Abstract. In this post, I aim (1) to provide a clear statement of the central question of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, as well as (2) a cogent, if brief, sketch of those concepts which constitute the core of his ontological analytic of ex-sistence, among them discursiveness, the clearing, logos, and thrownness. Furthermore, I hope to (3) articulate the way in which Heidegger’s concept of a kinetic, ex-sistential subject that is always engaged with meaning simultaneously responds to and overcomes the rigid dualism of Cartesian metaphysics.
Heidegger’s question, Heidegger’s answer. If one were to ask just what it was that Martin Heidegger was after in Being and Time, to reply merely that Heidegger’s aim was to “seek out an understanding of the essence of being,” or to say that his intention was to “carry out an investigation of being itself,” would be to state the goal of his project in such inadequate and ambiguous terms as to inevitably fail to satisfy even the most casual inquirer. A more satisfactory formulation of the question which lies at the heart of the Heideggerian project—one which hints at an understanding of the “being of things” as the intelligibility of things—may be stated as follows: Heidegger’s aim in Being and Time was to place meaningfulness itself under investigation in pursuit of that which makes meaningfulness possible at all.
Heidegger’s purpose. Our inquisitive interlocutor may very naturally want next to know the reason why Heidegger chose to dedicate himself to this particular philosophical question instead of any of the other questions he might have pursued. Heidegger believed that the philosophical tradition had for millennia crucially overlooked the question of being, and in doing so had remained blind to the fundamental “Factum” that makes the entire project of philosophical inquiry (or, for that matter, inquiry of any kind) possible in the first place. To Heidegger, the philosophical enterprise’s exaltation of theoretical understanding had since antiquity led it to neglect—or rather, to take for granted without truly understanding—the fact that there is something fundamental which underlies theoretical understanding, something which both enables and requires human beings to make meaningful sense of things in the world.
Heidegger’s real purpose. Having thusly stated the motivation for Heidegger’s undertaking, I hasten to add that his project was not embarked upon solely for the sake of the philosophical tradition as such. The real, final purpose which propelled the Heidegerrian enterprise was that of inspiring authentic self-transformation in those who might understand and embrace his conception of human being (hereafter also written as “ex-sistence,” following Thomas Sheehan). By uncovering our previously overlooked nature as beings whose ex-sistence consists of having to always be choosing and living ahead into possibilities—the ultimate and always-present possibility being the possibility of death—Heidegger aimed to awaken his reader to the radical finitude that lay at the core of ex-sistence and compel her to take her own mortality as the basis from which to live an authentic life. This distinct mode of ex-sisting in full awareness of and resonance with the inescapable fact of one’s mortality is what Heidegger called “authenticity.”
The Cartesian viewpoint. A useful starting point from which to approach Heidegger’s analysis of ex-sistence is his rejection of the rigidly dualistic subject/object divide as proposed by René Descartes. Heidegger’s explication of ex-sistence is situated in critical opposition to the classical Cartesian dichotomy between the subject as knower and object as the known. With “cogito sum,” Descartes took as the starting point for his metaphysics an initially-given, thinking subject that is radically divorced from the external world. The Cartesian subject, immediately accessible to itself, is the only thing about whose existence it can be certain. From there, the subject tries to know objects “out there” in the external world by “taking a look” at them in their objective presence, perhaps rendering them intelligible by "reading off" their essences via a sort of epistemological X-ray vision.
The Cartesian oversight. According to Heidegger, Descartes’ taking the pronoun “I” of the subject as given and immediate led him to overlook the significance of the verb “am” in the famous Cartesian formulation “I think, therefore I am.” Heidegger claimed that a proper investigation of the “am” of “I am” is necessary to uncover the fundamental structure of ex-sistence, and that this structure must already be operative before the “think” of “I think” is even possible. The statement “I am” presupposes an intuitive understanding of what it means for a person—oneself—to exist, but Descartes failed to inquire into what it is that accounts for this understanding. Descartes’ dualism did involve a “turn to the subject,” but it crucially neglected to ask about the being of that subject. Heidegger’s goal is thus to correct and complete the “turn to the subject” inadequately carried out by Descartes. Heidegger seeks to encounter and uncover those ontological foundations that were overlooked by Descartes, and his investigation starts with our everyday ex-sistence—our “normal” mode of ex-sisting—in which we are always (whether we are aware of it or not) relating to our own ex-sistence.
There is no “inside.” Heidegger’s surpassing of the Cartesian subject/object divide involves a rejection of the notion that there is an “inner” subject which “bumps into” objects that are objectively present in the external world. According to the problematic Cartesian view, objects in the world are nakedly and unintelligibly “just there” until the subject clothes them in meaningfulness. To Heidegger, our primary epistemic contact with things is with things as already meaningful, as things which are from the get-go laden with meaning. We are not bombarded by “pure” sights or sounds or by “raw data” which first stream in through our sense organs and then get resolved into meaningfulness by our “inner” subject. We do not first encounter objectively present things, but rather we encounter things as meaningful. Indeed, the first thing which we encounter in the world is not “things” or “objects” but meaningfulness. Heidegger will show that our encountering things as immediately and meaningfully present, as always pre-loaded and freighted with meaning, is a necessary fact which follows from the structure of ex-sistence. We encounter things as immediately meaningful even when we are in a state of bewildered incomprehension. Even in this extreme case, things still appear to us as meaningful because we still encounter them as baffling in a particular way, as things that need to be made sense of for a particular purpose. In no case do we encounter things as nakedly “out there,” idly waiting for us to assign meanings to them. In this sense, the being of things is not their ontological realness but rather their meaningful presence to us, their intelligibility. We are always standing in relation to things in terms of their significance to us. I am not an “internal” subject who comes to understand the being of things by “just looking” at them, but rather am an embodied ex-sistence which dwells (i.e. is always actively making sense of things) in the world. The world, understood in the proper Heideggerian sense, is not some container for holding objectively present things, but is rather the meaningful context within which we always encounter things—it is the realm of potential meanings that those things can have for us, and we are, as ex-sistence, inescapably embedded in it.
Ex-sistence engages with meaning discursively. Ex-sistence engages with the world of intelligibility discursively—that is, via a kinetic movement of “ahead-and-return.” The “thrownness” or “thrown-aheadness” of ex-sistence refers to the fact that we, as ex-sistence, are always stretched-ahead of ourselves as possibility among possibilities. In the practical realm, this means that I always ex-sist in worlds of meaning which are structured according to my purposes (e.g. needing to make a cup of coffee or pitch a tent). Meaningful engagement with this world entails a kind of “running back and forth” between things and their possible meanings, or between tools and the tasks for which they might be suitable. In my ahead-and-return engagement with meaning, I might be asking questions such as “Is this kettle suitable for boiling this water?” or “Is this rock suitable for hammering these tent pegs?” Thus, the fact that we are always living ahead in possibilities implies that we are always in touch with a range of needs and purposes. Our needs and purposes are meaning-giving in the sense that when we “return” discursively to things, we encounter them as suitable-for or not-suitable-for the satisfaction of those needs and purposes.
Intelligibility is a structural element of ex-sistence, not a property of objects. The discursive “ahead-and-return” engagement with meaning just described which renders intelligibility possible is what Heidegger called logos-1. Below, I will elaborate upon this discursive process of meaning-making which lies at the heart of ex-sistence.
The hierarchy of logos-1, logos-2, and logos-3. Heidegger distinguishes between three different forms of meaningfulness, logos-1, logos-2, and logos-3, in order to clarify the meaning of logos (which had been muddied by numerous philosophical interpretations of the word) as well as to highlight the ontological priority of logos-1.
Logos-3: meaningfulness as making assertions about things. Assertions are statements about things that can be true or false. At first blush, assertion-making may seem to be constitutive of meaning-making. For example, one might venture that I understand the apple juice in my hand as something that can quench my thirst just by making the assertion, “I can drink this apple juice,” or that I understand a kettle as suitable for boiling water when I say, “This kettle will work for boiling water.” The term logos-3 refers to this assertion-making form of meaning-making. When our assertions are “correct,” the statements we make agree with the state of affairs that the assertion refers to. However, to take assertions as the locus of meaning-making would be a colossal oversight, as it would overlook everything that makes things intelligible to me even before I can make judgments about them. Therefore, logos-3 depends on logos-2, which is the letting of things be seen-as-something, as not covered-up.
Logos-2: meaningfulness as the meaning-giving act of taking-something-as. Logos-2 is the opened-up-ness of things as knowable and meaningful. In order to make any assertions about a glass of apple juice or a kettle, I must first allow the apple juice or the kettle to be intelligible or “uncovered,” available to me as something that I can encounter and thereby make sense of. However, to halt our inquiry into what allows us to make sense of things with logos-2 would still be premature, as we would be overlooking the common background against which things manifest as meaningful. We still would not understand what accounts for the intelligibility of things as meaningful. Put another way, underlying logos-2 is that always-operative structure which accounts for the intelligibility of things in the first place: logos-1.
Logos-1: the “clearing” as the space which makes all meaning-making possible. We now return to logos-1, understanding it as the source of and pre-condition for all human meaning-making. Logos-1 can be described metaphorically as the space or “clearing” which we ourselves are that makes possible ex-sistence’s engagement with meaning.
The labor of the concept. Only God can have immediate, noumenal knowledge of things-in-themselves. God does not need to “make sense” of anything because God already knows everything. As human ex-sistence, our engagement with meaning is interpretive—it is hermeneutic. The disjunction that we experience between things and their meanings requires us to always be doing the interpretive work of relating things to our possibilities and concerns. This discursive work of interpretation is what Hegel called the “labor of the concept.” Heidegger points out that the act of bringing forth the meaning of something (i.e. of understanding something in terms of one of its possible uses or meanings) is a kind of creation, a kind of making which requires a held-open space in which to take place.
I am my openness. The metaphorical use of the term “open” in describing the clearing as “held open” points to the possibility and necessity of intelligibility that is ex-sistence. The clearing is the “realm of disclosedness” in which the understandability of things occurs in the first place. The clearing is that always-already opened-up “space” that allows us to make sense of things, and as such is the ex-sistential precondition for all other forms of meaning-making (logos-2 and logos-3). This “space” is a sign of our finitude, our still-to-be-accomplished-ness in contrast to a hypothetical perfect self-coincidence. As ex-sistence, we are that held-open space, that gap in which the discursive relations between things and their meanings or tools and their tasks are formed and re-formed. Ex-sistence as constant and necessary interpretive sense-making just is the holding-open of the clearing in which that discursive meaning-making labor happens. Our “essence” as human beings is that we are constitutionally ahead of ourselves, we are possibility amidst possibilities. To be my own openness is to be the discursive understanding of the being of things (either practical or theoretical) and of my own ex-sistence. Ultimately, Heidegger describes authentic human ex-sistence as the on-going decision to become myself-as-radically-finite-becoming.
We are structured as logos. Our openness refers to the fact that we are structurally an open region of possible meaningfulness. We are structured as logos, and as such we are the ontic condition of ontology—the ontic condition that lets things be discovered as meaningful. In other words, we are a priori a discursive understanding of the being of things. Put yet another way, we are onto-logical beings—those beings who understand the being of things. Here, onto- means “of or relating to things”, and -logical means “of or referring to interpreting the meaning of…” . Hence, to be onto-logical means "to be ever making sense of things." This is the answer to the question Heidegger poses in Being and Time of what accounts for our ability to make sense of things: we are the structural possibility of making sense of things and of ourselves.
I am thrown into a world of meaningfulness. It is not the case that I first exist, and then only later find myself “in” a world of meaning. My ability to engage with meaning is made possible by the fact that I am always ex-sisting as a world of meaning. Ex-sistence as being-in-the-world does not just “sit there,” sometimes establishing relationships to things and sometimes not. I am a “hermenute,” a being that is always engaging with meaning and relating to its own ex-sistence. Therefore, meaning-making is what I am, not some add-on feature to a “plain-old existence.” I am a priori thrust into ex-sisting, “delivered over” to my ex-sistence and required to ex-sist. To cease to be thrown-open ex-sistence is to cease to have any further possibility of meaning-making—in other words, to be dead. This is what is meant by my “thrown-ness.” I am thrown into the realm of possible needs and purposes, and I have no choice but to always be engaged with the world of meaning.
Heidegger’s fundamental ontology underlies all science and ontology. The concepts sketched above comprise part of Heidegger’s ontological analysis of ex-sistence which he called “fundamental ontology.” Fundamental ontology describes the primordial ex-sistential foundation which gives rise to all science and ontology. Without fundamental ontology, science and ontology fails to grasp the meaning of being as the pre-theoretical condition that makes meaningfulness possible. Heidegger’s dramatic claim is that until his explication of fundamental ontology, all science and ontology had presupposed the intelligibility of being while simultaneously overlooking and failing to understand it, and thus had been “naive and blind.”
Conclusion. I hope to have concisely stated the fundamental question that Martin Heidegger asks in Being and Time, and to have provided a cogent sketch of some of those concepts which are central to his answer to that question. I have outlined the motivations behind the Heideggerian enterprise, and in my explication of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology hope to have illuminated its significance to the philosophical tradition as a challenge to the rigid subject/object dualism of Cartesian metaphysics.