Being and Time

A Brief Summary

The Martin Heidegger

Being and Time (1927)
Heideggers work offers a thorough critique of this ego-subjectivity.

The main metaphysical question in philosophy has been the question of

being. What makes it possible for this (kind of) thing to be just the
determinate and self-identical (kind of) thing it so definitely is, and that I
can recognize it as being? What is the source or origin of a things
determinate identity, of its self-identical Being, as precisely the thing it
is?

He noted that Descartes had divided being into three kinds of

substances:
1.Entities in need of no other entity.
2.Res cogitans
3.Res extensa
But this conception has some problems . . .

First, this is an odd account of being because it points to an infinite

difference. It imagines that the being one finds in all three of these
is the same . . . But how can that be?
Second, when Descartes speaks of extensa he points only to (in
Heideggers words) whatever substantial property belongs most preeminently to the particular substance.
Third, the kind of being which belongs to entities within-the-world is
something which they themselves might have been permitted to
present; but Descartes does not let them do so. Instead, he prescribes
for the world its real being, as it were, on the basis of an idea of
being whose source has not been unveiled and which has not been
demonstrated in its own rightan idea in which being is equated with
constant presence-at-hand. (B&T, 129)

Descartes has narrowed down the question of the world to that

of Things of Nature as those entities within-the-world which are
proximally accessible. He has confirmed the opinion that to know
an entity in what is supposedly the most rigorous ontical manner
is our only possible access to the primary being of the entity
which such knowledge reveals. (B&T, 133)
In this way of thinking, the res cogitans is not the world but the
world is composed of all the res extensa.

Heidegger thought that the best way to get at the being question was to
interrogate ourselves. We are that being Dasein (Being-there).
For Heidegger Dasein is being that asks itself what being is.
Dasein is therefore a self-interpreting being; existence is self-interpretation.
Dasein is, first and foremost, the being that says I.
It has a sense of mineness.

In Being and Time Heidegger distinguished between three modes of

being (with the understanding that the being of entities is not itself an
entityp. 26):
Dasein
Presence-at-hand
Readiness-at-hand
See:
p. 32
pp. 67-71
pp. 76-77 (especially 77)

Average everydayness is the normal mode of existence for Dasein. Living

in this way its like my life is living me, not the other way around. But in
certain moments I may be forced to reflect on why I am living in this way;
if I resort to some kind of argument that it is somehow necessary, I am
living as inauthentic Dasein because Im sloughing responsibility off on
some kind of higher power or principle. Such consolation is the defining
mark of inauthenticity.
But most of Daseins existences is neither authentic or inauthentic, it is
lived in average everydayness.

Heidegger thinks most conceptions of the subject go wrong by converting

the subject into an object. He believes that the alternative is to see it as
Being-in-the-World.
This environment is one in which Dasein is filled with things, not objects.
(Pragmata, not res). A thing has meaning or significance in two sorts of
assignments, or references:
first, it is what it is in terms of the projects(s) within which it
appears
second, it is what is is in relation to other things also involved
in
such projects.
So things are Zeug, or gear, for the accomplishments of such projects. As
Zeug it has a particular kind of being: readiness-to-hand. In Heideggers
account, then, the being of a thing is given to it (as that particular kind of
thing) by the holistic context of back-and-forth references created both by
some project of Dasein and by the other things likewise involved in that
project. . . Things always already are what they are as a result of their
place within a referential totality of other things given alongside them.

Dasein as the They-self.

Dasein would be this maker of meaning only if Dasein were itself the pure
individualthe fully self-present, unitary entitythat could serve as the
significance-granting subject, and it is not. We dont normally think of Dasein this
way because it seems to us that I stands alone, even if nothing else exists, and
because Daseins individuality seems to offer a unique kind of perspective. But this is
a flawed perspective. Dasein is always in relationship to other things. It is always in a
world inhabited already by other beings. Normally I thoughtlessly make use of a
whole tableau of public understandings to get through life forgetting that those things
are there for anyone to do or use. The gear is for others, too. My language, words, and
projects are not for me alone. Dasein is they-self.

The call of conscience is what happens when Dasein is shocked into the
value of existence, the publicness of they. It understands its life is a life into
which it has been thrown by various contingencies. This produces a kind of
uncanniness, a feeling of not being at home, a groundlessness.

When this happens the inauthentic response is to make claims to some sort of
metaphysical warrant for identifying oneself with some particular set of ones
constitutive social practices. It conceals ones own contingency.
Authenticity would require acknowledging their Being as practices; that is as
contingent ways of Daseins being that are always ranged alongside an indefinite
number of other actual and possible ways of Dasein to Be. But most practices are
self-concealing.