A Peek at Martin Heidegger Through Thomas Sheehan

Several years ago, I read Martin Heidegger, more Heidegger than I should have been reading if I’m being honest. (I also wrote pieces, on Heidegger’s philosophy, many of which I tossed in the bin due to my concern that the phrases didn’t ruffle their feathers like falcons in captivity).

My readings included his magnum opus Being and Time, his The Question Concerning Technology, his Hegel’s Phenomenology Of Spirit, his Introduction To Metaphysics, his History Of The Concept Of Time, and his What Is Called Thinking. I grappled—grappled might be an understatement. I went toe to toe—with the Heideggerese in Being and Time, but I can not claim to have fully grasped the contents of the tome.

Last year, Thomas Sheehan attempted to decrypt the language in his Heidegger’s Being and Time, and it’s by reading this that I indirectly returned to Being and Time, giving it another go, hoping to skip all the crypticism. In this piece, I’ll attempt to summarise—while including personal observations—Sheehan’s Heidegger’s Being and Time, in a attempt to further simplify Being and Time for Martin Heidegger enthusiasts.

According to Thomas Sheehan, it’s key not to forget that Heidegger was influenced by the loss of Catholicism as he’d known it, Nietzsche’s “death of God” hypothesis, and the collapse of metaphysics as he’d known it. Heidegger reformulates the question of Being as a question about human existence (existenz)—understood with a dose of “changing” to it.

The term Dasein, is coined and used by Heidegger as a technical term referring to Human Being. Heidegger believes that Dasein/the Human Being is neither a rational animal, nor a subject facing objects. Heidegger believes Dasein/the Human Being is thrown-open sense-making—with thrown meaning always already in a meaningful world that Dasein/the Human Being did not choose, with open meaning projecting ahead into possibilities, and with sense-making meaning interpreting everything in terms of “for the sake of” Dasein’s/the Human Being’s projects.

Sheehan conjectures that everything in the book Being and Time relies on the concept that Dasein/the Human Being is the “clearing/lichtung/da” in which things can appear meaningful.

Sheehan states that in the introduction of Being and Time, Heidegger reformulates the question of Being, delves into why we must analyse Dasein/the Human Being––in response to which he conjectures that Dasein/the Human Being is the only being for whom Being is an issue. Heidegger also states that phenomenology is the method to be used for this analysis of Dasein—phenomenology in the sense of “let what shows itself be seen from itself.”

Heidegger proceeds, in the first division, by delving into the preparatory analysis of Dasein/the Human Being. That is, analysis of Dasein/the Human Being in his/her everyday, “inauthentic” mode. According to Sheehan, Heidegger conjectures that this mode is “Being-in-the-world”, which Heidegger uses to mean a mode when Dasein/the Human Being is not inside a head looking out, but already practically involved in the world. Heidegger also conjectures that in this mode, to Dasein/the Human Being, the world is a web of significance/bedeutsamkeit—in the sense that things are “ready-to-hand/zuhanden”, to mean that things are equipment for Dasein’s/the human Being’s projects, before they are “present-at-hand/vorhanden”, to mean before they are objects of theory. Within this mode, Heidegger conjectures, Dasein/the Human Being is characterised by care/sorge—the unified structure of Dasein. This unified structure/care/sorge includes: thrownness/facticity/past—which means Dasein/the Human Being having been delivered over to a world; projection/existentiality/future—which means Dasein/the Human Being pressing ahead into future possibilities; falling/present—which means Dasein/the Human Being being absorbed into the “they"/idle talk/curiosity. Heidegger further conjectures, according to Sheehan, that Dasein/the Human Being while in this mode is mainly “inauthentic”—which is to mean that Dasein is lost in the anonymous “they-self”, fleeing his finitude.

Heidegger then goes further, in the second division, by executing what he conjectured is the more incisive analysis of Dasein/the Human Being. That is to say, analysis of Dasein/the Human Being in his/her deeper, “authentic” mode. Heidegger notes that in this mode, the meaning of care is temporality/zeitlichkeit—which is to mean, the ecstatic ahead-of-itself-already-in as being-alongside. Temporality in the sense that future means the anticipation/vorlaufen of death, while past means having-been/thrownness, and present means making-present/the clearing in which things show up. Heidegger noted that “authenticity/eigentlichkeit” means Dasein/the Human Being owning up to his/her finitude. He also noted, according to Sheehan, that the act of Dasein/the Human Being owning up to his/ her finitude is triggered by angst/dread, which collapses everyday meanings and reveals the groundlessness of existence. And under the “eyes of death”, Heidegger conjectured, the “call of conscience” summons Dasein/the Human Being to resolve/ entschlossenheit on his/her thrown possibilities. Historicality, in this mode, Heidegger suggests, involves “authentic” Dasein/the Human Being retrieving his/her heritage and handing down, as part of a community, possibilities finitely.

Heidegger did not publish the third division, “Time and Being”, of Being and Time. Additionally, he did not publish the second part of Being and Time that he’d also hinted at. In the second part, he’d hoped to execute a destruction/deconstruction of the history of ontology—critiquing figures like Kant, Aristotle, and Descartes. Heidegger became dissatisfied with the systematic, phenomenological method he’d set out with in Being and Time and abandoned the planned continuation of the book. He shifted from the systematic, phenomenological method, in a shift he referred to as a turn/kehre, to a more poetic and historical method.

Heidegger’s Black NoteBooks—which are his philosophical jottings from the 1930s to the 1970s—contain critiques, reinterpretations, and rethinkings of his book Being and Time. Heidegger’s book Contributions to Philosophy, written in from 1936 to 1938 and published posthumously in 1989, has at times been interpreted, by some, as a continuation of his Being and Time, but that’s highly debatable.