Heidegger, one needs to know that he was German
and belongs to the twentieth century. But because of the very
separate development of English philosophy, Heidegger is at a
further cultural distance for the English reader - a distance
which it is important to bridge if his work is to be understood.
Heidegger freely admitted that his major philosophical debt was
to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In fact the relation-
ship between the thought of these two is both more complex, and
in some ways more intimate, than is generally appreciated.
Heidegger was less explicit in acknowledging his debts to
another philosophical source, from which the English-speaking
world is equally distant - the hermeneutic tradition. It will be
necessary, therefore, to spend some time discussing hermeneu-
tics; while phenomenology will become a secondary theme
which runs throughout the book.
Heidegger's major work was Being and Time. It was the first
publication of his maturity, and mapped out a project for his
life's work. It was also the only sizeable book he ever wrote/
which, I shall maintain, anticipated all the major themes of his
later writings. For this reason, I have made the core of the present
book an analysis of Being and Time.
This study falls into four unequal parts, each of a rather
different character. Part I is something of an intellectual history,
tracing Heidegger's development up to the point at which he
began to compose Being and Time. I start with his education and
his early debt to the hermeneutic tradition, and then turn to what
phenomenology meant for Husserl before Heidegger encoun-
tered it. I look at the developments which took place during the
period of their close friendship, noting, however, the signs of
Heidegger's persistent reservations about Husserlian
phenomenology. A brief consideration of the impact Karl
Jaspers' work made on Heidegger brings us to the point at which
Being and Time was conceived.
Part II takes a cursory glance at the Marburg environment in
which Being and Time was written, then quickly plunges into the
text itself. This section is essentially a close analysis of the argu-
ment of the book, supplying constant cross-reference, so that the
reader who wishes to do so can easily check my account against
the original. At this stage I make no attempt to criticize or to
Preface Xl
extrapolate from Heidegger's text: my object is to expound the

argument as faithfully as possible.
Part III has a hybrid character. It looks at Heidegger's career in
the thirties and then considers the breakdown of his relationship
with Husserl, and his involvement with the Nazis. In no sense
have I tried to analyze his later works in detail, though some
pointers are given, and I return to their themes in my last section.
Part III concludes with a summary of what I see as Heidegger's
principal insights - those major themes which run throughout
his work and differentia te it from that of his predecessors.
Up to this point in the book I confine myself strictly to exposi-
tion and explanation - that is, to making Heidegger's doctrines
as intelligible as possible, with the minimum of personal critical
intervention. In Part IV however, the gloves are off, and I am
highly critical of many aspects of Heidegger's argument. The
spirit, however, is that of a critique - namely, not a wholesale
destructive dismissal, but a teasing out of the core of truth, so
that this can be transcended in the direction of a more adequate
philosophical position.
There are two people I would like to thank for their part in the
making of this book. The first is Jacky, my wife, for providing the
space without which I would never have been able to write it. The
second is Pam Blustin who, by rapidly transforming my illegible
scrawl into beautiful typescript, not only halved the labour of
writing, but allowed me a continuity of thought which would not
otherwise have been possible.
Ashen
January 1980
Note: The abbreviations within the text and notes, refer to the
book lists which appear in the appendices. Where a single author
has more than one source cited, the number within brackets
following the reference distinguishes the particular work.
NOTES
1 His two volume work on Nietzsche is really a collection of essays.

PART I
THE EARL Y YEARS

1
THE YOUNG HEIDEGGER AND
HERMENEUTI CS
1916 was a pivotal date in M,artin Heidegger's career; 1928 was
another. The first was the year Edmund Husserl came to
Freiburg-im-Breisgau to take the chair of philosophy. The
second was the year Heidegger himself succeeded to that same
chair. The coming of Husserl inaugurated a period of fruitful
collaboration between the two men. The return of Heidegger in
1928 finally terminated it. I shall take these two dates as pivotal
in my exposition of Heidegger's development, and begin by
asking, in this chapter, where Heidegger was at in 1916.
Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 at Messkirch in the Black
Forest, a few miles from the city of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. He was
to spend almost all his life in this particular corner of southwest
Germany. His father was sexton of the Messkirch Catholic
Church and named his elder son Martin after its patron saint.
The boy and his younger brother were both brought up as devout
Catholics: Martin was a bell ringer at the church. The two
brothers were to remain close in later life- Martin even having a
study in his brother's house in Messkirch for when he stayed
there.
Heidegger enjoyed his school education. He later said of it: 'At
the grammar schools in Konstanz and Freiburg-im-Bresigau,
between 1903 and 1909, I enjoyed fruitful learning under excel-
lent teachers of the Greek, Latin and German languages; like-
wise, besides my formal education - or rather, during it - I
acquired everything that was to be of lasting worth' (AH, p3).1
The remark is significant, for the conventional humanistic educa-
tion had a profound effect on all his later attitudes. It was natural
that when, at the age of seventeen his philosophical interest was
awoken, it should have been a book about Aristotle that did it.
Whatwas perhaps surprising was that the short work was On the
Manifold Meaning of Being according to Aristotle by Franz
Brentano. In his old age Heidegger remembered reading this as a
major event in his life: it certainly presaged things to come. The
book puzzled and intrigued Heidegger- but did not illuminate
4 A Heidegger Critique
him. The following year he tried looking at the original- Aristo-
tle's Metaphysics - only to find that the discussion of 'Being' was
even more complicated than Brentano had made out.
In 1909, shortly before leaving school, he came across a book
called On Being: An Outline of Ontology, which had been
written some thirteen years earlier by Carl Braig, a Freiburg
professor of systematic theology. Later that year he enrolled at
Freiburg University as a student of theology, and not only went
to Braig's lectures, but had conversations with him during walks
afterwards. In later life he remembered Braig as one of the two
teachers who had 'the decisive, and therefore ineffable, influence
on my own later academic career': the other was the art historian
Wilhelm Voge. Braig he characterized as 'the last in the tradition
of the speculative school of Tiibingen which gave significance
and scope to Catholic theology through its dialogue with Hegel
and Schelling' (AH, p4). At Freiburg it was not long before
Heidegger got to hear about Husserl's Logical Investigations,
then exciting interest in various quarters. He borrowed the two
volumes from the library and tried to read them. But it was
obscure stuff for the twenty-one year old theology student, and it
is clear from his early writings that he got very little from Husserl
at this stage.
After four semesters he changed his major study from theology
to philosophy. A word is in order here about this change, since
one of the fraught questions about Heidegger is his stance on
religion and the divine. The change was not motivated by a loss
of faith, at least not in any simple sense. Heidegger continued to
attend some theology courses as a student. A dozen years later he
was making a deep impression at theology seminars in Marburg;
and even in his seventies he contributed a paper on theology to an
international symposium. (PNT). He was at various times
strongly interested in both Kierkegaard and Luther, so much so
that he was believed by some contemporaries, including Husserl
at the height of their friendship, to be a Protestant or even a
Protestant convert. Nearly simultaneously (in the thirties) he was
believed by others to be an atheist, a charge which he strongly
rejected in his 1947 Letter on Humanism, but in terms which, to
say the least, are not conventionally theistic. His later writings
often refer to the 'gods' (plural), and also to the 'divine', some-
times with clearly Christian allusions. There is little evidence,
however, that he retained a belief in a personal God, and much of
The Young Heidegger and Hermeneutics 5
his later work is clearly not consistent with orthodox Catholic
doctrine. Nevertheless, he seems throughout his life to have
regarded himself as a religious man, and when he died he received
a Catholic burial at Messkirch. The question of Heidegger's
religiosity is one to which we must return later.
Heidegger's change to philosophy brought him directly under
the influence of Heinrich Rickert, the then professor at Freiburg.
For the next five years (1911-1916) he was to expose Heidegger
to the hermeneutic tradition: an exposure which profoundly
affected Heidegger's development, and all his subsequent think-
ing. In the meantime, however, Heidegger felt himself involved in
an intellectual adventure. As he later put it: 'What the exciting
years between 1910 and 1914 meant for me cannot be adequ-
ately expressed; I can only indicate it by a selective enumeration:
... Nietzsche's The Will to Power, the works of Kierkegaard and
Dostoevsky in translation, the awakening interest in Hegel and
Schelling, Rilke's works and Trakl's poems, Dilthey's Collected
Writings.' (AH, p4). It was primarily to Dilthey that Heidegger
owned his conception of 'hermeneutics': but what that meant in
1911 was founded upon a much older tradition.
THE HERMENEUTIC TRADITION
In a sense, the notion of hermeneutics is as old as learning in the

West: it is concerned with the explication and correct under-
standing of texts. As such, the tradition was entrenched in the
universities from medieval times onwards: it encompassed not
only classical theological studies, but historical, legal and origi-
nally even medical ones. Both the Renaissance rehabilitation of
the classics, and the use made of the Bible by the Protestant
Reformation, appealed to textual exegesis as the means of purify-
ing corrupt dogma. The development of physical science in the
seventeenth century represented a challenge to hermeneutics as
the method of attaining knowledge: but in most fields the prac-
tice of elucidating texts flourished, and was refined during the
course of the eighteenth century. In the latter half of that century,
however, the nature of hermeneutics changed, in that people
began to theorize about this 'art of understanding' which was
un reflectively being practiced. What had previously simply been
assumed, or mentioned en passant in a particular exegesis, now

became formulated as a principle to be applied - for example,
the need to take account of the whole in interpreting the meaning
of the parts of a work. These initiatives, which were strengthened
in specific areas (such as theology) by the general movement of
the German Enlightenment, were further reinforced by new
standards of scholarship encouraged by the reform of the Ger-
man universities. They culminated in the development by
Schleiermacher of the idea of 'general hermeneutics'.
Schleiermacher (1768-1834) belonged to the 'Romantic Gen-
eration' of the 1790s: he was a friend of Friedrich Schlegel and
Novalis, a contemporary of Hegel's. With his On Religion:
Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799), he became the first of
that Generation to return to Orthodox theism. He soon became
famous throughout Germany as a preacher and teacher, and
subsequently established himself as the great systematic
theologian of Protestantism in the nineteenth century.
Philosophically, he was critical of Kant's attempt to take Reason
out of history- it only occurs, he asserted, in individual histori-
cal agents, not in some 'pure', a-historical form. These agents
express it in their idiosyncratic lives, through a language which is
pre-given. The individual therefore owes much to society and to
history, but he makes his life into a unity which is peculiarly his
own.
Schleiermacher applied this philosophical attitude to the prob-
lems of hermeneutics. Reading a text was like understanding a
speaker: you had to share his language of course, but you also
had to know the unspoken assumptions of his thought - the
society he lived in, its accepted standards and norms, his immedi-
ate historical situation, etc. Above all, you had to appreciate the
idiosyncratic unity of the vision that a particular author was
striving to express; a unity which was rooted in the unity of the
author's life. This ability to understand texts, which is founded
upon our ability to understand other people through language, is
general to human beings. It is an ability which can and should be
cultivated: the general art of hermeneutics.
By this argument Schleiermacher transformed the idea of her-
meneutics from a rather abstruse skill exercised by academics in
pedantic disputations, into a general and fundamental capacity
of the human spirit, crucial to all ethical, cultural and even
scientific pursuits. He also saw it as religious, in that it governed
our relationship to, and understanding of, God. Scientific her-

meneutics would rigorously study the principles governing this
art of understanding and interpretation, and would pull together
much that was already known to special sciences such as rhetoric
and dogmatics. In pursuing this programme, Schleiermacher
formulated concepts and principles which became the common
property of hermeneutic thinking. The world of the author, he
said, is a meaningful unity whose parts are inextricably inter-
related. Its meanings cannot be deduced from any simple axioms
or first principles. It is a totality of references within a system
which is closed. Explanation is perfectly possible within this
circle of meanings, but translation into some other terms
destroys the original unity and distorts the interrelationship of
the parts. As interpreters then, we must break into this her-
meneutic circle, make an intuitive leap in order to share the
understanding which is being expressed. We can then explore the
dialectical relationship which exists between the parts and the
whole.
Schleiermacher bequeathed to the hermeneutic tradition a set
of ideas which, by various routes, were to come to fruition only in
the twentieth century: the emphasis on philosophy as philosophy
of life, the incipient notion of the lived-world as a referential
totality, the notion of an intuitive leap into a closed circle of
significance, the stress on the individual as the sense-giving his-
torical agent, the corresponding devaluation of science and
objective knowledge, and the preoccupation with discourse as
the sedimentation of cultural tradition.
As a young seminarist interested in philosophy Heidegger was
already heir to Schleiermacher, albeit at several removes. His
gymnasium education, stressing as it did textual exegesis of the
classics and of German literature, still continued that tradition of
learning from which Schleiermacher's general hermeneutics had
flowed. His transition to theology reinforced his exegetical prac-
tice, and led on to reflective accounts of the nature of hermeneu-
tic understanding. His initial philosophical studies on Aristotle
and the Greeks, and later on Augustine and St Thomas, were
methodologically in keeping with this early training. In his read-
ings of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky he encountered explicit
reverberations of Schleiermacher's ideas: the individual's crea-
tion of significance and value, the existential leap of faith, and so
on. And in reflecting on his appreciation of German poetry he
was unwittingly drawing on hermeneutic themes, which had

never been far from literary criticism, and had nurtured explicit
studies of aesthetics and art criticism during the nineteenth cen-
tury.
But what hermeneutics had come to mean by the time Heideg-
ger knowingly encountered it, owed far more to Wilhelm Dilthey
than to Schleiermacher. Dilthey (1833-1911) was a man of
many parts, including historian, literary critic and philosopher.
\Vith his initial training in theology, he had been asked as a young
man to edit Schleiermacher's correspondence. The eventual
result was a classic biography which not only made him famous,
but provided a model for a particular type of essay in the history
of ideas. Dilthey attempted, in a manner which Schleiermacher
himself would have approved of, to really grasp the unity of his
life and thought.
Schleiermacher had read and been impressed by Spinoza:
Dilthey must read and assess Spinoza. Schleiermacher had
immersed himself in Goethe: Dilthey's biography must digress at
length on Goethe's works. Schleiermacher had lived in Berlin in
the 1790s: Dilthey must research the conditions of Berlin at that
date. In this way Dilthey appropriated Schleiermacher's thought.
He went on to transform it, by 'applying' general hermeneutics to
the problem of the human sciences.
The German term 'Geisteswissenschaften' literally translated
means 'sciences of the spirit'. Actually, it was itself the German
translation of the English 'moral sciences'. In the nineteenth
century 'Geisteswissenschaften' was used in opposition to
'Naturwissenschaften' (the natural sciences). In this sense, it
included not only history and the social sciences, but also all
those fields which studied human cultural products - jurispru-
dence, literary studies, philology, aesthetics, etc.
As Dilthey saw it, these were all studies of the expressions of
the human mind or spirit, and this linked them fundamentally
with hermeneutics. Schleiermacher had realized that reading a
text is like understanding a speaker; yet the study of texts is the
primary method of all those sciences covered by the term 'Geis-
teswissenschaften'. What differentiates them from the sciences of
nature, Dilthey argued, is not primarily their subject matter; it is
the fact that their method is hermeneutic. Human expression,
gesture, or action, can be studied by the methods of natural
science and the result will be knowledge in physiology or another
of the positive sciences. But such knowledge will not penetrate to
the inner life of which the act is an expression; and therefore,
humanly speaking, such knowledge will be superficial. That,
Dilthey thought, was the mistake being made by contemporaries
who were trying to establish an experimental science of psychol-
ogy, borrowing its method from the sciences of nature. 2
Hermeneutics, then, was essentially the method of the human
sciences. But this was no accident. The objects studied by all the
human sciences - history, politics, jurisprudence, literary
studies - were human products. And as human products they
were meaningful. Unlike natural objects, they already contained
a meaning or significance, by virtue of the fact that they were
expressions of the inner life of man. It was because their signifi-
cance did not lie in their surface appearance that the methods of
hermeneutics needed to be employed. In interpreting history, law
or whatever, we have to make that leap of which Schleiermacher
spoke, into the hermeneutic circle of significance which existed
for the authors of the text. Only by penetrating through the
surface phenomena to the significant inner form which these
expressed, could we appreciate the real meaning of cultural
objects.
So in hermeneutics we have more than just the methodology of
the human sciences; we have, Dilthey believed, their epis-
temological justification. Kant had developed a very adequate
epistemology - but only for the natural sciences. He had dis-
covered the basic categories of thought insofar as they apply to
matter. He had elucidated the nature of explanation, character-
istic of natural science, as the apprehension of the connections
between phenomena - the external characteristics of objects.
But that epistemology was inadequate for the human sciences
which deal not with the explanations of external phenomena, but
with the understanding of inner significance. What was needed,
was a philosophical account of human science to supplement the
four Kantian Critiques: a fifth 'Critique of Historical Reason'.
Such a critique had to account for the unity of inner and outer
which expression entails, for the unity of the inner experience
which the author lives through and expresses, and for the leap of
understanding by which we pass through the outer into the inner
hermeneutic circle.
When we approach the human sciences, Dilthey argued, we
never do so from a position of ignorance. These sciences develop
out of the business ofliving, with which we are already familiar.

Indeed, we already have the categories in which to think about
human beings, and one of the most fundamental of these is time.
'Life', he wrote, 'is very closely related to the filling of time. Its
whole character, its ephemeral nature and its continuity through
the unity of the self is determined by time'.3 This is why the fifth
Critique must be of historical reason: the human is the historical.
'Not through introspection but only through history do we come
to know ourselves'.4 Language and the other referential systems
we employ in thinking about ourselves are historical in nature:
we as individuals do not invent them, we inherit them. Legal
institutions, cultural traditions, etc., are socially evolved in the
course of history. Yet, as individuals, we use these inherited
systems to express the specific life-experiences that we live
through. The categories of thought we employ - terms such as
'development', 'meaning', 'culture'- become available for use in
human science. But their basis is our experience of life, the world
as we live it- the Lebenswelt or 'lived-world'. 'Behind life itself
our thinking cannot go5'. We experience life as a totality; but
within this totality we grasp particulars in individual moments of
meaning. These moments are fundamentally temporal: they
require both the context of the past and the horizon of the future
in order to be intelligible at all. Thus the Geisteswissenschaften
develop out of, and must return to, concrete lived experience.
Dilthey himself never managed to write his Critique of His tor-
ical Reason in any systematic way, though what it would have
contained became fairly clear from his later published writings 6
and his teaching. Its influence was particularly felt in what has
become known as the South-West German school of Neo-
Kantians, 7 the chief of whom was Wilhelm Windelband
(1848-1915). Windelband had taught at Freiburg before Rick-
ert: it was his death in 1915 thattook Rickertto Heidelberg as his
successor, and brought Husserl to Freiburg. Like Dilthey, Win-
delband believed that the Kantian Critiques were adequate for
natural science, but, as he put it, they were not adequate to deal
with the subjects of Kant's second and third Critiques i.e. the will
and the emotions. A distinction must be made, he argued,
between theoretical judgments (i.e. statements) such as the gen-
eral laws discovered by natural science, and critical judgments
which are typical of the historical sciences. The natural sciences
are 'generalizing'; the historical sciences 'individualizing'. Every
real object can be viewed in both ways: either 'nomothetically' as

falling under a general law; or 'idiographically', that is, in its
specific individuality. The historical sciences, in making critical
judgments or assessments, are evaluating: they inevitably refer to
values and norms, to what ought to be as well as what is.
His follower Rickert (1863-1936) rejected Windelband's
absolute sefaration of the natural from the historical sciences.
The natura sciences, he argued, are as much the products of
human history as any others; which is not to say they cannot
yield knowledge which is universally valid. The distinction
between nomothetic and ideographic methods was, he thought, a
crucial one, and he went on to elaborate a 'logic of historical
sciences' based on it. He found Dilthey's approach to historical
reality too subjective. It was crucial to specify the objective
criteria which are being employed in critical historical evalua-
tion. By definition, such judgments cannot be value-free: indeed
all epistemology is based in the lived experience of Kant's 'practi-
cal reason'. But the nomothetic thinking of natural science
escapes the problem of evaluation, because it deals only with the
universally valid: the concrete particular it leaves to historical
science. Yet insofar as it achieves objectivity, history is employ-
ing universal criteria of evaluation, or standards of value. The
realization of such universal values is what culture is all about;
indeed the historical sciences should be called the Kulturwissen-
schaften.
When Heidegger transferred into philosophy in 1911, this was

the tradition of hermeneutics to which he became exposed. Its
influence was profound and formative, and we shall see the fruit
it bore through-out his mature work. But from the first his
acceptance of hermeneutics was never uncritical. He had a fun-
damental reservation about it, which harped back to Brentano's
essay and the influence of Braig. He identified what he objected
to as the 'Kantianism' which ran throughout the hermeneuticists'
thinking. The trouble was that Kant had been so busy worrying
about knowledge, that he had never got to grips with the problem
of what exists. As Heidegger put it in 1912, in his first published
work, 'Kant ... could do no better than hypothesize a mysteri-
ous "thing-in-itself". And when one realizes that Kant ultimately
only applied his transcendental method to the formal sciences in
that he investigated how pure mathematics, science and
metaphysics (in a rationalist sense) were at all possible, it
becomes clear that the problem of reality simply had no place in
his epistemology', (PR, p64). 'The problem of reality', 'what
exists', 'the Question of Being' are all ways in which Heidegger
referred to his central philosophical preoccupation- a preoccu-
pation which antedates his formal study of philosophy. Much
later, Husserl was to say: 'The wonder of all wonders is subjectiv-
ity': but for Heidegger it was Being- the amazing fact that there
was something rather than nothing (1M, pI ff).
Unless one has some conception of what Heidegger meant by
the 'problem of Being' it is impossible to appreciate the concern
which was utterly central to his thinking. So I will attempt, in true
hermeneutic fashion, to interpret what seems to me the unity of
insight lying behind Heidegger's many and various pronounce-
ments about it. We must suppose, I think, some experience or
experiences of a religious nature which occurred quite early in
Heidegger's life. These experiences were what a conventional
religious man would call experiences of God's presence. But by
early manhood Heidegger had ceased to be a conventionally
religious man, and was certainly no longer able to accept that
sort of talk about 'God'. Who orwhat God was, the young reader
of Nietzsche realized, had become problematic. Indeed, it was far
worse, because it wasn't even clear that talking directly about
'God' would get anywhere: the formulation of the problem itself
had become problematic. So he came to the conclusion that
progress could not be made within the confines of orthodox
religious doctrine in the study of theology, but only in philoso-
phy. Nevertheless, whatever the difficulties of formulation or
articulation, however tortuous the words and arguments might
be, of one thing he was absolutely sure- that his experiences had
been experiences of something real, something given in and
through the things of this world. He had been confronted by, he
had actually felt, the presence of , Being' .
There is no place in Heidegger's writings where he confesses
having any such experiences. On the other hand, it would have
been quite out of character for Heidegger to talk directly about
anything of such extreme personal significance. He was a very
private person; there is little of an autobiographical nature in any
of his writings. But taking together Heidegger's passionate com-
mitment to a problem he never even managed to formulate
adequately, the facts of his intellectual development, and the

sense of his various pronouncements about Being, I think the
conclusion that these were based upon intense personal 'religi-
ous' experiences is inescapable.
, "Why are there beings rather than nothing?". Many men never
encounter this question, if by encounter we mean ... to feel its
inevitability. And yet each of us is grazed at least once, perhaps
more than once by the hidden power of this question ... The
question looms in moments of great despair, when things tend to
lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured. Perhaps
it will strike but once, like a muffled bell that rings into our life
and gradually dies away. It is present in moments of rejoicing,
when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be
there for the first time .. .' (1M, pl).8 Although written in 1935,
these words begin to explain why nearly twenty years earlier the
young Doctor Heidegger was planning a study of the great
medieval mystic Meister Eckhart (KBDS, p232 n 1).9
As for what he meant by 'Being', in the lecture just quoted
Heidegger tried to explain to his students like this:
You can, as it were, smell the Being of this building in your nostrils. The smell
communicates the Being of this thing (Se;ende) far more immediately and truly
than any description or inspection could every do ....
But do we see Being as we see colour and light and shade? Or do we hear, smell,
taste, feel Being? We hear the motorcycle racing through the street. We hear the
grouse gliding through the forest. But actually we hear only the whirring of the
motor, the sound the grouse makes ... wherein consists Being .. .?
A heavy storm coming up in the mountains 'is' ... wherein consists its Being?
A distant mountain range under a broad sky ... It 'is'. Wherein consists the
Being ... ?
The door of an early romanesque church is a thing. How and to whom is its
Being revealed ... ?
The state;s. But where is being situated ... ?
A painting by Van Gogh ... what;s here ... ?
What in all these things we have just mentioned is the Being of the thing? We run
(or stand) around in the world with our silly subtleties and conceits. But where
in all this is Being? (1M, pp27-9).
I have quoted at length from this passage, because it is arguably

the simplest and clearest statement of what he is trying so pain-
fully to get at. Heidegger is a man who wants to talk about the
presence of God in all things - but can't use the word 'God'.
Instead, he talks about the 'Being of things', or more opaquely,
'the Being of beings'. 'Heidegger,' says John Macquarrie, the
translator of Being and Time, 'replaces God with Being'.l0 It is a

view shared by the Jesuit author of the first major work on
Heidegger to appear in English. l1 I believe they are both abso-
lutely right.
But Heidegger, as a young student finding his way in philoso-
phy, trying to articulate his disagreements with his famous pro-
fessor, had to work within the conventions of the subject. So in
1912, when he first committed himself to print, he attacked the
Kantians for not coming to grips with the 'problem of reality', of
being too concerned with knowledge and not enough with exis-
tence. And for support he turned to an establishment figure, a
certain Oswald Kiilpe (1862-1915) who was best known as a
proponent of empirical psychology, but who had written a
number of philosophical works, especially on the nature of think-
ing and its relation to reality.12 His appeal for Heidegger lay in his
rejection of the Kantian distinction between phenomenon and
noumenon, appearance and reality. The real, Kiilpe had claimed,
is given in that which appears; it is not hidden behind it. Heideg-
ger agreed entirely; but, he continued, it is a mistake to suppose
that the real is only physical appearance. Idealists confuse the act
of consciousness which is psychic, with its content, which is not.
Being transcends thought: the Being of things transcends our
conceptualization of them as beings (Seiendes). 'The psychical
existence (Existenz) of a concept and the ideal Being (Sein) of the
content of this concept are two completely different things. True,
real Being is thought by means of a concept, but this in no way
means that it (real Being) is taken inside the Subject and trans-
formed into psychical Being' (PR, pp66-7). So Heidegger,
expounding Kiilpe: 'Thought accommodates itself to its objects.
The Laws of Thought are the laws of its objects, and as such, the
Copernican revolution which Kant claims for his theory of
knowledge (namely that the objects accommodate themselves to
thought) does not apply to thinking' (PR, p68).
Although Heidegger made little of it in his exposition, Kiilpe
also emphasized, against naive realism, that though thinking in
no way creates the real object, it does contribute actively to the
way in which it is 'realized' (or made real). He therefore called his
position 'critical realism'. Whether Heidegger was aware of it at
this stage or not, Kiilpe was considerably indebted to Husserl: a
fact which made Heidegger's sympathetic reception of the latter
much easier when the time came.
In the meantime Heidegger was in for a considerable dose of

logic, epistemology and philosophy of Geisteswissenschaft: Rick-
ert saw to that. Small wonder that Heidegger's second publica-
tion (1912) was a survey of recent work in Logic (published in a
Catholic intellectual journal). Apart from some book reviews,
between then and 1916 Heidegger completed three substantial
pieces of work, all of which were subsequently published: two
were supervised dissertations required by the university, the third
was the trial lecture, as a result of which he was confirmed as a
'privatdozent' with the right to teach.
His 1914 doctoral dissertation on The Theory ofJudgment in
Psychologism actually dealt with a topic on which Husserl had
done a substantial amount of work. In spite of the fact that
Husserl's book Ideas had been published in the previous year, a
book which Heidegger said first made sense of phenomenology
for him (MW, pp76-7), Husserl is hardly referred to, and the
discussion confines itself to the terms of the neo-Kantian debate.
By 1915 he was ready for his trial lecture, and what better
topic to prepare in the Rickert school than 'The Concept of Time
in Historical Science'? In the autumn he gave his first lecture
course, on the presocratics, and his first seminar class, on Kant's
Prolegomena. 13 He was simultaneously working on his 'habilita-
tion' dissertation on the apparently curious historical topic of
Duns Scotus' Doctrine of Categories and Meaning.
Heidegger's choice was by no means as odd as it first seems. He
had finished his 1912 article with the words: 'The Aristotelian-
scholastic philosophy, which has always thought realistically,
will not lose sight of this new epistemological movement (the
'critical realism' of Kiilpe); positively progressive work must be
its concern' (PR, p70). Thus Heidegger, in his very first work,
was already looking back to the unity of the medieval world-view
which saw the presence of Being in all things, and hoping to
re-work it as the answer to modern (particularly post-Kantian)
fragmentation. Scotus' doctrine of categories, he says, reveals the
dominant power of 'analogy' in medieval thought. Analogy is
'the conceptual expression of the world of experience of
medieval man, (a world which is) qualitatively fulfilled, charged
with value and drawn into relationship with the transcendent; it
(analogy) is the conceptual expression of the determinate form of
inner existence anchored in the primordial and transcendental
relationship of the soul to God' (KBDS, p239: quoted by Caputo

(1),p14).
This dissertation, dedicated to Rickert, about a philosopher
whom Windelband regarded as the greatest of the scholastics, is
shot through with the terminology and the thinking of her-
meneutics. In the above passage analogy is said to be the expres-
sion of Lebenswelt (lived-world), using the unity of inner and
outer to reveal the inner form of inevitably valued experience. In
the body of the work Heidegger attributes to the Scotist position
aspects which are simply not to be found in the original, a
procedure which he justifies hermeneutically: 'This side of Scot-
ist philosophy must be set out more clearly and sharply than it
was to Scotus himself. But this does not in any way change the
fact that everything which is to be presented belongs to the circle
of thought of the philosopher, and this alone is decisive' (KBDS,
p21: Caputo (1), pl09). And in explaining the purpose of the
essay he says: 'Philosophy lives at the same time in a tension with
the living personality and draws its content and claim to value
out of its depths and fulness of life. A personal stand on the part
of the philosopher concerned is, for the most part, the basis of
every philosophical conception' (KBDS p4: Caputo (1) pl12): a
remark which is autobiographically revealing.
The substance of Heidegger's argument is that in his Gram-
matica Speculativa Scotus 14 had developed a theory of meaning
superior to any of the neo-Kantian variants, since it related the
world of the intellect to that of reality. Each 'world' has its
characteristic form of being (logical v real) and its own type of
truth (truth of judgments v truth of being), but they are unified
through expression. Expression is the meaningful articulation by
the intellect of the truth of being. Yet expression is through
language, and language always occurs in certain characteristic
forms. Underlying all languages there is ana priori grammar (this
was the basic doctrine of the medieval 'speculative gram-
marians'), which helps to reveal not merely how the intellect
must function, but also how the world is. Similarly, there are
basic categories of meaning which likewise reflect the world.
Heidegger then proceeds through the Scotus text discussing the
various grammatical word forms (noun, adjective, etc). and dis-
tinguishing their essential modes of signification (forms of mean-
ing), from the inessential.
The core of Heidegger's argument here informed the project,
and the eventual structure of Being and Time, as we shall see.
More immediately, it made clear that since the publication in
1913 of Husserl's Ideas, Heidegger had been finding more and
more to interest him in the new phenomenology. Indeed, the
Scotus work can with some justification be read as an application
of Husserlian phenomenology, and without doubt it marks a
transitional stage between his hermeneutic-dominated early
work, and his next 'phenomenological' decade. Before turning to
that, however, let me sum up where Heidegger had got to by
1916.
Personally, Heidegger was doing fine. He was twenty-seven
years old and still single. His chosen career as an academic was
going beautifully. He was already a university teacher with a
clearly original tum of mind and, for his age, a remarkable range
of knowledge in philosophy- he could quote with equal author-
ity from the presocratics or from the most up-to-date studies in
logic. Admittedly it had cost him a great deal - every long
vacation had been spent alternating intensive work with long
walks. And then there was the war. In 1914 he had volunteered
for the army, but after two months was discharged on grounds
on ill health. Nevertheless war was taking its toll: colleagues and
friends were dying. Kiilpe, a great nationalist, had died in 1915
while visiting the front. The young Emil Laske, a follower of
Rickert who Heidegger thought surpassed his master, had been
killed in action in Galicia. Heidegger was far from indifferent to
the outcome of the war: he wanted Germany to win.
Intellectually, Heidegger had already fixed his central problem
and the basic parameters of his subsequent thinking about it. The
problem of Being - why there was something rather than
nothing, how Being manifests itself through things: these were
the heart of the matter. From the hermeneutic tradition he had
taken a set of concepts, and indeed a notion of philosophy, which
he was to preserve for the rest of his life. Philosophy must arise
out of, and return to, lived experience: that is what gives it value
and ensures its truth. Our lived experience is fundamentally
temporal, dependent for its meaningfulness on memory and
anticipation; it contains a unity of understanding which is prior
to knowledge in the natural scientific sense. The world of experi-
ence is the world of reality, and in language we express our
understanding of the real. The lived world and language which
speaks of it are together a referential system which is shared with
others, and is intrinsically historical. This system is a totality we

cannot escape: a closed hermeneutic circle, born of a long tradi-
tion, whose meaning we can only discuss from the inside. Our
reading of a philosophical text, just as of a literary one, should
aim at grasping the intuition of the life-world that the author was
trying to express. Ancient and medieval texts are at least as
worthy of study as modern ones, and indeed may contain truths
which the modern age has obscured. Great philosophy, like great
literature, is such because of the insight it expresses into the way
things are.
Weighed against this positive debt to hermeneutics, what was
uppermost in Heidegger's mind was its inadequacy, the total
failure of neo-Kantianism to come to terms with that central
problem of reality. For all his insight and intuition Dilthey, the
greatest of the bunch, was very limited as a philosopher (B&T,
pp72-3). Windelband, although appreciating the inadequacy of
Kant's epistemology for dealing with the human subject, mis-
takenly retained a place of honour for natural scientific know-
ledge; while Rickert never achieved a proper ontological basis for
his 'logic of the historical sciences', which therefore went astray
(B&T p427). Laske, who seemed set to rescue Rickert from these
errors, was dead; as was Kiilpe, who had been moving in the right
direction. That left one great original from whom Heidegger
could learn - Edmund Husserl; and he was coming to Freiburg
as the new professor.
NOTES
1 A list of Heidegger's works is given in Appendix 3.

2 Fechner was one who came in for Dilthey's criticism here.
3 c.f. Dilthey (1), p232.
4 quotedinPalmer(1),p101.
5 quoted by Palmer (1), p99. See also Hodges (1), p43.
6 see particularly The Construction of the Historical World in the Human
Studies (1910): extracts in Dilthey (1). See also Ermarth (1), Chapter 5.
7 See, for example, L Goldmann (1), p3f.
8 I have substituted 'beings' as a more intelligible translation of 'Seiendes'
than 'essents' in this and the subsequent quotation. For the same reason I
have occasionally used 'things'. Following Macquarrie and Robinson's
convention, I have capitalized 'Being' as the translation of'Sein'.
9 Heidegger never lost this interest in Eckhart, and continued to quote him
throughout his life, ego Tr, p40; d. Caputo (1) p115.
10 Macquarrie (1), pSI.

11 WRichardson (1).
12 Bossert (1) suggests that Heidegger wanted to get away from Rickert and
was trying to attract Kiilpe's attention in order to do so. There is absolutely
no evidence for this speculation. Moreover, it completely underestimates
Heidegger's real debt to the neo-Kantian hermeneuticists.
13 Richardson (1),p663.
14 Not long after Heidegger wrote, it was established that Scotus was not in
fact the au thor of this work!
2
HUSSERL'S DEVELOPMENT OF
PHENOMENOLOGY
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was completely different from
Heidegger in almost every way. In the first place he was thirty
years older; in 1916 he wa.s fifty-seven as compared to Heideg-
ger's twenty-seven. Secondly, he came from a totally different
background: he was born in a village in Moravia in the days of
the Austrian Empire. His parents were Jews, though he himself
converted to Lutheranism in his twenties. His motives for this
seem to have been more concerned with assimilation to German
culture than with any deep religious experience. Indeed,
although he regarded himself as a believer throughout his life,
religion apparently meant little to him, and certainly had nothing
to do with his philosophy. 1
His intellectual development, too, was quite different from
that of Heidegger. He had received the standard gymnasium
education not in some small town in Baden but in Vienna, the
capital of an empire. He knew Greek and Latin of course, but his
interests lay in science and mathematics, not literature and his-
tory. When he first went to university at Leipzig it was to read
maths, physics and astronomy, though he attended Wilhelm
Wundt's philosophy lectures out of interest. After two years he
transferred to Berlin and concentrated on mathematics, but still
maintained his interest in philosophy. At the age of twenty-two
he transferred again, this time to the university in Vienna; and it
was from there that, in 1883, he received his doctorate for work
on the calculus of variations. His old mathematics professor at
Berlin offered him an assistantship which Husserl could not
refuse, though when after a few months his mentor was put out
of action by a serious illness, he resolved to return to Vienna and
devote himself to philosophy.
Curiously enough, the man responsible for drawing Husserl
into philosophy was none other than Franz Brentano, whose
work on Aristotle was to arouse Heidegger's philosophical inter-
ests twenty-odd years later. It was not Brentano, the apostate
Catholic priest wrestling with the meaning of 'Being', who
Husserl's Development of Phenomenology 21
attracted Husserl however: it was the author of Psychology from
an Empirical Standpoint. For two years he worked under
Brentano on logic, philosophy of science and philosophical psy-
chology, and received a thorough grounding in the British Em-
piricists. Then in 1886, on Brentano's advice, he went to Halle to
become the assistant of Carl Stumpf. Like Brentano, Stumpf was
working on what they called 'descriptive psychology', or some-
times 'descriptive phenomenology'. It was under Stumpf's direc-
tion that Husserl completed his 'habilitationsschrift' which he
later published (1891) as Philosophy of Arithmetic. After some
long, hard years at Halle, eking out an existence and trying to
raise a family on the precarious salary of a privatdozent, he
eventually got an associate (extraordinarius) professorship at
Gottingen in 1900. In the same year he published the first part of
his Logical Investigations which, at the age of forty-one began to
create his reputation.
At Gottingen that hard slog through Halle began to bear fruit.
The second volume of the Logical Investigations appeared in
1901, and in it Husserl had started to use the term 'phenomenol-
ogy' to describe his distinctive philosophical position. He now
developed this in lecture series and seminars which began to
attract graduate students from elsewhere. From these years
date the lectures posthumously published as The Idea of
attract graduate students from elsewhere. From these years
on The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. By
1913 he had a flourishing gradu~te following, which was very
gratifying for someone who was by now self-consciously trying
to found a new philosophical 'school'. That same year he pub-
lished the first part of his projected three-volume summary of his
work, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.
Although he subsequently circulated the manuscript of Part Two
amongst his students, neither that nor Part Three was ever pub-
lished during his lifetime. He was now in his late fifties, but it was
to be another three years before he got a full professorship. When
it came he could only regard it as a just reward. He was nobody's
protege; he had belonged to no school. He had ploughed his own
furrow, and had the satisfaction oflearning that great names like
Dilthey had keenly read and even given classes on his Logical
Investigations. 2 When Rickert recommended him as his succes-
sor to the Freiburg chair it was purely out of respect for the
quality of his work: Husserl was no man's disciple. 3
The professor who came to chair the department was in all

respects in a very different situation from the perhaps brilliant
and knowledgeable, but philosophically still immature young
lecturer. Heidegger had just completed his dissertation on
Scotus, and Husserl helped him get it published. As a project, it
was aeons away from anything which interested Husserl- his-
torical, scholastic, tainted with Lebensphilosophie and advocat-
ing a sort of ontological realism. Heidegger needed to point out
to him not only his interest in phenomenology, but his actual
application of it in the Scotus work. Within a short time the two
men had struck up a firm friendship and started on a decade of
fruitful cooperation. In spite of all their differences, they had
found a common ground in Husserl's 'phenomenology'. Exactly
what this meant is something to which we must now turn.
Husserl, as we have seen, had come to philosophy from
mathematics by way of logic. That progress had been motivated
by impulses quite different from those which drove Heidegger.
Husserl was searching for certainty, for the absolutely indubit-
able foundations of mathematical knowledge. Mathematics, that
seemingly most secure of sciences, had undergone a revolution
during the course of the nineteenth century - internal changes
had shaken its very foundations. Such developments as non-
Euclidian geometries, denying the 'self-evident' truth that paral-
lel lines never meet, or the theory of sets and groups, clearly
central to advanced mathematical theory and close to the basic
laws of logic: such developments as these transformed the old a
priori certainties and called into question the very status of
mathematical truth. 4 Like Frege and Russell, Husserl turned to
logic to discover the foundations of mathematics; but the logic
they found was inadequate. The question was thereby pushed
back one remove and the problem now became how to establish
the basis of logical truth (U, Vol 1, p41).5 And at first Husserl
looked to 1S Mill for the solution.
The laws of logic, said Mill, are the laws of thought. What
makes them true? They are true simply because the human
psyche is made in that way. They are empirical truths about the
functioning of the human mind. This was the position which
Husserl, in common with many of its contemporaries, adopted in
his Philosophy of Arithmetic, a position known as 'psycholog-
ism'.6 But by the early 1890s he was becoming increasingly
dissatisfied with it.
Eventually, in the Logical Investigations he rejected it in

favour of quite a different theory. His arguments were many and
various, relentlessly hammered out in great detail, but the most
telling was this. If the truths of logic are empirical generaliza-
tions, then the way to establish them is by empirical investiga-
tion. But any empirical investigation must presuppose the basic
laws of logic before it can begin. So if they were empirical
generalizations, the laws of logic could never be shown to be true.
On the other hand, we know that they are true. Indeed we know
them to be true prior to any empirical study: they are a priori
truths. If you like, they are self-evidently true, in that they need
no further evidence to establish them. They are truths which we
can establish simply by intuition (Anschauung): by direct inspec-
tion of the ideas involved. Actually it would be more correct to
say that we inspect the relationship between ideas in establishing
logical truth. And this gives us the key to understanding the
nature of mathematical truth. It derives purely from the relation-
ships between the ideas involved: ideas which we can look at
(with a sort of inner sight) and investigate, without any need to
embark upon empirical studies.
THE THEORY OF IDEAS
Now in spite of his later claim that phenomenology is 'presup-

positionless', Husserl in fact makes certain assumptions without
which much of his thinking loses its plausibility. In the first place
he assumes, as did Brentano and Stumpf, that the human psyche
is composed of ideas, and these ideas are related in logically
determinable ways. Further, and more importantly, he assumes
that the human psyche in all its individual manifestations, has a
common structure which is describable in terms of the relation-
ships between ideas. There are certain fundamental ideas which
all men must have by virtue of the fact that they are human. In
essence, we all share these ideas; they are the basis of human
rationality and human communication. That is to say, there are
~rhl i.de9s which occur in each individual psyche in essen-
tially t e same form.
It follows from these assumptions that anyone, any human
being, has available for direct inspection a set of universal ideas
which are in essence shared by everyone. There is a realm of ideas

which is knowable a priori. The investigation of the essences of
these ideas is the proper subject matter of philosophy. Philoso-
phy can thus be called an 'eidetic' (from the Greek 'eidos' = Latin
<essentia') science. It can achieve and accumulate knowledge. In
its own proper sphere, the realm of a priori ideas, it can be as
rigorous and as cumulative as the positive sciences (PRS, passim).
Yet it has a special relationship to the positive sciences because it
is both foundational for them, and central to them. It is founda-
tional, in that no empirical science can even begin to raise ques-
tions without employing ideas which are already there. Psychol-
ogy must presuppose a prior idea of 'psyche', medicine an idea of
'health', and so on. For this reason there can be, indeed should be
(thinks Husserl), 'regional' philosophical investigations into the
a priori ideas employed byall the special sciences. But philosophy
is also central to the sciences in that only it can tie them together.
Only by investigating the relationships between ideas such as
'health' in medicine and 'nature' in physical science can the
relationship between these areas of knowledge be explored.
Philosophy, in the traditional phrase, is the queen of sciences
(PRS, passim).
This theory of ideas, which was first expressed in its fully
fledged form in the book called Ideas, gave Husserl a project for a
lifetime's work. Indeed, it gave him more, because there was no
way he could personally hope to carry out these philosophical
investigations into all important human ideas, especially since his
life was by then two thirds over. It was this that impelled him to
found a school or movement, which would carryon his work
after he had gone. His followers should rigorously and carefully
investigate the a priori essence of ideas. They should build up
knowledge of the complex, logically interrelated structures,
starting with the roots like 'truth', 'reality', 'time'; working
higher through the great nodal points, like 'self', 'nature', 'soci-
ety', and so out into the branches with such ideas as 'justice',
'weight', 'price' etc., which are constitutive for the special sci-
ences (Id, p. 404 f£).
Of course, Husserl did not suppose that this theory of ideas
alone justified his grandiose project. Two other essential compo-
nents contributed to the synthesis he came to call 'phenomenol-
ogy': firstly, the doctrine of the Intentionality of Consciousness,
and secondly the notion of phenomenological method.
THE INTENTIONALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
It was from Brentano that Husserl derived the doctrine of the

Intentionality of Consciousness. In his project for a 'descriptive
psychology' which would discover the universal laws of the
human psyche, Brentano had asked: 'What is it that characterizes
mental acts like hearing, seeing, sensing, thinking, judging, lov-
ing, etc?'. His answer was that all these acts refer to a content:
they include an object within themselves - I hear something,
think something, love someone. Of course the 0 bj ect of thought
mayor may not exist in reality; but it has a sort of 'existence' as
the content of a psychic act. Brentano called this 'intentional
inexistence', and the object 'the intentional object', to distinguish
it from real existence and the real object. In fact he borrowed the
terminology from scholastic philosophy; 'intend' is used in the
Latin sense of 'point towards' or 'indicate'. What characterizes
the psychic act, then, is that it is 'intentional'; it always intends an
object which is the content of the act. Remember the distinction
between act and content which had appealed to Heidegger in
Kiilpe's work? The source is ultimately the same: Kiilpe had been
studying in Gottingen when Husserl was there. 7
Husserl, for his part, took Brentano's doctrine, and trans-
formed it into a metaphysical principle. 'Intentionality (is the)
wonderful property (of consciousness) to which all metaphysical
enigmas and riddles of the theoretical reason lead us eventually
back: perceiving is the perceiving of something, maybe a thing;
judging, the judging of a certain matter; valuation, the valuing of
a value; wish, the wish for the content wished, and so on'. (Id, pp
242-3). Since I myself am a consciousness, I can know beyond a
shadow of doubt that this is true. This truth is epistemologically
foundational, because it is on this basis that I can come to know
all other truths. The contents of my own psychic acts are given to
me directly and indubitably. It is possible for me to have abso-
lutely certain (or 'apodictic') knowledge about my own inten-
tional objects. As he was to put it much later, Descartes didn't go
far enough: I can be absolutely certain not only of my own
existence as a consciousness, but also of what I am thinking
about. 'The Cartesian evidence- the evidence of the proposition
ego cogito, ego sum - remained barren because Descartes ne-
glected ... to direct his attention to the fact that the ego can
explicate himself ad infinitum and systematically, by means of

transcendental experience, and therefore lies ready as a possible
field of work' (eM, p 31).
Husserl now put this doctrine together with his theory of ideas,
with, for him, very happy results. I can have absolutely certain
knowledge of the content of my own consciousness. But what are
the contents of my own consciousness except ideas? And since
the fundamental structure of human rationality is the same the
world over, I can, by investigating my own ideas attain know-
ledge which is not only apodictic, but universal. It is because
consciousness is intentional that Husserl's philosophical project
is possible at all.
But, says Husserl, we must be quite clear about the status of
our investigation. If we undertake an enquiry into an intentional
object, what we are asking about is one of the content of con-
sciousness. We are operating at the psychic level, in the realm of
ideas and not in the realm of things. A philosophical investiga-
tion into necessary truth is not an empirical investigation into the
real world. As philosophers we can ask about our idea of space,
and explore its necessary connections with our other ideas. But
that is quite different from conducting an empirical investigation
into what space is actually like: that we must leave to the physi-
cist. Philosophy can yield no empirical knowledge. Its discoveries
are quite separate from, and logically prior to, those of the
empirical sciences.
This logical priority of philosophy over empirical science does
not of course imply a historical priority. Husserl has enormous
respect for the achievements of nineteenth century science,
including the theoretical achievements. He in no way supposes
that these are going to be invalidated by philosophy, or that
philosophical discoveries about their fundamental ideas will
require them to make extensive theoretical revisions. It is more
an issue of their philosophical presuppositions. They are not at
the moment adequately founded, and when they are we may
come to see some basic ideas in a new light.
Which brings us to something we have been assuming without
noticing; namely, that we can have misconceptions about our
own ideas- their essential nature is not immediately apparent to
us. As Husserl puts it, the problem is to get at pure ideas, to strip
off distortions, misinterpretations and accidental accretions so
that we are left with the bare essences. The process of purification
is by no means simple, and so far we have really not addressed the

problem of methodology at all. But one thing is clear, we will not
get anywhere unless we suspend all our preconceptions, all our
naive beliefs about what is or is not the case, and depend solely
upon what is self-evidently given beyond a shadow of doubt. In
particular, we must put in question the philosophical claims of
natural science to reveal to us the ultimate nature of reality: that
is a usurpation by empirical science (Id pp93-7). It is precisely
that type of unfounded philosophical presupposition which pro-
duces the misconceptions we have about our own ideas. All such
presuppositions must be shed, or at least put in doubt. Philoso-
phy should operate with no assumptions other than those which
are stated clearly from the first, and can be seen to be self-
evidently true. We must get back to the 'principle of all princi-
ples', that 'whatever presents itself in "intuition" in primordial
form ... is simply to be accepted as it gives itself out to be' (Id
p92).
The implication of this argument is that we must set aside our
beliefs about the real until after our philosophical investigation.
As Husserl put it, we must put the real 'in brackets', and suspend
the 'Naturalistic Attitude' we have towards the world (Id p107).
In other words, epistemology is logically prior to ontology or
metaphysics. As far as Husserl is concerned, there is no point in
discussing questions about what does or does not exist until we
have clarified our ideas. An intentional object mayor may not
correspond to a real object. The question of that relationship
must be put aside until we know what the intentional objects are
like. 'Phenomenology', he says toward the end of Ideas (p404),
'starts off with problems of intentionality, but at first quite
generally, and without drawing into its own circle of considera-
tion the question of the real (or true) Being of what we are
conscious of when we are conscious'.
This is a far cry from Kiilpe's 'critical realism' which the young
Heidegger found so appealing. From Husserl's point of view,
Kiilpe was unable to free himself from the Naturalistic Attitude:
malgre lui, his realism was naive. It was natural to assert that the
real is directly given to consciousness, but until this could be
self-evidently demonstrated by direct inspection of our ideas, it
was no more than pure speculation. Similarly for Duns Scotus, or
any brand of medieval realism which Heidegger might espouse.
'First clarify your ideas, and then demonstrate to me the self-
evidence of the proposition, and I will subscribe to its truth', was

Husserl's response to the ontologically impatient. In fact, as he
was not unaware, his postponement of the question of reality
was getting him off the Kantian hook. By sticking at the level of
ideas, which were psychic phenomena, he could leave aside the
Kantian problem of the ultimate inaccessibility of the things in
themselves.
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION
So far then, Husserl had a programme for the investigation of the

essences of ideas, based upon the fundamental truth of the Inten-
tionality of Consciousness. What he lacked was a method for
carrying this into effect: which is where phenomenology came in.
To understand how this came about, we must hark back to the
descriptive psychology of Brentano and Stumpf (amongst
others). They envisaged their work as empirically based
philosophical psychology, and believed we should carefully
examine actual psychical phenomena in order to determine the
fundamental structures of the psyche. Out of such detailed
'phenomenological' study would emerge the essential character-
istics of categories such as judgment, affect, volition, etc., which
doctors and scientists were employing in their work.
What Husserl retained from the programme of his teachers
was the method of detailed description of psychic phenomena.
Indeed, for him it became the method of philosophy, because his
theory of ideas transformed it from a methodological tool of
psychology into the necessary prerequisite for all empirical
research. Yet without one further element the justification for
this transformation is lacking: that element is the notion of
conSCIousness as a stream.
Empirical psychologists such as William James, with whose
work Husserl was thoroughly familiar, used the model of a
'stream' of consciousness for explaining the relationship between
the permanent structure of the psyche and the constant flux of its
phenomenal contents. The senses provide consciousness with a
constant bombardment of sense 'data' or phenomena, which are
the raw material of thinking. They come into consciousness and
flow out of it again in a never-ending stream. 'Consciousness
... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as

"chain" or "train" do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the
first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows ... let us call it the
stream of thought, (or) of consciousness ... ' (james, (1), Vol 1,
p239). Consciousness organizes these 'streaming' phenomena
into meaningful patterns in accordance with the ideas it has
available. If I have the idea 'top hat', I can deploy it as the means
of organizing an otherwise chaotic phenomenal picture. As a
result I recognize the top hat for what it is.
It is this model which Husserl assumes, and which underlies his
thinking about the relationship between phenomena and ideas.
Our psyches may be composed of ideas as the basic building
blocks; but ideas only occur as the organizing principles of
phenomenal appearances. When so organized, the phenomena
become meaningful. What was hitherto a meaningless amalgam,
is now synthesized into the unity of an intentional object. The
intentional object, then, is the particular manifestation of an idea
as the meaning of a unified set of phenomena. The object is
particular, the idea is general. In recognizing an object, con-
sciousness actively synthesizes the phenomena and gives them
meaning in accordance with an idea. The intentional act is there-
fore a meaning-giving (or 'dator') act. In Husserl's sense, there is
no thought without an act of consciousness. 8 Every type of
conscious act employs an idea to organize phenomena (Id,
p246 f£). This applies whatever the origin of the phenomena:
they may be externally caused, as we assume them to be in
perception, or internally generated, as we take memory to be.
This means that the only way of studying our ideas is in their
occurrence in particular acts of consciousness. For the purpose of
getting at the idea, the nature of the particular act is irrelevant.
My idea of 'pick~es' is the same whether I am perceiving them,
remembering them, or simply imagining them. The act may vary;
the content is constant. That is why the 'bracketing' of the real in
no way interferes with our investigation into ideas - the question
of whether the pickles 'really' exist simply does not matter.
Now that he has clarified the relationship between a general
idea, a particular intentional object, and the phenomena of
which it is composed, Husserl is in a position to delineate a
method of getting at the idea. All that he needs to do is to take a
particular occurrence of it and describe in an unprejudiced way
those phenomena which are essential to it. That, in a nutshell, is
his idea of phenomenological method.

Out of the nutshell it is considerably more elaborate. First,
decide the idea to be investigated. Next, fasten upon a particular
occurrence of the idea in an individual act of consciousness.
Suspend the naturalistic attitude, i.e. disregard all preconcep-
tions about the reality-status of the intentional object, and ignore
the apparent mode in which consciousness apprehends the object
(perception, imagination, etc.). Now describe in detail the
phenomena which are synthesized in the object. This reduces the
intentional object to its phenomenal appearance: it achieves the
phenomenological reduction.
The next stage is to get from the particular object to the idea.
This is done by discarding those phenomena which are inessen-
tial to the idea, so that one is left with a specification of the
essential ones. In particular, we consider the phenomenal
description and ask: 'What is it in these phenomena which make
them an appearance of such-and-such, and not another thing?'.
We answer this by varying (in the imagination), particular
phenomena in turn, and seeing which variations leave the object
intact, and which do not. For example, an elephant varied in
colour from grey to white would still be an elephant; but an
elephant varied in size down to the microscopic would be some
other thing. Thus, by a process of 'imaginative variation', we
establish the essence of the idea. This second stage, of getting
from the phenomena to the idea, Husserl called the 'eidetic
reduction' .
I have now outlined the phenomenological method as Husserl
had evolved it between about 1901 and 1907- from the second
volume of the Logical Investigations to the lecture series on The
Idea of Phenomenology (though I have given references to Ideas
since the first clear exposition occurs there). Husserl claimed for
it those merits which he had found in empiricist philosophy, and
more. 9 It returned 'to the things themselves' ('Zu den Sachen
selbst') as they actually appear, whether real or otherwise. On
this firm basis it operated a rigorous method of detailed descrip-
tion and careful analysis. It moved from the actual to the realm of
the possible, delineating the necessary structure of ideas. It was a
scientific and empirically based idealism, which strictly avoided
empty speculation.
THE TRANSCENDENTAL TURN
Over the next few years, however, the emphasis of Husserl's

thinking began to shift away from the object of thought and more
towards the subject of consciousness- the'!' that was implicit in
every conscious act. The first results of this shift were apparent in
Ideas, though the problems raised there continued to exercise
Husserl until the end of his life. They led first of all to a re-
interpretation of the method of reduction, and ultimately to a
major transformation of the notion of intentionality - with
serious consequences for the theory of ideas. The changes can
collectively be called the development of 'transcendental'
phenomenology, for reasons which will become apparent later.
Initially, they were heralded by the elaboration of the 'transcen-
dental' reduction' in Ideas, to which I shall now turn.
In the Logical Investigations the doctrine of the Intentionality
of Consciousness had been first used to belabour psychologism
and establish a field of pure ideas for philosophical investigation,
and then to conduct some investigations into ideal intentional
objects. For Husserl, as for Brentano, the intentionality of con-
sciousness was closely related to the distinction between acts of
consciousness and their contents. The investigation of an inten-
tional object explored the content of a conscious act - what
Husserl was to call the 'noema' (pI. 'noemata'). But just as
consciousness was aware of the content, so equally it was aware
of the act. In acting, that is, in taking an object, consciousness
cannot help but be aware of its own action. This was implicit in
our recognition above, that the mode of appreheonsion of an idea
is irrelevant to the content: it is the same idea whether it is
perceived, remembered or whatever. This self-awareness, or
reflexivity, of consciousness gives us a whole new area for inves-
tigation; that is, a philosophical investigation into the ways in
which consciousness apprehends objects. It will yield knowledge
which is in a sense 'psychological', in that it is about the structure
of the psyche. But it is a priori, philosophical knowledge, based
upon no empirical research. What we are doing is taking the act
(or 'noesis') of perceiving, remembering, etc., as the theme for
our investigation and subjecting it to the same sort of detailed
phenomenological description that we used in approaching the
contents or noemata. Indeed, by thinking about the act or noesis,
we are making it the object or content of a secondary conscious

act- an act of reflection. This is exactly analagous to reflecting
upon die content of a previous act. Moreover, we can take a
single act of consciousness, say hearing a shout, and investigate
first the noematic content (the shout as intentional object), and
then the noetic act (the hearing) (Id, pp258-260). In the latter
case we shall ask 'Wha t makes this act one of hearing, rather than
seeing, remembering or anything else?' Once again we employ
the method of imaginative variation on the phenomena, and the
result is discovery of the essence of hearing. In each case we are
dealing with 'reduced' phenomena, since reality is still bracketed
out by the phenomenological reduction.
By the time he wrote Ideas, Husserl had come to regard the
noetic type of phenomenological investigation as research into
the structure of 'pure' consciousness. By disclosing the a priori
structures which governed even rationality, phenomenology
would produce results of great importance for empirical
psychology. But misreadings of the Logical Investigations had
shown that it was necessary again and again to stress the status of
the philosophical knowledge yielded by the phenomenological
method. Knowledge of the pure consciousness was not know-
ledge of the 'natural' psyche. Because he had never escaped the
natural attitude, Brentano had only investigated the 'natural'
psyche in a world of things (Id p249). Phenomenology, by con-
trast, suspended the world of things and revealed the residue of
consciousness to be absolute. 'The realm of experiences ... is
shut off fast within itself ... It is the whole of Absolute Being .. .
It is essentially independent of all Being of the type of a world or
Nature, and it has no need of these for its existence (Existenz) , (Id
pp156-7).
Philosophical knowledge is thus superior to scientific know-
ledge, because it, and it alone, can be absolute. And of course
absolute knowledge is only to be found within the sphere of pure
consciousness, the realm of ideas. There can be no apodictic
certainty about the realm of the real. Although we have sus-
pended our naive naturalistic beliefs about what does and does
not exist, it is clear that the existence of consciousness cannot be
doubted. It is equally clear that, within the realm of purified
consciousness, the 'I' distinguishes between those intentional
objects which are 'real' and those which are not. Irrespective of
the source of the phenomena which appear in consciousness,
some of them are synthesized into 'reaP objects and others are
not. In this sense, the 'reaP depends upon consciousness. 'The
whole being of the world consists in a certain "meaning" which
presupposes absolute consciousness as the field from which the
meaning is derived' (Id, p169). Thus consciousness even when
purified of naive naturalism is 'transcendental', in that it goes
beyond its 'I' to intentional objects, some of which are 'real' and
therefore 'transcendent' to it. Moreover, the Kantians are wrong
in believing that the real can mean anything other than that
which is given in phenomenal experience.
Husserl was later to go much further in his explorations of the
'transcendental ego' and its relation to the 'transcendent' world,
but in 1913 he managed to maintain an ambiguity about his
ontological beliefs, which therefore remained intriguing for
Heidegger. It now appeared as if the phenomenological reduc-
tion was not so much a postponement of ontology, as a device for
disburdening our thinking of a false ontology, i.e. the natural
scientific account of reality which denies the truth of human
experience and destroys the dignity of the human subject.
For all his claims to be operating purely at the level of con-
sciousness, Husserl was at pains to reject any charge of subjective
idealism (Id p169). Consciousness may 'constitute the real', but
did not create everything that was. 'If the concept of reality is
deri ved from natural realities, from the unities of possible experi-
ence, then "universe", "Nature as a whole", means just so much as
the totality of realities; but to identify the same with the totality
of Being, and therewith to make it absolute, is simply nonsense'
(Idp168).
What Husserl meant by this was that natural science suppress-
ses human consciousness, the only possible absolute, and obs-
cures its works. But for Heidegger it seemed to indicate an
openness to the question of Being with a capital 'B', i.e. that
which is beyond man and nature, and used to be called 'God'.
The sources of mutual misunderstanding were there from the
very beginning.
NOTES
1 For Husserl's attitudes to religion, see Spiegelberg (l), Voll, pp85-87.

2 Spiegelberg (1), p123. See also Ermarth (1), p197 ft.
3 For Husserl's bitter reflections on the consequences of this, see the letters to
Brentano quoted by Spiegelberg (1), Vol 1, pp89-90.
4 Husserl explicitly took up the theory of groups in The Philosophy of Arith-
metic.
5 A listofHusserl's works is given in Appendix 4.
6 By this time psychologism had a long pedigree. Starting as a reaction to
Hegelianism, it reached its peak in the 1870s and 1880s in works by Lotze,
Frege, etc. Husserl's Logical Investigations did the final hatchet job on it.
7 The act /content distinction had been made most clearly by Lotze in 1874.
8 In the broad sense of 'act' . Husserllater qualified this usage. Id, p244.
9 According to his assistant Landgrebe, Husserl's discussion of the 'Natural
Attitude' developed from reading Hume's account of belief, while his con-
cept of 'experience' developed out of a critique of Locke. Landgrebe (1).
3
HUSSERL AND HEIDEGGER: THE
PERIOD OF COLLABORATION
Even if he had known nothing about phenomenology before,
Heidegger could not long have remained in ignorance about it
once Husserl arrived in Freiburg in 1916. Husserl, having at last
achieved the professorial chair, was burning more than ever with
his sense of mission: 'It is utterly beyond doubt that
phenomenology, new and most fertile, will overcome all resis-
tance and stupidity and will enjoy enormous development', he said
in his inaugural lecture. (IL, 1917, p18). But whether these words
were spoken out of confidence or bravado, in his early days at
Freiburg he lacked the means to realize his ambitions. The begin-
nings of his 'school', the Gottingen graduate seminar, was left
behind. He inherited a department built up by a neo-Kantian
hermeneuticist, with not even the interest in post-Brentanian
'phenomenologies' that could be found for example at Marburg,
or Leipzig. Once again he was isolated, making another begin-
ning. But time was short and he needed help - help with the
department, aid in his own work, support in the philosophical
world. Heidegger was just"the man to help him.
Heidegger, of course, had known of Husserl before his arrival.
Soon after going to university he had heard talk of the Logical
Investigations, and had borrowed them from the library. They
sat on his desk for a long time and he 'read in (them) again and
again', but without getting much out of them. They seemed to be
saying something important, but he just could not get his head
round this notion of 'phenomenology'. In particular, in the first
volume Husserl was destroying psychologism, while in the
second he seemed to reinstate it by offering a 'phenomenology'
based on the analysis of acts of consciousness- which was surely
a psychology after all? (MW p76). Yetthe analysis of intentional
acts and their contents in the Fifth Investigation was both subtle
and puzzling: subtle because of its attention to normally neg-
lected aspects of consciousness, and puzzling because of the
ambiguous status of the contents of consciousness - were they
or were they not aspects of the real?
In Heidegger's own words: 'The year 1913 brought an answer'

with the publication of Ideas. When Husserl used terms like
'transcendental' and 'subjectivity' he was talking a language
which anyone trained in neo-Kantianism knew. But he gave a
new dimension to 'transcendental subjectivity'. 'Phenomenology
retained 'experiences of consciousness' as its thematic realm, but
now in the systematically planned and secured investigation of
the structure of acts of experience, together with the investiga-
tion of the objects experienced in those acts with regard to their
objectivity' (MW p77). This was not so far from Kiilpe's critical
realism, but infinitely more subtle. It certainly avoided the neo-
Kantian impasse of the inaccessible thing-in-itself, and seemed
set fair to develop an account of the actual appearance of Being in
things.
In spite of the comments made retrospectively in his old age,
Heidegger probably did not internalize the argument of Ideas
and so come to an understanding of phenomenology, until
shortly before Husserl arrived. His early works reveal no direct
influence, and although as we noted in Chapter One there is an
influence detectable in the Scows work, it probably came more
indirectly through the person of Emil Lask than directly from
Husserl's works (MW p78). The connection between Scotus and
phenomenology lies in the idea of a formal logic or grammar
which determines the structure of thinking and is discoverable a
priori. The difference lies in the positive Scotist assertion that this
structure mirrors the structure of Being, as against Husserl's
apparent refusal in the Logical Investigations to move beyond
the realm of the psychic. Unquestionably, however, the Investig-
ations opened up at the level of ideas a field of research far more
profound than what was available in SCOWs' speculative gram-
mar. And Husserl's Ideas was sufficiently ambiguous ontologi-
cally to leave open the possibility of positive phenomenological
work on the ways in which Being revealed itself.
But what clinched the matter and made Heidegger call himself
a phenomenologist, was his direct practical experience of what
Husserl meant by philosophizing in a phenomenological man-
ner. 'Husserl's teaching took place in the form of a step-by-step
training in phenomenological "seeing" which at the same time
demanded that one relinquished the untested use of philosophi-
cal knowledge. But it also demanded that one give up introducing
the authority of the great thinkers into the conversation' (MW
Husserl and Heidegger: the Period of Collaboration 37
p78). As a result, says Heidegger: 'My perplexity (about the

meaning of phenomenology) decreased slowly, my confusion
dissolved laboriously'. To the scholastically inclined her-
meneuticist, Husserl's dismissal of the authorities was as refresh-
ing as a bucket of cold water. Henceforth only their pertinence
to the here and now was to justify studying them.
Heidegger's apprenticeship in Husserl's 'workshop' was how-
ever soon interrupted by the war. In 1917 he was called up, but at
first managed to combine military service with his academic
work. During the day he worked with the military mail in
Freiburg; when he finished he gave his lectures and seminars at
the university. He must also have found time for courtship, for in
that same year he got married. Before long, however, he was
posted to the Western Front, where he served at a meteorological
station. The hiatus in his academic career lasted until 1919, when
he was back in Freiburg, formally working as Husserl's assistant.
In that year his elder son was born; in the following year, the
younger.
The war, the Armistice and what followed, had profound and
far reaching effects throughout German society. Heidegger was
as sensitive to these changes as anyone, though the tragedy of the
war was far greater for Husserl than for him. Of Husserl's two
sons the younger had been killed at Verdun, and the older seri-
ously wounded twice in Flanders. As things developed Husserl,
now in his sixties, was to see the events of the twenties as an
ever-more depressing decline. For Heidegger, the universally
acknowledged crisis of culture and societyl was an opportunity
for heroic beginnings. What was needed was a philosophy in tune
with the times, and Heidegger was destined to provide one.
In 1919, however, this was far from apparent, and for the next
four years the two men worked harmoniously together. Indeed,
their cooperation and complementarity worked so well, that
after a couple of years Husserl could say 'phenomenology, that is
I and Heidegger, and no one else'. (Gadamer (2) p143). Their
work was cooperative in that Heidegger participated in Husserl's
seminars, had frequent philosophical discussions with him out-
side these classes, had free access to Husserl's papers, and indeed
was supposed to work with him in preparing them for publica-
tion (B & T, p489). Heidegger seemed to identify himself with
Husserl's phenomenology; he learned and began to apply Hus-
serl's method- as he understood it. Their work was complemen-
tary in that Heidegger concentrated on the historical side of the
teaching programme, which Husserl had neither much interest in
nor much knowledge of. So while Husserl was doing thematic
studies in phenomenology, Heidegger taught courses on Aris-
totle, ancient Scepticism, Augustine and neo-platonism, medieval
mysticism, Descartes, Kant and Nineteenth Century German
Idealism. 2 While Husserl worked from his notes or thought
aloud, Heidegger worked from the text. Even when Heidegger
began to give courses on 'phenomenology' he did it textually by
taking Husserl's Ideas or, more significantly the (suppressed)
sixth Logical Investigation (MW, p79). Heidegger's insistence
on using this text, which Husserl now regarded as twenty years
out of date and far surpassed by the development of transcenden-
tal phenomenology, was an indication of the coming rift.
What appeared to be complementarity of subject matter
within an identical method in fact obscured the differences bet-
ween the two men which had always been there. Heidegger's
insistence on working from texts was part of the unshakable
legacy of hermeneutics. Although he may have thought he was
simply applying Husserl's method to textual exegesis, in fact he
was forever going beyond it. He was doing something which
Husserl did not do. It may have seemed merely a matter of
personal predilection on the part of each; but what Husserl did in
analysing the phenomena of consciousness owed nothing to
hermeneutic exegesis, while what Heidegger did in interpreting a
text was fundamentally an exegetic exercise.
However, they both agreed they were rejecting a neo-Kantian
dualism, working by detailed description of the phenomena
given in consciousness, penetrating through those surface
appearances to the essential meanings hidden within them, and
uncovering the a priori structures of the transcendental subject.
In particular, Husserl's work had reached a stage which fasci-
nated Heidegger, and there was undoubtedly a great deal of give
and take between the two on this. The work was on the structures
of the lived world; and the aspect which particularly intrigued
Heidegger was its relationship to time.
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF INTERNAL TIME

CONSCIOUSNESS
Back in 1904-5 at Gottingen Husserl had given a lecture course

on the phenomena of time, as they are given in conscious experi-
ence. Basically, he argued, time has always been discussed in
philosophy from an objective point of view, and inadequate
attention has been given to our actual experience of time. If we
suspend the natural attitude and therefore our naive belief in
objective time, we can get at the phenomena of temporal exis-
tence and so approach the problem of how the idea of 'time' is
constituted.
Husserl had in fact worked around to the problem of time
from his analyses of perception. He had come to the conclusion
that it is essential to perception for an object to endure. It is of
course possible to recognize a real object in a momentary glimpse
- once we are familiar with it. But the meaning of that object-
what we understand in becoming familiar with it in the first place
- is not something momentary. A real object is given in three
dimensions, with different sides which it is impossible to see
simultaneously. The sequence of perspective views which are
revealed as we turn an object over or walk round it, are related in
no simply describable way. These complex phenomena are
synthesized into the unity of, say, a cube- an idea which can be
simply grasped. Yet the idea and the unity actually contain an
extrapolation beyond what was immediately given. I do not need
to have seen the cube from every conceivable perspective in order
to synthesize its unity; but having produced the synthesis (i.e.
identified the cube) I can anticipate perspectives as yet unseen.
This anticipation of what is to come is, says Husserl, an essential
part of perceiving the real. For example, I can establish the
difference between the real and the illusory by carrying out tests:
I shift my position, look closer, turn the object over, touch it etc.
In testing, I compare the actual phenomena with the anticipated
phenomena. And while I rarely need to do it in practice, the
possibility of carrying out such tests is intrinsic to the idea of the
'real' .
Perception, the identification of an object as real, Husserl says,
necessarily implies a synthesis of phenomena through time. As
far as the subject is concerned, this involves retention of the
phenomena which have just passed, and the anticIpation (or

'protention') of phenomena yet to come. Like the object, the
subject of consciousness must perdure through time; though the
subject must also be aware of it. But here comes the crunch! The
awareness of time, as the passage of the flux of conscious
phenomena, must accompany all other awarenesses. Time, to use
Husserl's term, must be a 'horizon' for all conscious experience.
It is therefore unlike an ordinary object of perception or other
intentional object. To investigate the idea of cube I ask 'What
enables me to identify this object as a cube and not another
thing?'; and the question delineates a set of phenomena for me to
work on. There is a discrete, 'observable', object intended by my
act of consciousness. With 'time', however, there is no such easily
identifiable intentional object. It appears, as it were, 'unnoticed',
in acts of consciousness which take other intentional objects.
Now the fact that this awareness is ancillary (non-thematic or
'non-thetic'), need not of itself disturb us too much. We already
know that consciousness has the 'non-thetic', incidental aware-
ness of its own acts, that we called 'reflexivity'. In thinking I
know that I am thinking, in remembering I know that I am
remembering, etc. But the non-thetic awareness of time extends
to all conscious acts. We must therefore accept that a fundamen-
tal characteristic of consciousness is its 'permanent' awareness of
time: time is the inescapable background to, or permanent hori-
zon of, all conscious experience, even though we don't often
think about it.
This conclusion ofHusserl's, which if viewed in one way seems
utterly obvious and trite, was to hit Heidegger with the force of
revelation. The mistake of the neo-Kantians, indeed, of western
metaphysics in general, was to overlook this oh-so-obvious
truth: that the fundamental structure of human consciousness on
the one hand, and the world and its contents on the other, was
temporal. Even Dilthey had failed to follow up his initial insights
into the temporality of life. Everyone had supposed (at least
everyone since Socrates) that you could analyse static entities;
whereas fundamentally they were dynamic, extended and
attenuated in time. The static entities, the Cartesian or even
Aristotelian 'substances', including the soul-substance or spirit,
were abstractions, distortions of our experience of ourselves and
the world.
Of all Husserl's papers available ·to him, it was those 1905
lectures on 'The Phenomenology of Internal Time Conscious-
ness' which Heidegger chose to edit.
THE LIVED WORLD
'Consciousness on the one hand, and the world and its contents
on the other': with this phrase we have slipped over to the other
aspect of Husserl's developing phenomenology which was to
prove so fruitful for Heidegger - the lived-world. At least since
Dilthey, this notion of the Lebenswelt or lived-world had
attained a certain currency in German philosophical circles. But
Husserl, poring over Dilthey's 'psychology' in these years and
finding it ever more fruitful, 3 developed and elaborated the
notion at great length, until in the end it became one of his more
fertile legacies to his followers. 4
With respect to Husserl's analysis of perception, it soon
became clear that time was not the only 'horizon' of all percep-
tual acts. Another was space. What happens when consciousness
constitutes the unity which is a real object? It synthesizes certain
phenomena out of the temporal flux, says Husserl, and identifies
them as belonging to the object perceived. But the phenomenal
flux is obviously composed of more than what becomes synthe-
sized into an individual object. Indeed, the object appears as
emerging out of, or in contrast to, a background. At its broadest,
that background is the whole phenomenal stream past, present
and future. But for purposes of perception it is much more
restricted than that: it is the whole of what is given now as the
perceptual field.
The analysis of time phenomena, however, has revealed that
the 'now' referred to cannot be treated as a simple instant. The
operative 'now' of the perceptual field is more like a sort of
temporal 'area' than the static representation of a snapshot. As
we walk round the cube observing the changing perspectival
views we are in each case distinguishing them from a changing
background. If we complete the circuit and come back to our
starting point, we have en route taken in as background the
whole of the visual field. And this visual field as a whole retains a
certain constancy while we look from one object to another, as
well as from one side to another of the same object.
The perceptual field however is not confined to the visual. The
establishment of the object as real is trans-sensory. When talking
previously of tests, we envisaged touching it, walking around it.
Vision alone is not adequate to establish reality. Indeed it is a
profound mistake to suppose that it is, though one which has
frequently been made in the history of philosophy. An account of
consciousness which relates it to the real purely as a visual
observer, can easily be corrected by phenomenology- by actual
attention to the phenomena of perception. What these
phenomena reveal is that the real is given to us in a synthesis
which unifies the experience of all the senses. The real as it
confronts us has visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory charac-
teristics.
If we now attend to the background out of which the particular
real object emerges, then not only does it perdure through our
survey of this object, but it is in a sense continuous throughout all
our experience of the real. If I identify a chestnut tree in the park
at 12.30, and a lime tree in the avenue at 12.45, then the two are
connected by the continuous background of the spatial world of
which I have had continuous experience while walking from one
place to the other. This awareness of the world as background
does not go away if I close my eyes. And when I reawaken after a
night's sleep it reappears together with consciousness. World
then, Husserl concludes, like time, is the constant horizon to all
our conscious acts. And of course 'world' in this sense is not to be
identified with the theoretical construct of the physicist, geolog-
ist or geographer. World, as the horizon of consciousness, is the
inescapable background against which all experience occurs and
out of which all thematic consciousness arises. It is the lived-
world.
The lived-world, however, is not an undifferentiated backdrop
to things and events. It is structured: for example it has an 'up'
and a 'down' to it, a 'near' and a 'far', a centre and a limit. Indeed,
Husserl claims, we have uncovered here a new and exceptionally
rich field for phenomenological investigation: the necessary
structures of the lived-world. And perhaps the most difficult of
these structures, because the most persuasive, is its temporality.
Exactly how does the horizon of time intersect with the horizon
of the world? In each case consciousness has a 'permanent'
awareness, in each case it constantly effects a non-thetic synth-
esis. Together they constitute the indispensable background
without which no meaningful act could arise.
Heidegger could be forgiven, I think, for supposing in his
discussions with Husserl about time as we experience it, and the
world as we live in it, that what was at issue was our mode of
access to what exists. But although that was the issue as far as he
was concerned, he was under no illusion that Husserl shared this
view. In fact, Husserl could not have disagreed more. 'You have
not understood the first principles of phenomenology if you
suppose that we are talking about existence', is what he would
have said. 'The phenomenological reduction brackets out exis-
tence; from then on we are talking only about consciousness,
phenomena and ideas. We investigate the idea of "cube" as inten-
tional object- the "objective correlate" of the conscious I. Simi-
larly we investigate "time" - as intentional object; similarly with
"world". We are talking only about ideas and their interrelation-
ship: how consciousness necessarily must think'. And in response
to the charge that in talking about perception he was talking
about our mode of access to the real, his only defence was 'I am
investigating only our idea of "real": what exists, "being", is
quite another question'.
This imaginery exchange between Husserl and Heidegger did
not take place, though I believe it represents their positions at the
beginning of the twenties. What prevented such clarification of
their differences was the dominating personal role which Husserl
had in the relationship. Those who knew him well agreed that
'his thinking was fundamentally a monologue, even when he
confronted an intimate group'. In his attempts at genuine discus-
sion, even with close assistants such as Eugen Fink, the most he
could do was to assign to the other the role of devil's advocate;
and ultimately 'he always remained his (own) only partner'.5
This lack of sensitivity on Husserl's part, his apparent inability
to appreciate a genuinely held alternative view, kept from him
the profundity of Heidegger's disagreement about the status and
purpose of the investigation. It also ensured that when, much
later, the depth of the difference was borne in upon him willy-
nilly, it came with the force of a betrayal. Be that as it may, as far
as the actual investigations of temporality and lived-world were
concerned, there was genuine discussion and collaboration
between the two men. 6 It was on the subject side of Husserl's
epistemological divide that the differences first became apparent.
THE TRANSCENDENTAL EGO
For Husserl, the lived-world was only the 'objective correlate' of

yet another constancy of consciousness: the transcendental ego.
For when consciousness synthesizes phenomena into the unity of
an intentional object, or when consciousness synthesizes the idea
of the lived-world, it is always accompanied by an awareness of
the subject which constitutes these thought objects. I know all my
acts of consciousness to be mine; I have a non-thetic awareness of
my transcendental ego. This implies the constant unification of
the stream of phenomena as 'mine'. 'As startling (if not at first
sight even contradictory) as it may appear to assert that the flux
of consciousness constitutes its own unity, it is still true,
nevertheless' (PITC, p 1 06).
At its most fundamental, then, the transcendental ego was the
principle of unification of the phenomenal stream - a far cry
from an actual empirical ego or psyche, and very far from being a
describable 'self'. And yet it had to be described in all its barren
purity; for the more Husserl worked at the foundations of
phenomenological certainty, the more starkly it came to depend
on the judgments of the transcendental ego. The early analysis of
the individual act of consciousness confronting a single inten-
tional object was now transformed. That had 'presupposed' the
unified stream and the horizon of the world. Reinterpreted, the
intentionality of consciousness now came to mean a confronta-
tion between two totalities: the transcendental ego and the trans-
cendent lived-world.
This confrontation produces parallel structures in both
totalities- analagous to the noetic-noematic parallelism of indi-
vidual conscious acts. On the object side there is the synthetic
unity of 'world' with its structures of 'time', 'space', etc., all
waiting to be investigated as pure ideas. On the subject side there
is the 'temporality' of the flux of consciousness, the 'spatiality' of
all experience and so on. For each subjective structure there is an
objective correlate and vice-versa. World and ego are conjointly
given in phenomenal experience.
There is another dimension to the problem however: the world
as objective correlate of my consciousness is inhabited by other
people, people whom I know to have consciousness like my own.
Exactly haUl I know this on the basis of their phenomenal
appearance remains to be determined and linked back into the

starting point of Husserl's phenomenology - how I attain
philosophical knowledge which is both apodictic and universal.
As far as the transcendental ego is concerned, an unprejudiced
investigation must take account of all the phenomena of 'mine-
ness', and distinguish their levels. It must separate the 'mineness'
of my whole conscious stream from the 'mineness' which
delimits my body from the surrounding world~ and the 'mine-
ness' which arises in relation to my experience of others. The
objective correlate of this last sense of 'mine' will be the distinc-
tion between 'private' and 'public' in the lived-world. And again,
there is a difference between the 'private' which is inaccessible to
others and the 'private' which just happens to be mine. Indeed,
we are now running up against the fact that the lived-world is not
just constituted by my transcendental ego in isolation: there are
many aspects of it which are constituted 'intersubjectively'. This
is another type of structure in the world as we experience it and
live in it: the intersubjective constitution of the 'real', as opposed
to the 'reality' of things in my phenomenal experience.
These problems were preoccupying and perplexing Husserl
throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s: problems of the rela-
tionship between transcendental ego and transcendent world, of
the corresponding structures of each, and of the mode of access
to other consciousnesses, of the intersubjective constitution of
objectivity etc. But throughout, he persistently maintained that
he was operating purely at the level of ideas and their necessary
interrelationship: for him the validity of the whole exercise
depended upon this. The alternative was a relapse into a new
form of psychologism, or as he later accused Heidegger, of
anthropologism (P & A, 1931). The development of his own
thinking he therefore interpreted as an increasing radicalization,
a re-interpretation of the phenomenological reduction at ever
more profound levels. Each discovery of a previously unsus-
pected presupposition, be it the horizon of 'time' or the intersub-
jective constitution of 'world', revealed a new barrier to be
undermined. The aim was always to dig deeper until the absolute
bedrock of pure phenomena was reached, because only on that
base could the edifice of absolute knowledge be reared. The final,
transcendental reduction to the pure ego was designed to achieve
this.
Heidegger saw this regress in quite a different way however.
The more Husser! asserted the necessity of reduction to the
transcendental ego, the more Heidegger saw a relapse into an
obsolete neo-Kantianism. The more Husser! emphasized the
purely ideal character of the enterprise, the more Heidegger saw
a retreat from real and pressing problems. From Heidegger's
perspective, Husserl seemed set on denying the real significance
of what he was doing - actually uncovering the structures of
what exists. 'What occurs for the phenomenology of acts of
consciousness as the self-manifestation of phenomena is thought
more originally by Aristotle and in all Greek thinking and exis-
tence as aletheia, as the unconcealedness of what-is-present, its
being revealed, its showing itself' (MW, p79).
Nothing could be more wrong, in fact, than Husserl's pretence
that he could suspend the question of existence. He was not in
fact doing it, because it could not be done. And the more he
thought he was doing it the more he avoided the questions at the
centre of his confusions, or rather, the more he approached them
in a way which admitted of no solution. The existence of the
world, as that which confronts consciousness, could not be sus-
pended: nor indeed was Husserl really suspending it. The exis-
tence of human consciousness which, as embodied awareness,
confronts the world, could not be suspended. And to talk about
the relationship between them as if it were fundamentally a
matter of knowledge, was to overlook the truth of the hermeneu-
tic tradition that knowing is founded upon a more primitive
practical understanding of life in the world.
JASPERS 'EXISTENZPHILOSOPHIE'
In 1919, the tradition of 'Lebensphilosophie' (or philosophy of

life) was passionately reasserted by a psychotherapist who was
turning to philosophy to find the meaning of life. Karl Jaspers'
Psychology of World Views 7 found a ready audience in the
dislocated world of the post-war German intellectuals. Against
the background of the crisis and collapse of state institutions, of
social 'disintegration', of abortive revolutions and freebooting
private armies, Jaspers proclaimed the integrity of the individual.
Extreme situations could bring out the individual best. Drawing
on Kierkegaard, Jaspers wrote of anxiety (angst) and death as the
limit-situations (Grenzsituationen) which reveal to man the truth
about himself, the truth of his existence (Existenz). This 'Exis-
tenzphilosophie' was as apt for the times as Sartre's 'Existen-
tialisme' was to be in the aftermath of the second world war. It
was philosophy for living - true Lebensphilosophie. It had a
profound effect on those to whom it appealed - and Heidegger
was amongst them.
But if Jaspers expressed, and expressed powerfully, the spirit
of the times, Heidegger the academic was in no doubt about the
inadequacy of this expression. Jaspers was not (yet) a
philosopher: his work lacked both method and rigour. The book
was sloppy, with no patience for detail. But it was a moving book
and a vital counterweight to Husserl's dessicated academicism.
Between 1919 and 1921 Heidegger worked on a critique of
Jaspers' book. s He seems to have intended it for publication, but
eventually gave up the idea and sent his critical appreciation
directly to Jaspers. He hoped that Jaspers might revise subse-
quent editions in the light of his comments, but Jaspers said he
could not tinker with what had been a very personal statement at
a particular time: only a complete rewrite would be possible. The
result of this exchange was a friendship which lasted until
Heidegger's identification with Nazism in 1933.
For all his methodological criticism, Heidegger praises Jaspers
for the 'significance' of his book. (Krell(I), pI48). The 'strongest'
part of the entire analysis is the description of the limit-
situations, particularly death and guilt. This 'explication of the
original motivating situations from which fundamental
philosophical experiences spring' must provide the basis for the
'destruction of what is transmitted in our intellectual history'
(pI48). Jaspers does not manage to transcend this: he has 'led
Lebensphilosophie to the central issue of the Existenzphanome-
non', (p 150) but fails to give it adequate conceptual expression.
'Existenz is ... a definite manner of Being, a certain sense of the
"is", which "is" essentially in the sense of (I) "am". It is a sense
that is not possessed genuinely in any sort of theoretical opinion,
but rather in the process ofthe "am" , (pI51).
All explanation must begin with the fundamental experience
of existence that 'radically and purely involves me myself', and
not as a particular instance of some 'universal' (pI51). (So much
for Husserl!) One must define 'life's striving' as the factical
inclination towards one's own existence, that is, as an a priori
structure 'of the disclosure and holding open of a horizon of
expectations with respect to concrete preoccupations' (pIS 1).
Only on the basis of such historical self-criticism can the dis-
crepancies between 'who we are and who we think we are' be
exposed. It is the only way back to 'the fundamental question of
the meaning of the "I am" '.
This 'review' of Jaspers is Heidegger's only published work
from the period of collaboration with Husserl. What it reveals is
that while at one level Heidegger was cooperating with and
learning from Husserl, at a deeper level he had already articu-
lated fundamental criticisms of his mentor. Moreover, what the
Jasper's book did was to identify a central problematic for
Heidegger: the need to give an account of the a priori structures
of individual human existence - not Husserl's bloodless 'con-
sciousness', but the anguished and throbbing human being. Jas-
pers had gone further; he had set out the markers for that account
in his concept of the limit-situation. The way to get at the truth
was through the extremity, particularly the extremity of death.
But if blood had to be pumped into the corpse of Husserl's 'ego',
a methodological skeleton was needed to stiffen the jelly of
Jaspers' 'existenz'. Here, then, was a project - the rigorous
phenomenological account of human existence - a project
which was to be realized in the Marburg years by the writing of
Being and Time
NOTES
1 c.f. Gay (1), Spiegelberg (1) Vol 1, pp79-80, Gadamer (2) p198 ff, Forman
(1) p30 ff, etc.
2 Richardson (1) pp663-4.
3 d. Husserl'sPhenomenological Psychology, p3 ff.
4 Landgrebe, Schultz, Merleau-Ponty, Gurwitsch, to name but a few.
5 Spiegelberg (1) Vol 1 pp88-9.
6 I find Gadamer's implied (but unsupported) claim of equal partnership dif-
ficult to credit however: 'who was the initiator and who the follower, Husserl
or Heidegger, remains undecided'. Gadamer (2), p 156.
7 Psychologie der Weltanschautmgel1.
8 d. Krell (1). Page references for the remainder of this chapter are to Krell's
article.
PART II
BEING AND TIME

4
MARBURG AND THE PROJECT OF
BEING AND TIME
In 1922 Heidegger was offered an associate professorship at
Marburg. The offer came through the good influence of Paul
Natorp, an established figure of the older generation. Earlier,
Heidegger had sent Natorp the draft of a book on Aristotle,
based on his lectures at Freiburg. 1 The manuscript dealt with a
theme that was clearly hermeneutic - the problems of under-
standing Aristotle today, when not only our language but our
world and our ways of thinking are so very different from those
of the Greeks. This was hermeneutics in the broad sense, the
attempt to make one life-situation intelligible from the stand-
point of another. But Heidegger's purpose went beyond this, and
beyond pure academicism. His aim was to illuminate the nature
and situation of man today: so it was appropriate to invoke not
only the Greeks, but also Augustine and Luther. The result was
an interpretation of Aristotle, indeed a mode of exegesis, which
struck Heidegger's contemporaries as new and exciting. 2
In fact the hermeneutic problem of understanding Aristotle
was one and the same as the hermeneutic problem of understand-
ing the discrepancies between 'who we are and who we think we
are' today. It was part of the project which Heidegger had
formulated in relation to Jaspers' book, of giving a rigorous
account of human existence. His 1920 course on 'Problems of
Pure Phenomenology' had begun that project by tackling the
'hermeneutic of factual existence', and in particular the analysis
of world as 'environment' (Umwelt).1t was not that these preoc-
cupations accidentally spilt over into his Aristotle teaching. It
was rather that he had a single set of concerns that he was trying
to bring into harmony with one another. It was the exercise of
'historical self-criticism' of which he had spoken to Jaspers.
What was beginning to emerge in Heidegger's work was a
thesis about the history of philosophy, indeed the history of
Western thought, that echoed themes of a current best-seller.
Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West had an enormous impact
on German intellectuals in those post-war years: between 1918
52 A H eidegger Critique
and 1926 it sold 100,000 copies. 3 Spengler's book was a massive
and brilliant excursion through various cultures and their
artefacts, hammering home an extreme idealist interpretation of
history. Each culture arose and developed as the manifestation of
its own particular soul: all its artefacts, including science and
philosophy, were expressions of that inner necessity and relative
to it. 'There are no eternal questions, but only questions arising
out of the feelings of a particular being and posed by it' (Spengler
(1) Vol 1, p367). Such cultural relativism was not to Heidegger's
taste. But the notions that philosophy, as the history of the
self-understanding of the individual in the universe, had decayed,
and that with this decay the motor of civilization was running
down, were entirely in tune with his way of thinking. For Speng-
ler, the decline of the West was closely bound up with the rise of
scientific rationality and the technological society which resulted
from it. Heidegger could only agree, and see this as intimately
connected with the centring of philosophy on knowledge (and
knowledge of nature in particular), rather than upon the ques-
tion of Being.
From this perspective, the problem of understanding Aristotle
was the problem of overcoming our own decadence. Our think-
ing, indeed even our language, was corrupt. This was why the
'destruction of what is transmitted in our intellectual history'
was necessary. Jaspers had been unable to overcome it: so had
Husserl, for all his suspension of the 'Natural Attitude'. It was
not that Aristotle had got the answers; but he had been in a
fortunate position of innocence and, most crucially, the language
available to him was in a purer form than that given to us. For
him, as for all the Greeks, it was therefore still possible to pose
questions and to pose them in the right way. Above all, it was still
possible to pose the Question of Being because the primordial
wondermentin the face of Being had not yet been suppressed.
'European science is advancing towards self-destruction
through refinement of the intellect ... But from Skepsis a path
leads to the "second religiousness" " wrote Spengler (Vol 1,
p424).4 And that was Heidegger's hope- a hope which he was
still expressing in virtually the same form in the last years of his
life. 5 It was the hope of inducing the second religiousness by
re-opening the question of Being that made the offer of a job at
Marburg particularly attractive. Marburg had long been a centre
of theological studies and home of neo-Kantianism in both
Marburg and the Project of 'Being and Time' 53
philosophy and theology.s But the post-war disturbances were
rocking even the solidities of Marburg theology, and recently
some ugly cracks had begun to appear in the neo-Kantian facade.
Max Scheler, who had developed a 'phenomenology' related to
Husserl's but deliberately at a distance from it, had considerably
impressed Nicholai Hartmann - the then leading light of the
philosophical avant-garde. Scheler's work Formalism in Ethics
and Material Ethics of Value had been published in 1916 as the
second and third volumes of Husserl's phenomenological year-
book. In it he had argued that attention to the actual phenomena
of ethical value reveals the total inadequacy of any account based
on Kantian premises. The phenomena of ethical value constitute
a structured field far broader than Kant's consciousness of the
moral 'ought'. Those around Hartmann were bound to welcome
Heidegger, the phenomenologist from Freiburg who was
thoroughly familiar with Scheler's work, and indeed who
regarded it as second only to Husserl's in phenomenology (MW
pp80--81).7
In theology proper, Malburg was currently coping with the
first salvoes from Rudolph Bultmann. Ultimately Bultmann was
to emerge as a leading protestant theologian, enormously influ-
enced by Heidegger, with whom he maintained a life-long friend-
ship.s But at that time he was attacking the liberal tradition of
Marburg theology with his critique of Christian mythology. The
historical person of Jesus, he argued, had soon been turned into a
myth by primitive Christianity. There was no longer any possibil-
ity of disentangling the real from the mythical, since the myth had
transmogrified historical reality in an irreversible way. But that
didn't matter, since that sort of historical scholarship missed the
theological point. The truth of the myth is not dependent upon
what actually happened in history. It is a message addressed by
God to man, a 'kerygma' or divine call, which is not restricted by
historical events or particular formulations. What was necessary
was to become attuned to the eternal call which the literal
interpretation of scripture interferes with. It is a hermeneutic
problem - to 'demythologize' scripture so that we can hear the
word of God it contains. 9
What Bultmann was trying to do with scripture seemed very
similar to what Heidegger wanted to do with Aristotle, with one
important difference. Heidegger was not even sure that theology
was possible: didn't it presuppose a naturalistic conception of
God for which no justification could be offered? Shortly after his

arrival at Marburg in 1923, Heidegger took part in a debate in
the theology faculty. The true task of theology, he said, is to seek
the word that is able to call one to faith and preserve one in faith.
That task has been forgotten, and must be rediscovered.1O 'The
call', 'the word', Bultmann's 'kerygma' were not already given
for theology to elaborate upon. The hermeneutic problem of
theology was to prepare the individual for hearing: to
'demythologize' in Bultmann's terms; or in Heidegger's own to
'destroy what is transmitted in our intellectual history'.
To the avant-garde, this philosophical undercutting of estab-
lishment theology, so much in sympathy with Bultmann's
attacks, threw all the emphasis back to a Kierkegaardian loca-
tion: that of the individual's direct relationship with God. And
indeed, this was the same location which Jaspers, also despairing
of the edifices of social knowledge, had begun to explore in its
limit-situations. Philosophy was acquiring a new importance.
And even beyond the limits of Christianity, Buber, the German
Jew, was contributing to the same debate with his 1922 explora-
tion of man's relationship to the world, to his fellow and to God,
in I and Thou. 11 The way was being prepared for a great synth-
esis: the synthesis which Heidegger spent his first three years at
Marburg constructing (MW p80).
THE PROJECT OF BEING AND TIME
Heidegger's own account of the completion and publication of

the Being and Time text is a rather flippant dramatization (MW
p80). 'Professor Heidegger- you have got to publish something
now. Do you have a manuscript?'. So, according to Heidegger,
said the dean of the Marburg philosophy faculty in the winter of
1925-6. The purpose of publication was to secure Nicholai
Hartmann's full professorship for Heidegger. The faculty had
proposed his name to the ministry in Berlin, but it had been
rejected because Heidegger had published nothing in ten years.
Husserl arranged with the publishers of the Phenomenological
Yearbook to run off fifteen proof sheets and these were rushed to
Berlin. Nevertheless, they were judged inadequate. By April
1926, however, Heideggcr had completed the manuscript, and
by the following February Being and Time was in print as the
eighth volume of the Yearbook, published under Husserl's
editorship. It was dedicated to Husserl 'in friendship and
admiration' .
The text is in fact very uneven in quality, and towards the end
there are distinct signs of a rushed completion: Chapters five and
six of part two are full of unfinished discussions, postponements,
and at one point four pages of barely digested quotations
(pp451-454). Be that as it may, I propose to treat the work as it
stands, and in the order of its presentation. In the remainder of
this, and in the succeeding chapters I shall try to give a sympathe-
tic exposition of the argument of Being and Time, saving my
criticisms until we have actually understood what Heidegger is
trying to say. A genuine critical evaluation will be possible only
on the basis of an adequate understanding of the text. I shall use
the Macquarrie & Robinson translation and indicate any devia-
tions from it. From now on page numbers in the text will refer to
Being and Time, unless otherwise stated.
The Introduction to the work was, as it happens, written after
the rest of the book (BW, p38).1t clearly belongs at the beginning
though, since it sets out to explain what Heidegger intends to do,
why he intends to do it, and how he means to proceed. In short, it
describes his project.
He begins (p19) with this quotation from Plato's Sophist: 'For
manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when
you use the expression "being". We however, who used to think
we understood it, have now become perplexed'. And today, says
Heidegger, we neither understand the word 'being', nor are we
perplexed by it. The purpose of the work is to 'reawaken an
understanding for the meaning of this question', to work out
concretely what the Question of Being means. Provisionally, the
aim is to show that time is the 'horizon' for any understanding of
Being at all.
This preliminary over, Heidegger proceeds to the first part of
the introduction, which develops his argument about the Ques-
tion of Being. The Qestion has been forgotten: 'What (Plato and
Aristotle) wrested with the utmost intellectual effort from the
phenomena, fragmentary and incipient though it was, has long
since become trivialized' (p21). Instead, 'on the basis of the
Greeks' initial contributions ... a dogma has developed ...
which sanctions (the) complete neglect of the Question of Being'
(p22). This dogma is sustained by three 'presuppositions': that

Being is the most 'universal' concept, that it is indefinable, and
that it is 'self-evident'. These presuppositions are not untrue, but
neither are they grounds for dismissing the question.
The universality of the concept was recognized by Aristotle:
'Being' is in some sense understood whenever any thing is judged
to exist. But, Heidegger argues, Aristotle also realized that Being
as a universal is not simply the aggregate of all existing things, as
the dogma would have us believe. It is the transcendent unity of
all things; what Scotus called a unity of analogy. In this sense the
universality of Being remains mysterious.
The second presupposition states that 'Being' is indefinable-
which is true. But this does not dispose of the problem of explain-
ing its meaning: it merely recognizes that its meaning cannot be
encapsulated within a definition. The third presupposition states
that 'Being' is a self-evident concept: which is also true in a sense.
We all understand the 'is' of 'the sky is blue'. But the nature of
that understanding is not articulated: indeed, if asked to explain
it we are inarticulate. In short, all these presupposed 'reasons' for
ignoring the question turn ou t to be no reasons at all. When
examined, they reveal that the question not only lacks an answer
butis itself obscure. Hence it must be formulated.
What is lacking in the formulation of Heidegger's argument is
the guts of his concern about Being. He refers to it as a 'question',
but it's not so much that as a problem, or rather the wonderment
in the face of Being that Heidegger wants to reawaken. The
presuppositions need suspending and the dogma needs to be
destroyed before the wonderment can arise. And right here at the
beginning of his argument we see him characteristically develop-
ing a Scotist interpretation of Aristotle, a phenomenological
suspension of 'presuppositions' (though in a subtly different
sense from Husserl's), and a hermeneutic concept of meaning as
circular rather than axiomatically definable. In discussing self-
evidence he gratuitously fires a salvo in the direction of the
younger Husser!: 'The appeal to self-evidence in the realm of
philosophical basic concepts ... is a dubious procedure', since
self-evidence itself is at issue (BW p44). By 1926 the older Hus-
ser! agreed with the statement, if not the tone in which it was
expressed. 12
The Question of Being, then, must be formulated (p24). To
this end, says Heidegger, a short formal exegesis of the nature of
questioning will help. Every inquiry is a seeking. Some entity is

sought, some entity is questioned, and something is to be disco-
vered in the process. Furthermore, an enquiry implies a ques-
tioner. With respect to the Question of Being, we know what we
are seeking because we already have a vague understanding of
'Being': that is what guides the search. In addition, we know
what we are trying to discover: the meaning of Being. That leaves
us with the problem of what entity to interrogate- answer, the
one in which the meaning of Being can be disclosed. And here we
have it, for there is only one such entity - man. The clue lies in
the fact that the question implies a questioner. We can ask the
question of Being precisely because Being is disclosed to us. We
are the beings which perceive, understand, conceive, choose and
question. It is therefore our own being which we must interrogate
in order to disclose the meaning of 'Being'. We (says Heidegger)
shall use the term 'Dasein' (literally 'being-there') for human
being. There is a hermeneutic interrelatedness of Being (Sein) and
Dasein which imparts an apparent circularity to our investiga-
tion. But this circularity is not vicious: it is the 'remarkable
"relatedness backward or forward" , (p28) which is familiar in
hermeneutics and leads to deeper understanding.
The crux of Heidegger's argument here is that man must be
investigated because it is to man, and only to man, that Being
appears. He does not want to deny that animals are aware of
things in some sense, but they are not aware of 'Being - that
which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which
entities are already understood', (pp25-6). The implication
seems to be that both the unityand the meaning of what is escapes
animals. Mere things are of course insensate. Which leaves man
as the only being to which Being appears: thus the investigation
of Being must start with human being. 13
Heidegger is aware that he has not yet established the impor-
tance of the Question of Being. It is, he wants to maintain, 'both
the most basic and the most concrete' of all questions (p29). In
the first place, it has a theoretical priority over all other ques-
tions: it is 'ontologically' prior. All scientific inquiry, he argues in
a manner redolent of Husserl, is founded upon a pre-scientific
understanding of some basic concepts. Today (1927) there is a
widespread recognition that the various sciences need their
foundations clarifying: to HusserI's standard examples of maths
and physics Heidegger adds the 'historical Geisteswissenschaf-
ten' and theology. (In a Spenglerian aside he adds: 'The level

which a science has reached is determined by how far it is capable
of a crisis in its basic concepts' (p29)). The basic concepts
employed determine the possibilities of progress in a science, and
each special science delimits an area of entities as its field. But if
the Being of those entities is itself obscure, then the basic concepts
cannot be properly clarified. Ontological enquiry, Heidegger
states, aiming a direct clout at Husserl, 'remains ... naive and
opaque if its researches into the Being of entities fails to discuss
the meaning of Being in general' (p31). Indeed, this is what it is all
about: 'All ontology ... remains fundamentally blind ... if it
has not previously clarified the meaning of Being ... and grasped
this clarification as its fundamental task.' (BW, p53). The Ques-
tion of Beihg then has a clear theoretical priority over all other
questions.
But the Question has a different, more concrete sort of prior-
ity, which Heidegger calls 'ontic'. The 'ontic' is the level of our
pre-theoretical understanding of how we are and how Being is:
the sort of understanding we demonstrate by our ability to cope
with the world, however inarticulately, in our everyday dealings.
But in order to establish the importance of the Question of Being
for everyday life, Heidegger has to anticipate some of his later
argument, and present it here in a very compressed form.
Science, he argues, is a human activity; one amongst the other
activities of Dasein, and not the most basic (p32). (He is using
'science' in a broad sense which includes all branches of know-
ledge.) But Dasein is not just any entity: it is peculiar in that it
already has some understanding of itself (its own being) and its
relationship to what is (Being). Thus: 'Understanding of Being is
itself a (determining) characteristic of Dasein's Being'. This kind
of Being which Dasein has we call 'existence', to distinguish it
from other entities whose essence can be specified in terms of
their material content (BW, p54). The essence of Dasein lies in its
relatedness to Being, and to itself: 'In each case it has its Being to
be, and has it as its own' (pp32-3). In other words, the essence of
Dasein lies in its 'existence'- its own special way of Being.
This passage is really only intelligible in the light of the later
analysis, but it involves a crucial play on the word 'Being'. The
German word 'sein' is both the infinitive 'to be' and the abstract
noun 'being'. The'sentence just quoted reads in the German 'dass
es je sein Sein als seiniges zu sein hat', mixing the abstract noun,
two uses of the infinitive and the word for 'own' from the same
root. The impression created is one of unintelligible profundity
- a thoroughly characteristic feature of Heidegger's prose. In
fact, Heidegger is here trying to do a number of things all at once.
He is starting with human self-awareness, but is avoiding the
term 'consciousness' since that has a built-in dualist ontology
(Husserl's problem). Self-awareness, he wants to argue, implies
an awareness of 'self'; not self as if it were thing-like, but rather as
a way of existing. 14 And that he wants to link to Being in general,
as the unity of what is: man's way of being is to be self-aware;
man is the self-awareness of Being.
Heidegger's avoidance of conventional terminology is a delib-
erate part of his 'destruction' of the intellectual heritage. His
development of alternative terms he regards as in no way arbi-
trary: they reflect the phenomena more adequately. And since
language used to be more pure before corruption by false theory
set in, adequate terminology is to be found in ordinary, or better
still, archaic German: thus 'Dasein' for human existence.
Because he believes that language in a pure form is the expression
or articulation of what is, the connection between 'Da-sein' and
'Sein' is truly significant. 'Da-sein' is the being-there, the appear-
ing, of Being. And for Heidegger, the fact that English makes no
distinction between 'Being' in the global sense (das Sein) and
'being' in the sense of entity or thing (das Seiende), reveals the
inadequacy of the language. Elsewhere he makes quite explicit
his view that German is the only modern language in which
philosophy is possible. 15
The Introduction to Being and Time, however, has not yet
established the everyday 'ontic' importance of the Question of
Being. Science, 'knowing', he has argued, is not what character-
izes human being. Rather, its essence lies in the fact that its being
is its own: it is aware of its existence for itself. 'Dasein', he
continues, 'always understands itself in terms of its existence-
in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself' (p33).
Inevitably Dasein decides its own existence, but it can either do
this consciously and deliberately, or unconsciously and by
default. 'The question of existence never gets straightened out
except through existing itself' - that is, it must be lived through.
And that is the importance of the Question of Being to everyday
life. The existence of Dasein has an a priori structure which must
be analysed as part of the re-awakening of the Question of Being.
But this analysis of existence, or 'existential analytic', has practi-

cal implications for the way in which we live our lives. There is a
difference between seizing hold of our existence in a full under-
standing of its character, and simply letting go and letting it
happen. This existential analytic is not some dry academic exer-
cise producing knowledge which does not touch us. Rather, it is
the development of our own understanding of how we are, and in
that sense is prior to all our other activities, including science.
This is the ontical priority of the Question of Being.
Dasein is always Being in a World (p33). The world as a
horizon is given simultaneously with the entities within it. Any
ontology which starts with the entities in the world 'has its own
foundation and motivation in Dasein's own ... structure' which
includes a 'pre-ontological understanding of Being'. Thus 'fun-
damental ontology . .. must be sought in the existential analytic
of Dasein' (p34). Dasein is prior to all other entities in its lived,
ontical, self-awareness; prior in its theoretical, ontological dis-
tinctiveness, which carries an awareness of Being; but also prior
since it possesses 'an understanding of the Being of all entities of a
character other than its own'. This last expresses the relationship
of Dasein to things: Dasein provides, says Heidegger, 'the
ontico-ontological condition for the possibilities of any
ontologies'. This priority of Dascin in ontology reveals that 'the
Question of Being is nothing other than the radicalization of an
essential tendency of Being which belongs to Dasein itself- the
pre-ontological understanding of Being' (p35).
We might sum up Heidegger's argument about the importance
of the Question of Being in terms of the triadic relationship
between Dasein, Being, and things. We can only get at Being
through Dasein, because Being appears only to Dasein. Dasein
already understands its own being and the being of things as
expressions of the unity of Being, but this understanding is not
yet articulate. Ordinary life provides us with all the phenomena
we need for an analysis of human existence. This analysis will
illuminate both Being and things (because they appear to
Dasein). Such analysis must be lived through as a transformation
of our own self-understanding. This transformation affects all
our activities including scientific investigations into particular
types of entity in the world.
METHOD
Which brings Beidegger to the problem of method. When we

cQnsider how to approach the analytic of Dasein, he says, we
immediately find a paradox. Ontically, as we live, Dasein is
closest to us - because we are it. But ontologically, in terms of a
theoretical understanding of its Being, it is farthest away. In fact,
Dasein has an in-built tendency to interpret itselfin terms of what
it confronts - the world (p36). Ironically, because of Dasein's
understanding relationship to things (the 'ontico-ontological
priority'), it misunderstands itself. Thus our method, that is our
mode of access to Dasein, must take account of this. It must allow
Dasein to show itself from out of its everyday living, not from out
of some theoretical 'scientific' account. The existential analytic
will, says Heidegger, provide the basis for a philosophical anth-
ropology: though that is not its prime task. It will uncover the
structures of Dasein's Being, and reveal temporality as the
'meaning' of that Being. The structures already uncovered must
next be re-interpreted as modes of Dasein's temporality. Thus it
will become clear that time is the 'horizon' for the understanding
of Being: but 'time' understood through Being's temporality, not
time considered as an entity as it has been from Aristotle to
Bergson. In this way we shall reach the answer to the Question of
Being, by learning 'to conceive the possibilities which the
"Ancients" have made ready for us' (p40).
All research, including ontological enquiry, is an (ontical)
activity ofDasein (p41). Dasein finds its meaning in temporality;
temporality makes 'historicality' possible. 'Historicality' is the
capacity for having history, and is therefore prior to it. In a sense,
Dasein is its past, both as an individual, and as a member of a
generation. This elemental historicality of Dasein can be disco-
vered by the study of tradition. But just as Dasein tends to
misunderstand itself in terms of 'world', it also misunderstands
itself in terms of tradition - the traditional ontology in particu-
lar. 'Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it
over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial
sources from which the categories and concepts handed down to
us have been in part quite genuinely drawn' (p43). The historical-
ity of Dasein has been 'uprooted' by tradition, which prevents
Dasein going back to its past to 'make it productively its own'.
The tradition of ontology which misinterprets Dasein as a thing

in the world has remained unchanged in its essentials since the
Greeks. This tradition must be destroyed, so as to uncover its
authentic foundations. Only thus can we uncover the suppressed
Question of Being, which neither Kant nor Descartes raised, and
which therefore bound their researches into time and the subject
within the limits set by Greek ontology. Once we get back to
those beginnings, we shall find that indeed the Greeks under-
stood the Being of things in terms of time: they are conceived as
'presences'- things given in present time (p47).
So, we must take our clue from the ancients, get back to the
primordial sources which inspired them, and dispense with the
corrupt ontology which has obscured the nature of Being and
human being ever since. There remains the problem of how to get
at the primordial sources. Heidegger's answer is 'phenomenol-
ogy', though not phenomenology as H usserl understands it.
, "Phenomenology" " Heidegger opines (pSO), 'signifies primarily
a methodological cOllception' which in no way characterizes the
objects of research. So much for Husserl's science of ideas; his
intentional objects have been brushed aside in the shift from
consciousness to Dasein. ' "Phenomenology" expresses a maxim
which can be formulated as: "To the things themselves!" , (pSO)-
Heidegger retains at least this from Husserl. But then there
follows a remarkable section of some dozen pages in which
Heidegger sets out what he understands by 'phenomenology'.
What makes it remarkable is that the bulk of this section is a
hermeneutic exegesis of the Greek words 'phainomenon' and
'logos' with regard to their etymological origins and supposed
original meanings.
'Phainomenon', says Heidegger, is not to be identified with
'appearance': rather it signifies the actual showing itself of some-
thing. In the true sense 'phainomenon' cannot be separated from
the thing itself, as Kant attempts to do. As for 'logos', it means
'discourse' in the sense of true speech; that is, making something
which is, manifest through language. (Here Heidegger is drawing
upon Scotist ideas of the revelation of Being through language.)
The primary sense of 'true' is in the simple seeing; only in a
secondary sense can language and propositions be called 'true'
(pS7). So the function of discourse is to let true seeing happen.
Putting the two words 'piJainomellon' and 'logos' together, what
we get is a unified notion of 'letting something show itself as it
actually is'. That is why phenomenology is only a method of

letting us see. And what it lets us see is the things themselves in
their very Being. Indeed 'only as phenomenology, is ontology
possible' (p60). Phenomena, those primordial sources, are for the
most part not given: they are covered up, and there is a persistent
tendency for them to be re-covered. 'Whenever a phenomenolog-
ical concept is drawn from primordial sources there is a possibil-
ity that it may degenerate if communicated in the form of an
assertion. It gets understood in an empty way' (pp60-61). That is
why 'the way in which Being and its structures are encountered
... must be wrested from the objects' in an 'originary' and
'intuitive' grasping. It is because 'phenomena ... are never any-
thing but what goes to make up Being, while Being is in every case
the Being of some entity', that phenomenology must turn to the
things themselves. Thus, 'with regard to its subject-matter,
phenomenology is the science of the Being of en tities - ontology'
(p61).
I have quoted Heidegger's words at length to show how he
turns Husserl's terms back on him, in order to prove not only that
the reality question cannot be suspended, but that true
phenomenology is ontology and Being (not ideas) is its true
subject matter. The method Heidegger uses in this argument is
the hermeneutic exegesis of Greek roots - which are only relev-
ant if you accept his thesis about the purity of the early Greek
language. Given this, it is hardly surprising that Heidegger's next
step is to identify phenomenology and hermeneutics. 'The mean-
ing of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpre-
tation ... The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the
primordial signification of this word, where it designates this
business of interpreting' (pp61-2). Only because of this can
hermeneutics be considered in a secondary sense as the
methodology of the historical Geisteswissenschaften (so much
for Dilthey). So phenomenology is ontology, is hermeneutics-
the whole to be identified with true philosophy, which has as its
essential problematic the disclosure of Being.
'The following investigation', Heidegger adds, 'would not
have been possible if the ground had not been prepared by
Edmund Husserl, with whose Logische Untersuchungen
phenomenology first emerged'. But Husserl really only prepared
the ground; and it is significant that Heidegger mentions only the
Logical Investigations and not the Ideas. 'What is essential in
(phenomenology) does not lie in its actuality as a philosophical
movement. Higher than actuality stands possibility. We can
understand phenomenology only by seizing upon it as a possibil-
ity' (pp62-3). In short, Heidegger is leaving Husserl behind. I6
So, having disposed of method, the only further thing Heideg-
ger needs to explain - in the Introduction - is the design of the
whole treatise. It is in two parts, he says. Part one deals with the
interpretation of Dasein and the explication of time as the hori-
zon for the Question of Being. Part two deals with the destruction
of the history of ontology, concentrating upon Kant, Descartes
and Aristotle. The present volume tackles only the first two of the
three divisions of part one: the analysis of Dasein, and Dasein
and temporality. In fact neither the third division of part one,
'Time and Being', nor any of the proposed three divisions of part
two, ever appeared. So Being and Time as we have it is only the
truncated beginning of Heidegger's projected revelation of the
Question of Being.
NOTES
1 d. Gadamer (2) p200.

2 Gadamer attests to this, as does Hannah Arendt (1) in what must surely be a
gross exaggeration. Though written in old age about the events of youth,
her appreciation is messianic in tone.
3 Forman (1), p30.
4 The passage was revised in the second edition, but not so as to change the
meamng.
5 ego in OSI, p277.
6 d. 'Heidegger and Marburg Theology' in Gadamer (2).
7 See also the dedica tion of KP M to Scheler.
8 On the relationship between Bultmann's thought and Heidegger's see Mac-
quarrie (2).
9 d. Macquarrie (3) p362 ff.
10 Gadamer (2) p198.
11 Buber(I).
12 d. Husserl, E &J.
13 The argument is similar in structure to Locke's in the Epistle which explains
the origin of the 'Essay conceming Human Understanding'. Locke (1) Vol
l,p9.
14 d. Husserl: 'the being of the transcendental ego is for-itself, PL 1929, p25.
15 ego DSI, p282 'When (the French) begin to think they speak German, being
sure that they could not make itwith their own language.'
16 He does not do so, however, without paying his respects. He adds this
footnote, which was retained even through the height of Nazi anti-
semitism: 'If the following investigation has taken any steps forward in
disclosing the 'things themselves', the author must first of all thank E
Husser!, who, by providing his own incisive personal guidance and by freely
turning over his unpublished investigations, familiarized the author with
the most diverse areas of phenomenological research during his student
years in Freiberg' (p489).
5
THE ANALYSIS OF EXISTENCE
'We ourselves are the entities to be analysed. The Being of any
such entity is in each case mine': so Heidegger begins chapter
one. These entities have an understanding of their own Being:
their Being is in each case an issue for them. This radically
differentiates human beings from beings of other types.
Firstly, 'the essence of Dasein lies in its existence' (p67). Exis-
tence )n this sense must not be confused with the type of Being
which other entities have. We (says Heidegger) shall therefore
refer to them as things 'present-at-hand'. Things present-at-hand
can have essential properties which determine their Being.
Dasein cannot. Dasein has only characteristics, which are poss-
ible ways for it to be. 1 Its essence lies in its way of Being, its
'existence' .
Secondly, because Dasein is in each case mine, its Being is
always an issue for it. 'Dasein has always made some sort of
decision as to the way in which it is . . . mine ... It can ...
"choose" itself and win itself; it can also loose itself and never win
itself' (p68). In choosing itself, in appropriating its own (eigen)
Being, Dasein becomes authentic (eigentlich). In rejecting it,
Dasein becomes inauthentic. The fact that Dasein can be inau-
thentic, itself indicates the rejected possibility of authenticity.
Inauthenticity is not a 'lower' degree of Being; indeed Dasein can
be inauthentic when at its most concrete - when excited, when
busily involved in the world etc.
Because we stand in this special relationship to Dasein,
because we are it, we cannot approach it as if it were just another
thing present-at-hand. Dasein determines itself by choosing a
possibility which it somehow understands (p64). We must be
careful in approaching Dasein not to focus upon some differenti-
ated activity like 'knowing', but to take Dasein in the fullness of
its everyday life- its 'average everydayness'. In analysing ordi-
nary human existence, even if it is inauthentic, we are laying bare
how man already understands himself to be: we are articulating
the inarticulate a priori structures. We shall call these structures
The Analysis of Existence 67
'existentials' to distinguish them from the 'categories' which
apply only to things present-at-hand (p70).
The ontological analysis of human existence is not to be con-
fused with anthropology, psychology or biology: it is theoreti-
cally prior to these (p71). What the analytic is trying to do can be
made clearer by comparison with Descartes. His 'cogito ergo
sum', 'I think therefore I am', is taken as the starting point for
modern philosophy, but he never questioned the Being of the
'sum', of the 'I am'. Therefore he could never really grasp the
'cogito' - the nature of thinking. Any position which starts with
an 'I' or subject as the given, falls into the same trap. 'The subject,
the soul, the consciousness, the spirit, the person ... these terms
... are never used without a notable failure to see the need for
enquiring about the Being of the entities thus designated' (p72).
In Dilthey, for example, as in 'any serious and scientifically-
minded "philosophy of life" , there is a striving towards an
understanding of Dasein's Being, but it never gets formulated.
'The Phenomenological Interpretation of personality is ... more
radical ... But the question of the Being of Dasein has a dimen-
sion which this too fails to enter' (p73). Husserl and Scheler may
differ, but 'the question of "personal Being" itself is one which
they no longer raise'. At this point Heidegger adds a qualifying
footnote which refers to Husserl's unpublished work: the impli-
cation is that Husserl may not be totally beyond hope (p489, I, 1,
n ii).
The point is that 'man's Being ... is not simply something we
can compute by adding together those kinds of Being which
body, soul and spirit respectively possess' (p74). But the legacy of
the anthropology of Christianity and the ancient world is dif-
ficult to overcome. Man is supposed to be a 'rational animal': an
animal with reason added. Or he is supposed to be made 'in the
image and likeness of God', where 'God' too gets interpreted on
the basis of the ancient, thing-oriented ontology. With the tradi-
tional anthropology, so with the more modern psychology and
biology: they operate with the presuppositions of the same
ontological tradition, where the Being of man is never put in
question (75).
The 'everydayness' to which Heidegger appeals is not, he says,
to be confused with primitiveness. Rather it is Dasein's way of
Being when active 'in a highly developed and differentiated cul-
ture' (p76). The life of primitive peoples can have positive signifi-
cance for the analysis of Dasein, because '''primitive

phenomena" are often less concealed and less complicated by
extensive self-interpretation on the part of the Dasein in ques-
tion'. But the ethnology we have obscures this, because it is
founded upon the same ontological tradition which is in ques-
tion. The mass of information which we have these days about
so many different cultures may tempt us into the belief that what
is 'universal' is to be established by cross-cultural comparison.
This is not so. Any principle of comparison and classification
itself has philosophical presuppositions which must be addressed
directly.
BEING-IN-THE- WORLD
Now, says Heidegger, we must turn to the structures of Dasein,

what we have called 'existentials' (p78). We have noted that
Dasein is always already in the world. What we have not stressed,
however, is that Dasein's Being-in-the- World is a unitary
phcnomcnon, a 'primary datum' which 'must be seen as a whole'.
We can look at this unitary phenomenon in three ways. We can
look at the side of 'world', that is, the idea of 'worldhood'; or at
t he side of the 'who' of Dasein; or at the relationship between the
two- the 'Being-in'.
Heidegger's exposition here seems obscure, unless we bear in
mind thnt whm he is doing is transposing Husserl's intentionality
of consciousness on to the plane of 'Being'. For Husserl, the act of
consciousness is a unitary phenomenon out of which we can
discriminate the subject (ego), the intentional object (noema), or
the mode by which the subject grasps the object (noesis). Heideg-
ger rejects the terminology of 'consciousness', 'subject' and
'object' on the grounds that it confines itself to the psychical by
its ontological presuppositions, and so can never see the 'world'
as anything more than a projection of the individual conscious-
ness. Illstead, Heidegger's ontology starts with the understand-
ing I have in everyday life, namely that'!' am in the world, and on
that basis alolle am I able to ask about the nature of the world
(for me), about myself, and about the relationship between
myself and the-world.
Because Being-in-the- World is a unitary phenomenon, the first
existential, the primary structure of Dasein, is its 'Being-in' -

that is, its relatedness to world (p79). Later, s.ays Heidegger, we
shall use the three aspects of the unitary phenomenon to struc-
ture the successive stages of our investigation, but first we must
dispel some misconceptions about Dasein's relation to 'world',
its 'Being-in'. In the first place, Dasein is not 'in' the world like
water is 'in' a glass or a garment is 'in' a cupboard. 'In' in that
sense refers to a spatial relationship which properly belongs only
to entities present-at-hand. Space so conceived is a category of
the world, and not an existential of Dasein.
So instead of being 'in' the world like an object in a box, Dasein
is rather 'absorbed' in the world as a dwelling place. Dasein 'has'
the world, it encounters it in a way no object can. The chair
cannot 'encounter' the wall next to it: but Dasein cannot avoid
encounter with the world. So the Being-in, the relationship
between Dasein and world, is fundamentally unlike the con-
tiguity in space of two worldless objects. Heidegger coins the
term 'Sein-bei' for this relationship, a term which Macquarrie
and Robinson translate not very satisfactorily as 'Being-
alongside'. The preposition 'bei' in German has the same conno-
tation as the French 'chez', and this connotation of 'at-homeness'
is one Heidegger intends to exploit. 'Sein-bei' he says, is a second
existential founded upon Being-in (pp80-1): a differentiation
which already indicates that his usage of 'existential' as a struc-
ture ofDasein is to be extremely loose.
The mistake then, says Heidegger, is to regard Dasein as if it
were merely an object present-at-hand of the sort that can be 'in'
space. Dasein can seem to have some object-like characteristics
because some facts are true about it. We shall see later though,
that this 'facticity' of Dasein is ontologically quite different from
the 'facticity' of things, although it does arise from our essential
relatedness to them. Similarly, we shall see that Dasein has its
own Being-in-space: but a spatiality unlike that of things, and
which is founded upon Being-in-the-World in general (p82).
Dasein's Being-in-the-World is always determinate. It has
always absorbed itself in some particular mode of relating to
'World'; producing something, looking after something, under-
taking, considering, discussing, etc. All these ways of Being-in are
characterized by concern. The things we do matter to us. Thus
concern is the third existential: it is 'the Being of a possible
(determinate) way of Being-in-the-World' (p83). Heidegger says
he has not chosen the term 'concern' (Besorgen) because Dasein

happens to be 'practical' and economic, but because of its con-
nection with 'care' (Sorge). It will later become clear that care is
the Being of Dasein.
So Being-in is an inalienable, inescapable characteristic of
Dasein (p84). As yet we have only been able to say what it is not,
for the very good reason that we must first destroy misconcep-
tions before we can progress. Dasein 'gets its ontological under-
standing of itself ... from those entities which it itself is not but
which it encounters "within" its world' (p8S): it understands itself
as object-like. Moreover, it mistakenly conceives its relationship
to those entities as primarily one of 'knowing'. As a result Dasein
actually comes to experience its Being-in-the-World as a relation-
ship between one entity (the world) and another (the soul). Its
true Being-in-the-World becomes invisible; and 'knowing'
becomes so predominant that ordinary practical activity gets
looked upon as deficient- as 'non-theoretical' or 'atheoretical'.
Knowing is a phenomenon, a determinate mode of Being-in-
the-World. But it is commonly interpreted in a superficial and
formal manner, as a 'relation between subject and Object' (p87).
'But subject and Object do not coincide with Dasein and the
world'. Setting up knowing in this way makes an insuperable
problem of how the subject gets from 'inside', to the world
'outside', and returns back again. In practice that is not the
problem, as unprejudiced attention to the phenomena of 'know-
ing' will reveal. Normally, Being-in-the-World is absorbed in its
activity, fascinated by the world it is concernfully involved in
(p88). Knowing arises when Dasein pulls back from this concern-
ful involvement and just looks. 'This kind of Being towards the
world is one which lets us encounter entities-within-the-world
purel y in the way they look (eidos)'.
Far from practical activity being a deficient mode of knowing,
the reverse is true. Knowing is a deficient mode of Being-in-
the- World, a determinate mode of Being-in-the-World in gen-
eral. 'Thus', Heidegger concludes, 'Being-in-the-World as a basic
state, must be Interpreted beforehand' (p90). In other words
(which Heidegger refrains from writing) Husserl could not have
been more wrong in supposing that the Question of Being could
be left until our knowledge of ideas had been clarified. Small
wonder that when the later Husserl was forced to take an
ontological stance, he interpreted Being as a special form of
knowing, and thus remained locked in the subject-object

problematic.
WORLDHOOD
After this preliminary clarification of Dasein's relationship to

world (the existential of 'Being-in'), we can now turn to the
'world' side of Being-in-the-World without falling prey to the
ontological presuppositions embedded in the tradition. The
temptation in approaching 'world' is to look for the phenomena
of 'things' with their 'substantiality' within 'Nature'. But all these
terms conceptualize entities which are within the world and
dependent upon it. In everyday life, 'world' has a pre-ontological
significance: it is 'that wherein a factical Dasein as such can be
said to "live" , (p93) - which is quite different from the totality
of entities present at hand. The distinction that Heidegger is
trying to make here is between the Lebenswelt (lived world), and
the 'world' as understood theoretically or scientifically. Heideg-
ger is taking the Lebenswelt as primary, and the scientific concept
as a theoretical abstraction from it.
But, corresponding to the Lebenswelt there is the structure of
Dasein, (the existential) of always and inevitably 'having a
world'. This existential Heidegger calls 'worldhood'. If Dasein
were not like this, then 'world' could not appear, and concepts
such as that of 'Nature' could never arise. But because it over-
looks this, 'traditional ontology operates in a blind alley' (p94).
We must start then, says Heidegger, with the world of every-
day Dasein and with that aspect of it which is closest to us- the
environment or Umwelt (literally, the world-around). We have
already noted that our primary way of relating to the world is by
practical concernful activity, and not by disinterested observa-
tion. The Greeks had a useful word for things encountered in
such praxis: they called them 'pragmata' (p97). For these
Heidegger adopts the term 'zeug', meaning literally 'gear' or
'equipment', which he uses in the collective sense of a totality of
useful things. This, he argues, is the basic way we encounter
things in the lived world - as interwoven complexes of func-
tional things which are structured in accordance with our inter-
ests, our motivations and our purposes. Things so encountered
are in no way neutral or value-free: we are concerned with them

and about them. He calls them things 'ready-to-hand', in con-
trast to the things 'present-at-hand' of traditional ontology.
We do not encounter things ready-to-hand as disinterested
observers. We encounter them as interested seekers; we look
around them with 'circumspection' (Umsicht) (p98). Heidegger
distinguishes this from the 'just looking' which characterizes
theoretical behaviour. 'The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoret-
ically at all' (p99); because when we are absorbed in the work we
do not stare at the tools. The work carries with it a referential
totality in which the tools have their place, and which is oriented
purposefully towards an end-product. In such concernful activity
we encounter materials and things which are not produced, but
occur 'naturally'. In this way we encounter 'Nature', not as a
theoretical abstraction, but as something living 'which "stirs and
strives", which assails us and enthralls us'. Nature in this sense is
a 'readiness-to-hand' (pl00).
Productive work, however, refers not just to the end product
and to the materials used, but also to the user. The tailor cuts the
cloth to the figure of the wearer. In other words, the referential
totality of the work-world refers to other Daseinen, who live in
the world together with me. The 'work ... is ready-to-hand not
only in the domestic world of the workshop but also in the public
world. Along with the public world the environing Nature
(Umweltnatur) is discovered and is accessible to everyone. In
roads, streets, bridges, buildings, our concern discovers Nature
as having some definite direction. A covered railway platform
takes account of bad weather' street lights take account of
darkness, clocks tacitly refer to the sun, etc. (pl00-l0l).
What Heidegger is trying to establish here, by means of a
hermeneutic of the Lebenswelt, is that ordinary practical activity
presupposes 'world' as a background or horizon. He now goes
on to argue that out of this pre-ontological understanding of
world, things emerge as objects in certain specific ways, and so
the theoretical attitude is born. All these ways of emergence are
characterized by a common feature: the object negates our pur-
poseful activity.
The Analysis of Existel1ce 73
THE EMERGENCE OF OBJECTS
At work, a tool may turn out to be damaged (p102). We discover

this in our normal 'circumspective' dealings; but once disco-
vered, the tool stands out, becomes conspicuous, and we are
forced to look at in a new way. 'Pure presence-at-hand
announces itself in such equipment' (p103). We have now to
attend to the object 'thematically'. Note that when a broken tool
stands out in this way it does so only temporarily, until it is
repaired, and always against a background of a world structured
by our purposeful activity. The environment as a whole is ready-
to-hand; the individual tool becomes a presence. And even if it
cannot be repaired to its former state, it still relapses into the
readiness-to-hand of the environment: the broken spanner gets
used as a hammer, the broken washing-machine as a table-top,
etc.
A second way in which things ready-to-hand can emerge as
presences is when the tool I need is missing. I can't find what I
want, so what I can find becomes obtrusive: it is just there, and
no more. And a third way is when a thing is neither missing nor
broken, but just doesn't work properly - it stands out as obsti-
nate. But these shifts in perspective do not immediately give us
'world'. They merely mark the occasion when world can first
become noticed. Our purposeful activity is interrupted, there is a
break in the referential totality of equipment, and Dasein finds
itself confronted by a 'presence' in the midst of an environment
structured as ready-to-hand. 'World', which encompasses both
the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand, is first noticed as
something with which Dasein was already familiar - as the
'there' of its 'Being-there' (Da-sein). To get at this referential
totality, says Heidegger (p107), we must enquire into the nature
of reference and signs. Bur before we leave the subject, let us note
that the prime meaning of the 'Being-in-itself' of something is not
founded in an object regarded as initially a presence-at-hand:
rather it originated in the readiness-to-hand of the tool 'in itself'
before it failed (p 106).
REFERENCE AND SIGNIFICANCE
The world appears as a referential totality. But that does not

mean that 'world' (i.e. Lebenswelt) can be specified as a set of
formal relationships between pre-existent entities. In the lived
world one thing indicates another, but an indicator is itself part
of the totality of equipment. There are 'signs' in the strict sense of
road signs, pointers and the like, and there are things which
'refer' in the broad sense (pp108-9). Of course, all such refer-
ences indicate 'relations', but relations which take their meaning
from the purposeful totality of which they form a part. And
ultimately, the reference of the structural whole is back to the
purposes of Dasein - as an end in itself (pl16). Dasein has an
understanding of Being: it chooses its acts within a context of
relationships for a purposeful end which expresses its own poten-
tiality. 'The "wherein" of an act of understanding ... is the
phenomenon of the world. And the structure of that to which
Dasein assigns itself is what makes up the worldhood of the
world' (p 119). In other words, it is significance, the significance
of Dasein's choice of possibilities within a context of relation-
ships, that makes up the structure of the world. On this basis
language can arise: the 'Being of words' is founded on Dasein's
prior assignment of significance (p121). We must be clear that
the relationships of things in the world as we live it 'resist any sort
of mathematical functionalization'. Indeed it is only on the basis
of the existential of the world hood of the world that the
categories of being ready-to-hand and being-present-at-hand can
emerge. And only that which is just present-at-hand and no more
can have its 'properties' defined mathematically (p122).
The thrust of Heidegger's argument here is to establish the
lived-world as the source of all meaning, and to press that
through to a re-evaluation of the claims of science to reveal the
ultimate nature of reality. He is not, he argues, 'doing a Husserl'
and 'viciously subjectivizing' Being. 2 He is undercutting the sub-
ject/object split of knowledge theory and getting back to the
primordial way in which we encounter the world - practical
activity. And, he argues, we actually do encounter the world and
know ourselves to be in it. But the world of our practical con-
cerns is a significant world, and one whose significance is struc-
tured by our chosen activities. Science is one such possible activ-
tty which structures the significance of whatever area of the
world it chooses to investigate. But the discoveries which it
formulates are, in a sense, local, and impoverishments of the
richness of the world as we live in it. To press home this argu-
ment, he now turns to a consideration of Descartes' ontology, as
part of the presupposed tradition which needs to be destroyed.
DESCARTES' MISTAKE
Fundamental to Descartes' account of the world is that 'exten-

sion' in space is its basic characteristic (p122). This claim is not
nonsensical: indeed we shall see that it derives its plausibility
from the genuine spatiality of the environment, but distorts this
through the traditional ontology. Descartes makes a radical dis-
tinction between 'ego cogito' and 'res corporea'- the basis of all
subsequent distinction between spirit and nature. But both of
these, together with God, are said to be 'substances' - a concept,
deriving ultimately from Aristotle, which always had two
ambiguous meanings: it meant both the individual substance, or
entity; and also substantiality in general, or the Being of the
entity. So Descartes has a notion of 'substance', which he asserts
applies only to beings whose existence is independent of others;
and yet he applies it across what he admits is the 'infinite differ-
ence' between God and entities within the world. Even the
school men realized that 'Being' could have no single signification
which encompassed both God and things; they understood it as
signification 'by analogy', and ontologically they went no further
than the ancients. 3
Because of the fundamental ambiguity in his notion of sub-
stance, Descartes has to say that' "Being" itself does not "affect" us
and therefore cannot be perceived'; a principle which Kant
merely reiterates when he says that 'Being is not a real predicate'
(p127). Descartes only believes substance to be accessible
through its essential properties: which in the case of matter is
extension.
The result of this ungrounded article of faith is not only that
Being- the Being of entities - becomes inaccessible, but that all
other properties - shape, motion, force, hardness, weight, col-
our- must be reduced to pure extension. They cease to belong to
the real Being of the entity. This contradicts our basic experience
of the world: Descartes does violence to the phenomena, as we
can see if we take his account of , hardness' (p124).
According to him, 'hardness' is nothing more than the resis-
tance a static thing opposes to my approaching hand. 'Thing' and
'hand' are regarded here as two presences side-by-side in the
world. But this completely obscures the fact that hardness can
only arise as a felttollch, and only Dasein can feel a touch (p130).
As a result, Dasein gets treated as a substance, that is as object-
like; and Being, in the full sense of 'Being of the world', gets
reduced to entities regarded in a very selective way.
It is not that objects are not extended in space, but that their
Being does not consist in this. And the sort of Being that objects
have, can only emerge within the horizon of world in general.
The mathematical physics to which Descartes' account of the
world gives rise is a legitimate way of regarding objects, but a
very limited one (p134). The point is not to confuse this with
ultimate reality, but rather to recognize that it itself must rest on a
more adequate account of the Being ofthe World.
SPATIALITY
We are now in a position to appreciate how Descartes' mistake

could arise out of the genuine spatiality of the environment.
Things which are ready-to-hand in our everyday dealings are
more or less close to us (p 135). Indeed, it is characteristic of such
things that they can always be described in terms of how near to,
or far from us, they are. Distance is a fundamental characteristic
of things ready-to-hand; but not distance as measured in centi-
metres or kilometres. The glasses on my nose are 'further away'
from me than the picture on the opposite wall at which I am
looking. In the distance which is determined by my activity (my
'circumspective concern'), the bus I am running for is closer than
the ground under my feet.
There is a second major characteristic which things ready-to-
hand reveal themselves as having- directionality. My activities
structure my environment not only with respect to distance, but
also with respect to direction. These two features locate each
piece of equipment in its proper place in the referential totality:
each item belongs somewhere. And each item belongs in an

immediate context which is an area of the surrounding world: in
other words, a region. We are not talking here about neutral
objects located in an indifferent space, but a lived world struc-
tured by our activity within it.
In such a world the sky has no prior 'geographical' meaning: it
is the overarching region which spans all places and regions. 'The
house has its sunny side and its shady side; the way in which it is
divided up into "rooms" is oriented towards these ... Churches
and graves ... are laid out according to the rising and the setting
of the sun - the regions of life and death, which are determina-
tive for Dasein itself' (p 13 7).
It is our own praxis which discovers to us the regions of the
world: but in our praxis the regions are not thematically given. It
needs an act of attention to bring out that which was already
there, unnoticed. The space which is discovered in the totality of
equipment belongs to the entities as their place. And it can only
be discovered because Dasein itself is spatial (p138).
Corresponding to the distance and direction which character-
ized things ready-to-hand in the world, we find on the side of
Dasein two existential structures 'de-severing' (Entfernung) and
directionality. 'De-severance' is the capacity of Dasein to consti-
tute and overcome distance. By its active attention Dasein can
bring something close, and 'in Dasein there lies an essential
tendency towards closeness' (p 140). Dasein, particularly in
recent years, has expanded its everyday environment (Heidegger
mentions the radio) and brought the world ever closer. 'Remote-
ness' in this context is quite different from measurable distance.
'A good walk', or 'a stone's throw', has a definiteness within the
context of action. Even apparent measurements like 'half·an-
hour's drive' must be understood in the same sense as the dura-
tion of an activity, not as 'thirty minutes'. 'A pathway which is
long "objectively" can be much shorter than one which is "objec-
tively" shorter still, but which is perhaps "hard going" and
comes before us as interminably long. Yet only in thus "coming
before us" is the current world authentically ready-to-hand ...
This "subjectivity" perhaps uncovers the "reality" of the world
at its most real' (pp140-1). This last remark reveals, in conven-
tional terminology, one of Heidegger's major themes.
The real which is given to us in this way always appears as an
'over-there', in relation to the 'here' of Dasein. 'Dasein under-
78 A J--Ieidegger Critique
stands its "here" in terms of its environmental "yonder" ... from
this "yonder" it comes back to its "here" , (p142). This consequ-
ence of dc-severance is the spatiality which belongs essentially to
Dasein. Dasein cannot 'cross over' into the 'yonder' of things
ready-to-hand: wherever it goes it carries its 'here' with it, as an
essential structure. Similarly, it carries its directionality, its right
and left, its up and down. Kant was quite wrong, says Heidegger,
to believe that left and right are 'mere feelings' (p143). They
belong to the essential directionality of Dasein, as structures of its
relatedness to the World.
Only on the basis of this spatiality of Dasein can the concept of
'pure' space emerge. When we allow entities to be encountered in
the world we give them space, we 'make room' for them. This
'making room' for things is an existential structure of Dasein - it
allows 'space' to be discovered. 'Space is not in the subject, nor is
the world in space' (p 146). Rather 'because Dasein is spatial ...
space shows itself as a lJriori'. In other words, 'space' can be
conceptualized out of our prior experience of our own spatiality
in a spatial world. The world is already there before space can be
concei ved: and space is only one aspect of that world.
With this, Heidegger concludes his 'preliminary' analysis of
the 'World'. His planned investigation into Dasein as Being-in-
the- World has thus dealt with the relationship itself ('Being-in')
and with one of the terms (World). He is therefore ready to turn
his attention to the other term, the 'who' of Dasein.
NOTES
1 d. Husserl: the essence of the transcendental ego lies in the 'I can' (PL, p25).
2 He does not makeexplicif reference to Husserl in this context.
3 The reference is again to Scotus.
6
INAUTHENTICITY AND ANXIETY
The account of human existence which Heidegger has so far
developed has been characterized by the attack on 'traditional
ontology'. The usual accounts of man's place in the world, his
relationship to things, and the nature of things themselves, have
all been called into question by the appeal to the phenomena of
lived experience. These phenomena, Heidegger has argued,
reveal that the world is not some value-free, neutral space, but
the living environment in which we pursue our activities. And the
things we encounter in the world are not anonymous substances,
having only measurable extension in space as their essential
characteristic, but tools and materials which are essentially use-
ful in relation to our purposes.
But turning as he now does to people - to the 'who of Dasein'
- Heidegger meets a problem (p149). The appeal to everyday
lived experience has begun to reveal, he believes, the true being of
the world and of things. But the true being of people, he thinks, is
hidden in everyday experience. Must he therefore abandon the
appeal to the lived world? Instead, he chooses to argue that
everyday phenomena contain essential clues, the hidden meaning
of which can be revealed by hermeneutic exegesis. In the process
it will become clear that the cause of this covering up, the
traditional ontology, had its ulterior motive in our ordinary
inauthentic lives. The project of true ontology will thus be
exposed as authentic self-discovery: we shall be rescued (though
each separately) from the corruption into which we have fallen.
In approaching the 'who' of Dasein, says Heidegger, we must
begin with an obvious, but often forgotten truth - that none of
us is alone in the world. Indeed, it is fundamental to our experi-
ence of the world that we are together with others in it (p152).
We found, for example, when we were discussing the world of
work, that things in their very significance necessarily referred to
other people. In the referential totality of the work-world, people
appear as the ends for which purposeful activities are under-
taken. And people, so encountered, are not as the traditional
ontology would have us believe. We do not mistake them for

things present-at-hand to which some soul-substance has been
added (plS4). We do not even mistake them for tools - things
passively ready-to-hand for our manipulation. When I meet
other people, I recognize that I am encountering beings like
myself: other people are essentially like me. Indeed, 'others', says
Heidegger, 'are rather those from whom, for the most part, one
does not distinguish oneself'. This gives a special meaning to the
way in which I am with others in the world. 'The world is always
the one that I share with Others. The world of Dasein is a
with-world (Mitwelt). Being-in is Being-with-others' (pISS).
BEING- WITH-OTHERS
So the appeal to experience reveals the world as essentially a

with-world (Mitwelt). But at the same time Dasein is revealed as
essentially a Being-with (Mit-sein). That is to say, Being-with is
an existential structure of each individual Dasein. It is the neces-
sary capacity for relating to others, on the basis of which actual
relationships can arise. 'Being-with is in every case a character-
istic of one's own Dasein' (p 157), because' "in the first instance"
this entity (Dasein) is unrelated to others' (p 156).1
When we discussed Dasein's relationship to things ready-to-
hand we found that it was characterized by concern: things
matter to us. It is also true that people matter to us; though how
we care about people differs from how we care about things. We
shall, (says Heidegger), use the word 'solicitude' (Fursorge) for
the way in which we care about people, as opposed to the
'concern' (Besorgen) we feel for things. Later we shall realize that
these are both determinate forms of the general phenomenon of
'care' (Sorge), as the way in which my own existence matters to
me.
Solicitude then, is an existential structure of Dasein, though
Dasein usually exhibits it in a deficient mode. 'Being for, against,
or without one another, passing one another by, not "mattering"
to one another- these are possible ways of solicitude. And it is
precisely these ... deficient and indifferent modes that character-
ize everyday, average Being-with-one-another' (plS8). This is
why the traditional ontological account is plausible: people are
Inauthenticity and Anxiety 81
supposed to be just side-by-side as thing-like subjects who do not

essentially care about one another at all. This is a superficial
account of average everydayness, which overlooks the true
meaning of the phenomena.
But if solicitude normally occurs in the deficient mode of
indifference, it also has its positive modes as well. There is in fact
a whole range of such modes. At one extreme there is the soli-
citude that so cares about the other that it takes over for him, and
takes away his own care from him. By concentrating upon what
he is concerned about, this type of solicitude ends up by dominat-
ing the other person and making him dependent. At the other
extreme there is the type of solicitude which addresses itself to the
person of the other - the who of concern rather than the what.
At its best, this type of solicitude is liberating for the other: it
shows him how to care for himself.
In practice, our being together often takes the form of a joint
involvement in some common enterprise. But simply being next
to somebody else doing the same thing can lead to a competitive-
ness which sets people apart. 'The Being-with-one-another of
those who are hired for the same affair often thrives only on
mistrust'. On the other hand, if they are genuinely devoted to the
common cause, 'they ... become authentically bound together,
and this makes possible the right kind of objectivity, which frees
the other in his freedom for himself' (p159). But this 'anthro-
pological' description and classification of the various forms of
Being-with one another, is put by Heidegger 'beyond the limits of
this investigation'.
The appeal to experience, then, has revealed Being-with as an
existential structure of the individual Dasein. The phenomena
also revealed that we already have an understanding of others as
essentially like ourselves. 'Dasein's ... understanding of Being
already implies the understanding of others' (p161). But in talk-
ing about 'understanding', we are referring to what is revealed in
our activities, in our actual ways of relating to others. That is
quite different, however, from the account I usually give of what I
'know' about myself. That account, instead of being the articula-
tion of my own lived experience, is actually based on other
people. That is, self-knowledge is mediated by others. And the
fact that we normally relate to others in the deficient mode of
indifference, means that a particular form of Being-with stands in
the way of genuine self-knowledge.
In my everyday Being with others I constantly compare myself

with them. I am concerned 'whether (my) own Dasein has lagged
behind the others and wants to catch up ... or whether (it)
already has some (lead) over them and sets out to keep them
suppressed' (pp163-4). This competitiveness sets us apart from
one another. Moreover, we are all in subjection to it. We all of us
are so concerned to compare ourselves with 'the others', we are
all so worried about what 'they' will think, that we fail to notice
that 'the other' is never there. 'The other' is no specific person at
a11- though from time to time this or that person can be taken as
representing 'the others'. So who are 'the others'? 'The "who" is
not this one, not that one, not oneself, not some people, and not
the sum of them all. The "who" is the neuter, the "they" (das
Man)' (p164).
THE ANONYMOUS 'ONE'
Here Heidegger again presents the translators with a problem.

'Man' in German is the equivalent of 'one' in such contexts as:
'One does not drink sherry out of a brandy glass'. It is the
impersonal form of the verb, which can equally well be rendered
by the passive, 'It just isn't done! '. Heidegger's claim is that our
everyday existence is dominated by this constant, competitive
reference to the anonymous 'one'. But although there is an
apparent reference to a person in this way of talking, no actual
person is being referred to. Macquarrie and Robinson translate
'das Man (the anonymous "one") as "the they", by analogy with
such usages as 'They always say that .. .'; but this carries much
more implication of 'otherness' than does 'das Man'. 'One
always says .. .', makes it clear that! include myself in this way of
talking. It is crucial to Heidegger's argument that I think of
myself in terms of this anonymous 'one'.
Being with one another in public, Heidegger argues, 'dissolves
one's own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of "the
Others" " and so 'the real dictatorship of the" one" (das Man) is
unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as one takes
pleasure; we read see and judge about literature and art as one
sees and judges; likewise we shrink back from the great mass as
one shrinks back' (p164).2 Thus 'the "one" ... prescribes the
kind of Being ofeverydayness'.
Everyday existence is obsessed with 'averageness' - indeed,
averageness is an existential characteristic of the 'one' as we
understand it. Everything exceptional or out of the ordinary is
suppressed and glossed over; all the true possibilities of Being get
'levelled down' to what 'one' does. 'Apartness, averageness, and
levelling down ... constitute what we know as "publicness" ,
(p165).3 This publicness controls the way we interpret both the
world and ourselves; and although 'it is insensitive to every
difference of level and of genuineness', it is always taken to be
right.
This dominant publicness has a yet more pernicious effect
upon my own self-interpretation. Since I do what 'one' does, it is
the 'one' who is responsible for my actions: I myself am relieved
of that responsibility. It is no longer necessary for me to decide or
make a judgement. As a result, 'everyone is the other, and no one
is himself'. This 'one' then, although it is no actual person, is a
fundamental part, indeed an existential structure, of every
Dasein (p167). 'The self of everyday Dasein is the one-self (das
Man-selbst)', which must be sharply distinguished from the
authentic self. The difficulty which Dasein always faces, is that its
true self is hidden by the public world which absorbs and domi-
nates it. We always have to start from this everyday normality,
which our very language reinforces by the use of the impersonal
'one', and transcend it in the discovery of our own true pos-
sibilities. 'Authentic Being-one's-self ... is an existential modifi-
cation ofthe "one" , (p 168).
In this way, Heidegger explains why the appeal to the
phenomena of everyday experience does not work in a simple
fashion when people are being investigated. The phenomena do
reveal an essential structure (the 'one'), but they do not reveal
true Being. True, that is, authentic Being is therefore to be
regarded as a modification of false or inauthentic Being- which
is more basic. To the Christian this notion presents no difficulty:
man is in a state of fallenness, but contains within himself the
possibility of salvation- if only he will recognize it.
As Heidegger explains it, the Dasein which succeeds in
extricating itself from the 'lostness' of the 'one', does so by
identifying an 'I' at a new, ontological level. He is at pains to
differentiate this conception of authentic self from the purely
formal conception of a transcendental ego. As always, Heidegger
is talking about lived experience as the ground from which all
theorizing springs. Husserl's account of pure ego as the unity of
my manifold intentional acts, is but a pale theoretical shadow of
Heidegger's struggling Dasein, painfully extricating itself from
the 'fallenness' of the public world. The Neitzschean overtones of
this self-elevation above the corrupt masses are very clear.
Heidegger has dealt in a 'preliminary' way with Dasein's rela-

tionship to World, with world itself, and now with Dasein. But,
he argues, the deeper understanding we have now attained
enables us to return to the relationship of Being-in to consider it
more profoundly and in considerably more detail. Before he does
this, however, he inserts a brief discussion which in fact is very
significant in revealing how he thinks of Dasein. Consider, he
says, the 'there' of Being-there (Da-seil1). We have recognized
that Dasein is always already there (Da). We have seen that it
carries its own spatiality in relation to the space of the world. The
'there' has directionality and distance: in particular it is struc-
tured by a 'here' and a 'yonder'. The 'here' side is Dasein's
awareness of itself in the 'yonder' of the surrounding world.
What the 'there' of Dasein reveals, says Heidegger, is that Dasein
is essentially 'uncovered' or 'disclosed'. 'This entity carries in its
ownmost (eigel1tlich) Being the character of not being closed off
(pl?l).
This sounds like an obscure restatement of the fact that human
beings are conscious. But for Heidegger 'consciousness' is a
corrupt term, and he thinks of his alternative description as
literally a more adequate articulation of how it is. Dasein is a
'clearing' in the midst of Being. The idea is that if you make a
clearing in a forest then light is let in and this illumination allows
things to appear. This, he says, is the phenomenological basis of
such conceptions as the 'natural light' of reason. 'Only for an
entity which is existentially cleared in this way does (its)
present-at-hand become accessible in the light or hidden in the
dark. By its very nature, Dasein brings its "there" along with it ...
Dasein is its disclosed ness' (pI?I). Only through Dasein can
Being appear.
MOOD
Turning now to the way in which Dasein is in the world, Heideg-

ger starts by noting that Dasein is always in some mood (p 173). It
may often be the case that Dasein's mood is one of ennui or
indifference: but this is nevertheless still a mood. In such a mood
the world itself may seem a burden 4 - why, we do not know, but
then 'the possibilities of disclosure which belong to cognition
reach far too short a way compared with the primordial disclos-
ure belonging to moods' (p173). Moods reveal how we are in a
very fundamental sense. Indeed they reveal that I always find
myself to be in some state. This is an existential structure which
we can call 'state-of-being'. In fact the term Heidegger uses is
'Befindlichkeit' which carries the definite implication of finding
oneself. 5 Macquarrie and Robinson translate this as 'state-of-
mind', but I shall use the less colloquial 'state-of-being'. Mood,
then, ,is the lived expression of a state-of-being. It discloses my
state-of-being- which is not to say that I articulate it verbally, or
have any intellectual grasp of it. In fact, for the most part Dasein
evades the Being which is disclosed by its moods.
What Dasein discovers through mood is just that-it-is in a
particular way. Whether I like it or not, my mood reveals to me
that I am there, as Being-in-the-World. I find myself inevitably
and inescapably cast into the world. This brute fact of simply
being-there, willy nilly, Heidegger calls my 'thrownness'
(Geworfenheit) (p174). He is also careful to distinguish between
the way in which facts are true of things - their 'factuality' -
and the way in which Dasein experiences the facts which are true
of it- its 'facticity'. Dasein's thrownness is part of its facticity.
At this point in his argument Heidegger makes a few asides
which are worth mentioning in relation to Husserl, and the
charge of 'irrationalism' later levied against Heidegger himself.
Moods, he says, are of crucial importance, not in what they
disclose, but how they disclose it. Pure knowledge is irrelevant in
the face of mood. The person who knows where he has come
from and where he is going to, can nevertheless fall victim to the
present mood - which therefore reigns supreme. It is a funda-
mental mistake to overlook this. 'From the existential-
ontological point of view', that is to say Heidegger's own, 'there
is not the slightest justification for minimizing what is "evident"
in states-of-being, by measuring it against the apodictic certainty

of a theoretical cognition of something which is purely present-
at-hand', (as Husserl would). On the other hand, this is not an
excuse for failing to consider moods rationally: 'The phenomena
are no less falsified when they are banished to the sanctuary of
the irrational. When irrationalism, as the counterplay of ration-
alism, talks about the things to which rationalism is blind, it does
so only with a squint' (p175).
A mood cannot be overcome by knowing about it; it can only
be mastered by another mood. And Dasein can and should
become master of its moods. But in order to do this, moods have
to be faced and understood - whereas what usually happens is
that Dasein turns away from them. Mood can disclose in a
primordial sense the way in which we are in the world; but it can
also cover it over completely. A bad mood permeates everything,
making us blind to ourselves and our whole environment.
Indeed, this is a feature of moods, that they colour the whole
relationship between Dasein and world: they disclose Being-in-
the-world as a whole. This is the existential basis for how any-
thing can matter to us. It is also the basis upon which anything
can 'touch' our senses, and give them a feeling. 'Bare mood' is the
primary discovery of world (p 177).
The fact that our perception of the world varies from mood to
mood reveals positively the variability and variety of the ready-
to-hand. 'By looking at the world theoretically, we have already
dimmed it down to the uniformity of what is purely present-at-
hand' (p 177). It is part of the corruption of the tradition that
feelings and affects, instead of being treated as basic, have sunk
to the level of 'accompanying phenomena'.
UNDERST ANDING
But together with the State-of-Being in which I find myself,

another existential structure of the 'there' emerges - Under-
standing (Verstand) (p182). This understanding is the capacity
for coping with myself and the world which I display in my
activities. My activities are directed towards ends. My under-
standing is therefore a grasp of my possibilities for the future. I
cannot avoid having possibilities and I cannot avoid choosing
amongst them: and in this sense I cannot avoid understanding as

a fundamental structure of my existence.
The way in which Dasein has possibilities is quite different
from the way in which a thing 'has' possibilities. A thing is as it is.
But Dasein is always more than that: it constantly goes beyond
what it is now towards what it is not yet (p185-6).6 Indeed,
'possibility' is the key to the ontological structure of Dasein.
Understanding projects itself towards the future, even though
initially it has no thematic grasp of this projection. And my
understanding can be either authentic, that is, arising out of my
own true possibility, or inauthentic.
This projective understanding constitutes what Heidegger
calls Dasein's 'sight' (Sicht). As an existential structure, 'sight'
takes the determinate forms of 'circumspection' (Umsicht)
towards the ready-to-hand; 'considerateness' (Rucksicht)
towards persons; or 'transparency' (Durchsicht - literally,
seeing-through) towards oneself. This last is the fundamental
form of 'self-knowledge', which takes in one's whole Being-in-
the-World. 'Sight' corresponds to the clearing of the 'there'
which we noted before. ' "Seeing" does not mean just perceiving
with the bodily eyes' (p187), but rather the total grasping of what
appears, which is grounded in understanding.
Referring again to Husserl, though not by name, Heidegger
comments, ' "Intuition" and "thinking" are both derivatives of
understanding, and already rather remote ones. Even the
phenomenological "intuition of essences" is grounded in existen-
tial understanding' (p 187). Once more, Husserl is accused of an
ontological failure.
But Heidegger needs now to clarify where he stands on some
crucial hermeneutic themes- understanding and interpretation.
Understanding 'develops itself', he says, in interpretation (p188);
and interpretation can express itself in assertions. The basis, as
always, is lived experience of the world, which from the very first
reveals our understanding. Anything in the world is understood
as a part of the totality of our involvements; it has an 'as'
structure which determines our seeing it 'as' something. The
referential totality is the ground of significance, and within it all
'meanings' must be located.
Strictly speaking, 'only Dasein can be meaningful' (p193),
because meaning is an existential structure of Dasein, not a
property of entities. Heidegger is claiming here that only people
'mean' anything, and what they mean refers to things which have
no meaning in themselves. Things present-at-hand can be absurd
and in their absurdity can 'assault Dasein's Being' (p193).7
Against Husserl, he remarks that there can be no 'presupposi-
tionless apprehending of something presented to us', because all
interpretation, even 'pre-predicative seeing' (p 189), is a
development out of the totality of our prior understanding.
As for 'assertion', it is fundamentally 'a pointing-out which
gives something a definite character and which communicates'
(p 199): it is an expression of the meaningfulness of Dasein.
Language is only one of the ways in which assertions can be made
and meanings expressed. Statements derive their intelligibility
from the total human context, and: 'Language already conceals
in itself a developed mode of ideation'. 8 It is therefore quite
wrong to suppose that logic (which is truly the structure of
'logos' or discourse) is some sort of entity in itself with an
'objective validity' detachable from its role as the expression of
human understanding. 9 It can only be seen in that way because
the statement form of assertion, bolstered by the whole tradition
of logic since Aristotle, obscures the readiness-to-hand of the
environment. Instead of looking at the structure of practical
discourse, say the interpretation and assertion contained in
'Hand me the other hammer!', logic has constructed a presence-
at-hand and assigned a property to it: 'This hammer-thing has
the property of heaviness' (p200).
DISCOURSE
Discourse, in fact, is as fundamental to the structure of human

being as mood and understanding (p203). Dasein's understand-
ing expresses and articulates itself through discourse, which is
therefore the foundation of interpretation. It is wrong to suppose
that language is in some way prior to speech. Language is no
more than a totality of words, whereas speech or discourse is a
mode of human being, and fundamental to being human. 'Lan-
guage can be broken up into word-things which are present-at-
hand (p204); but the significance of those words derives from the
totality of my understanding aboutthe world.
Discourse is an activity of Dasein which includes not only
speech as the expression of its understanding, but also hearing.

As a way of being with others, keeping silent is a possibility of
discourse which may disclose far more than idle talk does. 10 The
fact that language is founded on discourse has been overlooked
by linguistic science, which therefore stands in need of a proper
ontological basis (p209).
Having discovered how the 'there' of Dasein is structured by
mood and understanding, we must now return to everyday
experience and look at the ways in which these actually appear
(p2I0). What we soon realize, says Heidegger, is that the possi-
bility of genuine discourse (Rede) as part of authentic Being-with
others does not normally occur. What we find instead is the
chatter (Gerede) of the public world in which the 'one' reigns
supreme. 'What is said in the talk gets understood; but what the
talk is about is understood only superficially' (p122). This is
because 'discoursing has lost its primary relationship of Being
towards the entity talked about'. Instead of a genuine disclosure
of things as they are to the other person, we get instead a false
'togetherness' created by prattling on, which actually obscures
true reality. And this prattle acquires a sort of authority by sheer
force of repetition.
Similarly, instead of a genuine 'seeing' as the basic understand-
ing of, and openness towards, entities, we find in everyday exis-
tence a superficial curiosity. Perception, in a sense broader than
just vision, is our prime mode of access to Being. l1 'Primordial
and genuine truth lies in pure beholding' (p2IS) - a thesis that
has provided the foundation of Western philosophy ever since
Parmenides. But the 'one' of everydayness perverts all this.
Curiosity wanders over the surface of things, never dwelling
anywhere, always distracted by novelty. It becomes a seeing for
its own sake, like the talking for its own sake, concerned only
with what 'one must see' and 'one must read' (p2I7). As a result,
a fundamental ambiguity enters into our being with others. We
become confused: we find it impossible to distinguish between
genuine understanding and mere intellectual fashion.
Chatter, curiosity and ambiguity characterize the Being of
everyday Dasein. It represents a sort of failure: 'Dasein has ...
fallen away from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its
Self, and has fallen into the "world" , (p220). This absorption in a
superficial Being-with-one-another we can call 'fallenness'.
Self-distraction in the public world is a temptation to which
Dasein constantly exposes itself. 'Being-in-the-World is in itself
tempting' (p221). But falling into this temptation drives Dasein
to frantic activity which tranquillizes the understanding. As a
result 'Dasein ... drifts along towards an alienation (Entfrem-
dung) in which its (authentic) potentiality-for-Being is hidden
from it' (p222). Dasein does not succeed in escaping itself: on the
contrary, it gets driven to excesses of self-dissection. 12 This 'fal-
lenness', says Heidegger, is a necessary ontological structure of
Dasein, which can be modified into authentic existence (p224 ).It
is not to be confused with the traditional conception of a thing-
like 'human nature' which is corrupt.
ANXIETY
Dasein's being-in-the-world is a unity. We are now in a position,

says Heidegger, to appreciate that it is care which unifies it
(p227). We shall do this by considering the phenomenon of
anxiety, which simplifies Dasein and reveals its structural total-
ity. Anxiety is quite different from fear. Fear takes a specific
object: some entity within the world stands out as fearsome.
Anxiety, on the other hand, takes no object. 'What oppresses us
"in anxiety" is the world itself' (p231). What we are anxious
about is our whole Being-in-the-World, which the anxiety
permeates. What anxiety reveals is our freedom for being authen-
tic. It individualizes Dasein; discloses its 'existential 'solipsism' ,
(p233). When we previously talked about Dasein's relationship
of 'Being-in' to the world (p69 above), we noticed that it con-
sisted of Dasein being 'at-home' in the world. The anxiety which
accompanies Dasein's 'falling' into the public world changes all
this. 'As Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in
the "world". Everyday familiarity collapses. Dasein has been indi-
vidualized, but individualized as Being-in-the-World. Being-in
enters into the existential "mode" of the "not-at-home" ,
(p233 ).13
Anxiety, then, is a positive phenomenon because it pulls
Dasein back from inauthenticity. It reveals that in 'falling' into
the temptations of the world, Dasein is attempting to flee its own
possibility of being authentic. Here (p235, n.iv) Heidegger makes
one of his few references to Kierkegaard as 'the man who has
gone farthest in analysing the phenomena of anxiety' - though

only 'psychologically'.
'In each case Dasein has already compared itself ... with a
possibility of itself' (p236). Dasein cannot help going beyond
itself into the future: indeed, the whole referential totality of the
ready-to-hand is future-oriented. In this sense, Dasein is already
'ahead' of itself in the world. But the self it is 'ahead' of is initially
the 'one-self': its options are restricted to 'the familiar, the
attainable, the respectable' (p239). The world gets projected as a
mere 'wish-world', not as something that can be appropriated by
an authentic willing of one's future.
It is care (Sorge) which unifies this articulated structure of
Dasein. Care is the ontological precondition for any determinate
'caring' about things (Besorgen) , about others (Fursorge) , or
about oneself (p237). In projecting myself towards a future in the
world, I am revealing my care for myself in relation to things and
other people.
What Heidegger is trying to get across here is that without
'care' nothing matters; and something - myself- always mat-
ters to me. This 'mattering' structures my world and determines
my interest in things and my relations with others: it is the basis
of all motivation. Typically, he quotes at length a Latin fable
about (personified) Care forming man, as 'pre-ontological' and
'pre-scientific' evidence for his analysis (p241 ff).
THE QUESTION OF REALITY
So, having completed his 'preparatory' analysis of Dasein,

Heidegger now takes stock of how far he has got in relation to the
question of Being. In the first place, he argues, we can now
understand what is wrong in identifying 'Being' with 'Reality'
(p245). Reality is only one kind of Being - the Being of the
presence-at-hand of things. And as such, 'Reality' is founded on
the Being of Dasein as Being-in-the-World. What 'Reality' means
is problematic- and this gets interpreted as 'Are external objects
independent of consciousness?' or 'Can consciousness be trans-
cended?'.
The whole history of this problematic reveals that it is ontolog-
ically ill-founded. Kant, for example, while realizing that time is

a clue to the Being of Dasein, still treats consciousness as if it were
an object present-at-hand (p247). 'The question of whether there
is a world at all and whether its Being can be proved, makes no
sense if it is raised by Dasein as Being-in-the-World; and who else
would raise it?'. Dasein in its very essence understands itself to be
in a world, so what proofis appropriate?
'The "scandal of philosophy" is not that this proof is yet to be
given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and
again' (p249). The real question is why Dasein regards the world
as doubtful in the first place; and the answer to this is to be found
in the way in which Dasein 'falls' into a motivated misinterpreta-
tion of its own Being-in-the- World. Over and over again we find
in the tradition, even in some of the most promising of recent
thinkers such as Dilthey and Scheler (says Heidegger), a failure to
recognize the prior need for clarification of the ontological struc-
ture ofDasein.
In short, the significance of 'Reality' is derived from Dasein's
caring. 'Reality is ontologically grounded in the Being of Dasein
... Only as long as Dasein is', does Being appear.14 Without
Dasein nothing could either appear nor remained concealed:
which does not imply that Dasein is solely responsible for the
appearance.
As for 'truth', it too must be re-evaluated as a result of the
preliminary analysis of Dasein. 'Parmenides was the first to
discover the Being of entities, and he "identified" Being with the
perceptive understanding of Being' (p256). Ever since, philoso-
phy has associated truth with Being; but the traditional concep-
tion has failed to clarify why this should be so.
According to the standard account (which derives essentially
from Aristotle), truth is located in an assertion which 'agrees'
with, or corresponds to, an object. But we have already dis-
covered (pSS above) that asserting is fundamentally 'a pointing
out which gives something a definite character'; in short, it is a
way of Dasein's Being towards the thing (p260). An assertion is
'true' if it uncovers the entity as it is in itself. 'What is primarily
"true" - that is, uncovering - is Dasein' (p263). Only in a
secondary sense can the word 'true' be applied to what is dis-
closed.
We have seen already that it belongs essentially to Dasein to
disclose entities in the world in its self-projection towards the
future, and that it normally does this inauthentically. We can

now properly describe this way of Dasein's being as 'in untruth'
(p264). What happens is that a genuine disclosure of an entity by
Dasein gets expressed in an assertion which itself becomes some-
thing ready-to-hand in the world. But the assertion is appropri-
ated by the 'one', and in the process of repetition gets regarded as
a presence-at-hand side by side with the thing. These two things
present-at-hand are now seen to 'agree' with one another, and
truth gets interpreted as correspondence. Thus it is that 'the
primordial phenomenon of truth has been covered up by
Dasein's very understanding of Being' (p268);
Since truth is a way of Being for Dasein ' "there is" truth only
insofar as Dasein is and so long as Dasein is ... Newton's laws,
the principle of (non-) contradiction, any truth whatever- these
are true only as long as Dasein is. Before there was any Dasein
there was no truth; nor will there be any after Dasein is no more'
(p269). All truth is therefore 'relative' - to Dasein's Being: it
could only be 'eternal' if Dasein were eternal. This is not to say
that truth is 'subjective', if that means 'left to the subject's discre-
tion'. Indeed, it is only because Dasein can genuinely uncover
entities as they are in themselves that truth can be: and in so being
it is 'universally valid' .
That there is truth is a fundamental presupposition which
cannot be escaped. Truth, as Dasein's disclosure, must be, just as
'Dasein itself, as in each case 11'ly Dasein and this Dasein must be'
(p271). The sceptic who doubts this does not even need to be
refuted: he can only substantiate his doubt by obliterating Dasein
'in the desperation of suicide'. This is why 'actual' sceptics are as
commonly found as 'eternal' truths. To make their arguments
plausible, an 'ideal subject' has to be posited which is far
removed from the true Being ofDasein. 1s
And so disposing of some traditional metaphysical and epis-
temological problems as rooted in the ontological mistake,
Heidegger turns to the second stage of his investigation. What he
now wants to establish is the fundamental temporality ofDasein.
NOTES
1 My italics.
2 Reading 'one' for 'they' in the M and R translation in this and subsequent
quotations.
3 Translating 'Abstandigkeit' as 'apartness' instead of M and R's 'distantia-
lity'.
4 d. Jean-Paul sartre's Nausea.
5 'Wie be(i"den Sie sich?' means simply 'How are you?', 'How do you feel?'.
Again Heidegger exploits ordinary German, for what he takes to be its
hidden meaning.
6 'Dasein ... ;s existerltially that which ... it is not yet' (p186). Cf. sartre;
'The for-itself ... is a being which is not what it is and which is what it is
not', Being and Nothingness, p 79.
7 d.sartre.
8 My translation. The German reads 'die Sprache je schon eine ausgebildete
Begri(flichkeit in sich hirgt' Sein und Zeit, p157.
9 Heidegger is referring here to Logical Positivism, q.v. B&T, pp198-9.
10 d. Merleau-Ponty. 'Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence', passim.
11 In this, Heidegger agrees totally with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
12 A clear allusion to the growing popularity of psycho-analysis in Germany in
the 1920s.
13 In this passage Heidegger exploits the German 'umheimlich', literally 'un-
home-ly', but more accurately translated by M and R as 'uncanny' (p233
n.1).
14 Heidegger's words are 'Only so long as Dasein is ... "is there" Being'
(p255). The 'is there' is Macquarrie and Robinson's standard idiomatic
translation of 'es gibt' (literally, 'it gives'). In LH, Heidegger says that he
meant 'it gives' - and what gives is Being. The sense is that Being reveals
itself.
15 This is a swipe at Husserl's method of Cartesian doubt.
7
DEATH AND TEMPORALITY
So far, Heidegger argues, we have revealed how Dasein is in its
everyday existence. But this interpretation of the hermeneutic
situation is not primordial, because everyday Dasein is essen-
tially incomplete (p276). Primordial interpretation means reveal-
ing the unity of an entity. But Dasein lacks unity insofar as it is
inauthentic. And surely Dasein is incomplete since its everyday
existence lies between birth and death; it has at any time the
unrealized potentiality of the future. If we are to grasp the unity
of Dasein, its potentiality for being an authentic whole, we must
take account of Dasein's Being towards Death (Sein zum Tode).
In doing so, we shall realize the part which conscience plays in
revealing Dasein's potential authenticity. It will gradually
become clear that 'the primordial ontological basis for Dasein's
existentiality is temporality' (p277) - which is to say, the struc-
tural unity of Dasein is founded on its temporality. That estab-
lished, we shall have to return over our earlier analysis to show
the temporal significance of the structures we discovered before.
A fuller understanding of temporality will reveal how it is con-
nected to Dasein's historicality. That will complete division two
of Being and Time and prepare us for grasping how time provides
the horizon for the meaning of Being in general.
DEATH
Starting, then, with Dasein's potentiality for being a whole, we

immediately encounter a paradox (p279). It seems that if Dasein
is alive it is always incomplete, and if dead it has ceased to be
Dasein: therefore it appears impossible for Dasein ever to be
whole. This paradox stems from misconceiving Dasein as if it
were something present-at-hand: it involves overlooking the
essential temporality of the 'is' of Dasein. We shall see that
Dasein can be a totality prior to its factual death.
'When Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously

loses the Being of its "there" (Da)' (p281). This is a transition
which I can never experience for myself, though I can witness it in
others. 'In the dying of the Other we can experience that remark-
able ... change-over of an entity from Dasein's kind of Being (or
life) to no-Ionger-Dasein. The end of the entity qua Dasein is the
beginning of the same entity qua something present-at-hand'
(p281). But the death of the other is not my experience of death:
my own death is something which no one can take away from
me.
The fact that Dasein has a future, and in this sense is 'not-yet',
does not mean that it is an incomplete 'ready-to-hand' process.
Nor does the fact that every Dasein reaches death mean that
death normally 'fulfils' its life: indeed, Dasein usually ends in
unfulfilment (p288). Dasein is inevitably a 'not-yet', but the
not-yet of its possibilities need not prevent its integration as a
whole. And the inevitability of my death can, if grasped in its
meaning to me, become the means to integration: 'Death is a way
to be'.
In the widest sense, death is a phenomenon of life (p290). The
positive meaning of death is not illuminated by considering the
deaths of others. My death is inalienable - I cannot put it away
from me. Indeed, of all my possibilities death stands as the only
one which I can certainly not escape: 'thus death reveals itself as
that possibility which is one's most authentic, which is not rela-
tive, and which cannot be surpassed'.1
But in the inauthentic mode of everydayness we flee from
death (p295). We say: 'One dies - someday' as if death were
something that happened only to other people. There is a con-
stant 'tranquillization' about death: 'The "one" does not permit
us the courage for anxiety in the face of death' (p298). My death
is made into something alien. I agree that in the end I shall
certainly die; but that agreement does not spring from an authen-
tic certainty which is meant (p302).
This inauthentic flight from death is no more inevitable than
the 'falling' into the world of which it is a part. It is possible to
face death authentically without either morbidly brooding upon
it, or simply waiting for it to come (p306). I can anticipate it, in
the sense of 'look towards' (Verlaufen) as the last of all my
possibilities for the future.
Peculiarly, death is 'the possibility of the impossibility of any
Death and Temporality 97
existence at all' (p307).1t is the measure of my finitude, but itself
is without measure. It is absolutely certain, but when it will occur
is utterly uncertain. To grasp death authentically is to look
towards it, recognizing that it is my ultimate and most authentic
possibility, the annihilation in the face of which I am full of
anxiety. Facing death authentically individualizes me, drags me
back from lostness in the 'one'. It is a liberation, an 'impassioned
freedom towards death' (p311). It is the revelation of the possi-
bility of being authentic.
CONSCIENCE
The fact that Dasein has authenticity as an ontological possibility

in no way demonstrates, says Heidegger, that it is actually poss-
ible to achieve. We must go back to the phenomona of everyday
life and ask whether anything reveals to Dasein its possibility of
authenticity. The answer lies in 'what ... is familiar to us as "the
voice of conscience" , (p313).
Dasein is the only being which has conscience. 'Conscience
gives us "something" to understand; it discloses'. Conscience
calls, and 'calling is a mode of discourse'. The call of conscience
summons Dasein to its guilt at not being its authentic self. The
call is not an actual vocalization: indeed it 'dispenses with any
kind of utterance' (p318). 'Conscience discourses solely and
constantly in the mode of keeping silent'. But what the call
discloses - Dasein's lostness, in the public world - is une-
quivocal.
In conscience, Dasein calls its inauthentic self out of its unease
(Unheimlichkeit) in the world, to its authentic self. 'That unease
pursues Dasein and threatens the lostness in which it has forgot-
ten itself' (SZ, p277). Phenomenally, I experience the call of
conscience as coming from me and yet from beyond me: 'it' calls
(p320). It is the manifestation of Dasein's fundamental caring
about its own Being.
Of course the call of conscience can only be heard when Dasein
recognizes its fundamental guilt. The public manifestations of
guilt, such as having responsibilities, owing something to others,
etc., are founded upon guilt in a more primordial sense (p329).
Dasein is guilty in its very Being, since it is permeated through
and through with nothingness (Nichtigkeit)2 (p331). It is not

what it is, since it is thrown into a factical being not of its own
making; and it is what it is not, since it constantly projects itself
towards unrealized future possibilities. 'Unease brings (Dasein)
face to face with its undisguised nothingness' (p333). 3
'This essential Being-guilty is ... the existential condition for
... morality in general': without it no specific system of morality
could arise. Failure to appreciate this leads to the common misin-
terpretations of the phenomena of conscience (p336). For exam-
ple, it is said that 'bad' conscience refers to a specific deed
retrospectively- but this is only half the story. It is not that guilt
produces pangs of conscience. Bad conscience, which stems from
the general situation of Dasein, precedes authentic guilt. In doing
so it points forwards to possibilities. What is called 'good consci-
ence' on the other hand, is not a phenomenon of conscience at all:
it is the avoidance of the authentic call. Conscience is often
thought of as critical and negative; but it is essentially positive.
'We miss (this) "positive" content ... , because we expect to be
told something currently useful about assured possibilities of
"taking action" which are available and calculable' (p340). But
'the call of conscience fails to give any "practical" injunctions,
solely because it summons Dasein to existence'.
To hear the call of conscience I must pull back from the 'loud
idle talk' of the public world. 'Only in keeping silent does the
conscience call, ... the call comes from the soundlessness of
(unease), and the Dasein which it summonses is called back into
the stillness of itself, and called back as something that is to
become still. Only in reticence, therefore, is this silent discourse
understood' (p343).
The reticent self-projection towards authentic guilt Heidegger
calls 'resoluteness'. The resolute self can relate authentically to
things ready-to-hand, and to others. 'When Dasein is resolute it
can become the "conscience" of others. Only by authentically
Being-their-selves in resoluteness can people authentically be
with one another' (p344). Resolution discovers what is factically
possible in its particular situation and seizes its possibilities for
authenticity. In doing so, Dasein is already 'taking action' in a
primordial sense - in a sense prior to the distinction between
theoretical and practical behaviour. The working out of struc-
tures of authentic possibilities is a task for 'existential anthro-
pology' such as that begun by Jaspers in his Psychology of

Worldviews (p348, n.xv).
But what do these phenomena of conscience have to do with
the meaning of my anticipated death? The answer lies in authen-
ticity as a striving towards completeness. We saw that death, by
negating my being, reveals it as a possible totality: and that
perspective pulls me back from my lostness in the public world
and shows me my individuality. The authentic attitude towards
death is therefore anticipation (p350). Similarly, we saw that
conscience, acting through my existential guilt, reveals both the
nothingness at the heart of my being and the possibility of facing
this resolutely. The authentic attitude towards guilt is therefore
resoluteness. But if this resoluteness also anticipates death, then
it is transformed from a momentary insight into something con-
stant: the realization that guilt is existential and therefore per-
manent achieves this (p355). Only in this way can Dasein com-
plete itself, become authentic, grasp its existence as a totality. In
doing so it is grasping its existence as authentically temporal.
By 'anticipatory resoluteness', then, we mean (says Heideg-
ger,) the understanding by which Dasein avoids self-deception
and so acquires power over its own existence. 'Anticipatory
resoluteness ... springs from a sober understanding of what are
factically the basic possibilities for Dasein. Along with the sober
anxiety ... there goes an unshakeable joy in this possibility'
(p358). This is the 'factical ideal of Dasein underlying our
ontological interpretation'.
At this stage, Heidegger feels that a little methodological con-
solidation is appropriate. Before embarking upon the analysis of
existence, he asserted that ontologically Dasein was farthest
away from us (above, p61). We can now see that this is based in
the structure of care (p359). Our escape into the world is a
motivated fleeing from ourselves. It is hardly surprising therefore
that the analysis of existence has constantly been 'doing violence'
to public 'common sense'. A correct interpretation of the
phenomenon dis-covers what is presupposed by understanding:
'understanding gets developed' and 'puts itself into words for the
very first time' (p362). This is inevitably 'circular', but is in no
sense a 'proof' since the analysis 'does not do any proving at all'.
Common sense wants to eliminate the basic structure of care, and
so rejects the circle on the spurious grounds of scientific princi-
pIe. Instead 'we must endeavour to leap into the "circle",
primordially and wholly' (p363).4
It is the unified structure of care that traditional ontology has
tried to escape (p363). Dasein as a whole has never been grasped:
instead the 'self' has been focussed upon as if it were a thing
present-at-hand - a simple, absolute subject which persists
throughout changeS (p366). Kant is a clear case in point: as a
result, his 'I' is inevitably an isolated subject. This 'fugitive' way
of saying 'I' is motivated by Dasein's falling: the traditional
ontology bolsters up Dasein's flight from self.
TEMPORALITY
We can now turn to the 'meaning' of care - that is, to care as to

the 'totality of the articulated structural whole' (p371). For an
entity to have 'meaning', it must have become accessible in its
Being: 'this Being ... is what "really" "has meaning" first of all'.
Thus, 'the meaning of Dasein's Being ... is the self-
understanding Dasein itself'. We discovered that authentic
Being-towards-a-whole was anticipatory resoluteness. 'This
letting-itself-come-towards-itself ... is the primordial
phenomenon of the future as coming towards' (p372). Being
towards death is essentially futurai. But anticipatory resoluteness
also means 'being Dasein authentically as it already was', that is,
being the 'thrown' basis of nothingness. This 'past' of Dasein
comes to it authentically through its orientation to the future: it is
best spoken of as a 'having-been'. Moreover, anticipatory resol-
uteness in grasping the current situation is concerned with what
is ready-to-hand, in other words with what is present as
environmental presence.
We therefore see the unity of future, past and present in the
temporal structure of care. But we must beware not to fall into
the ordinary conception of 'time' which is derived from inau-
thentic temporality. Let us avoid 'future', 'past' and 'present',
and say rather that 'Dasein's totality of Being as care means:
ahead-of-itself-already-being-in (a world) as Being-alongside
(entities encountered within the world)' (p375). The 'ahead of
itself' is grounded in the future, the 'already-being-in' reveals the
'having been' (of the past), while the 'Being-alongside' is only
possible in makingpresent the ready-to-hand.
The 'meaning' of care - that is, the 'principle' which articu-
lates its structure, is now seen to be temporality. Through tem-
porality the future brings the past to presence. 'The primary
meaning of existentiality is the future' (p376), just as the primary
meaning of facticity lies in the 'having been' of the past. Tempor-
ality unifies existence, facticity, and falling; and falling can now
be seen as an immediate making-present which is a way of being
towards the future.
Temporality is not an entity. It is a temporalization which
manifests itself in these three ways of standing-out - what we
can call the 'ecstases' of temporality. 6 Authentic temporalization
is the primordial basis of 'time'. The exstases are all equi-
primordial, though within this unity the future has a priority. We
shall see that the modes of temporalizing of the exstases differ.
Anticipatory resoluteness towards death reveals that Dasein
exists finitely. Thus the authentic future reveals itself as finite
(p3 78). This finitude is not just a stopping: it is a characteristic of
Dasein's way of Being. Only from the basis of Dasein's finite
temporali ty can 'infinite time' be derived.
INAUTHENTIC TEMPORALITY
Now that we have grasped selfhood as fundamentally a temporal
structure, we can begin to understand the inauthentic tempor-
ality of everyday existence. 7 The structures ofDasein's disclosure
were understanding, state-of-being or mood,8 falling into the
world, and discourse. Understanding we saw to be a projecting
towards my possibilities for Being (p385). As such, the future
clearly underlies this understanding. Dasein cannot avoid having
some understanding of its possibilities because it cannot avoid
being 'ahead' of itself. But it may temporalize itself authentically
in anticipation, or simply await the future inauthentically. Inau-
thentic waiting discloses things as the 'Present'; and inauthentic
making-present is a projection towards the future in terms of
'things'.
Authentic anticipation on the other hand holds the present 'in
the future and in having been' - an authentic present which
Heidegger calls the 'moment of vision' (Augenblick). This means
'the resolute rapture with which Dasein is carried away to what-
ever possibilities and circumstances are encountered in the situa-

tion' (p387). This is not something that can be explained in terms
of the 'now'. The moment of vision is not something which can
be 'in a time', but it 'permits us to encounter for the first time
what can be "in a time" as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand'.
Kierkegaard saw this phenomenon but failed to interpret it exis-
tentially.
Anticipatory resoluteness holds also a 'having-been', as the
'coming back' to one's authentic self. Heidegger terms this 'repe-
tition'. The 'having been' of inauthentic understanding on the
other hand is a positive forgetting: 'the exstasis (rapture) of
forgetting has the character of backing away in the face of one's
ownmost "been" , (p388). So authentic understanding tempor-
alizes itself in the future, but inauthentic understanding is locked
into the making-present of things.
Every understanding has its mood, and mood 'temporalizes
itself primarily in having been' (p390). Earlier, we took inauthen-
tic fear and authentic anxiety as exemplifications of mood. Look-
ing now at their temporality, fear is obsessed by the present: it is
lost in its immediate environment, overwhelmed by the world,
and self-forgetful. Anxiety by contrast comes from the future: in
it the insignificance of the world - indeed its 'nothing' - pre-
sents Dasein with its facticity and recalls it to itself with the threat
that the future may be as lost as the past (p395). All moods,
Heidegger concludes, are founded upon one's having been -
even hope 'which ... must be analysed in much the same way as
fear' .
Falling has its existential meaning in the present. This is seen
most clearly in the case of curiosity, though it also applies to idle
talk and ambiguity. Curiosity is fascinated by the present, and yet
it leaps from one thing to another, characterized by distraction. It
never stops - 'in never dwelling anywhere, Dasein is everywhere
and nowhere' - the very opposite of the 'moment of vision'
(p398). Always running on, immediately forgetting what has
gone before, curiosity is for ever making-present something new
- even if it has to fabricate it.
Discourse we previously found to be the articulation of
Dasein's disclosure, as constituted by understanding, mood, and
falling. It is obviously temporal in itself - witness the tenses of
verbs- but does not belong to any particular exstasis. However,
since 'discourse expresses itself primarily in language', the mak-
ing present of things has a 'priviledged constitutive function'

(p400).
Now that we have considered the temporality of these structures

of everyday existence, we can go on to examine the temporality
of Being-in-the-World, bearing in mind that it is care which
illuminates the 'clearing' of Dasein (see above, p90ff). We shall
look first at circumspective concern for the ready-to-hand envi-
ronment, then at its modification into theoretical knowledge,
and finally at the general problem of the transcendence of the
world.
In our everyday activities the tools and materials we encounter
do not cause our concern, nor does our concern cause things
(p402). Things emerge within the context of a total work-world:
we let them be involved in our purposive activity. We make them
present with reference to our future ends on the basis of retention
from the past. We saw earlier (p73 above) that the flow of our
total involvement in the work world can be broken when we run
up against the recalcitrance of things - they are damaged, mis-
sing or not functioning properly. What we can now appreciate is
that the very way in which objects emerge as present-at-hand is
founded upon the temporality of Dasein. If I did not expect the
tool to function in the present in the way in which it has done in
the past it could never appear as recalcitrant. But when it does, it
also reveals Dasein: 'Only insofar as something resistant has
been discovered ... can factical Dasein understand itself in its
abandonment to a "world"of which it never becomes master'
(p407).
THE THEORETICAL ATTITUDE
In talking about the emergence of the present-at-hand we have

moved on to considering the 'ontological genesis of the theoreti-
cal attitude', in which we might ultimately hope to discover the
meaning of science 'as a way of existence' (p408). The switch
from practical manipulation to theoretical exploration is not
characterized simply by the cessation of praxis. Pausing in the
work still leaves one in the attitude of circumspective concern,
deliberating upon and evaluating the achievements so far, etc.

'And just as praxis has its own specific kind of sight (,theory'),
theoretical research is not without a praxis of its own' (p409):
scientific experiments involve the manipulation of equipment,
archaeology involves digging holes, etc. What happens in the
change-over is rather a shift in our attitude towards the world,
which does not necessarily imply that we start relating to things
as present-at-hand: economics, for instance, studies things in
their uses, i.e., as ready-to-hand (p413). With this, Heidegger
seriously qualifies his earlier criterion for distinguishing between
the practical and the theoretical: and he leaves the matter unre-
solved. 9
The classic case of the genesis of a science is mathematical
physics. lo In it 'Nature herself is mathematically projected'; that
is, Nature is looked at as something constituted by the quantita-
tive (motion, force, location, time). Physical 'facts' can only be
discovered because entities are already projected as being like
that. They can therefore be thematised as objects. So what
theoretical knowledge does is modify our prior understanding of
Being.
TRANSCENDENCE
This prior understanding of Being is Dasein's transcendence of

itself towards the world, and it too is grounded in our temporal-
ity. What does this imply about the world? Dasein needs entities
in order to engage upon its projects, in order to be itself, in order
tobe'there' (Da) at all. 'Daseinis its world existingly' (p416). We
have already shown, says Heidegger, that the world is the re-
ferential totality: we can now see that it must be grounded in
temporality. Dasein's temporality constitutes the world as a
unity of signification, and determines the mode in which things
are disclosed. Things can be disclosed by Dasein's futural orien-
tation, by its recall of the having-been, or by its facing of the
present. 'If no Dasein exists, no world is "there" either' (p417).
But although Dasein is free to direct its attention towards this or
that entity, it is not free not to discover things at all: it cannot
avoid the transcendent world in which it has its Being. The true
problem of transcendence is not how can a subject take an object
(as Husserl construes it), but how is a world ontologically poss-

ible at all.
Even the spatiality of the world is based on Dasein's temporal-
ity as the Being which cares. Indeed 'only on the basis of its ...
temporality is it possible for Dasein to break into space' (p421).
Only 'because Dasein is 'spiritual' ... can it be spatial in a way
which remains essentially impossible for any extended corporeal
thing' (p420).
HISTORICALITY
We have now shown, claims Heidegger, how Dasein's everyday-

ness is rooted in its temporality. But our account of Dasein's
temporality is not yet complete. We have considered death, but
not birth, or what unifies everything in between (p42S). The
traditional difficulty of 'personal identity' misconceives the prob-
lem: the self is not a thing which somehow has to aggregate a
sequence of 'now' experiences. 'Dasein exists as born; and, as
born, it is already dying' (p426). Both 'ends' of my existence are
unified by me now, in the present; through the inescapable unity
of my temporality. But my existence is not static: it stretches itself
out into the future. It makes its history: it 'historicizes' itself. This
fundamental historicality of Dasein, rooted in its temporality, is
what makes history possible. Rickert was mistaken in treating
history as if it were a problem in the theory of science: by so
doing, he made history into an object with no phenomenal basis.
'Dasein ... is not "temporal" because it "stands in history", ...
on the contrary ... it exists historically ... only because it is
temporal in the very basis of its Being' (p428). It is this historical-
ity of Dasein which makes the Geisteswissenschaften possible.
And here Heidegger pays his tribute: 'The researches of Dilthey
were ... pioneering work; but today's generation has not yet
made them its own. In the following analysis (of historicality) the
issue is solely one of furthering their adoption' (p429).
There are various ways in which we understand the word
'history', but all are characterized by regarding man as the 'sub-
ject' of events. But this fails to grasp that 'what is primarily
historical is Dasein' (p433). Things in the world are historical
only in a secondary sense- they refer to Daseinen which used to
be, which produced artefacts and left us a heritage which is

specifically human. In this human meaning, things ready-to-
hand are historical in their very being - in a way which the
objectified present-at-hand cannot possibly be.
The historicality of Dasein, then, is the concrete way in which
it works out its temporality. Ordinarily, of course, this is inau-
thentic. But in resoluteness Dasein discovers its authentic pos-
sibilities in terms of the heritage which it takes over (p435). Once
I grasp the finitude of my existence I come up against the simplic-
ity of my destiny (Schicksal).l1 This is Dasein's 'primordial his-
toricizing ... in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for
death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen'.
'In the depths of its Being Dasein is destiny' (p436).
But as a Being-with-others, I do not determine my fate in
isolation. My destiny forms part of the broader destiny of a
community, of a people (Volk). 'Our destinies have already been
guided in advance in our Being-with-one-another in the same
world ... Only in communicating and in struggling does the
power of destiny (Geschick) become free. Dasein's fateful destiny
in and with its "generation" goes to make up the full authentic
historicizing ofDasein' (p43 6) .12
Dasein can take over its thrownness and be 'in the moment of
vision for its time' only because it is temporal. It can evaluate its
heritage because it uses the foundation of the past to move
towards the future. Authentic Dasein can repeat the possibility
which has been handed down: it can 'choose its hero', and follow
in his footsteps (p43 7). Such 'repetition does not abandon itself
to that which is past, nor does it aim at progress. In the moment
of vision authentic existence is indifferent to both these alterna-
tives'. The importance of history comes from Dasein's pos-
sibilities for the future; but to be authentic it must be grounded in
a handing down and repeating which comes from the past.
HISTORY
Properly understood, history is neither to do with the motions of

'objects' nor the experiences of 'subjects': it is the history of
Dasein's Being-in-the-World. Based upon Dasein's primary his-
toricality we have seen that in a secoridary sense cultural objects
come to be historical in their very Being. 'Equipment and work-
for instance, books - have their "destinies"; buildings and
institutions have their histories. And even Nature is historical ...
as a countryside, as an area that has been colonized or exploited,
as a battlefield, or as the site of a cult' (p440). Such things get
treated by inauthentic Dasein as if they were simply things
present-at-hand; so their true Being gets overlooked. 'When, for
instance, a ring gets "handed over" to someone and "worn", this
is a kind of Being in which it does not simply suffer changes of
location'. This historicality of the cultural world is 'there' before
the science of history and its 'objective' misinterpretations.
The authentic historicality ofDasein is the key to the 'problem'
of personal identity. Authentic Dasein 'understands history as
the "recurrence" of the possible' (p444). The 'repetition of the
heritage of possibilities' in resolute anticipation of death gives to
Dasein a self-constancy which is precisely what unifies its exis-
tence as stretched between birth and death (p442). Authentic
Dasein is loyal to its own self.
HISTORICAL SCIENCE
When we consider the science of history, we realize that it too

must have its roots in the historicality of Dasein. Like any
science, it involves thematizing; and historical science must be
based on the pre-scientific disclosure of the past to the historian.
It is no good looking to the practice of the average historian to
discover the essence of history, since true historical insight must
be based in authentic existence. The 'object' which the authentic
science of history thematizes is the possibilities of the Dasein
which has been (p446). In doing so it makes them available for
repetition in the future: it makes 'manifest the "universal" in the
once-for-all'. Arguments over whether history is about universal
'laws' or a series of unique events totally miss the point. 'The
emergence of a problem of "historicism" is the clearest symptom
that historical science endeavours to alienate Dasein from its
authentic historicality' (p448). 'In historical thematizing the
main point is the cultivation of the hermeneutical situation'.
Dilthey realized that the Geisteswissenschaften presuppose an
'existential' interpretation of Dasein's historicality. It was this
that he was striving to achieve throughout the various strands of

his work. In fact it was his friend Count Yorck who expressed
this most clearly in correspondence with him.
With this remark Heidegger attempts to justify four pages of
extensive quotation from Yorck's correspondence which add
nothing to his own argument. With approval, he quotes Yorck's
condemnation of false historians, 'natural scientists at heart',
who overlook the significance of history, and are 'put to shame
by the great Realities of Homer, Plato and the New Testament',
(p452). The quotations culminate in this revelation of Heideg-
ger's own self-appraisal: 'Because to philosophize is to live, there
is, in my (Yorck's) opinion, ... a philosophy of history - but
who would be able to write it? Certainly it is not the sort of thing
... that has so far been attempted ... Up till now the question
has been formulated in a way which is false, even impossible; but
this is not the only way of formulating it ... ' (p453). And
predictively for Heidegger's future: 'That which penetrates into
the basis of vitality eludes an exoteric presentation; hence all its
terminology is symbolic and ineluctable, not intelligible to all ...
Paradoxicality is a mark of truth' (p454).
TIME
So far, Heidegger continues, we have ignored the fact that history

occurs 'within-time'. This is something prior to historical or
natural science: 'Before Dasein does any thematic research it
"reckons with time" and regulates itself according to it' (p456).
Such reckoning is 'an elemental kind of behaviour' which is the
basis for saying that anything is 'in time'. So our characterization
of temporality so far is not only incomplete, it is 'defective in
principle because something like world-time ... belongs to tem-
porality itself'. Ordinary existence conceives time inauthentically
as a presence-at-hand, but with remarkable vacillation as to
whether it is supposed to be 'subjective' or 'objective'.
In ordinary inauthentic existence Dasein expresses itself in
discourse, in rclation to things. But this concernful involvement
cannot avoid using words like 'next', 'before', 'now' - words
which always implicitly refer to each other. When our temporal-
ity recalls, awaits, or makes something present it invokes an
implicit time-ordering, which Heidegger calls 'datability'. Even

in the most trivial conversation there is always a suppressed
'now', because in speech I express myself by making something
present. Since temporality constitutes the 'there', it can be dis-
covered within it. 'The making-present which interprets itself ...
is what we call "time" , (p460).
Thus the structure of time-ordering derives from Dasein's
self-interpretation as temporal: it reflects the ecstatic structures
of temporality. With the 'nows', the 'thens' and the 'befores', we
divide up the duration we live through- the 'time' which Dasein
'allows' itself. The ordinary person is inauthentically absorbed
with things; he 'has no time'. 'Busily losing himself in the object
of his concern, he loses his time in it too' (p463). 13 Authentic
existence, by contrast, 'never loses time and "always has time" , in
the moment of vision which constitutes self-constancy. Public
time which is 'there' arises out of normal inauthentic Being-
with-Others.
We have not yet clarified the sense in which time 'is', as a
phenomenon which every man can come across. 'Dasein's
thrownness is the reason why "there is" time publicly' (p464),
and both the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand are encoun-
tered in public time. 'Everyday circumspective Being-in-the-
world needs the possibility of sight (and this means that it needs
brightness)' if it is to engage in purposive activity. 'Day with its
brightness gives it the possibility of sight', which leads to a
structure of dating based on the coming and going, the rising and
setting of the sun. Because 'Dasein ... is finite, its days are
already numbered'. It divides up the days also, and so makes
possible 'something like a "clock" '.
But the time which arises out of concernful involvement is
always related to a purpose as appropriate, or inappropriate-
the 'right' time, or the 'wrong' time for something. In this sense,
time belongs to the world in its very significance: 'It is not an
entity in the world' (p467). But the development of clock-time
has abetted a way of making things present as measured. This
leads to a public interpretation oftime as a multiplicity of 'nows'
(p470); we forget that what is being measured is ourselves as
temporalizing beings. 'World-time', which belongs to the world
as transcendent, is neither objective nor subjective because it
precedes the subject-object distinction. It is the condition for the
possibility both of entities and the self; though strictly speaking
entities other than Dasein should not be described as 'temporal'.

It was Aristotle who first defined time as something counted;
and this became the basis of the ordinary conception. In it, time is
reduced to the infinite sequence of meaningless 'nows' - the
'now-time' (p474). Compared with the full essential structure of
world-time, 'now-time' has neither significance, nor time-
ordering (datability). The 'nows' are understood 'within the
horizon of the present-at-hand'. The way time hangs together-
its continuity - which really derives from Dasein, becomes
problematic. Now-time is interpreted as 'infinite' because inau-
thentic Dasein is looking to escape the inevitability of its own
death. Public time does not end because the 'one', being nobody,
never dies (p477). But we cannot avoid the intimations of poss-
ible authenticity. We say that time 'flies' because our time is
expiring. We know that time is not reversible - a fact inexplic-
able if time is a meaningless succession of 'nows'. Yet public time
is so incommensurable with the authentic temporality of the
moment of vision that the one cannot lead to the other. Such
authentic temporality, however, is primordial time (p479).14
In this context, Hegel's discussion of the relationship of time to
spirit can give us a clue. Hegel realizes that there must be an
essential relationship between the two, but fails to articulate it
adequately because he cannot transcend the Aristotelian concep-
tion of now-time. Time, he says, is intuited becoming; but he also
says that 'the true present is eternity'. He believes the 'now' to be
like a point but cannot explain why; neither can he explain how
time can 'pass away'. Turning to the relation between spirit and
time, he tries to reconcile them in a purely formal manner:
actualized spirit as the negation of a negation falls into time as the
immediate negation of a negation. 'Spirit', says Heidegger, 'does
not fall into time; but factical existence "falls" ... from primor-
dial, authentic temporality'. But, he finishes lamely, 'we cannot
as yet discuss whether Hegel's interpretation of time and spirit,
and the connection between them is correct and rests on founda-
tions which are ontologically primordial' (p486).
At this point Heidegger abruptly terminates the book, adding

only a couple of pages of transition to the (unwritten) third
division, on 'Time and Being'. We have now shown, he claims,
that the structures of Dasein which we uncovered in division one
are all founded on temporality. We originally turned to Dasein as

that being to which Being appeared, and our ultimate aim was to
re-awaken the question of Being. The next problem therefore is
to thematize Being, which so far we have only touched on in a
non-conceptual way, on the basis of Dasein's temporality. He
concludes: 'Is there a way which leads from primordial time to
the meaning of Being? Does time itself manifest itself as the
horizon of Being?'.
NOTES
1 My translation, 5 Z, p250.
2 Macquarrie and Robinson translate 'Nichigkeit' as 'nullity': I shall prefer
'nothingness' .
3 5artre was particularly influenced by these remarks. Indeed, one can find
sentences of Heidegger's which could well have served as 5artre's text for
Being and Nothingness, I, Chapter 1,- ego 'The ontological meaning of the
notness ofthis existential nothingness (Nichigkeit) is still obscure' (p331).
4 Thus the hermeneutic principle is again asserted.
5 Clear criticism ofHusserl is implied here.
6 The Greek 'ekstasis' which Heidegger alludes to here, means literally 'stand-
ing out'; he connects it with the similar supposedly original meaning of
'exist'.
7 From this point on Heidegger loses his self-assurance. He begins to get 'a
relentless insight into the complications of a primordial ontology of Dasein'
(p382), and in the next chapter has to force the argument that all structures
of everydayness are temporal.
8 In practice, Heidegger uses these two terms almost interchangeably.
9 This whole section (p408 ff) is written with a tentativeness which almost
amounts to uncertainty.
10 d. Husserl's account of the 'scientificity of science' in The Crisis of Euro-
pean Sciences.
11 M and R translate 'Schicksal' as 'fate', and 'Geschick', as 'destiny'. In
ordinary German they both mean 'destiny', and I shall follow this usage.
Heidegger tries to distinguish individual 'Schicksal' from collective 'Ges-
chick'.
12 Heidegger is here drawing very specifically (if obscurely) on Dilthey.
13 There is a contradiction between Heidegger's previous account of the
authentic engagement with things ego in craft work, and his present con-
demnation ofall concernful involvement.
14 Heidegger adds a footnote about 'eternity'. 50 far it has been conceptual-
ized on the basis of a constant 'now-time'. But 'if God's eternity can be
constructed philosophically, then it may be understood only as a more
primordial temporality which is infinite' (p4 79, n.xiii).
PART III
THE THIR TIES AND AFTER

8
RECTOR OF FREIBURG
I began this book by identifying two 'pivotal dates' in Heideg-
ger's career-1916, when Husserl came to Freiburg as professor,
and 1928, when Heidegger succeeded to the same chair. We have
seen how in 1916, with his background in theology and the
classics, his training in hermeneutics, and his overriding concern
with the Question of Being, Heidegger stood poised to receive the
training in phenomenology that Husserl was so anxious to give.
We have followed through Husserl's tortured arguments about
the lived world and the transcendental ego which preoccupied
him during the years of cooperation, and noted Heidegger's
probably unspoken, but none-the-Iess fundamental, criticisms of
his master's avoidance of ontology. We have seen how Jaspers'
book inspired Heidegger, and how the move to Marburg brought
him into contact with the new theology and Bultmann. Lastly, we
have seen how Heidegger pulled all these strands together in the
intellectual tour-de-force of Being and Time.
In 1928 Husserl reached the age of seventy and was forced to
retire. There was never any doubt that he would recommend
Heidegger as his successor; after all Heidegger had been groomed
for the role from 1916 until his departure for Marburg.
Moreover, since the publication of Being and Time there was no
doubt that Heidegger's appointment would be ratified. But few
could have foreseen, even twelve months earlier, that Heidegger
would return to Freiburg on a wave of triumph the like of which
Husserl had never enjoyed, that the 'pupil' would rapidly throw
his master into the shade, and that a total estrangement between
the two would soon ensue.
In July 1928 a new philosophy journal was launched in Berlin.
Its editorial, after castigating existing journals for their lack of
relevance to the contemporary world went on:
The first issue is devoted to a fundamental discussion of Martin Heidegger's
book Beillg and Time, because in it, as in no other book, all the living problems
of contemporary philosophy are most consistently thought through to the end. I
And in the same issue the young Herbert Marcuse wrote:
(In Being and Time) Philosophy has got back again to its primordial urgency ...
from now on all philosophical problems will be tackled on this basis ... It is
wonderful how from here on the problems and explanations which had become
fixed are brought back into a dialectical movement guided by concrete men who
have lived, and still live, through it ... Heidegger ... has pushed his radical
investigation to the highest point attained or attainable by bourgeois philoso-
phy.2
The impact of Being and Time was immediate. Almost overnight

it established Heidegger as the philosopher of contemporary
Germany. Why this should have been so is a question I shall
return to, but that it was so was undeniable. The Heidegger who
left for Marburg in 1923 had a reputation which was little more
than rumour generated by his students. The Heidegger who
returned to Freiburg in 1928 had a stature which Husserl failed
to appreciate. In this chapter I shall trace the later relations
between the two men and see how these affected the last work of
Husserl. I shall also consider the circumstances surrounding
Heidegger's succession to the Rectorship of Freiburg University,
and examine his involvement with the Nazi party.
THE BREAK WITH HUSSERL
The story of the relations between Heidegger and Husserl after

the former's departure for Marburg, is one of Husserl's gradual
realization of the profundity of Heidegge(s disagreement with
him. Contacts between the two did not cease when Heidegger
went away: there was some correspondence, and Heidegger
regularly passed through Freiburg on his way to and from Mess-
kirch- he spent vacations at the chalet which he had had built in
the Black Forest. In 1922 Husserl had given some lectures at
London University, and apparently as a result the editors of
the next edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica decided that an
entry on phenomenology would be appropriate. Husserl agreed
to write one, and asked Heidegger to collaborate - which
Heidegger said he would do. Husserl prepared a draft and gave it
to Heidegger for comment and amendment. Heidegger started it
afresh, though apparently cross-referring to Husserl's draft and
aiming at a text which would be ;lcceptable to the older man. In
the event no agreement was reached, and Husserl alone provided
Rector of Freiburg 117
the entry for the 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia. 3

Husserl's draft strongly reflected his current preoccupation
with philosophical psychology. It started with 'Pure Psychology'
and led on through a discussion of method to the necessity of the
transcendental reduction, as a way of establishing the pure ego as
source of apodictic certainty. Heidegger's version, which was
written immediately after the completion of Being and Time in
1927, leads off with the Question of Being. From the beginnings
of Greek Philosophy, he wrote, what has been special to philoso-
phy as the foundational science amongst all others, is its concern
with the Being of things. He then goes on to argue the necessity of
the 'regress to conscious awareness', and to discuss what 'pure
psychology' can comprehend. After the introductory section his
language, the topics he deals with, and the sequence of their
development are Husserl's rather than his own. He seems to have
been genuinely trying to reach agreement with his mentor. He
failed because the real differences between them were absolutely
fundamental.
Husserl's final published version made quite clear where he
stood on the question of ontology: only after reduction to the
pure transcendental ego is ontology possible. But 'phenomenol-
ogy properly carried through is the truly universal ontology'
which 'comprizes within itself the truly legitimate content as
grounded primordially in intentional constitution' (Husserl: EB,
pp87-8). For his part, Heidegger had summed up his position
when discussing 'reality' and the 'external world' in Being and
Time: 'knowing is a founded mode of access to the Real', 4 and as
such 'is founded ontologically upon the basic state of Dasein,
Being-in-the-World' (B & T, p246). The clarification of that
Being must therefore precede discussions of knowledge and cer-
tainty: ontology is prior to epistemology.
Heidegger tried to argue this point in a letter he wrote to
Husserl in October 1927, but Husserl's conclusion was 'Heideg-
ger has not grasped the whole meaning of the phenomenological
reduction'.5 He seems to have hoped that Heidegger's thinking
could be 'corrected' once he was back in Freiburg; but it proved
to be too late (as indeed it always had been). From Heidegger's
perspective, the impossibility of diverting Husserl from his head-
long flight down the road of 'transcendental purification'
became more and more apparent. As he mildly put it much later:
Doubt arose whether the 'thing itself' was to be characterized as intentional
consciousness, or even as the transcendental ego. (I concluded that) Being had
to remain the first and the last thing-itself of thought. Meanwhile
'phenomenology' in Husserl's sense was elaborated into a distinctive
philosophical position according to a pattern set by Descartes, Kant and Fichte
... The Being-question, unfolded in Being and Time, parted company with this
philosophical position, and that on the basis of what to this day (1962) 1 still
consider a more faithful adherence to the principle of Phenomenology (Pr R,
XII-XIV).
Nevertheless the finality of the split was probably not apparent

to either man in the autumn of 1928. For a couple of months the
Heideggers and the Husserls visited regularly, but relations
became strained. Towards the end of this period, a witness
described a dinner party at Husserl's in his diary; 'After a charm-
ing little dinner in which Heidegger was very quiet we retired to
the study. We got on to Logic ... Husserl brightened up ...
Husserl started on a long soliloquy (during which Heidegger was
silent, except on one occasion for a few words, and at times
looked at his train timetable)'. 6
The possibilities of cooperation were exhausted. Husserl was
disappointed with Heidegger's editing of his own Gottingen
lectures on Internal Time Consciousness which appeared in 1929
(Husserl PITC). Heidegger's preface was perfunctory in the
extreme, and completely ignored all of Husserl's work since
1905. Of course, Heidegger contributed an essay to the
Festschrift presented to Husserl on his seventieth birthday, but in
spite of the title- 'The Essence of Reasons' - nothing was to be
found in it about the eidectic reduction, and indeed, little about
phenomenology at all.
And then there was the Kant book. Heidegger had promised a
fairly rapid follow-up to the published part of Being and Time. In
November 1928 he told Boyce Gibson- the visitor whose diary
we looked at a moment ago - that the second part would be
ready by the following summer. What appeared instead in 1929
was a book entitled 'Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics' - an
'interpretation' of the Critique of Pure Reason. It was dedicated
to the memory of Max Scheler- that phenomenologist who had
ploughed a separate furrow from Husserl's, and earned his
resentment for it. Heidegger paid tribute to the 'Unfettered
power of (Scheler's) mind' - a remark not calculated to reassure
Husserl of his loyalty.
As far as the content of the book was concerned, there was no
discussion of phenomenological method, and no practicing of

the reduction. Heretically, Heidegger wrote 'The Critique of
Pure Reason has nothing to do with a "theory of knowledge" ,
(KPM, p21), rather it is an ontological work for Kant recognized
the precedence of ontology over epistemology. Kant 'thrusts the
problem of ontology to the fore', because he recognized that 'the
transcendental problem of the intrinsic possibility of a priori
synthetic knowledge becomes the question of the essence of the
truth of ontological transcendence' (KPM, p22). It seemed as if
Heidegger were intent on making it clear that he had broken with
everything Husserl held dear; and the latter began to think in
terms of betrayal. Heidegger even stopped using the term
'phenomenology': he later said that this was out of deference to
Husserl's prior claim on it (US, p21), but for Husserl it confirmed
his suspicions.
On top of this came Heidegger's popularity. Husserl had never
been a brilliant lecturer: he thrived in the less formal context of
the graduate seminar - where he could think out loud. Heideg-
ger, with the authority of reigning professor added to his reputa-
tion as author and teacher, was packing in the students. Boyce
Gibson's diary again:
Nov 5: I heard Heidegger give his first lectures in Freiburg as professor ...
Platze 267. Crowded out. More like 280, students standing all round
(The numbers have kept up since, rather increased).
At the quarter Heidegger appears in knee-breeches and stockings as
though just off his motor cycle. A brief 2-sec. applause with feet from
the students. Starts off straight away without any introduction into the
heart of the subject. Face interesting to watch. Charming glint in eyes.
Clear diction, easy to follow in language and thought. Intends to bring
philosophy home to the students as their own concern qua students. A
better lecturer than Husser! as he doesn't ramble and repeat ...
At the seminar he was the same quiet teacher. And very good! He
understands the art of getting his students to respond. A good few of
these seem to have followed him from Marburg. 7
Husserl found himself compelled, probably for the first time, to

undertake a careful reading of Heidegger's work. He began to
annotate Being and Time, and also the Kant book, now realizing
that time and again Heidegger was criticising his own position at
its very roots. If one can be incensed slowly and over a long
period of time, Husserl was incensed. It was necessary to repudi-
ate in public Heidegger's perversion of phenomenology. This he
first did in the 1930 volume of the phenomenological year-book.

'One', he wrote, clearly referring to Heidegger, 'has failed to
understand the fundamental novelty of the phenomenological
reduction and hence the progress from mundane subjectivity (i.e.
man) to transcendental subjectivity; consequently that one has
remained stuck in an anthropology, whether empirical or a
priori, which according to my doctrine has not yet reached the
gen uine philosophical level '.8
Ironically, the volume of the phenomenological yearbook in
which this attack appeared was the last. Heidegger and his
colleague Oskar Becker had taken over the management of the
last few issues, and with this virtual excommunication from the
phenomenological movement they let it lapse. Significantly, the
second volume of its successor, Philosophy and Phenomenologi-
cal Research, which appeared in America in 1941, contained the
German text of Husserl's next attack on Heidegger, hitherto
unpublished. It was a lecture Husserl had given in Berlin in 1931,
and repeated later that year in Frankfurt. Entitled
Phiinomenologie und Anthropologie, it set out to differentiate
true phenomenology from false 'anthropologism'.9 Without
naming Heidegger ('the younger philosophical generation') he
elaborated the reproach first made in the 1930 Yearbook:
Heidegger fails to escape the natural attitude, fails to perform the
reduction, and so remains trapped in precisely the sort of
psychologism- that he, Husserl, had developed phenomenology
to combat. To start with Dasein as the immediate given can only
result in anthropology, not in true philosophy.lO To claim that it
is a 'reform' of phenomenology is a travesty.
It was this attack which Heidegger regarded as the real break-
point. The lecture was delivered in the Berlin Sports Palace before
a large student body and reported in the Berlin press. Heidegger
later commented, 'Husserl settled accounts with Max Scheler
and me in public, the clarity of which left nothing to be desired',
and added with false naivety, 'I could not discover what had
moved Husserl to cut himself off from my thought in such a
public way' (DSI, p272). The estrangement was now open and
irreversible.
'WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?'
Meanwhile, however, Heidegger had been pursuing the dynamic

of his own development, and was going from strength to
strength. His inaugural lecture, delivered in July 1929, was
uncompromisingly independent of Husserl- or anyone else for
that matter. Heidegger chose as his topic 'What is metaphysics?'
which must have made Husserl cringe, recalling the brave hopes
of his own inauguration. Worse still, for Husserl, was the content
- a content which it is worth considering for a while. Heidegger
delivered what was clearly a popular lecture, very well-received
by the students, the real subject of which was - 'Nothing'! In it
he said things which appalled Husserl, invoked the scorn of
Marxists, and sent the positivists up the wall- but the students
went away deeply impressed, even moved by it.
Heidegger begins with the remark that all metaphysical ques-
tions are interconnected, and involve the questioner ... Dasein.
The different sciences, he continues, are held together only by the
'technical organization of the university' (a topic to which he
would return in 1933), and fail to appreciate their own nature.
They focus on things, and beyond 'things' they assume there is
'nothing'. But what is 'Nothing'?, he asks. It is no entity. Indeed
formal logic must rule out the question, because it demands an
answer beginning 'Nothing is .. .', which is a formal contradic-
tion. But that merely demonstrates the inadequacy of logic for
metaphysics, says Heidegger. The logical concept of negation
cannot explain 'Nothing', because Nothing is more primordial-
it is the foundation of the possibility of negation.
If we ask about 'Nothing' we are presupposing some under-
standing of what it means: we must be able to 'encounter'
Nothing. An everyday definition of 'Nothing' might be 'the
negation of the totality of what is'. But the totality of what is, is
not something that can possibly be experienced, so on this defini-
tion Nothing is reduced to a formal concept - 'an imaginary
Nothing, never Nothing itself'. Experience exceeds these
restraints of logic. 'Once again, and for the last time', Heidegger
declares, 'rational objections have tried to hold up our search,
whose legitimacy can only be attested by a searching experience
of Nothing' (EB, p333 ).11
It is our moods which bring us face to face with what is - that
which we are in the midst of. Moods normally hide the Nothing;
but anxiety is the fundamental mood which reveals the Nothing
itself. The Nothing is at one with the totality of what is: it 'makes
itself known with beings and in being, expressly as a slipping
away of the whole' (BW, pl04). The essence of Nothing is the
gesture which repels things, i.e. nihilation. 'Nothing nihilates
(nichtet) of itself' (EB, p339). Nihilation reveals the totality of
what is as pure 'other'. 'In the clear night of the Nothing of
anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they
are beings and not Nothing' (BW, pl05). So Dasein must project
itself into Nothing in order to grasp beings in their Being. But this
projection beyond the self and into Nothing is precisely what
'transcenpence' means. So Nothing is the source both of self and
of freedom. 'Without the original revelation of the Nothing, no
selfhood and no freedom' (BW, pl06).12 So Nothing is not the
conceptual opposite of beings: 'rather it originally belongs to
their essential unfolding as such. In the Being of beings the
nihilation of the Nothing occurs' (BW pl06). (It was sentences
such as this that brought hoots of derision from the positivists).
Thus, the experience of Nothing is the basis of the concept of
negation. 'If this breaks the sovereignty of reason in the field of
enquiry into Nothing and Being, then the fate of the rule of "logic"
in philosophy is also decided. The very idea of "Logic" disinte-
grates in the vortex of a more original questioning'(EB, p342). (It
was remarks like this that made Husserl apoplectic.) Rational
negation is not the chief way in which Nothing is revealed.
'Unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke have a more
abysmal source than the measured negation of thought. Galling
failure and merciless prohibition require some deeper answer.
Bitter privation is more burdensome' (BW p 107). (It was lan-
guage such as this which stirred up the students.)
Our underlying anxiety which testifies to nihilation is nor-
mally suppressed. Only the brave allow it to pulsate most
strongly: they exert themselves 'to preserve a final greatness in
Dasein'. The anxiety of the brave lies beyond originary joy or
comfort: it stands 'in secret union with the serenity and gentle-
ness of creative longing' (BW pl08/EB p343 ).13
Classical metaphysics disposed of the question of Nothing
with 'Ex nihilo nihil fit'. Christian dogma made created being
come out of Nothing and overlooked the consequent problem of
God's relationship to Nothing. What we now realize is that Being
and Nothing are not conceptual opposites. Hegel was more right
than he knew in saying 'Pure Being and pure Nothing are there-
fore the same'. They are so 'because Being itself is essentially
finite and is only revealed in the transcendence of Dasein as
projected into Nothing' (EB, p346/BW, plIO). Only in the
Nothingness ofDasein do beings as a whole come to themselves.
Now we realize, says Heidegger, that the question of Nothing
has indeed involved the Being of Dasein, as we claimed
metaphysical questions always did. Furthermore, we now see
that science, which is essentially the 'perpetual discovery of the
whole realm of truth' (rather than the accumulation and classifi-
cation of knowledge), must arise out of metaphysics. Metaphys-
ics belongs to the nature of man: it 'is the ground phenomenon of
Dasein. It is Dasein itself' (EB, p348). Philosophy 'is the setting in
motion of metaphysics' which happens by 'leaping with all its
being ... into the fundamental possibilities of Dasein as a whole'
(EB p349/BW pl12). We must prepare ourselves for this leap.
This inaugural lecture typifies Heidegger after he had completed

the analysis of Dasein. Although he never finished Being and
Time, and although nothing after the Kant book was ever pre-
sented as its direct continuation, Heidegger did continue in the
direction he had promised to go - towards Being. He had ceased
ciiscussing human being directly: he never went back and revised
what he had already said; he assumed it in his later writings. To
the extent that his analysis of Dasein is incomplete or erroneous,
these deficiencies are carried through to the later work. In an
important way the later discussions of Being are founded on the
analysis of Dasein; just as the discussion of the experience of
Nothing in the inaugural lecture is clearly an elaboration of the
sections of Being and Time on anxiety and negation (see above
p95 ff).
The inaugural lecture also set the pattern and the tone for later
work in other ways. Almost all of Heidegger's writings after
1929 were based directly upon lectures or talks. As a result, they
consist of relatively short units which are more or less discrete.
Where these are strung together into apparently continuous
books,14 they still lack the style of systematic exposition which
characterized Being and Time. The failure to continue with
systematic exposition increased the ambiguity and obscurity of
his work. The inaugural lecture does not make clear what
Heidegger thinks are the relationships between Being, Nothing
and Dasein. The implication is always that Heidegger knows, he
is trying to explain as much as he can in the time available, but the
subject is, after all, very difficult. Because his language is simple
(the heavy academicism of Being and Time is by and large not
found in later works) it seems that any lack of clarity must be the
reader's, not Heidegger's. 'Nothing nihilates of itself' would be
simple if only we could grasp this notion of nihilation ...
wouldn't it?
Other thematic elements in the lecture are characteristic of the
later work: the linkage of science and technology with false
epistemology; the rejection of reason, as a barrier to the under-
standing; the allusion to the terminology of the philosophical
tradition, and its radical reinterpretation; the appeal to indi-
vidual experience and feeling; and the implication that a heroic
but difficult struggle must be joined. This last was to become
particularl y dominant over the next few years.
POLITICAL STIRRINGS
Less than 12 months after the inaugural lecture, Heidegger's

fame had penetrated even the recesses of the Prussian Kultus-
ministerium in Berlin. The minister, Adolph Grimme, wrote to
him: 'As admirer and in a modest sense as pupil ... I don't have
to tell you how very anxious I am (to get you to Berlin). With you
here a particular type of philosophy, above all metaphysics,
could break through in Berlin. '15 Heidegger declined. For the
record, Grimme was a Social Democrat. He seems to have been
continuing in the attitudes expressed by the previous Social
Democratic KultusmiJlister years earlier: 'But if ... the German
people, having suffered for decades from the plight of mechanism
and materialism, ... if in our spiritual life not only the intellec-
tual but also the irrational is to receive its due, then the barriers
will have to be broken down which presently separate the univer-
sities and the people. '16
In the climate of the Weimar Republic Spenglerian attitudes
were by no means' confined to the political right. But it was the
right which appealed to Heidegger, and he was coming to realize
that philosophy- his philosophy- could be a political force. In
his lectures he began to make claims for the political relevance of
(his) philosophy. References such as that in the inaugural lecture
to the need for the brave to struggle for the greatness of Dasein,
were replaced by overt political reflections:
This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own
throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and
America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America
are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted
organization of the average man ...
Situated in the centre, ollr nation incurs the severest pressure. It is the nation
with the most neighbours and hence the most endangered. With all this, it is the
most metaphysical of nations. We are certain of this vocation, but our people
wi\l only be able to wrest a destiny from it if within itself it crea tes a resonance
... for this vocation .... This nation ... must move itself and thereby the
history of the West ... into the primordial realm of the powers of being. If the
great decision regarding Europe is not to bring annihilation, that decision must
be made in terms of new spiritual energies unfolding historically from outof the
centre (1M pp31-2).
Although these precise words were spoken in 1935, two years

after the Nazis' accession to power, they express what Heidegger
already thought and said before 1933. His thesis about the
connection between metaphysics and politics is summed up by
'the word "Being" hold(s) within it the historical destiny of the
West' (1M p35). The idea is that the West has declined because its
spirit has been perverted by scientific rationality, materialism
and the fruits of technology. This has led to the forgetting of
Being, which takes the form of an escape into the public world of
'average man', in other words the flight into inauthenticity. To
face the inevitability of my death, to pass beyond anxiety, makes
me open once again to experience the wonder of Being. Only the
German nation can lead this spiritual rebirth because the lan-
guage and culture of Germany are peculiarly philosophical. The
truth can be realized only in the development of a German elite
(1M pp37-8).
Heidegger began to see the hope for the future in the Nazi
party. The Nazis were the only effective alternative to the
triumph of materialism in a Marxist revolution. Through a Nazi
takeover the spiritual rebirth would become possible. Spirit, as
opposed to mere intelligence was everything:
If the spirit is taken a<; intelligence, as is done in the most extreme form of
126 A i-iciciegger Critique
MMXi!>lll, thell it i!> perfectly correct to say, in defence against it, that in the
order o( the effective forces of Daseill, the spirit i.e. intelligellce, IIlllst always be
ranked bdow healthy physical activity ;llld c!l;1r:lcter. But this order becol11e~
(:lIse ollce we lInderst:lnd the true essence of the Spirit. For all true power :lnd
beauty o( the body, all sureness alld holdness ill comhat, ;III authellticity ;lnd
inventiveness o( the lInderst:lnding, Me grounded in the spirit ... The spirit is
the sustaining, domin:lting principle, the (irst :lnd the last (1M p39).
To this way of thinking the person of Hitler could appear as

spiritual hero. When Jaspers, a liberal democrat appalled by thc
possibility of a Nazi takeover, asked Hcidcgger how an unedu-
catcd man like Hitler could rule Germany, the latter is supposed
to have retorted 'Education is altogcther unimportant - just
look at his marvellous hands' .17
NAZISM
On 30 January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. In

February the Reichstag burnt down. In the March elections the
Nazis secll red forty-four per cent of the scats. On the first of April
the boycott of Jewish shops began. On 16 April the newly elccted
rector of Freiburg University, a Social Democrat, took office. He
was rapidly removed from this office by the Baden Minister of
Culture, ostensibly for refusing to post a proclamation against
Jews. On 23 April Heideggcr was e1ectcd in his stead. On 3 May
Heidcgger joined the local Nazi party, and his rectorial address,
given later that month, was overtly political and pro-Nazi. Soon
afterwards, he wcnt to Heidelberg where he gave a similar
address to staff and studcnts. In November, on the eve of thc
Rcichtag elections, he was again publicly speaking in favour of
the new rcgime. In Fcbruary 1934 he resigned as rector. There-
after he seems to have ceased overt political activity.
Those are the bare facts of Heidegger's brief career as a politi-
cian. 11I I shall leave till later the question of what importancc
should be accordcd to it, and conccntrate upon making sensc of
it.
Jaspers and Heidcgger had becn friendly since the early twcn-
ties, and visited each other from time to time. In the spring of
1933 Heideggcr visited Jaspers in Heidelberg and utterly sur-
priscd his fricnd with his enthusiasm for the Nazis. Heidegger
seemed 'caught lip in the frenzy' of the movement and said they
must 'get involved' with the new political 'reality'. Heidegger
himself gave no public account of his involvement until thirty-
three years after the event, when he talked to the magazine Der
SI)iegei on condition that the interview would not be published
until after his death. By his own account he certainly saw in the
Nazi accession to power the possibility of a 'new dawn' (D51
p271). However, he took on the rectorship, he claimed, because
the removed rector and his deputy both prevailed upon him to do
so lest a 'party functionary' should be appointed. He was
'besieged' by the younger faculty to take it on, but did so with
S0111e reluctance. What he hoped to achieve by becoming rector
was reform of the University. As rector, according to him, he
opposed the racial policies of the Nazis and prevented the burn-
ing of books. He certainly did not permit discrimination against
Jews in the philosophy department (which included Husserl as an
emeritus professor). He resigned when it became clear that the
Nazi party would not adopt his ideas on university reform in
general, and when his own attempts to reform Freiburg were not
meeting with success. The im111ediate calise of his resignation was
his refusal to comply with a party demand that he replace the
deans of the two faculties (D51 pp273-4). Later, he claimed, he
was critical of the Nazis, and was spied on, and discriminated
against up to the end of the war.
Jaspers had a Jewish wife. After Heidegger's pro-Nazi speech
in Heidelberg in 1933 Jaspers objected to the 'wicked nonsense'
of anti-semitic propaganda. According to him Heidegger replied.
'Hut there is a dangerous international alliance of Jews' - a
remark not incompatible with the true statement that 'some of
my best friends arc Jews'. On the other hand, there is no evidence
that Heidegger did or said anything to implement the racialist
policies of the Nazis, and while his speeches had numerous things
to say in favour of the Nazis, racialism was not one of them. His
later rclations with Husserl do not seem to have been coloured by
any new-found antisemitism on his part.
It is indisputable, however, that his rectorial address un-
equivocally welcomed the Nazi accession to power. It spoke of
the 'greatness and glory of this new dawn'. It attacked academic
freedom: 'The much-sung academic freedom is driven out of the
German university. This freedom was false became it was only
negative' (D51 p269). It exhorted his listeners to dedicate them-
selves to the service of work, to military service and to the service

of knowledge. Finally he wrote. 19 'Do not let doctrines and ideas
be the rules of your Being ... The Fuhrer himself and he alone is
the present and future German reality and its rule' (DSI p271).
Although it is probably true that 'even by 1934' he no longer
said such things (DSI p271), there is no evidence that he regretted
saying them. In 1935 he was publishing the Introduction to
Metaphysics from which I quoted his analysis of the political
situation. In it he could still refer to the 'inner truth and greatness
of this (the National Socialist) movement' (1M p166). He let all
this stand in the 1953 edition. In 1937 when the Rhineland was
already occupied, the anti-Comintern pact was in the offing and
Germany was clearly (for most Germans) headed towards war
for 'Lebensraum', he wrote:
When we think back on the possible greatness and the standards of Western
culture, we immediately recall the historical world of the early Greeks. And we
just as easily forget that the Greeks did not become what they were by remaining
'encapsulated' within their territory (Rat.l1n). Only thanks to the sharpest but
most creative conflict, with to them the most alien and difficult- the Asiatics-
did this people (Yolk) ascend in the brief course of its historical uniqueness and
greatness'.20
The message of those words, addressed not to an academic

audience but to the general public, was quite clear: the coming
war of expansion against the Asiatics will give the German
people the chance to become great and to produce a great culture.
And even long after the war, certain though he was that Nazism
had failed to realize its promise, he still felt that it had been
'moving in the right direction' (DSI p280): he had little faith in
democracy as a political system (DSI p276). With his rectorial
address, however, he was still flying high. The political naivety,
which a reporter had noticed back in 1931, had not yet run its
course; and his impact on students was still immense. One of
those who heard it wrote:
In comparison to the numerous ... speeches which professors of equal rank

have given since the takeover of power, this philosophical and forceful speech is
a little masterpiece. Service in the labour forces and in the armed forces merges
with service in the realm of learning in such a way that, at the end of this speech,
one no longer knows whether to study Diel's Presocratics or to march in the
ranks of the Storm Troopers.2J
HUSSERL'S FINAL 'CRISIS'
For Husserl, Heidegger's 'conversion' to Nazism was the final act

of betrayal. The septuagenarian Jewish liberal, whose intellec-
tual aim had always been to get at the roots of thinking, at the
mainsprings of human rationality, was now thrown back to the
roots in a new way. Ironically, his search for absolute truth
having overlooked history, history was now catching up with
him. Banned from teaching or publishing in Germany, watching
the destruction of all that he held dear, he was forced to ask
himself 'What went wrong?'. His answers were given first in
Vienna and Prague, where he lectured in 1935, and ultimately in
his book The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, which was unfinished when he died in 1938.
These last works nor" only adopt some of Heidegger's ter-
minology (in the Crisis Husserl makes extensive use of the term
'Dasein'), but explicitly take up some of Heidegger's persistent
themes. The meaning of human existence (Dasein), the tradition
of European culture, the heritage of the Greeks, the failure of
scientific rationality, and even the need for courage in the con-
temporary spiritual struggle 22 , all figure prominently in these
writings. But despite these superficial similarities, the interpreta-
tion is profoundly different.
The core of Husserl's position is 'true rationality': 'To be
human at all is essentially to be a human being in a socially and
generatively united civilization; and if man is a rational being, it
is only insofar as his whole civilization is a rational civilization'
(Cr, pIS). This lies at the heart of European civilization. The
birth place of 'spiritual Europe' was in ancient Greece, and the
great achievement of the Greeks was the breakthrough into a
new sort of attitude towards the surrounding world, i.e. philoso-
phy. 'Correctly translated ... that means nothing other than
universal science, science of the universe, of the all-encompassing
unity of all that is' (Cr, p276). It is the striving after rational,
universal knowledge, which gave rise to a new sort of humanity
living together towards infinite ideals. 'The concept of Europe
(is) the historical teleology of the infinite goals of reason' (Cr
p299).
The development of the theoretical attitude was the first step
on the road to civilization; but that attitude became distorted
with the 'mathematization of nature' by Galileo. Theoretical

study was now concentrated entirely on the object, to such an
extent that the very existence of the subject was sometimes
denied. This suppression of the subject also suppressed for sci-
ence any consideration of the practical activity of the inves-
tigator. A complete divorce was thereby effected between the
theoretical and the practical, the object and subject. This was the
failure of Enlightenment rationalism.
But the answer is not to abandon the achievements of science;
and certainly not to deride human rationality per se (indeed, even
the 'irrationalists' must use rational arguments to try and per-
suade us of the truth of their positions). It is rather to redress the
balance by establishing the validity of subjective truth, and
showing th~t scientific objectivity has its origins in the practical
activity of the rational human subject. This is precisely what
Transcendental Phenomenology does. This, therefore, is the true
continuation of the Greek ideal of rationality, which is the very
foundation of civilization as we know it.
'Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodicti-
cally rigorous, science - the dream is over', wrote Husserl in
1935 (Cr, p389). And yet, amid the disillusion of his later years,
he strove to keep going:
'Is it only the foolhardiness of striving toward a goal which is beautiful but only
vaguely possible, one which is not definitely impossible but still, in the end,
imaginary ... ? Or does what appears from the outside to be a failure, and on
the whole actually is, bring with it a certain evidence of practical possibility ...
a partial success?' (er. p391).
Husserl died in 1938. Heidegger did not attend the funeral.
NOTES
1 Maximilian Beck's editorial to Philosophische Hefte Vol I i; Juli 1928 (p2).
2 Marcuse in Philosophische Hefte cited (p55); d. alternative translation,
Marcuse (1), (ppl6-17).
3 See Spiegelberg (1), Vol I, p279 ff; also translators' introductions to
Heidegger IP, and to ER. Heidegger's draft cannot really be taken as
'independent' as Spiegelberg claims. Deely and Novak are right to say that it
represents what Heideggcr was prepared to put his name to, but I think one
should add 'if pushed'.
4 Ironically, Heidegger is here turning Husserl's concept of 'founded
modes' (see U) back on him, to undercut his whole position.
5 Letter to Roman Ingarden, Dec 26, 1927: quoted by Spiegelberg (1), Vol I,
p281. See also Husserl's marginalia to his copy of'Sein und Zeit', quoted in
A. Diemer Edmund Husserl, Meisenheim am Glan, 1956; some also in
translator's introduction to Heidegger, ER, pxii, n.3.
6 Boyce-Gibson (1), p76. ~iary entry for 15 Nov 1928.
7 Boyce Gibson (1),pp73-4.
8 Nachwort to the Ideen, quoted by Spiegelberg (1), Vol I, p282.
9 English translation as Husserl, P & A.
10 For Heidegger's earlier rejection of this charge, see KPM, pp215-220.
11 Two translations are available, one in Existence and Being (EB), the other in
Basic Writings (BW). I shall quote from both.
12 It seems that Sanre encountered this lecture when he was in Germany. Its
influence is clearl y revealed in Being and Nothingness.
13 The Nietzschean overtones of remarks such as this are very clear.
14 ego the two volume work on Nietzsche.
15 A Grimme, Briere, Heidelberg, 1967, pp36-7. Quoted by Forman (1) p24,
n.51.
16 K Haenisch, Staat und Hochschule, Berlin, 1920, ppl0l-11. Quoted by
Forman (1),p24.
17 Krell (2),p126.
18 The chief source available is Heidegger's own account (OSI). Other main
sources incl ude Krell (3), p27; and Krell (2), P 126.
19 That is, he published, though claimshe never spoke (OSI, p271).
20 'Wege zur Aussprache' in Kerber F, (ed) Alemannenland, Stuttgart, 1937,
p139.
21 Quoted by Kockelmans (1), p5.
22 'If we struggle against this greatest of all dangers (weariness) as 'good
Europeans' with the sort of courage that does not fear even an infinite
struggle, then out of the destructive blaze of lack of faith, the smouldering
fire of despair over the West's mission for humanity, the ashes of great
weariness, will rise up the phoenix of a new life-inwardness and spiritual-
ization as the pledge of a great and distant future for man: for the spirit
alone is immortal'. The Vienna Lecture, Husserl, Cr., p299.
9
HEIDEGGER'S INSIGHTS
It is not my intention to give any systematic analysis of Heideg-
ger's later works, or to trace the subsequent details of his un-
eventful life. My main interest lies in Heidegger's account of
human existence, and that, as I have already said, was complete
with Being and Time. I do not see, as certain writers have
claimed, a fundamental 'turn' (Kehre) in Heidegger's later work,
away from Dasein and towards Being. 1 The orientation to Being
was always there, as I have argued. It was more the circumstance
of publication, the fact that Being and Time was read as an
'existentialist' text, that made people surprised at Heidegger's
subsequent concentration on Being to the exclusion of more
'humanistic' concerns. 2 A further factor was that phenomenolo-
gists loyal to Husserl took very seriously his characterization of
Heidegger's position as 'anthropology', which left them some-
what nonplussed when Heidegger practically ceased to make any
further reference to 'man' or to Dasein.
Nevertheless, as I have already claimed, Heidegger's later
work does presuppose the analysis of human existence in Being
and Time, and the themes that emerge most predominantly are
entirely consonant with the earlier text. It will be relevant, there-
fore, to cite the later works when assessing the analysis ofDasein,
since they can clarify what Dasein meant, and certainly reveal the
tendency of his thinking. Suffice it to say, then, that the Question
of Being remained central throughout his later works, that lan-
guage and its relationship to the disclosure of truth was a recur-
rent topic, that he came to see poetic discourse as especially apt
for the revelation of Being, that he extended this notion to
include other 'artistic' artefacts, that he continued to meditate on
the insights of past thinkers in the Western philosophical tradi-
tion, that theological concerns were never far from his thoughts,
and that he came to see technology as particularly responsible for
the fallenness of man in the modern world. As I said in the last
chapter, there was no second 'magnum opus', nor was any
Heidegger's Insights 133
planned: the whole of his later work took the form of relatively
short writings.
The facts of his later life can be given briefly. After 1928, he
continued to live in or near Frieburg. In later years, he spent more
and more time at his 'ski-hut' at Todnauberg - the chalet near
Messkirch which I have already mentioned. In 1944 he was
conscripted into the Volksturm - Hitler's last round-up of all
able-bodied males between sixteen and sixty - and worked for
some months on the Rhine fortifications. 3
With the French occupation he was prohibited from teaching,
as an ex-Nazi. (He asked Jaspers, who was persona grata with
the new authorities, to intercede on his behalf to get the ban
lifted. It seems that Jaspers did nothing about it - probably
because Heidegger had not even commented when, in 1938, the
Nazis deprived Jaspers of his chair).4 The ban was in fact lifted in
1951, just before his official retirement. As emeritus professor he
continued to teach at Freiburg, as well as to give lectures and
talks throughout Germany. He even went to France on a couple
of occasions, notably in 1955 when he was applauded by both
Gabriel Marcel and Paul Ricoeur for an address he gave at
Cerisy-Ia-5alle. 5 He died in 1976, and was given a Catholic burial
at Messkirch- in the church where he had been a bell-ringer as a
boy.
So far, I have expounded Heidegger as conscientiously and as
sympathetically as I was able. Obviously, I have given an
interpretation, but I have striven to be absolutely faithful to the
text, even at the risk of writing obscure or ugly prose. I have also
tried to suppress my criticisms so that the reader could encounter
Heidegger with as little intervening bias as possible. As I said in
my Preface, however, exposition is notenough- and I now want
to move towards a critical engagement with Heidegger's
thought. I propose to evaluate his major insights, rather than
return over the text of Being and Time in a pernickety fashion-
so I shall need to start with some specification of what I think
those insights are. The rest of this chapter, therefore, will be given
over to summarizing the major themes and their interrelation-
ship.
KNOWING IS FOUNDED ON BEING

Heidegger's central vision in Being and Time is that any adequate
philosophical account of man must arise out of and return to his
whole existence, and not merely the attitude of knowing ... This
he expresses, in Husserlian terms, as 'knowing is a founded mode
of Being-in-the-World'. This implies a criticism, not merely of
Husserl, but of the whole modern tradition in Western philoso-
phy which has given the problem of knowledge precedence over
metaphysics or ontology, and therefore has interpreted man
primarily as a knower disengaged from the world. The conse-
quence, Heidegger believes, is a distorted account of human
existence, which has suppressed the practical side of life and
discounted our normal ways of engaging with things. Instead of a
whole human being, living and working and relating to things
and to others, man has been treated as a disembodied conscious-
ness, not really engaged with anybody.
It is precisely because of this that the question of knowledge
has remained problematic: indeed the way in which it is set up
renders the problem insoluble. As a consciousness, I can never
truly transcend that consciousness towards the world. I can never
prove, within my consciousness, the existence of anything
beyond it. As a result the existence of things, of other people,
indeed of the world itself, is held to be problematic.
But in practice, this conclusion is absurd. No philosopher can
live by it - which itself ought to reveal to him the untenability of
the position. In practice I am constantly and continuously
engaged with people and with things. If I doubt whether a
particular thing is really there, I reach out and touch it: not with
my consciousness, but with my hand. I am busy in the world and
know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world and all its
contents exist as certainly as I do myself.
Therefore the adequate philosophical account of human being
must start from what we already understand to be the case in our
ordinary experience. This gives us both a programme of work
and a methodology. The programme will be to investigate those
structures of human existence which are revealed as underlying
our everyday understanding of ourselves and the world. Since
our account is to be philosophical, we are not of course interested
in what is peculiar to this or that individual: our aim is to uncover
universal structures - those which necessarily underlie our
Hcidegger's Insights 135
experience. Heidegger has called these structures 'existentials',
and characterized the investigation as 'a jJriori'.
The methodology is the appeal to the phenomena of ordinary
lived experience - what Dilthey, and Husserl after him, had
corne to call the lived-world. The phenomena of experience are
the bed-rock, the final court of appeal in all theoretical activity. If
a particular idea or conceptualization does not cash out in
experience, then it is the idea which must be revised. The mistake
of so many philosophers has been to deny the experience for the
sake of the abstract idea. If an experience does not fit with our
notions of logic or rationality, then it is our notions of logic and
rationality which must give, not the experience. The simple fact is
that all Ollr ideas are derived from experience and are intended to
make sense of it. If they cease to fit it, they must be discarded or
revised.
This clarifies something else about the status of our investiga-
tion.1t is not an enquiry intoa priori ideas. If man is thought of as
purely a consciousness (as essentially a 'pure consciousness'),
then his necessary structures get interpreted as structures of
consciousness, or a priori ideas. But once we realize that man is
more than just a consciousness, we also realize that the structures
of understanding revealed in his practical engagement with the
world are not 'ideas' with some prior, possibly innate, form of
existence. They are ways of being; necessary aspects of what it
means to live and act in a world. The analysis of human exis-
tence, then, is not an enquiry into the a /JYiori ideas of some
transcendental ego or pure consciollsness.
The approach that we are taking of course denies the Kantian
dichotomy between phenomena and real existence. In our lived
experience we know that what we encounter are the real things,
as they are in themselves. Their reality is not something hidden
behind the phenomena - it is given through them. Only because
man is reduced to a disengaged, observing consciousness on the
Kantian account, is it plausible to claim that he does not
encounter the reality of things directly. The appeal to experience
reveals the claim for what it is- an absurd misunderstanding.
Any philosophical account of human existence is necessarily
an interpretation. If our account is phenomenological, in the
sense of appealing to the phenomena of lived experience, it must
also be hermeneutic. It is concerned with the elucidation of a
correct understanding of things. We are inevitably on the inside
of the operation, within the hermeneutic circle. We must attempt

to articulate the understanding which we already have, in terms
of the discourse which we already possess. We ourselves are the
beings to be investigated: the investigation must take the form of
a disclosure in language of what we already 'know' to be the case.
There will be an increase of self-understanding; or rather a shift
from the inarticulate level of 'primordial' understanding, which
is revealed in the way we act in the world and cope with things, to
a more direct seeing of what is the case by means of the adequate
articulation of the truth. Naturally, the insight gives us more
'control' over ourselves- it frees us from blind engagement with
the world and enables us to take possession of our own destinies.
'The truth' in the sense in which we have just used it, is not
primarily conceptual, nor something located in a linguistic for-
mulation. 'The truth' is how things are, a state of being, which we
strive to articulate through language. It does not 'become' lan-
guage or a property of language. Language tries to 'capture' or
express it; but truth always remains beyond language in what is
- it always 'escapes'. More precisely perhaps, 'truth' expresses a
relationship between me, as the being which understands, and
the thing understood. Only I, as the being which 'sees under-
standingly', can make the thing appear as it actually is. Seeing it
in this way, I have insight into its truth. Its truth cannot be
otherwise expressed, except through and to a being such as
myself.
The disclosure of truth, the articulation of understanding
through discourse, and the appeal to the phenomena of experi-
ence give us the essential elements for approaching our cultural
heritage - in particular the heritage of our philosophical tradi-
tion. There is a deadweight of theoretical garbage to be shed - in
the form of a false ontology. But the way to do it is not by
wholesale uncritical abandonment of what has come down to us
from the past. We must recognise that past thinkers were also
striving to make sense of their lived experience, were also trying
to articulate their understanding of the truth, even though this
may have been extremely distorted by the mode of discourse
available to them. To try and express man's relationship to things
in terms of subject and object, to formulate this as a knowledge
relationship, was not a complete waste of time. Great thinkers,
like Kant, say-like Husserl- were groping towards the expres-
sion of ontological insights, only to be defeated ultimately by
restraints imposed on them by their disclosure. What we must do

is re-interpret them, to unearth from their inadequate terminol-
ogy the valid insights that they were trying unsuccessfully to
express. We can learn from the great thinkers of the past -
mistaken though they were - by holding a dialogue with them.
And ultimately we must test out their insights on the basis of our
own lived experience. That is still the final court of appeal, the
way of assessing the past and of recovering from it that which is
still valid, because eternally true.
THE FALSITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
The second insight, or area of insight, which Heidegger expresses

in his account of human existence, concerns the 'falsity' of every-
day life. If I ask myself the question 'Who am I?' it focusses my
attention on a curious fact - that whoever I am, I seem more
concerned in my everyday dealings to cover it up than to express
it. I 'present' myself to others, play games, pretend to be what I
am not, cover up my real feelings, hide behind a role. I put myself
into the part, now of a teacher, now of a neighbour, now of a
father etc., so that no space seems to remain for the 'I' which is
playing these roles.
But the situation is more complex than that, because what I do
I do together with others, and with their help. If I walk into a class
and deliver a lecture to students, I am only able to do that because
the students let me. They are deliberately 'being' students, which
means that they need 'teachers' such as myself. If I am playing the
part of a lecturer, that is because the students are playing their
part as students. We are all colluding in the game, and without
that collusion the game would not be possible.
So the typical situation is not one of lying or deceit, since I do
not really deceive the other person. Rather it is one of an
unspoken agreement to avoid real encounter, to remain on a
bland superficial level which deliberately obscures how each of
us actually is. And for the most part, we both 'know' that we are
doing this. The 'knowledge' though is not at the level of articulate
formulation: it is the sort of 'felt' understanding which we previ-
ously called primordial experience.
Once we have recognized this everyday collusion in superfi-
ciality and avoidance of true expression, the question must arise

as to why we do it. And the answer to that is fear, or apprehen-
sion - we are afraid of our true selves coming out. Which brings
us to another curious fact about the collusion which is going on.
It is not that I am normally fooling you: rather I am normally
enlisting your aid in fooling myself. The deception which is being
practiced is a self-deception. We are each of us helping the others
to avoid their selves, to obliterate true self-expression, and to
defuse the question 'Who am I?'.
It is this unspoken collusion, this conspiracy of silence, which
characterizes the public realm. It permeates our everyday lives.
Our normal way of encountering others, the gestures, the moves
in the game, indeed, even the language we use, reinforces this
flight from self. So instead of language as it should be, the
revelation of truth, we get language which hides the truth.
Instead of a genuine seeing of how things are, we get a superficial
glance which never really encounters what is before it.
Yet in order to maintain the superficiality, we must always
move on rapidly to something new. If we dwell too long on one
thing the fa<rade begins to crack: we start seeing through it. This
danger, which threatens to reveal things and ourselves as they
really are, is the true source of the speed of modern living, and its
fascination with the novel. And modern 'civilization' has
developed elaborate ways of keeping us from the truth. The
media, technological advance, rapid travel over the physical
surface of the earth - these things and many others serve only to
uproot, destroy, and render superficial all genuine contacts with
things as they really are. They make it more difficult than ever
before to overcome the flight from self and return to true being.
Precisely because they are so pervasive, it is that much more
difficult to escape their corrupting effects.
In spite of these elaborate and sophisticated aids, however, my
flight from self can never be a total success. I have to keep
running. And since it is myself that I am really running away
from, I can never actually escape. Like my shadow, the threat of
reality breaking through follows me everywhere. The sign that
the threat is there lies in that very aspect of human existence that
philosophers have always neglected - feeling. We can see now
that this neglect was motivated by the common human desire to
avoid the real questions of self.
When, in my dealings with others I playa part, or when, in my
solitude I think of myself only as others see me, I always have an

awareness that the depth of my being is unexpressed or disen-
gaged. That awareness is something I avoid thinking about: I
suppress it from the level of conscious thought. But I cannot help
feeling it. When philosophers talk about human existence as if it
were just consciousness, and either ignore feeling or treat it as a
debased form of thinking, they are colluding with this suppres-
sion ofthe 'real' self.
The feeling which persists and returns in my everyday exis-
tence, as the awareness of this suppression, is anxiety. It is not
that I am in a constant state of non-specific fear: rather I have a
permanent underlying unease which always threatens to break
forth and overwhelm me, and sometimes actually does so. The
attack of anxiety is like a scream of truth from my suppressed
being. Of course, my initial reaction is to deal with it as I deal
with all other uncomfortable intimations that the fa~ade is not
reality - suppress it and move rapidly on to some new distrac-
tion. But once it has happened I can never again avoid the
knowledge, or cease to live in understanding, that I walk on the
edge of an abyss. I only have to look down and vertigo will
overcome me and I shall topple in: so I walk with a consciousness
of averting my gaze.
If properly understood, however, anxiety is actually a positive
phenomenon. It reveals to us the shallowness of our existence. It
keeps on reminding us that the depths to be plumbed exist, if only
we had the courage to face them instead of running away. Facing
up to anxiety and living through it is the only way to overcome
the enormous public pressures to conform to the superficial. We
need to withdraw into ourselves, dissociate our existence from
the public game and pass through anxiety to the other side. What
we must aim at is not some permanent disengagement from
society, but a purging confrontation with self which will so
strengthen us that we can return to society immune to its corrup-
tion. We are searching for an inner spiritual strength which will
maintain us as authentic, in spite of the constant temptation to
lapse into the easy superficiality of ordinary life.
So, with respect to the phenomenological method of interpre-
tation, we see that in the phenomena of everyday life there are the
foundations of an adequate account of human existence. Our
normal interpretations and self-interpretations, operating as
they do at the level of disengaged thought, systematically distort
the real meanings of the phenomena of our existence. The theory

that man is essentially a consciousness serves to devalue those
feelings which are the real clue to the depths of human existence.
To the truth that my existence is fundamentally my own (a far
better formulation than 'I am self-conscious') must be added the
truth that fundamentally I care. That is, whether I like them or
not, I have feelings about everything: about things, about people,
and, most significantly, about myself. In a sense, my own feelings
about myself can be taken as the measure of my spiritual health
or wholeness. And indeed, it is wholeness, or the reunion of my
self-projections with the inner depths, that I should be striving to
achieve.
OBJECTIFICATION
These two insights of Heidegger's- that a philosophical account

of man must encompass his whole being, not merely his knowing
consciousness, and that our ordinary existence is permeated by
inauthenticity- come together in what we might discriminate as
a third 'insight'. The key to the philosophical misinterpretation
of man, he believes, is the notion of 'object' evolved by the
Greeks. According to this idea, a thing is a static 'substance'
which has certain properties, some of which are essential to it and
others of which are inessential. This analysis, Heidegger argues,
ignores both the essential relatedness of any individual thing to
all others, and also its relatedness to man. The world is supposed
to be full of objects, all conforming to this same type, with the
totality being no more than the aggregate of all parts. And man is
supposed to be essentially a consciousness (foreign to the whole
landscape) which regards all things from a distance. In reality, he
argues, we are dealing with an intrinsically unified whole. There
is no way, except 'theoretically', we can separate out a thing
which appears from the background against which it appears, or
an 'object' of knowledge from the 'subject' who knows it, or
indeed, one subject from the community of subjects who collec-
tively establish what is understood and known.
But this truth "has not been appreciated in the development of
the Western philosophical tradition. Instead, the analysis of
object has been elaborated and refined, as if it were something
totally self-subsistent. When it became apparent that no compar-

able account existed of the 'subject' to whom the 'object'
appeared, the response was to develop an account of subject
modelled on the established accountof object. It was not just that
human beings were discussed as if they were purely 'conscious-
ness'. It was that consciousness (and thereby the subject) was
anal ysed as if it were an 0 bj ect.
A person, then - a human being - is supposed to be an
independently existing substance, which contains certain proper-
ties - like honesty, integrity, impulsiveness etc. This analysis
suited and reinforced the flight from self which we previously
noted. If I am a substance containing certain essential properties,
then my being is in a sense already determined. I happen to be
honest, which enables me to predict that in future I will behave in
an honest way. This relieves me of all responsibility either for the
'properties' I am supposed to possess, or for the necessity of
choice on any particular occasion.
But this account conflicts with our actual experience in every-
day life. I know myself to have the freedom to choose. I can
decide to take this thing which does not belong to me or I can
decide not to - but in any event, I do not introspect the previ-
ously determined outcome and merely bring it to realization. I
take a decision: and it is only on the basis of such decisions,
constantly made and reaffirmed, that I can ever know what
characteristics or properties I am supposed to 'contain'.
This points to the complete interrelatedness of the way in
which we conceive things, other people, and ourselves. We start
with a basic model for things, which we are then tempted to turn
back on the 'subjects' to which these 'objects' appear. But in
doing so, we are actually regarding only other people. That is, we
are giving an account of people as if they were objects (of a
special type). This is plausible if we have others in mind, but not if
we are thinking of ourselves. And yet we proceed with this
analysis, coming up with an account of our own existences as if
they were those of other people.
This is actually at odds with the phenomena of our lived
experience. Whether I like it or not, I am not just an observer of
my own existence; I am responsible for it. Or, to put it another
way, I care about my own existence in a way that I care about
nobody else's. I cannot maintain a neutral stance in relation to
what I am no matter how abstractly I try to think about it. The
truth that: 'My existence is my own', implies not only that I am

self-conscious, but that I am conscious of my self in a way that I
am conscious of no one else's.
The analysis of the human subject, therefore, which bases itself
on the analysis of the independently existing object, not only
distorts the truth about how human being actually is, but serves
to justify the flight from self. Moreover, it distorts the truth about
the thing, precisely because as a presence to the human existent it
has no independent existence of its own. The inter-relatedness of
things.. to each other, and the relationship of each and all of them
to us, are inextricably interconnected.
As a "result, an appreciation of the truth about things, and the
discovery of the truths about myself, go hand-in-hand. In pulling
back from the public world, therefore, I can seek inspiration in
my relationship to things. Indeed, if I try to consider my self in
some sort of total isolation from the world I will get absolutely
nowhere. The process of tuning in to the way things actually are,
not as philosophers and other theoreticians have believed them
to be, is by no means easy. But quite clearly we must drop that
distracted way of looking only at their surfaces, and get back to a
genuine engagement with them. We can take our clue from the
sort of genuine engagement that the craftsman reveals with his
tools and materials.
We find the same sort of attunement to the way things are in
great works of art. Art attempts to present things as they are in
truth. When this takes the form of poetic expression then a sort of
summit is reached. Linguistically, this form is more attuned to
the being of things than is conventional philosophical discourse,
and certainly more so than the 'scientific' way of talking. A truth
is expressed which is the revelation of how things are. Inevitably,
it both presents the things and reveals their relationship to
human beings.
THE FINITUDE OF EXISTENCE
The fourth and final insight which illuminates Heidegger's

account of human existence concerns its finitude. Because things
have been discussed as objects eternally present, and because
human beings have been thought of on the analogy of objects, a
crucial fact about human existence has been obscured- namely,

death. Philosophers and others have discussed human being in
terms of spirit and matter, copsciousness and body, as if it were
not mine but anybody's - some eternally present universal
man's. But this has only been an excuse for ignoring what I know
in my own existence to be a fundamental truth about me- that I
shall die. 'Man' may partake of some eternal essence, but I don't.
There is nothing eternal about my existence. Death looms - and
of after-death nothing can be said.
If it is true that the mood of anxiety permeates my Ffe, then it is
even more true that death does. Never at any time do I truly
believe that my existence is eternal. Whatever action I undertake,
whatever project I embark upon, is within the time scale of a
finite future; a future in which I age by the minute and move
inexorably towards the only possible outcome- death. So death
is the limit of all my future plans, the un-thought-of horizon to
everything I do. The connections between anxiety, death and
authenticity are not fortuitous. We have seen that the persistence
of anxiety indicates the inauthenticirt of ordinary existence. The
normal reaction of someone who is forced to think of his own
"death, for the first time, is also anxiety. The reason is that death,
of all the possibilities for my future, is the only one that I
absolutely cannot escape. And it is the only event of my life in
which I cannot playa part or pretend to be someone else. Of
course I can try, but the ownness of my existence at the time of
my dying wells up as on no other occasion. My death is peculiarly
my own.
When I realize this, it inevitably exposes the falsity of my
current existence. When I think 'What if I were to die tomor-
row?', it transforms the significance of my present acts and
brings me back to my responsibility for my own existence. I
realize that I am dissipating, wasting and avoiding it. This is why
death causes anxiety. The anxiety is about my present inauthen-
ticity: the thought of death merely exposes this as no other
thought can.
Philosophers have ignored death. They have overlooked the
finitude of human existence, and, as with their neglect of feelings,
this was not without reason. Once again they were colluding
with, and proving theoretical justification for, the flight from
self. Death produces anxiety; anxiety exposes the superficiality
of everyday existence. So just as we normally avoid confronting
our own anxiety, equally we avoid confronting our own death.

Again, we walk the edge of an abyss, except now with even more
delicate steps. The abyss of death is even deeper, because it
contains the very annihilation of our own existence. And yet our
every step advances us towards the future, at the end of which lies
the ultimate inevitability. As soon as we begin to recognize the
temporal advance of our existence towards death, then what is
borne in upon us is a truth so obvious that it is difficult to know
how we could ever be persuaded to overlook it: our existence is
fundamentally temporal. How I engage with things, how I relate
to others, how I experience myself, are all permeated by my
awareness of temporal change. Action initiated or concluded,
decay, development, even mere movement- all essentially refer
to time. It is utterly fundamental to all our experience of
phenomena.
Of course philosophers have not denied that time is a funda-
mental idea. What they have succeeded in doing, however, is
divorcing it from its human meaning in my existence, by again
treating it only on the analogy of 'object'. But there is even less
mileage in thinking of time as an entity, than in thinking of
consciousness as an entity. Consequently philosophers have usu-
ally found little to say about time, even when they acknowledged
its importance. It has been supposed to have three aspects- past,
present and future - which, almost like properties, were in a
constant process of transformation from one, through the other,
to the third. The immediate present was conceived as a point
moving along a pre-existent line: the line as a whole existed in
some permanent, unchanging eternal present.
That is not our experience of time at all: or to formulate it
better, our temporal experience is not like that. What we experi-
ence is things (including people) standing in essential relationship
to ourselves as parts of a whole. The things which present them-
selves, the presences, have temporal and historical depth. Con-
fronted by this broken jug, I cannot escape the memory of
dropping it on the floor last night, nor the realization that I had
better sweep it up before someone steps on it this morning. The
past and the future are given through the presences of things, as
an essential part of the way those things are experienced.
Through such constellations of past and future events, the sig-
nificance of things is experienced.
Yet the human world of things refers essentially beyond the
confines of my own temporality - the poem, the Greek temple,

even the mature oak tree, refer beyond my time, into the times of
those who went before me. Out of the temporality of human
existence is born its historicality. But history, whether of what
has been or of what is to come, is only insofar as it appears
through the presences of things. History, as the revelation of
meaning, comes about when I recognize in the Greek statue the
vision of Praxiteles.
So my own existence is revealed both as temporal and histori-
cal, caring as well as knowing, acting as well as thinking, essen-
tially related to things, to others, and to itself, as well as the
totality of which it is a part.
These, then seem to me to be the central insights from which the

rest of Heidegger's philosophy flows. A genuine critical engage-
ment with Heidegger must therefore concentrate upon these
themes. I now turn to that critique.
NOTES
1 ego Richardson (1).

2 Heidegger himself objected to this misreading of this work and the linking of
his name with that ofSartre. See LH passim.
3 The fact that he was not exempted he later cited as evidence than he was out
of favour with the Nazi party, See DSl.
4 Krell (2).
5 Langan (1),p9.
10
ONTOLOGY VERSUS
EPISTEMOLOGY
Heidegger's central vision in Being and Time is that an adequate
philosophical account of human existence must treat man as a
whole, not merely as a knowing consciousness. There can be no
doubt that this is right. In making this claim Heidegger is advanc-
ing a powerful criticism against his philosophical predecessors,
and most immediately against Husserl. Of course, it was not
Husserl's prime purpose to give a philosophical account of
human existence, any more than it was Descartes's or Kant's.
Like them, Husserl was more concerned about knowledge and
truth, and how certainty could be established. But also like them,
he implicity gave an account of how human beings are, which
concentrated centrally on their capacity to discover knowledge.
By contrast, Heidegger says that man's being-in-the-world
precedes the establishment of knowledge; that knowing is a
'founded' mode of being-in-the-world. This sounds right. Cer-
tainly, it is true of the development of an individual child: at birth
(s)he cannot properly be said to 'know' anything, if knowing is
taken in the sense of 'objective' knowledge so hallowed by the
philosophical tradition. In a similar sense it seems true of the
historical development of culture. Nobody worried very much
about 'objective' knowledge before Descartes, or at least before
the beginnings of the scientific 'revolution' in the latter half of the
sixteenth century. And we have no good reason to suppose that
'knowledge' was considered as, in any sense, a problem
until shortly before Socrates. Distinctions between knowledge,
understanding, practical ability, or wisdom, we can suppose to
have arisen quite late in our history - and certainly long after
homo sapiens (so-called) began to exist. So in both historical
senses, that of the individual and that of culture, we can concede
tha t human existence preceded knowing, and knowing was never
more than one way of being in the world.
But Heidegger does not base his position on any such appeal to
history. We might properly ask, then, whether 'Being precedes
knowing' is intended in a purely logical sense. Husserl clearly
intended a logical sense when he used the term 'founded mode'.

So if Heidegger says 'Knowing is a founded mode of Being-in-
the-World', we might reasonably suppose that he means 'know-
ing is logically based upon being', i.e.: 'It is logically impossible
for knowing to occur, except to some previously existing being'.
But it was never Heidegger's style to argue on the basis of what
logically must be the case. Indeed, we have seen that in his
inaugural lecture he attacked the 'sovereignty of reason' and
said: 'The very idea of "logic" disintegrates in the vortex of a
more original questioning'. His argument was that 'logic', as any
other science, must arise out of our experience. This is a position
which must cast doubt upon his use of terms like 'a lJriori', his
intention of uncovering necessary structures of human existence,
and his claim to be elucidating what is universally the case.
Be that as it may, 'knowing is founded on being' cannot be
understood simply either in a historical sense, or a logical one-
since Heidegger appeals to neither. He appeals instead to the
phenomena of experience. Which brings us to the central prob-
lem area for the whole phenomenological movement: how do
you appeal to the phenomena of experience? what counts as a
phenomenon? how do you know you've got the right one(s)?,
that you've described them correctly? that you've drawn the right
conclusions?, and that these are universally valid? In short, what
is the proper phenomenological method?
Husserl, for his part evolved a fairly clear conception of what
to do and how to do it - though admittedly he changed his
method over time. You set out to investigate an idea; you observe
or imagine some proper application of it; you describe in an
unprejudiced way what the appearance is that the idea is pro-
perly applied to; and you ask what is essential in that appearance
that makes it a proper application of the idea. So a phenomenon
is any aspect of the appearance that I care to identify- though
originally Husserl envisaged phenomena as 'simples' akin to
sense-data.
Heidegger does not share this conception of the appeal to
experience. It is not his purpose to uncover ideas, but to articu-
late the necessary structures of (human) beings. Husserl's ideas
are known beforehand, in the sense that we already usc them: we
can all identify a cube, so we can all examine the phenomenal
appearance of the cube and hope to reach agreement about it. But
Heidegger articulates 'Being-in-the-world', Worldhood', 'Fal-
Ontology versus Epistemology 151
lenness', 'Temporality', etc., which are very different from Hus-

serl's more prosaic examples. Since we don't yet know what
counts as 'Fallenness', or 'State of Being' (Befindlichkeit) , we are
in no position to pursue the investigation ourselves. Our only
choice is to tag along behind Heidegger's interpretation of
experience, and check it against our own. What is not at all clear
is how Heidegger himself selects the correct phenomena to attend
to. Indeed, whereas Husserl thinks of the visual appearance of
three faces of a cube as a phenomenon, it is not clear what
Heidegger regards as the phenomenal appearance of 'Fallenness'.
Equally obscure is what he counts as a phenomenon. And for the
most part Being and Time does not read as a series of descri ptions
in any sense of that word.
Perhaps not too much turns, however, on whether Heidegger
can properly be called a 'phenomenologist'. He is clearly, in some
sense, attempting to elucidate experience. In fact, what he keeps
referring back to is not some discrete chunk of the stream of
phenomenal experience (such as the sight of a cube), but to
'primordial understanding'. This is what is really opposed to
knowledge in his thinking. This is the ultimate court of appeal. It
is what replaces Husserl's pre-given ideas in guiding the investi-
gation. Without ever saying it in quite so many words, Heidegger
believes that there is an inarticulate, pretheoretical understand-
ing of the world and its contents, and the purpose of the
philosophical exercise is to bring this to adequate articulation.
This is the hermeneutic of human existence- to articulate what
we all already 'understand'. And because we already have the
understanding, though not the words and concepts by which to
articulate it, it should be enough for Heidegger to produce the
concept, for us to recognize its truth. So Heidegger's appeal is to
whatwe already understand but cannot say.
Of course, the force of that appeal depends upon how well it
works: that is, how adequately I believe Heidegger to be
articulating some prior 'understanding' of my own. If it rings no
bells, then it will actually be very difficult to take issue with what
Heidegger has said. If I recognize nothing in my experience which
corresponds to Heidegger's 'Fallenness', that may be because I
have not understood what he means, or because I have not had
that experience, or because I have had but am 'blocking' its
emergence into consciousness.
It is a consequence of Heidcgger's position that he cannot
admit the second of three possibilities - that I have not had such
an experience - without assigning me to the less than fully
human. If I do not recognize a 'necessary' structure of human
being in myself it cannot be that it isn't there. So he must always
conclude that an active 'blocking' is going on: I am motivated not
to admit the truth. This notion of the suppression of what I really
'know' to be the case has an obvious parallel in psycho-analysis
- a point to which I will return later.
Even if I do recognize in my experience the things which
Heidegger is talking about - I identify, say, the phenomena of
anxiety - then two important questions remain. The first con-
cerns the correctness of Heidegger' s interpretation, for there is no
doubt that he, like Husserl, goes beyond the immediate
phenomena as given. It is not at all clear how I am supposed to
take issue with Heidegger if I cannot accept his interpretation.
For example, Heidegger says that I am anxious in the face of
death: I will agree. Heidegger says that anxiety is not really about
death, but about my current inauthenticity. Suppose I disagree.
We are not disputing the phenomena, so no further phenomena
can be invoked to resolve the difference. We cannot appeal to
logic, since Heidegger holds that logic must conform to experi-
ence and not the reverse. So I am tempted to say: 'That may be
true in some cases, but people differ, and it happens not to be true
in mine'.
But that brings us on to the second question about Heidegger's
interpretations - his implicit claim that they are universally
valid. He cannot afford to admit of individual differences, at least
insofar as his fundamental structures are concerned, without
jeopardizing the status of his whole investigation. But nor has he
any way of establishing that his interpretations are universally
valid. In critizing the philosophers of consciousness, he rightly
believed that they could not, within individual consciousness,
ever prove the existence of any transcendent being. But he him-
self is in a similar dilemma, for he can never show, by reference to
his individual experience alone, that his interpretation of it is
universally valid.
Therefore, what he needs is some way of entering into a
dialogue with others, to ensure that his interpretations transcend
the personal and idiosyncratic. No such dialogue is envisaged in
Heidegger's writings. The dialogues he considers are all
'dialogues' between an individual and 'Being' or 'beings'. This
gives his writings the didactic arrogance of one revealing the

truth to the unenlightened - which indeed is what he clearly
thinks he is doing. It is this attitude (a form of intellectual
authoritarianism) which enables him to dismiss the problem
which really still remains for him- the problem of knowledge.
Let us accept for whatever reasons - historical, logical, or

others, - that human existence precedes knowing, and that
therefore any account which treats man exclusively as a knowing
consciousness will be seriously deficient. Perhaps we can even
accept that man is not essentially a knowing consciousness, in
that he is always and everywhere embodied - an embodiment
which involves action, motivation, feeling, etc. But Heidegger
wants us to go further than this: he wants us to agree that man is
essentially not a knowing consciousness; that to interpret him as
such is not merely deficient butwrollg.
The plausibility of Heidegger's claim derives from the image of
'knowledge' to which he vaguely refers, and can only be main-
tained because he never explicitly discusses it. By 'knowledge' he
means something like the 'objective, rationalistic product of
scientific - particularly experimental- investigations'. And, in
common with many Weimar intellectuals, he believed that such
scientific knowledge was not only incomplete and distorted, but
actually dangerous. Extravagant claims had been made for it
during the nineteenth century, but in the twentieth it had
revealed itself as fundamentally inhumane. It was the root cause
of most of our present ills - a theme which Heidegger explicitly
developed in later works. 1 What is certain is that by 'knowledge'
Heidegger means nothing very precise. He explicitly excludes
'practical' knowledge of the sort that a craftsman has, and an
apprentice sets out to acquire. It is unclear whether the 'practical
knowledge' of a doctor or a lawyer is meant to be included or
excluded. It is clear that the practical knowledge of an engineer is
included. Heidegger seems to be operating with a traditional
Geisteswissenschaft/ N aturwissellschaft distinction, cutting
across a practical/theoretical dichotomy - but more of this
anon.
So let us take Heidegger's claim to be that man is essentially
not an objectively investigating, scientific consciousness, and
that to interpret him as such is wrong. Let us bear in mind that
man also pursues natural science, and that we have no particular

grounds for supposing that this is against his nature. Natural
scientific knowledge does exist, and it is in some sense correct or
true- a sense which it is incumbent upon Heidegger to explicate
before he can establish that it is inferior to, or false in the face of,
his higher sense of truth.
But irrespective of the truth or otherwise of natural science,
Heidegger cannot simply sweep away with the same brush all
other branches of knowledge. As a life-long academic who once
very seriously tried to launch a programme of university reform,
Heidegger quite clearly did not think that academic study and the
search for truth were a waste of time. In particular, he thought
that the traditional humanistic pursuits were worth following-
that a lot could be gained from literature and the classics, linguis-
tic studies and history. But he wanted to describe what could
valuably be gained as 'understanding' rather than 'knowledge'.
This brings us to a fundamental ambiguity in Heidegger's
conception of 'understanding'. What Heidegger means by
'understanding' differs from the normal conception of 'know-
ledge' in two very important respects: it is non-cumulative, and it
cannot really be transmitted. The ambiguity is that 'understand-
ing' means both the pre-theoretical, inarticulate ability to cope
with the world, and the articulated theoretical interpretation of
this. Heidegger believes that there is no essential difference
between the act and the description, at least insofar as the
description is adequate. 2 All that happens is that I bring to
conscious articulation what in a sense I 'knew' all along. Under-
standing is non-cumulative because there is no more of it present
after articulation than there was before. Similarly, understanding
cannot really be transmitted from one person to another. All I
can do is articulate my understanding and hope that you find it
an adequate articulation of yours. I am not telling you anything
you don't already 'know'- I am merely putting it into words for
you.
Judged from this perspective, the traditional conception of
knowledge as progressing, accumulating and being transmitted
from one generation to the next is sheer illusion. It is not just that
Heidegger's conception of truth is static and deeply conservative
- it is fundamentally medieval in its non-acknowledgement of
change. 3 It is not just that Heidegger avoids developing an epis-
temology because he doesn't think it important: he cannot give
any adequate account of knowledge because he has no basis
upon which to do so- he therefore has to write it off completely.
We shall see that this led him into insuperable difficulties in his
accounts of practical understanding and history - types of
'knowledge' which he evaluates positively. But for the meantime,
let us return to the implications of this position for the status of
Heidegger's own investigation.
All that we can suppose Heidegger to be doing, by his own

account, is articulating his own primordial understanding. If we
find that articulation to be true for us, then there is at least a sense
in which we have learned something, that we 'know' more after
reading Heidegger than we did before we started. Indeed, if
people did not expect to learn something from Heidegger it is
difficult to see why on earth they would read him. And having
learned something from Heidegger, they can presumably indi-
cate what it was: they may say for example: 'I now realize that
the scientific detachment from things is based upon a more
primitive practical engagement with them'. Now whether we call
this 'knowledge', 'understanding' or 'wisdom', it is clear that
something has been learned, that whatever it was has been
transmitted, that it has implications for what I will say about the
truth or falsity of certain statements, and it can lead on to further
charges in what I know/understand or whatever.
In short, I am arguing that even on Heidegger's own account
there must be a difference between 'primordial' understanding,
and the understanding after successful articulation of experience.
If there were not, then there would be as big a practical contra-
diction in Heidegger writing Being and Time as there is in a
philosopher seriously trying to prove solipsism to another per-
son: in each case the logic of the belief should be to reduce the
believer to silence. Heidegger was at least tempted by this logic,
though never actually convinced. 4
He remains then in an incoherent position, which fails to
account for the status of his philosophical argument. He sets out
to persuade, to teach, to transmit something, at the same time as
saying that the reader will acquire no knowledge from reading
the book. Moreover, he maintains that there is no acquisition of
understanding since the understanding was there before. He
therefore has no way of describing the change which is supposed
to occur in the reader as a result of reading the book. This

omission is part and parcel of the methodological obscurity we
noted before. Husserl says - look at, or imagine, a cube. Isn't it
true that you can only see three sides? What can we learn about
visual objects and vision from this? Heidegger says - curiosity
and idle chatter belong to the public world of the 'one'. Husserl
tries to put over a method, the results of which we can evaluate
and discuss, and which will hopefully produce knowledge on a
cumulative basis. Heidegger says, that is all a waste of time, its
results are illusion. All we can do is meditate on what it is and
hope to be able to see what was already there. Philosophy is no
more than a gesture in the direction of truth.
But if Heidegger lacks methodological criteria, fails to explain

what happens when we learn anything, and has no adequate
account of the status of his own investigation, what are we to
understand by the 'ontology' which he says is so important? If
ontology is to precede epistemology, how do we do ontology?
And if ontology is not to acquire any knowledge, in what sense is
it a science, or serious study at all? What of Husserl's objection
that knowledge of Being is also knowledge, so epistemology must
beprimary?
I think we must take it that Heidegger is not merely exhorting
us to do ontology, but considers himself to be doing it. He clearly
believes he is at least opening the way to the Question of Being.
Now the 'being' of Dasein, which he opposes to the 'knowing' of
Husserl's conscious ego, is ordinary everyday activity. Appar-
ently this is to substitute the ordinary man at work (for it is the
work situation he invokes) for the philosopher in his study, as the
paradigm case of human existence. Indeed part of Heidegger's
appeal in the early thirties was that he spoke of getting on with
the job, rather than theorizing in abstraction from the real world.
It is my contention, which I shall develop later, that Heideg-
ger's appeal to 'praxis' is both anti-scientific and romantic:
'anti-scientific' because unselfcritical activity is opposed to scien-
tific knowing; and 'romantic' because Heidegger's concept of the
work situation is an idealization, several removes from the reality
he was apparently invoking. Be that as it may, he conceives of the
ontology of Dasein as essentially based on the elucidation of
purposive human activity, typically in the work situation. OUf
primary encounter with things is as tools and materials for our
use; and since the work situation refers essentially to other
people, our encounter with things leads on to our encounter with
others. Ontology, then, must start from our practical doing, as
opposed to just knowing, from our essential unity with things and
the world instead of our detachment from them. Once the struc-
tures of human existence exhibited in doing have been eluci-
dated, we can turn to the Being which appears (only) to human
existence. Hopefully, we shall then be able to say something
about Being.
This approach only achieves plausibility through its connec-
tion with Heidegger's concept of 'understanding' which we have
already discussed. The notion is that the 'understanding' of
things in the work situation is one of profound sympathy, but is
theoretically inarticulate. It is totally adequate to the task, to
being truly human, and indeed to the true being of the thing. It
achieves a depth of encounter which mere scientific manipula-
tion, dealing as it does with superficialities, can never aspire to.
We live in a situation, then, of theoretical articulation of superfi-
ciality (science), and profound understanding which is silent
(craft). The ontological task is to articulate the profound under-
standing. (Readers will note the sympathetic vibrations of this
position for a whole range of latter-day ecologists and whole-
earth freaks).5
If I chop wood with an axe rather than slicing it with a chain
saw, it is certainly true that I shall sweat more. It may also be less
smelly, less noisy, less offensive to the neighbours, more healthy
for me, and a far better thing on a whole host of aesthetic and
economic grounds. There are no grounds for supposing, how-
ever, that I will be more in touch with the 'being' of the wood just
because I employ a brute lump of steel rather than a product of
advanced scientific rationality. Nor are there any grounds for
supposing that, in either of these cases, I am having a 'truer'
encounter with the wood than my friend who slices it with a
scalpel and examines the section under a microscope (no sweat).
Yet Heidegger initially approaches true being as that which
appears incidentally to unreflexive consciousness. For him it is
typically the craftsman, the artist and the poet who are in touch
with the being of things. It is to their experience that we must
look for the foundation of ontology, not to that of the scientific
investigator. Or rather, we must look to aspects of our own
experience which correspond to those of the craftsman etc.
Heidegger indeed has a principle of selection from the
phenomena of experience; but it is one based on a highly dubious
presupposition about what constitutes true being (or true
appearance): it certainly does not satisfy Husserl's criterion that
only presuppositions which are self-evidently true should be
admitted.
Ontology, then, for Heidegger, is the articulation of our
primordial understanding of what is, based on experiences such
as those of the craftsman, artist or poet. And just as the craftsman
already knows what he is doing, and the artist and poet already
know what they are seeing, so we already understand the being
which it is the business of ontology to reveal. Just as the poem
adds nothing to the landscape it describes, so ontology does not
add to the understanding of being it reveals. The seriousness of
ontology as a study is derived from the seriousness of its 'object'
i.e. 'being': just as the seriousness of a poem derives from the
content of the vision it expresses. In this way, Heidegger believes,
ontology can be worthy of serious study and yet essentially
non-cumulative. As with poetry, all that can accumulate are the
successive insights of different poets. It is inappropriate to think
of a poetic tradition in terms of progressive accumulation of
knowledge.
Heidegger's analogy (or indeed near identity, as he sometimes
claims) between ontology and poetry highlights a feature of his
position we noted above: there can be no interpersonal criterion
by which it can be evaluated. Just as it is inappropriate to pick a
particular sentence out of a poem and ask whether it is true or
not, so for him it is wrong to suppose that a particular
philosophical statement is true or false in isolation from the work
of which it is apart. 6 The philosophical work, like the poem,
expresses a vision. One can talk about the truth in the vision, the
truth 'of' the poem or the philosophical work. But the truth of a
vision must be grasped as a whole: it cannot be assessed on the
basis of any 'criterion' - no matter how many people can sub-
scribe to it.
Attractive though this conception may be to some, it does have
clear consequences for what ontology can and cannot be.
Heidegger rejects the view (shared by Husserl, say) that the
articulation of our primordial understanding produces know-
ledge. Like a poem, it adds nothing to what we already under-
stood; like a poem (he would claim) its value derives from the fact
that it reveals what was already there. Ontology is therefore a
serious study: it is as serious as Being itself. He would reject the
argument that there is any practical contradiction between doing
ontology and denying that it discovers knowledge. Its justifica-
tion is ostensive: it points the reader at something else. And of
course, he rejected Husserl's argument that 'knowledge of Being'
was also 'knowledge' - so epistemology was primary. For
Heidegger, ontology was not about knowledge of Being at all.
Ontology, then, is not to establish any knowledge; it is to be

validated by reference to certain types of privileged experience,
but cannot be judged by any public, or interpersonal, criterion. In
essence, it is the attempt to grasp and to express a vision - the
vision of truth. This is not the truth about anything in particular:
it is the truth about what is - about Being. Ultimately, then,
Heidegger's explanation of his project in Being and Time comes
back to the validity of questioning Being as a whole.
Early on in this book (p13) I quoted John Macquarrie's
remark that 'Heidegger replaces God with Being'. We are now
better able to appreciate the full significance of this statement.
Ontology, for Heidegger, is preparation for the experience of
God. The Being for which Heidegger is seeking is to be given in a
'moment of vision'. Just as Bultmann was listening for the
Kerygma, the divine call which echoed through the mythical
story of Christ, giving it its truth irrespective of historical facts, so
Heidegger is waiting for the vision of God as Being- the hidden
truth in philosophy, poetry and history, and the only true pur-
pose of human endeavour. This is why he dismisses natural and
social science, and all the discussions about factuality, rationality
and true knowledge. They are all vanity before the experience of
True Being. Ontology is the search for that experience: and
Heidegger accepts without embarrassment or sense of loss the
charges that it is neither scientific, rational nor even philosophi-
cal.
Of course, the whole project of ontology depends upon the
possibility of having such an experience, and on that experience
really being a vision of God. No one can deny Heidegger the
reality of his experience, any more than YOll can successfully deny
that I really dreamed of Cleopatra. What is open to dispute in
both cases, however, is what, if anything, was the object of the

experience. Disbelieving, you might challenge me with: 'OK, If it
was really Cleopatra tell me what she was like'. I reply, 'It was a
he actually - rather like the Hunchback of Notre Dame in
appearance': and for you that settles it. I go on maintaining,
however, that it really was Cleopatra, she just looked like
Quasimodo.
My description of my experience thus remains inviolate- but
at the expense of having no public currency. Heidegger takes his
argument further than this however. Continuing the analogy,
suppose I now lean forward confidentially and say 'Actually, I
misled you. I didn't dream about Cleopatra. Cleopatra herself
appeared to me - in a dream'. If I genuinely believe this, my
belief has total protection. My dream is not of course directly
accessible to you or anyone else: to ask for public verification is
inappropriate. Furthermore, the meaning is given in the experi-
ence, as an intrinsic part of it: I just know it's Cleopatra. I do not
have to apply any criterion to establish the meaning: indeed the
very notion of applying a criterion is irrelevant.
The way in which this differs from the previous case is that
more now appears to be at stake: I am claiming the independent
existence of Cleopatra- that she transcends my experience. But,
as we saw above, in order to establish that claim I must have
some criterion for transcendence: a criterion which must neces-
sarily go beyond my own experience. As a matter of fact we do
have criteria for establishing the existence of things independent
of any particular individual: the procedure involves asking other
people whether they have similar experiences. In a world without
other people, 'exists for me' might be the same as 'really exists':
but in a world with other people 'really exists' inevitably means
more than just 'exists for me'.
The relevance of this to Heidegger's argument is that whereas
he can chose to describe his experience in whatever way he likes,
if he wants that description to have any public currency, he must
invoke criteria by which the public usage is to be established. It
simply isn't good enough to say: 'The meaning is intrinsic to the
experience', since this exploits an ambiguity in the term
'meaning'. 'Meaning' in the sense of personal significance can be
intrinsic to the experience: but 'meaning' in the sense of publicy
accepted equivalence cannot.
Since Heidegger also wants to establish the transcendence of
his experience of Being, i.e. that Being exists independently of his

own experience, he must necessarily have recourse to public
criteria for the establishment of that existence. But he does not.
He disdains to discuss any such criteria. We thus have no grounds
for supposing that Heidegger's experience is anything other than
private to him. We can no more take it as evidence that 'Being'
exists, than we can take my dream as evidence that Cleopatra is
still alive, or a junkie's experience of hell as proof of the existence
of an underworld.
So what is left of Heidegger's ontological project? Heidegger

attacks epistemology, science and rationality in the name of an
all important quest for Being. But his attack does not dispose of
them. He is reduced to dismissing all scientific and much human
knowledge as illusory (though extant), and recommending
instead the cultivation of the 'understanding'. This understand-
ing is something we already have, so its cultivation produces no
new knowledge. It is merely the preparation for the moment of
vision, in which the truth of Being is revealed. The ontology
which Heidegger recommends and practices, must therefore be
seen as analogous to poetry. I t must not be expected to express
the truth, so much as to indicate it. As preparation for the
experience of Being, ontology might be on a par with taking
mescalin, and presumably should be judged by the same criterion
- namely, whether it works. And as with a mescalin trip, the
feeling that some thing was experienced is not by itself any
evidence that the thing exists. Yet Heidegger is not prepared to
discuss any application of public or interpersonal criteria to
determine the reality of the experienced thing. His project there-
fore stands or falls on a matter of faith alone: if you believe in
Being, then nothing matters except the search for it; if you don't,
you are lost, unregenerate, a fallen son of Adam.
I suggest that this is not really a project for a philosophical
exercise - or indeed for any other exercise except mystical
meditation. After Being and Time Heidegger himself accepted
that what he was doing was not really philosophy, so he called it
'thinking' - about the Being Question. I would further suggest
that it was the development of this doctrine which itself pre-
vented the completion of Being and Time (or perhaps was the
rationalization for its non-completion). By the last two chapters
of the published part Heidegger was already finding it very
difficult to say anything intelligible about Being. The Kant book,
the Essence of Reasons and the inaugural lecture make little
headway; indeed they get more and more vacuous, ceasing to
bear any intelligible relationship to the supposed phenomena of
experience. His later works return again and again to the 'Ques-
tion of Being' without it ever being formulated, let alone
answered. In the face of this repeated failure Heidegger did not
conclude that there was nothing to formulate and the whole
project was incoherent. Instead he chose to believe that the whole
matter was unutterably profound i.e. unsayable and ineffable.
'What have we achieved?' He asked in 1953, 'We have become
attentive to that which is inaccessible'. (SR. p.179). 7
But if the project Heidegger initiated in Being and Time was
doomed in the long term, does that make his analysis of human
existence collapse? I would argue not. I think there is a gap, a vast
gap, between what Heidegger says he is doing, and what he
actually does. The reason most people valued his work was
because of what he did, and in spite of what he said he did.
What Heidegger did in Being and Time was to propose a way
of looking at human existence, an a priori analysis if you prefer,
which was superior to the currently available alternative. It was
taken as the very thing that Husserl said it was, and Heidegger
denied - namely, philosophical anthropology. As such, it actu-
ally was a contribution to knowledge, in some ways on a par with
psychoanalysis in the twenties, or theoretical linguistics, say, in
the sixties. Of course it could be argued that it developed under-
standing rather than establishing objective knowledge. But
something was learned, transmitted and added to as a body of
truth, accessible in principle to validation between persons on the
basis of agreed criteria. And in this sense it was indeed know-
ledge. This was what was taken by psychoanalysts such as Bins-
wanger, Boss and Carus0 8 as the a priori basis for empirical
work. If Heidegger could have confessed to these limitations,
Husserl might indeed have been proud of him.
But if Heidegger was not doing ontology as he claimed, what
was the status of his work? 'Knowing is founded upon being in
the world' is a statement of historical truth about culture as a
whole and individuals within it. Heidegger's readers (but not
Heidegger) realized it to be such, and read on accordingly. 'I
know how to use things before I acquire theoretical knowledge
about them': again a statement of historical truth - but not one

from which any conclusions can be drawn about the necessary
essence of human being. And so Heidegger proceeds, actually
formulating truths about his own experience, which many other
people found to illuminate theirs. As was to be expected, his
formulations were most illuminating to right-wing, Catholic
intellectuals with a background in the Geisteswissenschaften.
But some of his analysis was sufficiently general to apply to the
experience of many Westerners, at least for the remainder of this
century, and it is this that now needs evaluating.
NOTES
1 Most particularly, 'The Question concerning Technology', but see also, ego
the 'Letter on Humanism'.
2 This belief is derived from the Scotist doctrines of the Grammatica
Speculativa. See above, p 16.
3 'The wind that blows through Heidegger's thinking,' says Hannah Arendt,
'does not spring from the century he happens to live in.' Arendt (1), p303. She
means itas a compliment, butit is profoundly true.
4 Even at the age of seventy-seven, he would go no further than to say, 'It may
be that the path of thinking has today reached the point where silence is
required'. DSI, p279. (My italics).
5 I should make it clear that I do not regard ecologists as necessarily freaky, any
more than I regard appeals to 'praxis' as necessarily anti-scientific.
6 Note the hermeneutic conception.
7 See also TB.
8 See bibliography.
11
PRAXIS AND THE SOCIAL WORLD
'British Empiricism takes as its typical instances of what we
notice in the world such facts as "the grass is green" " writes
John Passmore in A Hundred Years of Philosophy. 1 'In contrast,'
he continues, Heidegger takes' "the hammer is too heavy",
(which) suggests as typical a quite different, more practical,
attitude to the world'. Indeed, Heidegger's emphasis on the
primacy of the operational encounter with things over a detached
observation of them, is crucial to his whole analysis of our being
in the world. 'We are not primarily uninvolved spectators: we are
engaged with things - we care'. And surely, in this Heidegger is
right.
We can agree, then, that our practical involvement with things
comes before our theoretical knowledge of them. The basis of
this agreement, as we saw in the last chapter, was that it happens
to be historically true both in a personal, and in a broad cultural
sense: but it cannot be claimed as revealing any eternal essence of
being human. Heidegger wants to use this truth to claim that our
'primordial encounter' with things is somehow more genuine or
pure than subsequent theoretical reflections upon them. Again,
working is better than thinking. What we now need to examine is
the quality of Heidegger's analysis of this operational encounter
with things, and whether his account of the shift into the theoret-
ical attitude is acceptable.
We encounter things, says Heidegger, primarily as tools or
equipment for our use. Sounds plausible. It is not, however,
based upon any unprejudiced description of the phenomena of
the lived world. Heidegger preselects his 'phenomena' -like the
hammer- to illustrate the point he is making. The question must
therefore be asked: What of other ways of encountering things?
Heidegger allows only one other - the detached, theoretical
observation. But surely this crude dichotomy does violence to the
many various ways we relate to things? I toy with a pencil while
talking on the 'phone. I look at a bowl of fruit to sketch it. I let my
finger trail in the river- for sheer amusement. I pull the petals off
Praxis and the Social World 165
a daisy, to count how many there are. I throw a ball in the air. I
wear a silver chain around my neck - because I like it. None of
these ways of relating to things can be reduced to Heidegger's
dichotomy without distortion.
What Heidegger has to argue is that his dichotomy expresses
the two most essential ways of relating to things, and that there-
fore there is no distortion of essence by the reduction of other
examples to these two types. Although he clearly believes this, he
brings no evidence to support it: he is left with the general
problem phenomenologists have of validating their interpreta-
tion of the phenomena as the correct one.
In fact, Heidegger's dichotomy derives its plausibility from the
juxtaposition of terms. I start off in the practical attitude, then I
shift to the theoretical. Let's examine Heidegger's account of this
shift a little more closely. I am engaged in hammering, then
something goes wrong. The hammer breaks. The wood splits. I
can't find the nails. In short, I am up against the recalcitrance of
<things - or more formally, things negate my purposive activity.
As a result, they stand out for me: I am forced to regard them as
they are in themselves. Ergo, I adopt the attitude of attempting to
'know'them.
Now clearly this scenario could well happen. But equally
clearly, others are also possible. Going for a walk (for sheer
pleasure) I come across a fallen yew tree. Yew is a beautiful
wood. So I go back for my (chain) saw, cut up the wood and take
it home. Having let it season for a couple of years. I get it out and
examine it carefully. I decide it would made a very nice set of
shelves. I cut it into planks, but it turns out to be far knottier than
I anticipated. So instead I make it into a chest of drawers, using
the knotty pieces for the back, where they won't be seen.
Here, then, is a nice Heideggerian example of craft work in
which the sequence of events (or attitudes) is the reverse of
Heidegger's paradigm. I am not initially engaged in purposive
work activity: I am walking for the sake of walking. Incidental to
that activity, I just happen to notice- for no reason- the fallen
tree. I examine it (as it is) out of sheer curiosity. Only then do I
decide to begin work by getting the saw etc. Again, after the
wood is seasoned I let it 'suggest' to me what I should make it
into. Having started on one project- the shelves- I abandon it
and start another which is more suited to the nature of the wood.
Now it is doubtless possible to force my encounter with the
yew tree into the mould of a Heideggerian description. Heidegger

could argue that walking is a purposive activity in which the
ground and the landscape came to me as ready to hand; and my
noticing the yew tree is covered by his concept of the 'standing
out' of objects which interfere with (= negate) my actions. But
this is to save the theory by stretching it beyond the limits of
plausibility; the descriptions of phenomena are squeezed to fit
the preconceived ideas. This strategy is very similar to that of the
'drive' psychologists who, having postulated that all activity is
motivated by a goal-oriented drive (like hunger), had to invent a
goal of 'curiosity-satisfaction' to explain why animals just
played.
Heidegger wants to be able to justify his dichotomy as arising
out of the 'intrinsic nature' of the two types of experience: we are
supposed to just recognize that these are as Heidegger says, and
that they are related in the way he says. But whilst we have
acknowledged that there are such experiences and they can be
related in that way, we have also found that they need not be, and
that there are other types of experience which are being over-
looked. In short, Heidegger's analysis, whilst applicable in some
circumstances, had no demonstrable necessity. But should we
accept it as especially significant on other grounds? Granted that
certain ways of relating to things are excluded by it, is it espe-
cially revealing of the initial genesis of the theoretical attitude?
Can it be argued that the theoretical attitude can only arise in the
first instance out of on-going practical activity?
We might be prepared to accept that this is normally the case,
as a matter of historical fact,- but not that it must necessarily be
so. Not all human activities can be reduced to work, no matter
how broadly this is interpreted. Of course, man needs to work to
live; but infant man, just like primitive man (and indeed many
animals) also plays. He pokes his nose into things just for the hell
of it. He is curious to find out what things are like and how they
work irrespective of any possible future use. Indeed, the normal
behaviour of children and animals would seem to suggest quite a
different relationship between Heidegger's two modes of
encountering things. Curiosity and play occur after the satisfac-
tion of needs. The infant who has fed plays with its toes. The
hungry rat dashes straight through the maze; but the satisfied one
explores it at leisure. Things are examined for what they are, not
within purposive activity, but outside of it. Of course, Heidegger
does say that exploratory behaviour follows on from goal-
directed activity. But for him it is not a matter -of historical
precedence: and the exploration is an interruption of the purpo-
Sive act.
It is quite clear that his model is of a workman who is forced to
theorize in order to reach his goal (or complete his work). His
argument implies that if it were not for the recalcitrance of
things, if they did not negate my purposes, then I would never
make that switch into the theoretical attitude, and look at things
as they are in themselves. This is clearly false.
Indeed, a more plausible argument can be constructed to prove
the opposite. 'Things could not negate my purposes unless I had
expectations for the future. But my expectations for the future
are founded upon knowledge of how things are. I cannot set out
to make a chair unless I have some basic knowledge of wood and
carpentry. For me to be using the hammer in the first place, I must
have learned its use. So Heidegger's argument depends upon
abstracting one particular activity from the general context of the
work situation. A view of the whole situation will recognize that
the carpenter's apprentice must acquire knowledge in order to
practice the craft'.
This argument has a force to it, but no more than Heidegger
can it establish the necessary priority of one attitude over the
other. The truth is that neither term can be given priority,
because what we are considering is a dialectical interaction.
Thinking and praxis rebound and collide constantly. Activity
without thought occurs only in a trance; and thought completely
unrelated to praxis is fantasy. In the narrower sense that Heideg-
ger wants to discuss, itis true that science sometimes arose out of
the failures of praxis: the difficulty of getting a cannon ball on
target stimulated the science of ballistics, etc. But it is equally
true that new praxis arose out of the successes of science: flying
to the moon is not a craft activity.
Heidegger's notion of praxis, like his notion of thinking, lacks

historical dimension. He sees no dialectic between thought and
action, and no accumulation of knowledge, which is why his
dichotomy between the two attitudes towards things begins to
break down in Division 2 of Being and Time. In Division 1 the
craft/science distinction is run together with the praxis/theory
dichotomy. So the attitude of encountering things as ready-to-

hand is typical of the craftsman at work; whereas the attitude of
regarding things as present-at-hand is typical of the detached
scientist who has lost all feel for practical engagement. By Divi-
sion 2, ho"wever, Heidegger is having second thoughts. Of course
the craftsman has to get to know his tools and materials, as they
are in themselves: he acquires a practical wisdom. And the scien-
tist often has to dirty his hands by doing experiments or other-
wise initiating action: the archaeologist even has to wield a
spade. Yet Heidegger needs to maintain an absolute difference
between the thinking of the craftsman and that of the scientist,
otherwise his thesis about the necessary corruption in science and
epistemology breaks down. In the event, he gives up. That is, he
leaves the problem unresolved in Being and Time, and does not
return to it directly in later workc; (works which inherit the legacy
of this incoherence).2
If we actually attend to more varieties of human activity than
the two Heidegger considers, we begin to realize that there is a
continuum of cases, and that a twofold typology of craft practice
versus scientific theory is absurdly simplistic. Suppose an indi-
vidual sets out to build a shed - something he has never done.
Before he starts he needs materials in certain quantities, and
before he knows what materials to get he has to decide upon
rough dimensions, general design, and method of construction.
In taking those decisions he must think about the purpose of the
shed (his purpose in building it). But he must also learn some-
thing, either from other people, from written sources, or from
examining other sheds. He sees, or is advised, that a concrete
base is a good idea. He reads that a brick foundation for the walls
is important, that a timber frame will be cheapest, that the most
suitable planking to clad it with is such and such ... and so on.
He does his calculations, orders his materials, and now he has the
problem of tools. He has never mixed concrete before, or laid
bricks. He has seen workmen wi.th a heap of cement and stuff
turning it over with a shovel and sloshing water in. How is it
done? How does he know when it's ready to use? It's obvious
how to use the shovel; but what if someone lends him a concrete
mixer? He knows how to use a saw, but how do you use a power
saw without jamming the blade?
In short, the process of building a shed is a constant interaction
between thinking and activity. Lea"rning, or the acquisition of
experience, is going on all the time. And when the shed is
finished, the builder will know the mistakes he made, and what
defects it has. He will also be in a position to build a better shed
next time, or to advise someone else on how to build one.
Heidegger says that our work-activity necessarily refers to other
people - but he intends this mainly in the sense of producing
goods for exchange which are useful to others. The learning
which precedes and accompanies work-activity, and the know-
ledge which results from it, are equally part of the social aspect of
work. I take and give, receive and transmit, not only tools and
materials, but knowledge about their use.
The strict division which Heidegger wants to make between
craft 'understanding' of things, and scientific 'knowledge' of
them, simply does not stand up. Using wood, I wonder why oak
is harder than poplar. Mixing concrete, I want to know why it
sets. In each case I want a 'scientific' explanation which does not
entail any profound shift in attitude to the materials. Having
received that explanation, I now understand the things I am
working with better: I am less likely to make mistakes and more
likely to be able to correct the ones I do make. The answers I am
given or discover can be at various levels of scientific sophistica-
tion. Comparing oak and poplar, I notice that the former is
heavier and the texture less open: I may stop there. Or I may put
them both under a microscope and observe that the cells of the
former are smaller and more numerous. Or I may get into chemi-
cal analysis, or down to the level of the physical arrangements of
the molecules. And none of these investigations implies a neces-
sary detachment from, or lack of feeling for, the material I
investigate. Indeed, the whole motivation for my scientific study
of timber may be a deep appreciation of the beauty of wood: and
down at the level of cellular structure I find it no less fascinating
and no less beautiful- though certainly different.
I suggest that if Heidegger had been a Ii tde more faithful to the
phenomena of work experience, he would have been unable to
maintain the distinction between things ready-to-hand and
things present-at-hand. There is no essential difference in kind
between a craft hand-tool, a power tool constructed with scien-
tific knowledge and a scientific instrument. Ask Heidegger's
woodsman, carpenter or chair-bodger if he still wants to use his
treadle-driven pole lathe; or whether the power lathe doesn't
actually give him greater control over the cutting, and extend the
range of possible products. There is no necessary incompatibility

between the craft attitude, which Heidegger so values, and the
use of more and more sophisticated tools.
The farmer's wife makes country wine. She picks her elder-
berries, ferments them, strains the must, lets it mature. Some-
times the wine tastes sweeter, sometimes less sweet. Sometimes it
goes bad. Often it works, but there is no precise way of predicting
the outcome. Along comes a travelling salesman with a little
instrument called a hydrometer, and a packet of powder called
sodium metabisulphide. 'If you use this instrument', he says, 'you
will be able to control the sweetness of the wine, and its alcoholic
content. If you use this powder you need never have a bad lot of
wine again'. It would be perverse of the farmer's wife, or at best
obscurantist, to say, 'I don't want any of your new-fangled
instruments and chemical things', and send the man packing. The
hydrometer is merely a tool, no different in kind from the wine-
press she already uses. The sodium metabisulphide is a material,
neither less nor more chemical than the sugar she already adds.
So why is Heidegger's distinction at all tempting? Why did he

seem to be saying something profound about our very related-
ness to things? The answer is not difficult to find. There are other
attitudes towards materials, tools and products which contrast
sharply with those of our idealized craftsman, attitudes which we
commonly find in our society, and which were certainly much in
evidence in the Germany of the early thirties. I am thinking of the
attitudes expressed in talk about the exploitation of natural
resources, the unprofitability of traditional ways of doing things,
the necessity of constantly increasing the productivity of labour,
etc. I am also thinking of a workman's lack of pride, indeed lack
of interest, in what he is producing; his hostility to and fear of
mechanization of the production process, and his lack of any
feeling of responsibility for the products of his work.
Perhaps we think of these attitudes as typically connected with
large-scale industry or commerce. In fact, they permeate our
society through and through, though in the Germany of the
twenties and thirties Heidegger could see their advance under-
mining the traditional attitudes and a traditional way of life
which still persisted in rural provinces. Like others before him,
Heidegger idealized what was passing away, overlooked the
narrowness, meanness and poverty of peasant living, and
indulged in a romantic nostalgia for the past. Such nostalgia was
an important, if confused, constituent of Nazi ideology.
Heidegger believed that the cause of the defect was in the
human psyche, a reprehensible shift of attitude was occurring
which underlay a multitude of socially observable phenomena. If
only that corruption of the mind, or rather of the spirit, could be
halted, then the social phenomena would right themselves. Spirit
- as he made quite clear- was alta It was this that precipitated
his incursion into politics and made him welcome the Nazi
accession to power. It was this that he hoped to achieve by his
programme of university reform. He failed, just as it failed, not
because of some incapacity to fish in the murky waters of politics,
but because his analysis was fundamentally wrong. Towards the
end of his life he recognized the failure, was extremely pessimistic
about any change for the better, but still held to the same
analysis. He came to the inevitable conclusion that 'Only a god
can save US'.4
What is wrong with Heidegger's analysis is that he attempts to
reduce an economic and social process to the attitudes of the
individual psyche. If I, having been a craftworker, take an unskil-
led job in a mechanized factory, this is not due to some moral
failing on my part. No amount of personal improvement will
change the situation I now find myself in. We are not dealing here
with some metaphysical tendency, some essential structure of
Dasein which causes it to shift from the attitude of ready-to-hand
to that of present-at-hand. We are dealing with a historical
process in the face of which the individual as an individual is
powerless. The process has been going on for a long time (Engels
documented it well in 1844):5 craftworkers are driven into fac-
tories because the economic base of their craft production is
destroyed. They lose not only their livelihood, but also their tools
and property: the system bankrupts them. The shift of attitude
which indeed does occur, is a rational response to the situation of
dispossession in which the wage labourer finds himself. His
product is not his own, the tools and machines are not his, his
contribution to the production process is that of a meaningless
fragment, and while at work he is not even his own man. Work
loses all intrinsic purpose: its sole function becomes that of
acquiring a wage. It was this situation, with its typical attitudes

and responses, that Marx was trying to analyse in his discussion
of alienation. 6
But the attitudes to which Heidegger objects are not just those
of the industrial worker. The exploitation of nature, profitability
and productivity are the language of the employers of labour.
They are just as distant (or as alienated) from the material and
machines of large scale production as their employees are. If the
worker cares only about his take-home pay, the employer cares
only about his profit. Nor is this simply a capitalist/worker
problem. The self-employed farmer who abandons mixed farm-
ing and only grows grass for sale, or who battery-farms chickens,
follows the same cash motivation and finds his relationship to the
things of his work similarly impoverished.
This is the sort of thing Heidegger deplored. This was the sort
of experience of his readership which the distinction between
ready-to-hand and present-at-hand seemed to make sense of. But
the emphasis must be upon the 'seemed', because it misunder-
stands the motor of the social process - indeed, it does not
analyse the process as essentially social at all. The common factor
in all these 'corrupt' attitudes towards things and nature, is that
they are not valued for what they are, they are valued only in
terms of cash. The dispossessed labourer is not moti vated by the
thought of producing a fine product: the purpose of his labour is
to acquire cash. The employer is not in business out of charity.
The intrinsic usefulness of his product is irrelevan t except insofar
as it increases sales; what matters is the profit he can make. The
self-employed farmer may prefer driving a tractor to working in
an office: but he voluntarily impoverished the variety and
intrinsic satisfaction of his work for the sake of more cash. It is
cash which makes the system work, and cash becomes the only
standard of value. It becomes impossible to discuss the intrinsic
value or usefulness of things: instead cash becomes the only
measure of value. Which is precisely Marx's argument in Chap-
ter 1, Volume 1 of Capital.
Without straining the point, what I am arguing is that there is
indeed a phenomenal base for Heidegger's distinction between
ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, but because he does not
attend to the phenomena in an unprejudiced way, he misinter-
prets those few he abstracts. The shift from practical, engaged
involvement with things, to disinterested, unengaged manipula-
tion is an aspect of a fundamental social change - the penetra-
tion of a pre-capitalist economy by a value system based only on
cash. The shift is not due, as Heidegger believes, to some moral
decline caused by the corrupt ideology of science, but to
economic factors which Heidegger does not begin to under-
stand. 7 As a result, his implied remedy - back to primitive
engagement with the things themselves - is in fact no remedy:
since it treats as a matter of individual psychological adjustment
what in fact is a profound social problem.
From things, Heidegger's analysis moves on to persons. The

world of work, he argues, is a referential totality which intrinsi-
cally refers to other people. With this we can agree. We should
not assent, however, to any suggestion that the individual's
encounter with things precedes or is in any way prior to his
encounter with others. We have seen that the whole work situa-
tion is shot through with social learning and acquired know-
ledge. Practical activity in everyday life not only takes place
within a social context, but presupposes knowledge about the
existence of others. The human adult is both heir to a long
tradition of practical knowledge, and himself has acquired con-
siderable experience during his life history. At every stage, the
experience of things was mediated by other people, and the
experience of others took place within a context of things. In
terms of his personal history, the mother gave the infant the
breast or the bottle. In terms of cultural history, we cannot
identify and should not believe in a time when totally isolated
individuals related to the things of nature, before coming
together in families or broader societies.
Let us accept then, that the work-world, and indeed the
lived-world in general, intrinsically refers to other people, and
that Heidegger could just as well have progressed from people to
things rather than th~ reverse. Now applying the same
methodological approach to our experience of others as he did to
our experience of things, he finds (but does not directly comment
on) a curious asymmetry between the two. Our everyday
encounter with things is, he has argued, genuine before it is
corrupted by theory. By contrast our everyday encounter with
persons is false. He will later go on to argue that this is due to the
theoretical attitude I take towards people: it is analogous to
seeing things as present-at-hand. What he does not explain is

why there is no genuine initial relationship to people, corres-
ponding to the ready-to-hand relationship to things.
There is, I think, underlying Heidegger's analysis, an implicit
historical account which his terminology of 'fallenness',
'thrownness' etc. indicated - namely of a historically primitive
state of innocence, a golden age when relations between people,
as of people to things, were genuine and whole. To what extent
Heidegger is Hegelian, in believing that the primitive wholeness
was characterized by lack of self-consciousness, is something I
shall not speculate about.
Be that as it may, he is quite clear that our normal relationships
to others are characterized by inauthenticity. He does not, like
Sartre for example, believe that authentic relationships are
impossible - merely that they are not normally the case. When
he turns to what normally is the case, the picture he paints is one
of superficiality and competitiveness. I avoid genuine encounters
with others. I am afraid of penetrating below the surface, so I
employ the ideological device of the 'one' (das Man). Heidegger
talks about the 'dictatorship of the one', the public standard
which seems to refer to everybody but in fact refers to nobody. It
is this standard which is purveyed by the mass media, by the
chatter of the market place. It is of a piece with the constant
search for novelty, the hurry, the dashing on to the next thing or
cause, which is in turn rapidly discarded.
It is clear that there is a phenomenal basis to Heidegger's
account, so once again the question must be: 'Does he describe
the phenomena adequately and interpret them correctly?'. In fact
he makes little attempt to offer any phenomenological descrip-
tion, preferring to pass directly to 'hermeneutic exegesis'. Apart
from the above allusions to the phenomena of inauthentic relat-
ing, Heidegger gestures only briefly and in passing towards the
phenomena of possible authentic relationships. He does so in
terms of an already interpretative distinction between negative
and positive modes of caring. My normal mode of relating to
others is indifference - which is negative. On the positive side
there are various possible modes (no such variety is counte-
nanced on the negative side). At one extreme I can care so much
that I 'take over' the other's responsibility for his existence
(typical of a dominating mother, perhaps). At the other extreme I
can lead the other towards his own freedom and responsibility.
In addition, there is the possibility of 'working together authenti-
cally' in a common cause.
Phenomenologically, what we have here is a hotch-potch; a
few random examples picked out only because they apparently
fit Heidegger's preconceived ideas. Sartre, who was far from
being without preconceptions himself, nevertheless went much
further than Heidegger in basing his interpretation of interper-
sonal relations on descriptions of actual phenomena. Heidegger
eschews this on the grounds that it would be too 'anthropologi-
cal'.8 He has simply not considered a whole range of phenomena
to do with our ways of relating to each other. The ones that he
does seize can therefore not be shown to be in any way typical or
essential. Consequently his whole account of authenticity and
inauthenticity in relationships must be called into question.
Let us consider for a moment his distinction between indiffer-
ence and positive caring. Think about the people you know, the
people you normally come into contact with, the ones you acci-
dentally meet. Try and draw the line between indifference and
positive caring. I suggest that there is no place where such a line
could reasonably be drawn, either on the basis of our own
intuitive criteria, or of some that Heidegger mayor may not have
had in mind. I care more or I care less; but the two-fold typology
polarizes what is actually a continuum of cases. My wife, myoid
friends, my children are all people I care intensely about, though
in very different ways. Amongst the people I work with, those I
see every day, or some I have met only once, there are people who
matter quite a lot to me: I would miss them if they went out of my
life, regret not having known them better. There are others who I
am happy to see, but don't miss if they're not there. There are
those who I hardly notice - I am indifferent about. Then there
are those who I actually dislike, those who I would be happy
never to see again. And some I dislike intensely.
Whatever my attitudes towards or feelings about a particular
other person, I let these show to differing degrees in my actual
dealings with him or her. I may care a great deal about my son,
but be unable to make this known to him: as a result I may feel
that our relationship is a failure and that we never really get to
know each other. In another case I may feel quite indifferent
about some acquaintance, but I make a show of caring about
them because they seem to need sympathy and I think it's a
friendly thing to do. In a third case I actually dislike somebody
and make it quite clear to him how I feel: we say some very nasty
and hurtful things to each other.
These are just a few· of many possible examples of ways in
which we relate to each other. I suggest that in the first case,
although my feelings are very positive, the relationship with my
son fails to be authentic- but it is not clearly 'inauthentic'. In the
second case I suggest that the relationship is inauthentic, though
not because I am indifferent to the other person; and maybe it
should be inauthentic (suppose the person has recently been
bereaved, for example). In the third case my feelings are positive
(in Heidegger's sense) though bad. The relationship is authentic
in that I show how I feel, but inauthentic in that I say untrue
things to the other about himself, simply because they will hurt.
What I believe these examples show is that there is no simple
connection between strong feelings, the authenticity of a rela-
tionship, and what is right or wrong. Heidegger implies that
strong feelings make for an authentic relationship which is
automatically right or preferable to an inauthentic one. I would
suggest that a relationship can be authentic even though it is not
intense, and that it can be inauthentic even though it is intense. I
would also argue that before we can discuss the authenticity of a
relationship we must take account of its reciprocal nature, i.e.
there are at least two people involved, each of whom are both
giving and taking. The examples Heidegger gives of 'positive'
relationships are distinctly asymmetrical: either I dominate the
other or I lead him towards freedom and responsibility. He seems
to have in mind here the type of master/pupil, parent/child,
God/man relations which Buber discussed in I and Thou. What is
missing is any genuine reciprocity, any give and take, or any
approach to equality in the relationship. The reason for this
becomes clear in Heidegger's subsequent analysis: what makes a
relationship authentic is nothing in the relationship itself. Since
authenticity is primarily a mode of relating to self, according to
him an interpersonal relationship can only be called authentic if
it guides another to the proper mode of self-relating.
Again we must ask why, in spite of the confusions and ob-

scurities, is Heidegger's analysis so plausible? The answer, I
think, is not to be found in his account of interpersonal relations,
but in what he devotes much more time to- the in authenticity of
ordinary life. Frenetic day-to-day activity, superficial encounters

with others, the babble of the mass-media, no time for genuine
relationships, no time to just 'be myself', constant competitive-
ness and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses - all these amount to a
syndrome which Heidegger thinks is intrinsically related to our
attitude towards things and the dominance of technology in our
lives.
We saw when discussing our attitude towards things that what
Heidegger objected to was not caused by some metaphysical
failing on the part of individuals, but by a general social condi-
tion in which men find themselves alienated from things, their
relationships to things always mediated by cash. Similarly,
although in his discussion of others Heidegger appears to be
writing about interpersonal relations, what really concerns him
is a social condition, and one which cannot be changed by any
transformation in the attitude of individuals.
The keeping-up-with-the-Joneses and maintaining appear-
ances, which figures so largely in Heidegger's account of every-
day life, might be thought of as a typically petit bourgeois
attitude - though in fact it is widespread enough amongst sec-
tions of the European working class. But the general attitude of
competitiveness which Heidegger contrasts so unfavourably to
cooperation in communal endeavour is endemic in the system we
live under. 'The Being-with-one-another of those who are hired
for the same affair often thrives only on mistrust', writes Heideg-
ger (B&T, p 159) - for the very good reasons that their principal
ground for coming together is the money they will get, and at any
time anyone may be faced with the sack (unemployment, redun-
dancy, or whatever other euphemism is currently in vogue).
Heidegger contrasted this, as did the Nazis and their ideologues
such as Ernst Junger,9 with the togetherness of fighting for a
common cause. But to realize this in the camaraderie of the
storm-troopers was no long-term solution to a problem which
will persist so long as men (and women) spend much of their
waking life at work, when the principle upon which that work is
organized is profitability.
The basic phenomena which Heidegger was appealing to in hIS
characterization of everyday public life were the same that Marx
was trying to capture in his descriptions of man's alienation from
man in the 1844 Manuscripts. 1o But by Heidegger's time (and our
own) we have to add to the essential competitiveness of the
system the elaborate sophistication of packaging, marketing and
advertising industries which constantly try to persuade us that
we cannot live without what we didn't even know existed, that
happiness consists in the acquisition of more and more posses-
sions, and that we shall have neither love nor self-respect unless
we SUCCEED in making more money.
It is phenomena such as these that give the ring of truth to
Heidegger's identification of the 'one' which rules our lives. But
instead of identifying the social phenomena for what they are,
proceeding to analyse them and discuss how they could be
changed, Heidegger reduces them to essential psychological ten-
dencies. A comparatively recent historical phenomenon is thus
elevated to an atemporal metaphysical condition, and by the
same stroke fixed as the inevitable future of most people most of
the time.
'Labour . , , is now reaching the metaphysical rank of the
unconditional objectification of everything present which is
active in the will to will' (OM, p85),ll
NOTES
1 Passmore (1),p478.
2 d. QT.
3 See above p126, and 1M.
4 DSI.
S Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
6 Marx: The 1844 Manuscripts.
7 Exactly the same criticism can be made of Husserl's idealist account of
science and our present discontents in The Crisis (Cr).
8 In his early work Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Sartre referred (p23)
to 'another psychologist, Heidegger .. .' - which the latter surely found
insulting.
9 For Heidegger's debt to Junger, see, ego OM, p8S ff.
10 Marx (l), pp329-30.
11 What Paul Natorp said of the ideology of the Wandervogel applies equally
to Heidegger: 'You fear the dismemberment of your being in all the piece-
work of human wishing and knowing, and fail to notice that you cannot
achieve wholeness if you reject such large and essential parts of that which
has been allotted to all mankind. You seek the indivisibility of man's being,
and yet assentto its being torn apart'. Quoted in Gay (1), pS5.
12
THE VACUITY OF HEIDEGGER'S
AUTHENTICITY l
In his discussion of our relationships to things and to others,
Heidegger has reduced problems of the social world to metaphys-
ical tendencies of individual people. He has reproduced those
phenomena 'within' the individual and made them a cipher for
evil- or at least temptation. Therefore, when he comes on to the
central problem of Being and Time - my own relationship to
myself- the cards are already loaded in favour of an individual
moral effort being required. 2 It comes in the form of the striving
towards authenticity. But because authenticity is the internal
attempt to overcome a problem which can really only be solved
in the social world, the striving, as Heidegger eventually recog-
nized, is doomed. What I shall attempt to show in this chapter is
that Heidegger's notion of authenticity is ultimately vacuous: it is
without any positive implications for how we lead our lives. I
shall also assess his description and interpretation of the
phenomena of self-relationship.
Heidegger develops his discussion of the self out of his discus-
sion of our relationship to others. This order of exposition is
necessary because he wants to argue that in my normal existence
I am estranged from myself in just the same way as I am estranged
from others. I regard myself as if I were anybody, or rather, I see
myself from the outside, superficially, as 'they' see me. Because of
this, a gap opens up between how I think of myself and how I feel
myself to be. Anxiety is the symptom of this non-coincidence
with self. Death, as the realization of my own ultimate non-
existence, is particularly important in making me aware of my
present inauthenticity.
Let us start, then, with Heidegger's claim that in everyday life I
think of myself as if I were just anybody- superficially, from the
outside, as 'they' see me. Taken at its face value this claim is
patently false. As a description of a possible mode of self-
conception it strikes a chord: I can conceive of myself in terms of
my appearance to others. But as a complete description of nor-
mality it will not wash.
In the first place, I do not mistake myself for another person.

Indeed, no matter how alienated the schizophrenic feels from his
other or false self, he is still aware that it is his. 3 Heidegger, then,
is employing a metaphorical usage. I know myself not to be
another person, but 1think of my self as if it were another's.
But in another sense, my self-conception is always derived
from other people - the sense in which all my conceptions are
derived from others. It was from others that I learned language
and derived my initial beliefs about reality. It is to others that 1
appeal to confirm my current beliefs about what is and what is
not real. It is with others that I check the validity of my oWn
beliefs about myself. Let's look how this works out in practice.
Suppose I grow up in the belief that I am friendly, open and
approachable - generally a nice guy. We can also suppose that
the source of those beliefs was my immediate family, who con-
stantly stressed my niceness. In adolescence I fall in love with a
girl who apparently loves me. 1open my heart to her, revealing, in
passing, my undisturbed belief that I am a nice guy. When 1 say
this she reacts sharply with what almost amounts to incredulity:
'I love you very much, but no way are you open, friendly and
approachable:
, you have duplicity and suspicion written all over
you.
I am now faced with two conflicting accounts of how I am,
both as it happens, derived from other people. How do I deal
with these contradictory descriptions? I suggest that I would
check their accuracy by referring in two directions- to how 1feel
myself to be, and to other people. The matter may be resolved
quite simply: I feel friendly, other people tell me I'm friendly; 1
reject the girl's description. Equally simply (at least in theory), 1
may examine my feelings and conclude that 1 don't really feel
friendly at all: others confirm the girl's description, and 1 conse-
quently reject my family's description of me. In this second case,
however, 1 have to revise my existing self-conception in the light
of how 1actually feel and what others think of me.
Matters may not be so easily sorted out though. 1 may be
unable to reconcile the conflict and end up maintaining two
contradictory views of myself. Referring to my feelings I indeed
find them open and friendly; but other people tell me I am hostile
and suspicious. The self that I feel myself to be is now different
from the self which others say I have: 1 have two selves- the one
I feel to be real and the self-for-others. Alternatively, examining
The Vacuity of Heidegger's Authenticity 181
my feelings I may conclude that the girl is right, but be unable

simply to abandon the way I have always thought about myself. I
now believe that my self-for-others is the real one, but can't
succeed in identifying with it.4
Of course, I have been discussing these cases as if they were
purely intellectual problems admitting of theoretical solution,
whereas we know that any issue of self-identity is in fact highly
charged with emotional commitment. As Heidcgger rightly stres-
ses, I care intensely about myself. What we have left out of
account is the anxiety factor. Any instance in which I seriously
begin to doubt my self-identity is anxiety-producing. Any situa-
tion in which I cannot resolve the question of my true or real self
has anxiety endemic within it. The particular 'identity crisis'
which I envisaged myself as having was very low-key. We know
from clinical practice that the identity crisis of schizophrenia can
be extremely debilitating and ultimately destructive. We also
know that part of the problem is often the schizophrenic's inabil-
ity to conceptualize how he really feels himself to be, or to
identify with that conception once formed. 5
But how does all this relate to Heidegger's account of our
normal everyday self-relationship? In the first place, as an
account of the phenomena it is now exposed as poverty-striken
and grossly over-simplistic. Certainly I can identify with my
self-for-others - how I think I appear to them. But this identifi-
cation need not produce anxiety or feelings of inauthenticity.
How I appear to others may express my own feelings about
myself and so coincide with my 'inner' self-conception.
On the other hand, there is no necessity for me to identify with
my appearance for others. Without great inner conflict I can
normally dissimulate and mislead, protecting my private self
behind a public fa~ade. Whilst we might want to argue that this
involves me in inauthentic relationships, it does not necessarily
condemn me to feelings of anxiety or 'personal' inauthenticity.
Furthermore, the very possibility of dissimulation or role-playing
is based upon my ability to distinguish between how I really
am/feel myself to be, and how I present myself to others. Heideg-
ger is wrong to think that I am normally so dominated by this
process of presenting myself that I forget or cannot identify who I
am presenting.
As always, what Heidegger docs in his account of the 'one-self'
(or self-for-others) is seize upon one possibility and elevate it to a
necessary structure of being human. In the process he suppresses

the phenomena which don't fit, and so comes up with an
interpretation which is a gross simplification. But simplifications
can be powerful, and there are two aspects, I suggest, which gave
Heidegger's account a powerful appeal. The first concerns the
thoughtlfeeling split, and the second the social reality which
generates widespread anxiety.
The splitting between affect and cognition, feeling and thought,

was the basis of the traditional definition of schizophrenia. 6 It is
perhaps worth noting that a typical form of schizophrenia was
known as dementia praecox: its onset was during adolescence, it
occurred far more frequently amongst girls than amongst young
men, and could loosely be described as an identity crisis. I men-
tion these facts only to point out the socially specific nature of
this type of'splitting' of self.
Heidegger took the cognition/affect split, and used it to show
that any philosophical account of self which concentrates on
self-know/edge completely misses an essential part of being
human- mood, or in particular my own caring about myself. To
this he appended a positive doctrine: if I think of myself purely as
a knowing consciousness and behave accordingly, then mood
will catch up with me in the form of anxiety. Mood cannot be
displaced by thought, but only by another mood. The 'logic' by
which one mood passes to another is not the logic of rationality.
Now this argument is different and separable from the argu-
ment that I conceive of myself in terms of the 'one': but Heideg-
ger runs the two together. What certain psycho-analysts were
quick to recognize was that this former doctrine about thought
and affect could provide a far more satisfactory philosophical
basis for psycho-analysis than anything Freud had available. 6 In
particular, it paved the way for descriptions of schizophrenia
which could not be adequately contained within Freud's tripartite
division of the self.
The psycho-analysts rapidly had to go beyond Heidegger's
analysis, even if they saw their work as philosophical psychology
based on Heidegger's fundamental ontology. Heidegger had hit
upon a genuine facet of self-conception. As we saw in my above
example, I must test any account of self against the way I feel. But
what is equally true, though Heidegger constantly overlooked it,
is that any conception of self derived from others is constantly

juxtaposed with, and evaluated against, my feelings. I do not
have to accept others' evaluation of me, and indeed I do not
normally do so without good reason.
There is one notable exception to this case - the child. The
developing child is dependent on others - necessarily and inevit-
ably- for his initial self-conception. In the normal case he learns
language, including the language which enables him to articulate
and express his feelings: as a result he is constantly evaluating
how he feels himself to be. When, probably during adolescence,
he asks himself: 'What sort of person am I?' (a question which
essentially involves his relationships with others) he already has a
good basis for answering. In the abnormal case, however, the
child does not succeed in learning unambiguously the language
which expresses how he feels, and indeed may be systematically
taught to misdescr'ibe his feelings. 7 He may be encouraged always
to say he loves his mother when he actually feels hate.
But what we are talking about here, both in the abnormal as in
the normal case, is the historical genesis of the individual psyche.
Again, the plausibility of Heidegger's account derives from its
applicability to a historical situation, not from its revelation of
some necessary structure of human being.
The other factor which Heidegger refers to with plausibility, but

actually misrepresents, is the social world. Built into his analysis
is the supposition that the public world is necessarily the world of
inauthenticity: it is the agency which corrupts, and prevents me
from becoming authentic. It foists upon me a 'one-self' which I
can only overcome by the utmost moral effect. I shall argue to the
contrary that the public world is the only possible forum for the
realization of meaningful authenticity, that it is only in terms of
our relationships with others that we can be either authentic or
inauthentic, and that the attempt to realize authenticity as purely
a mode of self-relatedness is vacuous.
No one need doubt that public life can be superficial, false, and
full of deceit. But Heidegger makes no distinction between
'public life' in the broad sense of 'exposed to the public gaze', and
all the other ways in which I come together with other people. I
may, like the fast set in The Great Gatsby, devote myself entirely
to novelty, distraction and maintaining a life of utter superficial-
ity. I may strive after 'publicness' in all my relations: it takes a lot
of effort and a lot of money to achieve it.
Most of us, however, operate differently in different social
circumstances: we are involved in a variety of levels of 'public-
ness'. In my family, with my best friends, with my workmates, at
a union meeting, and so on, I project myself differently. I adapt
what I say and do to the situation and to other people - that is
part of being sensitive and intelligent in one's relationships.
There are times when it is appropriate to be brutally honest and
others when one should be tactful. I expose more or less of my
feelings or my 'true self'. I can be less or more absorbed in the
pesona I am projecting, but what that will be varies from one
occasion to another and can be closer to or further from the 'true
me'.
To suggest, as Heidegger does, that all these contexts of pub-
licness share a single feature, which is inauthenticity or flight
from self, is simply preposterous. Indeed, it is stretching it to
argue (as Sartre does)8 that there is a single 's~lf-for-others' which
I project on all occasions, to all people. But to go further and
claim that this self-for-others is necessarily derived from them
without adaptation or critical evaluation, and that it is necessar-
ily false as compared with my true feelings about how I am, goes
beyond the limits of credibility.
What Heidegger overlooks in his general 'privatization' of the
social world, is the social nature of all reality - which includes
any possible account of true Being, and encompasses the very fact
of language itself. I cannot establish what is real and what is not
real except by reference to other people. Without language I
would not even be able to communicate with them my doubts
about reality.
In the example we considered above, where I grew up believing
myself to be a nice guy, that description depended upon my
acquisition of language. Indeed, the very possibility of self-
conscious thought is both created and limited by the language
which I learn and adapt for my own use. The social world gives
me both the words I have and my understanding of their mean-
ings. My conception of 'self' is therefore necessarily based on
what I have learned from others about the correct use of words.
Consequently, if my self-conception is challenged I appeal not
only to my feelings, but also to other people.
The correct use of language, the adequacy of the description to
the phenomena described (my 'friendliness', in the previous
example) is only part of the story. The other part is that 'friendli-
ness', 'openness', 'approachability' are essentially social qual-
ities: that is, they cannot be realized by an individual in isolation
from others. There is no way that I can be either friendly or
unfriendly sitting in a room by myself. I shall argue that authen-
ticity, if it is anything at all, is also a social quality.
The adolescent asks himself: 'Who am I?': I try to evaluate
someone's description of my 'character': the analyst tries to get
the patient to express how he feels his true self to be. In each of
these cases what is under consideration is my mode of relating to
others. There may be a gap between how I truly feel myself to be
and how I appear to others; but even the 'true' feelings are
feelings towards or in relation to others. My feelings about the
sunset or the pansy are not the ones which rear up to expose the
falseness of the self I project. 9
The feelings of inauthenticity which are so crucial to Heideg-
ger's analysis, can only occur in relation to others. By his own
account, a gap opens up between the self which I develop in my
relations with others, and what I feel. Genuine authenticity can
only be the closure of that gap: that is, the adaptation of myself in
relation to others in a way that expresses my true feelings. It is no
more possible to become authentic in isolation from others than
it is possible to become friendly. True, I can sit alone in my room
and rehearse being friendly or authentic, but until I go out into
the world and express these intentions in practice all I have done
is pretend.
This is clearly illustrated if we consider how people who have
been inauthentic achieve authenticity. They have been dis-
simulating, covering up, presenting a false front to the world.
They have begun to suffer recurrent anxiety, as Heidegger says
they should. The anxiety is not completely unspecific: it is associ-
ated with certain events or situations in which the false front
threatens to crumble, i.e. there has been a danger of others seeing
through it.lO Usually such people need a psychiatrist, a counsel-
lor, a sensitive friend or a therapy group to begin to identify the
cause of their anxiety. In order to recognize their inauthenticity
they need to articulate their real feelings. What is more, they need
to have these feelings confirmed as real. This can only be done
with the help of others.
Intellectual realization is not enough. The feelings need to be
not merely talked about but 'worked through', in other words

expressed before the therapist, friend or peer group.ll As
Heidegger says, mood cannot be displaced by thought, but only
by another mood: the 'logic' by which one mood passes into
another is not the logic of rationality. The transformation of the
anxiety of inauthenticity into authentic self-expression can only
take place through the agency of others and by their witness,
because authenticity is a mode of relatedness to others. The
whole process of 'transference' described by Freud, or the need
for 'confirmation' elaborated by Laing is a clear demonstration
of the intrinsically social nature of authenticity, as well as of
inauthenticity.
Heidegger's account is quite different. Inauthenticity, for him,
belongs essentially to the public world, and the public world is
essentially inauthentic. Authenticity can only be achieved by
insulation from the public world, by withdrawal into oneself, by
a deep heart-searching. For Heidegger, authenticity is essentially
a self-relationship which can only affect my relations with other
people in a secondary sense.
I suggested above that psychanalytic practice, intercourse with
friends, etc., give us everyday examples of what it means to
overcome inauthenticity, and achieve authenticity. We might
characterize this as being able to express myself, my true feelings,
before others. To do this is self-fulfilling: it involves the success-
ful articulation of how I am. It is essentially an act of communica-
tion: it requires others to confirm its success, and thereby to
confirm me. It can be contrasted with the self-expression and
self-fulfilment which can be achieved by working with things-
the sort of realization of self involved in craft work at its best.
Authenticity cannot characterize my relationship to things,
because things cannot be misled or cheated.
For Heidegger I become authentic in the privacy of my own
introspection. I recognize that my anxiety is fear for my whole
being, that I am squandering myself in the world of 'them'. I
attend to my feelings of guilt and understand their true meaning
as not being specific to this or that act, but at my lostness in the
'they-world'. I think about what it will mean to die, and faced by
the prospect of my ultimate annihilation I resolve to stop wasting
my life and to be true to myself in the future. I do this by
constantly reaffirming my freedom to choose in the face of all
social pressure and expectations of me.
Fair enough. But what counts as being authentic? Heidegger

gives no clear answer. His phenomenological account is con-
cerned solely with the feelings of inauthenticity and the realiza-
tion that this fallen state need not be. He brings us to the edge of
authenticity, but then does not say what it is we are trying to
achieve. Being authentic is realizing my true possibilities. What
true possibilities? The possibility of being authentic, says
Heidegger. So being authentic is realizing the possibility of being
authentic? Not quite. If I face the future in resolute anticipation,
he says, I can hope for a moment of vision, a 'resolute rapture
with which Dasein is carried away to whatever possibilities and
circumstances are encountered in the situation' (B & T, p387:
above plOl) Resolute crap!
When I resolve to be authentic in the future, the resolution is
empty unless it is realized in action. Sitting alone in my room I
can pretend to be authentic just as I can pretend to be friendly:
but then I have to go out and do it. Realizing that my future is not
determined and that I can choose between different possibilities
is the precondition for achieving authenticity. Not every possible
choice can be authentic, so how do I tell apart the authentic from
the inauthentic? Heidegger has no answer. 'Whatever is encoun-
tered in the situation': the moment of vision will tell you. This is a
cop-out. By making authenticity a matter of vision Heidegger
leaves it at the level of unfulfilled pretence.
But the vacuity of Heidegger's notion is not accidental. I
cannot judge amongst projects for action except by employing
some criterion of reality- in particular by making an assessment
of the social world. Heidegger cannot do this. He can provide no
standards for assessing social reality because he has written it off
as a lost cause. In his discussion of the social he has reduced it to
an internal aspect of the individual psyche- and one which must
be rooted out. In his philosophy as in his life, Heidegger was
unable to assess the genuine possibilities for public action (in his
case university reform), because he had no criteria by which to
make the assessment.
This means that Heidegger's authenticity cannot be realized in
action. It is an attitude of mind which has no implications for
how I live my life. Any and every activity (including running a
concentration camp) is compatible with Heidegger's authentic-
ity, and equally with inauthenticity. It is not just that there is no
action per se which is authentic: it is that there is and can be no
action for me which is authentic- since for Heidegger authentic-

ity is not a matter of action at all.
Heidegger's defence against this charge is that it misunderstands

the whole nature of his philosophical enterprise. It was not his
concern to develop any system of morality. He was merely inves-
tigating the necessary structure of human being. His a priori
analysis neither made, no should have made, recommendations
aboutwhatto do.
There are two responses to this argument. The first is that it is
falsely naive: the second is that it obscures a real incoherence in
his thinking. We noted above (p128) the response of one listener
to his rectorial address: it inspired him- but whether to join the
.storm troopers or to study the presocratics was uncertain
(courses of action which I suggest are in no way equivalent, but
which by Heidegger's concept of authenticity can be). Gadamer,
a sober academic close to Heidegger, had this to say of what he
communicated to students: 'The existential seriousness that
characterized Heidegger in his lectures seemed to suggest that the
rejection of inauthenticity and embracing of authenticity was the
meaning of his doctrine' .12 It is beyond doubt that this has always
been the main appeal of the early Heidegger. It is beyond doubt
that he was aware of this. I believe that it is also beyond doubt
that he intended it to be so. Anyone with the least hermeneutic
sensitivity to his style and exposition must realize that he recom-
mens us to avoid inauthenticity and to cultivate authenticity.
But irrespective of his intentions and objective appeal, there is
a second reason why we should not accept his excuse that a priori
analysis absolves him of any requirement to characterize authen-
tic action - namely, that without it his notion of authenticity is
incoherent. What does it mean to 'be authentic' if it is compatible
with any action and every state of affairs? How can I take
authenticity as a goal, how can I strive towards it if I don't know
what it is?
It is atthis pointthat Heidegger must show his true colours. He
must say what authenticity is, because if it isn't attainable what is
Being and Time all about? Heidegger's authenticity cannot
inform action because it is not something that I do, or a property
of acts. Moreover, I cannot choose to be authentic, because
strictly speaking authenticity is not a state of being - if 'state'
implies any sort of persi&tence. Heidegger's authenticity is
beyond my agency because it is something that happens to me: I
only watch. It is the 'moment of vision': in other words the
experience of Being, the reception of Grace, or the infusion with
the Holy Spirit.
She experienced her first and complete 'self-fulfilment' when, at the age of
sixteen, just removed from boarding school, out for a bicycle ride one June
evening, she achieved - as she lay on her back in the heather, 'spread-eagled
and in total surrender' ... , her gaze on the stars that were just beginning to
sparkle in the afterglow of the sunset- that state of bliss which these days is far
too often striven for; on that summer evening in 1938 as she lay spread-eagled
and 'opened-up' on the warm heather, Leni ... had an overwhelming im-
pression of being 'taken' and of having 'given', and ... she would not have been
in the least surprised if she had become pregnant.
So Leni, in Heinrich Boll's Group Portrait with Lady (p33).

Heidegger does not describe for us his equivalent experience.
If this is what Heidegger means by 'authenticity' it has nothing
to do with the fruitful concept which psycho-analysts and others
have developed, purportedly on the basis of his thinking. It also
becomes clear why it has nothing to do with action or my
relationships with others. But by the same token we can properly
ask: 'How can Heidegger justify appropriating the term 'authen-
ticity' to this experience? and furthermore- what on earth has it
gotto do with 'inauthenticity'?
Of course Heidegger and Humpty Dumpty can both use words
exactly as they like. But if they want them to have any public
currency, and if they want to be understood, they have to explain
what they mean. Suppose I have a feeling which I describe as
'anxiety' in accordance with publicly accepted criteria. Heideg-
ger wants me to interpret this as 'in authenticity' , which I am
prepared to do on one of his criteria but not on the other. That is,
I accept that I am anxious about the gap between the self I project
and my true feelings (or at least I am anxious about being found
out); but I do not accept that the self I project has been simply
imposed upon me by others. I have already argued that there is no
necessary connection between these two aspects of Heidegger's
'inauthenticity' .
But he now wants me to accept that the opposite of this
inauthenticity is a sort of religious experience. His grounds seem
to be how these two things 'feel': in the one case I feel fragmented
or split, in the other I feel unified and whole. This is strengthened
by the argument that it is precisely the dashing about in inauthen-

ticity (in the other sense) that prevents us from having the experi-
ence of fulfilment. The more we examine this, however, the more
the ambiguities and obscurities of the argument become appar-
ent. Feelings of being unfulfilled, fragmented, deceitful, alien-
ated, wasting one's energies etc., are broader and more various
than the psycho-analyst's concept of splitting; they relate to
things as well as people, and they do so at various levels of social
involvement. Some of them can be described as feelings of inau-
thenticity, but these cannot be identified with unfulfilment or
suppression of self, nor can they be attributed to a single cause.
Conversely, feelings of being fulfilled, of expressing one's true
self, being open, honest, undeceitful, integrated, unalienated, in
touch with others etc., occur in a variety of circumstances and for
a variety of reasons. Some of them are properly called feelings of
authenticity and can be directly regarded as the overcoming of
'inauthenticity'- as, for example, the closure of the gap between
'inner' feelings and outward expression in social relations.
But to argue as Heidegger does that because a particular
feeling is one of wholeness and self-fulfilment, it therefore repre-
sents the overcoming (and the only way of overcoming) all
disperson, fragmentation etc., does violence to the phenomena of
experience. Furthermore, by lumping together under one head-
ing phenomena which are very diverse, it suggests courses of
action quite inappropriate to particular cases. The alienation of
modern society, for example, is not overcome by the cultivation
of mystical experiences, any more than it is overcome by the use
of LSD.
In truth, Heidegger wants it both ways, which is why he
squeezes the phenomena to fit his interpretation. He wants to
argue both that the negation of inauthentic everydayness makes
one authentic; and also that it doesn't really- i.e. the realization
of inauthenticity and the subsequent avoidance of it in the social
world does not give one the religious experience. What Heideg-
ger cannot afford to countenance is "a being-authentic which falls
short of having the vision - since that would make the religious
experience superfluous. He therefore has to slur over what hap-
pens between the first realization of one's inauthenticity and the
momentof revelation.
But far worse for him, he has no way of describing what
happens between successive moments of authenticity. Do I
The Vacuity of HeideggerJs Authenticity 191
necessarily relapse into inauthenticity? - because if so this

inauthenticity is surely not the same as my previous benighted
state; or do I simply return to some third limbo state - having
seen the truth and waiting for it to hit me again?
'In the moment of vision', he wrote, 'indeed, and often just for
the moment, existence can even gain the mastery over the
"everyday"; but it can never extinguish it' (B&T, p422). Ulti-
mately, the project of becoming authentic was doomed.
Heidegger's notion of inauthenticity appealed, then, because it

hit on a real gap between personal feelings and how I present
myself to others. It, exploited also without beginning to analyse,
the social pressures to conform with standards and expectations
which we experience as alien. His treatment of these pressures as
individual anxiety symptoms precluded any understanding of
them as social phenomena. He was therefore unable to recom-
mend any action which would alleviate these social pressures or
in anyway remove the sources of this type ofinauthenticity.
Inauthenticity as the gap between feeling and self-for-others,
on the other hand, was to be dealt with by getting our own
self-relationship right. But instead of recognizing such inauthen-
ticity as essentially a mode of relatedness to others (as his
psychoanalytic followers mostly did), Heidegger dismissed the
whole public realm as essentially inauthentic. Authenticity, then,
could not be the true obverse of inauthenticity, in other words
closure of the gap between feeling and self-expression to others,
because that would envisage public authenticity. Instead,
Heidegger pulled authenticity back into the realm of an utterly
private experience of quasi-religious vision. 13
The consequences, in spite of the rhetoric of Heidegger's lec-
tures in the early thirties, were ultimately quietistic. Since authen-
ticity was not an action, no action could be authentic. One could
only wait passively for the moment of vision to occur. Yet
preparation was appropriate. In order to maintain the now tenu-
ous link between inauthenticity and authenticity, Heidegger had
to allow for a state between naive fallenness and the moment of
vision. The state of preparedness was not itself authenticity, nor
did it involve any action. Rather it was a psychological attitude
consequent upon withdrawal from the social world. Half a cen-
tury later and transposed to California, Heidegger might have
become a drug-using Jesus-freak.
NOTES
1 Some of the arguments in this chapter were originally presented in an article

in Radical Philosophy. See Waterhouse (1).
2 Heidegger's reading of protestant individualism from Luther to Kier-
kegaard was not wasted.
3 Laing (1).
4 Which is a case envisaged by Freud in his lecture on Lay Psycho-analysis.
Freud (1).
5 See, for example, the work ofR.D.Laing.
6 In particular see the work of Bin swan ger, Caruso and Boss.
7 See Laing (2) for various examples.
8 Sartre (1), Part Three.
9 I do not want to deny that in psychosis my relation to the world itself can be
false, and things can provoke intense anxiety. I am saying that this reality-
distortion derives from my distorted relation to people, and not the reverse.
10 See the section on 'ontological insecurity' in R.D. Laing, The Divided Self,
p39.
11 cf. Freud (1), p82 ff.
12 Gadamer(2),pI41.
13 It was no accident that the atheistic Sartre, when adapting Heidegger's
analysis, simply concluded that authenticity was impossible.
13
DEATH, LANGUAGE AND ART
Ivan Ilych ... suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his loneliness
pondered always on the same insoluble question: 'What is this? Can it be that it
is Death?' And the inner voice answered: 'Yes, it is Death' ...
It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely
that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It
occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against
what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely
noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the
real thing, and all the rest false ...
'But if that is so', he said to himself, 'and I am leaving this life with the
consciousness that I have lost all that was given to me and it is impossible to
rectI.£y.It- w hatthen.I' . ..
'All you have lived for and still live for is falsehood and deception, hiding life
and death from you' ...
From that moment the screaming began that continued for three days, and was
so terrible that one could not hear it through two dosed doors without horror.
Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilych pp 149-54
This story, as he indicates in a footnote in Being and Time, was

one of the sources of inspiration for Heidegger's account of
death. l Another was Jaspers' treatment of death as a 'limit situa-
tion' which illuminated human being - an aspect of Jaspers'
early work which Heidegger described as 'strongest' in his 1921
review (see above, p47). In chapter nine above, I referred to
Heidegger's 'insight' that a proper philosophical account of
human existence must include its finitude as central. I now want
to consider how Heidegger uses the notion of death, and to
examine the adequacy of his account.
When Ivan Uyich realized that he was dying, the inauthenticity
of his life was revealed to him. Heidegger universalizes the case:
the encounter with death always exposes the in authenticity of
everyday life (everyday life being necessarily inauthentic). He
also reverses the implication: the inauthenticity of everyday life is
always (and only) exposed by the encounter with death. Death,
he concludes, plays a crucial part in the process of becoming
authentic.
Pondering why this should be so, he comes up with a formal

answer. Death is the end of life, its annihilation, its negation. But
the negation, as limit, illuminates the nature of that which it
negates. Death completes life: therefore only from the standpoint
of death can life be seen in its completeness. Because death is my
own individual death, then death is supremely that which indi-
viduates. It is therefore my own-most (eigentiich) , i.e. most
authentic, possibility. Thus Dasein at its most authentic is a
being-towards-Death; and conversely, when it lives as a being-
towards-Death Dasein is at its most authentic.
It is quite fascinating to watch Heidegger, who elsewhere
attacks logic in the name of truth to experience, here pursuing
relentlessly the logic of his own argument in the face of· all
experience. For example, attention to ordinary experience will
quickly reveal that there is no necessary connection between the
thought of death and authenticity. In the ordinary sense of the
world I can be authentic whether or not I have ever encountered
death. Even Ivan Ilych could have been brought to realize his
in authenticity some other way (for example by actually falling in
love, by being sentenced to a labour camp, etc).
Conversely, I can face death - actually, really, without dis-
covering my inauthenticity. In the first place I may not be in-
authentic: I may be a 'together' person, living a worthwhile life,
being open and honest in my relationships. But even if I am not, I
can look down the barrel of the gun and abuse my executioner:
my inauthenticity may remain unshaken. Or, inauthentically
having lived a life of 'sacrifice' for others, I can welcome death as
the supreme martyrdom which confirms my inauthenticity. Or,
tormented by psychotic suffering, in a world imbued with false-
ness and inauthenticity, I may take my own life: my in-
authenticity is not overcome in this way, it is simply exting-
uished. 2 In short, there is no straightforward, necessary connec-
tion between the encounter with death .and authenticity in the
ordinary sense.
But still less is there any clear connection between death and
authenticity in Heidegger's special sense of the quasi-religious
vision. Heinrich Boll's Leni had the experience flat on her back in
the heather: she later faced death many times without it inducing
a similar experience. The literature of mysticism, in all religions,
makes it clear that whereas there are many ways of preparing for
and inducing visions, dwelling on death is not a necessary part of
Death, Language and Art 195
them. Even in this context, Heidegger is claiming universality for
a highly particular experience.
Ironically, when Heidegger does pursue the logic of an argument

in the face of experience, his logic is bad. 'Death illuminates life
because it negates it', belongs to a Hegelian dialectic of ideas: yet
elsewhere Heidegger rejects dialectic as no way to think. 3 It is of
course the idea of death which is of crucial importance for
Heidegger, not the experience of death. He neither recommends
that I should die in order to become authentic, nor implies that it
is experiencing the cessation of my life which exposes inauthen-
ticity. Unlike Ivan Ilyich, I should think about it before it is too
late.
Yet I cannot come to 'understand' death in the way that
understanding normally works according to Heidegger. If under-
standing is the articulation of my experience, then death cannot
be understood until I am dead! In fact it is my sympathetic
understanding of another's experience of death (e.g. Ivan Ilych's)
which brings home to me that I will die. But Heidegger does not
explore what might have to be called authentic interpersonal
communication. He wants to maintain that the public world is
necessarily inauthentic.
Since it is the thought of death, provoked by another's experi-
ence, that is important for Heidegger, some discussion would be
in order about the relationship of consciousness to experience,
and the relationship of both to learning from others. But Heideg-
ger regards consciousness as a corrupt term, to be avoided on the
grounds that it detaches understanding from mood. He therefore
avoids all discussion of the interaction between mood and
thought. By the same stroke he accomplishes a surprising feat for
one who takes Being-in-the-world as his starting point. Along
with consciousness he jettisons its traditional obverse - the
body. Reading Heidegger's account of Dasein one gains no
impression of its being embodied: it surely cannot have to shit.
Moreover, it is an it: sexless and in the third person. Heidegger's
Dasein is supremely spiritual, which is why the thought of death
comes to it without content, detached from physical decay or the
corruption of the body.
In the logic of Heidegger's discussion of death, it completes life
and thus provides the basis for a view of life as complete. Dialec-
tically, in thought, my life can be viewed as a whole without

'death' being the contrasting term. I can compare my whole life
with yours, or with the movement of collective human history, or
with the life cycle of a flea. And when Heidegger thinks of death
as the completion of life, he does so with a systematic ambiguity.
Death does always complete life, in the sense that it finishes it.
But Death rarely completes life in the sense that it rounds it out
tidily. Heidegger's statement is therefore true, insofar as the child
struck down on her eighth birthday has lived a complete life-
just because she is dead. Completeness and wholeness in this
sense is useless for Heidegger's purpose for every life is com-
pleted, the inauthentic no less than the authentic. Yet Heidegger
wants to argue that the thought of death exposes the incomplete-
ness i.e. the in authenticity of my life. It doesn't. All it exposes is
that I am not dead yet- which presumably I already know.
A similar illogicality enables Heidegger to describe death as my
most authentic (eigentlich) possibility. Dying is not the only thing
I can't do without realizing the own-ness of my being - for a
start I can masturbate. But even if it were, the own-ness (i.e.
particularity) of my death would bear no necessary relationship
to the other meaning of eigentlich - authentic. Commentators
such as Macquarrie or Gelven usually imply that the German is
richer than or superior to the English in recognizing a link
between own-ness and authenticity. In fact the reverse is true:
Heidegger is not able to distinguish between several quite distinct
things. What is claimed as synthesizing is in fact a failure to
distinguish differences.
We have already seen that Heidegger's 'authenticity' is an
incoherent concept: a moment yet more than a moment, the
opposite but not the opposite of inauthenticity. But neither in his
visionary sense nor in the more ordinary sense of expressing
oneself openly is authenticity necessarily connected with death.
Only on the basis of a religious residue which regards death as the
ultimate visionary experience can this claim seriously be made.
Moreover, to the extent that death is my most particular and
'therefore' most authentic possibility, the notion fails to do what
Heidegger demands of it. Everyone dies: everyone's death is their
own-most (eigentlich) possibility; therefore everyone is authentic
at death. But my being does not become mine at death: it was
mine all along. Therefore I have been authentic throughout, only
I didn't know it. Heidegger of course could never accept this. But
without clarifying the difference between being-for-myself and
knowing that my existence is my own, between experience and
thought, or between pre-reflexive and reflexive consciousness, he
has no way of contesting it.
A final logical ambiguity is exploited by the labelling ofDasein
as 'Being-towards-Death'. This is true if 'towards' (zu) means
'moving in the direction of'. But in German as in English 'zu'
(towards) can also mean 'for the purpose of', 'towards the goal';
and Heidegger wants to exploit the notion that man is born for
the purpose of dying. It bolsters his claim that Death is my most
authentic possibility: the 'end' for which I was born.
Death, according to Heidegger, recalls me from my inauthentic

to my authentic self. Becoming authentic, then, implies a self-
coincidence, even if this is only momentary when the rapture
sweeps over me. Unfortunately, however, Heidegger has little to
tell us about 'self'. We know that 'self' is not a substance; that it is
some sort of a unity between past, present and future. But we do
not know how it relates (authentically or inauthentically) to my
whole being, to my bodily existence, to other people, etc. In the
end, Heidegger presents no concept of self, either normal or
authentic, either speculative or based upon 'self' -experience. All
he gives us is the experience of authenticity which is his only
measure of self-coincidence. Ultimately there is nothing he can
say about such a feeling in relation to self: it is in fact an
impersonal experience, which is why the impersonality of Dasein
does not worry him.
By contrast, when Husserl tried to investigate the 'transcen-
dental ego' he appealed to the experience of 'mineness' - the
different senses of , mine' as in 'my memories, my hand, my book,
my friend etc.'. He appealed to the difference of experience
between encountering something as mine, and encountering it as
yours, or simply as not-mine. He began to distinguish between
different senses of 'self'. Heidegger ignored this work. Merleau-
Ponty and Sartre, however, used it as a basis for further investiga-
tion. Sartre developed the distinction between pre-reflexive
awareness of things, and overt reflexive consciousness. I am
always aware of my experiences as 'mine', and on this basis I can
raise the explicit question about my self. Merleau-Ponty
developed this to take further account of my bodily existence. I
cannot, for example, draw the limits between myself and you
without recognizing that we can touch. And touching, unlike the
seeing which Sartre concentrates upon, is a two-way, reciprocal
encounter. 4 What opens up here is a whole range of questions
about the way in which I experience my body, how I am 'in' and
express myself 'through' my body, and how it mediates my
relations with others.
In discussing in authenticity I already made use of Sartre's
notion of self-for-others to clarify Heidegger's account. But
Sartre does not allow the achievement of authenticity through
genuine self-expression, nor does he explore the possibility of
authentic communication with others. Merleau-Ponty, on the
other hand, recognizes a range of self-expression, self-creation
and self-fulfilment through gesture, touch, speech and all manner
of communications with others. But Heidegger, having admit-
ted the possibility of authentic relationship, then ignores it and
develops his very private notion of authenticity which can be felt
as experience, but which can lead to no statement of truth about
the self so experienced. This is why he is unable to evaluate
Hegel's account of spirit as self-conception (B&T, pp 484-8).
For Heidegger, self-knowledge is impossible, because knowledge
necessarily involves reification. By the same token, however, the
self cannot be thought about: it can only be experienced, as what
it is, in silence.
We are thus again left by Heidegger with an emptiness where
we might have expected to find something: another vacuous
concept which can be filled only by undifferentiated feeling. Like
Hegel's absolute idea, Heidegger's authentic 'self' is a great dis-
appOintment.
Heidegger's failure to attend to the bodily nature of our exis-

tence, and our experience of self in communication with others,
leads him to develop a strange theory of language. As a her-
meneuticist (to say nothing of the Graecophile), language, mean-
ing, expression, truth must all figure prominently in his philoso-
phy. As a supposed phenomenologist however, it is remarkable
how he ignores the phenomena of actual language use. Again,
what he does is pick out a highly particular use of language-
poetry - and universalize it as revealing the supposed essence.
'Language itself', he wrote in 1936, 'is poetry in the essential
sense' (OWA,p74).
The appeal to standard usage would, as Heidegger is well
aware, undermine the whole exercise of Being and Time. He
defends himself from that attack at the very beginning by label-
ling the language of everyday corrupt and unreliable. The Ques-
tion of the Meaning of Being has been forgotten, and language
has been one of the mechanisms by which it has been covered up.
Ordinary language is used as a means of escaping our anxiety, it
is reduced to distraction, idle talk, etc.
When he adds to this a picture of the social world as necessarily
inauthentic, the source of my flight from self, then he commits
himself to a view of language which discounts its essential func-
tion as communication in the social world. Instead, he has to say
that the essence of language is not social communication: its
interpersonal use detracts from its essence. As early as 1936 he
was saying 'Language is not ... primarily an ... expression of
what is to be communicated' (OWA, p73). By 1950 he was
saying: 'In its essence language is neither expression nor an
activity of man. Language speaks'.5 'The very nature of lan-
guage', he continued, 'needs and uses the speaking of mortals in
order to sound as the peal of stillness for the hearing of mortals'
(L, p208). But 'the peal of stillness is not anything human' (L,
p207). And the same essay: 'According to the Prologue of the
Gospel of St. John, in the beginning the Word was with God'.
The question of these origins must be made 'free ... from the
fetters of a rational-logical explanation', we must 'set aside the
limits of a merely logical description oflanguage' (L, pp192-3).
We are back here with Bultmann's Kerygma: the divine call.
Heidegger summed up his position in the 1947 Letter on Human-
ism, by saying: 'Language is the House of Being' (p193). The
view towards which he inclined more and more in his later years
was that language in its essence is the word of God, and our
proper stance in relation to it is utterly passive- we are listeners.
So language as reciprocal communication is dead: we do not even
talk back to God with it.
The implication of this passivity is that we - including
Heidegger - should stop talking: we should shut up and wait.
But he can never quite bring himself to that conclusion, even
though from the logic of his position he has nothing else to say.
'Language itself is language. The understanding that is schooled
in logic, thinking of everything in terms of calculation and hence
usually overbearing, calls this proposition an empty tautology.
Merely to say the identical thing twice-language is language-
how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to
get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get just where are
already'6. By this argument he should content himself with saying
mantras - with repeating words not because they are meaning-
ful, but because they induce a mystical state.
I have already pointed out in talking about authenticity that I

learn language from others, and that my understanding of mean-
ings is derived from the same source. Heidegger learned language
the same way. His argument is that we can evaluate that lan-
guage, discard the surface dross, and uncover the message which
is buried deep within. How are we supposed to evaluate lan-
guage? Answer- against experience. This is extremely plausible,
for what Heidegger is pointing towards is a normal feature of
language use. In speaking we do not automatically produce
words strung together in ways appropriate to the circumstances:
we search for the best words to express what we mean, we resort
to metaphor, we coin neologisms. In short, speaking is an expres-
sive, creative activity, though how expressive and how creative
varies with the occasion. Poetry, as an extremely creative and
expressive use of language, can illuminate these aspects of its
normal use.
But the evaluation of language against experience is just like
the evaluation of my self-conception which I discussed before. In
the example I used, my self-conception as a nice guy was chal-
lenged by a girl-friend, and I attempted to resolve the conflict by
appealing in two directions- to my own experience and to other
people. Similarly, if Heidegger challenges normal usage of
words, or if I find the language available inadequate for what I
want to express, an appeal must be made in two directions- to
my felt experience, and to other people.
Poetry, like all writing, is born out of speech. I can of course sit
and talk to myself, and in a sense I do when I am thinking
something out. But talking to myself only occurs within a larger
context of my life in society where I derive my language from
others, use it to communicate with them, and check the results of
my private thinking with them- even if I have been constructing
an imaginative fantasy. Although while I am writing my work of
the imagination my audience may not be uppermost in my mind,
if they are not there in the background the whole nature of the
exercise changes. Poetry written for myself alone can descend to
a degree of privateness which represents unintelligibility to any-
one else. True, Heidegger sometimes borders on this in his own
poetry, 7 as he does in his philosophical writing: but he still sent
his poems about language to other people, even up to the last year
of his life. 8 In practice, he treated poetry as he treated philosophy,
as communication between people: but he refused to think of it in
this way.
His thoughts about language do not reflect the way he used it.
By concentrating upon the evaluation of language against
'experience', he deprives himself of any criterion for evaluating
its function as expression. In speech, I judge the adequacy of my
expression in terms of its success in communicating. I adapt what
I say to the particular listener: if others do not understand, I have
not succeeded in expressing what I mean. In successfully ex-
pressing something, even to myself, I have inevitably cast my
experience in a socially accessible form. The alternative consists
not of descriptions which are expressive of my experience, but in
labels which are no more than private mnemonics. 'Kyrenia
stone '61,' is such a mnemonic for me, but it is in no sense
descriptive or expressive of my experience; it communicates
nothing to you, and cannot be considered as poetry or the poetic
use of language. It does not even allow anything to appear as it is
in itself, as Heidegger would wish.
The deficiency in Heidegger's account of language centres on
his location of truth in individual experience- and ultimately in
experience of the single, revelatory type. 'Truth means the nature
of the true. We think this nature in recollecting the Greek word
aletheia, the unconcealedness of beings' (OWA pSI). But my
experience of Kyrenia stone simply was: it may have been 'real'
- but it was not 'true'. Truth arises only with language, or at
least with the possibility of symbolic representation. My descrip-
tion may be 'untrue' to my experience- though I would prefer to
use the term 'adequate', as admitting of degrees. Strictly, I think it
is only when we pass beyond the descriptive towards the
interpretation (not that I think any clear demarcation line can be
drawn between the two) that we should talk about truth.
Any account of truth which claims to be faithful to the
phenomena must relate back to falsehood, deception and misre-
presentation as practised between people. 'Telling the truth' is
not, as Heidegger would have it, a matter of adequately expres-
sing the revelation of Being. It is a matter of not lying, being
honest and being frank with others.
Because Heidegger suppresses the interpersonal validation of
truth, just as he suppresses the function oflanguage as communi-
cation, he is left in a position which reifies language- it is made
into the 'House of Being'. Language is no longer people talking
together, cooperating, communicating and collectively discover-
ing truth - it is not a process at all, it is a thing. And the thing
which it is, is not even a human creation: it is the revelation of the
Divine. Language is spirit.
Feuerbach long ago exposed this creation of God by man for
what it was. 9 Heidegger merely exemplifies, in a very clear
latter-day form, the objectification and alienation of what is
humanly produced. But his interpretation of language is fol-
lowed through to other cultural products, and forms the basis of
his curious interpretation ofhistory.lo
Being and Time has little to say about cultural artefacts. But a
certain understanding of them is implied by the interpretation he
gives of history - an understanding which is spelt out more
clearly in the later works. l l Again, this is characterized by the
alienation of the cultural product from man, and the replacement
of its human meaning by a supposed divine one.
'On the usual view', he wrote in On the Origin of the Work of
Art, 'the work arises out of and by means of the activity of the
artist'. But 'in themselves ... artist and work are . .. by virtue of
a third thing which is prior to both, namely ... art' (OWA, p 17).
And art? 'Art ... is the happening of truth': it 'is by nature a
distinctive way in which truth comes into being' (p78). 'By
contrast, science is not an original happening of truth' (p62).
Art allows what is to show itself, as it is in itself. What he
means by this is revealed in his discussion of Van-Gogh's paint-
ing of peasant shoes:
From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the
worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the
accumulated tenacity of her slow tread through the far spreading and ever-
uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the
dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the
field path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its
quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow
desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining
anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more
withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at
the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and is
protected in the world of the peasant woman (OWA, p34; Heidegger's italics).
It is this sort of whole-earth 'truth' that Heidegger thinks is so

superior to that of 'science' - including historical science as
normally practised. Such 'truth' is neither rational nor objective
- indeed it need not even be inter-subjective. Heidegger's per-
ception of the Van Gogh painting is clearly conditioned by his
own (non-universal) values and attitudes - attitudes which
smack of romantic bourgeois phantasy, and arrogant condescen-
sion towards the dumb beasts he takes the peasants to be. Such
attitudes can only be based on a fundamentally alien and in-
authentic relationship to members of the 'inferior' social class.
They are on a par with those of the tourist who says, 'But darling,
the slums of Napoli were simply wonderful - so charmingly
picturesque!
But Heidegger has not done yet. The 'earth' of his last sentence
turns out to be the ever-present ground of our being, which is in
constant conflict with the 'world' of our historical existence. This
conflict is the motion at the centre of which is the still, harmonious
point of the art-work. 12 He waxes lyrical again: 'Earth is that
whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that
arises without violation. In the things that arise, earth is present
as the sheltering agent'. It is not one of the four traditional
elements along with fire, air and water- it is the element: what
the Greeks meant by 'physics' (before the dastardly Latins mis-
translated it as 'matter').13
We now discover that: 'The work (of art) lets the earth be an
earth' (p46) and on this ground opens a 'world'.
The world is the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and
essential decisions in the destiny of an historical people. The earth is the
spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-searching and to that
extent sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from
one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth,
and earth juts through world (pp48-9).
It comes as no suprise then, to learn that all art (including the

Greek temple which precipitated the foregoing universal
analysis) is essentially poetry, and that it is Being which 'lets the
place of openness happen' (p61). In case we might have thought
that the artist as creator had much to do with it, Heidegger
explains that 'creation' is really allowing something to emerge
'which has been brought forth', and that 'techne' which in Greek
equates art with craft is really a mode of knowing (or rather
'seeing'- it 'never signifies the action of making' (p59).
But if all art is essentially poetry, all language is too (p74).
'Genuinely poetic projection is the opening up or disclosure of
that into which human being as historical is already cast' (p75),
i.e. the earth. So 'art as poetry is founding'. 'Whenever art
happens - that is, whenever there is a beginning - a thrust
enters history, history either begins or starts over again ...
History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task as
entrance into that people's endowment' (p 77). It would be idle to
speculate on what Heidegger thought was the endowment of the
German people in 1936 (when he wrote those words). However,
it must have been good to know that: 'Art is history in the
essential sense that it grounds history'; it is 'a distinctive w~y in
which truth ... becomes historical' (pp 77-8).
In short, Heidegger rolls together language, poetry and art,
and treats them identically as the revelation of Being. In 'essence'
they cease to be human products or creations, they cease to be
expressions of human joy or sorrow, they cease to be communi-
cations or modes of interrelating between people. Instead they
are reified, made into non-human - or rather superhuman -
objects, before which the proper attitude of the human individual
is passive ~ubmission. So Heidegger, the passionate critic of
human alienation in industrial society, offers in its place only
alienation in primitive society. In place of what Marx called the
fetishism of commodities, he offers only fetishism per se: 'The
sculpture of the god ... is not a portrait whose purpose is to
make it easier to realize how the god looks; rather, it is a work
that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself
(OWA,p43).
NOTES
1 B & T, p49S, n.xii.

2 In this I disagree with Binswanger's Heideggerian analysis of the case of
Ellen West, where suicide is portrayed as an authentic act. Binswanger (3).
3 d.IM.
4 Heidegger half realizes this in relation to things in his section on 'Being-in':
but he never develops it, and of course never considers it as part of my
relatedness to other people.
S 'Language',p197.
6 L, p190.
7 See, for example, 'The Thinker as Poet'.
8 TRC,p291.
9 Feuerbach (1).
10 Feuerbach was of course criticizing Hegel's idealism. Heidegger is heavily
indebted to Hegel for his account of poetry, art and truth: he describes
Hegel's Aesthetics as 'the most comprehensive reflection on the nature of
art that the West possesses' (Epilogue to OWA, p.79). Compare Hegel (1),
Vol 1, pp 101-2 (Part I, Introduction).
11 See particularly The Origin of the Work of Art (OWA).
12 d. TS Eliot: 'At the still point of the Turning world .. .' from Burnt Norton,
II, line 16. There are in fact many similarities between Eliot and Heidegger,
particularly Eliot's wrestling with time in the Four Quartets.
13 There was a certain Metropolitan of Athens in the 9th century (one Michael
Choniates), who expressed the belief that asses would sooner perceive the
sound of the lyre, and dung beetles perfume, than the Latins apprehend the
harmony and grace of the Greek language (Obolenski (1), p 202). Heideg-
ger agreed entirely: e.g. 'The rootlessness of Western thought begins with
this translation' from Greek into Latin (OWA p23).
14
HISTORY AND POLITICS
Through vigorous phenomenology, Heidegger finally raised and answered the
question (of historicity) in its full and radical significance ... Being and Time
... seems to us to indicate a turning point in the history of philosophy - the
point where bourgeois philosophy transcends itself from within, and opens the
way to a new, 'concrete' science ...
(Heidegger) has discovered that ... praxis is the basis for all decisions. He has
established the moment of decision and determination, as an historical situa-
tion, and the determination itself as the taking charge of historical destiny.
So wrote the young Herbert Marcuse in 1928. 1 It was a gross

misjudgment- as he soon realized. I hope my critique so far has
shown that in no sense did Heidegger pursue a 'vigorous
phenomenology', that his philosophy did not open the way for a
new concrete science - indeed it was only 'pseudo-concrete',2
and that his 'moment of decision and determination' was both
vacuous and determined nothing. What I now intend to argue is
that Heidegger so misunderstood history, that on the basis of his
philosophy it is impossible to assess a historical situation, and
thus the 'taking charge of historical destiny' is actually pre-
vented.
I have already discussed Heidegger's failure to develop any
philosophical account of society, or indeed to discuss our rela-
tions with others at any level, except in terms of inauthenticity
and interference with the individual's perception of 'truth'. Con-
sequently, when Heidegger talks about 'history', he has no way
of dealing with collectivities, institutions or classes which exist or
have existed. It is true that in the 1930s he made reference to the
'destiny of the people' (Volk): though how this was related to the
individual Dasein was entirely obscure (B & T, p. 436). He also
talked about Russia and America- but as metaphysical entities
(1M, p31). And he regularly alluded in passing to the political
state- but only to treat it as a 'thing' in 'truth'. 'A state- is. By
virtue of the fact that the state police arrest a suspect ... ' (1M
p29). 'Another way in which truth occurs is the act that founds a
political state' (OWA, p62).
History and Politics 207
So we are left with instituti9ns as alien objects, unrelated to the

individual Dasein except in terms of vague feelings of belonging
or not belonging, subject to changes both unpredictable and
uncontrollable by human effort. In short, we have a classic case
of the alienation of man from himself. Let us look a little more
closely at how Heidegger ends up like that.
Heidegger's general strategy is to derive the public and objective

(or interpersonal) from the private and subjective. In the current
context, this means deriving public time from personal temporal-
ity, and public history from personal historicality. We have.
already seen (p 11 0) that his discussion of time runs into difficul-
ties because of this. He argues that if my experience were not
temporal I could not develop a concept of time- which is surely
true. But then it occurs to him to wonder how my experience can
be temporal unless it happens 'in time': at which point he termi-
nates the discussion.
So long as 'time' is spoken of as a superhuman entity akin to
Being, then it inevitably remains mysterious and impenetrable.
Questions about the 'being of time' seem the most profound and
the most difficult, ones which only the superior genius can wres-
tle with. They partake of what Lovejoy calls 'the pathos of sheer
obscurity, the loveliness of the incomprehensible which has ...
stood many a philosopher in good stead with his public'. It works
because 'the reader doesn't know exactly what they mean, but
they have all the more on that account an air of sublimity; an
agreeable feeling at once of awe and of exaltation comes over him
as he contemplates thoughts of so immeasurable a profoundity-
their profoundity being convincingly evidenced to him by the fact
that he can see no bottom to them.'3
But 'time' is essentially a concept - a public way of speaking
and thinking about historical process. The abstract noun does
not refer to any 'thing' - As Heidegger knows when he says time
is not an entity (Seiende). What he cannot allow himself to
conclude is that 'time' is only a way of talking, because that
would demystify it and have drastic consequences for the mys-
tery of 'Being'. How could Being 'temporalize itself in time' if
'time' were merely an intersubjectively constituted word of con-
venience? What lurks at the back of Heidegger's mind is that
Being, as a sort of super-Dasein, creates Time as a spiritual thing,
just as individual Dasein creates the idea of time.

If 'time' is admitted to be only a useful way of talking about
historical process, what is left for 'Being' to be, except a not very
useful way of referring to the whole of what is? And that is not
the sort of thing which can be experienced as a presence - as
Heidegger well knows. To demystify 'Being' in this way would
force Heidegger to re-interpret his quasi-religious experience in a
way which he simply could not accept. Because it came as an
intense experience it must, he believes, be deeply and perma-
nently'meaningful'.
Heidegger needs, therefore, to keep Time at a distance, to
argue for its independence from Dasein. And indeed it is inde-
pendent of the individual human being. I, as an individual,
cannot wish the British monarchy, or the capitalist system, out of
existence. Even though they are humanly created institutions,
they are independent of my existence or of that of any other
individual. We are dealing here with what is collectively consti-
tuted, and which in that sense transcends the individual. Such
things can appear to take on a life of their own: they seem to be
alien objects governed by non-human laws.
The classic case of the utterly alien object is God. But Being,
and Time, will do almost as well - as mysterious thought-
objects, humanly created, which take on an alien life of their
own. 'Time' exists independently of me in the same sense that
capitalism does. Both are intersubjectively constituted - essen-
tially human realities. That is not to say that if human beings
disappeared completely then the universe would cease to be or
cease to change. It is to say that, in conceptualizing change by
means of the abstract notion of ' time', we do not create any entity
which can be discovered in the world. 'Time' would disappear
with the cessation of humanity, just as capitalism would.
'Temporality is prior to time; but isn't Time prior to temporal-

ity?' Heidegger wonders. Thus his project of deriving the objec-
tive from the subjective gets stuck. Its failure should be even more
obvious when he comes to history, because the claim: 'My per-
sonal historicality is the source of all human history' is nonsensi-
cal- yet that is the claim which Heidegger makes. Of course he
puts it a slightly different way: 'The historicality of Dasein is the
basis of Dasein's history', which obliterates at a stroke the recog-
nition of any distinction between personal existence and collec-

tive history. We previously saw that the talk of 'Dasein' as every-
man led to the derealization of the social world; we now see that
it also de-historicizes history.
We can safely ignore, says Heidegger, what historians do
(B&T, p445): that is inauthentic superficiality. We must return
to my historicality, to my present experience of the 'having been'.
Thus, Heidegger reduces history to my current aesthetic experi-
ence of cultural artefacts. And my comprehension of these
artefacts is not based on my relatedness to other people: rather
my relationships to others are mediated by this heritage. If other
thinkers have reduced history to the history of nation states, or
the history of economic forces, Heidegger reduces it squarely to
the history of Art. 4
If we recapitulate Heidegger's transition from temporality to
historicality, we shall see how he obliterates the dialectic between
individual experience and collective history, and so reaches his
preposterous conclusions. My inauthentic 'lostness' in the social
world creates an anxiety, the full meaning of which is brought
home to me when I face the inevitability of my own death.
Temporality is then seen to be the fundamental structure of
human experience, which permeates all others. In my finitude I
undertake projects in which I attempt to realize some envisaged
state of affairs. These projects structure my time experience; they
determine what I notice now and what I recall from the past.
Thus time is not experienced as a succession of neutral 'nows',
each causally determined by the one before. Rather the future, as
the way in which things stand out for us now, determines the
past.
But the presences which I encounter, Heidegger continues,
refer beyond my own time. I find myself surrounded by artefacts
- buildings, paintings, books, poems, which are a cultural herit-
age. It is the experience of such artefacts which is the basis of
history; and authentic history is concerned with the significance
of such works for my own existence. 'Historical science', on the
other hand 'can distort man's relation to history . . . ; or misin-
terpret it and degrade it to a mere knowledge of antiquities' (1M,
p36). 'History ... is essentially the history of spirit', says
Heidegger, quoting Hegel with approval (B&T, p480). So by
dwelling upon and recognizing the Truth in and through the
great works of the past (such as the Greek temple, or Van Gogh's
paintings, or Trakl's poems), I can come to realize my own

possibility for authenticity, and become open for the moment of
vision in which Being will be revealed.
So history, for Heidegger, instead of being the story of the past,
the accounts of people, groups and institutions dead and gone,
becomes the story of things. And things are treated as if they were
not human products: essentially they are revelations of Being.
Tempted as he is by Nietzsche's supermen, by the romantic
efflorescences known as genius, he ultimately opts for the utterly
alien, the reified art-object as the incarnation of super-human
force.
As a consequence, history can in no sense be considered pro-
gressive. It is neither the story of man's triumph over nature; nor
of his overcoming of ignorance and want. At best it is the eternal
recurrence of the same (B&T, p444); at worst (which may in fact
be where we are at), it is actual decline from some heroic or
golden age.
The world is darkening. The essential episodes of this darkening are: the flight
of the gods,5 the destruction of the earth, the standardization of man, the
pre-eminence of the mediocre ...
World i~ always world of the spirit ... Darkening of the world means emascula-
tion of the spirit ... This enfeeblement orginated in Europe ... in the first half
of the nineteenth century ... it is popularly called the 'collapse of German
Idealism'. This formula is a shield behind which the already dawning spiritless-
ness ... the rejection of all original enquiry into grounds ... are hidden. It was
not German Idealism which collapsed; rather the age was no longer strong
enough to stand up to the greatness, breadth and originality of that spiritual
world, i.e. truly to realize it, for to realize a philo~ophy means something very
different from applying theorems ... The Jives of men began to slide into a
world which lacked that depth from out of which the essential always comes to
man ... so compelling him to become superior and making him act in confor-
mity to a rank. (1M, pp37-8).
In short, the age of romantic heroism is dead, and much regretted

by Heidegger.
Heidegger's transition, then, from temporality to historicality
is by way of things: not natural objects but cultural products.
These cultural products are seen not as expressions of human
originality or meaning: they are expressions of Being, or they are
inauthentic. In the face of such artefacts no action is appropriate:
only a seeing. This original seeing of the truth which the artefact
reveals is what history is all about - according to Heidegger.
Which, I assert, is a misunderstanding of what history is.

Furthermore, it leads to arBitrary misinterpretation of the very
cultural products that Heidegger so values- arbitrary because it
does not acknowledge the canons of what can be publicly estab-
lished as true, and gives no credance to the belief that the mean-
ing of the product must be related to what the producer intended
to express. By this doctrine Heidegger justifies his gross misin-
terpretations of Kant, Hegel, etc. 6 , his speculative word
etymologies and derivations,7 and his complete disregard for the
material context of a historical product. 'All you need to know
about Aristotle', he said at the beginning of a course on his work,
'is that he was born, he lived, and he died'.8
When Husserl lectured on the 'Phenomenology of Internal

Time-Consciousness', he gave detailed attention to the
phenomena of anticipation and immediate retention in the pro-
cess of perception. He did so with a method which he claimed any
rational human being could employ to establish knowledge
which would be both rigorously scientific and cumulative.
Heidegger appropriated and transformed this analysis, and
abandoned the method. Just as he universalized the craft-work
model in his account of all human praxis, so he universalized
goal-oriented activity in his account of time-consciousness - a
doctrine which sits uneasily with his passive contemplation of
truth.
When I am engaged in productive labour, itcan be the case that
my concept of the future product determines my current activity
to the extent of me ignoring the flies on the window, the tea-bell,
or my memories of last night's TV programmes. There are pro-
ductive activities, however, which are 'interactive': I have no
concept of the future product, I try something which seems right,
if it is I let it stand, if it isn't I try something else. 9 There are also
many activities, as we have already noted, which are non-
productive, at least in any sense that fits clearly into Heidegger's
analysis. Although a song is temporal in structure (as Husserl
pointed out), I do not normally sing it in order to get to the end:
its future does not determine its having been. Indeed, if I forget
the words in the middle I go back to the beginning and try again
- I do not concentrate on the last line.
There are also quite different forms of time experience. I
reminisce, dwell upon the past - not with a view to the future,
but for the sheer pleasure of recall. Indeed, the historicality of the
objects in my world seems primarily to be of this nature. A home,
as Heidegger would be the first to admit, is not a house. The
objects with which I surround myself in my home are full of
memories. We might say they have 'sentimental value'- butthat
narrows and trivializes what I am thinking of. Apart from the
vase my mother gave me, the decrepit chair we bought at an
auction just after we were married, and the faded postcard from
an old holiday, there is the wash-basin which I installed, the nail
in the door frame I gashed my hand on, the cracked window pane
I keep meaning to repair, etc. The historicality of these objects
refers to past events, actions, thoughts, and sometimes to future
actions or events.
I can dwell in the past. (Indeed Minkowski suggests that it is
characteristic of schizophrenics that they experience the future
with all the qualities of the past).10 And such reminiscence might
be as legitimate a source of imaginitive creation or phantasy as
high cultural objects like temples and paintings. The 'having-
been' of objects is not necessarily experienced with the full bur-
den of my facticity and thrownness included. My qualitative
experience of many objects is both as repositories of memories
and as possibilities for the future. Any particular object may be
wholly the one or the other; some objects may be neither. My
time-experience of things, my experience of their historicality, is
far richer and more various than Heidegger allows.
My memories are qualitatively different from my future plans.
But my memories of what I thought and felt are not qualitatively
different from my memories of what I heard and saw. The fact
that something belongs in the realm of memory gives it no public
validity. The 'truth' of what I remember is something which must
always be re-established now. And of course, the more I
reminisce, recall, rework and phantasize on the basis of my
memories, the less reliable they become - to say nothing of the
fact that my memory is in any case selective. Recalling the holi-
day, I remember the sunshine but not the rain, the good food but
not the bad smells - because the whole has the quality of a
pleasant event.
As soon as I pass beyond those associations which have the
quality of memories to the 'historicality' of the objects which
provoke them, I necessarily pass beyond the private to the public.
If I am interested in histori~al truth rather than material for

pleasant phantasy, then I should check my memory of that
holiday weather against the person I spent the holiday with, or
against the weather reports in the local paper of the day. This is
even more true if the object or event is not within my remembered
experience, but derives its significance from other people. The
idea that I can have any historical understanding of the French
Revolution, the break-up of the Roman Empire, or the rise of
Nazism, without extensive knowledge and careful, publicly con-
firmable analysis is just absurd. But for Heidegger history is not
about such events - it is a collection of entities whose meaning
can be revealed to individual contemplation because it is intrinsic
to each work.
Just as Bultmann spurned the search for the historical Jesus in
the name of the truth of the myth, so Heidegger spurns historical
truth in the name of the truth of Being. Heidegger is completely
uninterested in the establishment of historical truth, and disdains
to discuss how it can be attained. Once again, he rejects the
possibility of establishing any knowledge whatsoever. In this, he
jettisons the most of Dilthey's work, and indeed the whole pro-
ject of hermeneutics in relation to the Geisteswissenschaften.
He is left in the curious position of throwing a great weight
onto the 'tradition' or cultural heritage, and simultaneously
removing its basis. 'The tradition' becomes the objectification of
all valid (authentic) relationships with others. History is not
about people but about things. The tradition is a collection of
things. The 'wisdom of the past' is the only source of wisdom and
is to be found in cultural artefacts. But at the same time these are
not to be regarded as human products, as expressions of either
individuals or groups: they are expressions only of spiritual
forces (such as Art) or Being. 'Art', he wrote in The origin of the
Work of Art, 'grounds history'.11
Without historical knowledge, without historical analysis,
Heidegger was unable to give any guidance about the moment of
historical 'decision and determination' in the way that Marcuse
had hoped. Just as he failed to provide any criteria which the
individual could use to assess a particular situation for its authen-
tic possibilities, so he failed to provide any criteria for assessing the
potentialities of a historical situa tion in the larger sense. And yet
by seeming to offer this, he diverted people from the type of
historical analysis which would have been very pertinent in the
Germany of the late twenties and early thirties: he prevented that

'taking charge of historical destiny' which Marcuse recognized as
possible but which never materialized. As Marcuse himself said
in 1934: 'Genuine historicity presupposes a cognitive relation of
existence to the forces of history and, derived from it, the theoret-
ical and practical critique of these forces'. 12
Yet the lack of any basis for historical analysis or prognosis did
not deter Heidegger from recommending action. We have
already noted the impression he gave of exhorting his listeners to
'Be authentic!', and how his students were inspired to dedicate
themselves to the storm troopers or the presocratics. He went
much further than that however. He exhorted his audience to
realize the 'historical destiny' of the German Yolk (whatever that
was) and to ensure that Germany saved civilization from the
mediocrity of Russia and America. In the first lecture of
'Introduction to Metaphysics', his story of spiritual decline since
the heyday of German idealism was followed by his 'metaphysi-
cal' analysis of the current historical situation:
(After the collapse of idealism) Intelligence no longer meant a wealth of talent,

lavishly spent, ... but only what could be learned by everyone, the practice of a
routine ... In America and Russia this development grew into a boundless
etcetera of indifference and always-the-sameness ... Since then the domination
in those countries of a cross-section of the indifferent mass ... has become an
active onslaught that destroys all rank and every world-creating impulse of the
spirit, and calls it a lie. This is the onslaught of what we call the demonic (in the
sense of destructive evil) (1M, p38).
The destructive evil, according to his analysis, is not German

fascism, but Russian communism and American bourgeois
democracy which are 'metaphysically' the same. He cannot, of
course, justify this characterization and makes no attempt to do
so. He has to hold that the 'demonic' is immanent in the
phenomena and therefore requires no analysis to uncover: all
that is necessary is authentic seeing.
The prejudices he expresses here, whilst not logically implied
by, are nevertheless of a piece with, his rejection of historical
knowledge, his failure to develop an epistemology, and his indi-
vidualization of the social world. It is therefore naive of writers
such as Karsten Herries to claim, as she recently did, that
'Heidegger's thinking, ... has pushed beyond his own time in
J-listory alld }lo/itics 215
such a way that, given all that the age considers important, it
must seem beside the point. This untimeliness helps to explain
the apolitical character of his work'.13 Nothing could be further
from the truth.
Heidegger made the mistake of confusing philosophy with
history, and treating philosophy as a spiritual movement
detached from any concrete situation. 'In the existential analysis
we cannot, in principle, discllss what Daesin factically resolves in
any particular case. Our investigation precludes even the existen-
tial projection of the factical possibilities of existence' (13&'1',
p.434). This resolve vitiated the supposed practicality of his
analysis. Even more did it ulldercllt his pretcntions to make any
relevant historical judgments. His style of a /lriori analysis of
individual consciousness could in no way shed light on the social
and economic forces which were precipitating Germany towards
fascism and war. Yet he was not content to let his philosophy
remain a sort of epiphenomenon, the /lost (acto ration:llization
of preconceived prejudices. He had to claim for it the status of a
faith for the times - which meant a contribution to the ideology
of Nazism.
There is an irony- even a paradox- in Heidegger's thinking.
For the individual he orders authentic self-clarification: yet he
rejects the only means by which such self-clarificatioll can be
established - authentic relationships with others. In history, he
orders the seizing of destiny and yet fails even to describe what
authentic clarification in relation to history could be. He objec-
tifies history as the ultimately incomprehensible movement of
spirit. Living historical process is reduced to the residue of
artefacts, the human origins of which are then deriied. Thus,
preaching against the alienation of modern society, Heideggerian
man is alienated from his own history and his own products-
which consequently become mysterious. Assigning them to the
ultimate objectification of 'Being', even Heidegger admits him-
self baffled, and rests content in the 'pathos of obscurity':
Through Being there pas!>es a veiled del>tiny thar is ordained between the godly
and the counter-godly. There i~ much in being that man cannot master. There is
hut little that comes to he known ... What i!> known remains inexact, what is
ma .. tered imecure. What is, i!> never of our making, or evel1l11t'rdy the product
of our mind." a .. it might all too ea .. ily ~eem. When we contemplate this whole as
Ol1e, then we apprehend, .. o it appear .. , all that is- though we grasp it crudely
enough (OWA, pB).
NOTES
1 Marcuse(1),pp12and 17.
2 See Gunther Anders Stern's splendidly polemical article 'On the Pseudo-
Concreteness ofHeidegger's Philosophy': Anders Stern (1).
3 Lovejoy (1), p11.
4 It is worth recalling tha t along with the ontologist Braig, Heidegger remem-
bered the art historian Voge as the other teacher who had most profoundly
influenced his intellectual development. See above, p3.
5 As Wagnerian as it is Nietzschean!
6 ego KPM and HCE.
7 ego 'On the Grammar and Etymology of the Word "Being" , in 1M p43 ff.
8 Quoted by Kockelmans (1).
9 See, for example, Henry Moore's method of work: '1 sometimes begin a
drawing with no preconceived problem to solve, with only the desire to use
pencil on paper, and make lines, tones and shapes with no conscious aim
.. .' Quoted by Beardsley and Schueller, p176.
10 See Minkowski (1), p138, and Minkowski (2), p274 ff.
11 OWApp77-8.
12 Marcuse (2), p34. (My italics).
13 Murray (1), p304.
APPENDIX 1
NOTES ON SOURCES
My main sources, particularly Heidegger's own works, are indi-
cated in the body of the text. In Part I however, where I was
dealing with his early life, with the hermeneutic tradition and
with Husserl's development of phenomenology, it was not poss-
ible to make adequate reference to sources without disturbing the
narrative line. This note is intended to make good the omission~
The sources for Heidegger's early life and development include
three autobiographical statements of his. The first is the very
early (1914) sketch The Course of my Life (CL) which had to
accompany the submission of his doctoral thesis (LUP): he reti-
cently confined his statement to a dozen lines. The second is a
brief address to the Heidelberg Academy of Science given in 1957
(AH). The third is the late (1963) essay My Way to Phenomenol-
ogy (MW), which is much longer. The first and the third conflict,
as for instance: 'I dedicated myself entirely to philosophy' after
1911 (MW, p75), but 'after 1911 I concentrated mostly on
philosophy, mathematics and the natural sciences, and during
the last semester I added history' (CL, ppl-2). The earlier state-
ment, made about the recent past to university authorities who
knew the facts, is obviously more reliable. This points to the fact
that the later essay, although from the horse's mouth, must be
treated with caution: it is an old man's reconstruction of his early
history and benefits from hindsight. As he himself says else-
where: 'What a few strokes can thus sketch in retrospect ... was
in its historical reality, a tangled process, inscrutible even to me'
(PrR, pxiv). The late work very much plays down the influence of
Rickert and the hermeneuticists, but this is hardly surprising in
an essay written as a Festschrift for the foremost publisher of
phenomenology. The test of his account, as of any other, must lie
in an analysis of his published works.
In addition to these statements of Heidegger I have used
primarily Krell (3) and Richardson (1) (both of which were
checked with Heidegger himself) for the facts of his early life.
On hermeneutics I have drawn heavily on Gadamer (1) and (2)

and Palmer (1). Interesting background to Schleiermacher is to
be found in Chapter 1 of Taylor (1) and in Lukacs early essay on
Novalis' Romanticism, Lukacs (1) p42. On Schleiermacher's
relation to Hegel see Lukacs (2). On Dilthey, Hodges (1) long-
published book has recently been all but replaced by the appear-
ance of Dilthey (1). The most serious study of Dilthey in English
to date is Ermarth's (1). These two books between them replace
the out-of-print studies by Kluback (1) and Rickman (1). Rick-
man (2) is a good, popularizing essay on hermeneutics.
On Husserl there is a vast secondary literature in English, though

mostly in article form. At one time or another I have browsed
through a good chunk of this and could not at this stage even
begin to identify who and what have influenced my reading of
Husserl. For his early life however, the best sources are his
personal papers and the recollections of his associates and stu-
dents. None of these are collected in any English translation, but
scattered references are quite extensive. Spiegelberg's two
volume history of The Phenomenological Movement is still the
best source in English for the course of his life and early influ-
ences. Farber's monumental Foundation of Phenomenology is
philosophy not history and goes into far greater detail. A useful
brief summary of some main points of the Logical Investigation
and their connection to the Philosophy of Arithmetic is to be
found in Becker (1).
Of Husserl's own works, I have drawn to a greater or lesser
extent on all those in English listed in Appendix 4, and one or two
not yet translated which I have mentioned in the text. Roughly
speaking, my Chapter 2 deals with Husserl's writings up to 1913,
and Chapter 3 with those written after that date. The exception is
The Crisis, a part of which I have left until Chapter 8.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank:
BASIL BLACKWELL PUBLISHER LTD for permission to quote
extensively from M. Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by J.
Macquarrie and E. Robinson.
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS INC for permission to use material
from M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated
by R. Manheim.
APPENDIX 2
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED
JBSP Journal of British Society for Phenomenology.
PPR Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
RP Radical Philosophy.
SWJ Phil South Western Journal of Philosophy.
Anders Stern, G. (1) On the Pseudo-concreteness of Heidegger's Philosophy,
PPR 8, 1947-8, pp337-70.
Arendt, H. (1) 'Martin Heideggerat Eighty', in Murray (1), pp 293-303.
Beardsley, M.e. & Schueller, HM (ed) 'Aesthetic Inquiry', Dickenson, 1967.
Becker, O. (1) 'The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl', in Elveton, R.O. (1).
Binswanger, L. (1) Being-in-the- World, ed. J Needleman. Basic Books 1963.
Binswanger, L. (2) Grundformen und Erkemttnis menschlichen Daseins.
Binswanger, L. (3) 'The Case of Ellen West', in R. May (ed) 'Existence', Basic
Books 1958
Boll, H. (1) Group Portrait with Lady, Penguin 1976. Reinhardt, Miichen,
1964.
Boss, M. (1) Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, Basic Books, 1963.
Bossert, P. (I),Note on Heidegger's Opus One',jBSP, 4,1: Jan. 1973.
Boyce Gibson, W.R. (1) 'From Husserl to Heidegger: Excerpts from a 1928
FreiburgDiary',jBSP, 2, 1;Jan. 1971.
Buber, M. (1)/ & Thou, T &T. Clark, 1959.
Bultmann, R. (1) Kerygma and Myth, Harper Row. n.d.
Caputo, J.D. (1) 'Phenomenology, Mysticism and the "Gramatica
Speculativa": a Study of Heidegger's "Habilitationsshrift" ',jBSP, 5, 2:
May 1974, ppl01-17.
Caruso,1. (1) Existential Psychology, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1964.
Dilthey, W. (1) Selected Writings, ed. H P Rickman. Cambridge 'University
Press, 1976.
Dreyfus, H. & Haugeland J. 'Husserl and Heidegger: Philosophy's Last Stand',
in Murray (1), pp 222-38.
Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets, Faber, 1954.
Elveton, R.O. (ed) The Phenomenology of Husser I, Quadrangle, 1970.
Ermarth, M. (1) Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason, Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1978.
Farber, M. (1) The Foundation of Phenomenology, SUNY Press, 1943.
Feucrbach, L. (1) Essence of Christianity , Harper & Row, n.d.
Forman, P. (1) 'Weimar Culture, Causality and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927',
in Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, Yol3, 1971.
Freud, S. (1) Two Short Accounts of Psycho-analysis, Penguin, 1962.
Gadamer, H-G. (1) Truth and Method, Sheed and Ward, 1975.
Gadamer, H-G. (2) Philosophical Hermeneutics, University of California
Press, 1976.
Gay, P (1) 'Weimar Culture', in D. Fleming & B. Bailyn (eds) The Intellectual
Migratioll. Harvard University Press, 1969.
Gelven, M. (1) A Commentary on Heidegger's (Being & Time', Harper, 1970.
Goldmann, L. (1) Introduction to Lukacs & Heidegger, Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1977.
Hodges, H.A. (1) Wilhelm Dilthey, Routledge and Kegan Pa ul, 1944.
Hegel, G.F.W. (1) Hegel's Aesthetics, trans. Knox, Oxford, 1975.
Heidegger See separate bibliography.
Husserl, E. See separate bibliography.
James, W. (1) The Principles of Psychology, Dover 1950.
Kockelmans, J.J. (1) Martin Heidegger: A First Introduction to his Philosophy,
Duquesne University Press, 1965.
Kluback, W. (1) Wilhelm Dilthey's Philosophy of History, Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1956.
Krell, D Farrell. (1) 'Toward Sein und Zeit: Heidegger's Early Review
(1919-21) of Jasper's Psychologieder WeltanschauUlzgen', ]BSP, 6, 3: Oct.
75: pp147-56.
Krell, D Farrell. (2) 'The Heidegger-Jaspers Relationship',]BSP 9, 2; May 78,
pp126-9.
Krell, D Farrell (3) 'General Introduction: The Question of Being', in M.
Heidegger,BW, pp3-35.
Laing, R.D. (1) The Divided Self, Penguin, 1965.
Laing, R.D. (2) Self and Others, Penguin, 1971.
Laing, R.D. & Esterson A. Sanity, Madness & the Family, Penguin, 1970.
Landgrebe, L. (1) 'The Phenomenological Concept of Experience', PPR, 34, 1;
1973,pp 1-13.
Langan, T. (1) The Meaning ofHeidegger Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959.
Locke,J. (I)An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Dover, 1959.
Lovejoy, A.O. (1) The Great Chaill of Being, Harvard University Press, 1964.
Lukacs, G. (1) Soul and Form, Merlin, 1974.
Lukacs, G. (2) The Young Hegel, Merlin, 1975.
Marcuse, H. (1) 'Contribution to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism,
Telos 4; Fall 1969; pp3-34.
Marcuse, H. (2) Negations, Penguin, 1972.
Marx, K. (1) 'Estranged Labour', in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
1844, trans. in KMarx, Early Writings, Penguin, 1975.
Marx, K. (2) Capital, Vol I. Lawrence and Wishart, 1970.
Merlean-Ponty, M. (1) Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence, in Siglls.
Northwestern University Press, 1964.
Minkowski, E. (1) 'A Case of Schizophrenic Depression', in R. May (ed.)
Existellce, Basic Books, 1958.
Minkowski, E. (2) Lived Time, Northwestern University Press, 1970.
Murray, M. (ed) Heidegger & Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, Yale
University Press, 1978.
Macquarrie,J. (1) Martin Heidegger, Lutterworth, 1968.
Macquarrie, J. (2) All Existential Theology, SCM Press Ltd., 1955.
Macquarrie, J. (3) Twentieth Century Religious Thought, SCM Press Ltd.,
1963.
Obolenski, D. (1) The Byzalltine Commonwealth, Sphere, 1974.
Bibliography 221
Palmer, R.E. (1) 'Hermeneutics', Northwestern University Press, 1969.

Passmore,j. (1) A Hundred Years ofPhilosophy, Penguin 1968,
Richardson, W. (1) Heidegger: through Phenomenology to Thought, Nijhoff,
1967.
Rickman, H.P. (1) Meaning in History, Allen & Unwin, 1961.
Rickman,H.P. (2) 'Hermeneutics',jBSP, 7,3; Oct. 1976,pp167-76.
Sang-Ki Kim. (1) The Problem of the Contingency of the World in Husserl's
Phenomenology,B.R. Griiner, Amsterdam, 1976.
Sartre,j-P. (1) Being & Nothingness, Methuen, 1969.
Sartre,j-P. (2) Existentialism & Humanism, Methuen, 1948.
Sartre,j-P. (3) Critique of Dialectical Reason, New Left Books, 1976.
Sartre,j-P. (4) Sketch fora Theory of the Emotions, Methuen, 1971.
Spengler, O. (1) The Decline of the West, Allen & Unwin, 1932.
Scott Fitzgerald, F. (1) The Great Gatsby, Penguin, 1950.
Spiegelberg, H. (1) The Phenomenological Movement, 2 vols, Nijhoff, 1965.
Taylor, C. (1) Hegel, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Tolstoy, L. (1) The Death of/van Uyich, Signet, 1960.
Waterhouse, R.W. (1) 'A Critiqueof Authenticity' ,RP 21,1978.
Waterhouse, R.W. (2) 'Husser! & Phenomenology',RP 16, Spring 1977.
APPENDIX 3
HEIDEGGER'S WORKS
The list of Heidegger's publications is extremely long and still
growing as the definitive German edition of his works continues
to appear. Most of these works are relatively short essays or
lectures, many of which have similar titles. The situation is
further confused by the fact that English collections of his essays
do not correspond to the German collections, and quite a few
essays have been published individually in book form. So instead
of listing half a dozen titles of books published during his
lifetime, it is necessary to refer to each essay separately, and to
make it clear which English title refers to which German one.
Three lists follow. The first lists, in order of composition, those
of his works so far translated into English. The second lists
alphabetically the abbreviations I have been using to refer to
these works. And the third lists the German originals of the titles
in the other two lists.
HEIDEGGER'S WORKS IN ENGLISH
Listed in order of composition. Where the date of the first German edition
differs from that of composition I have given the publication date in brackets.
Initials after the title indicate the English collection in which it is to be found.
Initials in brackets indicate the German title.
1912 'The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy; jBSP, Vol. 4, 1. Jan.

1973,pp64-71 (RMP).
1914 'The Course of My Life', in J.J. Kockelmans, Martin Heidegger: a First
Introduction to his Philosophy, Duquesne University Press, 1965, ppl-2
(extract from LUP).
1915 'The Concept of Time in the Science of History',jBSP, Vol. 9, 1. Jan 1978,
pp3-10 (ZG).
1922 'The Idea of Phenomenology', New Scholasticism, 1970, Vol 44,
pp325-44 (I Ph).
1919-26(1927) Beingal1d Time, Blackwell, 1962 p501 (SZ).
1925-6(1929) Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Indiana University Press
1962, p255 (KM).
Heidegger's Works 223
1927 (1969) 'Phenomenology and Theology',PyT (PNT).
1927-46 (1950) 'What are Poets for?', PL T (WD).
1928 Editor's foreword to E Husser!, The Phenomenology of Internal Time
Consciousness, Nijhoff, n.d. pp 15-16 (VHPZ).
1928 'Review of Ernst Cassirer'sMythical Thought, PyT (PSF).
1929 The Essence of Reasons, Northwestern University Press, 1969 (WG).
1930 'What is Metaphysics?', inB W & EB pp353-92 (WMK).
1930 (1943) 'On the Essence of Truth', inBW &EB, pp317-51 (WW).
1935 (1953) Introduction to Metaphysics, Doubleday Anchor, 1961, pl72
(EM).
1935-6 (1962) What is a Thing?, Regnery, 1967 (FD).
1936-46 (1954) 'Overcoming Metaphysics',EP (UM).
1936-52 (1952) 'The Word of Neitzsche: "God is Dead",' QT, pp53-112
(NWGT).
1936 (1950) 'The Originofa Work ofArt',BW,PLT, (UK).
1936 (1937) 'H6lderlin and the Essence of Poetry', inEB pp291-315 (HWD).
1936-7 (1961) The Will to Power as Art. (WMK).
1937 (1961) The Eternal Recurrence of the Same (EWG).
1938 (1952) 'The Age of the World Picture', QT, pp115-54; also as the 'Age of
the World View',Measure II (1951),pp269-84 (ZW).
1939-43 (1945) 'Remembrance of the Poet',EB pp251-90.
1939 (1967) On the Being and Conception of Physis in Aristotle's Physics bk 1
Man and World IV, 1977, pp219-70 (WBPA).
1939 (1961) The Will to Power as Knowledge (WME).
1940 (1961) European Nihilism (ENS).
1940 Nietzsche's Metaphysics (NMK).
1941 'Metaphysics as HistoryofBeing', EP (MGS).
1941 'Sketches for a History ofBeing as Metaphysics', EP (EGSM).
1941 'Recollection in Metaphysics', EP (ErM).
1942 (1947) 'Plato's Doctrine of Truth', in W Barrett and H Aiken (eds.),
Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Random House, 1962, pp251-70
(PLW).
1942-3 (1950) Hegel's Concept of Experience, Harper & Row 1970 (HBE).
1943 'Aletheia',EGT (VA).
1943 'Postscript' to 'What is Metaphysics?',EB, WM (WM:N).
1944 'Logos', EGT (VA).
1946-54 The End of Philosophy (inel uding part of Nietzsche, Vol II).
1947 Letter on Humanism,BW, in Barrett & Aiken (op. cit.) pp270-302 (BH).
1947 (1954) 'The Thinker as Poet', PLT (ED).
1949 (1962) 'The Turning', QT,pp36-49 (K).
1949 (1965) 'Introduction' to 'What is Metaphysics?', in Kaufmann Existen-
tialism from Dostoevsky toSartre, Meridian, 1956 (WM:E).
1949 (1953) 'The Pathway', in Listening II (1967), pp88-91: revised in Listen-
ing VIII, 1973, pp32-9 (FW).
1949-54 (1954) 'The Question Concerning Technology', QTpp3-35 (FT).
1950 (1951) 'The Thing',PLT (D).
1950 (1959) 'Language',PLT(S).
1951 (1954) 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking',PLT, BW (BWD).
1951 (1954) ' ... Poetically Man Dwells .. .',PLT (DWM).
1951 Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry, University of Alabama Press, 1978
(EHO).
1951-2 (1954) What is Called Thinking?, Harper & Row, 1968 (WHO).
1953 'Science and Reflection', QT, pp155-81 (WB).
1953 'Language in the Poem', OWL (SGd:US).
1953 'A ~ialogue on Language', OWL (GS:US).
1953 'Who is Neitzsche's Zarathrustra?', Review of Metaphysics 20, 1967,
pp411-31; N2 (NWGT: US).
1953 Hofgeismar Conversation: 'Conversation with Martin Heidegger', PyT
(-).
1954 'The Thinker as Poet',PLT (ED).
1955 (1956) On the Question of Being, Vision, 1959 (SF).
1955 (1956) What is Philosophy? Twayne, 1959, (WdP).
1955 Discourse on Thinking, Harper & Row, 1966 (G).
1957 'Address to the Heidelberg Academy of Science': Man & World, 3, 1970,
pp3-4 (AHA).
1957 Identity and Difference, Philosophical Library, 1960 (IDZ).
1956 'The Principle of Ground' (SG),Man & World, 7,1974, pp207-22.
1957-8 'The Essence of Language', OWL (WS).
1958 'The Principles ofThinking',PyT (GO).
1958 'Words', OWL (W).
1961 'Messkirch'sSeventh Centennial' (AzH).
1962 (1969) On Time and Being, Harper & Row, 1972 (ZS).
1962 (1967) Preface to W Richardson Heidegger, Through Phenomenology to
Thought, Nijhoff, 1967.
1962 'Kant'sThesisaboutBeing',SW] Phil 4, 1973,7-33 (KTS).
1963 (1969) 'My Way to Phenomenology', TB,pp74-82 (MW).
1964 (1969) 'The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking' , TB, pp55-73
(EPAO:SO).
1964 (1969) The Problem of a Non-objectifying Thinking and Speaking in
Contemporary Theology (PyT): also in Philosophy and Religion, ed. J H
Gill. Burgess, 1968, pp59-65.
1966 (1976) 'Only a God can save us': interview with Der Spiegel (OSI)
Philosophy Today, Vol. 20,4/4; Winter 1976, pp267-84.
1969 'Artand Space', in Man and World Vol. VI, 1973,pp3-8 (KR).
1971-6 'Thoughts' for Rene Charete ('poems'), in Philosophy Today, Vol 20,
4/4; Winter 1976, pp286-91.
COLLECTIONS
BW Basic Writings, Harper & Row, 1977.

EB Existence and Being, (ed. WBrock) Regnery, 1949.
EGT Early Greek Thinking, Harper & Row, 1975.
EP The End of Philosophy , Harper & Row, 1973.
N,1-4 Nietzsche 1-4, Harper & Row, (not yet published).
OWL On the Way to Language, Harper & Row, 1971.
PyT The Piety of Thin king, Indiana University Press, 1976.
PLT Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row, 1971.
QT The Question Concerning Technology, Harper & Row, 1971.
TB On Time and Being, Harper & Row 1972.
HEIDEGGER'S WORKS IN ENGLISH:
ABBREVIATIONS
Letters after the title indicate the English collection in which it is found. Letters
in brackets indicate the German title (before the colon), and the German
collection in which the essa y first appeared.
AH Address to the Heidelberg Academy of Science.

AS Art and Space (KR).
AP On the Being and Conception of Physis in Aristotle's Physics Bk 1
(APK).
AWP Age of the World Picture (ZW:HW).
BOT Building, Dwelling, Thinking (BWD: VA).
B&T Being and Time (SZ).
CL Course of my Life (LUP).
CMT Review of Cassirer's Mythical Thought (PSF).
CTSH The Concept of Time in the Science of History (ZG).
DT Discourse on Thinking (G).
DSI DerSpiegel Interview.
DL Dialogue on Language (GS: US).
EH Elucidations ofHolderlin's Poetry (EHD).
EL The Essence of Language (WS:US).
EP End of Philosophy.
EPTT End of Philosophy and theTaskofThinkingBW, TB (EPAD:SD).
EN European Nihilism (ENs).
ER Essence of Reasons (WG).
ERS The Eternal Recurrence of the Same (EWG).
ET Essence of Truth EB (WW).
FH Foreword to Husserl (VHPZ).
HCE Hegel's Concept of Experience (HBE:HW).
HEP Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry EB (HWD).
IO Identity and Difference (IOZ).
IP The Idea of Phenomenology (IPh).
1M Introduction to Metaphysics (EM).
KPM Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (KM).
KTB Kant's Thesis about Being (KTS).
L Language (S:US).
LP Language in the Poem (SGd: US).
LH Letter on Humanism (BH: PL W).
MHB Metaphysics as History of Being EP (MGS:NII).
MSC Messkirch's Seventh Centennial (AzH).
MWP My Way to PhenomenologyTB (MW:SD).
NM Nietzsche's Metaphysics (NMK).
OM Overcoming Metaphysics EP (UM :VA).
OWA Origin of Work of Art (UK:HW).
PDT Plato's Doctrine of Truth (PLW).
PG Principle of Ground (SG).
PMD Poetically Man Dwells (DWM:VA).
PNT Problem of a Non-objectifying Thinking and Speaking in Contem-
poraryTheology (-).
PW Pathway (FW).
PR Problem of Reality (RMP).
PrR Preface to Richardson.
PT Principles of Thinking (GD).
P&T Phenomenology and Theology (PNT).
QB Question of Being (SF).
QT Question Concerning Technology (FT).
RM Recollection of Metaphysics EP (ErM:NIl).
RP Remembrance of the Poet EB.
SHBM Sketches for a History of Being as Metaphysics, EP (EGSM; NIl).
SR Science and Reflection QT (WB: VA).
Th The Thing (D:VA).
TB Time and Being (ZS)
TP The Thinker as Poet (ED).
TR The Turning (K:TK).
TRC Thoughts for Rene Charete.
WM What is Metaphysics? EB (WMK).
WNGD The Word of Nietzsche: 'God is Dead' QT (NW, GT: NW).
WL The Way to Language OWL (WgS: US).
WP What is Philosophy? (WdP).
WPA The Will to Power as Art (WMK).
WPf What are Poets for? (WD:HZ).
WPK The Will to Power as Knowledge N3 (WME:NI).
WT What is a Thing? (FD).
WTk What is called Thinking? (WHD :VA).
WNZ Who is Nietzsche's Zarathrustra? (WZ: VA).
HEIDEGGER'S WORKS IN GERMAN:
ABBREVIATIONS
Letters after the title indicate the German collection from which it is taken.
Letters in brackets indicate the English title (before the colon) and English
collection in which it is found. The letters 'br' indicate a book review.
A 'Aletheia (Heraklit)' , VA.

AzH 'Ansprachezum Heimatabend' (MSC).
AHA 'Antrittsrede: Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaft' (AH).
AKJ 'Anmerkungen zu Karl Jaspers Psychologie der Weltans-
chauungen'.
AR 'Abendgang auf der Reichena u'.
APk 'Vom Wesen und Begriff der Physis, Aristoteles Physik BI', WM
ASC Uber Abraham a Santa Clara.
BH 'Briefiiber den "Humanismus" " PLW (LH).
BWD 'Bauen, Wohnen, Denken', VA (BDT:PLT;BW).
D 'DasDing', VA (Th:PLT).
DWM 'dichterisch wohnet der Mensch', VA (PMD:PLT).
ED Aus der E rfah rung des Denkens (TP: PLT).
EGSM 'Entwiirfe zur Geschichte des Seins als Metaphysik', NIl
(SHBM:EP).
EHD Erlauterungen zu Holder/ius Dichtung (EH).
EM Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik (1M).
ENs 'Europaische Nihilismus', NIl (EN).
ErM 'Die Erinnerung an die Metaphysik', NIl (RM: EP).
EPAD 'Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens', SD
(EPTT:TB).
EW 'Aus einer Erorterung der Wahrheitsfrage'.
EWG 'Dieewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen', NI (ERS).
FD Die Frage nach dem Ding (WT).
IT 'DieFragenach derTechnik', VA &TK (QT).
FW Der Feldweg (PW).
G Gelassenheit (DT).
GD 'Grundsatzedes Denkens' (PT).
GPL 'Zur Geschichte des philosophischen Lehrstuhls seit 1866'.
GS 'Aus einem Gesprach von der Sprache' US (DL).
HBE 'Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung', HW (HCE).
HDH Hebel-der Hausfreuud.
HG 'Hegel und die G riechen'.
HEH 'Holderlins Erdeund Himmel'.
HW Holzwege.
HWD Holderli1l1md das Wesen der Dichtung, EHD (HEP).
IOZ Identitat und Differellz (10).
IPh 'Die Idee der Phanomenologie' (lP).
K 'Die Kehre' TK, (Tr:QT).
KA 'Kant und Aristoteles von C Sentroul' (br).
KBA 'Kants Briefe in Auswahl von F Ohmann' (br).
KBDS 'Die Kategorien - und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus'.
KL 'Kant-Laienbrevier von FGross' (br).
KM Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (KPM).
KPP 'Von der Klassifikation psychischer Phanomene' von F Brentano
(br).
KR Die Kunst und der Raum (AS).
KTS Kants Theseuber das Sein (KTB).
L 'Logos (Heraklit)', VA.
LUP 'Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus'.
M 'Moira (Parmenides)' , VA.
MGS 'Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins', NIl (MHB:EP).
MW 'Mein wegin diePhanomenologie', SD (MWP:TB).
NI & NIl Nietzsche I & II.
NWGT 'Nietzsches Wort "Got is Tot" ',HW (WNGD:QT).
NFL 'Neue Forschungen fur Logik'.
NMK 'Nietzsches Metaphysik', NIl (NM).
PLW Platons Lehrevon der Wahrheit (PDT).
PNT 'Phanomenologie und Theologie' (P&T).
PSF 'Philosophie der symbolischen Formen von E Cassirer' (br)
(CMT).
RMP 'Das Realitatsproblem in der modern en Philosophie' (PR).
S 'DieSprache', US (L:PLT).
SA 'Der Spruch des Anaximander', HW.
SD ZurSachedes Denkens.
SDU Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitiit.
SF ZurSeinsfrage (QB).
SG Der Satz vom Grund (PG).
SGd 'DieSprache im Gedichte', US (LP:OWL).
SH 'Sprache und Heimat'.
SZ Sein und Zeit (B&T).
TK Die Technik und die Kehre.
UM 'Uberwindungder Metaphysik', VA (OM:EP).
UK 'Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes', HW (OWA:BW,PLT).
US Unterwegs zur Sprache (OWL).
VA Vortrage uud Aufsatze.
VHPZ 'Vorbemerkungen zu Husserls Phanomenologie des inneren Zeit-
bewusstseins (FH).
VM 'Zu einem Vers von Morike'.
W 'Das Wort', US (W:OWL).
WA 'Wegezur Aussprache'.
WB 'Wissenschaft und Besinnung', VA (SR:QT).
WBPA 'Wesen und Begriff des 'Physis': Aristoteles' (AP).
WD 'Wozu Dichter?', HW (WPf:PLT).
WdP Was ist das- die Philosophie? (WP).
WgS 'Oer Weg zur Sprache', US (WL:OWL).
WHO Washeisst Denken?, VA (WTK).
WM Wegmarken
WG Vom Wesen des Grundes (ER).
WMK 'Der Willezur Macht als Kunst', NI (WPA).
WMk Was ist Metaphysik? (WM).
WME 'Der Wille zur Machtals Erkenntnis', NI (WPK:NZ).
WM:N 'Was ist Metaphysik?: Nachwort'.
WM:E 'Was ist Metaphysik ?: Einleitung'.
WW Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (ET).
WNZ 'Wer ist Nietzsches Zarathrustra?', VA (WNZ).
WS 'Das WesenderSprache', US (EL:OWL).
ZG 'Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft' (CTSH).
ZS 'Zeit und Sein' (TB).
ZW 'OieZeitdes Weltbildes', HW (A WP:QT).
ZZ 'ZeitLichkeitund Zeitlosigkeit, von N Bubnoff' (br).
The following are the titles of coLLections: Holzwege; Nietzsche, I & II; Unter-
wegs zur Sprache; Vortdige und Aufsatze; Wegmarken; Zur Sache des Oenk-
ens.
APPENDIX 4
HUSSERL'S WORKS IN ENGLISH
Dates are: (i) of composition (in brackets), (ii) of publication in German.
CM Cartesian Meditations (1929), 1931. Nijhoff, 1960.

Cr The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, (1934) 1937, Northwestern University Press,
1970.
EB Encyclopedia Britannica article on 'Phenomenology' (1922-7).
JBSP 2,2; May 1971.
E&J Experience and Judgment (1930), 1939, Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1973.
FTL Formal and Transcendental Logic (1928),1929, Nijhoff 1969.
Id Ideas (Vol I), 1913. Allen & Unwin 1931.
IL Inaugural Lecture: 'Pure Phenomenology'. (1917) in L.E. Embree
(ed.) Lifeworld and Consciousness, Northwestern University
Press, 1972.
IP The Idea of Phenomenology (1907) 1950, Nijhoff, 1964.
LI Logical Investigations (1896-1900) 1900 & 1901. Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1970.
LL London Lectures (1922): Syllabus.JBSP, I, i: Jan. 1970.
P&A 'Philosophy & Anthropology' (1931) in R. Chisholm (ed.) Realism
and the Background of Phenomenology', Glencoe, 1960.
PCEH 'Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity', 1935, in Q.
Lauer (see below), and Cr.
PITC Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, (1904-5),1928,
Nijhoff, 1964.
PL Paris Lectures (1929 in French), Nijhoff, 1970.
PPs Phenomenological Psychology (1925),1962, Nijhoff, 1977.
PRS 'Philosophy as a Rigorous Science, 1910, in: Q. Lauer (ed.)
Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, Harper & Row,
1965.
UT Universal Teleology, (1930) Telos 4, Fall 1969.
INDEX
A B
academic freedom 127 Baden 126
actuality 64 Beck, M. 130 n1
'Address to the Heidelberg Academy Becker, O. 120,218
of Sciences' 3,217 Be(indlichkeit - see State-of-Being
aletheia 46, 201 Being (Sein) 12,13((, 17, 18n8, 32,
alienation (Ent(remdung) 90, 171£, 33,52,55((, 111, 117, 132, 134,
190,202,204,207,210 149((, 189,204,207,213,215
ambiguity 89 Being-alongside 100f
America 125, 206, 214 'Being and Time' 17, 18,37,54((,
analogy 15, 56, 75 117, 187f, 191, 193, 198, 199,
Anders Stern, G. 216 n2 205 n1, 206, 209, 210, 215
Angst - see anxiety - composition of, 54
Anschauung - see intuition - plan of 64, 110f
anthropology 81, 120, 132, 162, Being-in 69, 205 n4
175 Being-in-itself 73
anticipation 96, 99ff, 187 Being-in-the-World
anti-semitism 126H (In-der- Welt-Sein) 68, 150
anxiety (Angst) 46,90, 102, 122, Being-there (Da-sein) 77, 84, 96
139, 143f, 152, 179, 181, 185, Being-towards-Death
191, 199 (Sein-zum-Tode) 96,194,197
a priori truth 24,26, 150, 188,215 Being-with (-others) (Mit-sein) 80((
a priori structures 66, 78, 135 beings (Seiende) - see
Aquinas 7 present-at-hand and
Arendt, H. 64 n2, 163 n3 ready-to-hand
Aristotle 3,4, 38, 46, 51, 52, 55, Bergson, H. 66
56, 61, 64, 75, 88,211£art 142, Berlin 54, 120, 124
202((,205 n10, 209, 213 Binswanger, L. 162,192 n6, 205 n2
artefacts 209ff body 126, 153, 195, 197f
artists 158 Boll, H. 189, 194
assertion 88 Boss, M. 162, 192 n6
Augustine 7, 38, 51 Boyce Gibson, W. 118H, 131 n6,
authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) 66, 79, 131 n7
8~ 83, 90,9~ 99, 10~ 143~ Braig, C. 4, 216 n4
174((, 179((, 185((, 187((, 192 Brentano, F. 3,20,21,23,25,28,
n13, 193, 196, 198 31
average/averageness 66, 80,83 British empiricists 21,30, 34 n9,
awareness 197 164
Index 233
Buber, M. 54, 176 death 95{{, 143{, 152, 179, 193f{
Bultmann, R. 53{, 64 n8, 159, 199 'Death of Ivan Ilych, The' 193ff
213 ' 'Decline of the West, The' 51{
democracy 128
c 'Der Spiegel Interview' 64 nS, 64
'Capital' 172 n15, 127f, 131 n18, 131 n19,
capitalism 172 145 n3, 163 n4, 178 n4
care (Sorge) 70, 80, 90, 91, 99f, Descartes 25, 38, 40, 62, 64, 67,
140, 141, 174, 175{ 75, 118, 149
'Cartesian Meditations' 26 de-servering (Ent{ernung) 77
Caruso, I. 162, 192 n6 destiny (SchickalIGeschick) 106,
categories 67, 69, 74 214f
chatter (Gerede) 89, 98, 199 destruction of tradition 52ff, 59,
child development 183 62,75,136
Christ 159 dialectic 167, 194f
Christianity 53, 67, 83 dialogue 137, 152
circumspection (Umsicht) 72{, 76, Dilthey, W. 5,8{{, 18,21,40,41,
87, 103 67,91,105, 107, 111 n12, 135,
clearing, the 84, 103 213,218
cogito 25, 67, 75 directionality 76
collusion 13 7f, 143 disclosure 84f, 102, 132, 136,201,
'Concept of Time in the Science of 204
History, The' 15 discourse 88, 97f, 102, 108f, 132,
concern (Besorgen) 69f, 72,80,91, 142
103 distance 76
conscience 95, 97ff Dostoevsky 5, 7
consciousness 59, 84, 91, 134f, dualism 26ff, 38, 59
140f, 195 Duns Scotus 15if, 27,36,56, 62, 78
- act of 14, 31, 34 n8 n3, 163 n2
- intentionality of 25{{, 68 Durchsicht 87
- stream of 28,40
- subject of 31
- time 39
E
- thetic 40ff
considerateness (Rucksicht) 87 earth 203
conspicuousness 73 ecstasis - see exstasis
'Course of My Life, The' 217 ego, transcendental 44, 68
craftwork 142, 157f, 165ff, 204, eidos 70
211 eigen (own) 66
'Crisis of European Sciences and Eigentlichkeit - see authenticity
Transcendental Eliot, T.S. 205 n 12
Phenomenology' 129{, 131 n22, embodiment 153; - see also body
178 n7, 218 'Encyclopedia Britannica
curiosity 89, 102 Article' 116ff
Engels, F. 171, 178 n5
Ent{remdung - see alienation
D environment (Umwelt) 51, 71
Dasein 57,84, 66U, 79{{, 95{{, 129 epistemology 154f; - see also
aatability 109f knowledge
234 A Heidegger Crtitique
equipment (Zeug) 71((, 103, 107, Freud, S. 182, 186, 192 n4, 192
142, 164ff n11
essence 87, 141 Fursorge - see solicitude
'Essence of Reasons' 118, 130 n3, future 100ff, 143f, 212
131 n5, 162
eternity 11 0, 111 n 14
everydayness (AlltCiglichkeit) 66, G
67,80,82,83,137((,179,193 Gadamer, H-G. 37,48 n1, 48 n6,
existential analytic 59(, 66( 64 n1, 64 n2, 64 n6, 64 n10, 188,
existentialism 132 192 n12, 218
existentials/ existential Galileo 130
structures 66,68,78,80,81,87, Geisteswissenscha(ten 8((, 15,
90, 101, 109, 134f, 182 75~63, 105,107,153, 163,213
Existenz 14,32, 46ff, 101 Gelven, M. 196
Existenzphilosophie 46 Gerede - see chatter
'Experience and Judgment' 64 n12 German idealism 38,210,214
exploitation 170, 172 Gewor(enheit - see thrownness
expression 16, 88, 198ff God 12, 53f, 67, 75,111 n14, 159,
exstases 101£f 199,207
Goethe 8
Goldmann, L. 18 n7
F Gottingen 21, 25, 35, 39, 118
facticity 69, 101 grace 189
facts 69 'Great Gatsby, The' 183
factuality 85 Greek philosophy/culture 46, 51,
faith 54 55,62,117,128,129,140,204
fallenness 83f, 89, 132, 150f, 174, Grenzsituation - see limit situation
187 Grimme, A. 124, 131 n15
falling 96, 101£ guilt 97, 99
fear 90 Gurwitsch, A. 48 n4
Fechner, G.T. 18 n2
feeling 137((, 175f, 182f, 185,
H
190f, 198; - see also mood
fetishism 204 Halle 21
Feuerbach, L. 202,205 n9, 205 n10 Hartmann, N. 53, 54
Fichte, J.G. 118 Hegel, G.W.F. 4,6,110, 174, 194,
finitude 142(( 198,205 n10, 209, 211, 218
Fink, E. 43 Hegelianism 34 n6
First World War 17, 37 'Hegel's Concept of
for-itself 64 n 12 Experience' 216 n6
founded mode 117, 131 n4, 134((, Heidegger, M.
149f - criticisms of Husserl 46,48,
France 133 56
Frankfurt 120 - education 3((,217
freedom 81,141,174,176,186 - elitism 125
freedom-towards-Death 97 - family 3,37
Frege, G. 2, 34 n6 - later works 132f
Freiburg 3,10,21,35,37,51, 115, - literary style 123f
116, 119, 126, 133 - marriage 37
Index 235
- method 61, 134f (Heidegger) 130 n3
- military service 37, 133 'Ideas' (Husserl) 21,24,25,27,
- politics 124(( 29ff, 36, 38,63, 131 n8
- rectorial address 127 idle talk - see chatter
- relation to Husser! 18, 20, 'Inaugural Lecture' (Husserl) 35
22,27,33, 35ff, 65 n16, 85f, inauthenticity 66, 79((, 90, 96,
115(( 1OlE, 108f, 137((, 143, 152,
- religion 3, 12((, 52, 133, 174ff, 184((, 189f, 193
159, 189, 196 indifference 80f, 85, 174, 175(
- teaching style 119 Ingarden, R. 131 n5
- works - appendix 3 intentionality of
Heidelburg 10, 126 consciousness 25((, 68
heritage 106f; - see also tradition interpretation 63, 87, 95, 152,
hermeneutic circle 57, 99f, 136 201
hermeneutics 5(f, 17, 18, 38, 63, intersubjectivity 45
87, 111 n4, 135f, 163 n6, 174, 'Introduction to
198,217£ Metaphysics' 12, 13, 125,
Herries, K. 214 128, 178 n3, 205 n3, 206,
history 106(, 204, 206(( 209, 214, 216 n7
historicality 61, 95, 105((, 144f, intuition (Anschauung) 23, 63,
174,207ff, 210 87
Hitler 126ff, 133 irrationalism 85, 124, 130
Homer 108
horizon 55, 61 ]
Husserl,E. 10,18,20((,52,54,56,
57, 62, 63, 64, 65 n16, 67, 68, james, W. 28
70, 74, 78 n1, 78 n2, 84, 85, 87, jaspers, K. 46, 51, 52, 54, 99,
88, 94 n15, 105, 111 n5, 111 115, 126, 133, 193
n10, 115,116((,127,131 n4, jews 126ff
131 n5, 131 n9, 131 n22, 132, junger, E. 177
135, 136, 149, 150f, 158, 162,
178 n7, 211, 218 K
- a priori truth 24, 26
Kant, I. 6,9, 10, 11, 18,28,38,
- death 130
62,64,75,78,92, 100,118~
- eidetic science 24, 30, 150
135, 136, 149, 211
- family 37
'Kant and the Problem of
- intentionality of
Metaphysics' 64 n5, 118,
consciousness 25, 68
131 n10, 162,216 n6
- 'London Lectures' 116
'Kategorien- und
- 'Philosophy of
Bedeutungslehre des Duns
Arithmetic' 21, 22, 34 n4,
Scotus, Die' 15, 16,22
218
Kehre (turn/turning) 132
- 'Phenomenological
Psychology' 117 kerygma 53, 159, 199
- theory of ideas 23 Kierkegaard, S. 4, 5, 7, 46, 54,
- works - appendix 4 90, 102, 192 n2
knowledge 17, 46, 52, 59, 70,
I 74, 117,134,149(~ 167, 198
Konstanz 3
'Idea of Phenomenology' KUlpe, O. 14, 15, 17, 18, 19
n12, 25, 27, 36 213f, 216 nl, 216 n12
Kultusministerium 124 Marx, K. 172, 177, 178 n6, 178
nl0, 204
L Marxists 125f
matter 203
Landgrebe, L. 34 n9, 48 n4
meaning 87, 101, 160, 198ff
Laing, R. 186, 192 n3, 192 n5,
Merleau-Ponty, M. 48 n4, 94 n10,
192 n7, 192 n10 94 n11, 197f
language 74, 88ff, 132, 136,
Meister Eckhart 13, 18 n9
138, 142, 184,198((
Messkirch 3, 116, 133
'Language' (Heidegger) 199,
metaphysics 121 ((, 134
205 n5, 205 n6
Mill, J.S. 22
Laske, E. 17, 18 mineness 66, 197
Latin 203, 205 n 13 Minkowski, E. 212,216 n10
Lebensraum 128 Mitwelt - see with-world
Lebenswelt (lived world) 10, 16, moment of vision (Augenblick)
18,41,71((, 135 101((
Leipzig 35 mood 85, 101, 121£, 182, 186,
'Letter on Humanism' 4, 94 n14, 195; - see also feeling
145 n2, 163 nl, 199 Moore, Henry 216 n9
limit-situation (Grenzsituation) 47, 'My Way to Phenomenology' 15,
54, 193f 35, 36, 46, 53, 217
lived-world - see Lebenswelt
'Lehre vom Urteil im
Psychologismus, Die' 15,217 N
Locke, J. 64 n 13 Natorp, P. 51, 178 nll
logic 88, 121, 135, 150, 194, 199 naturalistic attitude 27, 34 n9, 52
'Logical Investigations' (Husserl) 4, nature 71, 72, 107, 170, 172
21,23,30,35,36,38,63,218 Nazism 47, 116, 125, 126((, 133,
logical positivism 94 n9 145 n3, 171, 177,213,215
logical truth 22 negation 72f, 103, 121ff, 166, 194f
logos 62, 88, 199 neokantianism 10, 14, 16, 18, 36,
Lotze, R. 34 n6, 34 n7 38, 40, 52ff
Lovejoy, A.O. 207,216 n3 'Neue Forschungen (ur Logik' 15
Lukacs, G. 218 Nietzsche, F. 5, 12, 84, 13 1 n 13,
Luther, M. 4, 51, 192 n2 131 n14, 210, 216 n5
nihilation 122
M noema 31,68
noesis 31, 68
Macquarrie, J. 13, 19 n10, 64 n8, nothing (Nicht) 121 ((
64 n9, 159 nothingness (Nichtigkeit) 98ff, 111
Macquarrie, J and Robinson, E. 18 n2, 111 n3, 123
n8, 55, 82, 85, 94 n2, 94 n3, 94 now, the 102, 108ff, 111 n14, 144
n13, 94 n14, 111 n2, 111 n11, Novalis, F. 6,218
196 nullity (Nichtigkeit) 111 n2; - see
Man, das - see the One also nothingness
Marburg 4,35,48,51((,115,116,
119
Marcel, G. 133
o
Marcuse, H. 115f, 130 n2, 206, objectification 140((
Index 237
objects 73, 130, HOff, 166 politics 206, 214f: - see also
On~, the (das Man) 82ff, 174 Nazism
ontIc 58 positivists 121£
ontology 33, 55f, 100, 117ff 136 possibility 64,87,96, 143, 187,
149ff ' , 213
'Origin of the Work of Art potentiality 95
The' 199, 201ff, 205 niO, 205 pragmata 71
nIl, 205 n13, 215, 216 nIl Prague 129
?thers 80ff, 141, 179ff, 191, 197 praxis 71, 77, 103f, 111 n 13,
Overcoming Metaphysics' 178 130, 134, 153, 155ff, 164ff,
187f,211
P Praxiteles 145
paradox 108 'Preface to Richardson' 118,
'Paris Lectures' (Husser!) 64 n 14, 217
78 n1 pre-reflexive consciousness 197
Parmenides 92 presence 62, 73, 100, 142
Passmore, J. 164 present 62, 100ff, 144; - see also
past 100, 144, 212 the now
perception 39, 42, 89 present-at-hand
persons 173 ff (Vorhandenheit) 66, 69, 73,
phainomenon 62 95,99, 108, 169, 171, 174
phenomena 135 presocratics 128
'Phenomenological Psychology' primary datum 68
(Husser!) 48 n3 primordial understanding 62,
phenomenological reduction 28, 136, 137, 151, 155, 158
43, 117, 150 'Problem of Reality, The' 12,
phenomenological yearbook 54, 14,15
120 productivity 170, 172
phenomenology 20ff, 62ff, 150 profitability 170, 172
- transcendental 31, 44 privatization 184ff
'Phenomenology of Internal psychoanalysis 94 n12, 182,
Time Consciousness' 189, 191
(Husser!) 21,39,44, 118, psychologism 22ff, 34 n6
211 psychotherapy 46, 185 f
'Philosophische Hefte' 115f, publicness 81, 82ff, 99, 184,
130 n1 207,
'Philosophy and Anthropology' public world 72, 99, 138, 174,
(Husser!) 45, 120, 131 n9 177
'Philosophy and purpose 71, 73, 166ff, 211
Phenomenological
Research' 118 Q
'Philosophy as a Rigorous 'Question Concerning
Science' (Husser!) 24 Technology, The' 163 n1,
physics 76, 203 178 n2
place 77 questioning 56f
Plato 55, 108 Question of Being - see Being
poets 158
poetry 132, 142, 158f, 198f,
200f, 205 n10
R , .153f, 157, 169; - see also physics

SCience and Reflection' 162
ra~ture 101, 187, 197 Scotus - see Duns Scotus
ranonality 129, 135, 182, 199 Second World War 133
.ready-to-hand seeing 136, 138
(Zuhandenheit) 71 ff, 101 Sein (Being/to be) 58 - see also Being
169, 171 ' 'Sein and Zeit' 94 n8 " 97 111 n1 ,
reality 77,91, 117, 135, 184 131 n5; - see also 'Being and
reason 84, 124, 150 Time'
rectorship of Freiburg 126(( self 59,68,81,83,87, 100f, 105,
recurrence 210 107, 136,137((, 142f, 179((,
Rede - see discourse 184, 190f, 197f
reference 72, 73, 74 self-deception 138
referential totality 72f 79 87 sex 195
173 ' , ,
sight (Sieht) 87
reflexive consciousness 197 s~gnificance 74, 11 0, 160
Reichstag 126 signs 74
reification 198, 202 silence 96, 199
repetition 106£ Social Democrats 124 126
resoluteness 98ff, 187 social world 173((, t84, 187
responsibility 174,176 Socrates 40, 149
reticence 98 solicitude (Fursorge) 80, 91
revolution 125 soul 70,80
Richardson, W. 14,19 nIl, 19 space 69
n13, 145 n1, 217 spatiality 76, 105·
Rickert, H. 5, 11, 15, 16, 18, 19 speech (Rede) 88, 200f· - see also
n12, 21, 105,217 discourse '
Ricoeur, P. 133 Spengler, O. 51 ff 124
Rilke, R.M. 5 'Spiegel Interview; Der' 64 n5 64
role-playing 137, 181, 184 n15, 127f, 131 n18, 131 n19,
Romantic movement 6 145 n3, 163 n4, 178 n4
Rueksieht - see considerateness Spiegelberg, H. 130 n3, 131 n5,
Russell, B. 22 131 n8, 218
Russia 125, 206, 214 Spinoza, B. 8
spirit 75,110,125,129, 139f 195
S 210, 213 ' ,
Stjohn 199 state, the political 206
state-of-Being (Be(indliehkeit) 85((
Sartre, J-p 47,94 n4, 94 n6, 94 n7,
101, 151 '
111 n3, 131 n12, 145 n2, 174,
state-of-mind; - see state-of-Being
175, 178n8, 184, 192n13, 197f
stormtroopers 128
Scheler, M. 53,64 n5 67 91 118
120 ' , , , Stumpf, C. 21, 23, 28
Schelling, F. W. 4, 5 subject. ~OO, 106, 130, 140((
schizophrenia 180, 182,212 subJecnvlty 77, 207
Schlegel, F. 6 substance 75, 80, 140ff
Schleiermacher, E. 6((, 218 superficiality 137, 183f
scholastic philosophy 15, 75
T
Schutz, A. 48 n4
science 59, 103, 124, 129, 142, teehne 204
Index 239
technology 124, 138, 177 universality 152, 195, 198f, 211
temporality (Zeitlichkeit) 61, 64, 'Unterwegs zur Sprache' 119
95, 100f, 144f, 151,207, 210
theology 4, 53f, 58, 64 n6, 132 V
theoretical attitude 103, 129,
166ff, 173 Van Gogh 13, 202f, 209
They, the (das Man) - see the One Verstand - see understanding
'Thinker as Poet, The' 205 n8 Vienna 129
thrownness (Geworfenheit) 85, vision, moment of
100, 106, 174 (Augenblick) ·101f, 189, 194,
time 61, 64, 101, 108, 144, 207 196
'Time and Being' 163 n7 Voge, W. 4,216 n4
Tolstoy, L. 193 Yolk 106, 128,204,206,214
tools; - see equipment Volksturm 133
tradition 52ff, 59, 61f, 124, 132,
136, 140f, 213; - see also heritage W
Trakl, G. 5, 209 Wagner, R. 216 n5
tranquillization 96 war; - see First World War and
transcendence 104, 160 Second World War
transcendental ego 44, 64 n12, 78 'Wege zur Aussprache' 128, 131
n1, 117f, 135, 197 n20
transcendental 'What is Metaphysics?' 121f
phenomenology 130 wholeness 95, 100, 134, 138ff,
truth 92, 132, 136, 138, 142, 154, 190, 196
156, 201f, 205 n10, 212f Windelband, W. 10, 18
'Turning, The' 18 n9 with-world (Mitwelt) 80ff
work 72,79, 111 n13, 166ff, 173f,
U 211
uncanny (Unheimlich) 94 n13; - see world 68, 71, 104,203
world hood (Weltlichkeit) 71, 150
also unease
Wundt, W. 20
Umsicht - see circumspection
Umwelt (environment) 51, 71 y
Understanding (Verstand) 17, 46,
58, 61, 86, 101f, 134ff, 154f, Yorck, P.G. 108
161, 169, 195
unease(Unheimlichkeit) 97f; - see Z
also uncanny
Zeug (equipment) 71

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Roger Waterhouse - A Heidegger Critique - A Critical Examination of The Existential Phenomenology of Martin Heidegger-Harvester (1981)

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A HEIDEGGER

HARVESTER PRESS· SUSSEX

Phenomenology of Martin Heidegger

GENERAL EDITOR Roy Edgley, Professor of Philosophy, University of

1. FREEDOM AND LIBERATION Benjamin Gibbs

and in the USA by

© Roger Waterhouse, 1981

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Humanities Press Inc.

Typeset by Inforum Ltd, Portsmouth

All rights reserved

THE EARL Y YEARS

1 The Young Heidegger and Hermeneutics 3

BEING AND TIME

4 Marburg and the Project of Being and Time 51

THE THIRTIES AND AFTER

8 Rector of Freiburg 115

10 Ontology versus Epistemology 149

extrapolate from Heidegger's text: my object is to expound the

1 His two volume work on Nietzsche is really a collection of essays.

THE EARL Y YEARS

THE HERMENEUTIC TRADITION

In a sense, the notion of hermeneutics is as old as learning in the

assumed, or mentioned en passant in a particular exegesis, now

our relationship to, and understanding of, God. Scientific her-

was unwittingly drawing on hermeneutic themes, which had

out of the business ofliving, with which we are already familiar.

real object can be viewed in both ways: either 'nomothetically' as

When Heidegger transferred into philosophy in 1911, this was

adequately, the facts of his intellectual development, and the

I have quoted at length from this passage, because it is arguably

translator of Being and Time, 'replaces God with Being'.l0 It is a

In the meantime Heidegger was in for a considerable dose of

relationship of the soul to God' (KBDS, p239: quoted by Caputo

others, and is intrinsically historical. This system is a totality we

1 A list of Heidegger's works is given in Appendix 3.

10 Macquarrie (1), pSI.

The professor who came to chair the department was in all

Eventually, in the Logical Investigations he rejected it in

THE THEORY OF IDEAS

Now in spite of his later claim that phenomenology is 'presup-

which are in essence shared by everyone. There is a realm of ideas

THE INTENTIONALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

It was from Brentano that Husserl derived the doctrine of the

explicate himself ad infinitum and systematically, by means of

is by no means simple, and so far we have really not addressed the

evidence of the proposition, and I will subscribe to its truth', was

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION

So far then, Husserl had a programme for the investigation of the

... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as

his idea of phenomenological method.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL TURN

Over the next few years, however, the emphasis of Husserl's

we are making it the object or content of a secondary conscious

1 For Husserl's attitudes to religion, see Spiegelberg (l), Voll, pp85-87.

In Heidegger's own words: 'The year 1913 brought an answer'

p78). As a result, says Heidegger: 'My perplexity (about the

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF INTERNAL TIME

Back in 1904-5 at Gottingen Husserl had given a lecture course

phenomena which have just passed, and the anticIpation (or

THE LIVED WORLD

THE TRANSCENDENTAL EGO

For Husserl, the lived-world was only the 'objective correlate' of