Minds and Brains

For Heidegger, Dasein is an entity with a special mode of being. A human being is this entity and it is human beings in general who enjoy this singular kind of being, which can be referred to as Existenz, or existence. It is a general motif for Heidegger that human existence is existential in contrast to existentiell. The latter connotes a third person perspective of objectivity (ontic) whereas the former is in terms of a first person perspective of lived experience (ontological).

Furthermore, Existenz is constituted by several unique phenomenological features. Perhaps the most crucial of these features is being-in, which designates the way in which a human entity is always in-a-world. A world for Heidegger is a totality of referential significance wherein the entities encountered have a special salience in terms of our bodily comportment and self-understanding. Rocks do not “have” a world although they can be said to crudely “exist” in the world ontically. Moreover, in every case, Dasein is “mine” in the sense that humans – tautologically – are always individuals and thus cannot exist as two individuals simultaneously. If a human is defined as an entity, then an individual Dasein cannot be two separate entities (two individuals) at once. I think this structure of “mineness” is based on common sense notions of individuality and does not constitute any special connotation of egotistical existence. It simply states that Dasein is an individual human entity capable of being distinguished from other human individuals.

Moreover, a rock’s existence is qualitatively different than the existence or Existenz of humanity. A rock exists in the world merely in terms of a spatial or ontic arrangement. It is “next to” or alongside everything else in the world but it does not dwell in the world in the same way humans do. The rock does not have a “home” in the world nor is it familiar with the world it exists in. By contrast, in virtue of the referential structure of significance, humans can be said to live or dwell within a wordly world that they are for the most part familiar with. To use a classic example, humans do not experience a hammer as if it were an objective conglomeration of materiality but rather, we see it as something-for-hammering. It is familiar to us in terms of a referential web of usability.

However, our relation to these phenomenal worlds are not just in terms of a tacit understanding of how to use equipment; there is a component of explicit understanding. Heidegger refers to this crucial feature of Dasein as its understanding of being. We understand entities in terms of their “what” and their “that”. That is, we understand the world in terms of entities as entities e.g. we explicitly understand that, conceptually, hammers exist and we tacitly understand what it is: something-for-hammering called a “hammer”. This understanding is done tacitly on the level of pragmatic usability but it is also done explicitly in terms of our capacity for conceptual language. A useful model for this tacit-explicit dynamic is the postulated dorsal and ventral neural streams in visual processing. Roughly speaking, the dorsal stream is for tacit motor reactivity and the ventral stream is for more explicit object-recognition The understanding of being is also evident in our basic grammar for we utilize the structure of “is” in order to make sense of the world. “Today is Saturday.” “The cat is on the mat.” Thus, a central feature of Dasein’s uniqueness is our special mode of grammatical language wherein the world becomes perceptually structured in terms of thatness and whatness i.e. in terms of an understanding of being, understanding entities as entities.

Furthermore, Dasein can be distinguished as an entity with a special mode of being in terms of the existential structure of its being. The structure is generally referred to by Heidegger as “care”. Care-structure can be defined in terms of a human being-ahead-of-itself and being-already-in-a-world. Being-ahead simply means that humans routinely think and act in terms of future-oriented projects. We live for future possibilities and as Heidegger sometimes says, we are our possibilities. This capacity to live “in the future” constitutes one of the most basic existential structures of human existence and is exemplified by phenomena such as marriage and parenting, wherein our everyday behavior is structured by future possibilities. Moreover, we also live through our past as when Heidegger says “the other ‘end’ is the ‘beginning’, ‘birth. Only the being ‘between’ birth and death presents the whole we are looking for.”

Being-already-in-a-world simply means that humans always find themselves in a world of signification. Worldhood is not subjectively bestowed upon the world by our consciousness, but rather, is an a priori determination of phenomenal reality by virtue of the referential web of significance given through the milieu  of public language and practice.

Lastly, we can distinguish Heidegger’s conception of humanity from the classical tradition of substantive metaphysics. This tradition has always sought to define humanity in terms of an ever present ground e.g. the One, God, self-knowledge, transcendental subjectivity, etc. Heidegger’s approach is in stark contrast to these metaphysical approaches in the sense that he does not isolate a continually present substance that grounds the human self but rather, locates the constitutive features of humanity in terms of their thrown involvement in a public world with a dynamic body. There are no founding “onto-theological”  structures to Dasein’s existence because human being is always shifting dynamically in accordance with the complex, changing world we occupy. Because Dasein is a thrown possibility, and not a given presence, the “essence” of Dasein lies in its existence i.e. being-in-the-world, Existenz.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. (Matthew 6:34)

While this verse can be read in terms of a pragmatic wisdom regarding worry-warts and unnecessary anxiety, I think a deeper reading can also be procured that  ultimately brings into the question Jesus’s humanity. Is it possible for a human to ignore the future and live entirely within the present moment? When a father looks at his daughter, can he only see the current instant irrespective of his wishes and desires regarding the future: to teach her how to drive or walk her down the aisle? From a Heideggerian perspective, we are always throwing ourselves into the world (so that the past “resonates” with our current interpretation of the world) and  simultaneously projecting possibilities into the future. We are thrown projection. It is this temporal horizon that gives human mental life the curious transcendental feature of being more than a series of instant nows being transposed through time as if human experience was like a simple train moving along the tracks. As Bergson points out, this form of temporality lacks “duration” and can not account for the continuity and interpenetration of past-present-future which makes up our phenomenal experience.

It seems then that if we take the above verse seriously, we can see how radical Christianity is on a fully realized phenomenological level. The ueber-Christian is not really human is the phenomenological sense understood by Heidegger as Dasein. Dasein projects hus possibilities into the future to the extent that when it looks at hus daughter, hu literally sees the future. Not quite in an abstract, theoretically sense – although this is a possible mode of cognition – but rather,  in the enactive sense of “now”-perception being expanded beyond the immediate given of sensory input. As with seeing a coin spinning around on the table, the capacity for memory creates a perceptual field transcendent to the instant-moment and in the same sense, future-memory creates a transcendence that moves forwards in time.

How then can we follow in the footsteps of Jesus by not giving a thought for the morrow? Our basic outlook on the world, on our friends and family, on the familiar environment we reside in, is steeped in terms of temporality, forwards and backwards. The horizon of human experience is not that of the idealized instant, living like a Zen monk in the perfect Now. We do not live in the Now. Our lives are spaced out; time is but a horizon into past happenings and future possibilities. Was Jesus fully human then? Our answer here must be negative.

…continued from Dasein for Dummies part I

With the possibility of phenomenological-ontology in place, we are getting ready to better understand the general motifs of Being and Time and the underlying reason for Heidegger’s choice of “Dasein” as the central figure of his magnum opus. As we have seen, Heidegger quickly establishes in Being and Time that his project is phenomenological-ontology: the study of phenomena; that which shows itself. We must then further clarify how this “showing” unfolds; what does it mean for a world to show itself as something? First, it becomes clear as you read the text that for Heidegger it is important that this presentation of the world has to be presented to an observer for it to be considered a “showing.” Second, the totality of entities which shows itself must exist independently of our awareness or else being would be a construction, and not a presentation. A rock does not take the world to be one way or another, for a rock is only an entity amongst other entities, which “are, quite independently of the experience by which they are disclosed, the acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their nature is ascertained” (BT 228).

I bring up this issue of metaphysical realism in order to answer the charge that Heidegger was only concerned with the human-world relationship and had nothing pertinent to say about the real ontological question of “being qua being” – which would account for how the world is, independent of human access. In my view, this reading of Heidegger is disingenuous given that it fails to account for how he dealt with realism through his conception of “presence.” Through the development of this concept, Heidegger defends a crude form of ontic realism, wherein the occurrent (vorhanden) structure of world is independent of human disclosure. For Heideggen then, there is, in essence, some “fixed totality of mind-independent objects”. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology, he states:

This entity[the world] is intraworldly. But innerworldliness nonetheless does not belong to its being, rather in dealing with this entity, nature in the widest sense, we understand that this entity is as something occurrent, as an entity that we run up against, to which we are given over, that for its own part always already is. It is, without our uncovering it, i.e. without our encountering it in our world. Innerworldiness devolves upon this entity only when it is uncovered as an entity.

On my reading then, “being qua being” – the classic question of ontology – is already pre-reflectively understood by humans insofar as we are always running up against an ontically real world. The world is presented to us as being “there,” independent of our disclosure of it.

Entities are grasped in their being as “presence”; this means that they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time – the “Present”. (BT 47)

…

Those entities which show themselves in this and for it, and which are understood as entities in the most authentic sense, thus get interpreted with regard to the Present; that is, they are conceived as presence (ousia). (BT 48)

Hopefully, we can now begin to understand how Heidegger’s minimalistic defense of ontic realism helps answer the question of the meaning of being. By determining the meaning of “that which defines entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities are in each case already understood” (BT 25-26), “being qua being” comes into focus circuitously. Our understanding of the mode of being for the “mind-independent” totality of entities is presence. The German is “Anwesenheit,” which connotes the presence of someone at some place on such and such occasion. The “showing itself” of phenomenology now becomes more intelligible. While philosophers of antiquity had been focused on merely establishing the ontic configuration of that which is present, Heidegger sought to elucidate the neglected human-ontological understanding of this being – of the worlds intelligibility as being occurrent. Phenomenological-ontology is then focused on the being of entities, not on the occurrent structure itself, with being strictly understood as the disclosure-relationship between entities who understand that things are and what they are, and the world itself. In this sense, Being and Time is decidedly a human-centered enterprise that nevertheless helps shed light on the metaphysical questions of mind-independent realism.

While this might seem horribly anthropocentric, Heidegger’s reasons for keeping the question of being within an analytic of Dasein have nothing to do with denying intelligence or cognition to non-human animals or denying that they too have a unique “perspective” on the world. Nor does it have to do with denying crude ontic realism in the way his continental forebearers had. Heidegger’s basic point is that although the ontic configuration of the environment is the same for all biological organisms, by virtue of the type of creature we are, only the human-world interaction can actually be a disclosure of entities as entities, for such a phenomenon requires the powers of complex language, replete with syntactical and semantic depth. This is a subtle but crucial point. Only with creatures for whom the world is linguistically organized can the world show up as this or that entity – “something which is.” Heidegger was very impressed by the fact that humans understand what it means for something to be. “Today is windy.” “The cat is on the mat.” “I am a good person.” It is only in virtue of our linguistic constitution that the world shows up as something which “is.” By focusing on this particular sense of being – the determination of entities as entities, as being intelligible in terms of that it is, and what it is, Heidegger can avoid the complete anthropocentric idealism that is often leveled against him. Indeed, as Taylor Carman puts it:

To say that entities exist independently of us is not to assert the being or existence of anything like being or existence, as if too were a kind of entity, that is, something that is alongside or in addition to the entities themselves. It is consistent, then, to say that although being consists solely in our understanding of being, occurrent entities are independently of us and our understanding. (Carman, 2003, pp. 202-203)