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Understanding Heidegger’s Notion of Dasein - Part 1

By Marco Antônio Bomfoco

“There is music in the midst of desolation/ And a glory that shines upon our tears.”
Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen (1914).

Contemporary Western philosophy is divided in two main branches: continental philosophy and
analytical philosophy. The former developed many movements or fields like phenomenology,
hermeneutics, Marxism, existentialism, structuralism, postmodernism, etc. The latter studies mainly
language, truth and logic. To the followers of analytic philosophy, philosophy ought to be restricted
to the analysis of language, especially to the study of meaning. On the other hand, the most
persistent feature of continental philosophy is the commitment to the questioning of foundations.
Despite the vast range of themes, we can say that subject and truth are the two big themes which
have dominated the contemporary philosophical discussion.

A survey of the history of continental philosophy reveals the name of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
as one of the most innovative thinkers of the 20th century. Like Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber,
Wittgenstein and Adorno, Heidegger was a critic of modern culture. Writing in the aftermath of the
First World War (1914-1918), he tried to understand the intimate relationship between ourselves
and world through the study of the nature of being. Heidegger believed that the entire philosophical
tradition was misdirected. As Heidegger sees it, Western philosophy from Plato to modern times
has been preoccupied chiefly with entities or things of the world, without seeing that the more
primordial fact is the very existence of the world. In other words, the Western philosophical tradition
has forgotten the "question of being", the Seinsfrage. George Steiner observes that the leitmotiv of
Heidegger’s task was the question formulated by Leibniz: why is there something rather than
nothing? In that sense, Sokolowski notes that Heidegger formulates his task on classical terms and
shows profound knowledge of the history of philosophy. In fact, Heidegger was a philosopher which
always had an eye on the history of philosophy. His work represents a constant dialogue with
historical sources. Besides, it was Heidegger’s deep conviction that Germans inherited the
philosophical mission from the Greeks. Our aim in this essay is to sketch out a broad picture of
Heidegger's thought in order to deal with the account of Dasein.

For Heidegger, the central mystery is not the knowledge, but the Being, the existence. So that, he
emphasizes the importance of understanding what is "to be" in the world and not "to know" it.
Heidegger was mainly interested in the question that has escaped the consideration of philosophers
throughout history, to know: what is Being? Or in other words, what does Being mean? Heidegger
wanted to define our place in the world, since Being is the most fundamental aspect of life. In truth,
the question of being was formulated by Aristotle and had been a preoccupation to the medieval
Scholastics. So, what is the novelty of Heidegger’s approach? Heidegger notes explicitly that his
way of questioning being is more original than the metaphysic way. Surely Heidegger rejuvenated
the study of the nature of Being by means of the phenomenological reflection. Now recall that
Heidegger worked with Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) at Freeburg University. Husserl is the founder
of twentieth-century phenomenological philosophy. Saying in a few words, phenomenology is the
study of the structures of experience, or consciousness. Earlier in his career, Heidegger was
attracted by Husserl’s phenomenological call: “back to things themselves”. That is, the attempt to
describe things and experiences without metaphysical and theoretical speculations.
Phenomenology is entirely dominated, or at least its first phase, by the modern philosophy from
Descartes to Kant. In Husserl's perspective mind or consciousness are taken as a self-evident
starting point for any account of reality and that is a common tenet in Kant and German Idealism. In
fact, Husserl’s phenomenology is grounded on the Cartesian method of phenomenological
reduction also referred on the literature as the Cartesian way (chemin cartésien). Either way, we will
see that Husserl's phenomenology is not a kind of neo-Cartesianism. For now, it suffices to say that
Heidegger created an original method, the ontological phenomenology, working in opposition to the
main ideas of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. Christopher Macann observes that
Heidegger's break with the phenomenological tradition represents a "quest for concrecity". In the
same way, Ernst Tugendhat observes that the question for the meaning of Being represents a
radicalization of the phenomenological thematic, which was possible only through a methodical
breakage.

By the time Heidegger appears on the intellectual scene in the 1920s, German culture was
completely disoriented. In effect, the post-First World War era in which Heidegger wrote reveals a
period of deep reflection about the end of German cultural and imperial hegemony in Europe. As a
consequence of that defeat, there was the creation of the Republic of Weimar (1918-1933), which
was the first truly democratic state in the history of Germany. In philosophy, following the tradition of
elaborating big systems initiated by Hegel, thinkers like Ernst Bloch and Oswald Spengler wrote
between 1918 and 1927 extensively about utopia and decadence. The horrors of the war were
reflected in the cultural despair of this period. Artists were trying to create an ideal world. They were
angry with the destruction inflicted on Europe in the name of patriotism. Surely the destiny of man
became a current issue. The necessity of a renovation of man was in the air.

According to Karen Leeder, after those disastrous events German writers like Rilke, George, and
von Hofmannsthal rejected the spiritual impoverishment of modern living and sought redemption in
a transcendent realm. This is not all. At the outbreak of war, the movement known internationally as
Dada or Dadaism embraced a quest for a human language completely new, which could express
the desolation and frustration found in that epoch. German Expressionism also aimed at creating
language and world anew by the creation of new forms. Significantly, the German language was
fully open to such renewal. This is because after the war German language sought a breakage with
its past. Judging from this viewpoint, Heidegger’s proposal of reopening up the question of being
and his new philosophical vocabulary may be viewed as a response to that situation. George
Steiner tells us that the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal questioned the adequacy of the old words; he
was skeptical about the possibility of communication and believed that words had no more
meaning. Surely Wittgenstein and Heidegger heard attentively von Hofmannsthal's question. This is
one reason why Heidegger wrote in a sort of German-Greek idiolect. Another reason is his desire of
starting genuinely at the beginning with a vocabulary uninfected by earlier theorizing.
With Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Heidegger is one of the most important critics of the classical
period of German philosophy known as German Idealism. It is true that Heidegger was influenced
by both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Basically, Heidegger's philosophy is a discourse built on two
elements: a criticism of the traditional notion of subject and a reconstruction of language to permit
the understanding of Being. Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time (1927) is a masterwork of
artistic and technical skill, although the project as designed in two parts was not completed. It was a
reaction against empiricist reductionism and transcendentalism which still dominated the
philosophical research. This work represents Heidegger's effort to bring a new understanding of
ourselves and the world rooted in the phenomena of time to the core of the philosophical
discussion. Heidegger tried to articulate by means of phenomenology his own field of ontological
investigation. In short, Heidegger worked against two tendencies of the Western thought: the
traditional metaphysics of Plato and Descartes and the ninetieth century positivism, including its
later version known as the school of logical positivism. (See Part 2)

Marco Antônio Bomfoco 2009

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