Martin Heidegger: Being and Time

In Being and Time, Heidegger is mainly focusing on what is Being, and that we cannot understand being unless we understand it in the concept of time. Which isn’t necessarily a line that we move through, however is broken up into past, present and future. In our everyday lives, we are used to our surroundings and we no longer acknowledge the being of things. Although when something is missing or wrong, then we notice it. An example would be if the floor were to disappear all of a sudden, we would all take notice and start to think of the ways the floor used to help us.

Angst is Heidegger’s favorite feeling. This feeling can be achieved through thinking about one’s death, and that reality that it can happen to everyone, even you. This makes you think and start to wonder about what you should be doing in this one life that you have, Angst can make you question your life choices, making you as true to yourself as you could ever be. Without Angst, according to Heidegger we are constantly caught up in the ‘they’ and in our ‘everydayness’. To further explain, ‘they’ are those who have set standards for everybody, ‘they’ can be mainly understood as society. There are a lot of actions and things we do for no particular reason, however, there is an expectation of us to do them because ‘they’ have made it seem that way, such as to shake hands with others. ‘They’ produces an overall judgement and decision which sets a level, which makes the individual ‘level down’ in order to fit into the averageness of ‘they’.

In the chapter of the World Hood of the World, Heidegger explains how in order to understand the worldhood of the world, we must understand the environment around us, since the environment is the world’s ‘everydayness’. World can be experienced as a phenomenon by exhibiting the Being of entities in the world which are ‘present at hand’. To further explain, ‘present at hand’ means to view something from its appearance at to assume it’s being, and ‘ready at hand’ is more of a practical relation where you experience the being of something through using it for its purpose. According to Heidegger, if one cannot see Being-in-the-world as a state of Dasein then the phenomenon of the worldhood cannot be understood.

World can be split up into several phenomena:

1. as an ontical concept, which is to understand the totality of the entities that are present at hand.
2. as an ontological term, a world of a certain being which possesses characters and entities specific to the being, for example a world of a carpenter or mathematician.
3. In an ontical sense, where Dasein could possibly live, whether it is a public world that we all share, or in our own private domestic environment.

Heidegger discusses everydayness, which is the typical day to day life of the average human being, who is used to things being a certain way so no longer thinks about their surroundings and their day to day life. Everydayness according to Heidegger is the closest within the horizon of Dasein. In our everydayness there are ‘dealings’ which we encounter, and the way we assess and analyze these dealings can provide a certain knowledge which possess the qualities of its own being. We also encounter equipment in our everydayness and the readiness at hand that they can provide can be called ‘equip mentality’. For example, the way we reside in a space or a room is providing us with an equip mentality. According to Heidegger, the more we use an equipment and the less we look at it, the more primordial our relationship becomes, this Being that the equipment possesses is called ‘readiness-to-hand’. If we are simply viewing an object from the outside and not interacting with it, we will never understand their ‘ready to hand’ quality, because there is more to everything than what we see.

To begin to understand the phenomenon of the world, there needs to be an initial understanding of the Being of the entities of the world. This is due to the fact that the world itself is not an entity within the world, however, a world is a place where entities are encountered and have the ability to show themselves. When something is missing it becomes more authentic based of the un-readiness-to-hand that we experience when we are missing it. If something is not missing and we simply do not need it and it stands in our way this item also because un-ready-to-hand.

Whenever we encounter something in the world that is ready-to-hand, it’s being has been ‘freed’, which is also known as involvement. Therefore, when an entity is assigned to something it is therefore discovered. Any entity that Dasein may not possess can be called ‘discovered-ness’. For example, when using a hammer to nail a frame on the wall, this hammer now has a discovered-ness. Dasein understands itself before it is even assigned to any entity even before it is encountered, in other words, Dasein knows its involvements in the world before those involvements ever take place. This can be known as the phenomenon of the world or the ‘worldhood of the world’. The world consists of a structure that is in made up from, Dasein’s presence in that structure is called ‘Significance’. When Dasein knows it significance it this world through involvements, the kind of being that those involvements possess become known. According to Heidegger; Dasein has already submitted itself in a world that it encounters, and this submission belong to Being.

There are several foundations to understand the Ontological Definition of the world. The first is to understand that the Being of substance is characterize by not relying on anything and that all entities other than God need to be produced and sustained. The ontological ground of the world consists of the idea of substance and that comes across as a perception of what is seen from its substantiality and becomes unclear to understand. According to Kant, Being is not a real predicate because Being is not as accessible as an entity. On the other hand, Descartes states that Being can be understood through the use of mathematical knowledge, that whatever can be accessed in an entity through mathematics can therefore be accessed through Being. Descartes also states that entities never show themselves in their real Being. He also argues that our senses cannot provide us with information to cognize an entity and its Being and can only provide us with an external sense of this entity. However, Heidegger disagrees with Descartes on the argument that Descartes did not take into consideration the ‘phenomenon of the world’ or the ‘within-the-world-ness-, therefore, how can he understand how to identify the world and the entities within the world along with their Beings.

There are certain qualities that Dasein possesses and one of those is spatiality. There are different types of spatial qualities that Dasein can use and in the chapter of the World Hood of the World, Heidegger discusses three. The first one is the spatiality of the ready to hand in the world. Earlier we mentioned dealings which are things which we encounter in the everydayness of our lives. Those dealings have a ‘closeness’ which contains a balance in how often it is used and manipulated. This suggests that our dealings have a certain distance from us in terms of space. ‘Region’ defines a place where the dealings occur, along with whatever equipment was needed this to take place and Being in the world takes account of these factors beforehand which also has its own place. An example of this would be the sun, the sun has its place during sunrise, midday, sunset etc. and we are all aware of when it will occur because it has made it Being known before and it has a balance in its region and dealing. These places start to have indicators which display the regions that take place in them for example, a house has a sunny side and a dark side which divides it into rooms and affects the orientation. The environment does not organize and arrange itself in a space beforehand, however the context gets articulated and allocated in the space.