What does it mean to exist, already thrown into a world and heading toward death?
23 claims from this lecture, in the order Marci Shore makes them, with the 27 terms it leans on and its 25 links to other lectures.
Dasein is an entity which does not just occur amongst other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very being, that being is an issue for it.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. The epigraph Shore gives this lecture.
By number of claims in this lecture.
Shore’s own judgments and connections
The 7 claims the lecture spends most time on.
Modern philosophy since Descartes asks how we know before asking what being is. That order is backward: the Greeks understood that the question of being comes first.
Put simply Heidegger: since Descartes, philosophy has asked "how do we know?" before "what does it mean to be?" That order is backward. The ancient Greeks understood that the question of being comes first.
Dasein is no detached observer. It is always already being-in-the-world: doing things, caring about things, alongside other beings, with no outside position to withdraw to.
Put simply Heidegger: we are never detached observers. We are always already "in the world": doing things, caring about things, living among others, with nowhere outside to step back to.
The subject-object split assumes an Archimedean vantage outside the world. There is none: Dasein is inside, so the bridge problem is not solved but dissolved, since no gap exists.
Put simply Heidegger: the old puzzle of how a mind reaches the world assumes we could stand outside the world and look at it. We cannot. We are already inside, so there is no gap to bridge and the puzzle disappears.
Our first and usual relation to things is using them, not looking at them: the hammer is ready-to-hand. Only when it breaks does it turn into present-at-hand, something to contemplate.
Put simply Heidegger: we mostly deal with things by using them, not by looking at them. A working hammer is simply "ready-to-hand". Only when it breaks do we stare at it as an object, "present-at-hand".
Inauthenticity is conformity: handing the burden of deciding to convention and doing what one does. The agent there is das Man, the impersonal one, which is everyone and no one.
Put simply Heidegger: living inauthentically means conforming, letting convention make your decisions and doing "what one does". The one in charge is "das Man", the faceless "they" that is everyone and no one.
Other readings Hubert Dreyfus (Being-in-the-World, 1991) reads das Man as the shared background of norms and practices that makes things intelligible at all, a positive structure of Dasein that also pulls toward conformity.
Where to read it Heidegger, Being and Time §27 (H. 126–130).
Authenticity means facing, eyes open, that one is finite and always moving toward one's own death (Sein-zum-Tode). Inauthenticity is at bottom a way of fleeing that awareness.
Put simply Heidegger: living authentically means facing, eyes open, that you are finite and always moving toward your own death, his "being-toward-death". Living inauthentically is at bottom a way of running from that knowledge.
Shore leaves open whether Dasein radically thickens the subject, darker than Descartes', Kant's or Husserl's, or ends it: if subject and object are no longer apart, is there a subject?
Put simply Shore leaves it open. Does Heidegger's "Dasein" make the self far richer and darker than in Descartes, Kant or Husserl? Or does it end the self? If mind and world are no longer apart, is there still a subject?
Read down to follow the lecture. The time opens that minute on YouTube.
Husserl, in Shore's judgment, wants to dance at both weddings at once, as the Polish proverb forbids: subjectivity's full depth and objectivity's firm certainty, surrendering neither.
Put simply Shore's judgment: Husserl tries to "dance at two weddings at once," as a Polish proverb says you cannot. He wants all the depth of the inner self and all the firm certainty of objective knowledge, giving up neither.
Modern philosophy since Descartes asks how we know before asking what being is. That order is backward: the Greeks understood that the question of being comes first.
Put simply Heidegger: since Descartes, philosophy has asked "how do we know?" before "what does it mean to be?" That order is backward. The ancient Greeks understood that the question of being comes first.
German separates Sein, the uncountable verbal noun for existing, from ein Seiendes, a countable entity. English uses being for both, so the book's opening distinction is often lost.
Put simply Heidegger's German has two words where English has one: "Sein," the bare fact of existing, and "ein Seiendes," a being, a thing you can count. English says "being" for both, so his opening distinction often gets lost.
Among entities, only Dasein can ask what Being means, because its own existence matters to it. In Heidegger's words, it is "ontically distinctive in that it is ontological."
Put simply Heidegger: of all the things that exist, only we, his "Dasein", can ask what it means to be, because our own existence matters to us. Being able to ask about being is what sets us apart.
Where to read it Heidegger, Being and Time §4 (H. 12).
Heidegger drops the words subject, consciousness and human being in favor of Dasein, literally being-there. Whatever remains of the subject is an entity that is somewhere.
Put simply Heidegger stops saying "subject", "consciousness" or "human being". He says "Dasein", literally "being there". What is left of the self is something that is always somewhere.
Asking what Being is presupposes some rough prior sense of it; without that, the question could not even be framed. The questioner is already inside: the hermeneutic circle.
Put simply Heidegger: to ask what being is, we must already have a rough sense of what "to be" means, or we could not even ask. The asker is already inside the question. This is the "hermeneutic circle".
Descartes starts from thinking and Husserl from thinking about an object; Heidegger starts from existing. That I am comes before anything I think: being precedes knowing.
Dasein is no detached observer. It is always already being-in-the-world: doing things, caring about things, alongside other beings, with no outside position to withdraw to.
Put simply Heidegger: we are never detached observers. We are always already "in the world": doing things, caring about things, living among others, with nowhere outside to step back to.
The subject-object split assumes an Archimedean vantage outside the world. There is none: Dasein is inside, so the bridge problem is not solved but dissolved, since no gap exists.
Put simply Heidegger: the old puzzle of how a mind reaches the world assumes we could stand outside the world and look at it. We cannot. We are already inside, so there is no gap to bridge and the puzzle disappears.
Our first and usual relation to things is using them, not looking at them: the hammer is ready-to-hand. Only when it breaks does it turn into present-at-hand, something to contemplate.
Put simply Heidegger: we mostly deal with things by using them, not by looking at them. A working hammer is simply "ready-to-hand". Only when it breaks do we stare at it as an object, "present-at-hand".
Dasein's condition is thrownness (Geworfenheit): it lands, with a kind of violence, in a time and place it never chose, with no before and no outside from which to consent.
Put simply Heidegger: we are "thrown" into existence. Each of us lands, with a kind of violence, in a time and place we never chose, with no earlier moment or outside spot from which we could have agreed to it.
Inauthenticity is conformity: handing the burden of deciding to convention and doing what one does. The agent there is das Man, the impersonal one, which is everyone and no one.
Put simply Heidegger: living inauthentically means conforming, letting convention make your decisions and doing "what one does". The one in charge is "das Man", the faceless "they" that is everyone and no one.
Other readings Hubert Dreyfus (Being-in-the-World, 1991) reads das Man as the shared background of norms and practices that makes things intelligible at all, a positive structure of Dasein that also pulls toward conformity.
Where to read it Heidegger, Being and Time §27 (H. 126–130).
Heidegger insists Being and Time passes no moral judgment; Shore thinks that disavowal disingenuous, since any reader can see he finds living authentically far more impressive than living inauthentically.
The they-self (das-Man-Selbst) has fallen into the world: lost in gossip, trivial curiosity and vague indecision, its being taken over by others, it "must first find itself."
Put simply Heidegger: the self that just follows "the they" has "fallen" into the world. Lost in gossip, trivial curiosity and vague indecision, it lets others take over its life. It "must first find itself."
Surrendering to the they estranges Dasein from its authentic self, yet Heidegger argues the estrangement is comforting: going along with the crowd is easier than being oneself.
Put simply Heidegger: giving in to the crowd cuts us off from our real selves. But that loss is comforting, because going along with everyone is easier than being yourself.
Authenticity means facing, eyes open, that one is finite and always moving toward one's own death (Sein-zum-Tode). Inauthenticity is at bottom a way of fleeing that awareness.
Put simply Heidegger: living authentically means facing, eyes open, that you are finite and always moving toward your own death, his "being-toward-death". Living inauthentically is at bottom a way of running from that knowledge.
Fear always takes an object: snakes, spiders, planes. Angst takes none; what it faces is precisely nothing, the nothingness every existence is inevitably headed toward.
Put simply Heidegger: fear is always of something, like snakes or planes. "Angst", a deep dread, has no object. What it faces is nothing at all: the nothingness every life is heading toward.
Where to read it Heidegger, Being and Time §40 (H. 186–189).
Angst brings Unheimlichkeit, uncanniness, literally not being at home. The world cannot be a secure home for an existence that, squarely faced, is ungrounded by its own finitude.
Put simply Heidegger: dread brings "Unheimlichkeit", usually translated "uncanniness" but literally "not being at home". Our lives will end and so have no firm footing; faced honestly, that means the world can never be a secure home.
Heidegger, Shore observes, offers readers little incentive to choose authenticity: the clarity it brings is plainly miserable, close to unbearable.
Confronting one's own death alone, shaken by Angst, can produce resoluteness: taking hold of oneself and owning one's choices. That is authenticity's slightly empowering side, which Heidegger wants felt.
Put simply Heidegger: facing your own death alone, shaken by dread, can make you "resolute": you take hold of your life and own your choices. That is authenticity's slightly empowering side, and he wants readers to feel it.
Death singles each of us out, because everyone dies alone. It is the one moment that is truly mine (Jemeinigkeit), belonging to no one else.
In the text In Being and Time (1927; Macquarrie and Robinson translation), mineness belongs to all of Dasein's being: §9 says "The Being of any such entity is in each case mine"; §47 says death "is in every case mine".
Husserl's transcendental ego is wholly transparent to itself; Dasein never is. Forever up to something, evading something, tempted toward inauthenticity, it stays partly hidden from itself, closer to Freud.
Put simply Husserl's pure self can see all of itself clearly. Heidegger's human being never can. Always busy with something, dodging something, tempted to follow the crowd, it stays partly hidden from itself. In this Heidegger is closer to Freud.
Shore leaves open whether Dasein radically thickens the subject, darker than Descartes', Kant's or Husserl's, or ends it: if subject and object are no longer apart, is there a subject?
Put simply Shore leaves it open. Does Heidegger's "Dasein" make the self far richer and darker than in Descartes, Kant or Husserl? Or does it end the self? If mind and world are no longer apart, is there still a subject?
20 of these 27 first come up in this lecture. Definitions are our paraphrase.
Where a claim here answers an earlier lecture, and where a later lecture answers a claim here. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
DescartesEven if a demon has planted every thought in my head, the thinking itself is happening, so I must exist: "cogito, ergo sum." L2 · 15:49
HeideggerDescartes starts from thinking and Husserl from thinking about an object; Heidegger starts from existing. That I am comes before anything I think: being precedes knowing. L12 · 20:46
"I am, therefore I think": existing precedes knowing
RousseauVirtue needs authenticity, and society, which forces us into pretending we are someone else, rules authenticity out. Being virtuous therefore means withdrawing from society. L3 · 20:51
HeideggerInauthenticity is conformity: handing the burden of deciding to convention and doing what one does. The agent there is das Man, the impersonal one, which is everyone and no one. L12 · 32:39
Inauthenticity as conformity to the social gaze, now das ManOur inference
HusserlIntentionality is the structure of consciousness: always reaching for its object, like a magnet on a string. Neither subject nor object comes first; their relation does, bridged by intentionality. L11 · 40:21
HeideggerDescartes starts from thinking and Husserl from thinking about an object; Heidegger starts from existing. That I am comes before anything I think: being precedes knowing. L12 · 20:46
Reverses the order: being precedes thinking, so the "I think an object" already presupposes an I existing in the world.
HusserlIntentionality is the structure of consciousness: always reaching for its object, like a magnet on a string. Neither subject nor object comes first; their relation does, bridged by intentionality. L11 · 40:21
HeideggerThe subject-object split assumes an Archimedean vantage outside the world. There is none: Dasein is inside, so the bridge problem is not solved but dissolved, since no gap exists. L12 · 25:27
Husserl bridges subject and object by intentionality; Heidegger denies there is any gap to bridge.
HusserlStrip away the contingent particulars distinguishing empirical egos and a transcendental ego remains: the deepest, most essential I, yet universal and identical in everyone, as H2O underlies all water. L11 · 34:29
HeideggerHeidegger drops the words subject, consciousness and human being in favor of Dasein, literally being-there. Whatever remains of the subject is an entity that is somewhere. L12 · 18:35
Dasein is the next move in overcoming the notion of subjectivity that the transcendental ego began to unsettle.
HusserlThe phenomenological reduction jolts us from the natural attitude, where the world's existence is taken for granted, into reflection on consciousness; the reality question is bracketed, suspended rather than doubted. L11 · 30:57
HeideggerOur first and usual relation to things is using them, not looking at them: the hammer is ready-to-hand. Only when it breaks does it turn into present-at-hand, something to contemplate. L12 · 27:26
Shore calls ready-to-hand breakdown another variation on Husserl's question: when do we really see?
HusserlStrip away the contingent particulars distinguishing empirical egos and a transcendental ego remains: the deepest, most essential I, yet universal and identical in everyone, as H2O underlies all water. L11 · 34:29
ShoreHusserl, in Shore's judgment, wants to dance at both weddings at once, as the Polish proverb forbids: subjectivity's full depth and objectivity's firm certainty, surrendering neither. L12 · 3:55
Shore judges the pure, transparent I an unstable attempt to keep both subjective depth and objective certainty.
HusserlWhere Freud locates the essential self in what is most hidden, the transcendental ego is pure light: nothing in it stays concealed, and knowing is a matter of clear seeing. L11 · 45:42
HeideggerHusserl's transcendental ego is wholly transparent to itself; Dasein never is. Forever up to something, evading something, tempted toward inauthenticity, it stays partly hidden from itself, closer to Freud. L12 · 46:01
Dasein occupies the transcendental ego's privileged place but is never transparent to itself.
HeideggerDasein is no detached observer. It is always already being-in-the-world: doing things, caring about things, alongside other beings, with no outside position to withdraw to. L12 · 24:14
SartreIn his early Transcendence of the Ego (1937), Sartre rejects Husserl's phenomenological reduction on broadly Heideggerian grounds: always already in a world, we cannot bracket our belief in it. L13 · 19:10
Takes Heidegger's always-already-in-the-world to its anti-Husserlian conclusion: no reduction is possible.
HeideggerDasein's condition is thrownness (Geworfenheit): it lands, with a kind of violence, in a time and place it never chose, with no before and no outside from which to consent. L12 · 31:33
SartreSartre shifts Heidegger's thrownness toward abandonment: we find ourselves dumped in a world without God, forlorn, with nothing either inside us or outside us to rely on. L13 · 29:13
Keeps thrownness but stresses abandonment: cast into the world with nothing to lean on
HeideggerFear always takes an object: snakes, spiders, planes. Angst takes none; what it faces is precisely nothing, the nothingness every existence is inevitably headed toward. L12 · 41:22
SartreNothingness, for Sartre, is freedom rather than something to dread: what is not yet determined is precisely the open room in which we make ourselves. L13 · 33:22
Nothingness stops meaning death and comes to mean the open space of freedom
HeideggerInauthenticity is conformity: handing the burden of deciding to convention and doing what one does. The agent there is das Man, the impersonal one, which is everyone and no one. L12 · 32:39
SartreIn its commonest form, bad faith shelters behind determinism: pleading fate, natural law or an unchangeable character denies one's freedom and recasts oneself as a mere object. L13 · 40:55
Bad faith parallels flight into das Man, recast as a lie one tells oneself about one's freedom.Our inference
HeideggerDasein is no detached observer. It is always already being-in-the-world: doing things, caring about things, alongside other beings, with no outside position to withdraw to. L12 · 24:14
HorkheimerHeidegger's notion of care applies to social inquiry: we are already inside the world and it matters to us, so no neutral, detached, scientific stance toward it exists. L14 · 24:27
Takes "care": we are always already in the world, with no neutral standpoint
HeideggerDeath singles each of us out, because everyone dies alone. It is the one moment that is truly mine (Jemeinigkeit), belonging to no one else. L12 · 44:30
ArendtBy making death anonymous, the camps emptied it of meaning as the end of a fulfilled life; the victim's death only sealed the fact that he "had never really existed." L15 · 42:18
Anonymous mass death strips away the "mineness" of death that Heidegger made the core of authenticity
HeideggerDasein is no detached observer. It is always already being-in-the-world: doing things, caring about things, alongside other beings, with no outside position to withdraw to. L12 · 24:14
KojèveFollowing Heidegger, Kojève replaces talk of nature or the world with le donné, the given: we are always already caught up in it, so no uninvolved standpoint exists. L16 · 13:49
Shore says Kojève, following Heidegger, holds that the world is never independent of Dasein; his "given" draws on Dasein always already being in the world.
HeideggerThe they-self (das-Man-Selbst) has fallen into the world: lost in gossip, trivial curiosity and vague indecision, its being taken over by others, it "must first find itself." L12 · 35:03
BeauvoirBeauvoir holds women partly responsible for their own subordination: too often they shrink in bad faith from freedom's burden, remaining the inessential and accepting the object role. L16 · 32:42
Shore glosses Beauvoir's temptation to remain the object as a kind of Heideggerian falling into the they-self.
HeideggerAuthenticity means facing, eyes open, that one is finite and always moving toward one's own death (Sein-zum-Tode). Inauthenticity is at bottom a way of fleeing that awareness. L12 · 38:17
BeauvoirFrom Heidegger, Beauvoir takes the strong notion that human finitude must be accepted: we are mortal, moving toward death, and that is the context in which we make decisions. L16 · 20:23
Choosing as finite beings toward death: being-toward-death as the frame of ethics
HeideggerConfronting one's own death alone, shaken by Angst, can produce resoluteness: taking hold of oneself and owning one's choices. That is authenticity's slightly empowering side, which Heidegger wants felt. L12 · 44:18
LevinasIn Levinas's Philosophy and Awakening, the other tears me loose from the central place where I posit myself; I must then see myself from their side and answer for myself. L17 · 43:37
Shore likens Levinas's face-to-face to Heidegger's being-toward-death as the moment of shakenness, which for Levinas comes from the other, not from death.
HeideggerDasein's condition is thrownness (Geworfenheit): it lands, with a kind of violence, in a time and place it never chose, with no before and no outside from which to consent. L12 · 31:33
KosíkPeople are thrown into a history already moving on its own, yet they also act within it: individual and history shape each other in an interactive model. L18 · 41:09
Shore says Kosík rereads Marx and Hegel through Heidegger, yielding the idea that we are always already thrown into history yet act within it.
HeideggerInauthenticity is conformity: handing the burden of deciding to convention and doing what one does. The agent there is das Man, the impersonal one, which is everyone and no one. L12 · 32:39
GirardNobody wants anything purely from within. Desire is mimetic: we come to want a thing by imitating someone else who already wants it. L20 · 20:55
Mimetic desire echoes das Man: wanting what others want is conformity at the level of desire.Our inference
HeideggerDasein is no detached observer. It is always already being-in-the-world: doing things, caring about things, alongside other beings, with no outside position to withdraw to. L12 · 24:14
FoucaultKnowledge is never innocent of power; the slash in power/knowledge marks their inseparability, which rules out disinterested inquiry and any neutral Archimedean point to stand on. L21 · 37:31
Shore hears echoes of Heidegger's observer problem in Foucault's claim that there is no neutral, innocent space outside power.
HeideggerAsking what Being is presupposes some rough prior sense of it; without that, the question could not even be framed. The questioner is already inside: the hermeneutic circle. L12 · 19:52
ShoreDerrida's opening question on writing echoes Heidegger twice: needing a preliminary idea of writing before asking where it begins is the hermeneutic circle, and "always already" is Heidegger's phrase. L22 · 23:11
Shore hears echoes of Heidegger's hermeneutic circle in Derrida's point that one must already know what writing is to ask where it begins.
HeideggerInauthenticity is conformity: handing the burden of deciding to convention and doing what one does. The agent there is das Man, the impersonal one, which is everyone and no one. L12 · 32:39
ShoreLiving in truth carries a strong Heideggerian motif: Havel takes over the authentic/inauthentic distinction but turns it into an explicitly moral one. L23 · 43:07
Shore says Havel takes Heidegger's authenticity and inauthenticity and makes the distinction explicitly moral: living in truth against living a lie.
HeideggerConfronting one's own death alone, shaken by Angst, can produce resoluteness: taking hold of oneself and owning one's choices. That is authenticity's slightly empowering side, which Heidegger wants felt. L12 · 44:18
ShoreIn Heidegger's call for decision in everything and responsibility in every action, Shore hears existentialist motifs, decisionism and answerability, surfacing in his 1933 address as rector. L24 · 25:14
Shore hears existentialist motifs of decisionism and responsibility in Heidegger's words as rector; she does not explicitly tie them to Being and Time's resoluteness.
HeideggerDasein is no detached observer. It is always already being-in-the-world: doing things, caring about things, alongside other beings, with no outside position to withdraw to. L12 · 24:14
PatočkaTo be in the world from the outset is to be responsible for it from the outset; that responsibility goes everywhere with Dasein, an ontological trait, not a contingent tie. L25 · 43:29
Because Dasein is always already in the world, it is answerable for the world
Throughlines that pass through this lecture.
As they come up in the lecture.
Heidegger born in Messkirch, on the edge of the Black Forest.
Heidegger, needing a major publication to secure the Marburg chair, withdraws to his hut at Todtnauberg to write Being and Time.
Heidegger delivers the draft of Being and Time to Husserl for his birthday, dedicated to him.
Being and Time Sein und Zeit
Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) published.
Husserl retires at Freiburg and Heidegger succeeds to his chair; Levinas studies with both.
Davos debate between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer.
My Way to Phenomenology Mein Weg in die Phänomenologie
Arendt praises Heidegger's lecturing on his 80th birthday.