Heidegger: Being and Time

Sam Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential and enigmatic of 20th century philosophers. And this is in part because of the fact that he writes in a particularly obscure style and is a philosopher that engages in many verbal tricks and maneuvers which are unique to Heidegger and to his project, and which somehow, to some extent, determine the outcome and form that is philosophical project takes. And it's worth encountering and thinking about Heidegger because he was the source of so many movements in 20th century intellectual life. Existentialism, in some respects is a sort of godchild of Heidegger. Heidegger perhaps borrows some of the main ideas from Kierkegaard, but he's the one who reformulates many of these concerns in a 20th century idiom which turns out to inform things like Sartre or Camus or Merleau Ponty and a whole variety of French and German thinkers, particular, who will be relatively inaccessible unless you look at Heidegger first. Now, Heidegger himself has a very interesting background, which tells us a great deal about the sort of intellectual activity that he undertakes. In the first case, he starts out in his intellectual career as a Jesuit seminarian, which tells you a great deal about the cast of his mind, which tells you a great deal about his early intellectual habits. And much of this will have influence later on. We will see it come out in a sort of transformation. I may be the only person that believes this, but I may not be that. Growing up as a Jesuit seminarian definitely has telling effects later on in life, if you've ever met any, I believe you will find this to be true. Well, Martin Heidegger is that in spades. And when he makes a philosophical move, it is absolute and it is an attempt to go as far as a particular line of thought can take it, perhaps characteristic of that whole tradition, in addition to starting out as a seminarian, which is interesting in its own way, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Duns Scotus. Now, any of you at home who have read some scholastic philosophy, who know who Duns Scotus is, know how difficult and recondite and intimidating forbidding a doctoral dissertation like that is, and it indicates not only something of the cast of his mind, but also the intellectual ambition of someone who feels like he can cut the Gordian knot, I myself would never consider even reading, much less writing a dissertation on Duns Scotus. So if someone is going to undertake a project like that, this is a person for whom this very little is intellectually intimidating. Now, his first and perhaps Greatest work, or the work that got him the most notice was published in 1927. It's called Sein und Zeit, which means being in time. And he was a student of Husserl's, and it was published in Husserl's Phenomenological Yearbook and it was dedicated to Edmund Husserl. So there's a definite student, pupil, teacher relationship and a sort of conceptual relationship between the phenomenology of Husserl and the phenomenological existentialism that Heidegger develops. Now, Heidegger himself claims not to be an existentialist, but he is in a historical rather than a conceptual sense, rather than in a philosophical sense. It's clear that he does influence people like Sartre or Camus. And despite his protestations, his influence has been greatest in the philosophy of existence, as opposed to his unique and somewhat idiomatic philosophy. Philosophical project of developing an ontology. Now, ontology goes back to the Greek term. Maybe you've seen some of the lectures on Plato and you know that ontology, the science of being, or the logos of being, statements about being were one of the early philosophical attempts, one of the kind of foundational philosophical enterprises of the Greek tradition. And Heidegger wants to revive that enterprise, which is a particularly intimidating and, I don't know, impressive intellectual ambition, regardless of whether he achieves it or not. To go back to the science of being, to go back to being itself with a capital B, well, I don't know if that's a persuasive or even a possible thing in the 20th century. The fact that Heidegger thinks that he can do that, that he wants to take that project seriously, is a tribute to his great intellectual ambition, regardless of how it ends up turning out. So he thinks of himself primarily as an ontologist. Now, this leads us to all kinds of difficulties. First of all, talking about being is like trying to bite your teeth. In other words, what can you say about being? How can we come to know being? What sort of procedure do you engage in to find out about being? Well, this maybe discloses his connection to Husserl. You're not going to find out about being by investigating tables individually and chairs individually and Christmas trees individually, or even inspecting the outside world for its regular law like behavior. The way you're going to find it about being is some process of introspection. This is one of the things that holds the continental tradition together. They tend to be more concerned with that which is inside than they are about that which is outside. There is a decidedly anti scientistic tendency to this. And I will come back to that problem. But what Heidegger wants to do is find out about being. And he's very familiar with Greek philosophy. As a matter of fact, he thinks that pretty much it's all been downhill since Aristotle, right? That Christianity, the Romans, the Enlightenment didn't make much of a contribution to the history of thought. After Aristotle, it's all downhill. And the real high point was even before Plato was in the Presocratics. And what he wants to do is to force us back to the original sophisticated naivete of pre Socratic thought, which is a very funny way of thinking about it. But he does think that we have actually decreased our understanding of ourselves and the world around us by bracketing or eliminating this problem of ontology, the problem of being, and instead invest beings, particular elements in the world. So he wants to move away from that practical, concrete, tangible sort of inquiry into something a great deal more abstract and also more nebulous. Now, another thing to think about when we deal with Heidegger and his ontological hopes is what Plato said about being. And it's an interesting thought. Plato says in the Myth of the Cave, when he talks about the divided line, that being is not like the other beings in the world. When we get up into the realm of the forms, being is like light that discloses the things in the world to us, but it is not one of those things that gets disclosed. So being allows us to know about the being, the small B being of tables and chairs and podiums and carpets and things like that. And we all have a kind of intuitive, everyday knowledge of what it means to say that the grass is green or the podium is made of wood or the cup is blue, all those uses of the word is. We kind of feel like we have an idea of what's going on there. But there's a problem. Even though we know these local and particular uses of the word is, we don't know what being is. On the whole, we don't know what being, capital B is, what it is that holds all these little beings together, the small B beings. And that's because being itself is not like any of the beings that being discloses. Are you following this so far? In other words, light is not like the objects that we see in the room. It's a unique kind of a thing. And here I just mean it metaphorically because I don't know how to literally talk about this in any kind of sensible way. But the metaphor discloses the idea, roughly speaking, that somehow Being is different from all the other stuff of our experience. Heidegger says, before we bother with trivialities like this particular entity or that particular entity, what we have to do is leave all that stuff out in a way, bracket it for now, and let's talk about what it is to be, how we know being, who are we, what being tells us about itself. Now the question is, how are we going to do this? And what is being? Well, in the first case, Heidegger does not want to have a conception of being which is abstract, formal. He wants to connect it to the experience of everyday life. And this is kind of the Husserlian turn, or perhaps the whole continental turn. He says, think of it from the perspective of a human being, from your perspective now, rather than constructing a set of abstractions which later on you will use to tailor your experience of the world, start now with your experience and remove. Remove from your experience the things that are irrelevant, the dross, so that you get the pure gold of ontological knowledge later on. Now, the way in which he does this is to create a theory of what human existence is. And he calls this human existence Dasein, which doesn't translate out of German. One of the things that Heidegger does all the time. Human being. What is it like to be a human being? Dasein is human being in the world. It is finite, it is contingent, it is uncertain. It is a collection of psychic states like worry, guilt, anxiety. And this constellation of human qualities or human entities is not like anything else in the world. It is the way in which, or the vehicle in which the matrix in which being is disclosed to us. In other words, you can only find out what being is from the perspective or in the way that a human being finds out about what. And that's by being a human being. I know how. Now, can you see how this is going to get awfully circular and strange, and that we're going to have whole chapters and perhaps whole volumes of being talks to itself and projects itself into the future of being. You're going to get a lot of what appears to be circular reasoning on account of the fact that we're stuck within the internality, what I call the introcosm. And it's very hard to break out from the introcosm into the exorcosm. It's one of the characteristic flaws. It's perhaps the Achilles heel of continental philosophy. So what we're going to do is investigate, Dasein, investigate what it is to be a human being. And we're going to do that by being A human being. And we're going to do that in an authentic way. And what that means is we have to remove our illusions and remove our distraction by the events, the little trivial events in the world. Focus yourself in turn inward, and what you will find is your true self and your true being. You will move from a pre reflective state of inauthenticity, of concern with beings, small B beings, to an authentic state of concern with being itself. And apparently the only imperative, or from what I can discern in high degree, the only imperative that human beings have, the only thing left that we ought to do, that we somehow have a responsibility to do, is to authentically be capital B, to confront the reality of human life despite the fact that we may find it unpleasant or difficult or trying to. And it may well be that once we do that, we have moved to another level of experience and conceptualization of the world. And if that turns out to be the case, then he will have contributed something to our self knowledge. And if you remember that I said that Heidegger wants us to drive us back to that pre Socratic primordial kind of a state. And the Delphic oracle told Socrates and the rest of the Greeks that they must know themselves well, the continental project involves knowing yourself, turning inward and finding out what it is like to be a human being. Now, when we look at Dasein, at human existence and its contingency and its finitude, we find that it has a three fold structure. And that structure is understanding, mood and discourse. Now, understanding means that we have to accept Dasein as offering us as creating a context. In other words, to be a human being is to contextualize the world around you and to attribute meanings to it, to organize the experiences that you have into a sort of a gestalt, a whole. And in order to be a human being, you have to contextualize the world. A second thing that's necessary for Dasein is mood. And here it means something kind of unambiguous and fairly straightforward. Happiness, sadness, things like that. I mean the psychic states of our moods. And think about this for a second. Can you imagine an Anglo American empiricist telling us that one of the really important things you have to think about in the course of your philosophical development is the idea of mood very foreign to that scientistic approach to reality. Whereas for Heidegger it's a fact of life, it is perhaps one of the facts of life which we only ignore at our peril, at the peril of abstracting and making inauthentic your conception of yourself and the world. And the third element in Dasein is the idea of discourse. Language is constitutive of Dasein. Things can be formulated in speech and can be understood. Things can only be understood when they are formulated in speech and then made subject to our moods. So everyday depoeticized language doesn't uncover Dasein, it numbs us. It makes us anesthetized to the true facts of being and causes us to be caught up with trivialities. Do any of you know T.S. eliot's Four Quartets, where he says that the. And it's not the hollow men, but some example of inauthenticity or inauthentic men are distracted from distraction by distraction. Isn't that a beautiful and lovely poetic line? Well, to a great extent, that's what Heidegger is driving us towards. He's saying, I'm calling you back to yourselves. I'm asking you not to be distracted from distraction by distraction. Do not let the little beings of the world deprive you of the big being. And may I suggest that the big being has an uncomfortably strong homology to God. Remember, he starts out as a German theologian. Give that some thought. A Jesuit theologian. Well, this search after being, which is enigmatic and discloses itself in some very peculiar ways, may well be the depersonalized form of God in the 20th century. Now, Heidegger's stance towards being, to take this idea a little bit further, reminds me of the gospel story of the rich young man, rich young man, very virtuous, comes to Jesus and says, how do I really become good? How do I really become virtuous? And Jesus says, go sell all you have and follow me. Heidegger is saying something remarkably like that. He's saying, go forsake all of beings with a small. Be all the trivialities of your experience and sell all you have and follow me. Not follow Heidegger, but follow being itself, follow authenticity. It is the only obligation left for the conscious human being in the 20th century. This is a very closely sanded down version of theology, I suspect. Now his great work, Being in Time, is a very difficult piece of work because it wasn't all published in one whole chunk. He published it for various kind of academic contingencies in 27. And the idea behind it is that freedom has to be earned. It's not something you get given, it's something you work towards as a response to Dasein, and you earn your freedom. You become a human being. You make yourself by your confrontation with the real facts of human existence, of Dasein and here are some of the parts. The first volume is a sort of hermeneutics of being. The first. There are two volumes in Being and Time. And the first volume is an analysis of what we might call the unreflective state of being of a man or a woman that's caught up with this being small B and that being small B that is still distracted from distraction by distraction. And the problem that he's going to raise is that we are lying to ourselves. We delude ourselves, we get ourselves all caught up with little things that really don't matter to us. And then we ignore what we really are. And God knows we are offered little enough in this Dasein, in this world of contingent finitude and the minimally, we have an obligation to ourselves to become what we can. Now in this first volume he analyzes this pre reflective state before we actually connect or confront Dasein. And it turns out that human being has three related aspects or that Dasein is a three fold structure. The first is facticity in German Geworfenheit, to be thrown into the world. We didn't ask for this. No one consulted us before we were born or before we became conscious, asking us if we would like a kind of spatio temporal world full of people and things and objects and questions and issues like that. We're stuck with it. It's not a disease, it's not a problem. It's just it is what it is. We don't like it, that's tough. Deal with it. So facticity, the fact that we are cast into a world not of our own making and that we busy ourselves with little irrelevant things, that's a given. The second element in existence is existentiality. And this idea entails appropriating the world for our own purposes. We take knowledge, we take objects, we take food. We take things of utility to us and we manipulate them in practical ways, practical utilities, very pragmatic sense of how human beings interact with the world around them. And the final quality of human being, particularly this pre reflective quality, is the quality of. In German it's ver fallen. But the best translation in Danish is probably something like forfeiture. There's something wrong with us. There's something. There's a sort of radical deprivation of the human condition as it starts. This is what gives Heidegger something to do. He wants to start with this pre reflective kind of unconscious human state and drive us towards consciousness of ourselves. He doesn't guarantee that this is going to be pretty. He doesn't guarantee this is going to be easy, and he doesn't guarantee that this is going to be readily intelligible. But on the other hand, whatever it is you are engaged in, that isn't that relatively unimportant. What profiteth the man that he should gain the whole world and lose his soul? I think that this has at least one foot in Christian theology. And I think that many of the ideas of Heidegger's honest or authentic confrontation of being are philosophical, highly abstract Jesuit theology de theologized or de divinized. You hold onto the structure, you leave the content, things are going to get very weird. All right, so we have facticity, existentiality and forfeiture. This condition of being Ferfallen, of being caught up in a web of Maya, a web of illusions, the world of beings, this booming, buzzing confusion out there is essentially not real. Our reality is in being, capital B, not in any of these trivialities, these distractions that we are forced to confront just from being a human being. If you always live your life in this condition of being, fear fallen, in this condition of forfeiture, you have forfeited your claim to being really human. To be human is to confront the world the way it is. It's to be a grown up adult that is willing to deal with human life and as it is, rather than getting distracted or sidetracked by any of the various cul de sacs that life might offer us. And if you think about what this leads to, these men, or the vast majority of human beings apparently are caught up in this inauthentic mode of existence. And that is the Source in the 20th century of the thing called the mass man. Heidegger calls it Das man, but what it means is it's the opposite of being an individual. It's being a herd creature, not reflective, not thinking, not encountering the world on your own. And the best he can do, in perhaps the great tradition of German Romanticism, is to force us to become individuals. If you remember the great philosopher Kierkegaard, who is certainly one of the formative influences on Hegel or on Heidegger. Sorry. Thank you. One of the formative influences. Kierkegaard wanted his tombstone to say Soren Kierkegaard and his date of birth and date of death. And then below that, he wanted to say that individual, which is a beautiful and profound epitaph. Well, what Heidegger calls upon us to do is to follow Kierkegaard, but to follow him in that respect in an individual way, you confront Being on your own, become what you might possibly be. You might also deserve to be called an individual if you work really hard at it, if you cultivate your inner life and you find some authentic confrontation with things that you'd rather not think about. And in volume two of Heidegger's work, we find that he does try and sketch out what an authentic being would be like, how we really confront Dasein and what it will entail and what it will do for us. And in addition to that, he goes through the history of philosophy with considerable detail and in a very kind of idiomatic way. And the point of his going through the history of philosophy is to construct a philosophical history of ontology and to do a phenomenological destruction of prior conceptions of ontology so that he can clear the ground to erect his own new building. Essentially, he says, I'm going to only hold on to the pre Socratic legacy, most of Platonism and some of Aristotle. But after Aristotle, it's all downhill. I don't want to talk about their conception of being or ontology. It's a waste of time. We have gone down an inauthentic cult cul de sac. Human beings, almost without exception, have not been authentic since we began to separate ourselves from being. In particular, he's concerned with Nietzsche's charge that it's not even possible to talk about being anymore. So we'll talk about that a little later. But the idea is that Heidegger wants to force us back to an earlier pristine state. This sounds remarkably like going back to the Garden of Eden. I could be mistaken. This condition of being, fear fallen, sounds to me an awful lot like sin. And since it's so universal, it strikes me as an awful lot like original sin. But I may be mistaken. Professor Heidegger tells us that it's not original sin. He explicitly says so, but I have my doubts. Well, we construct this phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology. And in its place, instead of looking at the world subspeciae eternitatus, we're going to look at the world subspeciae temporalis. In other words, we're going to look at human being the way it really is. Rather than from the God's eye view view, we're going to look at it from the human being's eye view. And we're going to find that the world discloses itself and being discloses itself as a very peculiar matrix of things, most of which are not very pleasant in the first case. If you want to really confront Dasein, what we get from volume two. You're going to have to get used to the idea of amor fati, or acceptance of fate, particularly acceptance of your own death. Death, anxiety, worry, care, fear are the main themes of Heidegger's second work. And this is the good side. Remember, this is the upside. You're better off with this rather than dwelling on all the other things that might distract you from these businesses. And in addition, conscience is going to be an important element in this second volume. In other words, in order to come to our authentic being, in order to be truly human, which apparently so few people do, we must confront death. We must recognize that we have a conscience and it is ineliminable, and we must do what we can to sacrifice all else to sell all we have to follow being. Now, death is an interesting and important problem. And unlike most philosophers, Heidegger seems to be under the impression that he has some intelligent things to say about death. My personal feeling is that although death is a fearsome reality, and it is the kind of thing that a conscious person will inevitably, at some point, or perhaps at all points, come into contact with and think about. Having thought about it myself, I'm not able to think of or say anything intelligent about this topic. Perhaps you are. I apologize, but I'm not able to do that. There's not a lot you can say about death. On the other hand, Heidegger wants to talk about that as the horizon of human existence. If any of you have read Ernest Becker's book the Denial of Death, that's a sort of popularization of one Heideggerian problem. We all try and persuade ourselves in all the everyday activities of life. Life is it that I'm going to last forever? I'm going to last forever. I'm going to last forever. Time goes on into an infinite horizon. Nay, that is being small B. You are lying to yourself. Nay. In fact, we all have to realize that time is not an infinite horizon. To view time as time sub 1, time sub 2, time sub 3, time sub n. Going on forever. That's to view time from the perspective of God. That's also to view time from the perspective of our scientific friends. The only difficulty is that no human life experiences time like that. We experience it in a radically different way. We experience it as the horizon of our possibilities. So time is here to stay. Now can you see why he titles his book Being and Time? He wants to study being, and then he wants to study some essential foundational groundwork for the human experience of being and that turns out to be the fact that we are temporal. If you think of T.S. eliot in the Rose Garden, time present and time past, right? It's surprising how TS Eliot is so overtly Christian and this denies its Christianity or seems to be indifferent to it. But I think there are powerful Christian themes underlying this. So temporality, the fact that we must confront our own death, surely one of the great themes of Christianity as well comes out as being the one imperative. I would almost be tempted to say that this demand made upon us by conscience, because one of the important elements in volume two is that Heidegger talks about the human conscience. He says, look, you want to be a human being? Listen to your conscience. Because there is a real thing. Conscience is one of the? Oor facts of human life. And you know what your conscience tells you to do. Sell all you have and follow me. Don't get caught up with little trivialities. Do not become distracted by beings. Search out the final, the real, the ultimate being. So conscience forces us into authenticity. Conscience accuses us of being inauthentic and being concerned with beings and what he is or what Heidegger thinks he is. Here is the voice of conscience to no small extent. He moves from being a philosopher to being a prophet with surprising agility. And when he calls you to be yourself, when he calls you to heed the voice of your own conscience, he sounds more like Jeremiah than he does Sartre. But I could be wrong here. Now, authenticity, this confrontation of our own finitude, is the one state that would actually redeem us or would take us out of this pre philosophical, not quite human state. And what this discloses is a number of important issues, but one of the most important of them is the idea of guilt and care and worry. And I would be inclined to say that, like Eliot, Heidegger thinks that the human condition is one of radical deprivation. We are not what we should be, we are not what we could be. And once we confront our own finitude, we confront the fact that we have obligations to ourself which we can never meet. Think about. Let's think this through in the first case, when we confront Dasein and we find ourselves in being capital B, not just small B. The response on the part of the conscious agent is what is in German called zorge, and in English that would be called care or worry or concern. And there are at least three things about which we are concerned. And here comes the temporal element. First case, we are concerned about the future. And that means that Dasein, conscious human being, projects itself into the future. Right. In other words, the way we experience the world, we experience ourselves not just here and now, but we project ourselves into the future, and we also project ourselves into our own past. Projecting ourselves into our future causes angst, worry, almost. Almost a terminal frightfulness, because we must confront the fact that we come to an end and we don't know how to avoid that. We can't avoid that. We project ourselves into the earlier parts of our life. And an interesting fact is that we cannot avoid the experience of guilt. And I would be tempted to say that guilt is the uncomfortable certainty that we are not what we could have been. It's true, and Heidegger is right about that. And not only is he right about that, but that is an inimitable part of being a human being. And any scientific theory which either fails to talk about this or tells us we can't talk about it is just unacceptable. That's right. So we project ourselves into the future, we project ourselves into the past, and we confront Dasein in the present. And what we find out about ourselves when we confront Dasein in the present is that we have a potential for freedom from being small B which we have not completely realized. What this means is the following. We look into our past, we realize we have not been what we could have been. We look at the present and we realize we are not as free and as knowledgeable about being as authentic as we could be. And we look into the future and we realize that there is a definite temporal horizon. Think about this now we see our own death coming in the future, and this death, and we don't know when it will happen. It extinguishes all our possibilities. Right? But it does not exhaust all our possibilities. In other words, between now and the time we die, there is a great variety of choices we could make of context we could construct, of projects we could undertake. And the problem is that we will not undertake all of them. We will not do all these things. So that means that between now and then, you've got to make some choices about what you're going to do with your life. And the problem is that you will not be able to do all the things you might wish to do or that you could do if you were an eternal being. And that means that you will not realize some of your possibilities. And that means you owe yourself a debt that you can never repay. And that is a sort of cosmic guilt. May I suggest that this is the echo of original sin when it gets de theologized. It is the human condition, and we cannot escape it. If we try and escape it by truncating off reality by adopting some sort of human or positivistic position, it tells us, don't worry about guilt, don't worry about the internal facts of your psyche. The result is that you concern yourself with beings. You lapse back into that pre. Authentic, pre philosophical state that Heidegger says you ignore at your peril that you engage in. At your peril. If you want to be human, then get a soul. And you want to get a soul, then face the fact that there are certain inlimitable parts of your experience which you have to confront in order to be human. And there are certain questions that you have to ask in order to be human. The difficulty is, and the tension of being human is that you are forced to ask some questions for which there are no answers. You can't get around it. You must ask the question of being, even though it's not at all clear exactly what that means. And also it's not at all clear what the answer is. And if the answer were to come up and shake you by the hand, it's not at all clear that you would recognize it. So for a great many reasons, this is obscurity piled upon obscurity piled upon obscurity, combined with a certain obvious and honest confrontation of the realities of human life. I think this is a. That sort of funny combination of obscurity and obvious kind of literary or psychic truthfulness is one of the characteristic amalgams of 20th century Continental philosophy. Philosophy. Now, let's look back at the question of conscience. Dasein demands that we live our life facing death rather than denying it. And that means that ethics kind of, how can I put, implodes? So that the only real obligation that we have left is that we should be authentic. And that ends up meaning that it's not so important what you do in life as how you do it. In other words, between now and the time you die, it's not so important what projects you undertake as it is that you should be conscious of the fact that you're not going to be able to take all of them and that you have to decide which are better. The difficulty here is that this very easily shades off into straightaway nihilism. Heidegger, after all, became a Nazi. Heidegger was advanced due to his political connections to National Socialism. Heidegger, who, his greatest work, his first great published work, Being in Time, was in Husserl's Yar book. And Husserl was his teacher. And it was dedicated to Husserl. But alas, Husserl was a Jew. And so when Husserl was moved out of academic life starting in 1933, Heidegger publicly disassociated himself from Husserl. And Heidegger ended up taking Husserl's chair at the University of Freiburg. This sounds to me like the phenomenology of careerism, but I could be wrong. It is a particularly unhappy circumstance. Or when philosophers, at least those philosophers who claim to have a particularly deep or profound or important insight into life, should let us down in such an egregious way, there is something not only disconcerting about it, but something which makes me want to put the rest of his statements in italics. Be very careful about how I read them. In some ways, if being in this pre philosophical state of denying Dasein gets us to behave, well, I would be inclined to say, well, I'd rather be stupid. Perhaps that's just me. Now, in addition to confronting Dasein through the vehicle of conscience and through the vehicle of existence, the historicity of human beings is of course of great concern to Heidegger. We are in some particular context at some particular time, and we must always be oriented towards the future. In particular, when we are oriented towards the future and our own demise and our own end, we have to do what Heidegger calls thinking about nothing. Now, in the English translations of Heidegger, nothing gets a capital N. But alas, in the German language all nouns are capitalized, so we don't have quite that way out. And thinking about nothing is one of the most trying things you can try and do. I mean, there are long sections. I know it sounds like almost a joke, but there are long sections which we discuss our encounter with nothing. And he means that nothing is not quite negation, but the source of negation. I have no clear conception of what that means and what's involved in thinking about nothing. I have tried working through it and it runs us into all kinds of logical problems. And Heidegger will say, well, so much the worse for you and for your logic. Confront being as it really is. I can see why positivistic guys like Carnot and the Vienna Circle find this so trying. Lush ambiguity and elaborate self indulgence. It's one of the things that I think we would justifiably want to avoid in any philosophical construct. Now, after, during the Nazi years, he produced some of his most important work, and that Nazism should be hospitable to philosophy is, well, apparently the case. He's quite influential and, well, it's perhaps not fair to judge man's philosophical output by his life. It depends on how you look at philosophy. But I might be inclined to say that he is influenced by the cultural chauvinism of the time. He has some very peculiar ideas about language, apparently, and I'm not joking here, he holds the view that philosophy can only be done in German. That is not a joke. I know that may sound funny. It may sound, and I can imagine Wittgenstein in his grave turning over and over and over saying, nein, no, no, in any language. No philosophy can be done in any language. That's not correct. But Heidegger has what I would end up describing as a sort of mystical or magical view of language, which I think becomes more apparent in his late work and which makes it that much more difficult, which makes obscure and difficult philosophy doubly difficult later on. German is perhaps the only language philosophy can be conducted in. Maybe Greek. When he's in a good kind of feel good or a kind of generous mood, he willing to allow that perhaps some philosophy could be done in Greece, but that's about it. You have to do it in Greek. And what he's trying to do in this later work is to meet Nietzsche's objections about ontology. If you remember that Nietzsche at the end of the 19th century said that, look, our ideas about being have faded away into vapor and mist. Well, Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics says no, actually Nietzsche is a sort of seismograph who sees the intrinsic depravity and mistakes in the Western tradition. And he sees that it leads up to this idea that we can't talk about being at all. What he does is show us the inauthenticity of all the history of philosophy since the Greeks. So what he's going to do is drive us back beyond the Nietzschean impasse, back to the pre Socratics. An admiration that he shares with Nietzsche, of course, because Nietzsche loved the Presocratics as well. In the post war years, Heidegger's work continued to be difficult and almost impenetrable. And he spent most of his time analyzing the pre Socratics. There's a very interesting set of essays called what's the German name? Holzweger, which means wood trails. And what is interesting about wood trails, the reason why I chose kind of an odd title is that in German, wood trails have the idea of cul de sacs. In other words, you take a walk into the woods and there are various trails, but they don't lead anywhere. They lead towards nothing. They lead towards an impasse. He's written a set of essays that are the logical or psychic analogues of cul de sacs. Blind Alleys would be a way of translating Holzwega in a sensible way. And this is where we find most of his treatment of the Presocratics. There's an amazing and long detailed essay on Anaximander and he's one of the Ionian physicists. And it's amazing how much mileage you can get from one line, since after all we only have one surviving line of Anaximander and he's easily able to kick out 50, 70 pages on that. And this the most elaborate and implausible and self referential kind of treatment. So his later work is even more difficult than the earlier work. But in many respects it's an extrapolation from the earlier work and its concern with being and the sources of being back in that pre Socratic tradition. In some ways, by the end of his life, the great example of a philosophical enterprise is no longer Plato's Dialogues. It has become Parmenides poem about being. I don't imagine many of you at home or many of you here have gotten around to reading Parmenides poem about being. Let me see if I can help you with that. What Parmenides says is that we must think and say that being is from the other way. I debar you. What he means is that ontology is the first and primary and fundamental concern of human beings. All else follows from that. Heidegger is trying to drive us back to that Presocratic state of innocence. And the great exemplar of that would be Parmenides, the forbidding, difficult, completely abstract founder of ontology. Now, there are lots and lots of problems with this. It's hard to know exactly where to start. But let's take a couple of cracks at this. In the first case, Heidegger is so impenetrable that he often comes close to being self parody when he talks about nothing and thinking about nothing and nothing nots rather than nothing negates. I have no clear idea of what this nothing is. I found out that it's not negation, and I find out a lot about what Heidegger's ideas are not. I often have a difficulty in finding out how to attach some sensible predicate to an idea about like nothing. What can you think about nothing? What can you say about nothing? Heidegger appears to suggest that you can say quite a bit, but. But beats Me what it amounts to. Many of Heidegger's ideas or many parts of his writings are elaborate puns and plays on words. I'll give you an example from the German. He says that our feeling with regard to our encounter with Dasein is uncanny, and in German that's unheimlich. And he says that this uncanny feeling of not knowing our way around in the world amounts to not feeling at home in the world. Now, in German, the word for home is heim. And so when we have this uncanny feeling, we feel unheimlich, which means unhomely, which means we don't feel at home in the world. So he kind of makes the idea of uncanniness and uncertainty and kind of anxiety and the kind of being. And the feeling of being sort of homesick, of longing for our connection with being. Well, he kind of merges them all together in a kind of messy, mushy kind of linguistic overlap. And we might be tempted to think that that's a big problem with Heidegger. But I might be tempted to say that that's also the source of his richness. In other words, the fact that he's more concerned, in many respects, with connotations than denotations. The fact that he likes this messy overlap, this linguistic word play, these plays on words, these puns. And also he's famous for his elaborate and very implausible etymologies. When he doesn't know the actual historical source of a word, I think he usually makes it up and then provides some quote, philosophical argument to account for why only he understands the real source of this word. The rest of the lexicographers in the world do not. This happens all the time with the treatment of Greek. It also happens all the time with his treatment of German. Another problem that comes up is the problem of morality, mysticism and nihilism. And here's where I would like to take a. A sort of crack at the continental tradition. I'd like to offer kind of foundational criticism. When you start talking about interiority, when you move from the realm of public discourse about stuff out there, beings with a small B, to whatever it is you've got going on inside you. The difficulty is, first of all, that it's very hard to put words on this, to talk about this in any kind of intelligible way. The danger here is that you end up talking to yourself, right? Which is the opposite of the philosophical enterprise. A second problem is that nihilism is always a possibility because we might want to say almost the definition of nihilism. Is speech that's indistinguishable from silence. And I have often thought that this discussion of nothing and what it does and how we encounter nothing is a very sophisticated way of not saying anything. But that may be just me. My sense is, though, that this is that he's trying to do the impossible linguistically too much of the time. And my final difficulty with Heidegger, and I think this is the most interesting and important difficulty with him, at least from my perspective it is, is that this nebulous collection of insights and tautologies and unintelligibilities and neologisms are a kind of transformation of theology. In other words, it seems to me that what Heidegger's being is, what this ontological search is, is theology with the God left out, right? And we worship ourselves and we have obligations to ourselves instead of having obligations to the deity. And our one obligation to ourselves is to be ourselves. Okay? I mean, this comes very close not just to solipsism, but to self worship. I mean, what else is there to worship? There's only me. Solipsism is the great danger that recurs in all of these systems. Why? Because they're beginning from the inside and working out, and most of them never get out. That's the big difficulty, generally speaking. And this is, I mean, I think, tells us something about this kind of philosophy. It's had rather little influence, certainly in the Anglo American philosophical world. Carnap wrote a scathing treatment of some of Heidegger in which he said, this is a particularly unpleasant example of what happens or what happens to your brain when you do metaphysics. This is the high point of unintelligible gibberish. And Carnap published a very unkind treatment of this. And you can kind of see why he would. Scientific guys are not going to want to hear about dread and death and stuff, tables and chairs, atoms and physics and that kind of stuff. Well, where has it been influential? This is worth noting in theology. Paul Tillich, the great systematic theologian Heidegger turned into theology. Think about it. I mean, he makes his debt to Heidegger quite explicit. Those of you that know the work of Rudolf Bultmann demythologized Christianity. This is all Heidegger, Heidegger reducts. He's back to haunt us again. They just transformed the old theological problem into Heideggerianism and then Heideggerianism into what is alleged to be a new theological problem. May I suggest then that this enigmatic being so central to Heidegger's thought is in fact easily interpreted as the silence of God.