Being and Time and the Essence of Thinking
Can Martin Heidegger's Being and Time help us become better thinkers and simultaneously clarify the essence of thinking?
Editorial Note: This article is a modification of an essay that I originally wrote for Johannes Niederhauser's Being and Time course earlier this year. It captures my experience of first encountering Being and Time and lays out some ideas and questions that will serve as a rough guide for a deeper engagement with the text that I plan to undertake in the coming months.
Introduction
The first thing that struck me about Martin Heidegger's Being and Time was the depth and force of its thinking. The text seemed to employ a precise method yet also to stand above itself in awareness of its method, as if each step it took was deliberate, authoritative, and necessary. Moreover, this incredible intellectual force was summoned not in the service of "making an argument" or of "proving something correct," but in the service of the seemingly innocuous task of formulating a question. This question, of course, is the question of the meaning of being - of what is meant by words like "be" or "is" in phrases like "the sky is blue" or questions like "what is life?"
The depth and force of Being and Time's thought is reflected perhaps even more strongly in the striking intellectual priority and profound implications of its central question, despite the question's apparent simplicity. The question of being is the fundamental question of philosophy and is necessary to ground all knowledge, including apparently well-founded scientific knowledge. While biology, for example, can acquire detailed knowledge about living organisms, it cannot say exactly what its underlying concept of life is. Moreover, the question of being elevates the human being, rather than some abstract "objective" intellectual landscape, to central priority. The human being, as Heidegger tells us, is the unique being that is concerned about its own existence. Consequently, it is the being that must be interrogated to raise the question of being.
The striking intellectual force of Being and Time led me to wonder if I could train myself to think better and simultaneously clarify the essence of thinking by mastering this profound text. At the outset, I envision that mastering this difficult text will require my thinking to be greatly strengthened and will entail understanding, as much as possible, how Heidegger thinks. I envision that understanding his profound thinking will help clarify the essence of thinking: what thinking is, what its essential structures are, if great thinkers are separated from good thinkers primarily by their grasp of the essence of thinking, and consequently how, if it is at all possible, to "train" a good thinker to become a great thinker.
In this article, I explore my underlying questions - on the essence of thinking and how human thinking can be trained - in the context of the four aspects of the Being and Time that I highlighted above: the text's meticulous precision, the essence of questioning and its priority for thinking, the priority of philosophy (as inquiry into the question of being) over scientific knowledge and thought, and the intimate binding of the human being to thinking. In a future article I will address my underlying questions more directly and comprehensively.
Detailed Textual Analysis and Thinking
My struggle comprehending Being and Time was dominated by a difficulty in understanding its low-level text - its sentences, paragraphs, and sections - which, of course, blocked any path to understanding the book as a whole. My struggle with the text was accompanied by a strong feeling that the text was expertly crafted, possessing a carefully designed though hidden structure that I gradually felt myself unraveling as I read. I came to believe that my struggle with the text was primarily due to my inability to clearly see this structure and I felt a strong need to acquire an explicit elucidation of it - something that more rigorously, clearly, and comprehensively captured what my impromptu dissections of the text, manifest in my written marks on the pages of the book, crudely attempted to grasp. I felt that such an elucidation would serve as a detailed guide to the text, essential for comprehending it as fully as possible.
What exactly is this "hidden structure" and what would an elucidation of this structure look like? Is there ambiguity to this structure, or is it more or less certain, though concealed by the written text's sequential format? What are the merits and limitations of such an elucidation? Would it serve as a guide to help new readers understand the text? Would it help experienced readers gain a deeper mastery of the text? Is there something about the low-level text that fundamentally defies this kind of elucidation?
To investigate these questions, I will attempt a detailed analysis of the book's Introduction (§§1-8) that will proceed in two ways. First, will be a close reading of the text accompanied by a detailed commentary that will attempt to "explain" it and to grasp more precisely what I do not comprehend about it. Second, will be a more explicit elucidation of the text's structure which I believe is concealed by the text's sequential format. At the outset, I feel that that this requires at least the following: making implicit relations between sentences explicit, making contrasts (or similarities) among terms or concepts visually clear, clearly linking steps in an argument or line of thought across long blocks of text, and identifying a hierarchy among a sequence of ideas which signifies a kind of priority or importance among the ideas.
The task of obtaining a detailed understanding of the low-level text relates to this article’s guiding tasks of training myself to think better and clarifying the essence of thinking in several ways.
First, I felt that my failure to comprehend the text - and my inability to write anything approaching its caliber - represented a significant shortcoming in my ability to think. Moreover, I felt that I could utilize the task of obtaining a detailed comprehension of the text to "train" my thinking. That is, that I could deliberately expose myself to this task with the intention of strengthening my thinking and that I could repeatedly return to this task, as if it were an infinitely deep well, to progressively strengthen my thinking. Moreover, I felt that thinking deliberately trained in this manner would enhance my ability to think about problems beyond the comprehension of this book, such as about political and scientific problems important to me.
Additionally, this plan to train my thinking presumes a lot about the essence of thinking: that thinking is akin to an art that is amenable to training, that thinking can be improved by exposure to and analysis of a great thinker, that I am able to recognize great thinking (the text of Being and Time) before I am able to comprehend it, and that thinking can be "trained" in one domain and "transferred" to another. To what extent are these assumptions correct, and what do they fail to grasp about the essence of thinking?
Finally, I believe that an explicit elucidation of Being and Time's low-level text will reveal something about how Heidegger thinks. Some questions about this that I want to investigate include: Does the structure of the low-level text of great thinkers fundamentally differ from that of merely good thinkers? Is it somehow more complex, densely connected, or precise? On the other hand, does some essential aspect of the text, and great thinking more generally, fundamentally evade such a structural elucidation?
Questioning and its Priority for Thinking
Being and Time led me to reflect upon the nature of questioning and its intimate relationship with thinking. This reflection was spawned by three observations. First, by the book's sustained focus on the formulation of a question (the question of being); second by Heidegger's short but direct focus on questioning as such early in the book; and third by the abundant use of questioning in Heidegger's writing.
The book's sustained focus on the formulation of a question led me to reflect upon the nature of questioning and wonder: What exactly is a question? What does it mean to formulate a question? How do we know when a question has been properly formulated? Is questioning fundamental to all thinking, and if so, how can we think at all if we do not possess a mastery of the question? Such mastery would entail at least an understanding of how to formulate a question, how a question can be distorted, and how a particular formulation or distortion of a question implicitly bounds or distorts our thinking.
Heidegger touches upon some of these points early in the book (§2) where he discusses the structure of the question as such. This short meditation on the question was profound to me and unlike anything I had encountered it in my entire formal education. One simple statement that stuck out to me was that "Every inquiry is a seeking. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought." How exactly can you lack knowledge of something, yet still be intimately influenced by it, as something that gives your thinking necessary guidance? (This question is related to the relationship between a vague and deep understanding of being that I discuss below.)
Heidegger's writing makes abundant use of questioning. What functions does questioning serve in Heidegger's writing? Some of his questions seem rhetorical, as he immediately provides an answer. The very first lines of the text, for example, are of this form: "Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word 'being'? Not at all." It seems that this could have been written more simply as the assertion, "In our time we do not have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word 'being.'" What precisely is lost by such a formulation? What does the question capture that the assertion does not?
In explicitly laying out questions, is Heidegger intentionally revealing his thinking to the reader to implicitly teach him how to think, to invite the reader to think along with him? Moreover, what effect does the question have on the reader's experience of reading? In my experience, questioning dramatically effects the tempo of my reading. It forces me to pause which causes the question to ruminate in my mind briefly. This is in contrast to a "mindless," unthinking, state that I sometimes fall into while reading a series of assertions which doesn’t force me to pause.
The Primacy of Philosophy over Scientific Knowledge and Thinking
Being and Time was the first book I read that radically challenged the authority of scientific knowledge and the dominant contemporary judgement of scientific thinking as the apex of cognitive activity. It was shocking to hear Heidegger describe the apparently pristine and precise character of scientific knowledge as merely "simulated rigor" that fundamentally fails to think down to its roots. These roots, Heidegger claims, can be provided only by philosophy, properly understood in its central task of raising the question of being.
Under this view, philosophy is elevated from its common conception today, as merely one among many academic disciplines, to the fundamental ground on which all other disciplines rise and fall. While I had heard arguments on the supremacy of philosophy before, they had largely seemed theoretical or pedantic. For me, Being and Time was the first book that credibly and powerfully challenged scientific authority on this ground and that raised philosophy to the primary intellectual rank. Moreover, its challenge is rooted in our everyday experience of the world, in how we live, dwell, and die, not in some complex, esoteric theory about science.
This challenge to scientific authority is significant to me for several reasons. First, the idea that scientific knowledge faces a fundamental crisis of legitimacy was never seriously raised or even brought to my attention during my entire formal scientific education. Yet during this time I had often felt that there was something unstable about scientific knowledge: that it rested on predefined systems of concepts that were not seriously questioned, that many research projects were carried out in an ad-hoc manner, and that there was a lack of rigor in understanding the process of scientific thinking, of precisely how scientists engage in scientific inquiry. Moreover, there seemed to be little concern about any of these things within the scientific community.
Being and Time's claim that the fundamental necessity for grounding scientific knowledge - by raising the question of being - is one that most scientists (and most academic philosophers) are completely unaware of or believe is unnecessary resonated with my personal observations. Moreover, Being and Time gave me a concrete path to begin understanding the fundamental shortcomings of scientific knowledge and thinking, whereas before I only had suspicions.
The proper comprehension of philosophy and the recognition of its intellectual supremacy raises important questions related to this article's guiding tasks of improving my thinking and clarifying the essence of thinking. Does the primacy of philosophy over scientific knowledge also imply that philosophy requires thinking of a fundamentally higher caliber than thinking within the sciences? How would the character of my thinking change if I invested my time into studying Being and Time as opposed to studying scientific works? What can we discover about the essence of thinking when we recognize that it is more difficult to think about being, something seemingly simple and common, than it is to think about scientific questions, which are seemingly complex and accessible only to a handful specially trained experts?
Binding of the Human Being to Thinking
Three sets of questions regarding the intimate relationship between thinking and the human being jumped out at me as I read Being and Time. The first has to do with the relationship between a vague and deep understanding of being, the second with what made Heidegger such a powerful thinker, and the third with the fundamental difference in thinking between the ancients and the moderns.
First, as Being and Time tells us, we humans have a vague understanding of being which is not somehow inferior to a deeper understanding of being. The vague understanding is not an error or misunderstanding, nor is it a methodological artifact of human thinking - a kind of naive "intuition" that at best guides thinking towards acquiring a deeper understanding that ultimately supersedes and erases the vague understanding. Instead, our vague understanding, manifest in our everyday interactions, is somehow the basis for our ability to form a deeper understanding of being.
This idea led me to wonder: What is the character of this vague understanding of being? Is the vague understanding necessary to initiate our inquiry toward a deeper understanding? Does it guide us throughout this inquiry? Does it continue to live after our inquiry is "done?" That is, upon acquiring a deeper understanding of being, how exactly does the vague understanding continue to influence us? These questions are practically relevant to me as I consider the relationship between a vague and deeper understanding of the being of politically relevant phenomena, like courage. That is, if I begin with a vague understanding of what courage is, how can I begin thinking to acquire a deeper understanding of what courage is?
Second, what was it about Heidegger that made him so unique? How was it possible for him to write Being and Time and why does it seem like a work of similar gravity and depth could not be written today? One hypothesis I have relates to the seemingly innocuous claim that we all have a vague understanding of being. I want to investigate how this vague a priori understanding differs among people and particularly how Heidegger's understanding differs. Did Heidegger have a fundamentally different, somehow much richer, everyday experience and engagement with the world that made his penetrating inquiry possible? More generally, do the authors of Great Books have a fundamentally different everyday experience of the world that makes their writing possible? Why are great thinkers so rare and why has the recent rapid increase in the human population not coincided with an increase in the number of Great Books authored? Has this population increase led to, or coincided with, a widespread impoverishment of our everyday experience of the world, making such projects impossible?
Finally, I was struck by Heidegger's claims about the fate of the question of being throughout history. He tells us that the question of being was profoundly alive for ancient Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle but that modern thought is dominated by prejudices that block our access to the question. How is it possible that the Greeks had deeper insight than the moderns when we have millennia of human experience, the accumulated knowledge of great thinkers, and the technological tools to recall it instantly? How is it possible for a question to get lost and how is it possible to raise it anew? Is it raised anew by reading the ancient works and trying to piece together their thinking, as if attempting to resurrect a dead body, or is it raised anew by looking into one's self and raising it "independently" of the ancients, though perhaps in dialogue with them?
Conclusion
This article captures some of my initial reactions to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time. In particular, it raises questions about the essence of thinking and how the book can help its readers become better thinkers. I intend to use these questions and observations as a basis for a deeper engagement with the text that I plan to undertake in the coming months.